The Story of the Cannibal Woman (20 page)

Him too! Oh, these nominations, nominations for what, nominations for where, they are the aspiration of those whom revolutions and regime changes have passed by. They're as slippery as an eel. Lucky are those who can catch one.

Two of the youngest children came in crying the never-ending tears of childhood. Cheryl patiently calmed them down and sent them back to their games.

“Yes, I had a daughter once, the first and only one,” she continued. “I carried her for eleven months. She clung to me, she didn't want to let go. When finally the doctors extricated her from my womb with their forceps, she was dead. I too thought I was going to die. Ever since, I've had only boys. Why haven't you had any children? It's children, and children alone, who can brighten up our sad lives.”

Did I brighten up my parents' lives? Decidedly not.

“Didn't you want to have children?” Cheryl insisted.

It's much too long a story. Let's just say that first of all I didn't want to be a mother. Then motherhood didn't want me when perhaps I wanted it. Sometimes, I confess, I've dreamed of a son who would be both brother and lover. But I didn't come here to talk about myself.

“Do you know Chris Nkosi?”

“Perhaps,” Cheryl replied with a shrug of the shoulders. “As if we don't have enough on our hands with our own children, Olu takes care of all sorts of young people. He runs I don't know how many associations. Boys and girls come and go at all hours of the day, sleeping, eating, and drinking. One of them, a handicapped teenager, stayed here for over a year. Olu stood up for him. Apparently his family thought he brought bad luck and his own mother wanted to kill him. In the end, I lose interest.”

The somewhat frugal dinner that followed was filled with babbling, while ketchup and glasses of Coca-Cola spilled over the tablecloth, fortunately made of plastic. Cheryl reigned over everything with a gentleness that reminded Rosélie of Amy and Cousin Altagras. Some women make the decision to be a mother, nothing else, and stick to it. They close their ears to all the sirens of so-called success.

In the meantime, Olu carried on spouting vacuously.

Once the dinner was over and they had drunk the lemongrass tea, Cheryl and Rosélie promised to see each other again. A promise they would probably not keep, given the way their lives went in opposite directions. Olu offered to drive Rosélie back to Faure Street if she accepted to stop by the church of St. John the Divine in Guguletu, where he ran a choir on behalf of the unflagging Arte. As long as the mouth is filled with songs to the glory of God, it is not smoking marijuana!

In spite of its grandiose name, the church of St. John the Divine was a modest building of clay and straw. Inside there were rows of rough wooden benches. A poorly decorated high altar. It was revered throughout the country because the funerals of a number of ANC members assassinated by the police had been held there. It was from his humble pulpit that bishop Koos Modupe, as feisty as Desmond Tutu, even though he didn't win the Nobel Prize—you know what I think about prizes—had given his famous sermon, shamelessly plagiarizing Martin Luther King, Jr.'s “I have a dream.”

All the Holy Joes look alike. At the back of the main nave, two nuns, as skinny as rakes, their nonexistent breasts flattened further by their navy blue serge wimples, kept thirty or so boys and girls at arm's length, while a third, who was obese, beat out the rhythm perched on a platform. An invisible fourth was playing the organ way up in the rafters.

The choir was splendid.

From the throats of these gangly, ill-dressed teenagers, marred by malnutrition and deprivation, came celestial voices, the mystery of the language adding to the poetic power of the chant. Rosélie, who hadn't set foot inside a church since Stephen's funeral, knelt down, reliving the wonders of her childhood: Midnight Mass, Easter, and the Crowning of the Virgin Mary, all those ceremonies whose magic memory occasionally haunted her. She would have liked to lose herself in prayer like Rose, like the women in her family. She would have asked God for strength and courage in the trial she knew was looming like a huge black cloud over her head.

If the guidebooks call Hermanus the “whale capital” of South Africa, it is with good reason. Countless tourists can prove it. Standing in the right place on the cliffs, they have sighted with their own two eyes the humps of these beloved mammals piercing the metallic surface of the ocean. Many of them too have seen with their own two eyes whales, pregnant and heavier still, hastening toward the shore to deliver the fruit hidden in their swollen flanks. Sometimes they die before reaching the sheltered bays and their corpses float on the ocean waters like gigantic rubbery balloons. There is even a whale crier in Hermanus, dressed like a lighthouse keeper, who struts around in season with a loudspeaker through which he yells the latest sightings.

Hermanus lies seventy miles east of Cape Town. It takes about ninety minutes along the N2. But Papa Koumbaya insisted on driving the scenic route through Gordon's Bay to show Rosélie the splendid views. Add to that the way he crept along, and you can understand why it took three hours to drive a relatively short distance. Then they crawled along streets uniformly lined with souvenir shops and fish restaurants, congested with cars, buses, and pedestrians. In short, the morning was almost over when the Thunderbird drove into the black township. Finally it stopped in front of the Govan Mbeki School, even more forbidding in appearance than the Steve Biko High School. Behind a wall topped with broken glass and the inevitable rows of barbed wire, a rectangle of yellow prefabricated buildings lined a recreation yard, as bare as a monkey's behind. In a stifling room a young woman was typing on a typewriter that would have fetched a fortune in an antique shop. She did not even trouble to look up with her answer.

“Chris? He's teaching. Come back at noon.”

It was half past eleven. Rosélie went back to the sidewalk and agreed to meet Papa Koumbaya later on in the center of town in front of the Paradise Ice Cream Parlor.

