The Story of the Cannibal Woman

by Maryse Conde

  The very next morning after her arrival, she would get up at four to go to dawn mass. The bells would ring out in the cool of the morning and the bigoted churchgoers would stream to the cathedral like flies to a puddle of cane syrup. Every day she would take communion. Every Sunday she would visit Rose’s grave, her arms loaded with flowers that would warm the coldness of the marble.

  “She must have loved her mother so much!” people would wonder. “So surprising after what happened.”

  But what had happened? Nothing very much when you think about it. Everyone knows each of us kills the one she loves.

  The coward does it with a kiss

  The brave man with a sword.

  Once her act was over, Rebecca bowed and left the stage amid the cheers. The lights came on again and the hubbub of conversation resumed.

  “She’s our greatest singer,” the man boasted.

  “Nobody comes close to Hugh Masekela!” Dido flung back at him.

  A woman dared contradict him.

  “Hugh Masekela? Old hat!”

  The discussion almost turned nasty. Fortunately, a new band started up. Old-timers who began to strike up the old, familiar tunes. Dancers poured onto the floor. Dido grabbed Paul’s arm, the widower she was after, willowy and melancholic, who seemed frightened by her vitality. Rosélie stayed alone behind her drink.

  Yes, there’s something appealing about those songs whose words we cannot understand, something that speaks to us deep down. We can give them wings, embroider them with flowers and stars, and color them however we want. I’ve always preferred sitting down to listen to music. I’ve never known how to dance. Neither did you, Fiela. My reputation followed me throughout my teenage years: “She’s hopeless at jamming,” the boys would whisper in contempt. For years I was a wallflower, like you, watching my cousins perform boisterous dancing moves with their partners.

  When the music stopped, the dancers surged back to their seats, Dido delighted at having smooched with her widower. At that moment, Bishupal, still flanked with Archie, loomed up at their table. They formed an odd couple: Bishupal, handsome and melancholic like an archangel driven from paradise, and pretty-boy Archie with an evil streak. On seeing them, tongues began to wag. Shame on them! Those two with their vice and wickedness had gone to live with Archie’s mother, the widow Anna van Emmeling. The poor woman had no idea two boys could make love together and, deeply shocked, she had run to her confessor. Ever since, she had been immersed in novenas. She couldn’t sleep a wink at night while the two demons got drunk, copulated, and quarreled.

  Oblivious to this gossip, Bishupal gave Rosélie a piercing look, then without a word, a smile, or a blink, he turned round and, dragging Archie with him, disappeared into the crowd.

  Despite the liters of Plaisir de Merle ingurgitated and the late hour they had come home—even then Dido hadn’t gone to bed and sat up all night watching Keanu Reeves in Sweet November, lamenting his solitude on film and her own in real life—the sun hadn’t opened its eyes when Dido dashed into Rosélie’s room to announce the news.

  The verdict was splashed all over the front page of the Cape Tribune.

  Fiela had been sentenced to just fifteen years in prison. Naturally, the counsel for the prosecution had asked for life, deploring between the lines that capital punishment had been abolished along with apartheid. Only the ultimate punishment would have fit the horror of the crime. But the jurors hadn’t agreed with him. The two lawyers requisitioned for the job, those pink-skinned, fair-haired youngsters whom everyone took for a pair of nincompoops, had accomplished wonders. Halfway through the trial they had skillfully changed tactics. They had called to the bar a load of witnesses from goodness knows where! One man swore he had seen Adriaan more than once blind drunk at some ungodly hour. A woman testified he had exposed himself to her eight-year-old daughter on a secluded path. One of his colleagues at the Vineyard Hotel complained he fondled her breasts and buttocks at the slightest opportunity. Another claimed he organized secret poker games in a corner of the hotel kitchen. In short, the picture of a model father and upstanding husband, a regular churchgoer, singing the Psalms loud and true, endured a setback. The two pink-skinned, fair-haired youngsters whom everyone took for a pair of nincompoops had introduced a doubt. That’s all it needs in justice, a serious doubt! Suddenly Adriaan was suspected of having led a double, even a triple or quadruple life. Obviously, public opinion protested, convinced that Fiela was guilty. An angry crowd surrounded the courthouse, demanding an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Kill the murderess. Cut her into little pieces like she had done to poor Adriaan.

