The Story of the Cannibal Woman

by Maryse Conde

  Invisible woman!

  On Faure Street, Deogratias had already unrolled his mat at the foot of the traveler’s tree, but was not lying in that favorite position of his, on his left side, his checkered flannel blanket drawn up to his eyes. Myths die hard. Most experts agree that Deogratias’s ethnic group, the “descendants of a pastoral people,” are not really Negroid. Look at their height, their slender figure. Look at their aquiline nose in particular. A nose says everything. Deogratias had a flat nose. This did not prevent him from undergoing the same fate as his brothers of taller stature. He was waiting for Rosélie with a piece of news that made his Adam’s apple jump up and down. A fellow countryman had just arrived in Cape Town. A former government minister. What could he be up to? Rosélie ignored his excitability. Except for his speeches on the South Africans’ xenophobia, his only subject of conversation was the need to hunt down those who had destroyed so many lives, bring them before the international court of justice in Arusha and organize trials that would echo round the world like those at Nuremberg. This was the price to pay for Africa’s salvation. Together with Dido, Deogratias had been one of Rosélie’s first patients, well before she had thought of setting up business on her own. When Stephen had hired him, Deogratias was suffering from terrible nightmares. At times, lying under the traveler’s tree, he struggled with invisible torturers while his screams tore through the dark. Rosélie had taken care of him. She had been about to lose hope when his salvation came in the shape of Sylvaine, a young immigrant from the same ethnic group whom he had met at church. Sylvaine promptly gave him a daughter; the couple baptized her Hosannah in a shout of gratitude to the God who had reunited them. Although Rosélie had been extremely shocked, Stephen, as usual, had been more understanding.

  “What do you expect him to do? Spend his life lamenting the dead? In the end, it’s always life that wins.”

  After a quick look at the university housing, Stephen had dragged her on a house hunt. They both fell for the house on Faure Street. Of course, all those who knew Cape Town advised them not to live in the center of town. Much too dangerous! Worse than the Bronx! Worse than Harlem! But Harlem is no longer Harlem ever since Rudy Giuliani launched his trigger-happy police. To prove it, Magic Johnson has invested there. The center of town is worse than anything you’ve ever known. But Stephen was taken with so much space: ten rooms, a balcony, and a garage. Rosélie had fallen in love with the tree. With arms outstretched, it shouted to be let free in its little patch of lawn, and she got the impression the years had rolled back. A traveler’s tree! A silent witness to her games at Papa Doudou’s. She would huddle in its heart and the swarm of cousins would grouse they couldn’t find her.

  “Where on earth is she?”

  The triangular trade had been reversed. Before arriving in Cape Town, the Christ-Roi had anchored at La Pointe, where it had replaced its ebony cargo with other species. The magic of the long-lost tree, of Nature, the smell of the mighty ocean parading as far as the eye could see, and the everlasting distress of her people like a canker in the midst of so much beauty cast a powerful, equivocal spell, a magical, perverse philter against which she was helpless. A frenzy of blood flooded through her heart, her head, her arms and legs, and she painted, painted for days on end, endeavoring to convey her conflicting feelings with her brushes. Rage. Repulsion. Seduction. Love. Hate. Stephen, who had been mortified by her lack of enthusiasm for New York, capital of the world in his eyes, was elated.

  “You say you can’t bear this city, this country. And yet it inspires you. You’ve never painted anything so original.”

  Without a moment’s hesitation he bought the house, muttering that the estate agent was letting it go for a mere song. Something quite unlikely, since the center of Cape Town had recently been classified an historical area. But Rosélie didn’t protest.

  For three whole days a Congolese (there are forty thousand in the country) turned over the soil in the garden.

  He planted canna lilies, gladioli, gerberas, and especially white flowered flag bushes, a fragile shrub with a liking for humidity.

  Stephen was born in Hythe, a small coastal town in Kent. Cecil, his father, had been an engineer in charge of maintaining the military canal, a remnant of the Napoleonic wars. An unrewarding job he carried out dejectedly, dreaming of an Elsewhere, when he was offered a managerial position in Bangkok. Annie, however, his French wife and a former governess, was five months pregnant. Reluctant to leave her alone in her condition, he had given up the offer. Ever since, he had made the mother and child pay for his sacrifice.

