The Story of the Cannibal Woman

TWO

Rosélie only ventured out at the end of the day. Now that Stephen was gone, she, like the Catholics on a pilgrimage to Lourdes, religiously headed for the Mount Nelson Hotel, where he loved to take afternoon tea. It was a magnificent colonnaded building, one of the last remnants of the British Empire, the colossus with clay feet that had crumbled into dust, a living example of “grandeur and decadence.”

“Britannia rules the waves,” they nevertheless proclaimed from India to Africa.

Right up to the early years of the twentieth century, it was filled with aristocrats fleeing the English winter and fog, for Cape Town is known for its bracing and energizing climate. Today the Mount Nelson is mainly a tourist attraction. Hordes of tourists in Nikes and T-shirts, leaving their all-inclusive deals at the Holiday Inn, invade the gardens and have their pictures taken as they walk up the drive of centuries-old oaks or pose smugly in front of the greenhouses of orchids from Thailand. In spite of this, the power and majesty of the place had such an effect that Stephen, who as a rule hated everything English in him, rediscovered the intonations of his childhood to address the waiters, those bearded, formidable Indians, tightly bound in their cummerbunds, who glided around like well-trained ghosts. Rosélie, less susceptible to the lost glories of a colonial past, liked the Mount Nelson for quite a different reason. The undesirables in Nikes and T-shirts never ventured onto the waxed parquet floors inside. Trained in the art of discretion, some would say hypocrisy, the personnel swept by, their eyes fixed on the horizon. Consequently, for the space of a few hours, gone were the inquisitive looks that ambushed Rosélie and Stephen, whatever they did and wherever they were. They slipped into anonymity as if resting in eternal peace. In the Churchill room they would sit facing a gossamery pianist wearing a dancer’s headband who played “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” and listen in silence as they filled their plates with scones and muffins, Stephen adding egg and cucumber sandwiches. They would drink gallons of Darjeeling tea. When outside in the garden it began to grow dark they would stroll home, making a detour by the Big Bazaar on Kloof Street, where they rummaged through everything and bought nothing, which gave the owner, an Afrikaner, an extra reason to be angry.

Rosélie thought she saw Stephen slip between the deep red chintz drapes. In the past, leaning against the piano, he would hum along in his nice, melodious voice. The Indian waiters knew all about the crime that had made headlines in every paper, even the very serious Manchester and Guardian, more geared to political analysis than brief news items. They never approached her, however, to present their condolences. Despite their reserve, something in their silence testified to their compassion.

One afternoon she was pouring herself a second cup of tea when a white man greeted her. Tall, with a slight paunch, a shock of black hair, gray eyes, and tanned cheeks. In answer to his polite request, she nodded that he could join her.

“My name is Manuel Desprez, but everyone calls me Manolo because I play the guitar. You don’t recognize me, do you? I used to teach at the university with Stephen. We got on very well together. He told me so much about you I have the feeling I know you. What’s more, I have spent several evenings at your place.”

In Cape Town, like in N’Dossou and New York, Stephen would organize such lively and successful dinner parties, they never ended before dawn. Ever since an Australian, a Keats specialist, took her for the maid, Rosélie no longer attended them.

“You’re making a lot of fuss about nothing,” Stephen shrugged it off. “David is so absentminded he wouldn’t recognize his own mother if she was standing in front of him.”

She was by no means convinced and locked herself in her studio. Quite a few students came to these parties. Stephen assured her it was both a reward for the best in the department and a sure way of breaking the ice between professors and students, in other words between whites and blacks. When masters and disciples get drunk together, it’s something they never forget. Rosélie bumped into these young things, awkward and embarrassed, as they came out of the toilet, and quickly withdrew so as not to embarrass them even more.

Manuel Desprez was still talking.

“I’ve been away in France on a sabbatical and when I got back at the beginning of the week I heard what had happened. I was about to come and see you.”

She closed up. He was probably going to spout some commonplace remark, bemoan the absurdity of the crime, and find fault with the local police. It was true, in fact, that despite Inspector Lewis Sithole’s constant visits and the notes he kept jotting down, Stephen’s murderers seemed to have disappeared into thin air. But instead of uttering the predictable, his question was direct, even brutal:

“Aren’t you going to return home?”