  There was a photo too with the article in the Tribune. Standing between her guards, a great gawk of a woman, like me, an enigmatic face, like me, preparing to add her name to the already long list of mad women and witches. Nobody would ever know the truth. Fiela hadn’t said a word during the ten days of her trial. She hadn’t betrayed her joy on hearing her sentence. She hadn’t thanked her saviors. In short, she took her secret with her into jail.

  Fiela, Fiela, during all this time I was so preoccupied with my own tormented life I neglected you. You at least know the path mapped out in front of you. It seems as if I’m on the brink of a precipice where I shall fall and never climb back up. Tell me. You can tell me everything. Why did you kill Adriaan? What was his crime? You forgave him the first time when he gave Martha, the little neighbor, a belly. What was worse about this new crime? Did your lawyers hint at the truth? What was he hiding from you again and again, that you finally found out?

  Rosélie cut short Dido’s recriminations she had already heard so many times about the barbarity of the country ever since the Kaffirs had come to power, and extricated herself from the sofa bed. Joseph Lema’s consultation was at eleven o’clock on Faure Street. The buses took forever, so she would just have time to stop over on Strand Street. She didn’t know what she was hoping for from Inspector Sithole. To talk. To talk about Fiela. To talk about Stephen too. Both stories were now muddled in her head.

  Where does mine begin? Where does his end?

  But Inspector Sithole was not at the police station, where there reigned an atmosphere of utter pandemonium. Black offenders, black and white police officers. Offenders and police officers, their brutal, vicious faces identical, as if good and evil, order and disorder, justice and injustice were one and the same thing. Probably through close contact they ended up looking like each other. A white officer, his face covered with acne, though he was long past the age of this juvenile scourge, his upper lip bristling with a führerlike mustache, as fat as Lewis Sithole was willowy, was sitting at his desk. Frowning, he put Rosélie through a formal interrogation—Name–Address–Profession–Purpose of Visit—before informing her:

  “Sithole has lost his wife. He’s left for KwaZulu-Natal. He’ll be back tomorrow or the day after.”

  As she was about to leave, he stopped her with the same old song, uttered in that indefinable tone of voice that was both reassuring and threatening:

  “It’s often said that the police don’t do anything. But it’s not true. We are not idle, and we always end up discovering the truth.”

  Once outside, Rosélie walked in the direction of the Threepenny Opera without realizing it. It was as if her body were obeying orders from her brain without her knowing it.

  Bishupal’s incomprehensible rudeness obsessed her. Never very communicative or smiling, at least he was polite. One evening, tired of seeing him crouched in front of Stephen’s study, she had brought him a chair and a glass of Coca-Cola, which he had accepted.

  At this time of day the shopkeepers were still washing down the sidewalks. The homeless had cleared off, leaving behind their empty wine bottles, open cans of food, piles of old rags, and litter. Fiela’s much too light a sentence was on everyone’s lips. The way justice worked, in ten years she would be as free as a bird, free to reduce another innocent body to shreds.

  She could see from the entrance that there was n
o trace of Bishupal or Archie at the Threepenny Opera. Sitting on a stool, a blond girl was leafing through a magazine. Some white customers were rummaging through the opera shelves, some blacks through world music. Mrs. Hillster looked more ravaged than ever. With her hooked nose and her beady eyes between wrinkled eyelids, she looked more and more like the wicked fairy, or rather the picture we have of the wicked fairy, since, should we forget, she is a fictional character. Mrs. Hillster must have been the only person not to be shocked by the jury’s clemency toward Fiela. She had other things on her mind.

  “I can’t find a serious buyer either for the house or the shop,” she complained. “An African embassy made an offer for the house. But I don’t trust them. You know what I mean, don’t you?”

