The Story of the Cannibal Woman

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 around 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.

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 no 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.