The Story of the Cannibal Woman

by Maryse Conde

  She sat down behind the desk and stared at the murky eye of the computer. There was something troubling to the thought that now that Stephen was gone, the computer stored everything that had preoccupied him. All she need do to penetrate this artificial brain was press a few keys. Yet this would be a sacrilege. Without hesitating, she decided to destroy its memory and then donate the computer, a shell drained of its substance, to the Steve Biko High School. During the funeral a delegation of students and teachers had carried a wreath. Chris Nkosi, who had played Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, had read in tears one of his own poems. Without thinking, she tried to open the drawers. Locked except for two of them. The first was filled with those odds and ends you accumulate throughout life: business cards for people you will never do business with, blue erasable Waterman cartridges, matchbooks advertising Café Milano, Café Lalo, Café Mozart, felt-tip pens of every color, staplers without staples, and a small Chinese compass pointing feverishly toward the northeast. There was nothing worth keeping. Rosélie pulled the wastepaper basket toward her, and it was then she saw it, the cell phone they thought was lost. Nestling against one of the desk’s legs, half hidden under the jute rug. A tiny, very expensive object, just a few inches wide, folded into its black leather case. She flipped it open and pressed a key and it lit up, evil-looking and green, like an emerald in the palm of her hand.

  It’s Inspector Lewis Sithole who will be happy.

  In the other drawer there was a pile of photo albums. She opened one haphazardly. On the first page four people were smiling at the camera. Or rather three people were smiling at the camera, she was standing to one side, aloof and sulky. She turned the photo over: Lone Pine—1994—With Lisa and Richard—Memorable Stay. Stephen had underlined the last two words. The memorable stay fluttered, at first vague and uncertain in her memory, then settled motionless. She remembered. They had taken advantage of one of Stephen’s leaves to visit Death Valley in California. After driving for several hours, they had arrived at a small town whose name foreshadowed what it had to offer. Lone Pine. A few houses huddled along a main street. A fast-food restaurant where individuals with faces of America’s most wanted were swallowing platefuls of carbohydrates. A gas station where enormous trucks had come to a halt. Around a trailer park garlands of jeans, checkered shirts, and children’s sleepsuits were fluttering in the breeze. All the moroseness of Middle America was gathered there. Plus something else, something frightening. It was as if the bestiality of the inhabitants hidden behind these commonplace facades, like an ogre in his lair, would pounce at the slightest pretext. The guidebook had graced the Beaver Inn with three stars even so. Going down to join Stephen at the bar, she saw him in deep conversation with a couple. Around forty. The woman: blond, smartly dressed, and pretty. The man: slightly overfed, a mop of hair, and a pleasant face. As she walked over, they watched her behind their what-a-wonderful-world smiles, switched on for the occasion, with a mixture of aloofness and anxiety. What was this black woman doing walking straight toward them? She reached the table, and it was then that Stephen introduced her, drawing her close with a possessive hug.

  “My wife, Rosélie.”

  Every time, he never failed! She complained he was playing the conjurer pulling a lugubrious and surprising object out of his hat. In front of his colleagues, his acquaintances, the neighborhood shopkeepers, the newspaper seller, the cigarette merchant, and the florist. She would force a muttered greeting. Every time, the other person would strain their ears, on high alert. In her mouth the French accent that conjured up pell-mell Gay Paree, Chanel suits, Christian Dior, Must de Cartier, and the white lace of the French cancan sounded like an insufferable parody.

  You mean to say you’re French?

  Oh no! I’m from Guadeloupe!

  Where’s that?

  My God, what a mix-up!

  She suspected Stephen of reveling in the reactions his introduction produced. Remembering them in bed was his life buoy against their sexual shipwreck. Clinging to these memories gave a kick to an exercise that in the long run could have ended up as a routine and endowed it with a taste for the taboo, even perversity or vice.

  Lisa and Richard stood up like robots and awkwardly held out their hands.

  The unexpected thing about America is that you can live there for years without meeting the natives. Nor even speaking their language. Rosélie had ended up learning English, but not without difficulty. But since she didn’t have an outside job, the only Americans she knew were Stephen’s colleagues. When they came for dinner at Riverside Drive, their conversation revolved around literature or politics, subjects that were foreign to her.

