The Story of the Cannibal Woman

by Maryse Conde

  You won’t admit you love me and so

  How am I ever to know.

  You only tell me

  Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

  Rosélie would be lulled to sleep by this little night music.

  She had prepared herself for any further requests by Judith by buying a simplified version of The Arabian Nights, which she practiced reciting: “‘Scheherazade stopped when the day began to brighten Shahryar’s apartment. The following night she went on with her story…’” But that day Judith had something else in mind. She was carrying a satchel under her arm, which she opened mysteriously and from which she pulled out a bundle of large sheets of paper. Rosélie took them one by one, marveling at these bright drawings done with that freedom of form and color associated with the blitheness of childhood. What a miracle! What human ingenuity! These drawings signified that her imagination had been purified. She was cured. She had been able to survive her past with no trace of an indelible scar. While Rosélie was searching for words of encouragement and admiration, Judith drew her head close to hers, put her mouth against her ear, and whispered:

  “Don’t tell anyone. Especially Mummy. It’s a secret. When I grow up I want to be a painter. Like you.”

  Life’s like that. Sometimes it presents you with an innocent, spontaneous picture like those wildflowers growing on the side of the highway at the spot of a fatal accident. Rescuers take hours to cut the victims free from the wreckage and then lay the corpses among the buttercups, the poppies, and the cornflowers.

  TEN

  Like the distribution of toys with Simone a few years earlier, the distribution of Stephen’s souvenirs were not what Rosélie expected. Her disillusionments began with her visit to Mrs. Hillster. In the space of a few months, Mrs. Hillster had aged considerably. A gash had left a scar on her forehead that disappeared amid her snow-white hair. She limped and leaned awkwardly on a cane. Above all, she bore the expression of those who have experienced injustice and demand reparation from society, society in general. Rosélie was treated to yet another telling of the day that had marked the end of Mrs. Hillster’s peace of mind, dwelling at length on the misfortunes of her beloved Bishupal.

  “Those police brutes treated him as if he were guilty. They beat him, they almost killed him.”

  Taking advantage of a moment when Mrs. Hillster stopped to catch her breath, Rosélie placed her offer. Would she accept the collection of Stephen’s CDs? Mrs. Hillster seemed contrite.

  “You haven’t noticed, then?” she said, indicating a “For Sale” sign in the window.

  “I’m selling everything. My house in Rondebosch, my shop. I’ve already had several offers, but nothing I like. I want to leave. I want to leave Cape Town. I’m too old for all this violence, I’m scared, I can’t take it anymore. If I accepted your present, you would be giving it to someone else.”

  Rosélie remained speechless. Mrs. Hillster had been saying all along that South Africa had replaced England in her heart. She had arrived a blond twenty-year-old bride and followed her husband, Simon, from posting to posting. She waxed lyrical about her favorite region, KwaZulu-Natal, its sweltering natural parks, its lacy coastline, and the jewels of little towns strung along the shore. Politically speaking, there had been no shortage of difficulties given Simon’s liberal views. He was on first-name terms with the ANC leaders, gave them shelter and money. They had been living in Johannesburg at the time of the Soweto and Sharpeville uprisings, and in Cape Town when it was the turn of the Crossroads squatters. Each time, the government accused Simon of colluding with the rioters and threatened to send him back to England. Rosélie was stupefied. Witness to the darkest hours of the country’s history and to the most appalling events of injustice and inhumanity, Mrs. Hillster, now that two petty crooks had mugged her, was clearing off! How self-centered!

  As if she could read Rosélie’s thoughts, Mrs. Hillster explained:

  “You see, I was not prepared for the victims to take their perpetrators’ lessons to heart and that the blacks would learn to strike, kill, and rape so quickly.”

  Something they have always done. But you didn’t want to admit it. You always thought them to be innocent, smiling angels, ready to proffer the other cheek. For better or for worse, they are showing you they are men, quite simply men. Neither devils nor angels.

  “You’re going back to England, then?” Rosélie merely asked.

  Mrs. Hillster made a face.

  “No, of course not! I’m going to live with Cecilia.”

