The Story of the Cannibal Woman

by Maryse Conde

  “We haven’t abandoned them,” Amy asserted. “It’s because we love them too much to watch them deteriorate. I envy Caleb. He lost his mother when he was five. He hardly remembers her and has built a myth around her. Young, beautiful, and eternal. As for your father, fathers are made to be admired and respected. Yours made a bad job of it. It’s his fault if you felt nothing for him.”

  Amy and Caleb’s house, with its ornate rooms, its heavy, old-fashioned furniture, and portraits of aunts and uncles, was a bit like the house she had grown up in. It was also like La América, minus the presence of Ariel.

  Sometimes, Ariel, your absence is killing me.

  For Amy and Caleb lived amid a constant stream of friends of every origin and every color who worshiped every type of god and expressed themselves in every type of foreign idiom. Among this crowd who turned up unexpectedly and sampled the goulash of an evening, once the children were asleep, Andy and Alice were the only ones who terrified Rosélie. Andy and Alice were a couple of African-Americans: Andy, obstetrician in the same hospital as Caleb, and Alice, a law professor at a prestigious white university.

  Come now, the term Black American went out years ago. So did Afro-American. As for the word “Negro,” it is no longer pronounced. The Negro doesn’t exist.

  The looks Andy and Alice cast at Rosélie thrust her back into insignificance. Oh, she was a painter, was she? With very little talent, judging by the picture The Sea at Montauk that Amy and Caleb, out of pure paternalism, had hung in the middle of their living room.

  A child could do as well.

  Or me.

  They then insisted on calling her Rosalind, so different from Rosélie, and never apologized.

  Stephen would faithfully go and fetch Rosélie of an evening for he didn’t like her taking the subway after eight at night. He was far from sharing her infatuation for the Cohens. Even though there had been no further quarrel of epic proportions with any member of the family, his presence always caused a certain embarrassment. In his opinion, Amy and Caleb belonged to that most dangerous of species, the right-thinkers. Their conversation resembled a digest of the newspapers they devoured, like priests consumed by their breviaries. They never had a personal opinion on art or literature. They expressed admiration for the plays, films, musical comedies, and art exhibitions they were supposed to admire. In politics, they were so careful not to hurt anyone, they agreed with all sides.

  “Listen to them,” he sneered. “What a wonderful world we live in! Especially for the Arabs, blacks, Palestinians, Israelis, Indians, Pakistanis, Afghans, and Iraqis.”

  Stephen had bought a station wagon off a colleague leaving for Australia, which was too big, three times too heavy, and guzzled too much unleaded gas. He hardly drove it, having failed to interest Rosélie in the surrounding natural splendors. Niagara Falls, water, water everywhere!

  On the other hand, I’d like to visit the Grand Canyon and throw myself into the void like Thelma and Louise.

  Rosélie loved the drive back home at night. They would take up their position in a slow procession of cars, as if they were following a hearse, and cross the bridge. Facing them, Manhattan opened up like a scene from an opera, ablaze with lights, where the skyscrapers represented the divas and portly tenors, painted and dressed in their shiny, frazzled costumes. Sometimes they would stop in a bustling restaurant where everyone was yelling at the top of their voices. Then they would go and listen to jazz in a basement club, squeezed up against each other, experiencing the same vibrations. Unexpectedly, the music conjured up the image of Ariel. The pain assumed the sounds of the muffled trumpet.

  One evening Amy insisted they stay for dinner. It was Hanukkah, the Jewish Festival of Lights. She had cooked a traditional meal of latkes and brisket in gravy. After they lit the menorah, a few friends sat down informally around the table in the dining room. Among them were the inevitable Andy and Alice.

  The first half of the meal was monopolized by Andy in a solo performance. He showered his listeners with anecdotes at which he was usually the first and only one to roar with laughter. Example: Invited to a Hasidic wedding, something quite unprecedented, he met one of his patients, whose eight children he had delivered. As he held out his hand to shake hers, she had lowered her eyes and murmured: “I’m sorry, Doctor. I don’t touch men!”

  Are you laughing?

  The second half was monopolized by Andy and Alice in a duo. The previous summer they had made a trip to Nigeria, a pilgrimage, in fact, for they had both been in the Peace Corps there fifteen years earlier and had fallen in love with each other. The Peace Corps, ah! What an esteemed organization that brings modernity to Africa absolutely free of charge!

  Really? I heard just the opposite. Some see in it the hand of the CIA.

  During this second visit, their host had been no other than Wole Soyinka, the renowned writer, who had gone to great lengths to get the Americans to boycott his country. Nigeria, it should be recalled, although birthplace of the first African Nobel Prize winner, proved to be a dunce when it came to democracy. Andy and Alice described in length the prevailing incompetence, chaos, and corruption. No importance was placed on human life. The wonderful poet Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight members of his party had been hanged. Political rivals died a suspicious death in prison. Tribunals ordered adulterous women to be stoned, for women are the first victims of violence by their governments.

  There are no dictatorships without sexism. Example: the Taliban and Afghan women.

