The Story of the Cannibal Woman

FOUR

Once Simone was gone, Rosélie only had Dido.

As a Cape coloured, Dido had not experienced all the savagery of apartheid. She was born in Lievland, about twelve miles from Stellenbosch, in a picture-perfect landscape of rugged mountains, jagged-edged against an unchanging blue sky. A mass of flowers. Covered with the curly mop of vineyards. Her family descended from slaves from Madagascar come to work in the vineyards, which the de Louw family had purchased from a French Huguenot.

Nothing really justified Dido’s familiarity with Stephen and Rosélie. Nevertheless she would say “us,” meaning “us French,” referring to the trio they formed, because in even Dido’s eyes, though the color of their skin was identical, Rosélie had nothing in common with the South African kaffirs who had been excluded from working in the vineyards and dumped farther and farther from the white world she had learned to hate and despise. Since the words “Guadeloupe, overseas département” meant no more to Dido than to the rest of the world, she considered Rosélie to be French. Didn’t she speak French to perfection? Hadn’t she studied in Paris? Didn’t she eat her steak raw and her Camembert runny? Dido, who had a mind of her own and was not afraid to speak it, would gladly contradict her.

“You, you see racism everywhere! That’s not racism. It’s because you’re a woman they treat you like that. Women — black, white, yellow, or coloured — they’re the asshole of the world!”

Stephen’s version:

“Not everything can be attributed to racism. A lot of things are due to your individual attitude.”

Whatever.

Although apartheid had spared Dido to a certain degree, life had had no consideration for her. She had first landed herself a good match in the shape of Amishand, an Indian. The couple opened a restaurant named Jaipur, which soon made an excellent name for itself. With their earnings they had built a house in Mitchell Plains, the coloured district. If you didn’t meddle in politics — the right to vote, to education, to health benefits, to justice for all, and other such nonsense — life in South Africa could be sweet. Amishand was saving up to realize his dream of ending his days in India at Varanasi. If he was going to go up in flames, it might as well be on the shore of the Ganges. His relatives would scatter his ashes in the waters of the sacred river close by, and he would only have to make one small heavenly step to reach nirvana. His bank account was flourishing when coronary thrombosis dealt a deadly blow. From one day to the next Dido had become the Widow Perchaud, mother of Manil, a seven-year-old son she had killed herself raising in the memory of his deserving father. Alas, the beloved Manil had been the dagger that pierced her heart. Drink, women, men, and drugs! She had ruined herself paying off his debts, then was forced to mortgage and finally sell the Jaipur, that jewel of Indian gastronomy. She had reached the depth of degradation when she had had to hire herself out as a cook by the month. Fortunately, in her misfortune, she had met Rosélie, to whom she had grown attached, like family.

After Manil had died from AIDS, Dido lost the desire to live. She had been overwhelmed by a feeling of guilt. All that had been her fault. She had treated her son like a treasure she took pride in, like a bracelet to flaunt, like a necklace clasped to her neck. She hadn’t loved him for what he was. Neither her prayers to the God of the Christians nor her sacrifices to the Hindu deities could bring peace back to her heart. Only Rosélie had managed to do that. Through the laying on of hands and locating the pressure points of Dido’s pain.

The car disappeared into the night. Rosélie remained standing on the sidewalk littered with garbage. She had been lucky a taxi had accepted to take her to her appointment at Dido’s. Once the sun had gone down, no taxi driver ventured into the black townships: Langa, Nyanga, Guguletu, Khayelitsha, forbidden zones! And even Mitchell Plains, once a calm, hardworking district, was now eaten up with the wrath and fury of gang warfare.

Rosélie looked left and right like a cautious schoolgirl, then ran across the sinister, ill-lit street.

Just as she was furiously battling with fate, so Dido was fighting to make her surroundings a little more human. She was the president of an association that refused to let Mitchell Plains become like the hell of so many other neighborhoods. In her little garden she had planted not only the inevitable bougainvillea, but also hibiscus, azaleas, crotons, and magnificent orchids: green-spotted lady’s slippers. She had even managed to grow a blue palm that was covered with ivory-colored buds, as bright as candles on a Christmas tree. She hurried to open the door and whispered:

“Look! That’s his car over there.”

It was obvious she was taking great delight in the mystery.

