The Story of the Cannibal Woman (5 page)

These half-castes, aren't they the abomination of abominations?

Rosélie listened to her, flabbergasted. So all her patience, kindness, and Creole cooking had served no purpose whatsoever. Four centuries later the Code Noir was still a force of law:

“May our white subjects of either sex be prohibited from contracting marriage with the black population on pain of punishment or arbitrary penalty.”

A leper and a plague victim she was. A leper and a plague victim she remained, carrying in her womb the germs capable of destroying civilization. From that day on she never set foot again in Verberie, where Annie whined for her, summer after summer. Stephen put the blame on her.

“A lot of fuss about nothing! How can you possibly pay attention to the ramblings of an old woman of seventy-five, slightly tipsy into the bargain? Whatever you may think, my mother likes you a lot!”

Yet a few words would have been enough to calm her mother-in-law's fears. Neither Rosélie nor Stephen had any intention of slipping on the uniform of a parent. Ever since she was little, Rosélie had been sickened by motherhood: those round bloated or bombshell-pointed bellies of her aunts, cousins, and relatives of every nature, constantly pregnant in their maternity smocks ordered straight from France. She loathed their smug expressions, rueful in their rocking chairs, demanding respect as if they were carrying the Holy of Holies. She especially loathed the newborn babies. In spite of their talcum powder and baby cologne, they stank. They stank, retaining the stench of uterus in the dimples of their pudgy flesh. These were the formidable times before the pill when only the good old Ogino method protected lovers. The terror of falling pregnant protected her, much more than Rose's tirades on the flower of maidenhood, which bloomed incongruously between her legs and should only be plucked on the night of the day when Mendelssohn's wedding march echoed through the church. Moreover, propositions were rare, lovers few and far between. She intimidated people, they whispered. Her mouth remained shut like a sharp-nosed puffer fish. She never smiled and always looked as if she were bored.

As for Stephen, his hatred of children was based on objective grounds. He had had to look after his sly and disobedient little half brothers, whom he was not exactly fond of, and they had no particular liking for him either. When he was not listening to them recite the fable of the crow and the fox, when he was not supervising their French homework, he took them to play in the park and read them
The Adventures of Babar
. He got up in the night to take them to piss. It was their fault he hadn't been able to browse through
Les Cahiers du Cinéma
or admire
Ascenseur pour l'échafaud
or
A bout de souffle
. He never had to choose between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones: “I want to hold your hand” or “I can't get no satisfaction.”

His teenage years had been swallowed up by thankless jobs. As he grew older he became preoccupied with less selfish considerations: the hole in the ozone, the greenhouse effect, fast food, mad cow disease, bioterrorism, global warming, and the ugliness of a globalized world.

Rosélie and Stephen also agreed on this last point, a major consideration for a couple. They weren't interested in leaving a son and heir. Stephen elaborated on the subject with brio, claiming that the only valid creations are those of the imagination. Obviously, he had his books in mind, of which he was very proud. Especially the one on Seamus Heaney. At present he was preoccupied with his critical study of Yeats. He would start discussing it at breakfast, as if nothing else mattered, describing a thousand research possibilities.

“And what if I compared Yeats and Césaire? That's a bold move! What do you think?”

Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Because I don't know anything about it. I know nothing about anything. All I know is how to paint.

She would run and lock herself in her studio. Once the blinds had been opened, the impatient sun streamed into the room, daubing the walls with yellow. It playfully took the liberty of hanging its cheerful reflections on the canvases, which were in desperate need of them.

Sad, such sad canvases.

A lot of red. Not a bright red like the blood that soaks a birth, but dark and curdled like the blood that nurtures death. This color had always haunted her. When she was a little girl, Meynalda would buy gallons of blood from the butchers at the Saint-Antoine market in order to treat her chronic anemia. She would make it coagulate by throwing in handfuls of cooking salt. Then she would cut it into slices and fry it with chives and lard. It was her favorite dish for someone who only nibbled at her food, to Rose's great despair. The daughter was carved in bone, whereas the mother was kneaded in soft wax.

She also painted in dark brown, gray, black, and white.

Stephen didn't interfere but expressed surprise. Why always such gruesome subjects? Dismembered bodies, stumps, gouged eyes, spleens, and burst livers.