  Rosélie didn’t have time to meditate on such a negative vision of Mother Africa before Stephen took advantage of a brief pause in the monologues. He straightaway deplored the violence of black gangs in the United States. His words fell like stones dropped into the depths of a crevasse by a clumsy spelunker. The guests forgot to ask for seconds of the latkes. In a deathly silence, Stephen totaled up the number of blacks in high-security prisons and on death row, accused of murder, rape, and armed robbery, black criminals whose faces were splashed across TV screens.

  “You’re forgetting they’re not all guilty,” retorted Andy, choking with anger. “American justice is so inhuman, it crushes the weak and the poor! Those who can afford to pay lawyers with their fat bank accounts are declared innocent. Whereas the others—”

  “Even if these blacks appear guilty, and that’s the impression the police, the media, and the government want to give, they are, in fact, victims,” interrupted Alice impetuously. “Victims of the iniquity of the American social system.”

  “Inhuman justice for the weak! Iniquitous social system!” repeated Stephen, with a fake naive expression. “American democracy is full of flaws!”

  Andy and Alice agreed.

  “So,” continued Stephen. “If I were an African-American, instead of meddling in the rest of the world’s affairs, I would sweep in front of my own door.”

  Thereupon, he excused himself from dessert and, amid a deathly silence, headed for the door, dragging Rosélie with him. Once outside in the garden, he doubled up laughing. He was still laughing behind the wheel.

  “Did you see their faces? The truth always produces the same effect.”

  This episode, however, did not sound the death knell between Rosélie and Amy, as very well might have been the case. See the trouble with Fina.

  It merely provided them with a new topic for discussion during their tête-à-têtes in the park.

  “Admit he was rude,” Amy concluded. “Admit it. He was at the limit of racism. After you left, Alice cried, she is so sensitive. To make such a speech like that about African-Americans and their unending struggle.”

  Rosélie tried to defend Stephen. Far from denigrating the glorious struggles of the past, and perhaps of the present, he was preaching for a little humility. He would like Andy and Alice to stop sermonizing, coming from a community who have been left out of the American dream, in which, moreover, nobody believes any longer.

  Without admitting it, Rosélie was somewhat proud of Stephen. He had refus
ed to be a mere onlooker, which she had so often contented to be. He had refused to be invisible and forced the Other to see him for what he is worth.

  From that day on Alice and Andy treated Rosélie with somber compassion and no longer spoke to her. A sister who stays with a Caucasian of the most dangerous sort can only be pitied. Was it masochism? Certainly not! She was a living example of Mayotte Capécia’s complex of lactification, so magnificently denounced by Fanon. Him again!

  “She is asking for nothing, demanding nothing, except for a little whiteness in her life.”

  Stephen, the subject of so much disapproval, felt no remorse. However, he thought it wiser not to set foot again at Amy and Caleb’s. When he came to fetch Rosélie, he would sound his horn in front of the garden gate or send Mario to get her. Mario was an illegal immigrant. No job, however thankless, deterred him. He worked as a driver for Stephen, walked the Dalmatians for the second-floor tenants, washed the windows of the apartment on the fourth floor, and took the twins on the eighth to school. He also helped the old couple on the tenth to piss and bought them their ground beef, the only food their toothless mouths could eat. You didn’t dare whisper to him that his physique of a Greek god could have got him a less exhausting and more lucrative type of job.

  Caleb took a liking for his curly head and dark eyes. He found him a job as a security guard. Mario therefore left Manhattan to the annoyance of all those whom he had helped. Henceforth, dressed in a heavy leather jacket, wearing a flat cap, and armed with a revolver that didn’t suit his gentle disposition, he monitored the comings and goings at the hospital and kept the undesirables at a distance.

  At the start of the summer, Andy and Alice emerged from their silence and invited Rosélie to exhibit at an arts festival organized by an African-American association. Once she had got over her initial surprise, she realized that these good shepherds hadn’t lost hope of bringing their lost sheep back to the fold, in other words returning her to the Holy of Holies, the Race. What surprised her even more was that she was delighted by the invitation. Like a pariah suddenly invited to the master’s table. Like a condemned person suddenly pardoned and brought back to the company of the righteous.

  She therefore turned a deaf ear to Stephen’s warnings. It was not just a question of exhibiting a few paintings, he recalled. In addition, each artist had to explain his work, his sources of inspiration, and his technique. Was she prepared for that, she who had so much trouble expressing herself? Piqued, Rosélie spent the night scribbling page after page.

  The festival took place at Medgar Evers College. Situated in the very heart of Brooklyn, this imposing edifice, proudly named after a martyr, appeared to be one of the last bastions of that African-American grandeur so ignored on American soil. The president and board of directors, however, regretted there were so few native-born Americans, and far too many Caribbeans and Africans without a hyphen. The college now attracted first and second generations, born from successive waves of immigration, for whom racism, high tuition fees, and the lack of adequate training would have prevented them from studying elsewhere. There were also a great many white skins, the Latinos, often similar, alas, to the Caucasians. The corridors echoed more with the sounds of Spanish and Creole than those of Ebonics.