Rosélie turned her head and saw a Mercedes huddled in the shadows, its sidelights glowing in the dark like the eyes of a drunkard. Dido led her inside. The living room was like the garden. You never saw such a jumble! Too much heavy furniture: sofas overstuffed with cushions patterned with flowers, triangles, and rosettes; armchairs with round, square, and rectangle lace macassars; pouffes; pedestal tables; and glass and lacquered coffee tables jostled one another on flowery rugs. Under the reproduction of a group of apsaras draped in yellow there sat a man dressed in an alpaca safari jacket. So motionless you thought he was asleep. But when the two women went over to him, he immediately opened his eyes, whose flash was so piercing, that’s all you could see in his face. He stood up. He was slim, well built, but disappointingly small. Much smaller than Rosélie and her five feet ten inches. She had always been as lanky as a pole, the tallest in her class, sitting in the back row. Such a look would have better suited someone of another stature. Once Dido had led them into the guest room, as cluttered as the living room, with walls plastered with an array of prints, such as Ganesh with his monstrous trunk, monkey-headed Hanuman, and the handsome bearded face of Jesus Christ, our Savior, he asked abruptly, betraying his embarrassment:

“What do I do?”

“Nothing!” Rosélie smiled. “Just relax!”

She lit the incense and candles. Then she helped him take off his safari jacket and undervest, he resisting a little the intimacy of such gestures. She made him lie down on the sofa bed, laid her hands on his head and ran them over his warm shoulders. He closed his eyes.

“Dido tells me you can’t sleep,” she said softly.

“I don’t think I’ve slept since 1994. Night after night I stuff myself with sleeping pills. So I get thirty minutes or an hour’s sleep. You know what happened in our country?”

Who do you take me for? Everyone’s heard about the genocide in Rwanda. Eighty thousand Tutsis cut down to size in next to no time. But although Stephen had contributed to a collective work on the subject without ever having set foot in Kigali, and often discussed it with Deogratias, she avoided the issue out of fear of voyeurism. Moreover, she was unable to conceptualize such a massacre. It was impossible for her to imagine men, women, and children with their heads chopped off, breast-feeding babies sliced in two, fetuses ripped from their mothers’ wombs, and the sickening smell of blood and corpses thrown into the rivers and lakes during the killing spree.

She rubbed her hands with oil and began to massage him.

Very soon, he slipped into a semiconsciousness while she received through her palms his inner turmoil and endeavored to control it. Every time she set about healing wounds, she thought of the two beings she had been unable to relieve. Her mother, whom she adored. During her final years, when she still had enough courage to return to Guadeloupe for the vacations, she took refuge with Aunt Léna at Redoute. When Papa Doudou died, Aunt Léna, who hated her job as a social worker, retired. She dressed in sack cloth, stuck a bakoua hat on her head, and played the role of planter, wearing out the workers in her banana grove. Rose never complained about how seldom her beloved daughter visited her. She no longer went out, not even to take communion at dawn mass. Father Restif, a Breton with blue eyes, gave her the comfort of the Sacrament at home. She now weighed over five hundred pounds and refused to show herself. She inched open the door to let in only three people — Father Restif, the loyal Meynalda, and good doctor Magne. No need to mention that she no longer sang. She performed in public for the last time at the birthday of a great-niece when everybody begged her to sing. Breaking with habit, she had sung in Spanish:

Bésame, bésame mucho,

como si fuera esta noche

la ltima vez.

Some people said that her deformity was the work of one of Elie’s mistresses, a certain Ginéta, whom he had promised to marry and then abandoned with her four little bastards and her two eyes to cry with — at that time they hadn’t invented the expression “single mother.” Most people refused to accept such a commonplace explanation. Abandoning women and children is nothing new under the sun, neither in Guadeloupe nor in the rest of the world. Elie was neither the first nor the last in his category. Yet, as far back as Guadeloupeans could remember, they had never seen such a sickness as the one that was ravaging Rose. They thought rather she was paying for her papa, Ebenezer Charlebois, the most corrupt of all the politicians, who, with the help of a Haitian obeahman and Nigerian dibias, practiced human sacrifice to ensure his reelection. At every All Saints Day, instead of candles, his grave was daubed with a mixture of excrement and tar in revenge; then the word “CUR” written in capital letters evened the score.