I like horror. I think that in a previous life I must have belonged to a pack of vampires. My long, pointed canines sunk into my mother's breast.

While she worked Rosélie remembered Stephen's words: “The only valid creations are those of the imagination.”

His words seemed to her increasingly arrogant. She didn't know whether her creations were valid. How could she know for certain? Simply, she could not help painting. Like a convict in a chain gang. A convict whose bondage knows no end. When, exhausted, she went down to the kitchen, she would find Dido, her complaints, her gossip, and her newspapers, and the entire place smelling of lamb stew with spinach, a specialty of Rajasthan.

But Rosélie was never hungry. No more now than in the past. On her plate the green of the spinach, the saffron brown of the lamb, and the white perfumed rice from Thailand formed a still life. And she couldn't wait to go back up and lock herself in her studio.

R
osélie never went out because she didn't have any friends. In fact, even from an early age she never had any friends, cosseted by her jealous and possessive mother, and mixing with the family only because she had to. The conversations of her teenage cousins obsessed with their first kiss, or cousins now grown into womanhood obsessed with the performance or, alas, nonperformance in bed of their husbands and lovers, bored her. Ever since Simone Bazin des Roseraies, née Folle-Follette, had left Cape Town to follow her husband and consul to Somalia, she had no one but Dido to keep her company, and she treasured those moments. It's only normal. The popular saying goes that a woman needs another woman to talk to. Men are from Mars, women from Venus, and I didn't invent the expression. But enough of that.

Simone and Rosélie first met at the French Cultural Center. The French Cultural Center was guarded like Fort Knox ever since its wine cellar and stock of foie gras had been raided one Christmas Eve. Despite its cafeteria, which, until that terrible raid, had served excellent wines and delicious sandwiches, the center was always deserted. Charlotte Gains-bourg and Mathieu Kassovitz were doing their best. But how could you rival Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger, who could be seen strutting across every movie screen in Cape Town?

One evening Rosélie found herself sitting not far from the lovely, golden-skinned Simone, who positively glowed, during a showing of Euzhan Palcy's
Sugar Cane Alley
. She had seen the film again and again in Paris, N'Dossou, and New York. She never missed a showing, not merely for its merits as a movie but because Euzhan Palcy's miserere each time empowered her with the reality she did not possess. For an hour and a half she could stand up and shout to the disbelievers:

“Look! I'm tired of telling you. Guadeloupe and Martinique actually exist! People live and die there. They make babies who in turn reproduce. They claim to possess a culture unlike any other: Creole culture.”

Question: How do you recognize a compatriot? The Caribbean people have an instinct, like any other endangered species. That evening Simone was sitting with her children. As soon as the sepia-colored opening sequences started to roll the children began whispering in her ear. She likewise whispered her answers so as not to disturb the other spectators, pathetically trying to authenticate this far-off land that they had only seen depicted as fiction.

Kod yanm ka mawé yanm
. Friendship binds those who are far from their shores.

From that day on, Rosélie and Simone became inseparable. Yet their personalities were strict opposites. Rosélie was attached to nothing, perhaps because nothing belonged to her. Simone was pathologically attached to those thousands of facets some people call traditions: Christmas carols, mandarin pips, and polka-dot dresses at New Year's, coconut sorbet at four in the afternoon, codfish fritters, crab
matoutou
, and red snapper stew for lunch. She would go for miles to buy blood and pig's intestines to make her black pudding. But above all, unlike Rosélie, she had an opinion on politics and just about everything else: underdevelopment, dictatorship, democracy, Kofi Annan, Muslim fundamentalism, homosexuality, terrorism, and the India-Pakistan conflict. Belonging to the same people as Aimé Césaire, the inspiration of Caribbean consciousness, she naturally had the right to teach everyone a thing or two. She dared make negative comments about Nelson Mandela, the untouchable. She believed his influence had not allowed the South African people to purge their frustration and be born again in a baptism of blood under the sun. See Fanon: “On Violence.”

“One day all hell's going to break loose,” she liked to say, rubbing her hands as if overjoyed at the prospect. “It'll explode like at Saint-Pierre. The whites will hurl themselves on the blacks, and the blacks on the whites.”

For those who might not understand the comparison, she was alluding to the eruption of the Montagne Pelée and the total destruction of the town of Saint-Pierre in Martinique. Only one person escaped—a prisoner by the name of Cyparis…Oh, I'm sorry, that's another story.

