The Story of the Cannibal Woman

by Maryse Conde

  “Isn’t French a colonial language?”

  What is a colonial language? I speak what I am. I am what I speak. I speak therefore I am. I am therefore I speak. Et cetera.

  Salama Salama’s answer irritated him considerably.

  “The French language belongs to me. My ancestors stole it from the whites like Prometheus stealing fire. Unfortunately, they were incapable of setting light to the French-speaking world from one end to the other.”

  In fact, whereas Rosélie and Stephen agreed about everything, there was nothing but points of friction between Salama Salama and Rosélie, except for the hashish they smoked together, of which Rosélie had trouble breaking the habit. First of all, he blamed her painting. It was a rival. He couldn’t bear her devoting so much time to it, locked up days on end in her studio she had installed at the bottom of the compound between the washhouse and the storeroom. What’s more, everyone poked fun at it. Servants fetching rice or dried fish for the meals would burst out laughing or make the sign of the cross, depending on their temperament, when they caught sight of the paintings. Second, she loathed his music, reggae music. However hard he tried to get her to listen to the undisputed master, Bob Marley, or read to her illuminating comments on the subject, she stuck to her guns. Finally, he adored children and she didn’t. He begged her. Did she want his father, the man who had produced fifteen sons and as many daughters, to think he was impotent? His younger brothers, the oldest of whom were already taking their first communion, to disrespect him?

  When Rosélie, crushed as if the sky had fallen on her head, left the compound, Salama Salama’s mother had wept a lot. The reincarnation of her little sister was leaving. What sacrifice would hold her back? Alemanthia, her witch doctor from Benin, advised her to kill a white heifer with three ginger-haired stars marked on its forehead.

  They unearthed and sacrificed this rare animal. But Alemanthia lost face, for Rosélie never came back. After that frightful interlude at Ferbène, she had met Stephen, whom she thought would be her savior. She had been wrong about that too, since he had abandoned her to the hands of Faustin, who in turn had deserted her.

  Rosélie was lost in these hardly cheering thoughts when Dido came up to inform her that Raymond was waiting for her on the patio.

  Raymond, buttoned up as usual in a double-breasted business suit of a dark cloth, looked out of place, like a night bird under the sun. But that afternoon he wore a radiant smile that clashed with his funereal dress. A positive thinker, he interpreted Faustin’s letter as a commitment, a promise he was bound to keep. Without wasting time, as he had been told to do, he had every intention of taking care of everything. While he settled into an armchair and spread out his leaflets, she asked him:

  “What exactly does Faustin’s nomination consist of?”

  “I believe he is going to be in charge of the CRTA,” he replied vaguely, as if he considered the question pointless.

  “What’s that?”

  “A branch of the FAO, I think, whose director is a childhood friend of his.”

  “What does CRTA mean?”

  “Center for Research in Tropical Agriculture. You know that Faustin is an agronomist?”

  Then he got down to basics.

  “Do you want to stop off in Paris for a few days? Women always want to stop over in Paris.”

  Women? When Raymond talked of women, Rosélie didn’t know whether she was included in the species. She was not sure she saw herself as one of those whimsical creatures with uncontrollable and inexplicable desires, prepared to spend a fortune on Fashion Fair makeup, lingerie, and perfumes.

  Paris? Now, there’s a city that has never taken to me, never celebrated me. Our strained relations go back a long way. To please Elie I had enrolled at the law school, a cold cavern built of freestone in the shadow of the Panthéon, where I shivered with boredom. As a result, I would sit for hours in the cafés of the Latin Quarter, smoking Gauloises like a chimney; the marijuana came later. Afterward I would walk down to the banks of the Seine to purify my lungs. I ended up making friends with a bookseller specializing in colonial photographs.

  Algeria: Negro with a Fan.

  New Guinea: A Head Hunter.

  Ivory Coast: Missionaries and Their Choirboys.

  He was the one who sold me a reproduction of a woodcut by André Thevet dated 1522: Tupinamba Cannibal Indians at a Feast.

  I’ve always been fascinated by cannibals.