Home? If only I knew where home was.

Chance had it I was born in Guadeloupe. But nobody in my family is interested in me. Apart from that, I have lived in France. A man took me to Africa, then left me. Another took me to the United States, then brought me back to Africa, and he too left me stranded, this time in Cape Town. Oh, I forgot I’ve also lived in Japan. That makes for a fine charade, doesn’t it? No, my only country was Stephen. I shall stay wherever he is.

Despite the insistence of his half brothers — his mother had passed away some months earlier — Rosélie had refused to take his body back to the family vault in Verberie. Stephen, who loathed Europe, would have certainly preferred to remain in the country he had chosen.

“South Africa is such a tough place,” Manuel insisted.

The whole world is a tough place. They take potshots at you on the sidewalks of Manhattan as well as in London’s Chelsea. You’re not safe in the deadly Twin Towers, symbol of American capitalism. Almost three thousand dead, killed in a single morning. They rape old ladies in the east of Paris. They tell me that even my little Guadeloupe is keeping up with the times.

“I’m not talking just about violence.”

About what, then? Racism? Let’s talk about racism. I could write volumes on the subject. If racism is more deadly than AIDs, it is also more widespread, more commonplace than flu in winter.

I’ve always dreamed of writing a book on racism. “Racism Explained to the Deaf and Hard of Hearing.”

He became confused and changed the subject.

“They tell me you’re a painter.”

Rosélie stammered out a yes. This type of question always embarrassed her. As if she had been asked to put on a swimsuit, despite her cellulite, and pace up and down the stage of the Miss Guadeloupe contest. Manuel called a waiter, ordered a single malt, then went on to explain:

“My sister has a gallery on the rue du Bac in Paris. If I can help you in any way, I shall only be too pleased.”

The tone was sincere. The things he must have heard at the university! Doris, the coloured secretary, entertained her audience with her hissing voice:

“They’re not married, you know.”

I was the one who refused. He proposed regularly. Without any real desire, in my opinion. Like a broker offering comprehensive car insurance.

“If something happens you’ll be covered.”

It’s true that if I had listened to him I wouldn’t be where I am today! Worrying about how to make ends meet.

“So of course she’s not entitled to a pension,” Doris hissed excitedly. “Since she can’t do anything except paint ghastly pictures that nobody would want in their house, she’s bought a crystal ball and calls herself a medium.”

Split between hysterical laughter and commiseration, the circle of teachers gasped:

“No, you must be joking!”

The more generous-hearted proposed collecting donations. The idea didn’t meet with general approval: giving money or a check, it’s humiliating. The gesture might hurt her.

Before Stephen, few people had taken Rosélie’s ambitions seriously. Elie would throw a fit whenever he saw her wasting her time messing about with paint instead of revising her math or science for the baccalaureate. If she couldn’t be a lawyer, he’d like her to be an economist. No Guadeloupean can boast of a daughter as economist at the World Bank. As for Rose, who was never short of compliments, she whined for an explanation:

“What does that represent, darling? Is it a person, a tree, or an animal?”

Those members of the family who had visited the Louvre museum in Paris once or twice shook with hysterical laughter. She thinks she’s that painter who was fascinated by Tahiti and also spent time in Martinique. What was his name?

In the eyes of Salama Salama, Rosélie’s penchant for painting was incomprehensible and exasperated him. Stephen’s behavior was radically different. She hadn’t been with him for three months before he began to take charge of her affairs, as he did with everything else. She lacked technique because painting is like singing, cabinet making, or masonry: it’s not something you make up, it is governed by rules. So he got her admitted to the National School of Beaux Arts, the latest gift from France to N’Dossou, a place of extreme material poverty but spiritually very rich. The two are not incompatible. On the contrary. The Antillean proverb is mistaken when it claims: Sak vid pa kienn doubout. In other words, those who have an empty belly are only preoccupied with filling it. Not at all, they are devoted to the creation of Beauty and Spirituality. A French government minister had inaugurated the school in great pomp a few months earlier. The director was a friend. Stephen had no trouble whatsoever.

