The Story of the Cannibal Woman

by Maryse Conde

  Stuffed Eggplant

  Preparation: 30 min. + 30 min

  Cooking time: 45 minutes

  215 calories per person

  For six helpings…

  The bar also served a mysterious cocktail without alcohol called the Tsunami, invented by Tran Anh, sour as the bitterness of exile and green as tomorrow’s promise despite the cold light of reality. One evening a white guy sat down at the bar with a Pilsner Urquell, that’s a Czech beer. He looked around, got up, walked straight over to her table, and offered her a drink. His introduction was not very original, even conventional. It has worked ever since there have been bars, men, and women. He was no uglier than the rest. Somewhat better, even. She hesitated because she had never considered other partners in bed besides blacks. In her family nobody went in for mixed couples. The whites were terra incognita! The only exceptions were Great-uncle Elie, who left to work on the Panama Canal and ended his days with a Madrilenian, and cousin Altagras, whose name was erased from the family tree. Something attracted her to this white guy. They had walked out into the dusk as the red disk of the sun slipped untiringly into the ocean’s watery deep. And passersby, numerous at this time of day, fired the first of those looks loaded with hostility and contempt that from then on would never leave them.

  They had climbed into his red, somewhat flashy four-wheel drive, and navigating around the ruts and potholes that got deeper every rainy season, he had introduced himself. University professor. Taught Irish literature. Wilde, Joyce, Yeats, and Synge. His book on Joyce had been a mistake. Went completely unnoticed. Another on Seamus Heaney had been a critical success. He used to work in London. Listening to him, Rosélie was as fascinated as if an astronaut had described his days on the MIR space station. So people spend their time wallowing in fiction, getting worked up about lives they have never led, paper lives, lives in print, analyzing them and commenting on these fantasy worlds. By comparison she was ashamed of her own problems, so commonplace, so crude, so genuine.

  What are you doing in N’Dossou?

  Me? Nothing! A man has just left me high and dry. I’ve no work, I’ve no money. I’ve no roof over my head. I’m trying to survive and cure myself of my lenbe. Lovesick. Back home they call it lenbe.

  He certainly could talk. Never a bore, though, full of unpretentious literary allusions and anecdotes about the countries he had visited.

  Who was her favorite writer?

  Mishima.

  Found the name just in time. She wasn’t going to say Victor Hugo or Alexandre Dumas, so obvious!

  The Temple of the Golden Pavilion is magnificent, isn’t it?

  No, I prefer Confessions of a Mask.

  Said confidently. Yet it was the only one she had read, in paperback in economy class from Paris to Pointe-à-Pitre, one July when she was going back to spend her vacation with Rose and Elie. She had always been scolded for not reading. Ever since elementary school. Last in French composition. For her, the stories in books come nowhere near reality. Novelists are scared to invent the incredible, in other words life itself.

  Did she like to travel?

  There she felt obliged to tell the truth. She only knew a tiny portion, the tip of the iceberg, of the vast world around us: Guadeloupe, where she was born, Paris, where she had vaguely studied, and N’Dossou, where she had ended up three years earlier.

  Three years of Africa! Do you like Africa?

  Like! Does a prisoner awaiting his execution like being on death row? Now, now! Stop being facetious and witty! Africa hadn’t always been a prison. She had been eager to make the journey, thinking she was about to launch on the great adventure. Despite her misfortunes she remained loyal to N’Dossou, an unattractive, unpretentious (how could it be anything else?) yet engaging city.

  He had taken her home to his place, where they had slept in each other’s arms until the following morning. This was unusual for Rosélie. Her civil servants usually climbed up to her studio apartment and didn’t give her more than two hours of their time, watch in hand. As soon as they had finished with their well-oiled orgasm, they slipped on their clothes, awkwardly handed her a small commission, then limped back in their four-wheel-drives to their legitimate spouses. When she woke up, the houseboy, somewhat forward with a girl the boss had picked up on the cheap, served her coffee and a papaya that had seen better times. Stephen had already left for the university, leaving her an envelope stuffed with banknotes. He lived in the European quarter, with its crumbling buildings, its park and tree-lined avenues. Driving by a kindergarten, she had heard “Frère Jacques.” A little farther on the off-key sounds of “Für Elise,” which she too had murdered in her time to please Rose, floated out of a window.

  Would she see him again? Did she want to see him again? She could find nothing wrong with him: perfectly groomed, smelling of Acqua de Giò, and good in bed. A lot of kissing, embracing, playing, and fondling, as if penetration was not the main issue.

  That same evening he once more came through the door of the Saigon, where the civil servants recognized him and cast disapproving looks. A month later she moved in with him.

  It was love with a capital L.

  Rosélie put on the clothes carefully chosen by Dido. A dark brown boubou with a fitted yolk embroidered in golden yellow, and a matching head tie. She walked down the stairs in a regal manner befitting her role and entered her consulting room. Népoçumène was waiting for her, his face a little less haggard than usual. Was he sleeping now? Were his nightmares beginning to leave him in peace? Did he hear his wife’s voice? She had told him over and over again he would hear her once he had forgiven her for having abandoned him. That was the most difficult part. She herself still couldn’t hear Stephen’s voice. All too often she was overwhelmed by bitterness and a kind of anger toward him.