  I also bought a photo of twenty or so Guadeloupean women landing at Ellis Island in April 1932. This talisman has followed me everywhere. Braver than me, my ancestors, all alone, without a man by their side. What America were they going to discover? Dressed in their traditional Creole costumes and madras headties, they smile gallantly at the camera.

  “Do you know Washington?” Raymond asked.

  Washington’s the anti–New York, a city in black and white, compartmentalized, segregated, and racist. Even Stephen couldn’t invent a theory to absolve it. The search for a manuscript had taken them there one weekend. On leaving the Library of Congress, they had ventured into the black neighborhood around the Capitol, where a driver had knowingly tried to knock them over. At a bus stop some youths had heckled them with obscene gestures and threatening language. In fright they had taken refuge in a white neighborhood with one of Stephen’s friends, a specialist of Milton, whose wife was from Ethiopia. They had lunch surrounded by suitcases. Tired of the neighbors’ snubs and the insults suffered by the children at school, the wife was preparing to go back to Addis Ababa.

  Mother, tell me where I should live and where I should die.

  It’s true that living with Faustin, she would be spared such misfortune. First of all, they would have a car. They would live in the wealthy African-American district, whose houses ape the Caucasians’ in munificence and ostentation. The Gold Coast, they call it. They would have a chauffeur for the Mercedes, a gardener for the azaleas, and a cook for the barbecues. Faustin would never be at home, always at a meeting, a conference, or on a trip abroad. She would be buzzing with activity. She would belong to a cine club. Oh, not Euzhan Palcy again! Today we are showing Time Regained, a film by Raoul Ruiz.

  Marcel Proust versus Joseph Zobel. That’ll take some doing!

  She would also belong to a book club. Nothing trivial! This week we are reading Oran, langue morte by Assia Djebar. Subject for discussion: women and violence.

  Painting would become a hobby. Out of pure coquetry she would show her canvases to close friends, who would politely scold her: “Why did you ever stop? You could have had a brilliant career!”

  Can you see me, Fiela, in that sort of life?

  Yet, despite the mockery, part of her began to dream of what she would never possess. Material well-being. Self-confidence. Peace of mind.

  Oh, to leave Cape Town, to leave this country ravaged by violence and disease. To start one’s life all over again like making up a bed after a bad night’s sleep. The frightening thing is that you can never start life over again. Unhappiness, like happiness, is a habit formed at birth and impossible to break.

  Dido came out of the kitchen to sit in the sun with them. Dido and Raymond were the best of friends. Both crazy about the same music. Both dreaming of an aseptic Africa, without garbage, vermin, or germs, where the carrier of the AIDS virus would meet the same fate as the tsetse fly. For the same reasons as Raymond, Dido was ecstatic. She had conveniently forgotten her reservations and warnings of the earlier days, elated by her friend’s lucky star. In short, Dido and Raymond were like overjoyed parents who had given up hope for a daughter way past her prime. As a result, anger inside Rosélie built up, swelled, and exploded, as deadly as the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki.

  “I have,” she burst out, “no intention of following Faustin to Washington, D.C.”

  Raymond paid no attention to this outburst. We all know how women like to put on airs and graces and proclaim the opposite of what they think. But Dido pounced on Rosélie, like a mother scol
ding her daughter.

  “What on earth are you talking about?”

  Rosélie was not used to confronting Dido, nor anyone else for that matter. This time, however, she persisted.

  “I have said it over and over again. I will not leave Stephen alone here.”

  Dido looked around her, stared at Raymond to call him as a witness, then thundered:

  “And I will not let you sacrifice yourself for…for nothing.”

  “For nothing?” exclaimed Rosélie, appalled.

  Like Fina, Dido too was betraying her, reducing her sacred duty to childishness.

  “Yes, for nothing!” yelled Dido.

  We can only imagine what would have happened then if Deogratias, his daughter Hosannah, his wife, Sylvaine, and Bienheureux, their newborn baby, hadn’t arrived to pay Rosélie a courtesy visit, according to African custom. There is no way of predicting what irreparable words would have been exchanged. Instead of guessing what might have been, let us describe the scene that actually occurred. Bienheureux, thus named since his father read the Beatitudes every day, a lovely baby, aged four months and weighing thirteen pounds, was handed round while Rosélie, Dido, and Raymond pronounced those inane phrases babies tend to inspire.

