The Story of the Cannibal Woman (2 page)

“He can't sleep!”

She had treated a good many cases of this sort. The ability to sleep, contrary to reason, is a faculty most unfairly meted out. For the slightest reason humans lose their sleep and agonize all night long, their eyes riveted on the hands of a clock. She walked over to the bathroom.

Her first appointment was at nine. She noted down everything in a spiral notebook in South Sea Blue, an ink she had been particularly fond of since school.

Here was a tragic story that resembled her own. Népoçumène, a telecommunications engineer, had been away on business in Port Elizabeth. On his return home he had stumbled on his wife's lifeless body lying in a pool of blood at the door of their apartment. Perhaps raped. Murdered for a wretched handful of rand the couple kept deep in a chest of drawers.

As for Stephen, he had been working on his latest passion: a critical study of Yeats. At midnight he had gone out to the corner Pick 'n Pay store to buy a packet of Rothmans light in the red pack. Some thugs had murdered him for his wallet.

For some reason or other this version of the facts did not satisfy the police. In fact, Stephen's wallet had never left his back pocket. It had remained intact. There was no question of robbery.

“Perhaps the thieves had been disturbed before grabbing the wallet.”

“Disturbed by whom?”

“Security guards. Pick 'n Pay customers. Other thieves. I don't know. Who's leading the investigation?”

“According to the cashier, Mr. Stewart did not enter the Pick 'n Pay. He was killed at the other end of the sidewalk.”

Inspector Lewis Sithole, with the surprising slit eyes of an Asian, nodded his head. His opinion was that Mr. Stewart had not gone to the Pick 'n Pay to buy cigarettes but to meet somebody.

Who? What an imagination!

“Try to recall,” he insisted, “whether you heard the telephone ring.”

She had been asleep in the bedroom under the roof. Her studio occupied the entire second floor. They had taken down the inside walls to allow for more space and air. Stephen's study opened out onto the traveler's tree on the ground floor. In other words they were at opposite ends of the house. And then let's keep up with the times! Nowadays everyone has a cell phone. Stephen's didn't ring, it vibrated. Even if she had strained her ears, she wouldn't have heard anything.

And precisely, Inspector Sithole inquired, where was this cell phone?

The hospital hadn't given it back.

“Find it,” he ordered. “It's an important piece of evidence!”

This was the second time a man had abandoned Rosélie with so little consideration. Twenty years ago, her flesh was still palatable! In despair she had resorted to another stratagem. The oldest profession in the world, so they say. It's not with a glad heart that a woman sells her body. She really must have nothing else up her sleeve. However much she tells herself and takes comfort in the feminists' point of view that even a legitimate wife, who has been blessed in white by the mayor and the priest and wears a ring on her finger, is nothing but a prostitute, something holds her back. In this case, however, Rosélie had no choice. Besides, it wasn't complicated: all you had to do was sit with your legs crossed at the Saigon bar along the seafront in N'Dossou. From six in the evening customers swarmed in like flies on a baby's eyes in Kaolack, Senegal. Tran Anh, the owner, was a Vietnamese whose hatred of communism had landed him in this corner of central Africa. He lived with Ana, a Fulani from Niger, driven by poverty to the same corner. The two of them had produced four boys with uncircumcised willies—much to their Muslim mother's grief—who squabbled naked under the tables. From outside, the Saigon didn't look like much. But it was always packed. Packed with civil servants who sipped their pastis while bemoaning their bank accounts. It was only the tenth of the month and they were already in debt! Not a franc left to pay for the daily ration of rice. They were polite and, in this AIDS-ridden age, strict users of condoms. Thank God there was not a single government minister, private secretary, or personal advisor among them, those who think they can get away with anything. At the most, some former division heads ejected on orders from the IMF. The height of luxury, the Saigon had its own generator, and oblivious to the power outages that were the plague of N'Dossou, the air inside was as fresh as an Algerian oasis. While waiting to be picked up Rosélie would read copies of
Elle
and
Femme d'Aujourd'hui
that Ana had kept for her. She liked to muse over the cooking recipes, strange for someone who never cooked. A well-written recipe makes your mouth water.

Stuffed Eggplant

Preparation: 30 min. + 30 min

Cooking time: 45 minutes

215 calories per person

For six helpings…

The bar also served a mysterious cocktail without alcohol called the Tsunami, invented by Tran Anh, sour as the bitterness of exile and green as tomorrow's promise despite the cold light of reality. One evening a white guy sat down at the bar with a Pilsner Urquell, that's a Czech beer. He looked around, got up, walked straight over to her table, and offered her a drink. His introduction was not very original, even conventional. It has worked ever since there have been bars, men, and women. He was no uglier than the rest. Somewhat better, even. She hesitated because she had never considered other partners in bed besides blacks. In her family nobody went in for mixed couples. The whites were terra incognita! The only exceptions were Great-uncle Elie, who left to work on the Panama Canal and ended his days with a Madrilenian, and cousin Altagras, whose name was erased from the family tree. Something attracted her to this white guy. They had walked out into the dusk as the red disk of the sun slipped untiringly into the ocean's watery deep. And passersby, numerous at this time of day, fired the first of those looks loaded with hostility and contempt that from then on would never leave them.

They had climbed into his red, somewhat flashy four-wheel drive, and navigating around the ruts and potholes that got deeper every rainy season, he had introduced himself. University professor. Taught Irish literature. Wilde, Joyce, Yeats, and Synge. His book on Joyce had been a mistake. Went completely unnoticed. Another on Seamus Heaney had been a critical success. He used to work in London. Listening to him, Rosélie was as fascinated as if an astronaut had described his days on the MIR space station. So people spend their time wallowing in fiction, getting worked up about lives they have never led, paper lives, lives in print, analyzing them and commenting on these fantasy worlds. By comparison she was ashamed of her own problems, so commonplace, so crude, so genuine.