N’Dossou’s entire population is no bigger than a district of Manhattan. Moreover, the entire country numbers fewer than a million inhabitants. The dense forest and fevers have got the better of it. The rumor quickly spread through the residential areas and suburbs that Rosélie had no business being where she was.

Favoritism! Favoritism!

Especially as she had no talent. Her paintings lacked that opacity generated by cultural authenticity. The professors, too busy saving up for their retirement, made no effort to defend her. Wounded by the criticism, Rosélie found no consolation in receiving her final diploma. Locked in her studio rented by Stephen in the Riviera IV district (everything an artist could wish for), next to the Afrika recording studios, she couldn’t touch her brushes for weeks on end. Nobody could reassure her that she was anything but a conscientious student. She would have liked words of encouragement from painters as different as Modigliani, Wifredo Lam, and Roberto Matta to admit her into their magic circle.

Am I nothing more than one of those tlacuilos, Indians from Ixmiquilpan who filled the Spanish with so much admiration?

Stephen in no way influenced Rosélie. He merely expressed his approval. Why did she always get the feeling he behaved like a doting daddy?

You know, those parents who consider their little darling’s daubings a masterpiece, frame it, and hang it on the wall.

He encouraged her to expose at the French Cultural Center, run by a friend of his, in between a sculptor from Niger and a watercolorist from Togo. The few visitors wrote admiring comments in the visitor’s book on the creativity of Francophone artists. Stephen hosted a dinner for the only two journalists in the country who specialized in painting. Since the evening was devoted to the arts, he also invited his inseparable Fumio. Fumio was a Japanese artist who staged an avant-garde show in front of a stunned audience, more used to the singers of the National Instrumental Ensemble, fully clothed in ceremonial wrappers. His was a one-man show called Ginza-Africa (Ginza being a trendy district of Tokyo), during which he completely stripped and threw a full frontal into the bargain. Although Fumio was of not much use that particular evening, the two journalists were impressed by the dishes served up by the former cook of the Finnish embassy, the high point being the crabs stuffed with snails. They published articles as excellent as the meal. As a result, Rosélie sold two of her paintings to the owner of the Hotel Paradiso, on the seafront, who hung them in the lobby and forced his reluctant guests to enthuse over them.

The color of the air changed. Rosélie stood up, followed by Manuel Desprez. Nowhere was safe nowadays. Only the day before yesterday a group of tourists had been attacked outside the District Six Museum. He offered to escort her home. Deep down she knew only too well what the neighbors would say if, three months after the death of Stephen, she came home with a white man.

I’m telling you, they’re all whores.

“Black and Asian women are alike, they’re machines, they can’t tell one man from another.”

Cowardly, Rosélie declined his offer.

“Can I come and see you one of these days?” he insisted.

She thought she hadn’t heard right. What type of Good Samaritan was this who took an interest in a morose, destitute widow of a left-handed marriage?

“I’d like to see your paintings,” he stammered, taken aback by her look of surprise. “As I told you, my sister has a gallery. Sometimes I work as an art dealer for her.”

Pity, nothing but pity!

As night fell a cool wind settled on their shoulders, a treacherous wind blowing in from the merciless Atlantic and Indian oceans, that swept through the streets, sending dust and grease papers flying. In the background, the massive Table Mountain, like an evil spirit, overshadowed the city.

Rosélie had been reluctant to move. She had sort of got used to New York. Why set off again? But Stephen was a stubborn man. Once he had something fixed in his mind, he was not afraid to make bold comparisons. After seven years in New York, he argued, to see South Africa after apartheid would be like going back in time. Going back to when the United States had just finished muzzling its police dogs and the fight for civil rights was over. They would have a front-row seat to observe how communities, once bitter enemies, learn how to live together. Apparently, in South Africa the experience was particularly remarkable. Not the slightest drop of blood spilled. But no agrarian reform either. No redistribution of land. No Africanization along the lines currently meant. In Durban, Jo’burg, and Cape Town the statues of the colonials remained firmly in place on horseback, just like in the good old days. Rosélie had been incapable of holding out against such an onslaught. She had laid her canvases, like recalcitrant schoolgirls, in boxes custom-made by a carpenter on 125th Street.