  “I never knew him to be anything else but irascible, furious with a rage that I understood much later when I began to feel it myself.”

  Stephen had grown up in a small, one-story brick house, three windows on the first floor, two on the second, so identical to the houses on either side along St. Nicholas Road that he had to check the two numbers over the front door before entering. After school, he was regularly beaten up in the public gardens by the little bullies who called him a sissy because of his pretty face. On Sundays his parents would have lunch in a pub, always the same one. While he sipped his lemonade they would glower at each other over their lager. The view from the pub looked out onto the gardens of the nearby castle where blond-haired little aristocrats pedaled hard on their bicycles. Finally Annie had the courage to divorce and took Stephen back to Verberie, her hometown, where the buildings and humans share the same grayness. A few years later she married again, this time a school principal, a childhood friend, like Cecil but gloomier. She had two boys.

  In order to escape this horde of relatives—the mother, the mother’s sisters, the stepfather, and the half brothers—Stephen got it into his head to return to university in England. Alas! Oxford and Cambridge thought his diction much too French! He’d lost his tonic accent, the rise in intonation and, especially, that distinguished stutter. So he had to make do with Reading. There, he had above all made his mark playing Chekhov with the university theater group. Since nobody claimed him—his father and mother having virtually forgotten him—Stephen began to travel the world. At the age of seventeen, he had almost got killed traveling through Italy and Greece on a scooter. At eighteen he lost his virginity in a bar in Houston where he had been raped by the owner and his wife in turn. At twenty, he dreamed of imitating Malraux. During a stay in Bangkok he had been content to photograph the bas-reliefs of the temples instead of looting them. At present, he proclaimed himself without a country and avoided Europe. Not entirely. He would spend a few days in the summer in Hythe, where he rented a car and drove along the coast, passing through the string of seaside resorts of Margate, Ramsgate, Sandgate, Greatstone, and Littlestone. Then a week in London.

  Throughout his stay Stephen constantly called on Rosélie to bear witness.

  “You can understand why I loathe this country.”

  She looked around her and failed to understand. She was rather charmed by the color of the sea, so different from the Caribbean you wondered whether it was made from the same substance, the white facades of the great hotels, somewhat worse for wear, the ill-dressed crowds munching fish and chips on the endless piers, the boutiques stuffed with cute, unnecessary objects, and the tea shops that closed at five o’clock, just when it was teatime. And then she adored London. She would wander aimlessly counting the mixed couples whom she alone noticed. She envied them; they looked so happy and carefree. How did they manage?

  Stephen always lodged with his friend Andrew Spire. They had shared a room at Reading. During their university vacations they had discovered Europe together. Then they had gone through hard times in London, both of them dreaming of becoming an actor. Andrew was single, as finicky as an old bachelor, handsome and marmoreal like Michel-angelo’s David. Despite his frigid expression, he published unsavory, erotic poems dedicated to T in an avant-garde journal. Rosélie was convinced T was a man.

  I would love to be the cigarette

  that your desire slowly consum
es

  penis of fire that becomes smoke

  in your mouth.

  After years of walk-on parts with obscure theater companies, he had managed to get a teaching job at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, thanks to his connections in high-up places. The house he had inherited from his grandmother, widow of a senior civil servant in India, was furnished with marquetry-worked sideboards, canopied beds, rocking chairs, and copper-studded chests shipped back from Udaipur. Andrew had added half a dozen Siamese cats, meowing haughtily, who clawed and ran over the sofas as if they were perpetually in heat. After these weeks in London and Hythe, Stephen would cross the Channel and go to visit his mother alone, now widowed, and dumped in an institution for seniors by the sons from her second marriage, executives in a large private bank who were snowed under with work.

