The Story of the Cannibal Woman

FIVE

Every time Rosélie spent the night at Dido’s, not only did Dido keep her awake until the early hours of the morning, harping on life’s misfortunes — Amishand and his coronary thrombosis, Manil and AIDS, and the Jaipur restaurant, gone with its reputation for good food — but she also woke her up a few hours later to comment on the Cape Tribune and other national dailies.

That morning, the news of a dark, horrific event was spread across the front page.

A woman was accused of murdering her husband, who had been missing for several weeks. According to her son-inlaw, who had become suspicious of the meat packed in plastic bags on the refrigerator shelves, she had cut him up into little pieces and frozen them. Why would be anybody’s guess.

While Dido lamented on the state of barbarity in which the country had fallen, Rosélie was fascinated by the photo of this Fiela.

Around fifty. No more diabolical-looking than any other. She even looked quite gentle, almost shy. As thin as a smoked herring, which emphasized her angular features. The only thing that stood out were her eyes. Despite the poor quality of the photo, you couldn’t help looking at them. Elongated, they stretched up toward her temples, eyelids drooping like blinkers through which gleamed her pupils.

She’s my age. She’s not beautiful. She could be me.

The husband, the victim, was tall and thin with a pleasant face. Not ugly. Rather attractive. With a rounded forehead under a skullcap of peppercorn hair, and an intriguing smile.

Rosélie remembered a case that had made headlines while she was living in Paris. A Japanese student had murdered a twenty-one-year-old Dutch student. He had raped her dead body, cut it up, and eaten several pieces. Declared insane, he had been extradited to Japan.

With Dido still lamenting, this time about her knees swollen with osteoarthritis and the corns on her feet that had kept her awake all night, they made their way to the bus stop. In daylight Mitchell Plains seemed less sinister. Behind the hedges topped with barbed wire, the houses were pretty and the yards filled with flowers. The pattern of avenues had a certain harmony to them. The old wreck of a bus, repainted in orange to give it a new look, skirted the airport and rattled through the ring of shantytowns. As a rule, Rosélie found the sight harrowing. At the Liberty IV bus stop a woman with braided hair plastered with red mud like a Masai, was sitting on the street, surrounded by her rags and her hollow-eyed triplets. Who could have fathered them? Imagining this monstrous coupling made you shiver. The passengers threw coins into her lap to ward off the evil spells she was bound to make. That morning Rosélie took no notice, her only thoughts were for the mysterious Fiela.

Now facing Table Mountain, the indefatigable jailer, the bus crawled toward the center. Soon, it filled with men and women muffled up in harshly colored acrylic shawls and sweaters. For although a deceptive sun shone in the midst of a blue-lacquered sky, the wind, that pitiless wind that twisted the pines to its liking, tore at the lips until they bled, and seeped in just about everywhere. Rosélie had never got used to these European-style clothes, these crowds “so swayed from their own cry,” who seemed to have lost their joie de vivre, together with their finery. Away with clichés! “We are the people of dance,” claimed Senghor. “Zouk-la, sé sel médikamen nou ni,” shouted Kassav as an echo. Nothing is more debatable. Nevertheless, in N’Dossou distress didn’t grab you by the throat as it did in Cape Town. It adorned itself with the shimmering colors of boubous and head ties. It seemed ethereal, light, echoing with the rhythms of obaka dancing.

The bus entered the city and stopped amid the confusion of Grand Parade: tourists hurrying toward the massive hulk of the Castle, the former administrative center, passing market sellers crying out their wares of cheap clothes and spices from Madagascar and the Indian Ocean — peppers, saffron, cardamom, and cumin — others advertising their South African oranges, potbellied as grapefruit, grapes swollen with mauve juice, and apples with varnished scarlet cheeks. Here Cape Town was embellished by the disorder and colors of an African city. However, on reaching the residential suburbs, they gradually vanished. It became rectilinear, cold, immaculate, a poisonous flower growing at the extreme tip of the black continent.

Leaving Dido, Rosélie made her way to the central police station along Strand Street, an austere building where, previously, political prisoners were kept while waiting to be allocated to other jails in the province. She walked along endless corridors leading to sparsely lit rooms where black and white police officers were interrogating the accused with the same brutality. The latter were uniformly black, on this point nothing had changed. Crime knows no age. Old men who looked too old to concoct a crime rubbed shoulders with adolescents who looked too juvenile to try. In a cubicle a group of children who couldn’t have been more than twelve years old were crying hot tears while they waited.

