The Story of the Cannibal Woman

ELEVEN

Fiela, what have they got against him? He has always been by my side. Thoughtful. Considerate. Patient to my moods.

Often Stephen used to say:

“You are the most wonderful woman on earth. An extraordinary gift, too precious for me, like the ones my grandmother used to give me. My father and mother were so fraught with hate for each other they had no time for me. I grew up amid their indifference. So every Christmas my grandmother would decorate a tree in which she nestled little trumpets, little violas, violins, guitars, and bagpipes. She would switch on garlands of electric lights. On the branches she hung silver and gold balls that sparkled from the light. Then underneath she placed my present, wrapped in festive paper that I tore open when we got home from Midnight Mass. I can remember one year it was a white clown almost as tall as I was. When you pulled the strings it smiled and croaked, waving its arms: “Hi, how are you?” My grandmother died when I was ten. Shortly afterward my parents divorced. I followed my mother to Verberie and life never again gave me anything. Except you!”

Or else he would say:

“If I were to lose you, my life would revert to the desolate existence I led before I met you. I had nothing that was mine. I lived thanks to other men. Like a Tupinamba Indian I devoured their liver, their spleen, and their heart. But these bitter feasts left me even more despondent. Sated, I realized my baseness. You gave me everything.”

For their first Christmas together, he had wanted to take her on a journey. A real one. Because he realized that traveling for Rosélie meant only two things.

Either the drive from La Pointe to Basse-Terre. This was the time when she was a little girl and Rose still showed herself in public, when they would get up at four in the morning. The sky glowed pale over the hill of Massabielle as Elie, helped by Meynalda, loaded the Citroën with bottles of water, Tupperware containers of codfish fritters and curried chicken. Then the family would confront the perilous fifty-mile journey to attend a christening or a wedding.

Or else the journey by plane from La Pointe to Paris for her studies, for the Thibaudins considered Paris nothing more than a city where you were likely to find work. Neither Elie nor Rose was one of those fanatics who count up their stays in the metropole year after year and return home starry-eyed. In fact, Rose had only traveled once to the capital for her honeymoon. Her head had been ringing with the carnival songs of Cuba, Rio de Janeiro, and Salvador da Bahia. But how do you get to those places? Elie had no idea. One of his brothers had recommended a cheap hotel in Paris with furnished rooms and a kitchenette where you could do your cooking. The Hotel des Deux-Mondes stood on the place Denfert-Rochereau, a busy shopping district. Rose would walk round the statue of the Lion of Belfort, green as the mirage of grass in the middle of the desert sands, and continue on to the narrow rue Daguerre, overflowing with food stalls. There she would rub shoulders with other housewives and bargain for tuna, scorpion fish — similar to the red snapper — red peppers, and violet-colored eggplant. Madly in love with his young bride, who weighed no more than 130 pounds and whose voice rivaled that of the kiskadee bird from Dominica, Elie had not been mean with his money throughout their stay. He had taken her to see films starring Tino Rossi, whom she adored and whose hit songs she sang:

Marinella, oh reste encore dans mes bras,

Avec toi, je veux jusqu’au jour

Chanter cette chanson d’amour.

He showed her the Folies Bergère and the Moulin Rouge, but she was shocked by the dancers and thought they were little better than the ladies of easy virtue back home, showing off their legs and their breasts. Once, he was in the mood for a bit of culture and bought orchestra seats to a matinee performance at the Théâtre de l’Odéon of Corneille’s Le Cid, which they used to recite at school.

Rose was bored in Paris. She returned home to Guadeloupe, determined never to travel again, and with the help of her illness, she kept her word.

Stephen chose Italy. He was astounded that the only museum Rosélie had visited as a child on Saturday afternoons under the supervision of her French teacher was the Lherminier Museum, a pretty colonial house with wrought-iron balustrades. All it housed were collections of faded postcards, lace and mother-of-pearl fans, and children’s spinning tops. But it was the only museum in La Pointe. Rosélie got to know the museums in Paris much later when she was a student. Stephen couldn’t get over it.

“When did you feel you had a vocation?”

Vocation? Rosélie was incapable of giving an answer. A child does not have a vocation. She wants to paint. Period. It’s her caprice and her freedom to choose. She had entered into painting like a novice enters into religion. Without suspecting what lay in wait for her. Uncertainty. Fear. Solitude. Exhausting work. Lack of money and self-esteem. The search for recognition.

“You’re a miracle,” Stephen marveled. “You’ve reinvented painting.”

Florence and Rome appalled Rosélie. She thought Art was a delectation enjoyed by the happy few. An elitist and outmoded notion. It is fodder for senior citizens, corporate employees, and underprivileged children. White-haired tourists and schoolchildren elbowed one another around the Uffizi and crowded onto the Ponte Vecchio. Paper litter, African priests, and Indonesian nuns fluttered around the square in front of St. Peter’s.

