The Story of the Cannibal Woman (19 page)

She sat for a moment in the garden. Not a sound. In the distance a few cars rattled up the avenue. She went back up to the haven of her bedroom, put on her nightdress again, and went back to bed. The bed was cold. Cold and empty. She thought of Faustin and burst into tears, not knowing whether she missed him or Stephen more.

Rosélie seldom cried. Tears are a luxury that only children and the spoiled can afford. They know that a sympathetic hand is always there to dry them. She hadn't cried when Salama Salama cheated on her. She hadn't cried when she stood in front of her mother's body, eyelids finally closed, guarded by candles at the bottom of Doratour the undertaker's monstrous casket. She hadn't cried when Stephen died.

There hadn't been a wake. Rough handled back from the morgue midmorning by mindless coffin bearers, the heavy oak casket had been laid to rest in the middle of the living room, gradually smothered in wreaths from the university, schools, neighbors, and anonymous sympathizers. Around noon, they no longer knew where to put them. They were piled up in scented heaps just about anywhere. Emotions were running high in the rooms on the ground floor and in the garden, where people—mostly whites, but also some blacks—students, musicians, and artists who had known and loved Stephen, were praying side by side.

Nkosi Sikelei Afrika
.

Yes God, bless this country. Forgive it the terrible things that go on here!

The head of the funeral cortege reached the church while the end of it was still filing past the Mount Nelson Hotel. Many of the mourners remained outside in front of the church before setting off for the cemetery.

There was a crowd too for Rose's funeral. But it was different in her case. With its merciful scythe death had cut short the years of suffering and exclusion. As for Stephen, it had been shockingly unjust, striking down a man, still young in years, talented and beloved by all. On each occasion, Rosélie walked behind the coffin with a mechanical stride, not a tear in her eye and a face so bone dry it was as if she had no feelings. Consequently, nobody took pity on her.

That night, however, she cried. With tears that welled up from a never-ending source deep within her. It was like the rain on certain days during the rainy season when it begins in the predawn hours, slows down in the evening only to pour even harder in the darkness stretching to infinity, and continues until morning. The rivers then overflow their bed and the whole island smells of mud and mustiness. This constant patter of rain finally sent her to sleep with a dream. Or rather a succession of dreams, nightmares in fact, one after the other, exterior day, exterior night, like sequences in a film without words or music.

It was daylight. Was she in Guadeloupe? Or in Cape Town? The crowd was gone. The cemetery was empty. The raging sun was heating the great steel plate of the ocean. At intervals, birds of prey swooped out of the sky onto their quarry, visible only to them through the molten metal. She was looking for a grave. Her mother's? Stephen's? But however much she walked up and down the paths, turning right, then left, she couldn't find it. Suddenly, everything around her disappeared. She was lost in a desert of sand and dunes. Nothing but dunes. Nothing but sand. Nothing but sand. Nothing but dunes. Overhead, the calotte of sky was shrinking and the raving maniac in its middle continued to pound even harder.

It was night. She was lost in a forest as dense as N'Dossou's. Not a single hut. Only tree trunks, eaten by moss and epiphytes, their branches smothered in moving creepers like the arms of a giant. Suddenly, the trunks got closer and closer. They squeezed and crushed her while the boa vines wrapped themselves around her body.

It was daylight. The footpath wound through the grass, which promptly parted in front of her. Nature reigned supreme, everything in its place. The sun way up above, pouring down its usual dose of molten lead. The cottony white clouds, stuck to the blue by the heat. On the horizon, the rigid, triangular-shaped mountains. Suddenly the path turned at a right angle. A farm stood out against a quadrilateral of gnarled vines, planted at regular intervals like crosses. Closer to her was a cornfield. A woman was waiting, angular in her black dress, leaning against the tin siding of the main building. When Rosélie walked up, the woman turned her head and Rosélie recognized her. It was Fiela!

Fiela was wearing an open-neck blouse, as if she were going to the guillotine. Her tiny slit eyes and her face, with its triangular-shaped cheekbones, betrayed no sign of fright. No sign of remorse either. In actual fact, no feeling. It was one of those impenetrable faces that disconcert ordinary people. Rosélie thought she was seeing her twin sister, separated from her at birth and found again fifty years later, like in a bad film.