  Good heavens! Cecilia, her only daughter, lived in Bermuda. Every time she came back from visiting her, Mrs. Hillster would rant about this Disneyfied England, as artificial as a dolls’ kingdom with its little, white-roofed houses fit for Snow White’s dwarves. One Christmas, Rosélie and Stephen had taken refuge there to escape the snow in New York, and she recalled her malaise. The island of Bermuda had deliberately transformed itself into a Garden of Eden for wealthy tourists. But at what a price! The restaurants dished up that tasteless cuisine called continental, capable of adapting to any palate. What continent? Atlantis? They had attended a cultural week, visibly designed for the clientele of American cruise ships. The highlight had been a gala evening when a local singer, who was black in skin only, sang a medley of Sinatra songs, vigorously applauded by the spectators.

  Encore for “The Lady Is a Tramp”!

  It’s as if you need shantytowns, ghettos, and racial inequality to produce a specific culture. And that was where Mrs. Hillster was going to retire to after fifty years in a smoldering land where the most bitter of combats had been waged?

  At that moment, Rosélie met the gaze of Bishupal as he looked at her while perched on a stool, a book between his hands. She was about to smile at him when a mask of hostility veiled his face. He lowered his head and ostensibly plunged back into his book. Surprised, she asked Mrs. Hillster:

  “And what about him, what will he do if you leave?”

  Rosélie noticed for the first time that Bishupal, whom she had seen a dozen times without paying him any attention, was handsome. He couldn’t be more than eighteen.

  “He doesn’t want to stay here either,” Mrs. Hillster replied sadly. “He wants to go to England.”

  “England!” exclaimed Rosélie.

  “He’s just spent his vacation there and claims he made friends,” Mrs. Hillster said, even more sorrowfully. “I keep telling him London is one of the most difficult places to live, but Stephen convinced him it’s paradise, that there’s plenty of work and housing.”

  Stephen, who loathed England! Who every summer swore he would never set foot there again!

  So everyone was going off on their own. Life is a carousel that never stops turning. Only those sleeping under the earth stay put.

  “And what about yourself?” Mrs. Hillster asked softly.

  Rosélie gave the usual answer.

  “You know full well I couldn’t think of leaving him alone.”

  It might be objected that she had no scruples about leaving her mother and father. It’s true, but they were different. They were not alone. The family mounted guard around their graves. Elie had survived Rose by very little, scarcely six months, as if, unbeknownst to him, she alone made his life worth living. At present, husband and wife, united in death as the saying goes, lay in the Thibaudin vault, two stories of expensive black-and-white marble. At the Feast of All Saints the monument was scrubbed, polished, and covered with candles like a birthday cake. But if she left Cape Town, there would be nobody to take care of Stephen. He would be abandoned. Stephen Stewart, aged fifty-four, born in Hythe, England, lying under a bare tombstone, facing the immensity of the ocean and the infinity of time.

  Mrs. Hillster shrugged her shoulders.

  “I can’t understand you. The dead are always alone. Think about yourself. You’re still young. You could make a new life for yourself.”

  Me, still young? I get the impression I’m over a thousand years old. I am a tree whose branches hav
e been broken by hurricanes, whose leaves have been ripped off by great gales. I am naked, I am stripped bare.

  Mrs. Hillster lowered her voice as if she were broaching a sordid subject.

  “But that’s not what I wanted to know. Have the police got any further with their inquiry?”

  Rosélie shook her head.

  “My God!” Mrs. Hillster sighed. “It’s awful! Despite his failings, Stephen didn’t deserve to die like he did.”

  No, of course not! No man deserves to die, cut down like a dog on a filthy sidewalk between two rows of garbage cans. But what failings are you talking about?

  Mrs. Hillster shrugged her shoulders.

  “Who among us can boast of being perfect? Don’t take exception to what I’m about to say. Stephen was too domineering. He made people do what he wanted; he manipulated them. Especially you.”

  This was the first time she had dared criticize Stephen. She had always been all smiles, all billing and cooing and flirting despite her nearly seventy years.

