Three Strong Women

by Marie Ndiaye

Then, grasping how powerless she was, she’d wandered around the small, dark apartment, dizzy with worry and pain, staggered by the realization of what had happened, of the huge suffering already inflicted and certain to go on being inflicted, and of the fact that nothing could undo the terrible thing that had occurred.

  She’d then taken the metro to the salon where her mother worked.

  Even now, thirty years later, she couldn’t summon the strength to recall precisely the moment when she told her mother what had happened and what suffering still lay in wait.

  It was all she could do to remember, little by little, her mother’s wild stare as she sat on Sony’s bed, frantically smoothing the pale blue chenille coverlet and repeating shrilly, monotonously, “He’s too young to live without me. Five years old, that’s much too small!”

  Their father had phoned the day after his arrival. He was triumphant, full of gusto, and their mother had made an effort to be conciliatory, to sound almost calm, fearing above all that this man who hated open conflict would break off all relations if he thought she was making a big fuss.

  He’d let Sony talk on the phone but had grabbed the receiver back when the child, hearing his mother’s voice, had started to cry.

  Time had passed, and the bitter, heartrending, unacceptable situation had become diluted in the routine of everyday life, had melted in the normality of an existence only disrupted at regular intervals by the arrival of a clumsy, stilted letter from Sony, which Norah and her sister had to answer in a similarly formal way so that—their mother calculated—it would appear to their father that there was no risk in allowing greater contact.

  How accommodating and sadly devious this gentle, benumbed woman had shown herself to be in her distress! She’d gone on buying clothes for Sony, folding them carefully, and putting them away in the little boy’s chest of drawers.

  “For when he gets back,” she’d say.

  But from the outset Norah and her sister had been fully aware that Sony would never come back, knowing as they did their father’s lack of feeling, his indifference to the feelings of others, and his penchant for imposing his iron will on those around him.

  Once he’d decided that Sony was his by right he would ignore everything that could restrain his desire to have his only son at his side.

  He considered of little importance the unhappiness that Sony felt about his exile, just as he viewed the suffering of his wife as unavoidable and purely temporary. For he was like that: implacable and terrifying.

  Throughout the time their mother still expected Sony to return, Norah and her sister knew that she hadn’t gotten the full measure of her husband’s intransigence. He would stubbornly refuse, for instance, to send the boy back to France for the holidays.

  For he was like that: an implacable, terrifying man.

  The years passed and the painful subservience of their mother was rewarded only by an invitation to Norah and her sister to visit their brother.

  “Why won’t you let Sony come and see us?” their mother shouted into the phone, her face contorted in grief.

  “Because I know that you wouldn’t let him go again,” their father, calm and self-assured, probably answered, slightly annoyed perhaps because he loathed weeping and shouting.

  “Of course I would, I swear to you!”

  But he knew she was lying, and she knew it too. Choking and gasping, she couldn’t go on.

  That their father would never want to be burdened with his two daughters, that he’d do nothing to keep them, was so blindingly obvious that their mother let them go to see him, sending Norah and her sister as emissaries and witnesses to her immense affliction, to her somewhat disembodied love for a boy whose photograph his father from time to time sent to her, a badly taken picture, always blurred, which invariably showed Sony smiling broadly, in excellent health, amazingly handsome, and expensively dressed.

  Their father had acquired a holiday village while it was still under construction. He’d given it a complete, luxurious makeover, and it was now making him a wealthy man.

  Meanwhile, in Paris, in a symmetrical but contrary manner, as if she felt she had to atone for her misfortune by letting things slide, their mother was experiencing money troubles. She kept getting into debt and having to negotiate endlessly with credit card companies.

  Their father sent a little money at irregular intervals, different amounts each time, doubtless because he wished to convey the impression that he was doing all he could.

  He was like that, implacable and terrifying.

  He was incapable of compassion and remorse, and because as a child he’d been tormented by hunger on a daily basis, he was determined now to gorge himself and apply his quick intelligence to no aim but ensuring his comfort and establishing his power. He had no need to tell himself, “I deserve all this,” because he never doubted for a second that his privileges and the wealth amassed so quickly were his by right.

  Meanwhile their conscientious, desperate, insecure mother was getting into a mess with her accounts. Eventually, that meant she had to move. In the rue des Pyrénées they took a two-bedroom apartment that looked onto an inner courtyard. Sony’s drawer was stocked with fewer and fewer new clothes.

