The Story of the Cannibal Woman

EIGHT

Change your man and you change your rhythm of life.

With Stephen, Rosélie always played the same musical score. Allegro ma non troppo. She spent her days practically alone. As early as seven in the morning he would leave for the university with a colleague and neighbor, a Virginia Woolf specialist, author of a remarkable study on Mrs. Dalloway. In his absence she painted without taking note of the passing hours. Around one o’clock Dido called her from the bottom of the stairs, and Rosélie interrupted her work to watch her eat a usually copious lunch. Dido had what they call a hearty appetite. She spiced her meals with comments on the harshness of women’s condition, the chaos of the world in general, and South Africa in particular, which didn’t prevent her from eating up greedily and scraping her plate. Rosélie always felt slightly envious in front of this ravenous mouth and its masticating teeth. After a few cups of coffee on the patio, she went back up to her studio while Dido returned to the kitchen, where she noisily loaded the antediluvian dishwasher, bought secondhand at a university sale. Then she went and ironed in the living room while listening to Hugh Masekela. The music whirled, wafted up two flights of stairs, and joined Rosélie under the roof. Listening to it, in spite of herself, she ended up knowing every tune like she used to know her father’s Afro-Cuban melodies, Rose’s love songs, and Salama Salama’s reggae music, and she caught herself humming them.

The end of the afternoon brightened up when Stephen came home in another colleague’s car, this time a Chaucer specialist. Then tea at the Mount Nelson followed by dinner in a restaurant along the seafront. Always the same one, not because of the food — the fries were greasy and the chicken tasteless, rubbery hormone-fed meat — but because Ted, the owner, an Englishman, was living with Laurence, a black woman. Although Rosélie and Laurence sat coldly staring at each other, having absolutely nothing in common — Laurence working in a lingerie shop, preoccupied with thongs and frilly lace underwear, Rosélie preoccupied with her painting — Ted and Stephen, who had defied their society’s taboo, found themselves drawn closer together like two war veterans back from the front line. As usual Stephen would chatter away. But with Ted he didn’t talk about literature or politics. He would comment on the behavior of the royal family. According to him, Princess Diana had been a genuine antipersonnel mine that one of these days Buckingham Palace would step on. Besides, he declared, royalty was destined to be abolished. The prospect saddened Ted. He cherished the Queen and the Queen Mother, hats and handbags included. Neither Laurence nor Rosélie had an opinion on the question. Moreover, neither Stephen nor Ted asked them for one. In the distance Rosélie stared at the glow of Robben Island, which she had never visited and which was constantly calling her. A penal colony turned into a tourist attraction! Its lights winked in the distance, a reminder of a past that stubbornly refused to be transformed.

What do you do with the past? What a cumbersome corpse! Should we embalm it, idealize it, and let it take over our destiny? Or should we hurriedly bury it as a disgrace and forget it altogether? Should we metamorphose it?

Rosélie seldom accompanied Stephen to the department’s receptions. Cheese and cheap white wine in plastic cups. Very seldom to his colleagues’ parties. Braais and better-quality white wine. Never to his rounds of the waterfront jazz clubs. Jack Daniel’s and salted peanuts. She locked herself in her studio whenever he had guests. In short, her nocturnal activities boiled down to very little: evenings at the French Cultural Center and the DNA programs that had been severely trimmed since Simone left.

In fact, the DNA was dying.

They had hurriedly elected another Martinican woman as president who taught music theory at the French lycée. Whereas her students created mayhem in her classroom when they were not skipping class en masse, her husband was a sports idol whose picture, like Che Guevara’s in the sixties, hung in every student’s room. He coached a soccer team that had won the African Juniors Cup. They had hoped therefore that her appointment would arouse a competitive spirit in her and she would take the DNA to new heights. Nothing of the sort happened. She lacked savoir faire. In eight months she had only invited a relatively unknown Caribbean scholar, who happened to be in Cape Town for a conference on aesthetics.

Instead of a routine, Faustin established the unexpected and spelled disorder.

