The Story of the Cannibal Woman

by Maryse Conde

  “Someone else had the courage to do it, someone about whom he cared fuck-all like me. If I knew his name I’d give him a medal, a medal for doing good.”

  “If you hate him so much,” she asked, amazed she could keep her calm in spite of these provocations, “why did you cry at his funeral?”

  “Why?”

  He looked around him, distraught, started to cry again, this time silently, and his distress moved her more than his rage. After a while he stammered:

  “I was remembering the time when…”

  “What?”

  She had screamed. It was too painful, she now had proof, she was not the only one Stephen belonged to. Others possessed images and memories she could not share. Without answering, he wiped his face again in the same methodical way. She stood just a few steps away, close enough to touch him, breathing in his smell, a pleasant smell of cheap eau de cologne and tobacco. He stared at her with dark, piercing eyes through a forest of eyelashes curled from his tears. He looked so young. He could have been her nephew. Or rather the son Salama Salama so persistently demanded, the son she at times had wanted. A wave of pity tinged with tenderness welled up inside her and surged toward him.

  This truce made her grow bolder, and very quietly she ventured:

  “What exactly was there between you two?”

  He fluttered his eyelids like someone aroused from his sleep.

  “What was there between us two?” he repeated. “What do you mean?”

  She was already frightened and ashamed of her question. He looked at her again.

  “What do you think there was between us?” he said in a childish tone of voice.

  He laughed stupidly.

  “You’re crazy! There was nothing between us. I adored him because he was my teacher. He taught me everything.”

  Wasn’t that what she wanted to hear? Without insisting further, she walked out.

  Brenda seemed to be waiting for her in the yard. With a smile she motioned to her to come over. Rosélie had trouble understanding. But Brenda insisted. Surprised, Rosélie obeyed and followed her into a room. A narrow shop. A girl was standing behind the counter leafing through an old illustrated magazine. Just about everywhere bunches of flowers were heaped on the ground, in front of the door, on tables, shelves, and window ledges, as round as suns, as rigid as ginger lilies, cut out from recycled cans of Ovomaltine, Nestlé’s condensed milk, Lazzarro coffee, Mozart cocoa, Del Monte tomato paste, Baci di Dama biscuits, Gustoro olive oil, and drums of motor oil, gas, and paraffin. The effect was stupefying. The humble room had become a petrified magic garden. The old dream of alchemists seemed to have come true. A hand had transmuted base matter and changed it into gold.

  “Madam, buy?” Brenda articulated with difficulty.

  Worried, quite rightly, at not being understood, she immediately forced a bunch into Rosélie’s hands.

  “Did you make these?” Rosélie asked.

  Brenda nodded and proudly handed her a business card that looked like the ones she had had printed for herself.

  On your visit to Hermanus,

  Don’t miss Brenda’s Garden

  No. 17. Lane 3. Alley A.

  So she’s an artist too. In her fashion. Wasn’t she teaching her a lesson? A lesson of courage. Her flowers were born in the heart of the ghetto, in the midst of poverty, at the heart of life’s ugliness. Filled with admiration, Rosélie looked at her. Despite her drawn features, covered with the heavy mask of pregnancy, she was pretty. If it hadn’t been for her belly, you would have mistaken her for a small boy. The inevitable shaved head. The high cheekbones. A slightly curled upper lip revealing pearly-white teeth. At the end of her slender arms, her hands were surprisingly strong, with nimble fingers. Hands made to deliver beauty under any circumstance. If only Rosélie could have communicated with her instead of being content with smiles and superficial gestures. She had the feeling they were standing on either side of a river or on a harbor wharf watching a ship leave, separated by the inexorable space of the ocean. Just in case, she scribbled down her address and telephone number and explained that she too was a painter. If Brenda came to Cape Town, would she come and see her studio? Did she understand what she was saying? She nodded reassuringly and mumbled a few incomprehensible phrases. Then, with the graceful simplicity of a child, she kissed her. Rosélie was expecting anything but that. What did that kiss mean? Was it a customary gesture of politeness, the way Olu’s children had kissed her? It couldn’t possibly be a symbol? The symbol of her reintegration!