She hated Cape Town as soon as she left the airport, while sensing inside her a strange fascination. For towns are like humans. Their singular personality attracts, repels, or disconcerts. Cape Town possessed the brilliant sparkle and hardness of rock salt; its gardens and parks, the remarkable roughness of kelp. While Stephen admired pell-mell the mountains, the gnarled pines bent in two, the mass of flowers, the dazzling blue sky, and the endless expanse of ocean, she was blinded by both this splendor and the hideousness of the shacks that mushroomed all around her. No place had been more marked by its history. Never had she felt so denied, excluded, and relegated out of sight because of her color.

Outside the Victoria Cinema, the line was growing longer. A group of out-of-towners, recognizable by their antiquated dress, were chatting. Rosélie hurried on to avoid being struck down by their looks, then remembered with a start that she was alone. Stephen was no longer walking beside her, arm in arm, or ostentatiously placing an arm around her shoulder. They would not turn their heads in her direction. She no longer irritated, she no longer gave offense. She had become invisible. Sadly, she had to choose between being excluded or being invisible.

Invisible woman!

On Faure Street, Deogratias had already unrolled his mat at the foot of the traveler’s tree, but was not lying in that favorite position of his, on his left side, his checkered flannel blanket drawn up to his eyes. Myths die hard. Most experts agree that Deogratias’s ethnic group, the “descendants of a pastoral people,” are not really Negroid. Look at their height, their slender figure. Look at their aquiline nose in particular. A nose says everything. Deogratias had a flat nose. This did not prevent him from undergoing the same fate as his brothers of taller stature. He was waiting for Rosélie with a piece of news that made his Adam’s apple jump up and down. A fellow countryman had just arrived in Cape Town. A former government minister. What could he be up to? Rosélie ignored his excitability. Except for his speeches on the South Africans’ xenophobia, his only subject of conversation was the need to hunt down those who had destroyed so many lives, bring them before the international court of justice in Arusha and organize trials that would echo round the world like those at Nuremberg. This was the price to pay for Africa’s salvation. Together with Dido, Deogratias had been one of Rosélie’s first patients, well before she had thought of setting up business on her own. When Stephen had hired him, Deogratias was suffering from terrible nightmares. At times, lying under the traveler’s tree, he struggled with invisible torturers while his screams tore through the dark. Rosélie had taken care of him. She had been about to lose hope when his salvation came in the shape of Sylvaine, a young immigrant from the same ethnic group whom he had met at church. Sylvaine promptly gave him a daughter; the couple baptized her Hosannah in a shout of gratitude to the God who had reunited them. Although Rosélie had been extremely shocked, Stephen, as usual, had been more understanding.

“What do you expect him to do? Spend his life lamenting the dead? In the end, it’s always life that wins.”

After a quick look at the university housing, Stephen had dragged her on a house hunt. They both fell for the house on Faure Street. Of course, all those who knew Cape Town advised them not to live in the center of town. Much too dangerous! Worse than the Bronx! Worse than Harlem! But Harlem is no longer Harlem ever since Rudy Giuliani launched his trigger-happy police. To prove it, Magic Johnson has invested there. The center of town is worse than anything you’ve ever known. But Stephen was taken with so much space: ten rooms, a balcony, and a garage. Rosélie had fallen in love with the tree. With arms outstretched, it shouted to be let free in its little patch of lawn, and she got the impression the years had rolled back. A traveler’s tree! A silent witness to her games at Papa Doudou’s. She would huddle in its heart and the swarm of cousins would grouse they couldn’t find her.

“Where on earth is she?”

The triangular trade had been reversed. Before arriving in Cape Town, the Christ-Roi had anchored at La Pointe, where it had replaced its ebony cargo with other species. The magic of the long-lost tree, of Nature, the smell of the mighty ocean parading as far as the eye could see, and the everlasting distress of her people like a canker in the midst of so much beauty cast a powerful, equivocal spell, a magical, perverse philter against which she was helpless. A frenzy of blood flooded through her heart, her head, her arms and legs, and she painted, painted for days on end, endeavoring to convey her conflicting feelings with her brushes. Rage. Repulsion. Seduction. Love. Hate. Stephen, who had been mortified by her lack of enthusiasm for New York, capital of the world in his eyes, was elated.