She waited for him in vain for days on end. He would turn up unexpectedly, stay for a few minutes, leave for some mysterious rendezvous, come back, leave again, then decide to stay. Each time, the Mercedes zoomed up peaceful Faure Street. When he spent the night, his bodyguards, playing belote in the garden and downing beer after beer, disturbed everyone’s peace. Except for Deogratias, whom nothing could disturb. Rosélie trembled at the thought of the neighbors’ hostility. This would be their excuse for evicting her from the neighborhood. Disturbing the peace at night.

As soon as he came in the front door, it was a hubbub of telephone conversations, CNN and BBC News, and commentaries from Radio France Internationale. Since he still couldn’t sleep — on that point Rosélie had to admit she had been ineffective — he dragged her to nightclubs, not to dance (they were past the age, although in Guadeloupe arthritis doesn’t stop the old and achy from shaking a leg) but to listen to music. He had a particular liking for the Dogon, owned by some Malians, because the singer, a Senegalese, could be mistaken for the voice of the Gabonese Pierre Akendengué. He reduced Cape Town to its French-speaking population, for in a certain way he despised South Africa. Not for the political reasons she had heard voiced over and over again by Stephen. Simply because it did not form part of the prestigious circle of countries that spoke French. For him, to speak French forty years after African independence remained an honor and a privilege.

Faustin provided no information about himself, as if introspection were banned. What sort of child, teenager, and student had he been? What did he think of the Eastern bloc, where he had studied for many years? Of the United States, where he had met his wife? This last point intrigued Rosélie. Retrospective jealousy? Not only that. She graced this stranger with the characteristics of the African-American women she had met, shivering as she remembered them, and realizing that they more than anyone had convinced her of her shortcomings by subtly setting her against a standard she could never achieve: that of matron, poto-mitan, of the civilizations of the diaspora. What had she accomplished in which the Race could glorify?

In short, Faustin’s conversation was always superficial and insignificant. He described his grandparents’ rugo, the peace that once enveloped the country of a thousand hills, and the village traditions of long ago. He showed no interest in her island, which he would have been unable to find on a map. He took no interest in her painting. The only time he had walked through her studio, he had emerged stunned:

“My God, it’s Bluebeard’s closet!”

He no longer alluded to Stephen as if it were better to forget this episode in Rosélie’s life. Adult discussions on topics such as regional development, the future of the continent, and globalization he would reserve for Deogratias. After all, both men, originating from the same country, shared the same language, Rosélie told herself when these endless conversations drove her to distraction. He holed himself up to talk business with Raymond, his inseparable friend from Cameroon who had never lost the ways of ten years mistakenly spent in a seminary before giving in to his inordinate taste for women. On a courtesy visit to her studio he had been swept off his feet unexpectedly and surprisingly, like every infatuation, by a painting called Tabaski. A sheep with its throat slit, its scarlet blood draining into a blue enamel basin. He had questioned her. Did she think, like he did, that such sacrilegious practices should be banned, and that only the sacrifice by the Son of God counted? Did she hate Islam, like he did, the intolerance of the Muslims, their violence, and the dangers to the world they represented? Rosélie sharply defended her point of view. On the contrary, this religion that accompanied each of its rituals with a massacre of the innocents fascinated her. In N’Dossou the Muslims were mainly immigrants, Senegalese, Burkinabés, recognizable by their boubous and slippers they dragged through the filthy streets. Theirs was the Mossada district, huddled around a mosque. People in the neighborhood complained of the muezzin’s call to prayer. But Rosélie adored this high-pitched, lugubrious voice whose call to prayer was like a summons to death.

From then on, weekends were spent at Constantia, where Raymond’s villa stood not far from the home of Bebe Sephuma, who could be seen driving past at the wheel of her Porsche.

In actual fact, Raymond was the soul behind the association with Faustin. He was the one who had managed to sell as far as Pietersburg a type of garbage can called an Afri-bin. The huge orange ones took pride of place at crossroads. Smaller versions, green or blue, clung proudly to the backs of the garbage trucks. Raymond could talk forever on the subject.