  When she emerged from the yard, a bus crowded with tourists was bumping down the lane. AFRICULTURAL TOURS was painted in gigantic letters on its side. Them again! It was their latest invention. The Ministry of Tourism had understood that what the privileged from the North want when they travel to Southern shores does not boil down to sun, sea, and safaris, guaranteed to include zebras and giraffes. As for the lions, they’re asleep. Can’t you see them over there? They also need thrills and chills, a new version of panem et circenses, a gut-wrenching retrospective scare.

  Look, ladies and gentlemen, take a good look! Yes, you can take pictures with your digital cameras. It was on this exact spot that ten little niggers were shot during one of the ghetto’s most violent revolts. Their blood has irrigated the soil that has nurtured these wonderful flowers Brenda is giving you today.

  Brenda’s Garden.

  There was something in it for everybody. Brenda managed to make ends meet. The tourists satisfied their conscience and their curiosity.

  SEVENTEEN

  Flowers! Rosélie’s house was overflowing with them. Roses of every color. Gladioli. Irises. Arum lilies, anthuriums, and birds-of-paradise. An unexpected branch of mauve cineraria gave a pastoral touch. They must have cost a fortune. Delivered that morning by Interflora, they gave the room a slightly suffocating, formal atmosphere, reminiscent of Stephen’s funeral. They came with a message. Faustin informed her he was leaving for six months to supervise a tea-growing experiment in Indonesia. As a result, his move to Washington had been postponed.

  What a lot of trouble he was going to! She had already understood.

  In spite of these bland thoughts, her heart was in pieces. She went into the kitchen, where Dido was holding a mirror and putting the finishing touches on her makeup. While dabbing her cheeks with a bisque-colored powder, she glanced at Rosélie.

  “Come with me,” she proposed, seeing her expression. “It’ll do you good.”

  Rosélie had good reason to distrust Dido’s propositions. But anything was better than staying on her own on such an evening.

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “To Hildebrand’s wedding, Emma’s little sister,” Dido replied, now thickly layering her eyelids with mauve. “Besides, you were invited, but you’ve forgotten.”

  They took the bus, packed as usual. Any other crowd would have had a quiet laugh at this tall coloured woman, daubed like a carnival puppet with her heavy, showy jewels. But not this one. People got on, got off, stood up, sat down, silent and glum, without even turning their heads. Even the children, obediently holding their mother’s hand and looking like miniature adults, already had a funereal expression.

  The wedding reception was being held in the section III village hall, the residential area of Mitchell Plains, the one modeled closest to a white district. In spite of its barbed wire, it was almost pleasant, with streets lined with leafy parasol trees. The hall had a rather welcoming aspect. At the entrance, hefty private security guards rigorously checked identity cards. It was not unusual for criminals to mix brazenly with the guests and rob them at gunpoint as the night wore on. The previous week, in the very middle of the Holiday Inn at Rondebosch, a white middle-class suburb, the wedding guests had been robbed, the women stripped of their jewelry and the men their wallets. A hothead who had tried to intervene had been shot dead in cold blood in front of everyone.

  The wedding couple had gone to great lengths. The rotunda that could
accommodate five hundred people had been repainted. Bunches of pink and white lilies bloomed in vases and amphoras. Multicolored lights twinkled beside Chinese lanterns. The buffet table, presided over by liveried waiters, hired for the occasion from Pepper and Vanilla, Cape Town’s most famous white caterer, was awash with food: piles of fruit, mangoes, papayas, grapes, mountains of cakes, salads, slices of avocado, gambas as big as your forearm, cuts of fresh and smoked salmon, chicken cooked in papillote, grilled meat, saffron rice, and whole roasted suckling pigs, whose combination of natural juices and spices emitted a suffocating smell that made Rosélie feel sick. Then there was the choice of vintage champagne, planter’s punch, sangria, scotch, and fizzy drinks. Dressed in red and wearing matching bandannas, the popular Prophets were playing on a stage at a deafening volume to the delight of the youngsters, who were already swaying their hips to the beat.

