The Story of the Cannibal Woman

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.

“Thank you very much. We’ll write to you. Next!” the examiners would scowl.

She had no idea whom he had flirted with or whom he had desired. He seemed to emerge from the famous London fog in a sudden halo of light. She hadn’t the slightest idea of what his life in N’Dossou had been like before she moved in with her two metal trunks, her canvases, and her lenbe. She knew that at one time he had taken in Fumio, who had left behind pictures of his mother and two sisters and the boxes of makeup he used to parody the Kabuki actors in his famous one-man show. Since then, like all rebels, Fumio had settled down and no longer did full frontals. Thanks to his father’s connections, he had been appointed director of the Japanese Institute in Rabat. Stephen and he kept up a correspondence, never missing a birthday or Christmas card. Rosélie had never bothered her mind about it. Now she had to imagine what interested Stephen when he was not with her. Amateur theatricals.

Chris Nkosi.

The name seemed to loom up all of a sudden. Yet she realized that ever since her first visit to the Steve Biko High School, during the rehearsal for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the boy had caught her attention. His name had remained lurking in the folds of her memory, ready to emerge into broad daylight at the slightest call.

The tenth grade had been rehearsing at the Civic Center for Community Action. It was a kind of hangar where Arté had organized a book fair selling hundreds of copies of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, as well as a hip-hop festival. The teenagers were laboriously stumbling over Shakespeare’s lines. Except for Chris Nkosi, alias Puck, who sailed over his text, scaling new heights:

Through the forest have I gone,

But Athenian found I none,

On whose eyes I might approve

This flower’s force in stirring love.

He was handsome and arrogant, probably from receiving constant compliments. He wore his dreadlocks like a wig. She bitterly regretted not having asked Olu for his address. The very next morning she would go back to the school to get some answers out of him.

Once she had made this decision, a sense of serenity enfolded her, like a sick person who has long hesitated, then resigned herself to undergo an operation. Either she will die. Or her life will be spared. In either case, the suffering will stop.

She decided to go home.

The last noisy groups of customers were leaving Ernie’s and the remaining few restaurants still open. This district of Cape Town used to be out of bounds to blacks. In order to have access you needed a pass. Judging by the looks that bored into her, her presence was still out of place and a threat even today. If they had guns, these young people would use them. In all impunity. Justice would acquit them like it acquitted the four police officers who assassinated Amadou Diallo in New York. Legitimate defense. A black man is always guilty.

But of what?

Of being black, of course!

Precisely, a group was standing at a street corner.

She became scared, turned her back, and almost began to run; then got hold of herself and walked back up the street. When she arrived level with them, she confronted them. A crowd of youngsters, almost teenagers. Squeezed into leather jackets. The boys wore their hair in a crew cut; the girls in a ponytail. Harmless. Their minds were on other things. The boys thinking how best to persuade the girls to come back to their place, and the girls wondering if it was still worth hanging on to what remained of their virginity.

As Stephen used to lament, once again she was making a song and dance about nothing.

She reached Faure Street.

She resolutely pushed open the door to Stephen’s study. This was the second time she had entered since he died. While he was alive, she hadn’t gone in very much either. Neither had Dido, who, with broom and vacuum cleaner, complained bitterly that she was kept out. She flipped the switch and the light flooded the paintings, the books packed against the walls, the sagging armchair, the heavy desk and its disparate ornaments: a Tiffany lamp, a miniature globe, and a stone paperweight from Mbégou. It was as if the room, motionless and silent, were waiting for its owner to return. As if Stephen’s restless personality were still palpitating. It was here he worked for hours on end amid a din of jazz turned up full volume — which always amazed Rosélie — where he read and watched his beloved opera videos. Rosélie had always felt that this part of his life rejected her. That she was not welcome. The attention diverted to her wretched self distracted him from higher preoccupations. She had none of the qualities to rival James Joyce, Seamus Heaney, or Synge. For the very first time she wondered what other interests, perhaps even less noble, absorbed him.

You don’t improvise being a voyeur, however. It’s not like an old pair of jeans you slip on whenever you want to. It has to be ingrained.

She was no sooner inside than a deep malaise gripped her. It seemed she was committing an indiscretion. That Stephen would come in at any minute and ask her, amused:

“What are you looking for?”

Yes, what was she looking for?

An icy cape settled around her shoulders. She was ashamed of herself. She was no better than a grave robber. She knew Stephen threw his keys into a Mexican pot on the window ledge. But when she was at the point of opening the drawers, she lost her nerve. The bunch of keys slipped from her hands and rolled onto the carpet. She quickly switched off the light and dashed outside.

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.