  Rosélie preferred to drift idly through the streets of Paris. She was a regular guest of a hotel in the Marais because Cousin Altagras lived close by. Out of all the Thibaudins, and there were enough of them to populate an entire district of Guadeloupe, all very prim and proper, Rosélie was the only member to frequent Cousin Altagras, daughter of one of Elie’s half brothers, who had arrived in France after the Second World War supposedly to study art. It was not because she had married a white man. The Thibaudins were above such considerations. It was because Lucien Roubichou, that was the name of the husband, owed his fortune, his apartment on the Place des Vosges, and his Audi Quattro to a rather special kind of industry. In short, he was a porn merchant, responsible for a certain number of immortal masterpieces, well known in closed circles: Lucy, Suck My Sushi; Don’t Speak with Your Mouth Full; and Caress Me, Caress Me, no connection with the famous song from Martinique. The family accused him of having used Altagras when she was a ravishing beauty and of now doing the same with their two daughters. Incidentally, he was a man of gentle manners, mad about cooking and Italian cinema. His specialty was vegetarian lasagna. His passion: Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose theorems he subtly analyzed. In spite of her diabolical reputation, Cousin Altagras was a disappointment for Rosélie. She had given up any artistic claims in order to cook beef stew for her litter of children. Marriage does that.

  During the early years, however, Rosélie never missed an opportunity to accompany Stephen to Verberie. Vacations took her back to Guadeloupe less and less, for she could no longer bear the sight of Rose nailed to her bed, like a beached whale. Consequently, looking after her mother-in-law eased her conscience somewhat. And then at every street corner she bumped into Stephen as a child. Here was the school that looked like a prison where he had acquired his taste for literature. Here was the sports ground where he had contracted his loathing for games. Here was the academy where he had performed his first roles. Moved, she could see the likeness in his mother’s worn-out face. He had inherited her somewhat prominent nose, her smoky gray eyes, and her resolutely feminine mouth. For this reason she could put up with Annie’s constant harping. The old woman’s memories revolved like a carousel around the Second World War. Southeast England had been particularly vulnerable. The children had been evacuated to the Midlands. Annie, just married, had left Cecil and joined the volunteers who escorted groups of little girls in tears. Since age stimulated the old woman’s appetite, Rosélie forced herself to cook, consulting Aunt Léna’s recipes she had jotted down in her favorite South Sea blue ink in her spiral notebook. Féwos a zabocat. Soup Zabitan. Bélanjè au gwatin. Dombwés é pwa. Blaff. Despite Stephen’s warnings, the old lady had a tendency to drink too many rum punches. Flushed and giggling, she would be seized with an unusual exuberance. One day, following a sumptuous meal washed down with plenty of wine, a daughter-in-law came to show off her newborn baby, a pink, blond-haired little angel, the type people are so fond of. It was then that Annie, with flushed cheeks and slurred voice, turned to Stephen and begged him. No grandson. No grandson. Never, never could she hug a little half-caste in her arms.

  These half-castes, aren’t they the abomination of abominations?

  Rosélie listened to her, flabbergasted. So all her patience, kindness, and Creole cooking had served no purpose whatsoever. Four centuries later the Code Noir was still a force of law:

  “May our white subjects of either sex be prohibited from contracting marriage with the black population on pain of punishment or arbitrary penalty.”

  A leper and a plague victim she was. A leper and a plague victim she remained, carrying in her womb the germs capable of destroying civilization. From that day on she never set foot again in Verberie, where Annie whined for her, summer after summer. Stephen put the blame on her.

  “A lot of fuss about nothing! How can you possibly pay attention to the ramblings of an old woman of seventy-five, slightly tipsy into the bargain? Whatever you may think, my mother likes you a lot!”

  Yet a few words would have been enough to calm her mother-in-law’s fears. Neither Rosélie nor Stephen had any intention of slipping on the uniform of a parent. Ever since she was little, Rosélie had been sickened by motherhood: those round bloated or bombshell-pointed bellies of her aunts, cousins, and relatives of every nature, constantly pregnant in their maternity smocks ordered straight from France. She loathed their smug expressions, rueful in their rocking chairs, demanding respect as if they were carrying the Holy of Holies. She especially loathed the newborn babies. In spite of their talcum powder and baby cologne, they stank. They stank, retaining the stench of uterus in the dimples of their pudgy flesh. These were the formidable times before the pill when only the good old Ogino method protected lovers. The terror of falling pregnant protected her, much more than Rose’s tirades on the flower of maidenhood, which bloomed incongruously between her legs and should only be plucked on the night of the day when Mendelssohn’s wedding march echoed through the church. Moreover, propositions were rare, lovers few and far between. She intimidated people, they whispered. Her mouth remained shut like a sharp-nosed puffer fish. She never smiled and always looked as if she were bored.

