The Story of the Cannibal Woman

by Maryse Conde

“I have no home. I’m living with friends.”

  He stared at her like a small boy who is burying the last of his family.

  “Then come to my place,” she offered. “The police regularly patrol the neighborhood.”

  They had done so ever since Stephen’s murder. Every cloud has a silver lining. He made a face and began to get dressed.

  “Does that prove it’s less dangerous? The police work hand in hand with the crooks. They’re as corrupt as they are in America. My God, who could have imagined that post-apartheid South Africa would become such a jungle?”

  Rosélie refrained from making any comment; she refused to judge, condemn, or question.

  In the ensuing silence, he continued:

  “Why do you stay here? I mean why don’t you go home? This is no place for a woman on her own.”

  What place on earth is made for a woman on her own?

  Tell me so that I can take refuge with my sisters, abandoned like myself. We’ll form a sisterhood of Amazons with neither bow nor arrow. In that way we’ll keep our right breasts.

  No doubt about it, without even knowing him, Manuel must have passed the word on. She began the usual explanation. For her, South Africa was not merely a political concept: the former country of apartheid, the former white bastion of southern Africa. Or a new El Dorado, a paradise for the enterprising. She was intimately linked to it, for here was the grave where a loved one lay.

  He interrupted her and said disparagingly:

  “I know. Dido told me the whole story…a white guy.”

  It was as if he had slapped her full in the face. She staggered from the force of the blow, then turned her back on him.

  “That’ll be eight hundred rand,” she said, trying to calm down.

  Money was no problem for him, that was obvious. Without a word of protest, he held out a handful of banknotes. She counted them ostentatiously, then headed toward the door with a curt thank-you. He ran after her and grabbed her sleeve, murmuring, embarrassed, like a child:

  “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

  What were you trying to do, then? But hurt me you never will. Not now! I’m used to it, you know.

  Since she still didn’t respond, he repeated his question.

  “Will I see you again?”

  Why not? Your money doesn’t have the color of your prejudice.

  “I told you, on Friday,” she said with a nod of the head.

  Then she preceded him into the living room, where Dido was glued to the TV, watching Keanu Reeves, who was so like her dead son, she said. She reluctantly turned round and asked:

  “How did it go?”

  She sounded like a madam inquiring of one of her girls how it went taking the virginity of a young boy. Neither one responded. Without a word, the two women accompanied Faustin to the front gate. The Mercedes had now drawn up along the sidewalk. A hefty bodyguard, openly holding a gun, dashed to open the door and Faustin dived into the back. The car noisily drove back up the silent street, everyone holed up in his house with his fears. The only signs of life were a pack of dogs under a streetlamp, fighting over a garbage can.

  The two women went back inside.

  For safety reasons Rosélie did not go back to Faure Street. She stayed and had dinner at Dido’s, then slept in the small room she had just used for her consultation.

  Faustin’s brutality had accentuated her moroseness. Day after day, under every sky, under every latitude, so much incomprehension! So many insults! So many snubs! She compared her life to one of those quilts she had bought during a visit to Amish country in Pennsylvania: a mosaic of different textures of a slightly dull coloring. Brown cotton: the years in N’Dossou; gray wool: the days in New York; mauve felt: life in Cape Town; and black velvet since the death of Stephen.

  The only exception, the scarlet silk of the stay in Japan.

  From the outset, New York had terrified her: its vastness, its shrillness, and its medley of colors. No skin had the same color. No voice the same accent. Which one was the New Yorker? The African? The Indian? The Arab? The Jew? The fair-haired WASP? All swam with the same ease in the aquarium of the city. The English language did not reign supreme. Spanish collided with Yiddish, Serbo-Croat, Urdu—and all this Babel composed an indescribable cacophony. She began by holing herself up for three months in the depths of her apartment. To the point where she aroused the compassion of Linda, the Peruvian cleaning lady, who thought she was sick and as a result forgot about her husband not having a green card and the worry it was causing. Every morning she would bring her native remedies of leaves, roots, worms, and insect larvae that she bought in a botánica on Amsterdam Avenue, run by a Puerto Rican they called Pepo the Magician. Touched by her thoughtfulness, Rosélie stoically drank these vile concoctions. To her surprise they ended up having an effect. One day she woke up cured.