  “My God, he’s so cute!”

  “He looks just like his papa and maman.”

  “Give Auntie a smile, little man.”

  Instead of which, Bienheureux began to cry. Sylvaine stuffed a breast in his mouth. Bienheureux gorged himself with milk, burped, and coughed up. Sylvaine wiped his mouth. Raymond, who had raised six children, showered her with advice. Dido too. After a while Dido went back to her kitchen. Raymond took his leave. A silence set in, since Sylvaine, Deogratias, and Rosélie had nothing to say to each other. After a reasonable duration Sylvaine said they had to go. They lived in Langa. The way back in an overcrowded bus would take forever. Once the young woman and her two children had left, Deogratias went into the garage to change his day uniform for his night uniform: a pair of padded khaki pants, a thick turtleneck pullover, and a woolen bonnet pulled down to his eyes. It was still too early to take up his position beneath the traveler’s tree. He leaned against the front gate, staring out at the street, greeting the other night watchmen arriving to take up their stations in the neighboring gardens. Most of them were French-speaking Africans, eating the stale bread of exile, having lost their land, their language, and their customs, and trying their hand at the harsh sonorities of a foreign idiom.

  FIFTEEN

  The proverb maintains: “The absent are always in the wrong.” The dead, absent for eternity, haven’t a chance to prove themselves right. Rosélie tossed and turned in bed. After Raymond left, she had gone into the kitchen, where Dido had calmed down. Her day now over, Dido too had changed clothes, endeavoring to resume the look of a woman of independent means. A dressmaker in Mitchell Plains, with the help of American catalogs, had made her a dark red pantsuit with wide lapels. Like Deogratias, she wore a woolen bonnet, but hers was elegantly crocheted. She was still a handsome woman who hadn’t given up looking for a companion. Up till now she had been more or less faithful to the memory of her late husband. But old age, which was creeping up fast, frightened her. She had set her heart on Paul, a coloured widower whose wife, a cousin of hers, she had taken care of before she died of cancer. She was not put off by his shortness or shyness. She had high hopes and paid no attention to the judicious advice of her sisters.

  “Be gentler, less sure of yourself. Men are scared of women who wear the pants.”

  She kissed Rosélie, then was gone, slamming the door like that of a closet where the skeletons could sleep in peace.

  Dominique first of all. Then Fina. Ariel. Simone and her husband. Amy and Caleb. Alice and Andy. Olu Ogundipe. Mrs. Hillster. Rosélie made the roll call of those who had criticized Stephen as if summoning them to a tribunal. What were they accusing him of? Of hiding something, of being a despot, an insensitive, domineering manipulator, a racist even? All these accusations that drew a picture as sketchy as a police profile led her nevertheless to call into question their entire life together.

  She got up and shivered in her nightdress for the air was cold. She hurriedly slipped on some clothes, and without switching on the light, she ran down the black mouth of the stairs. Deogratias had taken up his position on the patio, flooded in light by the streetlamp opposite. Muffled up in his padded quilt, he was snoring as usual and didn’t budge as she walked past, just as he hadn’t budged on that fatal evening a few months earlier. She went and pressed her nose against the bars on the front gate and looked around her.

  What had happened that night?

  Stephen had turned the key in the lock. The gate had creaked open in the silence. He had walked down the street. Two tomcats, back arched, had scampered round his feet, meowing and chasing each other. Left and right, the houses were silent. Everything slept except for the night watchmen, wrapped up like mummies on their folding chairs, their Zulu spears within hand’s reach. One of them had greeted him, while thinking to himself what a crazy idea to be out and about at such an hour.

  “Good evening, boss!”

  Stephen hadn’t replied, which was unusual. He loved chatting to complete strangers to exercise his powers of attraction. Those who knew him admired his simplicity. In actual fact, Stephen was a child, perhaps because he hadn’t had a childhood. That evening, his mind was elsewhere. He was probably thinking of his book on Yeats. He was not happy with the table of contents or his first chapter. Perhaps too he was thinking of something else. What? She would never know.

