The Story of the Cannibal Woman (4 page)

Rosélie had been reluctant to move. She had sort of got used to New York. Why set off again? But Stephen was a stubborn man. Once he had something fixed in his mind, he was not afraid to make bold comparisons. After seven years in New York, he argued, to see South Africa after apartheid would be like going back in time. Going back to when the United States had just finished muzzling its police dogs and the fight for civil rights was over. They would have a front-row seat to observe how communities, once bitter enemies, learn how to live together. Apparently, in South Africa the experience was particularly remarkable. Not the slightest drop of blood spilled. But no agrarian reform either. No redistribution of land. No Africanization along the lines currently meant. In Durban, Jo'burg, and Cape Town the statues of the colonials remained firmly in place on horseback, just like in the good old days. Rosélie had been incapable of holding out against such an onslaught. She had laid her canvases, like recalcitrant schoolgirls, in boxes custom-made by a carpenter on 125th Street.

She hated Cape Town as soon as she left the airport, while sensing inside her a strange fascination. For towns are like humans. Their singular personality attracts, repels, or disconcerts. Cape Town possessed the brilliant sparkle and hardness of rock salt; its gardens and parks, the remarkable roughness of kelp. While Stephen admired pell-mell the mountains, the gnarled pines bent in two, the mass of flowers, the dazzling blue sky, and the endless expanse of ocean, she was blinded by both this splendor and the hideousness of the shacks that mushroomed all around her. No place had been more marked by its history. Never had she felt so denied, excluded, and relegated out of sight because of her color.

Outside the Victoria Cinema, the line was growing longer. A group of out-of-towners, recognizable by their antiquated dress, were chatting. Rosélie hurried on to avoid being struck down by their looks, then remembered with a start that she was alone. Stephen was no longer walking beside her, arm in arm, or ostentatiously placing an arm around her shoulder. They would not turn their heads in her direction. She no longer irritated, she no longer gave offense. She had become invisible. Sadly, she had to choose between being excluded or being invisible.

Invisible woman!

On Faure Street, Deogratias had already unrolled his mat at the foot of the traveler's tree, but was not lying in that favorite position of his, on his left side, his checkered flannel blanket drawn up to his eyes. Myths die hard. Most experts agree that Deogratias's ethnic group, the “descendants of a pastoral people,” are not really Negroid. Look at their height, their slender figure. Look at their aquiline nose in particular. A nose says everything. Deogratias had a flat nose. This did not prevent him from undergoing the same fate as his brothers of taller stature. He was waiting for Rosélie with a piece of news that made his Adam's apple jump up and down. A fellow countryman had just arrived in Cape Town. A former government minister. What could he be up to? Rosélie ignored his excitability. Except for his speeches on the South Africans' xenophobia, his only subject of conversation was the need to hunt down those who had destroyed so many lives, bring them before the international court of justice in Arusha and organize trials that would echo round the world like those at Nuremberg. This was the price to pay for Africa's salvation. Together with Dido, Deogratias had been one of Rosélie's first patients, well before she had thought of setting up business on her own. When Stephen had hired him, Deogratias was suffering from terrible nightmares. At times, lying under the traveler's tree, he struggled with invisible torturers while his screams tore through the dark. Rosélie had taken care of him. She had been about to lose hope when his salvation came in the shape of Sylvaine, a young immigrant from the same ethnic group whom he had met at church. Sylvaine promptly gave him a daughter; the couple baptized her Hosannah in a shout of gratitude to the God who had reunited them. Although Rosélie had been extremely shocked, Stephen, as usual, had been more understanding.

“What do you expect him to do? Spend his life lamenting the dead? In the end, it's always life that wins.”

After a quick look at the university housing, Stephen had dragged her on a house hunt. They both fell for the house on Faure Street. Of course, all those who knew Cape Town advised them not to live in the center of town. Much too dangerous! Worse than the Bronx! Worse than Harlem! But Harlem is no longer Harlem ever since Rudy Giuliani launched his trigger-happy police. To prove it, Magic Johnson has invested there. The center of town is worse than anything you've ever known. But Stephen was taken with so much space: ten rooms, a balcony, and a garage. Rosélie had fallen in love with the tree. With arms outstretched, it shouted to be let free in its little patch of lawn, and she got the impression the years had rolled back. A traveler's tree! A silent witness to her games at Papa Doudou's. She would huddle in its heart and the swarm of cousins would grouse they couldn't find her.

