The Fugitivities, стр. 42

on the rue de l’Alouette. You know, I had not washed and I smelled so bad. But she didn’t say anything. She gave me soap. I thought I was in heaven. I was so happy. I was sleeping on her floor. And I would lie there and think, this is the greatest gift God has given me. Florèse gave me life again, and I began to fall a little bit in love with her. During the days I would look for work. I found some small jobs but always in the evening I would come back. And I asked, ‘Florèse, what can I do for you?’

“She had pain to her back when she worked. So she’d take me some evenings into the aquarium, secretly, when it was closed and there was no one. And I helped with her job. I was doing cleaning, washing things so she could rest. It was water all around us. We were alone under the ocean. Florèse knew all the fish and she would name them to me, like a goddess: gourami fish, green and pink Malabar fish, Picasso fish, Blue Hamlet fish. We would walk together and talk this way. And little by little I came to see two things. That Florèse was very intelligent, like a scientist or a saint. And that she was a woman who loved women. She was always talking about her lover. And even so, I know it’s crazy, but I found myself falling deeply in love. I hid my feelings, of course! What could I do? Besides, we became good friends. It was Florèse who introduced me to the music of Franco and the Orchestre Kinshasa. And it was Florèse who opened me to poetry. She was always writing on her days off, and sometimes, if I was helping her, she would write during her shift while I mopped. She encouraged me to make my own poems. She said it helped when you were hungry. She said that when you write you do not feel the time so much, and I discovered this is true.

“Florèse gave me books to read and she taught me many words. I was changing and becoming better in many ways that had escaped me in my past. But the burning inside of my love would not go away, and I did not know what to do. Florèse wrote poems in Lingala for her lover who lives in Saint-Denis and is married to a very religious man. She would read her poems to me and try to teach me words from her language. And it stung me more than you can imagine, because I wanted to learn everything from Florèse. I wanted anything that was drawing us nearer to each other. It was Florèse who introduced me to Rabearivelo. Jean-Joseph, mon frère austral, who changed everything in me, whose poems I drank coup sec like cups of coffee at six in the morning. I would be hauling trash or moving crates in a warehouse and my mind would drift to the palm beaches of Madagascar, to campeachy trees and willowy filao, to the bars and taverns of Antananarivo. Florèse would read to me from his journals. And I suffered with him the pain of wanting to get away, to get to Paris at all costs, and yet desiring the fragrance of home only the more with each passing day. Florèse told me that it was Rabearivelo who gave her the courage to continue writing in the face of everything. Florèse was a great poet too. But she was hopelessly in love with a married woman. I knew from the tone of her poems, even though I couldn’t understand most of them, that I would never be able to reveal my feelings for her.

“Then one day, the immigration police came and arrested her, right in front of everyone, all of her colleagues at the aquarium. It was terrible. Of course, there was no way I could see her, or find out if she was alright. I had to think of my own problems. Through contacts I learned that they had deported her. She had been working with false papers. Some people said that she had gotten them through Papa Wemba. I don’t know if it is true. What I do know is that she made it back to Kinshasa, because about a month later a person from the community found me at the café and gave me a letter from Florèse postmarked from the Congo. In the letter she asked me to act as a courier, to discreetly forward her poems to her lover in Paris. I wrote her back and promised her that I would take this job. Soon letters began arriving regularly from Kinshasa. Nathaniel, would you believe, to this day they come in thick envelopes with many stamps. And every couple of months I meet a woman I know nothing about, only her first name, and we always meet at the same café. I wait at a little table with letters from the woman I love in my hands, and her lover comes in and joins me. We talk about the weather and such things. She leaves a coin for the coffee, takes her packet, and leaves. This is what I owe Florèse. I have to do this for her. She saved me, out of the goodness and the strength of her heart. This is how I live, my friend. It is hard, very hard to live away from the people and the places that you know and love. My heart is not broken, but it is heavy. It is far away in the Congo where I know the most wonderful woman in the whole world is writing poems and love letters, but not for me.”

Life in Paris came abruptly to an end. But when it did, Nathaniel did not find himself entirely surprised. It was as if there had been an off-ramp he knew was coming, and perhaps