“The major problem of Africa is that there is no public opinion. So a handful of crooks can systematically bleed the continent dry. So why isn’t there a public opinion? Because people have no strength left. And why haven’t they any strength left? Because of the garbage. They throw it anywhere. Walk into a popular district of Yaoundé or Madagascar, for instance, and you’re swimming in garbage: on the sidewalks, at street corners, in the gutters, everywhere! The sun turns it into a terrible stench, but above all a powder keg of germs that the stray dogs tote from one end of the city to the other. So babies get sick; children’s sores become infected and fester. All sorts of epidemics spread among the grown-ups. Since the sick, the helpless, and the feeble are too poor to get treatment, the dictators take advantage of them and lay down the law. With Afri-bin, that’s history! Practical, cheap, easy to handle, and airtight! Garbage smack into the bin! People become healthy and, consequently, critical.”

When he had finished boasting of his merchandise, he clapped his hands and a cloud of domestics in dubious white uniforms emerged from the kitchen. They poured pink champagne into blue-stemmed flutes and served koki on silver gilt plates under the doleful eye of Thérèse. Thérèse was as apathetic as her husband was bursting with energy. Every day she leafed through Divas and Amina. Or else she watched Egyptian and Indian films on her state-of-the-art DVD player. She missed her children. Except for Berline, her latest little girl, constantly clinging to her breast despite her twenty-four months and her two rows of incisors, the five others lived in Montreal with her sister — for their education, she explained.

Thérèse felt nothing but antipathy for South Africa. Everything antagonized her: the crudeness of the Afrikaners, the arrogance of the coloureds, and the xenophobia of the blacks. Once she had gotten that out of her system, she consented to forget about Rishi Kapoor and Neetu Singh in Zahreela Insaan and join Rosélie to watch the adventures of Jackie Chan in Shanghai Kid. Then she drank gallons of Rooibos tea before returning to her two favorite subjects of conversation: her love for her children and her hatred of South Africa. When Rosélie withdrew with Faustin, Thérèse and Raymond gave them a smile of complicity, like lenient parents toward a couple of youngsters they had taken in.

“Good night!”

In this hurriedly furnished and badly maintained villa, Faustin had been given a studio apartment that opened out onto the rusty waters of a swimming pool. The domestics, busy doing nothing, seldom paid it a visit. Since the windows were never opened, the air was musty. Faustin changed the sheets himself. Making frenzied love in such a decor, on this uncomfortable, lumpy mattress, Rosélie regained the verve of those happy, younger days with Salama Salama when they used to hide from the concierge and the rent they owed. She got the impression that having come full circle, she had been brought back to square one.

At times she was crushed by a feeling of guilt. It had only been three months, and she was already cheating on Stephen, whose nails were still growing under the earth. If he could see her, how he would suffer! Fortunately, the dead see nothing. The worms are at work under their eyelids draining the eyeballs to the bone. Other times, her thoughts took a completely different direction. She asked herself on what unconfessed frustrations, on what bundles of dirty washing shoved day after day into a corner of her inner self she was taking revenge. In fact, had Stephen been her benefactor? Sharing his existence, living in his shadow had perhaps caused her enormous damage and prevented her from becoming an adult.

One year, Stephen, who never gave up, got it into his head to organize an exhibit at the Espace des Amériques, a gallery flanking the university. During a dinner party, he had placed her beside Fina Alvarez, the Venezuelan woman who ran the gallery. They had taken to each other, even more so because they had both been regular customers at a Brazilian restaurant in Paris, savoring the same feijoada during the same years.

“Can you believe how long it took for us to meet?” lamented Fina. “Perhaps we were sitting next to each other. Perhaps you got up to go to the rest room and said ‘excuse me’ to me.”

Fina boasted of a black grandmother, a humble illiterate peasant, who had been a past master in the art of storytelling. The songs and tales she had heard when a child had been at the root of her artistic talent. Trembling at her judgment, Rosélie had invited her to her studio.

“You are a genius,” she had assured her, smoking cigarette after cigarette as she strode past the canvases. “Believe me, it’s not just talent you’ve got. It’s genius. Sheer genius!”

In spite of these hyperboles, Rosélie had remained uncompromising. No exhibit at the gallery to comply with Stephen’s schemes. Fina openly approved.

“You’re right. One must succeed on one’s own terms.”