  Of course! It’s a well-known fact the African embassies are broke and leave nothing but debts behind them, in Washington as well as Paris. But Rosélie wasn’t here to discuss African embassies.

  “It so happens I met Bishupal yesterday at a wedding and he refused to say hello to me.”

  At the mention of his name, Mrs. Hillster looked like a stunned boxer after receiving a punch in the stomach. Her eyes filled with tears.

  “Bishupal doesn’t work here any longer,” she stammered.

  “Since when?”

  The words couldn’t get out quick enough.

  “The boy I cherished like my own son is an ungrateful wretch. Since he sent me this good-for-nothing Archie, who knows nothing about anything except hip-hop, confusing Verdi with Rossini and Callas with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, not anyone can work with music, you have to have some background, he smoked joints, and what’s more he was unbearable, insolent, always on the phone, I called Bishupal to know when he was coming back. Nothing unusual about that, was there? But he was so rude, telling me he wasn’t my slave and that I was a filthy colonialist like all the rest! Me, me? That I’d exploited him like all the others! Me, me? After everything I did for him, ever since the day Stephen introduced him to me.”

  “It was Stephen who introduced him to you?” Rosélie asked in dismay.

  “Oh, you didn’t know?” Mrs. Hillster exclaimed, a gleam flickering at the back of her eyes. “Bishupal was a messenger boy at the Nepalese embassy. They fired him, I don’t know why exactly, and Stephen, who liked nothing better than playing the Good Samaritan, flew to his rescue. He brought him here, paid for his correspondence courses with his own money, and found him a studio apartment.”

  That was just like Stephen, overly generous, always surrounded by all sorts of protégés, students, young artists, poets, painters, and sculptors. But Mrs. Hillster dispensed her information with venom, visibly relishing the meaning that might be implied.

  “He ended up screaming at me that he would never set foot here again, neither he nor Archie! What’s more, he was about to leave this lousy country for England. I’m not surprised at what you’re telling me, he always hated you.”

  Me? Why?

  But Rosélie didn’t ask the question out loud and fled.

  In her absence, Joseph Léma, feeling at home in his surroundings, had undressed. Uncovering his bony shoulders, he had lain down on the couch in the consulting room. He had already commented on Fiela’s trial to Dido, who had offered him a cup of coffee. He was now ready to expose his point of view to Rosélie. South Africa was a very strange country. Its philosophy of reconciliation and forgiveness following the crimes of apartheid was most irritating. Fiela deserved nothing better than a public execution. It would put some sense in the heads of women who wanted nothing better than to imitate her and sink their teeth into their husbands. Nigeria was setting the example by stoning adulterous women.

  Rosélie did not discuss matters further. Once again, she had other things on her mind.

  EIGHTEEN

  After a sleepless night interspersed with dreams no sooner forgotten than the memory of their horror lingered on, Rosélie went down to her studio. When she opened the windows, the sky stretched colorless and dismal. A cloth knotted tight above the city. A bitter wind lashed her face. In the murky half-light of dawn, the backyards emerged, cluttered with an odd assortment of garden tools, hosepipes, and pressure-cleaning equipment. She closed up again the shuttered windows and sat down on the sofa reserved for visitors without a glance at her gloomy canvases, like dejected daughters ignored by their mother.

  Don’t we mean anything to you? they asked her in silence. You seem to forget we are the blood that gives you strength, the blood that pumps your heart, your arms and legs. If you stop painting, you’ll stop living. When are you coming back to us?

  Soon, soon. I have to sweep in front of my own door, as they say in Guadeloupe. In other words, I have to sort myself out.

  She clasped her head between her hands in a theatrical gesture. If she went and knocked on Widow van Emmeling’s door, Bishupal would be obliged to see her and answer her questions, like all the others she had interrogated. But what would she ask him? Her knees gave way and her thoughts recoiled. She remembered her visit to Hermanus, Chris Nkosi and his puerile look: “You’re crazy!”