The brightly colored grotesques daubed on the ceilings of the convents and libraries in Parma, and Venice, especially Venice, despite its hordes, reconciled her to Italy. The city of the Doges drifted on the waters of a lagoon the color of the Sargasso Sea. Ocean liners, reviving the journeys of long ago, were escorted lazily out to sea. Rosélie dragged Stephen along alleyways off the beaten path, into obscure churches and hidden monasteries. And that’s how she came across Antonio Vivaldi. One evening, out of curiosity, they followed a small crowd into a patio cluttered with chairs and benches open to an indigo sky. They were giving a private concert, a common sight in the city. The concertgoers all knew one another and kissed and hugged with that Latin effusiveness. They made room for the strangers, turning round to whisper and stare. Yet this open display of curiosity was as vivifying as a hot bath. One man came up to them. Was the signorina from Ethiopia? Ignoring her negative answer, he began talking about Ethiopia. Or rather about himself in Ethiopia, since people only talk about themselves. For years he had worked with a team from Doctors Without Borders. He missed those isolated villages shivering in the icy mornings and the bitter breeze where he had treated the living as emaciated as the dead. Since his return to Italy, life had lost its meaning.

“And what about Art? And Culture?” Stephen asked in surprise. “You must have missed them in Ethiopia, you who are so blessed in this country.”

Art? Culture? He shrugged his shoulders.

Obviously he shared the view of a contemporary writer who had twice failed to win the Goncourt Book Prize: “Art and culture are necessary compensations for the misfortune of our lives.”

There was silence as the orchestra sat down. In the warm night air, thick with humidity from the nearby sea, Andreas Scholl began to sing the Stabat Mater by Vivaldi. Thus began the passion between Rosélie and the maestro of Venice. The passion for music differs from the passion you feel for a human being because it never disappoints you.

Domineering? Manipulating?

Stephen also watched over her and took her in his arms on nights when remorse gripped her in its persistent and steadfast embrace like on the very first day. He was never tired or exasperated. He made her drink when she was feverish with remorse, sponging her forehead and kissing her hands.

“You have nothing to be ashamed of,” he reassured her.

Nothing to be ashamed of? Judge for yourselves.

December was drawing to a close. Flanked by the inevitable Andrew, they had not only spent Christmas in Scotland and eaten haggis, but also relived the trip George Orwell made in the dangerous waters of the Gulf of Corryvreckan. Like Orwell’s boat, theirs had capsized and they had almost drowned. They had scarcely recovered from their fright when there came the call from Aunt Léna.

They hurriedly flew to London. But Stephen had kissed Rosélie good-bye at Gatwick, giving a hundred reasons why he couldn’t accompany her. She was no dupe. Nobody can confront the death of a mother.

Rose’s condition had not worsened. Simply, the heart, her poor heart, prisoner of layers of fat, no longer had the strength to pump blood to her brain and vital organs, which were failing. One evening, Meynalda, who slept in Rose’s room to check on her breathing, as reedy as a premature baby’s, thought it had stopped. The room was deathly silent, as the saying goes. Dr. Magne was sent for and certified that, from all appearances, she was still alive. In the morning she was still hanging on. Obviously something was holding her back in her place of misfortune: she was waiting for her daughter before closing her eyes.

And Rosélie took fright, imagining her mother’s long-suffering, obstinate gaze filtering through her swollen eyelids. How could she confront her? She hadn’t been back for three years under the flimsiest of excuses: the move to New York, a study trip by Stephen to Hawaii, and a bout of flu. To make amends, she had spent a fortune at Interflora for every occasion, knowing full well that these expensive bouquets of flowers could not hide the real reason.

On arrival at Orly-Ouest, it was raining. It always rains in Paris. Where is the City of Lights?

I see a damp and melancholic city. Under the Mirabeau Bridge, the waters of the Seine churn our memories, gray and heavy like drowned corpses.

Suddenly, the little courage she had mustered melted away. Her legs went weak, her eyes blurred with tears, and her strength failed her. There was no way she was going to dash to Roissy to catch her plane to Guadeloupe. She dived into a taxi and drove to the Porte Saint-Martin, a district that for her always symbolized desolation.

Hotel du Roi-Soleil. Rooms by the month and by the day.

“For how many days?”

I don’t know, I don’t know.

The room looked out onto a narrow street, a sort of dead end. The electric light, as glaring as an operating room’s, lit up a reproduction by Vincent van Gogh. Rosélie ordered two bottles of scotch and, for a person who didn’t drink, emptied both of them.

When she resurfaced it was night.