  Rosélie’s gift became evident very early on. At the age of six all she had to do was place her little hands over Rose’s eyelids for poor Rose to sleep like a baby until nine in the morning. Until then Rose had been tormented by Elie’s absences; her body had begun to swell considerably, and as a result she could never get to sleep. At the age of ten Rosélie had made a pack of Creole dogs turn tail as they were about to attack her and her cousins on the road in Montebello just before Bois-Sergent, where her aunt had a house. On weekends, unbeknownst to the skeptics in the family, Papa Doudou, her grandfather on her father’s side, took her to his property at Redoute, where the cows turned their backs on the bull and the mares refused to be mounted by the stud. She would look deep into their big gelatin eyes and the recalcitrant females would be completely transformed, as pliable as putty in your hands. Bad-mouthers, and there are some in every family, were skeptical and made no bones about it. Rosélie had been incapable of predicting that the same Papa Doudou would die of a hemorrhage from his testicles being ripped off by the horns of a small bull he was breaking in. And during Hurricane Deirdre she had been unable to foresee that a breadfruit tree would smash through Uncle Eliacin’s house and flatten it like a cowpat, killing him outright as well as his wife and five children with the American TV names of Warner, Steve, Jessica, Kevin, and Randy. Okay, she had seen Deirdre coming. But you didn’t need to be a rocket scientist to see a hurricane. Hurricanes are regular visitors. Year after year they arrive from the coast of Africa. What matters is their strength, and that is never the same.

  As an adult she would have liked to turn her powers to good account. But astrology? Palmistry? Chiropractic? Osteopathy? Shiatsu? All that is not very serious. So she had got bogged down in her law studies. Elie had so admired the black robes around him that he dreamed of putting his daughter in one. Oh, let her tear the French language to pieces like lawyer Démosthène, the famous bard of independence! As for Rose, she regretted her daughter had not gone into politics. Her father had been a local hero whose full-length portrait occupied a place of honor in the living room.

  If Dido hadn’t been there, she would still be looking for herself.

  She liked listenin
g to the way Stephen relived their first meeting. It became fictional and poetical, as if it were a chapter in a novel, perhaps Irish, perhaps not.

  “I landed up here a few months ago. Why, you ask? Because I realized I was becoming the spitting image of my father. I could no longer put up with London, its gray skies, my bedsitter, my teaching job, the boredom of the pubs and the Sunday papers. At least in N’Dossou everything seemed new under the sun. Ex Africa semper aliquid novi. One evening, after a scorching-hot day, I was searching for a cool breeze along the seafront, where the wind blows in from the ocean with occasional gusts and cools the sweat on your skin, when, out of breath and tired of tramping in the sand, I pushed open the door of a bar with a facade smeared in blue and a sign painted with palm trees: the Saigon. A stroke of luck. The shadowy interior smelled of peppermint, reminding me of my childhood. On summer visits my aunt Chloé, my mother’s sister, always used to give me a peppermint drink in a blue-stemmed glass. A view of the Mekong ran above the circular bar in bamboo. Another depicted the bay of Along with its extraordinary rocks like pieces in a game of chess. Ana was washing the glasses. Tran Anh, as usual, was idly blowing smoke rings into the air. You were sitting alone at your table, a little to the left. You were wearing a green dress with an orange pattern. [What was this about a green dress? He must have been dreaming. I loathe the color green.] I never accost women. Their cold eyes, their cruel teeth, and the way they have of sizing up and assessing men scares me. Will he be able to satisfy me? Black women were foreign, mysterious, a nebulous, unfathomable world. The other side of the moon. You looked so lost, so vulnerable that by comparison I felt serene and powerful. God Almighty. You were sitting behind a pile of magazines. You were leafing through one. Yet it was obvious you couldn’t care less what was flicking past your eyes. Your mind was elsewhere.”

  Oh yes, my mind was elsewhere!

  She was asking herself the same questions over and over again. What’s going to become of me? How long can I last without a cent to my name? What is there left to sell? I’ve already sold for next to nothing my gold choker and chain, given me by Aunt Léna. The other jewels are from Rose. I could never part with them.

  Dominique, a chance acquaintance who worked in real estate, had offered her a studio apartment. Never look a gift horse in the mouth. The apartment was badly situated in the Ferbène district, a shantytown, sitting in the middle of a swamp that was supposed to have been drained during the public works projects at the time of independence. After forty years, the work had never been completed and the swamp had turned into a quagmire. Life there was not worth a dime. On the sidewalks garbage piled up higher than a man. But could they really be called sidewalks? The tangle of streets were flooded all year round with a brackish soup. La Liberté, the name of this rat- and vermin-infested building, housed the studio apartment generously loaned by Dominique. Ten stories high, elevator chronically in need of repair, cassava and plantain peelings as well as banana skins, green and yellow, littering the hallways, and raggedy clothes hung out to dry on the balconies. It overlooked a panorama of shacks. Beyond, a pallid and disheveled ocean regularly vomited up corpses. One never knew whether they were foolhardy fishermen, suicides tired of vegetating without love or money, or victims of revenge wreaked by parents or neighbors.