  Two lives could not have been more different than those of Emma and Hildebrand, sisters nevertheless. Same father, same mother, as they used to say in N’Dossou. Like two life stories written by novelists of opposite temperaments. Whereas Emma suffered misfortune after misfortune, as we have described previously, Hildebrand was living a fairy tale. Having left school without even her primary school diploma, she had nevertheless found a job as an orderly in a private clinic. All day long, she cleaned and disinfected three floors of wards, changed piles of sheets and towels, and served meal trays to patients, unrewarding and exhausting work that she carried out with a smile, because nowadays what matters is to find a job. Anywhere, anyhow, and at whatever price. Four of her brothers were unemployed without benefits. It was then that the young Dr. Fredrik Vreedehoek, trained in London, had appeared to check the temperature of one of his patients. On seeing Hildebrand, demurely preoccupied with her cleaning products, his own temperature had risen dangerously. Three days later, he moved in with her. Five months later, he married her.

  Coloured marriages are a complex business. It’s not just a matter of class and education, like everywhere else. Bourgeois with bourgeois. Graduates with graduates. Inheritances from parents or grandparents. Life insurance. Bank accounts. A plot of ground to build a house or a weekend cottage. In addition, it’s a question of skin color. The golden rule is not to marry anyone darker than yourself. If Hildebrand had been dark-skinned, Fredrik Vreedehoek would never have dreamed of slipping a wedding ring on her finger. Although heavily melanized over time, her family descended from Jan, who in November 1679 had set foot in Cape Town as head of the Dutch East India Company. Before he died, Jan had legitimized his fifty-eight illegitimate children with one sweep of his pen, and given his name to the Malagasy slave who for thirty years had groaned under his two hundred or so pounds without ever forgetting to call him baas at the moment of orgasm. But Hildebrand’s hair waved the color of a cornfield. Her complexion had the hue of maple syrup. Any prejudice against her melted under the glow of so much blondeness, which, failing family jewels or property, she would pass on to the child already showing up under her lace dress. However, it had been tacitly agreed that once the wedding festivities were over, the Vreedehoeks would cut all ties to this family, light-skinned perhaps, but without a penny. This left a bitter taste of mourning over the wedding celebrations. Hildebrand’s eyes filled with tears at the thought of never again embracing her beloved mama and papa, her brothers, sisters, young nephews, and Judith, her favorite niece. Her mother, rigged out in a puce-colored two-piece suit with leg-of-mutton sleeves, greeted the congratulations like condolences. As for Emma, she openly sobbed on Dido’s shoulder, overwhelmed by a new reason to hate life. She had raised Hildebrand and now, alas, she was going to lose her.

  Dido dragged Rosélie to a table already occupied by some cousins and their teenage daughter, who was looking longingly at the dancers she wasn’t allowed to join. She wore patent-leather Mary Janes and a dress of white lace. Her hair was rolled into ringlets that danced black and shiny down her neck. Her mother boasted to anyone within hearing distance that she looked like Halle Berry.

  “I wonder why they chose that band,” groused the father. “They’re only playing rap. Isn’t our music good enough for them?”

  There then followed a discussion on the merits of iscathamiya, South African jazz, mbaqanga, and kwaito, which were head and shoulders above African-American music, that dared compete with them on their home territory. Besides, South African music was head and shoulders above every type of music. Dido was of the same opinion. Nobody could touch Hugh Masekela or Miriam Makeba!

  What could you expect? She stuck with the artists of her generation.

  “Not to mention gospel!” added the man. “Nobody can beat us.”

  Whatever the African-Americans might think, they are only novices in the genre. Rigged out in ludicrous chasubles, they sway to and fro, shouting in their churches, whereas everyone knows shouting isn’t singing. Once again, listening to these affirmations of vibrant chauvinism, Rosélie felt empty-handed. Nothing in her culture made her want to fight tooth and nail for it.

  Pity I’m not Haitian! In that case, I wouldn’t know what to choose.

  Ayiti péyi mwen!

  Carimi.

  Perhaps she dreamed the world would be one because of her own destitution? Did it betray a desire to align everybody on the same tabula rasa as herself? She had lost her parents and her land, loved strangers who did not speak her language—besides, did she have a language?—and pitched her tent in hostile landscapes. Faustin joked about it sometimes.

  “You’re like a nomad. Your roof’s the sky above your head.”

  Aren’t we all nomads? Isn’t it the fault of this wretched, topsy-turvy century in which we live? At the age of twenty-six my mother could make up her mind and say: “I shall never leave Guadeloupe again!”

