The Story of the Cannibal Woman Read Free Page A

promise despite the cold light of reality. One evening a white guy sat down at the bar with a Pilsner Urquell, that’s a Czech beer. He looked around, got up, walked straight over to her table, and offered her a drink. His introduction was not very original, even conventional. It has worked ever since there have been bars, men, and women. He was no uglier than the rest. Somewhat better, even. She hesitated because she had never considered other partners in bed besides blacks. In her family nobody went in for mixed couples. The whites were terra incognita! The only exceptions were Great-uncle Elie, who left to work on the Panama Canal and ended his days with a Madrilenian, and cousin Altagras, whose name was erased from the family tree. Something attracted her to this white guy. They had walked out into the dusk as the red disk of the sun slipped untiringly into the ocean’s watery deep. And passersby, numerous at this time of day, fired the first of those looks loaded with hostility and contempt that from then on would never leave them.
    They had climbed into his red, somewhat flashy four-wheel drive, and navigating around the ruts and potholes that got deeper every rainy season, he had introduced himself. University professor. Taught Irish literature. Wilde, Joyce, Yeats, and Synge. His book on Joyce had been a mistake. Went completely unnoticed. Another on Seamus Heaney had been a critical success. He used to work in London. Listening to him, Rosélie was as fascinated as if an astronaut had described his days on the MIR space station. So people spend their time wallowing in fiction, getting worked up about lives they have never led, paper lives, lives in print, analyzing them and commenting on these fantasy worlds. By comparison she was ashamed of her own problems, so commonplace, so crude, so genuine.
    What are you doing in N’Dossou?
    Me? Nothing! A man has just left me high and dry. I’ve no work, I’ve no money. I’ve no roof over my head. I’m trying to survive and cure myself of my lenbe . Lovesick. Back home they call it lenbe .
    He certainly could talk. Never a bore, though, full of unpretentious literary allusions and anecdotes about the countries he had visited.
    Who was her favorite writer?
    Mishima.
    Found the name just in time. She wasn’t going to say Victor Hugo or Alexandre Dumas, so obvious!
    The Temple of the Golden Pavilion is magnificent, isn’t it?
    No, I prefer Confessions of a Mask.
    Said confidently. Yet it was the only one she had read, in paperback in economy class from Paris to Pointe-à-Pitre, one July when she was going back to spend her vacation with Rose and Elie. She had always been scolded for not reading. Ever since elementary school. Last in French composition. For her, the stories in books come nowhere near reality. Novelists are scared to invent the incredible, in other words life itself.
    Did she like to travel?
    There she felt obliged to tell the truth. She only knew a tiny portion, the tip of the iceberg, of the vast world around us: Guadeloupe, where she was born, Paris, where she had vaguely studied, and N’Dossou, where she had ended up three years earlier.
    Three years of Africa! Do you like Africa?
    Like! Does a prisoner awaiting his execution like being on death row? Now, now! Stop being facetious and witty! Africa hadn’t always been a prison. She had been eager to make the journey, thinking she was about to launch on the great adventure. Despite her misfortunes she remained loyal to N’Dossou, an unattractive, unpretentious (how could it be anything else?) yet engaging city.
    He had taken her home to his place, where they had slept in each other’s arms until the following morning. This was unusual for Rosélie. Her civil servants usually climbed up to her studio apartment and didn’t give her more than two hours of their time, watch in hand. As soon as they had finished with their well-oiled orgasm, they slipped on