“You say you can’t bear this city, this country. And yet it inspires you. You’ve never painted anything so original.”

Without a moment’s hesitation he bought the house, muttering that the estate agent was letting it go for a mere song. Something quite unlikely, since the center of Cape Town had recently been classified an historical area. But Rosélie didn’t protest.

For three whole days a Congolese (there are forty thousand in the country) turned over the soil in the garden.

He planted canna lilies, gladioli, gerberas, and especially white flowered flag bushes, a fragile shrub with a liking for humidity.

Stephen was born in Hythe, a small coastal town in Kent. Cecil, his father, had been an engineer in charge of maintaining the military canal, a remnant of the Napoleonic wars. An unrewarding job he carried out dejectedly, dreaming of an Elsewhere, when he was offered a managerial position in Bangkok. Annie, however, his French wife and a former governess, was five months pregnant. Reluctant to leave her alone in her condition, he had given up the offer. Ever since, he had made the mother and child pay for his sacrifice.

“I never knew him to be anything else but irascible, furious with a rage that I understood much later when I began to feel it myself.”

Stephen had grown up in a small, one-story brick house, three windows on the first floor, two on the second, so identical to the houses on either side along St. Nicholas Road that he had to check the two numbers over the front door before entering. After school, he was regularly beaten up in the public gardens by the little bullies who called him a sissy because of his pretty face. On Sundays his parents would have lunch in a pub, always the same one. While he sipped his lemonade they would glower at each other over their lager. The view from the pub looked out onto the gardens of the nearby castle where blond-haired little aristocrats pedaled hard on their bicycles. Finally Annie had the courage to divorce and took Stephen back to Verberie, her hometown, where the buildings and humans share the same grayness. A few years later she married again, this time a school principal, a childhood friend, like Cecil but gloomier. She had two boys.

In order to escape this horde of relatives — the mother, the mother’s sisters, the stepfather, and the half brothers — Stephen got it into his head to return to university in England. Alas! Oxford and Cambridge thought his diction much too French! He’d lost his tonic accent, the rise in intonation and, especially, that distinguished stutter. So he had to make do with Reading. There, he had above all made his mark playing Chekhov with the university theater group. Since nobody claimed him — his father and mother having virtually forgotten him — Stephen began to travel the world. At the age of seventeen, he had almost got killed traveling through Italy and Greece on a scooter. At eighteen he lost his virginity in a bar in Houston where he had been raped by the owner and his wife in turn. At twenty, he dreamed of imitating Malraux. During a stay in Bangkok he had been content to photograph the bas-reliefs of the temples instead of looting them. At present, he proclaimed himself without a country and avoided Europe. Not entirely. He would spend a few days in the summer in Hythe, where he rented a car and drove along the coast, passing through the string of seaside resorts of Margate, Ramsgate, Sandgate, Greatstone, and Littlestone. Then a week in London.

Throughout his stay Stephen constantly called on Rosélie to bear witness.

“You can understand why I loathe this country.”

She looked around her and failed to understand. She was rather charmed by the color of the sea, so different from the Caribbean you wondered whether it was made from the same substance, the white facades of the great hotels, somewhat worse for wear, the ill-dressed crowds munching fish and chips on the endless piers, the boutiques stuffed with cute, unnecessary objects, and the tea shops that closed at five o’clock, just when it was teatime. And then she adored London. She would wander aimlessly counting the mixed couples whom she alone noticed. She envied them; they looked so happy and carefree. How did they manage?

Stephen always lodged with his friend Andrew Spire. They had shared a room at Reading. During their university vacations they had discovered Europe together. Then they had gone through hard times in London, both of them dreaming of becoming an actor. Andrew was single, as finicky as an old bachelor, handsome and marmoreal like Michel-angelo’s David. Despite his frigid expression, he published unsavory, erotic poems dedicated to T in an avant-garde journal. Rosélie was convinced T was a man.

I would love to be the cigarette

that your desire slowly consumes

penis of fire that becomes smoke

in your mouth.