She knew what she was talking about. She had divorced two men who, she claimed, had upset her temperament by forcing her to cook for them twice a day. Apparently, the separation hadn’t helped her, since after publishing three collections of poems and a novel by Actes Sud, she had given up and made do with a teaching job, which is the opposite of creativity. Fina was also a great walker. Every day, once she had finished striding through Riverside Park with Rosélie, she would accompany her back to 125th Street. But black grandmothers, although godmothers of creativity, are not a cure for bourgeois faintheartedness. Fina absolutely refused to venture any farther and left Rosélie to explore the forbidden territory of Harlem. Rosélie knew she would never be anything but an outsider. The articles in Ebony and Essence were not for her. Her name would never flash in neon lights in the pantheon of immortals. She would never be invited to those galas of self-celebration where the black creators take their revenge on centuries of Caucasian blindness. When nostalgia got the upper hand, she would go and eat grits and tripe at Sylvia’s, breathing in the intimacy from which she would forever be excluded. Back at the Riverside apartment, she would lock herself in her studio, the only place that was actually hers in a place filled with Stephen’s books, Stephen’s CDs, Stephen’s workout equipment, and his entire intrusive personality.

One day Fina introduced her to Jay Goldman. This former lover, still her good friend, as is the norm among intelligent people, dashed around Africa, squandering the fortune earned by the sweat of former generations on unusual artifacts. He was particularly proud of a collection of Luo water vessels in leather, calabash, wood, and tin; of Yoruba spinning tops, one of which was the size of a thimble; and of Pygmy bows and arrows, some of them still coated with their formidable poison. In a more serious vein, his collection included a number of Gauguins, Braques, and Picassos. Not only did Jay Goldman not spare his superlatives, but without bargaining he bought a series of paintings from Rosélie he named Nocturnal Dogs. He offered to organize a private exhibition for her in his loft, just steps away from the apartment of John-John Kennedy, who had not yet made his fatal dive into the icy waters of the Atlantic Ocean. He would take care of the publicity, the invitations, and the reception. He also mentioned he was the friend of a well-known producer of an arts program on TV.

Rosélie, who was in seventh heaven, couldn’t remember how she came back to earth with a bump. How she had found out that although Jay had perhaps shared Fina’s bed in the past, and neither of them could remember much about it, he was in fact an old friend of Stephen’s. He had lived at his place in N’Dossou. Together with Fumio, the two men had started out on a search for Ashanti gold weights and driven in a jeep to Kumasi in Ghana. The tires had burst three times and they had slept two nights out in the open under the canopy of centuries-old silk cotton trees. At the end of their journey they were admitted to an audience with the Asantehene in his palace, and this visit had been worth all their tribulations.

In short, everything boiled down to a friendly plot behind her back. It dealt a serious blow to her friendship with Fina, and for the first time she thought of leaving Stephen. Lycées and colleges were mushrooming in Guadeloupe. Then there was France. She was bound to find some school where she could teach art. For weeks, Fina sent her delirious messages, as if they had had a homosexual affair.

Falvarez@hotmail.com

to

rthibaudin@aol.com

I’ve never stopped loving you. I didn’t betray you.

Fina

As for Stephen, he poked fun at her hostile reaction.

“Why are you blaming us? Because we wanted to help you? We could have been open about it. It could have been done lightheartedly and enjoyably, but you are so proud you forced us to lie.”

Proud?

Before slamming the door and running down the stairs, for he never took the elevator, exercise oblige, he concluded:

“You know, you’ll never make it on your own!”

How right he was! She had stubbornly persisted. One year later, she had succeeded in organizing an exhibition in a seedy-looking gallery in Soho. A disaster! After three days, the owners, two first-rate crooks, cleared out. Notified by Stephen, who bore no ill feeling and was always ready to intervene in the event of a catastrophe, the police recovered three of her paintings. The others had vanished! Oh yes, she had sold one picture to a Spanish museum for their collection of primitive art of the Americas! Another to the museum of womankind in Coyoacán. The M2A2, nothing alarming, just the acronym for the Martinican Museum for the Arts of the Americas, sent her an urgent request for a contribution. In short, at the age of fifty, she found herself to be an illustrious unknown. Her canvases were gathering dust by the dozens in the attic. She had been washed up on a foreign shore and she had no idea whether she loved it or hated it.