The Inspector was scribbling in his cramped office, whose space was being eaten up by huge metal filing cabinets. On the wall hung the photo that had gone round the world: Nelson Mandela, smiling beside Winnie, as he walked out of prison victorious.

Inspector Lewis Sithole was no taller than a fourteen-year-old. Puny-looking, he wore a khaki uniform that was too big for him. An arid forest of overly long hair formed a halo around his head, on which was perched a baseball cap. His beard, however, was sparse. Inspector Lewis Sithole was not a handsome man.

On seeing Rosélie he jumped to his feet and hurriedly proposed they go out. They would be better off outside. Did she mind walking? They could walk as far as the Camelia, that café on Heritage Square.

At the corner of the street, two white men, two homeless derelicts, their pink skin blackened with filth, were sprawled on a bed of packing paper. They stared at Lewis and Rosélie with threatening looks, as if they held them personally responsible for their tumble from the top to the bottom of the social ladder. That summed up Cape Town! That hostility of the whites which poisoned the air like a miasma. This feeling of danger which could sweep down from anywhere. However hard the authorities over there in Pretoria reveled in big speeches about the duty of forgiveness, the need to live together, Truth and Reconciliation, there was nothing but tension, hatred, and desire for revenge in this patch of land. At the Camelia, once the coloured waitress, coloured and crestfallen, had taken their order, Lewis inquired about Stephen’s cell phone.

To tell the truth, she hadn’t looked for it, not understanding really what he hoped to find in it.

Armed with patience, he explained to her that cell phones can store the last ten numbers called. This way, they could find out who had called Stephen.

Rosélie shrugged her shoulders. Provided someone had called him!

Lewis Sithole leaned over, so close she could feel his warm breath. No man in his right mind would walk around the center of Cape Town unarmed past midnight. She persisted: Stephen had an excellent reason for going out. He wanted some cigarettes, for God’s sake!

Stephen refused to be intimidated by violence. He had even elaborated a theory on the subject and had no intention of behaving differently whatever the circumstances. In New York he would walk around the Bronx in the middle of the night. In London he didn’t let himself be intimidated by dangerous neighborhoods. In Paris he would prowl around the Sentier district at any time of the day or night.

“If he wanted cigarettes,” Lewis Sithole continued with the same air of patience, “he would have sent the watchman. At least he had his spear to defend himself.”

“Deogratias sleeps like a log,” retorted Rosélie. “Sometimes we can hear him snoring from our bedroom under the roof. That particular night, he didn’t even hear Stephen go out.”

“Yet the watchman at a neighbor’s house saw him walk past. He says he seemed to be in a hurry. Almost running. Where do you think he was going?”

To the Pick ’n Pay.

Stephen always walked briskly. Especially after midnight, when there was not a soul about and it was five degrees Celsius.

She relived with the same spasm of pain that moment when her life had been turned upside down and plunged her into solitude and fear. It was a group of young partygoers coming out of a fish restaurant on Kloof Street who had alerted the police. The latter had taken their time. They had taken over an hour to arrive at the crime scene and drive the victim to the hospital. There he had continued to bleed in a so-called emergency room. In the morning the hospital had called Rosélie, who was sick with worry, for Stephen never spent the night away from home. He knew she worried when he was away for too long, even during the daytime.

“What would you do if I worked at the other end of town until goodness knows what hour?” he complained.

Yet, beneath the reproach, she sensed he was pleased with his power.

She had spent an unpleasant fifteen minutes with the learned assembly of physicians and interns. They had lowered their masks, and above the squares of white gauze, they bored into her with their multicolored eyes. A real police interrogation.

You really want us to believe that you are the closest living relative? What relation are you to him? You, his wife? What perverse and degenerate tastes had this handsome Englishman? Where is his mother? His father? His sister? There’s nobody else but you? Where are you from in Africa? Guadeloupe? Where’s that? Why did you come to Cape Town? What do you do here? You, a painter? A Kaffir, a painter? And what next?