  As for Stephen, his hatred of children was based on objective grounds. He had had to look after his sly and disobedient little half brothers, whom he was not exactly fond of, and they had no particular liking for him either. When he was not listening to them recite the fable of the crow and the fox, when he was not supervising their French homework, he took them to play in the park and read them The Adventures of Babar. He got up in the night to take them to piss. It was their fault he hadn’t been able to browse through Les Cahiers du Cinéma or admire Ascenseur pour l’échafaud or A bout de souffle. He never had to choose between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones: “I want to hold your hand” or “I can’t get no satisfaction.”

  His teenage years had been swallowed up by thankless jobs. As he grew older he became preoccupied with less selfish considerations: the hole in the ozone, the greenhouse effect, fast food, mad cow disease, bioterrorism, global warming, and the ugliness of a globalized world.

  Rosélie and Stephen also agreed on this last point, a major consideration for a couple. They weren’t interested in leaving a son and heir. Stephen elaborated on the subject with brio, claiming that the only valid creations are those of the imagination. Obviously, he had his books in mind, of which he was very proud. Especially the one on Seamus Heaney. At present he was preoccupied with his critical study of Yeats. He would start discussing it at breakfast, as if nothing else mattered, describing a thousand research possibilities.

  “And what if I compared Yeats and Césaire? That’s a bold move! What do you think?”

  Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Because I don’t know anything about it. I know nothing about anything. All I know is how to paint.

  She would run and lock herself in her studio. Once the blinds had been opened, the impatient sun streamed into the room, daubing the walls with yellow. It playfully took the liberty of hanging its cheerful reflections on the canvases, which were in desperate need of them.

  Sad, such sad canvases.

  A lot of red. Not a bright red like
the blood that soaks a birth, but dark and curdled like the blood that nurtures death. This color had always haunted her. When she was a little girl, Meynalda would buy gallons of blood from the butchers at the Saint-Antoine market in order to treat her chronic anemia. She would make it coagulate by throwing in handfuls of cooking salt. Then she would cut it into slices and fry it with chives and lard. It was her favorite dish for someone who only nibbled at her food, to Rose’s great despair. The daughter was carved in bone, whereas the mother was kneaded in soft wax.

  She also painted in dark brown, gray, black, and white.

  Stephen didn’t interfere but expressed surprise. Why always such gruesome subjects? Dismembered bodies, stumps, gouged eyes, spleens, and burst livers.

  I like horror. I think that in a previous life I must have belonged to a pack of vampires. My long, pointed canines sunk into my mother’s breast.

  While she worked Rosélie remembered Stephen’s words: “The only valid creations are those of the imagination.”

  His words seemed to her increasingly arrogant. She didn’t know whether her creations were valid. How could she know for certain? Simply, she could not help painting. Like a convict in a chain gang. A convict whose bondage knows no end. When, exhausted, she went down to the kitchen, she would find Dido, her complaints, her gossip, and her newspapers, and the entire place smelling of lamb stew with spinach, a specialty of Rajasthan.

  But Rosélie was never hungry. No more now than in the past. On her plate the green of the spinach, the saffron brown of the lamb, and the white perfumed rice from Thailand formed a still life. And she couldn’t wait to go back up and lock herself in her studio.

  THREE

  Rosélie never went out because she didn’t have any friends. In fact, even from an early age she never had any friends, cosseted by her jealous and possessive mother, and mixing with the family only because she had to. The conversations of her teenage cousins obsessed with their first kiss, or cousins now grown into womanhood obsessed with the performance or, alas, nonperformance in bed of their husbands and lovers, bored her. Ever since Simone Bazin des Roseraies, née Folle-Follette, had left Cape Town to follow her husband and consul to Somalia, she had no one but Dido to keep her company, and she treasured those moments. It’s only normal. The popular saying goes that a woman needs another woman to talk to. Men are from Mars, women from Venus, and I didn’t invent the expression. But enough of that.