HOW COULD I KEEP MY WITS ABOUT ME

As always, there were exquisite flower arrangements at the little studio Daniel and Lætitia had lent them and, wonder of wonders, a little Christmas tree. She pulled out the sofa bed and Kouhouesso’s long body completely filled the tiny attic room. They got up at dusk, it was only five o’clock, winter over the roofs of Paris. In the kitchen area, under the eaves, he had to bend over so he wouldn’t bump his head. She taught him the expression ‘ye olde’, for the exposed beams, part of the charm of the Marais. She called a contact for some weed, and they got some good wine delivered. He had hardly listened to his messages, or checked his emails; he was, it seemed, on holidays for the first time since she’d met him.

He had a shower the way he usually did: with a plastic supermarket bag on his head. Even at specialist hairdressers he’d never found a big enough shower cap. He sat in front of the mirror for a long time, twisting his hair, then tied the loops at the back of his neck. She watched him; it reminded her of when she was a little girl, watching her father shaving carefully.

They made love swiftly, in one burst. It took their breath away. She would have given ten years of her life for those few minutes. It was madness. An illness.

She could have stayed there, absolutely self-contained beneath the roofs, until the end of the world, but he wanted to go out for dinner. Men always have to eat, go out. He spoke to her in camfranglais: ‘Whatever, whatever, let’s Johnnie there?’—Johnnie Walker, the whisky of walkers. She laughed and they set off at a clip towards Bastille. They stopped at Zadig & Voltaire; the salesgirls made a beeline for them. She bought him a sea-green fine cashmere jumper. The floodlit city was brighter than in daylight; seen from a satellite, Paris must have been twinkling like a Christmas tree.

‘Solange.’ He was calling her. The roar of the traffic on the square was so loud that he’d had to say those syllables, Sol-ange, the an- like the am in champagne. She felt effervescent. Her, and no one else: Solange. She was becoming real. She existed, out of all the women here on this particular section of the Earth that had witnessed the world changing—‘Solange!’ Near the canal, he pointed to the entrance of the amusement park, the statue of the black man with the huge mouth who was collecting tickets on his butler’s tray.

She in turn pointed to the Spirit of Freedom on top of the column: the angel holding aloft broken chains. He called her idealistic and ‘my little Frenchwoman’. And he kissed her.

Looking back, that short walk in Paris was perhaps the happiest moment of her life. After that sublime moment, everything was a letdown, a dangerous drifting off course.

People looked at them. They were beautiful, certainly, like they were on the plane, but there was something else. They were political. She who never used that word savoured the provocation of walking arm in arm with him. Nothing much: a minute disturbance of the atmosphere, a slight hesitation as passers-by looked at them: a black person and a white person. Together. Beautiful and wealthy and happy. And she noticed that there was always a touch of envy, or complicity, a sort of reverse aggression, in the way they were looked at, as if they were a couple of famous criminals, doomed but dashing romantics, the Bonnie and Clyde of Humanity’s Happiness. Solange and Kouhouesso, pray for us.

She cuddled him. ‘We’re making quite an impression.’

‘That’s normal,’ he chuckled. ‘We’re stars.’

Paris was whirling around them; they were being swept up from the square, Comment ne pas perdre la tête, serrée dans des bras audacieux?¹

At the end of the canal, at Boulevard Richard-Lenoir, she lost him for a moment. He had gone into a chemist and was standing, tall and impossible to miss, at the hair products counter: in front of the Carissa-brand shea butter, argan conditioner for split ends. As a shocked salesgirl looked on, he opened a bottle and got her to smell it. That was it. Frankincense. Myrrh and gold, the Magi. She went weak at the knees, reached for the back of his neck, and kissed him. ‘I can only find it in France,’ he said. Did he jump on a plane as soon as he ran out? Did he seduce a French girl whenever he had none left? The salesgirl, a metre from them, was standing stock-still, fascinated. He paid the paltry amount on his American Express card and they walked out with a bag full of bottles.

They hailed a taxi and had dinner at the Terminus Nord. She would have liked to show him around the Goutte d’Or, but he wasn’t keen on seeing those African neighbourhoods, no taste for such exoticism, no ndolè², no peanut chicken: he wanted foie gras and fig jam, oysters, sea snails, a grilled sole and some Pouilly-Fuissé.

They chatted; she felt hot; the wine and the jetlag and something about Christmas had gone to her cheeks. She mentioned Clèves, her southern Christmases, the absence of snow, the occasional red wind that deposited sand on the windows, sand that her mother claimed came from the Sahara. But she’d lost him already. She knew him well enough: when she spoke about herself, he preferred her stories that intersected with the big picture: what it meant to be Basque, for example; her experience of France, of a particular school, of secular education; the astonishing refusal by the French republic to use the word ‘race’. Although she was thinking about her son, she spoke about Brice, her West Indian lover, and how she had not noticed that he was black.

Kouhouesso shrugged. She was adamant. At the time, she had focused on other aspects of Brice. But talking Congo and Conrad non-stop, she was bound to end up with a flushed face.

He rubbed his eyes with the flat of his hands.

‘You saw the look the salesgirl gave me.’ It was a statement, not a question.

‘Anyone opening bottles of Carissa without indicating whether they intended buying them would get a dirty look,’ she pleaded.

‘What gave her the right to think that I wouldn’t buy some?’

She let it go; it was useless; he did not want to listen. Exhaustion prowled round them like a coyote.

But she started in again: ‘Brice himself never spoke about his colour.’

He cut her off: ‘You’re after a certificate. A certificate of non-racism. In fact, you’re only sleeping with me as a way of obtaining it.’

She shook her head vigorously, like a horse, a wounded horse. She muttered the word paranoia.

He pressed his palms against his eyes, then opened them, calmer now. ‘All those charming salesgirls, they remind me of those American girls, rushing up to say hello and goodbye and pretending that they’re colour blind. It’s important to them that they pass the test. Listen. You’re not that sort of petty person. But if you didn’t notice Brice’s colour, that just goes to show how repressed you are.

The bastard, he had undergone analysis, too. Jungian, he told her. In Palo Alto, return trip twice a week in his Mercedes Coupé.

‘I’m not repressing anything,’ she protested.

‘I can’t remember who said: to be Jewish is to ask oneself what it means to be Jewish. I ask myself what it means to be black. Yet everyone seems to know. When you’re black, others see it all the time. And who is the other? It’s me. The role I’m expected to play.’

She didn’t want to talk about Jews. Or black people, for that matter. Or others. She wanted to speak about them and about the rest of their trip and about Lisbon or not Lisbon and about children.

They finished off the seafood. The sole arrived; he sent it back—overcooked. Another sole arrived—perfect. He asked her to help him remove the bones, since she was born a fisherman’s granddaughter. She was touched that he remembered. He looked at her kindly. He knew just how brittle truth was. Whether they liked it or not, whatever, whatever, they inherited centuries of cut-off hands, of whippings and deportation. And he didn’t believe that love was stronger than death; that was only good for Walt Disney. No, they couldn’t love each other inside a bubble or under Mary Poppins’ umbrella.

Love. That was the first time he had said the word. The first time he had conjugated the verb to love with them as the subject.

She paid the bill; she had received a big cheque from Warner, and they were on her turf. Besides, they never went out in Los Angeles.