Having run out of words, they sent her to identify the deceased in the morgue. In a drawer, someone other than Stephen was waiting for her — eyes closed, pinched nose, as white as a sheet, wearing a skullcap of lifeless hair. The next morning they had delivered this stranger, as rigid as a corpse.

Barring a few exceptions, the neighbors had been beyond reproach, for Death being what it is, when it turns up on this earth, everyone bows down and respects it.

Besides, Stephen had thumbed his nose at them while he was alive, and had now got what was coming to him. His abject death on a sidewalk was proof of this. Forgetting their hostility, they invaded the territory that mourning had purified. One of them told the university, while another informed the family — the half brothers in Verberie, the father in Hythe. Or was it the other way round? This one arranged the flowers in vases, that one discussed arrangements with the undertakers, while another finalized details for the church ceremony. Yet, instead of touching Rosélie, their attentions merely accentuated her pain. Furtively, they eradicated her. They dismissed her to the margins of a life of which she thought she had been the center for twenty years. It was as if Stephen had been repossessed by this world from which he had always kept his distance. As if he had become what he had never been either for her or for himself, that is, a white man.

She was not the only one to remark on this exclusion. Dido, who was no fool, did too. Around noon, she came to join Rosélie in her lair, the room where she was holed up, incapable of tears. Handing her the black clothes she had had the presence of mind to order from her dressmaker, Dido dictated:

“Get dressed. Come downstairs. He’s your husband. You lived with him for twenty years. It’s your house. You must make your presence felt.”

Rosélie had obeyed and confronted this sea of faces, full of hate and contempt under their masks of compassion. They converged on her to haul her far from the dry land to which she was clinging, then push her under and drown her. Shaking, she tried to exorcise her fears by doing her best to mouth the Psalms:

The Lord is my rock, my fortress and my deliverer,

My God, my rock in whom I take refuge

My shield, and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold.

I call on the Lord who is worthy to be praised.

Unfortunately, they didn’t mean anything, just words out of her mouth. In the afternoon at the church of St. Peter’s, amid the funereal smell of wilting flowers, dying candles, and incense, she had collapsed on Deogratias’s shoulder. My night watchman. My cook. Now my only friends.

And the ceremony had been recuperated by the university vice-chancellor — the first black South African to acquire the position, of which he was so proud — the dean, the head of the department, both white, the mainly white colleagues, handpicked students, and students from the colleges who had rehearsed their end-of-year theater performances with Stephen.

Inspector Lewis Sithole’s voice pierced the thick fog of her pain.

“It’s been really a pleasure talking to you. But I have to go back. We have a terrible case on our hands. The public prosecutor’s office is under enormous pressure. They want us to bring it to trial as soon as possible and make an example out of it.”

“Fiela?” she asked familiarly, as if it were a girl she had sat beside on the benches of the Dubouchage school or a cousin, the daughter of an aunt, she’d grown up with in the same family.

He nodded, then added:

“It’s a pity I can’t call on you. I have the firm conviction you could help me.”

She stared at him, surprised he could joke about such a subject. He was only half joking.

“Ever since we arrested her, despite a stream of psychologists, psychiatrists, and communications specialists of all kinds, she hasn’t opened her mouth. I don’t know what her voice sounds like. They assure me, however, that nobody can resist you. During your sessions people recount everything they have on their conscience.”

Rosélie agreed, murmuring:

“Can you heal those whom you don’t understand?”

Patient No. 20

Fiela

Age: 50

Nationality: South African

Profession: Housewife

Don’t keep anything from me. You know full well when you say “I” you mean “us.” Let’s go back to when you were a girl. Your mother died when you were ten. Have you ever got over it? Do you still dream about her at night?

Can you see yourself playing horsey on her lap?

As they headed toward the door, the Inspector continued:

“Oddly enough, she formed with Adriaan, her husband, a very loving couple. They were married for twenty-five years; they didn’t just live together. No, they were married. Legitimately married. Both very religious. They were regulars at the Church of the Resurrection in Guguletu. They didn’t miss a service. Then, surprise, surprise, two years after their wedding, Adriaan had a child with a neighbor’s daughter. But apparently it didn’t affect their relationship. She took the boy in and raised him. The whole business remains a mystery.”