Africa39 (15 page)

‘Please tell me I didn’t spend close to a thousand pounds on air fare to hear you talk about a lippie that doesn’t stain.’

She cackled. ‘Oh, Gabrielle Essien, always as cutting. Anyway, here’s the job. I see a cluster of teachers forming over there and that’s no good . . .’

‘So I’m supposed to go show them that this reunion is to break all barriers.’

She blew me another kiss. ‘That’s why you were always my favourite deputy.’

I was just glad for the excuse to enquire after you and once all the salutations were out of the way, I quietly asked one of your colleagues where you were.

‘Jacques?’ he frowned. 

‘That’s the only Mr Sylla
I
got to know, Sir.’ I smiled. 

‘No, I know who you mean. It’s just that Jacques is dead. He died a couple of years ago,’ he shrugged.

I stared at him, wanting to ask more questions but the logical side of my brain told me he could not help. No question was going to bring you back. And despite the fans whirring overhead and the sea breeze, I felt hot.

‘Anyway, we’ve heard you’re now a professor in some big British university.’

Was Reading a big British university? And I was a lecturer.

‘I’m sorry, Sir. I must . . .’

I turned and hurried towards the exit. I walked as far away as my wedge heels would carry me on that sandy beach and found a rock I could sit on. Even though I could still hear the music, I knew I wouldn’t be going back.

I lit a cigarette, for once not caring who saw me. The tears I had been holding in now fell. I wiped them with the back of my hand and put on my sunglasses. I took a drag and wished I was smoking with you, like that day in Paris. It wasn’t something I would have done with any of the other teachers, even those who smoked. They would have had their little word to say, along the lines of why a good girl like me shouldn’t be sucking on a cigarette. Well, if anyone dared to spout such things today, they would get theirs. Having the odd cigarette was something I have been doing since I was sixteen and I wasn’t about to stop now. I confessed this secret to you the day one of the girls was expelled for smoking.

‘Trying to knock it out of you, hey?’ you’d smiled, but you also shook your head at the heavy-handedness of the administration.

Unlike the other teachers, you did not think a satisfactory conclusion had been reached just because you’d shaken your head. You saw the headmistress and our friend was allowed back in class but not until after being subjected to a pep talk on the responsibility upon her and the rest of us to uphold the values of our
lycée
; values of rectitude, civic duty and camaraderie. We were the future elite of Côte d’Ivoire.

The next day in class, you told us about those giants of French literature fuelling their imaginations with opium. And while the rest of the girls contented themselves with making surprised sounds before resuming their ever present bored expressions, I hung on to your every word.

‘Baudelaire, Gautier, Rimbaud, Lamartine; all these people, they did things,’ you mused and your eyes lit up.

‘It’s not all about flowers and love, you know. Look for the symbolism, girls!’ You banged the table and my heart leapt at your passion. It was your love for and knowledge of your subject that made me passionate about French literature. You made it interesting and fun, and soon I was trawling bookshops for the works of those men and women instead of spending my pocket money on clothes and make-up like all the other seventeen-year-olds. And just like you, I fell under the spell of their work.

‘Do you think it could be the opium?’ I once joked as we made our way out of school, you to your car and me to my chauffeur.

‘
Pourquoi pas?
’ we laughed.

From that day on, we just needed to say ‘opium’ and we knew. We sometimes wondered who would turn the face of our own Ivorian literature upside down. 

‘What about Bandama? Or Venance?’ you would ask.

‘Huh, interesting but don’t you think there is too much militancy in their books? Not subtle enough.’

‘Adoras then.’ You replied with a shrug of the shoulders, and we laughed some more. Books about dashing young men saving terrified little women were not what we considered literature.

I have a daughter now. She is only two years old but I sometimes wonder what I would do if I were to find out she was having such intense chats with her teacher. Would I think it totally innocent or would I see something behind it? I mean, I used to know which class you would be teaching at every hour of the day. I also knew when you were off. I sometimes went to your house and we chatted. I telephoned you. We had such easy conversations. But we only ever limited ourselves to talks about literature and my ambition to open a literary salon one day, when I was older.

‘Why not now? Why wait till you’re older? How old is “older”?’ You would ask with such an earnestness that I felt emboldened.

If you hadn’t been around, I wouldn’t have found an outlet for my thoughts and ideas, save for my diaries. These were not the kind of conversations we had in my house. Maman and Papa would’ve laughed at the thought of a literary salon where people debated, wrote and performed poetry. Their ambition for me was to go into the law. They would have preferred it if I had had an aptitude for the sciences of course. But with your encouragement, I went ahead and set up a poetry club. It didn’t quite catch on and I soon gave it up when, after three months, numbers didn’t go up to more than three.

I didn’t stop writing, though. I wrote poetry, not about the ills of colonialism but poetry on love, ambition and sex and showed them to you. I liked that you didn’t raise your eyebrows and I liked that you didn’t bat an eyelid. Even during lessons, I found a way to communicate with you. My essays were a code to tell you what I’d been reading. And you appreciated it.

‘It’s always a joy to read your work,’ you would say and I’d beam, for it was my intention that my work should set the standard. I knew the other girls invariably wrote about those writers we had already studied. So I had to be different.

I also think we loved one another. We never said anything. Not while I was your pupil anyway. But do you remember that time in France?

I invited you to come see me when you told me you would be visiting friends in Lille over the summer holidays. You came to the Sorbonne, which you had recommended to me as you’d also done your
maîtrise
in French literature there.

It felt so good to see you, especially as five years had passed. Sure, we called one another, but on that occasion, it felt good to meet up. We strolled the streets of Paris, unfazed by the hordes of people who always took over the city in June.