What upset Simone the most as a devoted mother of five was the government's disregard for children. Didn't they know they were the future of the nation?

The child is the future of man.

In her opinion, kindergartens and nursery schools should be under government control and not left to individuals, who were only intent on making a profit. Having investigated several of these places, she had seen for herself how these innocent children were left to macerate in filth, urine, and fecal matter. No intellectual stimulation. The lucky ones had a few cuddly toys, coloring crayons, and modeling clay. So at the end of December she begged Rosélie to play Santa Claus with her and accompany her on a toy distribution mission. Rosélie, who had the regrettable habit of being intimidated by anyone whose willpower was stronger than hers, gave in. One afternoon, then, they set off in the embassy's Peugeot to empty their sack of toys at strategic points. The way they were received at Bambinos as well as Sweet Mickey's as well as Tiny Tots' Palace filled Rosélie with dismay. Worse than intruders, veritable undesirables! The directors scarcely poked their heads out of their offices while their assistants grabbed the packages in such an offhand way, it was to be feared the cumbersome objects would end up in the garbage.

Why, for goodness' sake?

Simone hadn't always been a homemaker. She had been a brilliant student at the School for Political Science in Paris and read all the classics of decolonization. So the explanation she provided was inspired by her readings of years gone by.

“We're not white women. We are black. The whites, however, have brainwashed these people to such an extent that they not only loathe themselves but everything of the same color. What's more, it's the class struggle. Here we are in a luxury car. We don't live in the townships. We're bourgeois. They hate us for not living like them.”

Bourgeois? Speak for yourself. I live like a parasite. I don't have a career. I don't have any money or own any material or spiritual goods. I have neither a present nor a future.

Simone had a short memory; she hadn't always been a bourgeois. She was born in one of the most destitute villages of Martinique. Her father was a cane worker who had been a regular customer at the company rum store. There was never any meat on the table. The family was lucky when the fig bananas were accompanied by a slice of codfish and a little olive oil. At the age of ten, though she had never worn anything else but sandals, her godmother, a bourgeois mulatto from Prêcheur, gave her a pair of shiny pumps that her third daughter had not quite worn out. At boarding school she washed and ironed the only two dresses she had, one for weekdays and the nice one for Sunday mass. Right up to graduation she “massacred” the French language, which made her classmates die laughing. When she met Antoine Bazin des Roseraies, a minor aristocrat, nothing more, an egghead and first in his class, she had not been impressed. He had won her over only after a persistent courtship. Then, like in Mira Nair's
Monsoon Wedding
, after a marriage of convenience, the buds of love had blossomed.

At the present time, Simone would have been perfectly happy with a faithful husband and a loving family, if her public life had not been a calvary. On the many occasions when she represented France at her husband's side, she was systematically ignored and snubbed. Under her own roof, at her own receptions, the guests never spoke to her. At other people's dinner parties she was relegated to the bottom of the table. Nobody would believe she had studied at the School for Political Science. At her children's school they took her for the maid. Unlike Rosélie, she was feisty. With the help of her husband, albeit discreetly because of his function, she founded an association, the DNA, the Defense of the Negress Association, her handbook being a work by the Senegalese author Awa Thiam,
La Parole aux Négresses
, which she had read while at university. To those who balked at the word “Negress” and its colonial connotations, and who proposed periphrases such as “women of African origin,” “women of color,” “women of the South,” or even “women on the move,” Simone retorted that, on the contrary, it was good to shock.

The DNA had a large membership, wives of diplomats and international civil servants, teachers, traders, owners of beauty shops, visiting nurses, the manager of a travel agency, and the director of a school for models, one of whom had been voted runner-up in the election of Miss Black Maracas.

The association was known for including French, English, and Portuguese speakers, irrespective of class or nationality. Simone had no trouble inviting a wide range of guest speakers, for on this planet there is no black woman who one day or another has not been doubly humiliated because of her sex and color.