Through the window the neon signs for cheap hotels flashed red-green-green-red. A pneumatic drill was hammering her head while a plug of steel wool choked her mouth. She nevertheless managed to get up and leave the room. To call the elevator. To walk straight as she passed reception. To reach the sidewalk. It was still raining. The Ghanaian whores, feminine silhouettes lined up in the shadows of the sidewalk among the garbage cans, asked one another in Ewe:

“Where does the sister come from?”

“Don’t she look like a Malian?”

She entered a café. Soon a man accosted her. Nothing macho, just a young, fair-haired boy, probably a soldier on leave who had smelled a weak, helpless individual. Not long afterward they were back in her room, where he undressed, revealing a white, milky skin with no hair, few muscles, and a limp sex of enormous length. She opened her mouth. He fondled her breasts. But when he was about to penetrate her she collapsed. Who says that men have only a one-track mind and take unfair advantage of women?

Not Lucien Degras. Twenty-four and unemployed since he had left technical college. Ah yes, such is the lot of the majority in our postmodern societies. He listened to this stranger and took pity on her. Three days and three nights she raged delirious in his arms. She left no subject untouched: Rose’s mysterious illness, Elie’s infidelities, her flight and her fears. On the morning of the fourth day, he managed to drag her to a travel agency — L’Agence Hirondelle, Wings Around the World.

By noon he had paid a taxi for her out of his own money, for he had just received his unemployment check. Direction Roissy.

Eight hours later she arrived in La Pointe. The journey had been a nightmare. Babies crying. Children running up and down the aisles. Mothers desperately trying to quiet things down. Fathers calmly reading their papers in the midst of the hubbub. The family had dispatched Aunt Léna to the airport, her face furrowed with reproach. She kissed Rosélie on the forehead without saying a word and took the wheel of an old car she had inherited from Papa Doudou. During the bumper-to-bumper drive to the rue du Commandant Mortenol — there are too many cars on this wretched island! — they didn’t exchange a word. Not one question, such as where were you? Not one reproach, such as she’s been waiting for you for four days. Oh yes, she’s waiting for you.

Rose was lying on her bed, her eyes half open.

When Rosélie entered they widened, stared at her, letting fly those darts, those arrows that would bore into her heart, her mind and soul, rainy season come dry season, at any hour of the day or night; then they rolled upward and glazed over.

Forever.

Meanwhile, fraught with worry, Stephen had moved heaven and earth, including his mother’s retirement home in Verberie, his half brothers, the Hotel du Mont Parnasse in Paris, Cousin Altagras, Lucien Roubichou, and their numerous kids, the airline, and, as a last resort, the central police station.

“Fill in this form with your last name, first name, and address.”

“You’re not French?”

“She’s not your wife? When did she disappear?”

“Did you quarrel?”

In despair, he ended up in La Pointe about the same time as Rosélie. When he found her he hugged her in his arms in an embrace straight out of Gone with the Wind, reported a facetious nephew who was fond of movies.

“It was my fault,” he said, shouldering the blame. “I should never have left you on your own.”

Fearful all this fat would rapidly decompose, the undertakers had invented an ingenious system of refrigeration. They placed an insulated icebox at the bottom of the coffin that needed to be changed only every four hours. The family was dismayed by the stream of strangers filing in front of Rose’s body. They came from all over to get a last look at the recluse, confined to her room for thirty years like a monstrous Gregor Samsa. They elbowed their way into the funeral home, hastily sweeping their breasts with the sign of the cross and getting an eyeful of the horrible sight.

Following these painful events, Rosélie symbolized the ingratitude of children that kills the hearts of so many parents. Worse, she gave no explanation for being inadmissibly late.

“If she had gone via the North Pole she would have got here quicker,” as one uncle put it.

Rosélie walked behind the coffin like a zombie, or rather a junkie. Besides, she took drugs, it was whispered around in the family. This was not an entirely false rumor. Rosélie had tried marijuana in Salama Salama’s time.

As for Stephen, his preppy looks were reassuring. The women especially appreciated them. It’s sad, really, to think that white men make the best husbands. They don’t chase around. They stay at home and watch game shows and the news on television before climbing into bed with their wedded wives. The good-for-nothing husbands, those who come home to snore at four in the morning, drained by their exploits with their ladyloves, sneered:

“All that glitters is not gold! In bed, a black is worth at least two whites.”

True or false? They only had to ask Rosélie. But no one dared.

As for the politically minded cousins, they first found themselves in a predicament. For years Rosélie, who had never read a line of Fanon or Gramsci, had been their bête noire. The fact she was living with a white man and chose to live in the empire of evil didn’t surprise them. But here was her white man, who was not French (only the naive can’t tell the difference), proving to be the opposite of what they loathed. Not only was he always prepared to criticize France, Jacobin and colonialist at the dawn of the twenty-first century, but he professed he had no interest in rum punch or the beach.

“All that sand makes me sick,” he claimed. “I didn’t come here for that.”

