The marquee was set. Waiters and waitresses wearing the blue
and white colours of our uniforms weaved around, carrying hors d’oeuvres and champagne flutes on trays. Here and there, I spotted an old teacher and waved from a distance before making out that I needed to speak to someone else. But there was only one person I was waiting for and that was you. I wouldn’t have come otherwise. Ever since the reunion was advertised on Facebook, I had known it was just an exercise in boasting. Reunions always were, and one where even old teachers and headmistresses were invited was taking the art of boasting to another level. Yes, mention was made of the fact that funds would be raised to bring the library of our lycée up to the standard of a library of a lycée of Excellence . . . but still. So I came, because I would then be able to share my suspicions about the reunion with you. A few times I had thought about calling you and then decided that the element of surprise would work best. But for an hour I’d been participating in conversations I had no interest in and you were nowhere in sight. So I decided to mingle. Parties were not your thing anyway so perhaps you had decided not to turn up. And if that were the case, I would visit you at home.
‘Ah, Essien! There you are.’
‘I hope you’re not about to give me a job, chieftain,’ I groaned
inwardly but managed to keep a smile plastered on my face.
Chantal has always been the bossy one of us girls and I had been
trying to avoid her lest she roped me in on some task. Apparently the
reunion was her idea. But then again, only Chantal had the persuasive power to gather together 120 girls living on at least three different continents.

‘Well, it’s not really a job. By the way, how’s you, Mrs Professor?’
she planted a kiss on my cheek. ‘And don’t fear,’ she waved her hand
as if swatting away a fl y, ‘my lippie doesn’t stain. Do you know how
long I’ve been waiting for a lippie that doesn’t . . .’
‘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 Côted’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 fl owers and love, you know. Look for the symbol-
ism, 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 passion-
ate 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 fi nd 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 fi ll 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 fl oor 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 pos –
sibly 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 fi fty-fi ve, 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 under-
stand 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 know-
ing 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.
‘I’ll find someone,’ I promised. And I did.
His name is Martin and we both moved to England after my maîtrise.
He also just doesn’t understand my obsession with nineteenth-century
French literature, especially as I have set up a thriving literary salon.
We drink wine, smoke cigars or cigarettes and we read poetry, ours
and our heroes’. Sometimes when someone says something witty, I
fi nd myself thinking about you and almost ache that you are not there
because you were the one who sowed the seed in me. You introduced
them to me.