“Where on earth is she?”

The triangular trade had been reversed. Before arriving in Cape Town, the
Christ-Roi
had anchored at La Pointe, where it had replaced its ebony cargo with other species. The magic of the long-lost tree, of Nature, the smell of the mighty ocean parading as far as the eye could see, and the everlasting distress of her people like a canker in the midst of so much beauty cast a powerful, equivocal spell, a magical, perverse philter against which she was helpless. A frenzy of blood flooded through her heart, her head, her arms and legs, and she painted, painted for days on end, endeavoring to convey her conflicting feelings with her brushes. Rage. Repulsion. Seduction. Love. Hate. Stephen, who had been mortified by her lack of enthusiasm for New York, capital of the world in his eyes, was elated.

“You say you can't bear this city, this country. And yet it inspires you. You've never painted anything so original.”

Without a moment's hesitation he bought the house, muttering that the estate agent was letting it go for a mere song. Something quite unlikely, since the center of Cape Town had recently been classified an historical area. But Rosélie didn't protest.

For three whole days a Congolese (there are forty thousand in the country) turned over the soil in the garden.

He planted canna lilies, gladioli, gerberas, and especially white flowered flag bushes, a fragile shrub with a liking for humidity.

Stephen was born in Hythe, a small coastal town in Kent. Cecil, his father, had been an engineer in charge of maintaining the military canal, a remnant of the Napoleonic wars. An unrewarding job he carried out dejectedly, dreaming of an Elsewhere, when he was offered a managerial position in Bangkok. Annie, however, his French wife and a former governess, was five months pregnant. Reluctant to leave her alone in her condition, he had given up the offer. Ever since, he had made the mother and child pay for his sacrifice.

“I never knew him to be anything else but irascible, furious with a rage that I understood much later when I began to feel it myself.”

Stephen had grown up in a small, one-story brick house, three windows on the first floor, two on the second, so identical to the houses on either side along St. Nicholas Road that he had to check the two numbers over the front door before entering. After school, he was regularly beaten up in the public gardens by the little bullies who called him a sissy because of his pretty face. On Sundays his parents would have lunch in a pub, always the same one. While he sipped his lemonade they would glower at each other over their lager. The view from the pub looked out onto the gardens of the nearby castle where blond-haired little aristocrats pedaled hard on their bicycles. Finally Annie had the courage to divorce and took Stephen back to Verberie, her hometown, where the buildings and humans share the same grayness. A few years later she married again, this time a school principal, a childhood friend, like Cecil but gloomier. She had two boys.

In order to escape this horde of relatives—the mother, the mother's sisters, the stepfather, and the half brothers—Stephen got it into his head to return to university in England. Alas! Oxford and Cambridge thought his diction much too French! He'd lost his tonic accent, the rise in intonation and, especially, that distinguished stutter. So he had to make do with Reading. There, he had above all made his mark playing Chekhov with the university theater group. Since nobody claimed him—his father and mother having virtually forgotten him—Stephen began to travel the world. At the age of seventeen, he had almost got killed traveling through Italy and Greece on a scooter. At eighteen he lost his virginity in a bar in Houston where he had been raped by the owner and his wife in turn. At twenty, he dreamed of imitating Malraux. During a stay in Bangkok he had been content to photograph the bas-reliefs of the temples instead of looting them. At present, he proclaimed himself without a country and avoided Europe. Not entirely. He would spend a few days in the summer in Hythe, where he rented a car and drove along the coast, passing through the string of seaside resorts of Margate, Ramsgate, Sandgate, Greatstone, and Littlestone. Then a week in London.

Throughout his stay Stephen constantly called on Rosélie to bear witness.

“You can understand why I loathe this country.”

She looked around her and failed to understand. She was rather charmed by the color of the sea, so different from the Caribbean you wondered whether it was made from the same substance, the white facades of the great hotels, somewhat worse for wear, the ill-dressed crowds munching fish and chips on the endless piers, the boutiques stuffed with cute, unnecessary objects, and the tea shops that closed at five o'clock, just when it was teatime. And then she adored London. She would wander aimlessly counting the mixed couples whom she alone noticed. She envied them; they looked so happy and carefree. How did they manage?