Two years before he died, Elie had finally separated from Rose. He kept to his routine, continuing to drink his thirty-year-old Feneteau les Grappes Blanches rum with his friends in the living room before lunch. At half past twelve he was the first at table to devour a plateful of fried fish and lentils cooked in lard by Meynalda. At six in the evening he would join other friends at their meeting place, named the Senate, on the Place de la Victoire. No connection with that of the Luxembourg Palace in Paris. But he had taken up his night quarters in one of the family’s upstairs-downstairs houses on the rue Dugommier. There the bòbò women, not at all intimidated by his eighty years of age, rivaled in ardor and imagination to entertain and satisfy him. Yet Rosélie had no right to throw the first stone, she who was blissfully whiling away her days at the other end of the world with her white guy. Well, blissfully, in a manner of speaking! For the second person to whom she had never been able to offer peace of mind was herself. When you think about it, it’s not surprising. The cancer specialist doesn’t treat his own cancer. Nor the dentist his abscess. She had believed that Stephen would give her that strength of which he had more than enough to spare. Instead, his presence and protection had paradoxically sapped the little confidence she had in herself. Then, suddenly, he had left her on her own. The sly, insidious reproach embittered her heart.

Half conscious, Faustin tossed and turned and moaned. She tightened the pressure of her hands on his forehead and neck, and he relaxed.

In New York they had lived on Riverside Drive, steps away from the university where Stephen worked. An apartment with a view of the river. On the other shore of the Hudson they could see the high-rises of New Jersey, and in the evening, to their right, the luminous steel girders of the George Washington Bridge.

Nevertheless, Rosélie couldn’t help regretting N’Dossou. And all those who had helped her. Dominique, first of all. Dominique, quadroon with a heart of gold, from Cayenne in French Guiana. When you are five thousand miles from home, the overseas departments merge into one. Guadeloupe and Guiana united! Dominique and Rosélie had been seated not far from each other at the annual banquet of the Overseas Départements Association. As a result of her many sentimental misfortunes, there was no love lost between Dominique and black men. She always ended her judgments with the same lethal phrase:

“They’re all filthy machos!”

Not that she liked white men any better. She did not dare ask that question which constantly dances at the back of the eyes and haunts the mind:

“Let’s get straight to the point. Musically speaking, one white half note equals two black quarter notes. Sexually speaking, is one white guy equal to a black?”

Then she would take refuge behind a militant attitude and accuse Rosélie of betrayal. Betrayal? Of what? Rosélie asked angrily.

The Race, of course!

Cut to the quick, Rosélie retorted. She experimented with a weapon that in fact she was rather good at using: irony. So it was the unfortunate Stephen who had dealt in the lucrative traffic of prize slaves? He had been an absentee planter? It must have been he who whispered to Bonaparte to reinstate slavery? Since women always get the blame—cherchez la femme, they say — some had hastily accused the beautiful Creole, Josephine de Beauharnais. The reason why some hotheads had mutilated her statue on the Savane in Fort-de-France in Martinique. A statue with its throat slashed. A sun throat slashed. Celanire, throat slashed. And that’s not all.

Without stopping, Dominique accumulated a thousand reasons for loathing Stephen.

“Too polite to be honest. He’s two-faced, I can sense it. He’s hiding something. And then, he’s too full of himself.”

Stephen, two-faced? On the contrary, he spoke his mind. He poked fun at people, always ready to contradict, mock, and criticize. Rosélie wondered by what miracle she found favor in his eyes. During the early years she used to tremble, like a dunce at an oral exam, convinced the examiner would tire of her. She had waited for that moment for twenty years. In vain. His indulgence and patience had never failed. They had kept her safe and warm, like a premature baby in its incubator.

Then came Tran Anh and Ana. Tran Anh, openhearted but intimidated, didn’t dare manifest his poor French in front of this white university professor and never opened his mouth in his presence. Stephen complained that Ana’s armpits smelled and bluntly called her a whore.

“If she’s a whore, then I am too!” Rosélie protested.

“You,” laughed Stephen, “you’re a saint.”

Under her hands, the nodules, which had represented Faustin’s torment and tension, faded away. His breathing became more relaxed. She couldn’t do any more for a first meeting.

“That’s all for today,” she said.

Then, as he glanced around him somewhat dejectedly, she added convincingly:

“Tonight you will sleep, believe me.”

He sat up, and holding one of her hands between his palms, he asked:

“When will I see you again?”

His tone of voice was so urgent it was almost as if he were asking for a date. But that’s how attached patients get to those who treat them. She pressed down on his neck for a last time.

“Next Friday. But I’m not coming back here. Mitchell Plains is too dangerous. Where do you live? Would you like me to come to your place? I can treat you at home.”