Simone had the brilliant idea of making the young poet Bebe Sephuma honorary president, since she enjoyed a reputation throughout the country as dazzling as Léopold Sédar Senghor's in Senegal, Derek Walcott's in St. Lucia, or Max Rippon's in Guadeloupe. There is no equivalent in a Western country, where poets are generally ignored. Yet she had only written three flimsy collections, one of which was dedicated to the woman who brought her into this world before being carried off by AIDS when Bebe was three months old. She had been blessed with good fortune when, on the death of her mother, an English couple had adopted her and saved her from the Bantustan, where she would have surely wasted away with the rest of her family. They had taken her to London and sent her to the best schools. Nevertheless, she had never forgotten the hell she had escaped from. As soon as she could, she returned to settle in Cape Town, where she became the uncontested leader of arts and letters. She had her own cultural column and appeared regularly on television. Since she sponsored a string of art galleries, it was Simone's idea to drag her to Rosélie's studio, the plan being that Bebe would love her work and offer her an exhibition in a select gallery.

“She could give you the chance you've been waiting for.”

Rosélie and Bebe had often met. But obviously Rosélie did not interest Bebe, who would hurriedly greet her with a superficial smile. As for Rosélie, she had to admit that Bebe scared her. Too young. Too pretty. Too witty. A wicked smile revealing sharp, carnassial teeth made for tearing great chunks out of life, and betraying her formidable desire to succeed.

But what does it mean to succeed?

But in our countries, nobody ever gets a unanimous vote. Bebe Sephuma was not lacking in detractors. “Is she a true African? What does she know about our traditions?” whispered some of the disgruntled who recalled she had spent her childhood and adolescence in Highgate before reading philosophy at Christ Church, Oxford. As a result, she could not speak any of the languages of South Africa. Not even Afrikaans.

Simone managed to introduce Rosélie to the intimate circle of friends who were celebrating Bebe's twenty-seventh birthday. Duly coached, Rosélie slipped on a black silk sheath dress and brought out her gold bead choker, the one she would never part with, for it was her mother's, and applied her makeup. It's incredible what a little penciling around the eyes and a good lipstick can do! Under her arms she soaked herself with Jaipur by Boucheron. But she had a great deal of trouble trying to convince Stephen to accompany her, usually so worldly and infatuated with high society. He considered Bebe's poetry atrocious, and what's more, she spoke English with a pretentious accent.

Bebe lived in a villa decorated in a futurist manner by a Brazilian designer who was the darling of the rich South Africans. He had designed interiors of a number of pop singers and artists living in Cape Town and Johannesburg.

The villa was situated in Constantia. This neighborhood, one of the smartest residential districts of Cape Town, was gradually being taken over by ambassadors, businessmen, and experts from sub-Saharan Africa, as the good old Black Africa was now called. Not only were blacks seen as uniformed chauffeurs, their white-gloved hands holding the wheel, but sacrilege of sacrileges, they were also sprawling in the back, their peppercorn heads resting on the leather cushions of their Mercedes 380 SLS. Children with the same skin color were pedaling their expensive mountain bikes along drives lined with pine trees and centuries-old oaks.

But what struck Rosélie was not the environment, the interior design, the walls decorated with brightly colored
azulejos
and glass insets, the white marble tiles, the monochrome leather furnishings, the eclecticism of the decoration, a No mask next to a Calder mobile, a Fang mask rubbing shoulders with a tapestry from Ethiopia. Not even the sumptuousness of the dinner table, where nothing was lacking—from pink champagne and caviar to Scottish salmon. What struck Rosélie was that the dinner guests were made up solely of mixed couples, white men and black women, as if they constituted a humanity all their own that on no pretext should be mistaken for any other.

The most self-assured was Antoine, Simone's husband, on whom the nature of his job and the assurance of future promotion conferred an immense authority. When he spoke, his words had the power of a private bill being read to the National Assembly.

The handsomest was without doubt Bebe's partner, Piotr. This Swede, who would not have been out of place in a film by Ingmar Bergman (the early Bergman) shared and supported her enthusiasm. Like her, he knew that Art should be brought to the people and not the reverse. Like her, he had a different notion of Art than that found in school manuals. Art is everywhere, in the street, in everyday objects. To explain his point Piotr had recently pulled off a major accomplishment. With the help of a photographer, he had plastered over the buses in Cape Town giant pictures of the market in Cocody before it went up in flames, a London double-decker filled with turbaned Sikhs, the junks and floating restaurants of Hong Kong, the mosque at Djenné, and a caravan of camels crossing the desert on their way to the salt mines at Taoudenni.