She went up to her and murmured:

“Why did you do it?”

Fiela stared at her and said reproachfully:

“You're asking
me
? You're asking
me
?”

The sounds that came out of her mouth were guttural, very low, and startling like those of an instrument out of tune.

“I did it for you! For you!”

Thereupon Rosélie woke up, soaked in sweat, her nightdress stuck to her back like in one of her childhood fevers.

The moon shamelessly displayed her belly of a pregnant woman.

W
hen she showed up again in his office, Olu Ogundipe had that worried look of someone who has sighted a hurricane looming on the horizon. Yet Rosélie had nothing threatening about her. Instead she was rather shattered and slumped into an armchair. Around her on the walls, all of Olu's beloved heroes stared down at her fixedly. Always the same reproach. What had
she
done for the Race?

“What have you come to give me this time?” Olu said mockingly, not at all hostile. “Another computer?”

She didn't answer, tortured by a sudden urge to burst into tears. He was quick to see it and took an even softer stand.

“I was about to leave. My wife isn't too well, it's her allergies, I have to go and pick up my older children from school. Would you like to come with me? We can have tea at my place.”

She hesitated, and once again he poked fun at her.

“You're a pretty woman. But this isn't a trap. We know how to behave. Do we frighten you?”

Telling him that she hadn't always been the mistress of a white man and that her first partner had been an African would serve no purpose. The stereotypes about Antillean women die hard. They are supposed to hate and despise Black Skins. Rosélie hadn't the energy to put up a fight and she let him talk away.

“I know the Caribbean. I lived for three years in Kingston and came up against all sorts of humiliations. I've nothing against my in-laws. Admirable people. But Cheryl's family and friends accused her of soiling her sheets with a nigger, black like me. If we ourselves don't like our color, how can we blame the whites for not liking it?”

All this time he was signing a dozen letters with a majestic flourish.

They went out and crossed the deserted recreation yards that echoed with students' voices from every classroom, chanting lessons and singing a cappella. The sounds merged and composed an unexpected and appealing polyphony.

Olu got onto his favorite subject of conversation: the future of South Africa.

“You'd think Césaire had this country in mind when he wrote
The Tragedy of King Christophe
. Do you remember? ‘So here we are at the bottom of the ditch! The very bottom of the ditch! I'm talking of a spectacular ascent!' I think it's the most wonderful piece of theater. What do you think?”

Rosélie had only read
Notebook of a Return to My Native Land
by Césaire, which Salama Salama recited by heart. He dreamed of putting it to rap, cleverly beating out the lines:

“Get lost I said you cop face, you pig face, get lost, I hate the flunkies of order and the cockchafers of hope. Go away bad grigri, bedbug of a monklet.”

In the end, the fear of sacrilege stopped him.

Without being disheartened by so much ignorance, Olu continued.

“Give us a few more years and we'll be the leaders of Africa! I'm not talking only in economic terms, gross national product, gross domestic product, but in terms of culture.”

Art and culture are necessary compensations for the misfortune of our lives. (Once again.)

They reached the car. The ageless Nissan uttered a series of coughs and started up. The cheerful aspect of the school, a Catholic day school, made it look out of place in the general landscape. Olu's older children turned out to be three kids of an unexpected coffee color ranging from nine to twelve years. They spontaneously held up their cheeks for Rosélie to kiss and she was filled with emotion by such a gesture. It was as if they, the children, absolved her and were giving her back the place the adults had excluded her from.

Olu lived in Esperanza, a district still under construction on the outskirts of Cape Town. Neither township nor residential suburb. Its inhabitants belonged to the laboring middle class trying to emerge from the ashes of apartheid. His villa, like all the others, was surrounded by a concentration camp–type wall, topped by thick rows of barbed wire. And behind, you could hear the barking of hounds, straining furiously on their chains.

“Gangs operate around here,” he explained. “Loafers and good-for-nothings who don't want to do a day's work. Let's not close our eyes, there's a lot to be done. I'll quote once more
The Tragedy of King Christophe
: We are ‘schoolteachers brandishing a ruler in the face of a nation of dunces!'”

A nation of dunces? Did Césaire say that? Not a very nice remark!