  On that particular day, a crowd was streaming toward the college. And Rosélie in a daze thought she recognized tens of Aunt Lénas, Aunt Yaëlles, cousins, and uncles; so true seemed the saying, which everyone mistakenly thinks is racist, that all blacks look alike. In the yard a circle of curious onlookers were crowded around gigantic sculptures arranged close to the fountains. However hard she elbowed, she was unable to get a closer look. Alice and Andy had in fact mentioned an African-American sculptor who was taking blacks and whites alike by surprise.

  She followed the crowd heading toward an amphitheater. It was on the way there that she was gripped by terror and almost turned tail.

  Was she in her place, she who colluded with the oppressor?

  Sleeping with the enemy.

  Unfortunately, a hostess dressed with a headscarf fit for a Senegalese drianke and a boubou in rich brocade, seeing her hesitate, dragged her to the podium with the heavy hand of a revolutionary guard leading an aristocrat to the scaffold.

  The panel was composed of six artists: three men and three women. Equality oblige. Scheduled for 9:00 a.m., the discussion began around eleven, as they had to wait for a technician to set up the microphones. The ten minutes allotted to each speaker was not respected, since each participant complained louder than the other about the difficulties of being a creator in a materialistic world, thirsting for consumerism and threatened by globalization. The most vehement—and also the longest—was the moviemaker. The black public was no longer what it used to be, he hammered out. It no longer encouraged its creators. It had taken a liking for sex, visual effects, and violence, white values that had corrupted it. As a result, the wonderful stories that made up the heritage of the black people, those stories transmitted from mouth to mouth, were destined to perish. These diatribes together with the earlier delays and the rigors of alphabetical order had disastrous consequences. When Rosélie’s turn came, just before Anthony Turley’s, the other panelists had left, and the auditorium strewn with paper cups and litter was virtually deserted. Amid general indifference, Rosélie churned out the paper she had taken so much trouble over. Moreover, she got the impression that the few people left did not understand a word she was saying because of her accent.

  “How about lunch?” he proposed.

  Anthony Turley could boast of an impeccable pedigree. His family, originally from Alabama, tired of dying from hunger on land gone to waste practically ever since the South had been defeated, had left for Detroit. There they had found themselves as poor as before, but this time deprived of air and light, and imprisoned in the urban ghetto. The men, embittered, beat their women and raped their prepubescent daughters. He was the fruit of one of these family dramas. His mother, raped at the age of twelve by her uncle, had committed suicide in despair shortly after his birth. He had been raised by his grandmother, gone crazy from the brutality and abuse of numerous common-law husbands. Anthony had grown up on food stamps, spent vacations at summer camps for underprivileged children, and got through his studies with the help of scholarships for needy gifted children. In spite of all that, his entire personality radiated a gallant charm and an impression of joyful strength. You could guess the little boy and teenager he had been, tripping over corpses on the sidewalk and determined against all odds to get the most out of life, as he hummed his way along. He wouldn’t have been out of place on a basketball team, for he was well over six feet tall. Not an ounce of fat. Nothing but muscle. His head shaved, as shiny as a mirror, a mischievous gold loop in his left ear, and an easy laugh with the accents of a clarinet.

  They crossed the yard, forcing their way through the crowd still gathered in front of the sculptures.

  “Have you seen my work?” he asked. “I was very surprised to be invited to this festival. I hadn’t got much attention until The New York Times wrote a few lines about me, and now things are starting to change.”

  A helping hand, that’s what I need! Who will give me a helping hand? To bring me out of the shadows where I am foundering. The wings of an artist need to be caressed by the light, otherwise they fold and wither like stumps.

  There’s an unexpected charm about this neighborhood. They crossed a majestic avenue. Then he guided her through a maze of streets filled with little girls showing their chocolate-colored legs as they jumped rope, little boys running across imaginary baseball fields and old folk clutching walkers, and finally, they reached a restaurant called Nature. Yes, kids often took him for Michael Jordan and asked for an autograph. But once they had deciphered his signature, they went away disappointed. Sometimes young girls insisted on taking their photo with him. They often accepted a rendezvous. When he told them his real name they would shout insults at him as if he had wanted to cheat them. One
of them had even tried to sue him.

  Anthony had invented a substance that was a mixture of clay, resin, melted metal, ground glass with shards of flint and quartz, baked in an oven at a very high temperature. He used it to sculpt animals and creatures of his imagination, trees, and plants. Never humans.

  He changed his tone of voice and became serious.

  “I listened carefully to what you said…”

  What did I say? Rosélie had merely repeated Ariel’s theory: Art-is-the-only-language-that-can-be-shared-on-the-surface-of-the-planet and blah, blah, blah. Nothing very original.

  “I don’t agree at all on what you said about nationality, especially race. Aren’t you proud to be black?”

  Me? Proud?

  I’d like to be a Hindu princess combing her long hair from a window in the palace. The prince passes by on horseback and tramples on this billowing stream that flows into the forest.

  He took offense.