  That night at Dido’s she fell asleep amid the forgotten din of ambulance sirens, the screams of police cars, and the barking of fire trucks. In Times Square, above the idling crowds, the neon signs raped the darkness.

  I am in a New York state of mind.

  FIVE

  Every time Rosélie spent the night at Dido’s, not only did Dido keep her awake until the early hours of the morning, harping on life’s misfortunes—Amishand and his coronary thrombosis, Manil and AIDS, and the Jaipur restaurant, gone with its reputation for good food—but she also woke her up a few hours later to comment on the Cape Tribune and other national dailies.

  That morning, the news of a dark, horrific event was spread across the front page.

  A woman was accused of murdering her husband, who had been missing for several weeks. According to her son-inlaw, who had become suspicious of the meat packed in plastic bags on the refrigerator shelves, she had cut him up into little pieces and frozen them. Why would be anybody’s guess.

  While Dido lamented on the state of barbarity in which the country had fallen, Rosélie was fascinated by the photo of this Fiela.

  Around fifty. No more diabolical-looking than any other. She even looked quite gentle, almost shy. As thin as a smoked herring, which emphasized her angular features. The only thing that stood out were her eyes. Despite the poor quality of the photo, you couldn’t help looking at them. Elongated, they stretched up toward her temples, eyelids drooping like blinkers through which gleamed her pupils.

  She’s my age. She’s not beautiful. She could be me.

  The husband, the victim, was tall and thin with a pleasant face. Not ugly. Rather attractive. With a rounded forehead under a skullcap of peppercorn hair, and an intriguing smile.

  Rosélie remembered a case that had made headlines while she was living in Paris. A Japanese student had murdered a twenty-one-year-old Dutch student. He had raped her dead body, cut it up, and eaten several pieces. Declared insane, he had been extradited to Japan.

  With Dido still lamenting, this time about her knees swollen with osteoarthritis and the corns on her feet that had kept her awake all night, they made their way to the bus stop. In daylight Mitchell Plains seemed less sinister. Behind the hedges topped with barbed wire, the houses were pretty and the yards filled with flowers. The pattern of avenues had a certain harmony to them. The old wreck of a bus, repainted in orange to give it a new look, skirted the airport and rattled through the ring of shantytowns. As a rule, Rosélie found the sight harrowing. At the Liberty IV bus stop a woman with braided hair plastered with red mud like a Masai, was sitting on the street, surrounded by her rags and her hollow-eyed triplets. Who could have fathered them? Imagining this monstrous coupling made you shiver. The passengers threw coins into her lap to ward off the evil spells she was bound to make. That morning Rosélie took no notice, her only thoughts were for the mysterious Fiela.

  Now facing Table Mountain, the indefatigable jailer, the bus crawled toward the center. Soon, it filled with men and women muffled up in harshly colored acrylic shawls and sweaters. For although a deceptive sun shone in the midst of a blue-lacquered sky, the wind, tha
t pitiless wind that twisted the pines to its liking, tore at the lips until they bled, and seeped in just about everywhere. Rosélie had never got used to these European-style clothes, these crowds “so swayed from their own cry,” who seemed to have lost their joie de vivre, together with their finery. Away with clichés! “We are the people of dance,” claimed Senghor. “Zouk-la, sé sel médikamen nou ni,” shouted Kassav as an echo. Nothing is more debatable. Nevertheless, in N’Dossou distress didn’t grab you by the throat as it did in Cape Town. It adorned itself with the shimmering colors of boubous and head ties. It seemed ethereal, light, echoing with the rhythms of obaka dancing.