The black township of Hermanus was a jumble of small houses, shacks, and huts built from bits of corrugated iron, wooden planks, bunches of straw, wattle, dried mud and bricks, everything the ingenuity of misfortune can scrape together. Here, like in Khayelitsha, there was not a single flower, bush, or tree. A bare, reddish earth. As if Nature balks at growing anything green around shacks. Rosélie didn't dare venture far from the school. What sort of a welcome would she get if she explored these alleyways? She was so used to hostility she imagined the inhabitants would come out on their doorsteps, yelling at her to go home, hurling insults, even stones. But didn't she look like an intruder, even a spy, standing there in front of this walled enclosure?

After some time that seemed an eternity to Rosélie, the students filed out in a disciplined, orderly fashion, whereas boys and girls the world over jump for joy, whoop, and let off steam once school is out. The teachers followed somberly, carrying their briefcases. The same story of pitiful wages, poor housing, and no future was written all over their faces, obvious to anyone who knew how to read. Chris Nkosi looked younger, less handsome, and thinner in his crumpled, shabby clothes. He had shaved his dreadlocks, and his face, now exposed, appeared morose and unsmiling. Nothing like the conceited, confident Puck she remembered leaping over the stage. Before she had even made a move, he had recognized her and made straight for her.

“You? What are you doing here?” he asked savagely.

“I came to see you,” she stammered.

“To see me? Why?” he asked, just as infuriated.

She didn't reply, stifled by his ferociousness. He grabbed her roughly by the arm and dragged her away.

“We can't stay here. Everyone's looking at us. Let's go to my place.”

They set off into a maze of alleyways. As they delved deeper into this poverty, it was the cleanliness that was so amazing. For we always associate poverty with filth. Here, there wasn't a single garbage heap. Not one animal dropping. Not a single piece of litter on what served as a sidewalk. Chris walked so fast, without any consideration for her, that she was out of breath, running like a child to catch up with him. Finally they arrived in front of two shacks separated by a narrow passage that led to a kind of tenant's yard, also kept meticulously clean. The ground was covered with a mixture of gravel and white sand. Kitchen utensils were drying in the open. Dazzling lines of ragged washing were waving in the breeze. Chris pushed open a door into a living room that was about as dark and sparsely furnished as you get, and shouted:

“Brenda!”

A very young woman appeared, almost a teenager, in her last stages of pregnancy, shuffling along with a huge belly and heavy legs. He hurled a few words at her in their language and she turned and headed for the door like a frightened animal, without a glance at Rosélie.

“What have you come for?” he asked again.

Feeling weak, she collapsed into the only armchair and tried to regain her calm.

“I've come to give you Stephen's computer.”

He frowned as if he had heard a bad joke.

“What do you expect me to do with a computer? We don't even have electricity in the district. They've been promising it for over a year. But we're still waiting for it.”

She couldn't find anything to say.

“We're in South Africa here, you know,” he sneered. “Not in America.”

“I'm not American,” she protested. “I'm from Guadeloupe. A country poorer than yours.”

Was she hoping to move him? He gestured in a way that signified he didn't care whether she came from Mars, then repeated:

“What are you here for? What do you want from me?”

She didn't know what to say. She could no longer understand why she was here.

“Your uncle told me you quarreled with Stephen,” she stammered.

“And so what?” he asked roughly.

Discouraged, she got up. This conversation was getting them nowhere. She headed for the door, mumbling an apology for having disturbed him for no reason, when he called out to her.

“You've probably just realized that your Stephen was a bastard, haven't you? Not at all the liberal, role model of a professor, benefactor of the young, whom everyone adored. A bastard!”

She turned round to face him, and with the determination of someone who wants to know, she quietly asked:

“Why are you saying that? What did he do to you?”

“Me?” he repeated.

There was silence. Suddenly he began to yell. He was not that far removed from the disproportionate tantrums of childhood. With a distorted face, he became unrecognizable.

“He was a liar and a manipulator. He promised me the world. That he'd get me a scholarship to study in London. He said he had connections at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. I'd become an actor. I'd be another Paul Robeson. Better than Laurence Fishburne. I believed him. I believed him. Whereas, in actual fact…”

He collapsed onto the table, whimpering like a baby. She went over and placed a hand on his shoulder. He started.

“Don't touch me!”

He sobbed for a long time while she stood motionless behind his back. He finally got hold of himself and methodically wiped his eyes, his cheeks, and his entire face. Then he stood up, jostling her almost, and coldly declared:

“I didn't kill him, if that's what you want to know. Besides, the police have already questioned me. At the time of his death I was in Hermanus, at Tanikazi's, a neighborhood bar, playing darts. Twenty people can testify to the fact. Then I went home. Brenda and I made love. She can testify to that too.”

He stared at her spitefully.

“Someone else had the courage to do it, someone about whom he cared fuck-all like me. If I knew his name I'd give him a medal, a medal for doing good.”

“If you hate him so much,” she asked, amazed she could keep her calm in spite of these provocations, “why did you cry at his funeral?”

“Why?”

He looked around him, distraught, started to cry again, this time silently, and his distress moved her more than his rage. After a while he stammered:

“I was remembering the time when…”

“What?”

She had screamed. It was too painful, she now had proof, she was not the only one Stephen belonged to. Others possessed images and memories she could not share. Without answering, he wiped his face again in the same methodical way. She stood just a few steps away, close enough to touch him, breathing in his smell, a pleasant smell of cheap eau de cologne and tobacco. He stared at her with dark, piercing eyes through a forest of eyelashes curled from his tears. He looked so young. He could have been her nephew. Or rather the son Salama Salama so persistently demanded, the son she at times had wanted. A wave of pity tinged with tenderness welled up inside her and surged toward him.

This truce made her grow bolder, and very quietly she ventured:

“What exactly was there between you two?”

He fluttered his eyelids like someone aroused from his sleep.

“What was there between us two?” he repeated. “What do you mean?”