Maryse Conde: The Story of the Cannibal Woman

Once again Nature showed its indifference toward man’s affliction. Sunlight, radiant but freezing, flooded the streets. The sky was like a silky blue scarf dappled in white and spreading to infinity. The ocean immersed everything with its bitter smell of salt. The highway was still gleaming with cars full of carefree people. How unjust happiness is! Dispensed to some, denied to others. With no explanation.

The Sea Lodge at Clifton was a trendy restaurant for the natives. Few tourists. At this hour it was packed. Every head looked up and Rosélie rediscovered, like a familiar dress mislaid and forgotten, the contempt of a dozen pairs of hostile eyes. A white man with a Kaffir whore. Manuel Desprez seemed not to have noticed and was arguing with a waitress for a table on the terrace. Perhaps he was secretly excited by all these looks? Like Stephen? When they had been seated he took her hand across the table, to the fury of their neighbors.

“What you need is a change of air,” he asserted. “To travel. I’ve been invited to a guitar festival in Cadix. Would you like to come with me?”

She gave no reply, preferring to ask point-blank the same blunt question she had asked Dido.

“Did you know?”

He blushed, and this juvenile flush made him look thirty years younger.

“I suspected,” he confessed in a low voice. “Like everyone else. Quite a bit of gossip went round the department. There was a lot of whispering among the students and profs.”

That hadn’t prevented them from naming Stephen teacher of the year and giving him the complete works of Dollar Brand, knowing his love of jazz. He must be having a good laugh at their hypocrisy where he is now.

But what about me in all this? Wasn’t I being the most hypocritical? What did he think of me?

“Stephen loved you immensely, never doubt it,” he added awkwardly.

Really? Two days ago, someone well placed to know what he was talking about told me the complete opposite.

“Yes,” he insisted. “All those who knew him, who frequented him, knew it. He never stopped talking about you. He was very worried about you. He said you were hypersensitive, a tormented soul. All he wanted was to protect you.”

And yet he’s the one who finished me off, who killed me. Nothing unusual.

Each man kills the thing he loves.

“Let’s go to Cadix,” he repeated agreeably. “I’m the perfect traveling companion, discreet and obedient. I’ll do everything you want. If you like, I’ll just carry your cases for you.”

“ Fanm tonbé pa janmin dézespéwé ,” says the song from Guadeloupe. Bishupal, with the impertinence of his young age, was mistaken. The life of a woman is never over. There is always a man to help her continue on her path. Salama Salama had avenged her for the boredom and solitude of her adolescence. Stephen had prevented her from having a nervous breakdown after Salama Salama abandoned her. Faustin had brought her in from the cold after Stephen’s death. This Manuel was offering to console her for both Stephen’s and Faustin’s betrayal. But, in fact, all these providential rescuers were not helping her at all. All they did was distract her from herself. All they did was distract her from what should be the focus of her preoccupations. Her painting. What would her life have been like if in Paris she had not met Salama Salama, who had deafened her with his reggae music? If in N’Dossou she had not met Stephen, wrapped up in Seamus Heaney and Yeats? And Faustin in Cape Town, yearning for his nomination? She would probably have focused on herself. She wouldn’t have relegated her painting to the back burner and put her life on the line. She would have fought tooth and nail to perfect it and impose it.

She looked at Manuel Desprez. No doubt this fifty year-old, in good shape, three hours a week at the Equinox health club, an hour’s walk every day plus swimming, would make any woman happy in bed and an excellent lover. But she wouldn’t go with him to Cadix, prelude to a new affair of the heart or sex or both, which, in the more or less short term, would end in disillusionment. Yet another one. Furthermore, she no longer had the courage to go through everything she had gone through all these years and once again suffer exclusion and incomprehension. The mixed couple is a strong wine for strong constitutions. The fainthearted should abstain.

She had already wasted too much of her time.

Suddenly, she saw her future clearly mapped out for her in a straight line for the remaining years of her life.

Fiela, all things considered, you didn’t set an example. You chose to die. But it’s not a question of dying. It’s a question of living. Clinging to life. Obstinately.

She wouldn’t leave Cape Town. Suffering is equivalent to entitlement. She had earned this city. She had made it hers by reversing the journey of her ancestors, dispossessed of Africa, who had seen the isles loom up like a mirage to the fore of Columbus’s caravels, the isles where the cane and tobacco of their rebirth would germinate.

I shall no longer wear my heart out with loving. Why don’t we pay more attention to love songs and ballads? They hold the truth. When I was small, Rose, who still sang, though in a somewhat strangled voice, had one song she used to sing constantly. Listening from the cradle, I should have heeded the words:

Ah! N’aimez pas,

N’aimez pas sur cette terre!

Quand l’amour s’en va,

Il ne reste que les pleurs.

(Oh! I beg you not to love / not to love on this earth! / When love goes / Only tears remain.)

She looked at Manuel again, his handsome, considerate face, and said firmly:

“I won’t go with you to Cadix. I’ve never liked traveling. It was Stephen who forced me and I obeyed. Now I want to do as I please.”

He didn’t admit defeat and smiled.

“Then I won’t go either. I too am a stay-at-home. I’ll come back and see you, if you let me, and we’ll listen to Bach’s cello suites. Do you like Bach?”

After Verdi, Johann Sebastian Bach?

Rosélie dashed up to her studio, taking no notice of Dido idling on her kitchen doorstep like a madam curious for news. The windows had remained wide open. The five o’clock afternoon sun was pouring in, frigid. For those familiar with nuances, however, its glare was tarnished. Darkness was already lurking like a hungry beast prowling in the background. Gradually, Table Mountain would be defeated by the shadows of night and it would relinquish its watch over Cape Town. Then, from just about everywhere — the townships, the shantytowns, and the wastelands stretching to infinity — would emerge the cohorts of frustrated lovers who, unable to possess the city by daylight, took advantage of the night to ravage its body, finally vulnerable, accessible, and prostrate.

Rosélie carefully selected a canvas: forty-three inches by fifty-one. She fixed it to the wall. Grabbing a crayon, her hand drew in rapid, precise strokes a pair of eyes in the very middle. The eyes that had so impressed her. Drooping, half-slit eyes glowing between heavy lids. For those eyes, the surrounding world did not count. Only what boiled inside mattered and that remained a mystery. The entire face would be built around these eyes. Then, one by one, she unscrewed the tubes of paint, choosing the colors she liked: red, black, blue, dark green, and white. She squeezed them against the palm of her hand, spreading their contents onto her palette. She felt the dull sensation of her insides impatiently preparing to give birth. Finally, she approached the square of canvas where that impenetrable gaze held hers, and resolutely, she began to paint.

Fiela, is that you? Is this me? Our two faces have merged.

This time, she knew what her title would be. She had found it even before she had started. It had welled up from deep inside her on the crest of a raging tide: Cannibal Woman .