The Story of the Cannibal Woman Read Free Page B

their clothes, awkwardly handed her a small commission, then limped back in their four-wheel-drives to their legitimate spouses. When she woke up, the houseboy, somewhat forward with a girl the boss had picked up on the cheap, served her coffee and a papaya that had seen better times. Stephen had already left for the university, leaving her an envelope stuffed with banknotes. He lived in the European quarter, with its crumbling buildings, its park and tree-lined avenues. Driving by a kindergarten, she had heard “Frère Jacques.” A little farther on the off-key sounds of “Für Elise,” which she too had murdered in her time to please Rose, floated out of a window.
    Would she see him again? Did she want to see him again? She could find nothing wrong with him: perfectly groomed, smelling of Acqua de Giò, and good in bed. A lot of kissing, embracing, playing, and fondling, as if penetration was not the main issue.
    That same evening he once more came through the door of the Saigon, where the civil servants recognized him and cast disapproving looks. A month later she moved in with him.
    It was love with a capital L .
    Rosélie put on the clothes carefully chosen by Dido. A dark brown boubou with a fitted yolk embroidered in golden yellow, and a matching head tie. She walked down the stairs in a regal manner befitting her role and entered her consulting room. Népoçumène was waiting for her, his face a little less haggard than usual. Was he sleeping now? Were his nightmares beginning to leave him in peace? Did he hear his wife’s voice? She had told him over and over again he would hear her once he had forgiven her for having abandoned him. That was the most difficult part. She herself still couldn’t hear Stephen’s voice. All too often she was overwhelmed by bitterness and a kind of anger toward him.
    Rosélie’s gift became evident very early on. At the age of six all she had to do was place her little hands over Rose’s eyelids for poor Rose to sleep like a baby until nine in the morning. Until then Rose had been tormented by Elie’s absences; her body had begun to swell considerably, and as a result she could never get to sleep. At the age of ten Rosélie had made a pack of Creole dogs turn tail as they were about to attack her and her cousins on the road in Montebello just before Bois-Sergent, where her aunt had a house. On weekends, unbeknownst to the skeptics in the family, Papa Doudou, her grandfather on her father’s side, took her to his property at Redoute, where the cows turned their backs on the bull and the mares refused to be mounted by the stud. She would look deep into their big gelatin eyes and the recalcitrant females would be completely transformed, as pliable as putty in your hands. Bad-mouthers, and there are some in every family, were skeptical and made no bones about it. Rosélie had been incapable of predicting that the same Papa Doudou would die of a hemorrhage from his testicles being ripped off by the horns of a small bull he was breaking in. And during Hurricane Deirdre she had been unable to foresee that a breadfruit tree would smash through Uncle Eliacin’s house and flatten it like a cowpat, killing him outright as well as his wife and five children with the American TV names of Warner, Steve, Jessica, Kevin, and Randy. Okay, she had seen Deirdre coming. But you didn’t need to be a rocket scientist to see a hurricane. Hurricanes are regular visitors. Year after year they arrive from the coast of Africa. What matters is their strength, and that is never the same.
    As an adult she would have liked to turn her powers to good account. But astrology? Palmistry? Chiropractic? Osteopathy? Shiatsu? All that is not very serious. So she had got bogged down in her law studies. Elie had so admired the black robes around him that he dreamed of putting his daughter in one. Oh, let her tear the French language to pieces like lawyer