  “What are you interested in?” Stephen would ask mockingly after every one of those dinners. “Next time we’ll do our best to please you.”

  What am I interested in? Me, me, nothing but me.

  In fact, besides Linda, the only people she spoke to were the day porter, a Pakistani in a dark blue uniform; the night porter, a Bulgarian in a brown uniform; and the security patrolmen in their light blue uniforms with gilded facings, swaggering along the neighborhood streets, all of them Latinos.

  Lisa and Richard went far beyond her wildest imagination. Richard was a lawyer. Lisa worked for a television station. They were parents of three sons. Both divorced, they each had three daughters from their previous marriages. They didn’t spare one detail recounting their first marriages, the tribulations of their divorces, the trouble with their parents, their quarrels with their in-laws, the problems with their children, their rivalry with brothers and sisters, their marital difficulties, their sexual boredom, the failed orgies, the successful affairs, and their futile sessions with their shrink, who, nevertheless, had cured Hillary Clinton of her depression. This outpouring was especially painful, as it was directed solely at Stephen. Products of centuries of racism and exclusion of blacks, Lisa and Richard were incapable of looking at Rosélie in the eye and treating her like any other human being. At the most they managed to grimace an inane smile, by half turning in her direction. In fact, Rosélie, used to invisibility, could have put up with it if she had been deaf as well. On day four, while Lisa and Richard were giving endless descriptions of their trip to Tuscany and their futile efforts to get the dark, curly-haired Italian gardener into bed with them, she couldn’t take it any longer and fled. A taxi drove her to the Los Angeles Sheraton, from where she called Stephen. He soon joined her. She was waiting for him with some very precise questions. What enjoyment did he get from such company? Did he care about the ordeal it meant for her? Instead of giving an answer, he made love to her with unusual violence, gagging her with kisses.

  “You don’t know how to have fun,” he complained yet again.

  Have fun? Was that having fun? They didn’t share the same sense of humor.

  Back in New York, Stephen invited Lisa and Richard to one of his dinners. But at the last minute they canceled with a lame excuse and were never seen again.

  Rosélie also gathered enough strength to climb up to her studio, open the windows, and gaze at her paintings. Since Stephen had gone she hadn’t touched her brushes. Since the officiant was no longer there for the naming ceremonies, she no longer gave birth.

  Oddly enough, in Cape Town she had sold a fair number of paintings. All it took was for Mrs. Hillster, while on a visit to her studio in the company of Stephen, now the official guide, to enthuse over Devils, She-Devils, and Zombies and buy it for her shop; as a result, a number of customers had made the detour to Faure Street to be the first to own a painting by this genius, who was still totally unknown but destined in the more or less long term for the spotlight of celebrity, as Mrs. Hillster declared, duly coached. Since South Africa was a cauldron where all the world’s nationalities were cooking, the Germans, Norwegians, Swiss, Indians, and the Mexicans, who remarked learnedly on the similarities with their very own Frida Kahlo—the blood, the entrails, the physical suffering—left with their treasures under their arm, looking very pleased with th
emselves.

  Dido thought along the same lines as Simone.

  “You know Bebe Sephuma. Couldn’t she give a helping hand? That’s what you need!”

  How could she explain that Bebe Sephuma was not interested in her? Not glamorous enough for a magazine cover! Too awkward and self-conscious! And then she wasn’t English-speaking. People who speak English feel a deep contempt for the rest of the world. The time is long gone when French was considered the language of culture. For serious minds it now seems nothing more than frivolous gibberish.

  Once again she was seized with doubt. What were the fruits of her labor worth? As long as she was busy choosing, then mixing the colors, applying the paint with long or short brush strokes, savoring its vivifying smell, her eyes were fixed on this white square of canvas that her imagination slowly peopled and transformed. She heard nothing except for the hum of the outside world that mellowed inside her. She was inhabited by a happiness, no doubt comparable with that of a woman whose fetus moves in the very depths of her flesh. However, once she had lost her waters and given birth, she detached herself from her creation. Worse, she took a sudden dislike to it, like a cruel mother who dreams of throwing her newborn in a garbage dump, wrapped in a plastic bag. So why did she go on painting? Because she couldn’t do otherwise.