I took you to my favourite café in Montmartre where we sat on the metal bistro chairs outside – we both had coffee and you had an almond croissant – and lost ourselves in people-watching. We shared a
Gauloise
, passing back the cigarette after each drag. Even though there was a new packet lying beside our coffees we didn’t think to light another cigarette.

‘I’ll share with you,’ you’d said when I held the packet open to you, so that was what we did. You took that first drag, sighing as you did so. I imagined your eyes closing behind your sunglasses. 

‘Why does the first drag always taste so good?’

‘Especially when you haven’t had one in a while.’

You clicked your fingers in agreement.

You noticed that I didn’t have any of the croissant.

‘I don’t want to get fat.’

‘If you’re worried about fatness, what about me?’ you patted your stomach.

I turned towards you then, ‘You’re not fat at all.’

‘Middle-age spread then.’ You smiled and even though your sunglasses hid your eyes, I felt them dancing behind the mirrored lenses.

With any other man, I would have felt the need to fill the silence with chat, any type of chat. With you I enjoyed the companionable silence. And there wasn’t that need to do something, anything, just so we could say we were doing something. Even when we finished our coffees and our cigarette, we whiled away a few minutes just sitting there. Every once in a while you would comment on a building that wasn’t there in 1975 and I would realise then how old you really were. In 1975 you were finishing your first degree. In 1975, my father was fifteen; my mother was twelve years old.

I did not share those thoughts with you. You were fully aware of the age difference between us. In fact, while we were sharing the
Gauloise
, you mentioned how those passing by would think what a cool father I had to be sharing a cigarette with. I looked at you then and you turned your head towards me. You lifted your sunglasses and raised an eyebrow.

‘Hey, we could do it like the French,’ you said, your eyes dancing with what seemed to be mischief, and thus closing the gap you’d opened with that comment about me sharing a cigarette with my father. ‘Oh my goodness!’ you sat up and started pointing at something across the road.

‘What?’ I asked.

‘That bookstore.’ You jumped up, taking my hand in yours and we crossed the road. ‘I used to spend my days in that place.’

‘I thought every African student had to work like a little demon?’

‘No. These were the days Côte d’Ivoire was competing with Singapore. The government was sending every student at least a million French Franc . . .’

And again, I would be reminded. The French Franc went out of circulation when I had started university and I only seen one at
Le Musée de la Monnaie
, but you’d touched it and handled it.

‘The guy who owned this place used to let us sit in there with a cup of coffee and just read to our hearts’ content.’

It did look like the sort of bookstore where one sat to watch the world pass by. Although it was in the main square, stepping inside felt like shaking off the madness of Montmartre. Shelves and rickety tables groaned under the weight of books. The floor shone with the number of people who’d walked through its doors. Shabby sofas and armchairs were placed in the alcoves. A benevolent member of staff walked up to us and asked if we needed any help.

‘We are browsing, thank you,’ you told him and to me, you said, ‘Come on, darling.’

My heart melted at that. Thankfully you’d let go off my hand by then.

‘Oh, look, the new owners haven’t made many changes. Here is the rare books section,’ you continued, unaware of the avalanche of emotions you were causing in me.

It was from that section that you got me a collection of stories by Balzac and I gave you some poems by Jeanne Duval.

‘Do you know, people said she didn’t write? But obviously . . .’ You held the tattered booklet out to me as proof.

‘Maybe they didn’t want to take the star away from Baudelaire. Besides, imagine the time she used to live in. Not only was she a woman, but she was Black.’

‘Hum,’ you agreed with me. ‘She was also the woman Baudelaire loved the most, you know.’

‘I know,’ I winked. As if I wouldn’t know such a thing.

That was when I told you I loved you, and I was so glad when you didn’t look at me with shock or worse, pretend you hadn’t heard me. Or say something about how young I was and therefore couldn’t pos­­sibly know what I was talking about. Because I was twenty-two then, not a seventeen-year-old who didn’t know her mind.

But you said, ‘I love you too,’ and brushed my cheek with the back of your hand before pulling me into an embrace. ‘But I’m fifty-five,
ma
chérie
.
Un vieil homme
,’ you’d sighed.

I smiled and burrowed my face against the material of your
boubou
, smelling your spicy eau de cologne. You were not old at all, not for me. But I didn’t tell you that. We pulled away from one another. You planted a kiss on my forehead. The same member of staff who accosted us before rang up our books and we left the shop, with you holding my hand. We stopped by the entrance to the store. We looked into each other’s eyes, wondering whether to kiss or not. In the end, we didn’t. We just smiled at each other and went to a bistro where we did it like the French, consuming alcohol at lunchtime, that is.

Do you think it was because we didn’t want to break the magic? Relationships tend to complicate everything after all. And I don’t think it was a coincidence when you telephoned me a year later to tell me you had met someone.

‘Wonderful.’ I said and I really meant it, even if my voice choked up a little. ‘Does she like Baudelaire?’ I teased and was strangely relieved when you said no.

‘She has more of a scientific mind. She’s a doctor who doesn’t understand literature,’ you replied and went on to ask if I had met someone.

‘No.’

After that conversation, I had sat at my desk in the little studio I was renting in Montmartre, holding the telephone and instinctively knowing that this call would be our last. It wouldn’t have been fair of me to keep calling you when you now had someone in your life. You had been a single man for such a long time that I didn’t want to give the poor woman the impression that you were still holding out a candle to some lost love.

‘Find someone. Be happy.’ Your voice had trailed off. I had known that we were saying goodbye to each other.