  But perhaps the night watchman had not been surprised at all. Boss was used to wandering about in the middle of the night like a blood-sucking soukouyan. Sometimes he would go and drink a late-night beer at Ernie’s. The barman knew him well, for he was out of place among the young crowd. Yes, he was always alone. No, he never spoke to anyone. He would drink his Coors, pay, and leave.

  In the Van der Haaks’ garden the scent of a frangipani hung heavy in the air, its fragrance accentuated by the night. Stephen had turned left onto the avenue. The storefronts were plunged in darkness, shutters lowered, neon lights extinguished. He had walked toward the lighted entrance of the Pick ’n Pay, open twenty-four hours. Seated on the sidewalk, wearing those same woolen bonnets pulled down to their eyebrows, a group of hoodlums on the lookout for mischief had watched him. A beggar, rolled up in his ragged blanket, had woken up to hold out his hand. The Pick ’n Pay was practically deserted. A few night owls were buying bottles of Coca-Cola and bags of peanuts. At this time of night, for security reasons, only one cash register was open. The blond girl in her striped overall uniform was chatting with one of the security guards, who was standing tall beside her for protection. When Rosélie approached, they turned and stared at her with an unfriendly look. She clearly discerned that fear which blacks, whatever they do, instill in whites: “Watch out for the Kaffir! What does she want?”

  Yes, what did she want from them? To question them?

  “Excuse me. Were you here on the night of February seventeenth? What exactly did you see?”

  “Me, I know nothing about it. I was nowhere near here. At the time I was working at a Pick ’n Pay in Newlands. Nothing like here, believe me. A district of rich white folks. Private militia everywhere. Order. Discipline. No drug addicts quarreling over their magic powder. No squabbling drunkards. No homeless sleeping on the sidewalk.”

  Realizing she was looking ridiculous, Rosélie beat a retreat.

  What had happened that night?

  Two scenarios were possible.

  One of the hoodlums had approached him while the others artfully encircled him. Stephen was not the sort to hand over his wallet without a fight, even if it didn’t contain very much. He had put up a struggle. So they shot him. They were about to rob him when the security guards came running, brandishing their guns. It was then they had scampered off.

  Or else, Lewis Sithole’s version, which was slowly worming
its way into her mind. Someone was waiting for him, leaning against the wall, close to the entrance of the supermarket. Someone he knew. Who had the power to drag him out on a bitterly cold night, far from his thoughts on Yeats, at seventeen minutes past midnight. They had first talked quietly together, then they had quarreled. The other person had pulled out his revolver.

  She didn’t know whom to turn to. Questions galloped around in her head like wooden horses on a carousel.

  She walked back up Kloof Street, a black lake floating with pockets of light.

  In detective stories, amateurs often play at being sleuths and pride themselves on solving the mystery. How do they go about it? They draw up a list of suspects, interrogate those who knew the victim, compare statements and photos. Through the ramblings of his mother, Rosélie had gathered that Stephen had been a typical, obedient little boy and teenager. She knew full well that beneath his quiet facade he hated Verberie and was deeply affected by the separation of his mother and father, by the impression that neither of them loved him. Some parents fight for the possession of a child. Not those two. They reached an agreement about him, the same way they did about the house on St. Nicholas Road, the furniture, and the old Vauxhall.

  Reading University has kept no memory of him. No professor was struck by the promise of his future talent. A few photos of a performance of The Seagull show him as Konstantin Gavrilovich Treplev, nothing remarkable, effeminate like young Englishmen often are. Likewise the university at Aixen-Provence has few memories of him. Some students recall he liked hiking and was a great nature lover. He would gather plants for his herb garden.

  There was no premonition of the brilliant researcher, hotly fought over on university campuses, envied as a colleague, worshiped as a professor. Rosélie realized she would have to inquire elsewhere. Her sources would only give her the official picture, the obituaries and hagiographic articles of the Cape Tribune. She would have to explore the shadowy zones. She would have to discover what had excited him in London apart from the theater, once he realized the stage would never be within his reach. She was so used to admiring him that she had difficulty imagining him with Andrew, auditioning unsuccessfully among dozens of other boys and girls.