Three other small boys, again coffee colored, ranging this time from four to six years, were playing in a patch of garden. They broke off to hurl themselves on their father with Sioux-like yells, then, in a charming ensemble, held up their warm cheeks for Rosélie, who, this time, almost burst into tears. The living room looked like Olu's office, but more chaotic. The leather sofa and three armchairs were streaked with scratch marks, the Moroccan rug lay crooked. The same dusty photos. In their frames the great men, now dust to dust, struck a sorry pose. Okay, they left behind their books. But who reads them? What is their legacy?

Nobody reads anymore. Everyone watches American sitcoms on television.

My favorite:
Sex and the City
.

Olu was proud of a set of snapshots placed on top of the inevitable piano in petty bourgeois interiors, between the inevitable bunch of artificial flowers.

“You see,” he said, priding himself, “that's Césaire and me at Saint-Pierre in Martinique. This is Césaire and Cheryl. He liked her a lot. And here we are all three of us, Césaire, Cheryl, and me, at Le Diamant. Behind us the famous rock. Do you know Martinique?”

Rosélie shook her head. In the Caribbean she only knew Kingston, Jamaica, where she had gone with Salama Salama to a reggae festival. She didn't remember much about this paradise turned hell on earth under the combined effects of crack and ganja. They had been advised to stay in their suite at the Sheraton because of the violence. She had lived in a cloud of smoke and only went out to lie by the pool in the shape of a peanut. When Salama Salama wasn't around, a barman from the Dominican Republic served her
trujillos
, an explosive mixture of rum, lemon, cane syrup, and tomato juice with a dash of Marie Brizard, while leering at her breasts. According to Salama Salama, his concert, which she hadn't attended, had been a triumph.

“I've been to Trinidad, Montserrat, Antigua, and Barbados,” he bragged again. “Haiti is my favorite island. The most African, the only one of its kind, you could say. That's where I really felt at home. You know what the Haitians call a man, whatever his color? A Nègre. The day will come when Noirisme, that theory they've so distorted, will be rehabilitated.”

Then he disappeared to look after his wife, leaving Rosélie faced with a lukewarm glass of Lipton teabags served up by a domestic in none-too-clean overalls. Large families live in an atmosphere of disorder created by the children—toys lying about on the rugs, teatime remains left on the table, and a constant noise of squabbling, tears, and cries, things that stab at the heart of the lonely. Sitting in this unattractive room where the windows covered by a grid of solid bars let in little light, Rosélie had never felt so vulnerable. She was reminded of the tribe she had grown up in, on days spent at the beach with aunts, uncles, and cousins. It required half a dozen cars to transport everyone, dozens of hampers to carry all the food, and at least three iceboxes for the drinks. Rose, of course, didn't accompany them. No question of undressing in public ever since a little nephew had compared her in a fit of laughter to Bibendum, the Michelin Man. But Elie was there, trim and muscular, swimming agilely in his striped swimming trunks.

What was she doing in Cape Town among people with whom she had nothing in common? Their language seared her tongue. The taste of their cooking insulted her palate. Their music was no music to her ears. Everything was foreign to her. Suddenly, she couldn't understand herself. Her faithfulness to Stephen's memory and her intention to remain at his side seemed absurd. Mrs. Hillster was right: “The dead are always alone.”

After a while, Olu reappeared and announced:

“Cheryl would like you to stay for dinner.”

Rosélie refused straightaway. She didn't want to intrude. She just wanted Chris Nkosi's address. A mask of hostility immediately covered Olu's face.

“Why? What do you want to know?” he asked.

Rosélie hesitated. What
did
she want to know?

“He was a good, hardworking boy,” Olu continued. “Quiet and obedient, until the honorable doctor, your husband, came and filled his head with stupid and dangerous ideas about the theater. Afterward, he liked to think himself as an
artist
. We didn't know what to do with him. He almost failed his exams. He wanted to leave the country. Go to London. Did he have any money? Was he forgetting his color? He'd become a filthy immigrant, parked in a slum, the prey of skinheads. Who knows if he wouldn't end up in jail? Or else convert to Islam and become a terrorist.”

It was obviously a joke. Rosélie gave a faint smile.