  But God in his mysterious ways had perhaps put an end to her agony. Now that Stephen was gone, she was no longer anything at all. A masseuse, a medium, a curandera, call it what you like.

  “Rosélie Thibaudin, healer of incurable cases.”

  At the same time, illogically, the loss of her gift was destroying her.

  Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.

  EIGHT

  Change your man and you change your rhythm of life.

  With Stephen, Rosélie always played the same musical score. Allegro ma non troppo. She spent her days practically alone. As early as seven in the morning he would leave for the university with a colleague and neighbor, a Virginia Woolf specialist, author of a remarkable study on Mrs. Dalloway. In his absence she painted without taking note of the passing hours. Around one o’clock Dido called her from the bottom of the stairs, and Rosélie interrupted her work to watch her eat a usually copious lunch. Dido had what they call a hearty appetite. She spiced her meals with comments on the harshness of women’s condition, the chaos of the world in general, and South Africa in particular, which didn’t prevent her from eating up greedily and scraping her plate. Rosélie always felt slightly envious in front of this ravenous mouth and its masticating teeth. After a few cups of coffee on the patio, she went back up to her studio while Dido returned to the kitchen, where she noisily loaded the antediluvian dishwasher, bought secondhand at a university sale. Then she went and ironed in the living room while listening to Hugh Masekela. The music whirled, wafted up two flights of stairs, and joined Rosélie under the roof. Listening to it, in spite of herself, she ended up knowing every tune like she used to know her father’s Afro-Cuban melodies, Rose’s love songs, and Salama Salama’s reggae music, and she caught herself humming them.

  The end of the afternoon brightened up when Stephen came home in another colleague’s car, this time a Chaucer specialist. Then tea at the Mount Nelson followed by dinner in a restaurant along the seafront. Always the same one, not because of the food—the fries were greasy and the chicken tasteless, rubbery hormone-fed meat—but because Ted, the owner, an Englishman, was living with Laurence, a black woman. Although Rosélie and Laurence sat coldly staring at each other, having absolutely nothing in common—Laurence working in a lingerie shop, preoccupied with thongs and frilly lace underwear, Rosélie preoccupied with her painting—Ted and Stephen, who had defied their society’s taboo, found themselves drawn closer together like two war veterans back from the front line. As usual Stephen would chatter away. But with Ted he didn’t talk about literature or politics. He would comment on the behavior of the royal family. According to him, Princess Diana had been a genuine antipersonnel mine that one of these days Buckingham Palace would step on. Besides, he declared, royalty was destined to be abolished. The prospect saddened Ted. He cherished the Queen and the Queen Mother, hats and handbags included. Neither Laurence nor Rosélie had an opinion on the question. Moreover, neither Stephen nor Ted asked them for one. In the distance Rosélie stared at the glow of Robben Island, which she had never visited and which was constantly calling her. A penal colony turned into a tourist attraction! Its lights winked in the distance, a reminder of a past that stubbornly refused to be transformed.

  What do you do with the past? What a cumbersome corpse! Should we embalm it, idealize it, and let it take over our destiny? Or should we hurriedly bury it as a disgrace and forget it altogether? Should we metamorphose it?

  Rosélie seldom accompanied Stephen to the department’s receptions. Cheese and cheap white wine in plastic cups. Very seldom to his colleagues’ parties. Braais and better-quality white wine. Never to his rounds of the waterfront jazz clubs. Jack Daniel’s and salted peanuts. She locked herself in her studio whenever he had guests. In short, her nocturnal activities boiled down to very little: evenings at the French Cultural Center and the DNA programs that had been severely trimmed since Simone left.

  In fact, the DNA was dying.