What are you doing in N'Dossou?

Me? Nothing! A man has just left me high and dry. I've no work, I've no money. I've no roof over my head. I'm trying to survive and cure myself of my
lenbe
. Lovesick. Back home they call it
lenbe
.

He certainly could talk. Never a bore, though, full of unpretentious literary allusions and anecdotes about the countries he had visited.

Who was her favorite writer?

Mishima.

Found the name just in time. She wasn't going to say Victor Hugo or Alexandre Dumas, so obvious!

The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
is magnificent, isn't it?

No, I prefer
Confessions of a Mask.

Said confidently. Yet it was the only one she had read, in paperback in economy class from Paris to Pointe-à-Pitre, one July when she was going back to spend her vacation with Rose and Elie. She had always been scolded for not reading. Ever since elementary school. Last in French composition. For her, the stories in books come nowhere near reality. Novelists are scared to invent the incredible, in other words life itself.

Did she like to travel?

There she felt obliged to tell the truth. She only knew a tiny portion, the tip of the iceberg, of the vast world around us: Guadeloupe, where she was born, Paris, where she had vaguely studied, and N'Dossou, where she had ended up three years earlier.

Three years of Africa! Do you like Africa?

Like! Does a prisoner awaiting his execution like being on death row? Now, now! Stop being facetious and witty! Africa hadn't always been a prison. She had been eager to make the journey, thinking she was about to launch on the great adventure. Despite her misfortunes she remained loyal to N'Dossou, an unattractive, unpretentious (how could it be anything else?) yet engaging city.

He had taken her home to his place, where they had slept in each other's arms until the following morning. This was unusual for Rosélie. Her civil servants usually climbed up to her studio apartment and didn't give her more than two hours of their time, watch in hand. As soon as they had finished with their well-oiled orgasm, they slipped on their clothes, awkwardly handed her a small commission, then limped back in their four-wheel-drives to their legitimate spouses. When she woke up, the houseboy, somewhat forward with a girl the boss had picked up on the cheap, served her coffee and a papaya that had seen better times. Stephen had already left for the university, leaving her an envelope stuffed with banknotes. He lived in the European quarter, with its crumbling buildings, its park and tree-lined avenues. Driving by a kindergarten, she had heard “Frère Jacques.” A little farther on the off-key sounds of “Für Elise,” which she too had murdered in her time to please Rose, floated out of a window.

Would she see him again? Did she want to see him again? She could find nothing wrong with him: perfectly groomed, smelling of Acqua de Giò, and good in bed. A lot of kissing, embracing, playing, and fondling, as if penetration was not the main issue.

That same evening he once more came through the door of the Saigon, where the civil servants recognized him and cast disapproving looks. A month later she moved in with him.

It was love with a capital
L
.

Rosélie put on the clothes carefully chosen by Dido. A dark brown boubou with a fitted yolk embroidered in golden yellow, and a matching head tie. She walked down the stairs in a regal manner befitting her role and entered her consulting room. Népoçumène was waiting for her, his face a little less haggard than usual. Was he sleeping now? Were his nightmares beginning to leave him in peace? Did he hear his wife's voice? She had told him over and over again he would hear her once he had forgiven her for having abandoned him. That was the most difficult part. She herself still couldn't hear Stephen's voice. All too often she was overwhelmed by bitterness and a kind of anger toward him.

Rosélie's gift became evident very early on. At the age of six all she had to do was place her little hands over Rose's eyelids for poor Rose to sleep like a baby until nine in the morning. Until then Rose had been tormented by Elie's absences; her body had begun to swell considerably, and as a result she could never get to sleep. At the age of ten Rosélie had made a pack of Creole dogs turn tail as they were about to attack her and her cousins on the road in Montebello just before Bois-Sergent, where her aunt had a house. On weekends, unbeknownst to the skeptics in the family, Papa Doudou, her grandfather on her father's side, took her to his property at Redoute, where the cows turned their backs on the bull and the mares refused to be mounted by the stud. She would look deep into their big gelatin eyes and the recalcitrant females would be completely transformed, as pliable as putty in your hands. Bad-mouthers, and there are some in every family, were skeptical and made no bones about it. Rosélie had been incapable of predicting that the same Papa Doudou would die of a hemorrhage from his testicles being ripped off by the horns of a small bull he was breaking in. And during Hurricane Deirdre she had been unable to foresee that a breadfruit tree would smash through Uncle Eliacin's house and flatten it like a cowpat, killing him outright as well as his wife and five children with the American TV names of Warner, Steve, Jessica, Kevin, and Randy. Okay, she had seen Deirdre coming. But you didn't need to be a rocket scientist to see a hurricane. Hurricanes are regular visitors. Year after year they arrive from the coast of Africa. What matters is their strength, and that is never the same.

As an adult she would have liked to turn her powers to good account. But astrology? Palmistry? Chiropractic? Osteopathy? Shiatsu? All that is not very serious. So she had got bogged down in her law studies. Elie had so admired the black robes around him that he dreamed of putting his daughter in one. Oh, let her tear the French language to pieces like lawyer Démosthène, the famous bard of independence! As for Rose, she regretted her daughter had not gone into politics. Her father had been a local hero whose full-length portrait occupied a place of honor in the living room.

If Dido hadn't been there, she would still be looking for herself.

She liked listening to the way Stephen relived their first meeting. It became fictional and poetical, as if it were a chapter in a novel, perhaps Irish, perhaps not.