“It was in England I met Cheryl,” he continued. “That's where we got married. I know what I'm talking about. What city is more racist than London? Its reputation as a multicultural paradise is an invention of intellectuals like Salman Rushdie, who, besides, emigrated to the United States.”

“I'd like to have a talk with Chris Nkosi,” pleaded Rosélie, who, despite the meandering conversation, had not forgotten the purpose of her visit.

“Talk about what?” he shouted angrily. “Leave him alone, for goodness' sake! He's deserved it.”

A worried look flared up at the back of his eyes. But she looked so unhappy that he sighed, went into his study, and came out grudgingly brandishing a piece of paper.

“His wife's pregnant,” he announced as if it were something important. “By this time, she might have given birth.”

Thereupon he dived back into his study. In short, if for Olu, Stephen's bad influence boiled down to encouraging Chris, then it wasn't anything very serious. In N'Dossou, a class of twelfth-graders had made a name for themselves performing brilliantly
The Importance of Being Earnest
on the occasion of the twenty-third birthday of the president's fifth wife. (He had repudiated the first three. The fourth, who had opened a center for handicapped children and a maternity clinic, died in childbirth and was christened the African Evita Perón, the Holy Mother of the Nation. Way out in the bush, a thousand workers labored on the construction of a basilica in her honor that was to rival St. Peter's and Yamassoukro's in Côte d'Ivoire.) Some jealous folk had criticized this Westerner, this Stephen Stewart, in
L'Unité
, the single party's single rag. In their opinion, staging
The Importance of Being Earnest
was not along the lines of Authenticity, but rather those of Alienation. Rosélie felt oddly reassured, without, however, admitting what she had feared.

She was deep in these troubling thoughts when Cheryl Ogundipe, draped in a black kimono and wearing a somewhat doleful expression, emerged from her bedroom.

O Love, you are a mischief maker. You're rightly depicted as a blind god. You pounce without distinction on your prey and light the fires of passion.

Looking at Cheryl, even the keen eye of a Caribbean, apt at distinguishing the most subtle shades of color, would have hesitated. You could have mistaken her for a Scandinavian, given her fawn-colored torsade, her eyes the color of seawater, and her Cleopatra nose. She had a face studded with freckles. As if she had looked at the boiling sun of her native island through a sieve.

Rosélie reproached herself for being so surprised. Such contradictions are frequent. The brain, the heart, and sex, each goes its own way. Olu's brain had followed the path of black activism. His heart and sex had led him into the trap of a mixed marriage. For Cheryl was the daughter of a white Jamaican Creole, descended from planters who had lost all their possessions, and an Irish mother whose family had never had any.

Outside the Caribbean, islands and continents drift to and fro. Borders lose their meaning. Differences become blurred. Languages no longer matter. Guadeloupe, Martinique, Haiti, Jamaica, and Cuba fit into one another like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle finally put together again. Immediately the conversation between these two Caribbean women took on an intimate tone.

“Olu says you don't want to go home to Guadeloupe?” Cheryl inquired.

She too said “go home.” Go home to the island like going back into your mother's womb. The unfortunate part is that once you're expelled you can never go back. Go back and curl up. Nobody has ever seen a newborn baby turn back into a fetus. The umbilical cord is cut. The placenta buried. We have to walk bent double, but walk even so till the end of life.

“In some respect I can understand you. I swore I would never set foot again in Jamaica. When I was little I suffered agony. Because of our color, my brothers, my sisters, and me, the “guava whites” as you say in Guadeloupe, we were excluded. There was no place for us in the country of the Maroons. Twenty years later I return with a black husband. They find him too black. They make fun of his accent. They call him “alien.” But you can't be serious about staying here. However much I adored Nigeria—we lived in Ibadan, I buried my firstborn and gave birth to two of my sons there, then there was the vitality, the music, and exuberance—this place makes me sick. It's as if a shroud is covering it and underneath there is nothing but dead bodies. What's more, if things go on as they are, AIDS will kill off all the blacks and the epidemic will have succeeded where the Afrikaners failed. That's what causes all my allergies. It's psychosomatic. Unfortunately, Olu will stay here until we're both dead. He's waiting. He's hoping, day after day, for a nomination.”