  The bus entered the city and stopped amid the confusion of Grand Parade: tourists hurrying toward the massive hulk of the Castle, the former administrative center, passing market sellers crying out their wares of cheap clothes and spices from Madagascar and the Indian Ocean—peppers, saffron, cardamom, and cumin—others advertising their South African oranges, potbellied as grapefruit, grapes swollen with mauve juice, and apples with varnished scarlet cheeks. Here Cape Town was embellished by the disorder and colors of an African city. However, on reaching the residential suburbs, they gradually vanished. It became rectilinear, cold, immaculate, a poisonous flower growing at the extreme tip of the black continent.

  Leaving Dido, Rosélie made her way to the central police station along Strand Street, an austere building where, previously, political prisoners were kept while waiting to be allocated to other jails in the province. She walked along endless corridors leading to sparsely lit rooms where black and white police officers were interrogating the accused with the same brutality. The latter were uniformly black, on this point nothing had changed. Crime knows no age. Old men who looked too old to concoct a crime rubbed shoulders with adolescents who looked too juvenile to try. In a cubicle a group of children who couldn’t have been more than twelve years old were crying hot tears while they waited.

  The Inspector was scribbling in his cramped office, whose space was being eaten up by huge metal filing cabinets. On the wall hung the photo that had gone round the world: Nelson Mandela, smiling beside Winnie, as he walked out of prison victorious.

  Inspector Lewis Sithole was no taller than a fourteen-year-old. Puny-looking, he wore a khaki uniform that was too big for him. An arid forest of overly long hair formed a halo around his head, on which was perched a baseball cap. His beard, however, was sparse. Inspector Lewis Sithole was not a handsome man.

  On seeing Rosélie he jumped to his feet and hurriedly proposed they go out. They would be better off outside. Did she mind walking? They could walk as far as the Camelia, that café on Heritage Square.

  At the corner of the street, two white men, two homeless derelicts, their pink skin blackened with filth, were sprawled on a bed of packing paper. They stared at Lewis and Rosélie with threatening looks, as if they held them personally responsible for their tumble from the top to the bottom of the social ladder. That summed up Cape Town! That hostility of the whites which poisoned the air like a miasma. This feeling of danger which could sweep down from anywhere. However hard the authorities over there in Pretoria reveled in big speeches about the duty of forgiveness, the need to live together, Truth and Reconciliation, there was nothing but tension, hatred, and desire for revenge in this patch of land. At the Camelia, once the coloured waitress, coloured and crestfallen, had taken their order, Lewis inquired about Stephen’s cell phone.

  To tell the truth, she hadn’t looked for it, not understanding really what he hoped to find in it.

  Armed with patience, he explained to her that cell phones can store the last ten numbers called. This way, they could find out who had called Stephen.

  Rosélie shrugged her shoulders. Provided someone had called him!

  Lewis Sithole leaned over, so close she could feel his warm breath. No man in his right mind would walk around the center of Cape Town unarmed past midnight. She persisted: Stephen had an excellent reason for going out. He wanted some cigarettes, for God’s sake!

  Stephen refused to be intimidated by violence. He had even elaborated a theory on the subject and had no intention of behaving differently whatever the circumstances. In New York he would walk around the Bronx in the middle of the night. In London he didn’t let himself be intimidated by dangerous neighborhoods. In Paris he would prowl around the Sentier district at any time of the day or night.

  “If he wanted cigarettes,” Lewis Sithole continued with the same air of patience, “he would have sent the watchman. At least he had his spear to defend himself.”

  “Deogratias sleeps like a log,” retorted Rosélie. “Sometimes we can hear him snoring from our bedroom under the roof. That particular night, he didn’t even hear Stephen go out.”

  “Yet the watchman at a neighbor’s house saw him walk past. He says he seemed to be in a hurry. Almost running. Where do you think he was going?”

  To the Pick ’n Pay.

  Stephen always walked briskly. Especially after midnight, when there was not a soul about and it was five degrees Celsius.