This favorable opinion changed to negative when he announced he was leaving the rue du Commandant Mortenol and taking his wife to St. Barts. St. Barts! Now he was showing his true face. In the end, for him and others of his color, the Caribbean was nothing more than a tray of exotic fruit for the tasting.

It was true that Stephen hated these tourist paradises. But although he was suffocating in La Pointe, this was not the real reason. He had trouble adapting to the Guadeloupean way of life. In other words, the constant stream of visitors, wave upon wave of friends, uncles, aunts, cousins, nephews, nieces, great-nephews, and great-nieces; the telephone calls without rhyme or reason, preferably at dawn or bang in the middle of siesta; lunches for christenings, first communions, engagements, weddings, silver, gold, or, more rarely, diamond anniversaries that lasted from noon to seven in the evening, and the everlasting discussions on the political status of the island.

“Do we need a single Assembly?”

Elected by universal suffrage, by proportional representation according to the principle of the current regional reforms.

Above all, he wanted to remove Rosélie, who lent herself only too well, from the grip of death: the mass and ceremony of the ninth day, the fifteenth day, the thirtieth day, the daily collective prayers and the annotated reading of L’ Imitation de Jésus-Christ. Finally, quite simply, he believed that nothing would be better than the luxury of a five-star hotel to give her a new lease on life.

To a certain extent, they didn’t feel out of place in St. Barts. Where were the natives hiding out? The island was swarming with Americans, Caucasians, and a handful of African-Americans. None of your university bookworm types, dressed any old how. None of the obese proletariat either. These were people with money, recognizable, despite the required look of jogging suits and Nikes, by their slim figures, their tan, and their assurance. On the beaches at Les Salines and l’Anse du Gouverneur the men showed off their tanned skins and flat stomachs while the women unraveled their hair like Rita Hayworth in Gilda. They politely grimaced a smile at Rosélie and made small talk, nothing intellectual:

“Beautiful weather, isn’t it?”

“The water’s great this morning.”

“I hear the East Coast is snowed under!”

Stephen had somewhat miscalculated. Rosélie accompanied him to the beach, the pool, the restaurant, and the bar, swimming, eating, and drinking three or five cocktails an evening. But it was obvious she was not drinking in the luxury, blinded as she was by her own grief. So she was unaware that the hotel staff were eating her up with their eyes. Those who kept the books at reception had passed the information on: she was not married to Stephen. So the verdict of the men, from the gardeners and the pool boys to the servers of planter punches in their tight-fitting white pants, bulging back and front, was final. She was nothing more than a bòbò picked up in the airport in Guadeloupe or Martinique together with a gift package of aged rum, a jar of hot peppers, and three sticks of vanilla and cinnamon. The population of chambermaids wavered between rage and envy. What did she have that was so special to hook a white man and wallow at his side in painless opulence at the five-star Palm Beach, safe from the sun, AIDS, and underdevelopment? Not that beautiful. Not that light-skinned. Not that young. And bad hair.

Grief is a marathon runner that sets its own pace.

On their return to New York, Stephen took Rosélie to Carnegie Hall to listen to Vivaldi, and to Brooklyn to admire the Bartabas horses, and, on the advice of some colleagues, consulted Orin Sherman, a respected psychotherapist who treated half the university, but there was nothing doing. Zombie she was, and zombie she stayed, creeping blindfolded through the glare of her days and the shadows of the night. This lasted almost a year.

One morning her nostrils filled with the delightful aroma of Linda’s coffee — Linda, whose magic potions bought in a botanica on 110th Street had been having no effect. She felt the desire for Stephen’s body, forgotten for so long on the other side of the king-size bed. Her hands burned to pick up her brushes again. Life had reasserted itself.

Shortly afterward, Aunt Léna, decidedly the messenger of misfortune, called to announce the death of Elie.

Elie had died while Carmen, his favorite bòbò, was giving him a blow job during the blissful hours of siesta. His member, on the point of bursting, had suddenly gone limp. She had looked up and there was the old man prostrate in his rocking chair, his eyes rolled upward and his mouth gaping wide open. Sealing the quarrel with the family, Rosélie refused to go to Guadeloupe to attend the funeral. Her time for mourning was over! She had finished eating her heart out. Above all, she confessed her father had never meant anything to her. She could not forgive him his infidelities toward her mother and the rivers of water his humiliations had made her cry.

It had all started when some good souls had reported to Rose he was complaining to his group of friends.

“Man, soon I’ll need a ladder to climb up onto that woman!”

“Man, she’s not the Aegean Sea, but the Sea of Grease.”

“Man, that woman’s a nightingale locked up in a demijohn.”

He was a useless individual, devoid of dreams, utopia, and ambitions. A Creole-style dandy. He took himself to be the center of the world when he walked on his crooked legs to the clerk’s office to scribble his mumbo jumbo, dressed in a white drill suit, his bunions pinched into button boots.