  He must have sniggered behind her back. Poked fun at her. Like Bishupal would poke fun at her. Like everyone else.

  Like everyone else?

  As if she were fleeing some kind of danger, such as a hurricane drawing inexorably closer to the shore, she dashed out of the studio and bolted down the stairs. While she ran down the stairs, the wail of a police siren heading for a police station with a van full of crooks beat time with her steps. Too bad for those who had been robbed, raped, and murdered under cover of night. Nobody suffered as much as she did who had lost everything. She ended up near the traveler’s tree. In the meager light of day, Deogratias, still cramped in his night uniform, was sipping a root tea he had brought in a thermos. The Gospel according to St. Luke was wide open in front of him. He looked up from his reading and said in surprise:

  “Up already?”

  She managed to stammer a reply and went into Stephen’s study. It was like stepping into a pharaoh’s tomb. Treasures lay in the shadows within hand’s reach, irresistible temptations for robber voyeurs. But she didn’t switch on the light or pull up the shades. Nothing interested her. She didn’t try to force the locks, open the drawers, or check the computer, sitting silent, pale, guarding its secrets. She simply sat down in the armchair that Stephen had used so many times, where his body had left its imprint on the leather seat. She laid her hands flat on the wood, recalling those years she had always thought were happy. Stephen and she never quarreled. She let him decide everything, arrange everything, and solve everything. In his opinion, he did what he thought best. From their very first meeting in the Saigon bar, the roles had been cast and had never changed. He was the lifeguard. She was the drowning swimmer. He was the surgeon. She was the heart patient. A bond of gratitude echoed that of love.

  She relived those years. New York, Tokyo, Cape Town. Until that final night, which had brought it all to a grating and incongruous end. All those years laden with happy memories, seldom important or noteworthy, which put end to end made up a successful union. Successful? For the first time she dared scrutinize this word like a jeweler hunting for a flaw in a diamond. Soon tears streamed down her cheeks.

  What was she crying for? She had to agree with Inspector Sithole’s idea that Stephen’s death was not the work of young junkies short on crack. It was not a routine incident for journalists out of a job. The gratuitous violence of modern times had nothing to do with the matter. A nauseous truth was lurking, like a baby swaddled in dirty diapers.

  As for Stephen, deep down inside her, in that part where the light of truth never ventures, she had to admit that she had always known who he was. Moreover, on the first day, hadn’t he warned her, quite casually, in his offhand, playful manner?

  “I never accost women. They scare me too much.”

  She had simply chosen to ignore the evidence. Blessed are those who have two eyes and see nothing. Sa zyé pa ka vwè, kyiè pa ka
fè mal, says the Guadeloupean proverb. She had refused to pay the terrible price of lucidity.

  So what was suddenly weighing on her? Why was she filled with a feeling of revolt, a feeling she had been duped? At this point in her thoughts, she clumsily tried to be ironic. No Simone de Beauvoir expressions, please! But irony didn’t help. She hurt even more.

  “Your Stephen is de la mierda!” Fina had screamed.

  “You’re sacrificing yourself for nothing,” Dido had said, going one step further.

  Who should she be crying for?

  In fact, should she be crying?

  It was Dido who interrupted all these thoughts with her tray of coffee and the Cape Tribune. On the front page, Fiela, who was en route to the high-security prison in Pretoria, once reserved for the most recalcitrant political prisoners, had been replaced by another woman, white this time, united in the same madness and wickedness. Once again the righteous would be scandalized. This woman had drowned all five of her children, the youngest being only a few months old, in the family bathtub.

  Rosélie cut short Dido’s fulminations with a wave of the hand, drew a cup to her lips, drank a sip of the scalding liquid, then asked, very quietly:

  “You knew, didn’t you?”

  Immediately Dido’s expression clouded over. As if she had been waiting for this question for days. Like a night moth imprisoned by mistake in an attic, her gaze frantically fluttered around the room, then came and settled on Rosélie.

  “What did I know?” she asked.