When, regretfully, she takes her leave of the musicians, Denis offers her a drink. It is already 11:30. They are leaning against the bar and Denis beckons to the barmaid.
“What are you drinking?”
He accompanies his question with a gesture—tilting his head back with his thumb to his mouth.
“A Coke, please.”
“A Coke? Come on! We have good homemade punch. We have beer from Mauritius, rum from Mauritius. It’s on the house.”
“It’s very kind of you, monsieur, but I have to get back to the office to write my article. It appears tomorrow, you know.”
Who does she think she is, this woman? Denis says to himself. For several days he has been broadcasting it to all and sundry, the woman from the paper, the woman from the paper, the woman from the paper, they had got on well on the telephone, he had made her laugh, something about rum and the heat, the classic quip he saves for customers who are native-born French, the well-worn cliché about islands, with their sleepy inhabitants and their easy life. It was the first time that an event organized at the club was going to be covered in the press and he was going to pamper her, this woman from the paper. He had evidently formed a very clear picture of her, this reporter, who called him “monsieur” on the telephone. Barely forty with half-length blond hair, one of those women who still wear ripped jeans and flaunt their bikinis on the beach. Possibly divorced, two teenage children, she watches American TV series with them, smokes a joint from time to time, never votes, but has an opinion on everything. Her face is beginning to show the signs of overexposure to the sun. She likes dancing, prefers the company of men to that of women, she’s white. When Anita appeared before him and introduced herself he felt almost vexed, as if he had been cheated on the goods he had ordered.
So, how had she got here? Was she born here? What schooling had she had? How old was she? He would never have ventured questions like this with anyone else but, as he himself had a grandmother from Mauritius, he has the curiosity of a distant relative. But Anita sidesteps, she responds to his questions with other questions, and suddenly he gets the message. She’s assimilated. Oh yes, he’s met others like her, these immigrants who’ve gone far beyond what was expected of them, who live either in the center of the city or in some village in the forest, they have houses in the country, they go to Paris for the holidays, they don’t have a trace of an accent. They smear themselves with sunscreen all summer because they don’t want to tan even if no one can see the difference, they know the fashionable restaurants, marry locals, call their children Clovis or Marianne, are experts at tasting wine, love runny cheese, and can’t abide chili peppers anymore. They never come to the Tropical, they go to the Cercle, downtown, which plays sanitized and packaged world music on Friday nights. When these assimilated immigrants meet a compatriot they smile faintly, as people do at the poor, the ignorant, the unfortunate. The woman from the paper had done just that when he asked her precisely where on Mauritius she had been born.
A Coke! Whatever next? (A milkshake?)
“So I guess you’re like the cops in the movies, are you? You don’t drink when you’re on duty?”
And suddenly she laughs. All at once she reminds him of those shy young women who hide their mouths when they laugh, as if they had bad teeth. Maybe he’d judged her too hastily? It’s clear she’s eager to write a good article.
“All right. Just a tiny glass of punch.”
Denis leans across the bar and literally yells: “Adèle! Adèle!”
Then he turns back to Anita and she smiles at him in the most open and dazzling manner possible.
“The barmaid comes from Mauritius, like you.”
“Is that so? I really like your club. I’ll come back here.”
Denis had definitely been mistaken that evening.
Anita delivers her copy at 1:00 in the morning. Fifteen minutes later the news editor calls her to tell her in a warm voice that all is well, the piece is “perfect,” and she can go home.
But Anita lingers in the empty reporters’ room. She walks over to the big bay windows that look out over the square, she strolls around, inhaling deeply, as if she wanted to breathe it all in and keep it within herself: the Post-it notes stuck to screens, the titles of books on desks, the personal photographs pinned up with thumbtacks or in frames, the quotations on the walls, the posters, the tourist pictures. She keeps her hands behind her back, as in a museum, so as to touch nothing, disturb nothing. Anita likes this place and can still feel the effects of the adrenalin, that mixture of excitement and stage fright when she had to sit down and write, when she had to condense everything she had seen, learned, and felt during the evening into five hundred words. But when her fingers began tapping
