Francoise felt it, like a cold current, a cold breeze slicing through the entire villa the day her husband passed away. After the funeral of the white patriarch in Abidjan, and the crowd sweating under their suits and ties, she perused the entire photo library Robert had meticulously compiled over five decades of their life in the Ivory Coast.
"I will always be there for you now, Maman." Djambo promised.
Francoise looked up into his eyes. She remembered how, at the beginning, she hadn't been too keen on her husband bringing young Djambo into their life: Her life.
In her mid-thirties, when Robert Martin was an expat, she felt lonely at first, missing home, France, and the fun of 1960's Paris. Then she began enjoying her quiet solitude, discovering her own sensuality for the first time in her life. She particularly enjoyed the company of younger men as long as they were over eighteen.
Djambo's arrival at the villa changed everything, and she no longer had the delicious privacy of her afternoons. She became a mother again, and the logistics of loving became too complicated. So she vowed chastity, renewed faithfulness to her husband, and began raising Djambo as her own child.
Now, in the ornate living room in Chatou, looking at her, Djambo remembered too. She had been a wonderful stepmother, helping him with the intricacies of mathematics and science in High School. In the absence of Papa Robert she became his confident when it came to the things of love. He confided to her about his romances at school, his timidity with girls, and his adolescent natural shyness. Girls scared him at the beginning. They were such a mystery. He was attracted to them, but feared them at the same time.
"It's natural" Francoise had said; "It's your age."
"I wish I weren't so afraid of speaking with them, inviting them to dance, Mom."
"You won't be. A day will come and you will meet a nice girl. Let love come to you, you're so young. The world belongs to you. You shouldn't be so worried, so curious."
But he was curious. It was stronger than him, universal. The romantic current that brings men and women together started young, always. Djambo felt it with the first vibrations of his heart, and it stayed with him for the rest of his life. Francoise knew he would be fine. As long as he was heterosexual, all would be fine with her.
She was reassured about it when she felt his presence watch her sunbathe in the nude. Under the sun, heating the inside of her thighs until it burned sometimes, she occasionally overheard a step, a movement, behind the thick bougainvillea bushes surrounding the pool.
The thought alone that it could be him, her little Djambo, her adopted native son, flattered her. His voice had been muting. He was becoming a man. Djambo turned eighteen at the beginning of Junior High but he was still a virgin.
With his stepfather, he only discussed the things of nature, hunting, politics, the things of the world, but never women. Robert Martin had a certain catholic modesty about him that made him almost a puritan when it came to sexuality.
His wife Francoise came from the same vein, from the Loire Valley, but life in Africa had changed her and she became more daring in her thirties.