  Distraught, Rosélie walked out into the glare and din of Buitengragt.

  The street disappeared between antique shops with massive Dutch facades and shopping malls of the flashier and more fake American style. Nausea was welling up inside her. What had Mrs. Hillster meant? It’s a fact she never contradicted Stephen. But to speak of manipulation!

  She darted into a taxi and had herself driven to the Steve Biko High School.

  It was midmorning and the driver made no objections.

  Khayelitsha was one of the most monstrous legacies of apartheid. It loomed up out of the sands of False Bay like a formidable bantustan erected at the gates of Cape Town: the coveted, inaccessible, and forbidden city. It had been designed to place the workers under house arrest as far away as possible as well as detain the undesirables looking for a job. The long-term plan was for the population of Langa, Nyanga, and Guguletu to be uprooted and for all the blacks to be herded into Khayelitsha and kept there by force. Rosélie noted that the area had been somewhat humanized since her last visit with Stephen some two years earlier. The new regime had built entire districts of modular houses, painted garish orange, green, and blue like blocks of Lego. A cultural center looking like a fairground stall stood at one of the corners of Albert Luthuli Square. All the bric-a-brac of South African craftwork was on display there: spears, wall hangings, and plates decorated with multicolored pearls. In spite of everything, the overall sadness grabbed you by the throat.

  Remodeled after apartheid, the Steve Biko High School was not exactly welcoming. Not surprising the kids try to set fire to their schools with such architecture! A watchtower straight out of an American prison film stood in the center of a quadrangle of grayish buildings encircling a bare playground. It was as if the shrubs and flowers that thrived in the residential districts of Cape Town refused to grow in Khayelitsha. It was recess time. The older pupils cramped into combat-style fatigues were jostling with the younger ones dressed in just as unattractive bottle green uniforms.

  The principal’s name was Olu Ogundipe. Years earlier, on the eve of his arrest for his political opinions, he had had to flee his native country of Nigeria and escape to Jamaica, his wife’s home island. Alas! Jamaica was no longer the land of the maroons. Even the Rastas strumming their guitars amid the smell of ganja smoke have long ceased caring about Ras Tafari and Marcus Garvey. Olu realized this soon enough. His Marxist positions aroused the anger of the authorities and he was sent packing. So South Africa seemed to him to be the best place to stand up to capitalism and racism. But although he was a well-known figure throughout Cape Town and the provinces, it wasn’t because of his political essays or commendable causes; it was because his scarred and bearded face appeared on advertisements for a mobile phone company. At crossroads and along the highway he proclaimed convincingly:

  “Always keep in touch with a Nokia T193.”

  Or else:

  “Nokia T193

  Use it for pleasure, for thrills, and for the Internet.

  Use it to telephone as well.”

  His office was the very image of a museum of the black world, with its dozens of photos stuck to the walls. Rosélie patiently endured a homily on the African renaissance that perhaps was taking its time, but would eventually strike the white world with the violence of a thunderbolt, the favorite instrument of Shango, the Yoruba god. Olu Ogundipe ventured a comparison: the South Africans after apartheid were like the Haitians after their independence in 1804. They needed time to build a nation. Then they would be an example to the world.

  Like the Haitians?

  He gestured with contempt at the Cape Tribune, spread out on his desk, Fiela’s photo on the front page.

  “Just look at that! Why do they make such a fuss over that woman. She’s mad. They should bring back the death penalty for cases like hers. What image does she give our country? Our newspapers remain in the hands of those who want to demoralize the reader and discredit the government. If I were Minister for Information I’d close down the lot of them.”