After years of walk-on parts with obscure theater companies, he had managed to get a teaching job at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, thanks to his connections in high-up places. The house he had inherited from his grandmother, widow of a senior civil servant in India, was furnished with marquetry-worked sideboards, canopied beds, rocking chairs, and copper-studded chests shipped back from Udaipur. Andrew had added half a dozen Siamese cats, meowing haughtily, who clawed and ran over the sofas as if they were perpetually in heat. After these weeks in London and Hythe, Stephen would cross the Channel and go to visit his mother alone, now widowed, and dumped in an institution for seniors by the sons from her second marriage, executives in a large private bank who were snowed under with work.

Rosélie preferred to drift idly through the streets of Paris. She was a regular guest of a hotel in the Marais because Cousin Altagras lived close by. Out of all the Thibaudins, and there were enough of them to populate an entire district of Guadeloupe, all very prim and proper, Rosélie was the only member to frequent Cousin Altagras, daughter of one of Elie’s half brothers, who had arrived in France after the Second World War supposedly to study art. It was not because she had married a white man. The Thibaudins were above such considerations. It was because Lucien Roubichou, that was the name of the husband, owed his fortune, his apartment on the Place des Vosges, and his Audi Quattro to a rather special kind of industry. In short, he was a porn merchant, responsible for a certain number of immortal masterpieces, well known in closed circles: Lucy, Suck My Sushi; Don’t Speak with Your Mouth Full; and Caress Me, Caress Me, no connection with the famous song from Martinique. The family accused him of having used Altagras when she was a ravishing beauty and of now doing the same with their two daughters. Incidentally, he was a man of gentle manners, mad about cooking and Italian cinema. His specialty was vegetarian lasagna. His passion: Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose theorems he subtly analyzed. In spite of her diabolical reputation, Cousin Altagras was a disappointment for Rosélie. She had given up any artistic claims in order to cook beef stew for her litter of children. Marriage does that.

During the early years, however, Rosélie never missed an opportunity to accompany Stephen to Verberie. Vacations took her back to Guadeloupe less and less, for she could no longer bear the sight of Rose nailed to her bed, like a beached whale. Consequently, looking after her mother-in-law eased her conscience somewhat. And then at every street corner she bumped into Stephen as a child. Here was the school that looked like a prison where he had acquired his taste for literature. Here was the sports ground where he had contracted his loathing for games. Here was the academy where he had performed his first roles. Moved, she could see the likeness in his mother’s worn-out face. He had inherited her somewhat prominent nose, her smoky gray eyes, and her resolutely feminine mouth. For this reason she could put up with Annie’s constant harping. The old woman’s memories revolved like a carousel around the Second World War. Southeast England had been particularly vulnerable. The children had been evacuated to the Midlands. Annie, just married, had left Cecil and joined the volunteers who escorted groups of little girls in tears. Since age stimulated the old woman’s appetite, Rosélie forced herself to cook, consulting Aunt Léna’s recipes she had jotted down in her favorite South Sea blue ink in her spiral notebook. Féwos a zabocat. Soup Zabitan. Bélanjè au gwatin. Dombwés é pwa. Blaff. Despite Stephen’s warnings, the old lady had a tendency to drink too many rum punches. Flushed and giggling, she would be seized with an unusual exuberance. One day, following a sumptuous meal washed down with plenty of wine, a daughter-in-law came to show off her newborn baby, a pink, blond-haired little angel, the type people are so fond of. It was then that Annie, with flushed cheeks and slurred voice, turned to Stephen and begged him. No grandson. No grandson. Never, never could she hug a little half-caste in her arms.

These half-castes, aren’t they the abomination of abominations?

Rosélie listened to her, flabbergasted. So all her patience, kindness, and Creole cooking had served no purpose whatsoever. Four centuries later the Code Noir was still a force of law:

“May our white subjects of either sex be prohibited from contracting marriage with the black population on pain of punishment or arbitrary penalty.”

A leper and a plague victim she was. A leper and a plague victim she remained, carrying in her womb the germs capable of destroying civilization. From that day on she never set foot again in Verberie, where Annie whined for her, summer after summer. Stephen put the blame on her.

“A lot of fuss about nothing! How can you possibly pay attention to the ramblings of an old woman of seventy-five, slightly tipsy into the bargain? Whatever you may think, my mother likes you a lot!”