He shook his head.

“I have no home. I’m living with friends.”

He stared at her like a small boy who is burying the last of his family.

“Then come to my place,” she offered. “The police regularly patrol the neighborhood.”

They had done so ever since Stephen’s murder. Every cloud has a silver lining. He made a face and began to get dressed.

“Does that prove it’s less dangerous? The police work hand in hand with the crooks. They’re as corrupt as they are in America. My God, who could have imagined that post-apartheid South Africa would become such a jungle?”

Rosélie refrained from making any comment; she refused to judge, condemn, or question.

In the ensuing silence, he continued:

“Why do you stay here? I mean why don’t you go home? This is no place for a woman on her own.”

What place on earth is made for a woman on her own?

Tell me so that I can take refuge with my sisters, abandoned like myself. We’ll form a sisterhood of Amazons with neither bow nor arrow. In that way we’ll keep our right breasts.

No doubt about it, without even knowing him, Manuel must have passed the word on. She began the usual explanation. For her, South Africa was not merely a political concept: the former country of apartheid, the former white bastion of southern Africa. Or a new El Dorado, a paradise for the enterprising. She was intimately linked to it, for here was the grave where a loved one lay.

He interrupted her and said disparagingly:

“I know. Dido told me the whole story…a white guy.”

It was as if he had slapped her full in the face. She staggered from the force of the blow, then turned her back on him.

“That’ll be eight hundred rand,” she said, trying to calm down.

Money was no problem for him, that was obvious. Without a word of protest, he held out a handful of banknotes. She counted them ostentatiously, then headed toward the door with a curt thank-you. He ran after her and grabbed her sleeve, murmuring, embarrassed, like a child:

“I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

What were you trying to do, then? But hurt me you never will. Not now! I’m used to it, you know.

Since she still didn’t respond, he repeated his question.

“Will I see you again?”

Why not? Your money doesn’t have the color of your prejudice.

“I told you, on Friday,” she said with a nod of the head.

Then she preceded him into the living room, where Dido was glued to the TV, watching Keanu Reeves, who was so like her dead son, she said. She reluctantly turned round and asked:

“How did it go?”

She sounded like a madam inquiring of one of her girls how it went taking the virginity of a young boy. Neither one responded. Without a word, the two women accompanied Faustin to the front gate. The Mercedes had now drawn up along the sidewalk. A hefty bodyguard, openly holding a gun, dashed to open the door and Faustin dived into the back. The car noisily drove back up the silent street, everyone holed up in his house with his fears. The only signs of life were a pack of dogs under a streetlamp, fighting over a garbage can.

The two women went back inside.

For safety reasons Rosélie did not go back to Faure Street. She stayed and had dinner at Dido’s, then slept in the small room she had just used for her consultation.

Faustin’s brutality had accentuated her moroseness. Day after day, under every sky, under every latitude, so much incomprehension! So many insults! So many snubs! She compared her life to one of those quilts she had bought during a visit to Amish country in Pennsylvania: a mosaic of different textures of a slightly dull coloring. Brown cotton: the years in N’Dossou; gray wool: the days in New York; mauve felt: life in Cape Town; and black velvet since the death of Stephen.

The only exception, the scarlet silk of the stay in Japan.

From the outset, New York had terrified her: its vastness, its shrillness, and its medley of colors. No skin had the same color. No voice the same accent. Which one was the New Yorker? The African? The Indian? The Arab? The Jew? The fair-haired WASP? All swam with the same ease in the aquarium of the city. The English language did not reign supreme. Spanish collided with Yiddish, Serbo-Croat, Urdu — and all this Babel composed an indescribable cacophony. She began by holing herself up for three months in the depths of her apartment. To the point where she aroused the compassion of Linda, the Peruvian cleaning lady, who thought she was sick and as a result forgot about her husband not having a green card and the worry it was causing. Every morning she would bring her native remedies of leaves, roots, worms, and insect larvae that she bought in a botánica on Amsterdam Avenue, run by a Puerto Rican they called Pepo the Magician. Touched by her thoughtfulness, Rosélie stoically drank these vile concoctions. To her surprise they ended up having an effect. One day she woke up cured.

That night at Dido’s she fell asleep amid the forgotten din of ambulance sirens, the screams of police cars, and the barking of fire trucks. In Times Square, above the idling crowds, the neon signs raped the darkness.

I am in a New York state of mind.