  Straightaway he conveyed his condolences, for he had known the deceased very well, that she knew. But between the lines of praise and pity there crept a subtle denunciation that the honorable Stephen Stewart had deserved his sad end. Wasn’t he a European and the worst of species? The English species. Some are fond of saying that the English were the first to abolish the slave trade, then slavery, the first to decolonize Africa and the Caribbean. Quite the opposite. If you thought about it, British foreign policy was one of the most devious and destructive there is. In between his anathematizing, Rosélie managed to convey the purpose of her visit. She wanted to present Stephen’s computer as a gift to the school. Olu seemed distressed, like Mrs. Hillster a few hours earlier. To fight nepotism and corruption the Minister for Education had just decreed that school principals were forbidden to accept gifts from individuals. These should be deposited with a state bank, the CND, which would then allocate them to schools and colleges according to their needs. He could not personally accept this precious souvenir from the honorable Dr. Stewart. Furthermore, if she deposited it with the CND, it would probably fall into the wrong hands. Rosélie, truly paranoid, got the impression he was hiding behind an administrative pretext and he wanted nothing more to do with Stephen.

  There was nothing else to say. She accepted a cup of coffee that triggered a speech on the comparative merits of the plant. He only drank Blue Mountain coffee from Jamaica. Nothing like the adulterated arabica used in electric coffeemakers. Then Olu broached a subject that was dear to his heart: the decline of South African literature by black writers. Some attributed their silence to the end of apartheid, which had deprived them of subject matter. He was of another opinion. South African writers persisted in flouting their mother tongues, wrongly called national languages, since nations held them in contempt. So what is a mother tongue? A language that expresses added meaning, a language that expresses secret places of the heart, a language that expresses the inexpressible! If she only knew how many masterpieces were produced annually in Nigeria in the vernacular!

  “Don’t you have the same problem with French and Creole?” he asked. “Aren’t the genuine masterpieces written in Creole?”

  Rosélie, whose only knowledge of French Caribbean writing was The Bridge of Beyond, read one very rainy season, knew nothing about these issues. Olu went on to inquire about Aimé Césaire. He had had the pleasure of meeting him during his exile in the Caribbean. With a simplicity that did him credit, the great man had received him at city hall and shown him his island. What an unforgettable memory! The poet knew every Latin name for every tree, plant, flower, and blade of grass. Rosélie was about to take her leave when an idea crossed her mind. Surely the Ministry of Education didn’t forbid donations to private individuals. Where was Chris Nkosi?

  Olu seemed troubled. It so happened he knew Chris Nkosi very well. Ever since he was a small boy. When he was four his father had vanished without notice. An association Ol
u ran called “Let Them Come unto Me” had taken care of the family, the wife left behind without a cent and seven children. Chris was a good boy. He had passed his certificate the previous year and left school. As luck would have it, a Catholic foundation had immediately offered him a job in one of its schools. Rosélie was surprised that Chris Nkosi had not continued a career in the theater, since according to Stephen he was so gifted. Theater? It was as if she had uttered an obscenity. Olu shook his head furiously. Chris Nkosi was now an elementary school teacher. He taught English grammar and the history of Africa. He was married. If Rosélie intended to give him the computer in memory of Stephen, he would certainly refuse it. They had quarreled. Quarreled? That’s news to me! Rosélie recalled the young man crying hot tears at the funeral and stammering out his poem. Surely the quarrel couldn’t have been very serious. On the contrary, Olu assured her. Stephen had tried to put pressure on Chris to force him to become an actor. Faced with his rebuff, he had insulted him, calling him a coward who was betraying his vocation. Chris couldn’t put up with it. Olu stared at her with sudden hostility.

  “You know as well as I do that the honorable professor couldn’t tolerate contention. Everyone had to do things his way. As a European, he wanted to do good in Africa, but he had the wrong idea of going about it. The theater! The theater! I won’t go so far as France in 1789 saying: ‘The Revolution doesn’t give a damn about artists!’ But do we really need theater, especially Western theater, at this moment in time?”

  Rosélie was dumbfounded. She couldn’t possibly believe Olu. Stephen would have wanted to regiment Chris’s future to the point of quarreling with him? They were hiding something from her.

  Once outside the school, she was amazed to find the sun still in its place, sitting stupidly in the middle of the sky, and the day was radiant. Two buses cluttered up Albert Luthuli Square. A crowd of laughing, enthusiastic tourists was piling into the craft center. Inside her the mood was darker. She had the feeling she had suffered the rebuffs on behalf of Stephen. It was as if he were no longer acceptable. Nobody wanted anything more to do with him.