Yet a few words would have been enough to calm her mother-in-law’s fears. Neither Rosélie nor Stephen had any intention of slipping on the uniform of a parent. Ever since she was little, Rosélie had been sickened by motherhood: those round bloated or bombshell-pointed bellies of her aunts, cousins, and relatives of every nature, constantly pregnant in their maternity smocks ordered straight from France. She loathed their smug expressions, rueful in their rocking chairs, demanding respect as if they were carrying the Holy of Holies. She especially loathed the newborn babies. In spite of their talcum powder and baby cologne, they stank. They stank, retaining the stench of uterus in the dimples of their pudgy flesh. These were the formidable times before the pill when only the good old Ogino method protected lovers. The terror of falling pregnant protected her, much more than Rose’s tirades on the flower of maidenhood, which bloomed incongruously between her legs and should only be plucked on the night of the day when Mendelssohn’s wedding march echoed through the church. Moreover, propositions were rare, lovers few and far between. She intimidated people, they whispered. Her mouth remained shut like a sharp-nosed puffer fish. She never smiled and always looked as if she were bored.

As for Stephen, his hatred of children was based on objective grounds. He had had to look after his sly and disobedient little half brothers, whom he was not exactly fond of, and they had no particular liking for him either. When he was not listening to them recite the fable of the crow and the fox, when he was not supervising their French homework, he took them to play in the park and read them The Adventures of Babar. He got up in the night to take them to piss. It was their fault he hadn’t been able to browse through Les Cahiers du Cinéma or admire Ascenseur pour l’échafaud or A bout de souffle. He never had to choose between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones: “I want to hold your hand” or “I can’t get no satisfaction.”

His teenage years had been swallowed up by thankless jobs. As he grew older he became preoccupied with less selfish considerations: the hole in the ozone, the greenhouse effect, fast food, mad cow disease, bioterrorism, global warming, and the ugliness of a globalized world.

Rosélie and Stephen also agreed on this last point, a major consideration for a couple. They weren’t interested in leaving a son and heir. Stephen elaborated on the subject with brio, claiming that the only valid creations are those of the imagination. Obviously, he had his books in mind, of which he was very proud. Especially the one on Seamus Heaney. At present he was preoccupied with his critical study of Yeats. He would start discussing it at breakfast, as if nothing else mattered, describing a thousand research possibilities.

“And what if I compared Yeats and Césaire? That’s a bold move! What do you think?”

Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Because I don’t know anything about it. I know nothing about anything. All I know is how to paint.

She would run and lock herself in her studio. Once the blinds had been opened, the impatient sun streamed into the room, daubing the walls with yellow. It playfully took the liberty of hanging its cheerful reflections on the canvases, which were in desperate need of them.

Sad, such sad canvases.

A lot of red. Not a bright red like the blood that soaks a birth, but dark and curdled like the blood that nurtures death. This color had always haunted her. When she was a little girl, Meynalda would buy gallons of blood from the butchers at the Saint-Antoine market in order to treat her chronic anemia. She would make it coagulate by throwing in handfuls of cooking salt. Then she would cut it into slices and fry it with chives and lard. It was her favorite dish for someone who only nibbled at her food, to Rose’s great despair. The daughter was carved in bone, whereas the mother was kneaded in soft wax.

She also painted in dark brown, gray, black, and white.

Stephen didn’t interfere but expressed surprise. Why always such gruesome subjects? Dismembered bodies, stumps, gouged eyes, spleens, and burst livers.

I like horror. I think that in a previous life I must have belonged to a pack of vampires. My long, pointed canines sunk into my mother’s breast.

While she worked Rosélie remembered Stephen’s words: “The only valid creations are those of the imagination.”

His words seemed to her increasingly arrogant. She didn’t know whether her creations were valid. How could she know for certain? Simply, she could not help painting. Like a convict in a chain gang. A convict whose bondage knows no end. When, exhausted, she went down to the kitchen, she would find Dido, her complaints, her gossip, and her newspapers, and the entire place smelling of lamb stew with spinach, a specialty of Rajasthan.

But Rosélie was never hungry. No more now than in the past. On her plate the green of the spinach, the saffron brown of the lamb, and the white perfumed rice from Thailand formed a still life. And she couldn’t wait to go back up and lock herself in her studio.