Stephen always lodged with his friend Andrew Spire. They had shared a room at Reading. During their university vacations they had discovered Europe together. Then they had gone through hard times in London, both of them dreaming of becoming an actor. Andrew was single, as finicky as an old bachelor, handsome and marmoreal like Michel-angelo's
David
. Despite his frigid expression, he published unsavory, erotic poems dedicated to T in an avant-garde journal. Rosélie was convinced T was a man.

After years of walk-on parts with obscure theater companies, he had managed to get a teaching job at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, thanks to his connections in high-up places. The house he had inherited from his grandmother, widow of a senior civil servant in India, was furnished with marquetry-worked sideboards, canopied beds, rocking chairs, and copper-studded chests shipped back from Udaipur. Andrew had added half a dozen Siamese cats, meowing haughtily, who clawed and ran over the sofas as if they were perpetually in heat. After these weeks in London and Hythe, Stephen would cross the Channel and go to visit his mother alone, now widowed, and dumped in an institution for seniors by the sons from her second marriage, executives in a large private bank who were snowed under with work.

Rosélie preferred to drift idly through the streets of Paris. She was a regular guest of a hotel in the Marais because Cousin Altagras lived close by. Out of all the Thibaudins, and there were enough of them to populate an entire district of Guadeloupe, all very prim and proper, Rosélie was the only member to frequent Cousin Altagras, daughter of one of Elie's half brothers, who had arrived in France after the Second World War supposedly to study art. It was not because she had married a white man. The Thibaudins were above such considerations. It was because Lucien Roubichou, that was the name of the husband, owed his fortune, his apartment on the Place des Vosges, and his Audi Quattro to a rather special kind of industry. In short, he was a porn merchant, responsible for a certain number of immortal masterpieces, well known in closed circles:
Lucy, Suck My Sushi; Don't Speak with Your Mouth Full
; and
Caress Me, Caress Me
, no connection with the famous song from Martinique. The family accused him of having used Altagras when she was a ravishing beauty and of now doing the same with their two daughters. Incidentally, he was a man of gentle manners, mad about cooking and Italian cinema. His specialty was vegetarian lasagna. His passion: Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose theorems he subtly analyzed. In spite of her diabolical reputation, Cousin Altagras was a disappointment for Rosélie. She had given up any artistic claims in order to cook beef stew for her litter of children. Marriage does that.

During the early years, however, Rosélie never missed an opportunity to accompany Stephen to Verberie. Vacations took her back to Guadeloupe less and less, for she could no longer bear the sight of Rose nailed to her bed, like a beached whale. Consequently, looking after her mother-in-law eased her conscience somewhat. And then at every street corner she bumped into Stephen as a child. Here was the school that looked like a prison where he had acquired his taste for literature. Here was the sports ground where he had contracted his loathing for games. Here was the academy where he had performed his first roles. Moved, she could see the likeness in his mother's worn-out face. He had inherited her somewhat prominent nose, her smoky gray eyes, and her resolutely feminine mouth. For this reason she could put up with Annie's constant harping. The old woman's memories revolved like a carousel around the Second World War. Southeast England had been particularly vulnerable. The children had been evacuated to the Midlands. Annie, just married, had left Cecil and joined the volunteers who escorted groups of little girls in tears. Since age stimulated the old woman's appetite, Rosélie forced herself to cook, consulting Aunt Léna's recipes she had jotted down in her favorite South Sea blue ink in her spiral notebook.
Féwos a zabocat. Soup Zabitan. Bélanjè au gwatin. Dombwés é pwa. Blaff.
Despite Stephen's warnings, the old lady had a tendency to drink too many rum punches. Flushed and giggling, she would be seized with an unusual exuberance. One day, following a sumptuous meal washed down with plenty of wine, a daughter-in-law came to show off her newborn baby, a pink, blond-haired little angel, the type people are so fond of. It was then that Annie, with flushed cheeks and slurred voice, turned to Stephen and begged him. No grandson. No grandson. Never, never could she hug a little half-caste in her arms.