  One morning Rosélie, plus two metal canteens of the type you never see now called cabin trunks, plus a plywood box, climbed out of one of Navitour’s trucks.

  NAVITOUR TRUCK RENTAL

  WHEN YOU WANT IT, HOW YOU WANT IT!

  The building’s residents were stupefied. Okay, okay, Allah doesn’t have to be merciful. But the least we can expect is that he hasn’t gone off his rocker. In the glossy pages of GuidArt they had often drooled over the new tenant—that’s her, I’m telling you, beside Salama Salama, the famous reggae singer, beloved by young and old alike. Salama Salama’s real name was Sylvestre Urbain-Amélie. He had had to change his name for the stage, showbiz rules. Salama Salama sounds strange and exotic. What country was he from?

  Devoured by curiosity, the tenants had dispatched Angéline, who got by in French after four years at school. Unfortunately, the door of apartment 4B was firmly closed to her. Rosélie had barricaded herself in together with the rest of her story. However hard the neighbors spied, the door of number 4B never opened an inch and they had had to wait another week for GuidArt to clarify matters. Salama Salama, the famous singer, beloved by young and old alike, had been appointed Minister for Culture, a position that had been cruelly lacking in the entourage of the president. In his magnanimity, the president had given his seventh daughter to go with the job. Seven, a magic number. He had seventeen biological and seven adopted daughters. This daughter was one of his own. Plus as many sons, making forty-eight children in all. A photo on page three showed Salama Salama on the arm of a teenage girl swathed in yards of Alençon lace, swollen by an early pregnancy, for they had put the cart before the horse, something quite common nowadays. He himself was wearing tails. The couple were to spend their honeymoon in Morocco with the crown prince, son of our late friend the king.

  The story was becoming clear. Betrayal. Cruel disappointment. For the second time Angéline was dispatched to the fourth floor. She finally managed to get in and scolded Rosélie, who had collapsed on the bed, her two trunks and box lying unopened beside her. She forced open not only the door of Rosélie’s apartment, but also her heart. She introduced her to Justine, Awu, Mandy, and Mariétou, and welcomed her into the band of women. Rosélie joined in the laughter, the repartee, pranks, and practical jokes that had been sorely missing in her solemn, solitary years as a young girl. Sometimes she thought of her family. Her father, who always thought himself the cat’s whiskers. What would Elie say if he saw her abandoned by her second-rate Bob Marley (already the choice of this unknown African musician had been the subject of volumes of abuse), in this city at the end of the world, in the company of these illiterate women? And Rose? For whom nothing was good enough for her daughter. And her uncles? With their pencil-sharp mustaches. And her aunts? Especially Aunt Léna, wrapped in her Creole jewelry. During the course of imaginary dialogues she tried to plead her case in front of this tribunal, and getting no encouragement, she ended up eliminating it entirely from her memory.

  All this merriment, joking, and secret talk ended at six in the evening. Angéline and the band of women scurried home, where, armed with brooms and sponge mops, they would scrub, wash, iron, and cook, in other words carry out all those jobs assigned the female species since the world began. For dusk brought home the creatures who had been absent all day long: the men. The men, embittered by their makeshift jobs at the other end of the city. As soon as they returned home they vented their frustration and disappointment, and the residence La Liberté echoed with shouts and recriminations, the screams of battered women and the cries of terrified children. It was then that Rosélie cowardly took refuge in the serenity of the Saigon, savoring with Tran Anh the smell of green papaya.

  The day arrived when, finishing a game of cards, she made the announcement to her companions. She was going to live with an Englishman, a university professor. In order to avoid getting sentimental she tried her hand at being cynical, something she ventured from time to time. A stroke of luck, no? She not only got love, but a roof over her head and food on the table. Nobody laughed. Her words were met with a silence of disbelief. Mariétou demanded an explanation. English is not a nationality, it’s a language. What was this all about? Rosélie explained, surprised deep down at her apologetic tone. Finally realizing what it actually meant, her girlfriends hurriedly withdrew, fleeing her like a leper. From that day on Rosélie found herself abandoned, her once inseparable companions now invisible, claiming they were too busy with their kids, their housework, or, even more unlikely, job hunting, for hoping and searching for a job in N’Dossou was like looking for a needle in a haystack. The day she left she was escorted by a cortege of children. They surrounded Stephen’s four-by-four, as solemn as if
they were coffining a body. The older teenagers, admirers of Pelé—at that time Zinedine Zidane, like the lamb in the fable, was still at his mother’s breast or else swimming in the waters of her womb—stopped kicking their soccer ball to look daggers at her.