  They had hurriedly elected another Martinican woman as president who taught music theory at the French lycée. Whereas her students created mayhem in her classroom when they were not skipping class en masse, her husband was a sports idol whose picture, like Che Guevara’s in the sixties, hung in every student’s room. He coached a soccer team that had won the African Juniors Cup. They had hoped therefore that her appointment would arouse a competitive spirit in her and she would take the DNA to new heights. Nothing of the sort happened. She lacked savoir faire. In eight months she had only invited a relatively unknown Caribbean scholar, who happened to be in Cape Town for a conference on aesthetics.

  Instead of a routine, Faustin established the unexpected and spelled disorder.

  She waited for him in vain for days on end. He would turn up unexpectedly, stay for a few minutes, leave for some mysterious rendezvous, come back, leave again, then decide to stay. Each time, the Mercedes zoomed up peaceful Faure Street. When he spent the night, his bodyguards, playing belote in the garden and downing beer after beer, disturbed everyone’s peace. Except for Deogratias, whom nothing could disturb. Rosélie trembled at the thought of the neighbors’ hostility. This would be their excuse for evicting her from the neighborhood. Disturbing the peace at night.

  As soon as he came in the front door, it was a hubbub of telephone conversations, CNN and BBC News, and commentaries from Radio France Internationale. Since he still couldn’t sleep—on that point Rosélie had to admit she had been ineffective—he dragged her to nightclubs, not to dance (they were past the age, although in Guadeloupe arthritis doesn’t stop the old and achy from shaking a leg) but to listen to music. He had a particular liking for the Dogon, owned by some Malians, because the singer, a Senegalese, could be mistaken for the voice of the Gabonese Pierre Akendengué. He reduced Cape Town to its French-speaking population, for in a certain way he despised South Africa. Not for the political reasons she had heard voiced over and over again by Stephen. Simply because it did not form part of the prestigious circle of countries that spoke French. For him, to speak French forty years after African independence remained an honor and a privilege.

  Faustin provided no information about himself, as if introspection were banned. What sort of child, teenager, and student had he been? What did he think of the Eastern bloc, where he had studied for many years? Of the United States, where he had met his wife? This last point intrigued Rosélie. Retrospective jealousy? Not only that. She graced this stranger with the characteristics of the African-American women she had met, shivering as she remembered them, and realizing that they more than anyone had convinced her of her shortcomings by subtly setting her against a standard she could never achieve: that of matron, poto-mitan, of the civi
lizations of the diaspora. What had she accomplished in which the Race could glorify?

  In short, Faustin’s conversation was always superficial and insignificant. He described his grandparents’ rugo, the peace that once enveloped the country of a thousand hills, and the village traditions of long ago. He showed no interest in her island, which he would have been unable to find on a map. He took no interest in her painting. The only time he had walked through her studio, he had emerged stunned:

  “My God, it’s Bluebeard’s closet!”

  He no longer alluded to Stephen as if it were better to forget this episode in Rosélie’s life. Adult discussions on topics such as regional development, the future of the continent, and globalization he would reserve for Deogratias. After all, both men, originating from the same country, shared the same language, Rosélie told herself when these endless conversations drove her to distraction. He holed himself up to talk business with Raymond, his inseparable friend from Cameroon who had never lost the ways of ten years mistakenly spent in a seminary before giving in to his inordinate taste for women. On a courtesy visit to her studio he had been swept off his feet unexpectedly and surprisingly, like every infatuation, by a painting called Tabaski. A sheep with its throat slit, its scarlet blood draining into a blue enamel basin. He had questioned her. Did she think, like he did, that such sacrilegious practices should be banned, and that only the sacrifice by the Son of God counted? Did she hate Islam, like he did, the intolerance of the Muslims, their violence, and the dangers to the world they represented? Rosélie sharply defended her point of view. On the contrary, this religion that accompanied each of its rituals with a massacre of the innocents fascinated her. In N’Dossou the Muslims were mainly immigrants, Senegalese, Burkinabés, recognizable by their boubous and slippers they dragged through the filthy streets. Theirs was the Mossada district, huddled around a mosque. People in the neighborhood complained of the muezzin’s call to prayer. But Rosélie adored this high-pitched, lugubrious voice whose call to prayer was like a summons to death.