The Story of the Cannibal Woman by Maryse Condé Read Free Book Online

understand why I loathe this country.”
    She looked around her and failed to understand. She was rather charmed by the color of the sea, so different from the Caribbean you wondered whether it was made from the same substance, the white facades of the great hotels, somewhat worse for wear, the ill-dressed crowds munching fish and chips on the endless piers, the boutiques stuffed with cute, unnecessary objects, and the tea shops that closed at five o’clock, just when it was teatime. And then she adored London. She would wander aimlessly counting the mixed couples whom she alone noticed. She envied them; they looked so happy and carefree. How did they manage?
    Stephen always lodged with his friend Andrew Spire. They had shared a room at Reading. During their university vacations they had discovered Europe together. Then they had gone through hard times in London, both of them dreaming of becoming an actor. Andrew was single, as finicky as an old bachelor, handsome and marmoreal like Michel-angelo’s David . Despite his frigid expression, he published unsavory, erotic poems dedicated to T in an avant-garde journal. Rosélie was convinced T was a man.
    I would love to be the cigarette
    that your desire slowly consumes
    penis of fire that becomes smoke
    in your mouth.
    After years of walk-on parts with obscure theater companies, he had managed to get a teaching job at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, thanks to his connections in high-up places. The house he had inherited from his grandmother, widow of a senior civil servant in India, was furnished with marquetry-worked sideboards, canopied beds, rocking chairs, and copper-studded chests shipped back from Udaipur. Andrew had added half a dozen Siamese cats, meowing haughtily, who clawed and ran over the sofas as if they were perpetually in heat. After these weeks in London and Hythe, Stephen would cross the Channel and go to visit his mother alone, now widowed, and dumped in an institution for seniors by the sons from her second marriage, executives in a large private bank who were snowed under with work.
    Rosélie preferred to drift idly through the streets of Paris. She was a regular guest of a hotel in the Marais because Cousin Altagras lived close by. Out of all the Thibaudins, and there were enough of them to populate an entire district of Guadeloupe, all very prim and proper, Rosélie was the only member to frequent Cousin Altagras, daughter of one of Elie’s half brothers, who had arrived in France after the Second World War supposedly to study art. It was not because she had married a white man. The Thibaudins were above such considerations. It was because Lucien Roubichou, that was the name of the husband, owed his fortune, his apartment on the Place des Vosges, and his Audi Quattro to a rather special kind of industry. In short, he was a porn merchant, responsible for a certain number of immortal masterpieces, well known in closed circles: Lucy, Suck My Sushi; Don’t Speak with Your Mouth Full ; and Caress Me, Caress Me , no connection with the famous song from Martinique. The family accused him of having used Altagras when she was a ravishing beauty and of now doing the same with their two daughters. Incidentally, he was a man of gentle manners, mad about cooking and Italian cinema. His specialty was vegetarian lasagna. His passion: Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose theorems he subtly analyzed. In spite of her diabolical reputation, Cousin Altagras was a disappointment for Rosélie. She had given up any artistic claims in order to cook beef stew for her litter of children. Marriage does that.
    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