Maryse Conde - The Story of the Cannibal Woman

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.

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.