  She relived with the same spasm of pain that moment when her life had been turned upside down and plunged her into solitude and fear. It was a group of young partygoers coming out of a fish restaurant on Kloof Street who had alerted the police. The latter had taken their time. They had taken over an hour to arrive at the crime scene and drive the victim to the hospital. There he had continued to bleed in a so-called emergency room. In the morning the hospital had called Rosélie, who was sick with worry, for Stephen never spent the night away from home. He knew she worried when he was away for too long, even during the daytime.

  “What would you do if I worked at the other end of town until goodness knows what hour?” he complained.

  Yet, beneath the reproach, she sensed he was pleased with his power.

  She had spent an unpleasant fifteen minutes with the learned assembly of physicians and interns. They had lowered their masks, and above the squares of white gauze, they bored into her with their multicolored eyes. A real police interrogation.

  You really want us to believe that you are the closest living relative? What relation are you to him? You, his wife? What perverse and degenerate tastes had this handsome Englishman? Where is his mother? His father? His sister? There’s nobody else but you? Where are you from in Africa? Guadeloupe? Where’s that? Why did you come to Cape Town? What do you do here? You, a painter? A Kaffir, a painter? And what next?

  Having run out of words, they sent her to identify the deceased in the morgue. In a drawer, someone other than Stephen was waiting for her—eyes closed, pinched nose, as white as a sheet, wearing a skullcap of lifeless hair. The next morning they had delivered this stranger, as rigid as a corpse.

  Barring a few exceptions, the neighbors had been beyond reproach, for Death being what it is, when it turns up on this earth, everyone bows down and respects it.

  Besides, Stephen had thumbed his nose at them while he was alive, and had now got what was coming to him. His abject death on a sidewalk was proof of this. Forgetting their hostility, they invaded the territory that mourning had purified. One of them told the university, while another informed the family—the half brothers in Verberie, the father in Hythe. Or was it the other way round? This one arranged the flowers in vases, that one discussed arrangements with the undertakers, while another finalized details for the church ceremony. Yet, instead of touching Rosélie, their attentions merely accentuated her pain. Furtively, they eradicated her. They dismissed her to the margins of a life of which she thought she had been the center for twenty years. It was as if Stephen had been repossessed by this world from which he had always kept his distance. As if he had become what he had never been either for her or for himself, that is, a white man.

  She was not the only one to remark on this exclusion. Dido, who was no fool, did too. Around noon, she came to join Rosélie in her lair, the room where she was holed up, incapable of tears. Handing her the black clothes she had had the
presence of mind to order from her dressmaker, Dido dictated:

  “Get dressed. Come downstairs. He’s your husband. You lived with him for twenty years. It’s your house. You must make your presence felt.”

  Rosélie had obeyed and confronted this sea of faces, full of hate and contempt under their masks of compassion. They converged on her to haul her far from the dry land to which she was clinging, then push her under and drown her. Shaking, she tried to exorcise her fears by doing her best to mouth the Psalms:

  The Lord is my rock, my fortress and my deliverer,

  My God, my rock in whom I take refuge

  My shield, and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold.

  I call on the Lord who is worthy to be praised.

  Unfortunately, they didn’t mean anything, just words out of her mouth. In the afternoon at the church of St. Peter’s, amid the funereal smell of wilting flowers, dying candles, and incense, she had collapsed on Deogratias’s shoulder. My night watchman. My cook. Now my only friends.

  And the ceremony had been recuperated by the university vice-chancellor—the first black South African to acquire the position, of which he was so proud—the dean, the head of the department, both white, the mainly white colleagues, handpicked students, and students from the colleges who had rehearsed their end-of-year theater performances with Stephen.

  Inspector Lewis Sithole’s voice pierced the thick fog of her pain.

  “It’s been really a pleasure talking to you. But I have to go back. We have a terrible case on our hands. The public prosecutor’s office is under enormous pressure. They want us to bring it to trial as soon as possible and make an example out of it.”

  “Fiela?” she asked familiarly, as if it were a girl she had sat beside on the benches of the Dubouchage school or a cousin, the daughter of an aunt, she’d grown up with in the same family.

  He nodded, then added:

  “It’s a pity I can’t call on you. I have the firm conviction you could help me.”