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

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.
    â€œAnd 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.

THREE
    R osélie never went out because she didn’t have any friends. In fact, even from an early age she never had any friends, cosseted by her jealous and possessive mother,