Maryse Conde: The Story of the Cannibal Woman

It was in Papa Koumbaya’s car, shortly before they arrived at Lievland, that they heard the news. Dido was dozing in a corner. Rosélie’s thoughts were roaming sadly around Stephen: Did he love me? During all these years, was he putting on an act? And why? Papa Koumbaya was droning on about life in the men’s hostels. He was just at the point in the story when he would grab his dick and get the sperm frothing when Sun FM suddenly interrupted the jerky rhythm of a rap song to announce the tragedy.

Fiela had cut her wrists with the handle of a spoon she had filed like a dagger. Taken immediately to the prison infirmary, she had never come round. Her body had been returned to Julian.

Rosélie at once was terror-stricken and guilt-ridden.

Fiela, Fiela, in the debacle of my life, forgive me, I forgot about you. I too, I abandoned you. Yet you seemed no longer to need me. In the end, you won. Tell me. Why did you insist on such a punishment when the jury had decided otherwise? Did you think you were guilty? Or did you no longer have the heart to live?

Like me.

Rosélie had kept her word. She hadn’t set foot in Lievland since Jan died.

She was going back this weekend because Dido had insisted. Sofie had suddenly fallen ill. The doctor, far from optimistic, believed she had only a few days left. She was no longer eating. She complained of suffocating. At times her breathing would stop, and she lay inert, her cheeks and lips turned blue.

At Lievland, the tourists kept coming. Coaches lined up in the parking lot and released chattering crowds, prepared to admire everything, to take pictures of everything, the vineyards, the ring of mountains, the homestead and its furnishings. Dido and Rosélie went up to the de Louws’ private apartment. Sofie had been carried from the child’s cot she had slept in for years to the canopied bed in the middle of the room, which faced the coromandel ebony wardrobe from Batavia that Jan had stared at until his final hour. Her body was swallowed up by the bed. The bed itself was swallowed up by the room, whose floor was tiled in black and white and resembled a small craft on the immensity of the ocean.

Rosélie went over to her.

It was as if Sofie were on the other side of our world, going by her gaze, dimmed blue between her wrinkled eyelids. So much like Rose’s in her patience and determination. She was waiting for her son.

That’s how mothers are. They can’t believe in the ingratitude and thoughtlessness of their children.

The morning went by in a strange atmosphere. The sunlight poured into the room, playfully caressing the funereal checkerboard of the tiles. Through the windows could be heard the cries of the tourists, some Swedes this time. They were ambling in the fields, holding one another by the waist and posing for photos. Outside was lively and joyful. Inside, reverence and dread to greet death. Dido and Elsie were reading the Psalms in a low voice. Rosélie relentlessly massaged the white, ice-cold body, so white, whiter than the pillow, the sheets, or the eiderdown. Under the pressure of her hands the blood flowed, but merely produced a glimmer of warmth here and there, like a bonfire that is constantly dying. Although her hands were steady, out of habit, her mind was in a state of confusion. Chaos. Her thoughts were as tangled as a skein of wool: Rose, Sofie, Stephen, Faustin, and Fiela were spinning round and round in her head.

Sometimes, childhood memories surfaced.

Rose’s bedroom in La Pointe. The wide-open window showed a cutout of the sky. In the middle stood the bell tower of the church of Massabielle, as clear as on a photo, crouching on its hill, housing the miraculous Virgin Mary for the adoration of the faithful. The last time the statue had been carried through the island she had made cripples walk again while a deaf-mute from birth had begun to shout “manman” at the very sight of her. Rose, who at the time weighed 250 pounds on her scales and was a tight fit in her rocking chair, was balancing her on her thighs, rolls of fat squeezed between the wooden armrests. Wheezing passionately, she asked:

“Who do you prefer? Your papa or your maman?”

Rosélie didn’t hesitate and docilely gave the hoped-for answer:

“My maman.”

Then Rose showered her with kisses.

At other times Stephen took the place of Rose. The decor had changed. The sun was shining, remote and cold. They were in New York. The bay windows looked out onto the glistening Hudson and the high-rises of New Jersey. Stephen was sitting cross-legged on the bed in his jogging outfit, his hair in his eyes.

“Out of all your lovers, which one did you prefer?” he asked.

“Out of all my lovers!” she protested. “There were not that many, you know full well.”

The civil servants in N’Dossou didn’t count. Oh no! My private life is hardly material for a pornographic novel. Neither Confessions of O nor Emmanuelle nor The Sexual Life of Catherine M. nor Perverse Tales by Régine Deforges. The voyeurs wouldn’t lose their sight spying on me. I kept my virginity until I was nineteen, a venerable age, even in my time. I’ve never been to an orgy or had multiple partners. I’ve never fornicated in a public place such as a museum, an elevator, or a church. Never been sodomized. For me, sex has never been a feat or a performance. It has always simply rhymed with love. That’s why I wouldn’t know if one black is better than two, three, or four whites. I’ve never compared my men.

“Even so,” Stephen insisted. “Which one did you prefer?”

Here again there was no hesitation.

“You, of course!”

Then he showered her with kisses.

Was he lying then?

Fiela, wherever you are now, you must know. Just one word of consolation. Did he love me? Had he always put on an act? Is it possible to put on an act for twenty years? And why?

Then it was Faustin’s turn. In her life Faustin had symbolized one of those children conceived at the last minute, a latecomer, a krazi a bòyò. They give immense happiness to their forty-year-old mothers.

I can do it! My husband can do it. I took my insides to be a bundle of dry, wiry ligaments and his sex a stick of dead wood. What a mistake! Together we created life.

Toward the end of the morning, the tourist buses moved off to other vineyards. Soon a flow of private cars replaced them. Friends and relatives of the de Louws, attracted by the smell of death, that inimitable smell, sadly nodded their heads and remarked:

“Well, Sofie didn’t survive Jan for very long. A few weeks ago we were gathered in this very same place for a similar painful event. It’s as if the couple is tied to an umbilical cord, stronger than the ties uniting mother and child. As if he couldn’t bear to be separated from her.”

We shouldn’t be duped by the good-natured expression, the self-conscious countenance, and the unassuming dress of these farmers and their wives. They had composed the silent cohorts, the pillars of apartheid, throughout the country. Each in his own manner had paved the way for Afrikanerdom once the ties with England had been severed. They had often occupied regional postings in the Party. Dido, who knew them all by their first names, introduced them to her friend Rosélie, clairvoyant, magician, capable of performing miracles. As a result, they bowed to her out of superstitious respect. As for Rosélie, she was fighting her malaise. She hadn’t forgotten Jan’s last look. Consequently, she braced herself for the insults and contempt that lay behind every eye.

If Stephen had been there, she would have been treated to one of his tirades.

“What are you afraid of? What are you going to invent now? They are preoccupied by the same fears that haunt every human. The same fears as yours. Fear of death, fear of life, fear of the known, and fear of the unknown. Of the foreseeable and the unforeseeable. Must we constantly blame people for what they once were? Must we forever hold it against the English, the Americans, the French, the white Creoles in Guadeloupe, and the békés in Martinique for the crimes of their slaveholding ancestors? We must move forward.”