  Even if I’d wanted to I could never have imitated her.

  Faustin! Dido had enthused over his flowers and took his procrastination at face value.

  “It’s better that way,” she declared. “It’ll soon be summer in America. I hear it’s suffocating in Washington. You’ll arrive for the autumn, the loveliest season.”

  Why had Faustin set his heart on her? Wounds heal when you’re twenty. They infect and fester indefinitely at fifty. Women who are paid by the job exist too. Cape Town’s full of them, hanging round the streetlamps on the waterfront. The authorities, who hunt them down, claim these depraved women come from Madagascar, not South Africa.

  Whores always come from somewhere else!

  Faustin had set his sights on her, she who was already so fragile, so infirm. You don’t shoot at an ambulance. She was forgetting the pleasure he gave her, the impression she had of regaining her youth, of starting life over again, and at times she thought she hated him.

  Gradually the atmosphere changed. The veneer of good manners cracked, and the guests, despite their elegant surroundings, sunk into vulgarity. With the help of alcohol and good food, voices grew louder, shrill, and quarrelsome. Tongues were loosened. The women criticized the callous Vreedehoeks, who were forgetting that white folk had despised them as well. The men, shrugging off such gossip, attacked the government. It was the whites who were profiting from the new regime. The whites and Kaffirs. Not the coloureds. The world no longer considered the whites as pariahs. They could travel, do business, and get rich. The Kaffirs’ wildest dreams were coming true. Thanks to special programs, they were invading the universities. Soon the country would be flooded with Kaffir doctors, lawyers, and engineers with degrees!

  Rosélie was the friend of a relative, so she was treated like family. Everyone knew the terrible ordeal she was recovering from. Another dirty trick by the Kaffirs! They’ll ruin South Africa just like they’ve ruined the rest of Africa. Corruption, coups d’état and civil wars are their progeny of misfortune. But their sympathy was expressed in Afrikaans, a language that Rosélie, little gifted for languages, could not understand. So despite the smiles, she felt terribly isolated.

  It was then, as she gazed a
round the room, she thought she recognized Bishupal. Yes, it was him, flanked by Archie, the young coloured guy who had replaced him at Mrs. Hillster’s. Apparently recovered, he was standing somber and indifferent at the edge of the dance floor, as if he were oblivious to the commotion around him. When their eyes met, she smiled at him. He immediately turned away and, grabbing his friend’s arm, was quickly lost in the crowd. Rosélie didn’t know what to think. What had gotten into him?

  Hadn’t he recognized her?

  Suddenly the lights dimmed. In the midst of shouts and applause, a female singer and a guitarist walked onto the stage.

  “Rebecca! Rebecca!” screamed the guests.

  Rebecca gave a gracious wave of the hand, then in a pleasantly husky voice began to sing a popular song that everyone seemed to know, since they sang the refrain in chorus: “Buyani, buyani.”

  What will my life be like if I stay here? Rosélie wondered lucidly.

  A powerful desire unfurled, flapped like a sail in the wind, and dragged her along. Blood, they say, is thicker than water. The Thibaudins would have to accept her and silence their reproaches. Even the prodigal son was embraced by his father: “Bring forth quickly the best robe, and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet; and bring the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and make merry; for this my son was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.”

  She wouldn’t go and bury herself in the hills at Barbotteau. She had always preferred the city, its life and energy. She would go and live in La Pointe, in the house on the rue du Commandant Mortenol where she had grown up, among her childhood memories. In the living room, the photo of her first communion. On the Klein piano where she had practiced her scales. In the library on the first floor, the books that had bored her to tears but which Rose made her read for her general knowledge. Next door, her bedroom and the chaste, single bed where her recalcitrant body had experienced its first teenage desires. The mirror where she had gazed at her own reflection, dreaming of a magic wand that would transform her. Would she have the courage to enter Rose’s room? On the dressing table, the three porcelain cups painted with Japanese ladies and their ebony chignons were covered in a layer of dust. Next to them, a souvenir from Paris: a glass ball in which the dome of Sacré Coeur peeked through the snowflakes. An hourglass congealing time. All these trite trinkets that had outlived their owner.