  So when the two girls, aged twelve and thirteen, arrived for the first time in their father’s enormous house, stricken with emotion and exhausted by the heat, they brought with them the decorous, austere, repressed sadness in which they lived, a sentiment betrayed by their short, simple haircuts, their denim dresses bought too big so as to last longer, and their graceless missionary sandals. It all aroused an overwhelming feeling of disgust in their father, made only worse by the fact that they were neither of them very pretty, as well as suffering from acne and being overweight. As they grew older they shed the extra pounds, but they would always, in a way, look fat to their father, because he was like that: a man deeply shocked and repelled by ugliness.

  That’s why, Norah thought, he’d loved Sony as much as he could love anyone.

  Their younger brother appeared on the threshold of the house. He hadn’t dropped from the poinciana, then still a small and delicate shrub, but had just dismounted from a pony on which he’d been slowly trotting around the garden.

  Dressed in a cream-colored riding outfit and wearing real riding boots, he stood with one foot forward, his riding hat tucked under his arm.

  No smell of rotting flowers clung to his lithe, elegant frame. The nine-year-old boy’s narrow chest was not lit from within by any unusual glow.

  He was simply there, smiling, happy, and magnificent, stretching his arms out to his sisters, as dazzling and carefree as they were dull and serious.

  And Sony treated them with extreme unpretentious kindness throughout their stay, during which, though scared and reproachful, they tasted a life of luxury beyond their wildest imaginings.

  He greeted every remark they made, every question they asked, with a gentle smile and a few noncommittal words, making a joke of it, so they failed to notice that they never got a straight response to anything.

  He remained silent whenever they mentioned their mother.

  He gazed into space and his lower lip quivered slightly.

  But it didn’t last; he quickly became once again the happy, calm, unpretentious, smooth-skinned, almost too gentle boy whom their father would gaze at proudly, obviously comparing him with his two lumpish anxious-looking daughters and telling himself—Norah supposed—that he’d done right in not leaving Sony behind, in removing him from his mother’s baleful influence, which had transformed two amiable little girls into a pair of tubby nuns, particularly since the beautiful woman with the scornful expression and slightly bulging eyes whom he’d married two or three years earlier and who wandered the property silently with a weary, irritated, melancholy, and intimidating air, had yet to give him a child and never would.

  When at the end of three weeks Norah and her sister returned home they were actually relieved to escape a way of life that their loyalty to their moth
er made them feel duty bound to condemn (“Mummy has money troubles,” they’d found the courage to tell their father on learning that Sony was being sent to a prestigious private school, to which he’d responded with a sigh, “My poor dear girls, who doesn’t have money troubles!”). They were also deeply saddened to be leaving Sony behind.

  Standing on the threshold with one foot in front of the other, dressed this time in his basketball uniform, his ball under his arm, and making every effort to smile, Sony had said good-bye, his lower lip trembling slightly, but otherwise maintaining the kind, inscrutably smooth, and submissive air he’d shown throughout.

  Their father was there too, standing up straight beneath the scanty foliage of the young poinciana, looking elegant, his narrow hips turned slightly away.

  He’d laid a hand on Sony’s shoulder, at which the boy had seemed to cringe, almost as if doubling over, greatly surprising Norah, who had thought, He’s afraid of him, but then, before getting into the car to be driven away by Mansour, rejecting the idea, since it bore no relation to anything she’d seen during their stay.

  Because their father, that terrifying, unbending man, had always treated Sony with great kindness.

  He had even shown him some tenderness.

  But then Norah had tried to imagine how distraught her five-year-old brother must have been to have found himself in this unknown country, alone in a hotel with his father, then in this hastily rented house soon invaded by numerous unfamiliar relatives, and how it must have slowly dawned on him that he was embarking on a new existence and that there was no longer any question of his ever returning to live with his mother and sisters in the little apartment in the twelfth arrondissement that up till then had constituted his whole universe.

  She felt very sorry for Sony and no longer envied him his father’s love or the pony in the garden.

  And the life those three lived, grim and solemn, thrifty and deserving, suddenly struck her as free and easy compared with that of Sony, the pampered little prisoner.

  Their mother, hungry for news, listened dejectedly and in silence to the two sisters’ cautious account of what they’d seen and heard.

  Then she burst into tears and kept repeating, “So he’s lost to me, lost!” as if the education and affluence Sony enjoyed was erecting an impenetrable barrier between herself and the boy, were she even able to see him again.

  It was at this time that their mother’s behavior changed.

  She left the hairdresser’s where she’d been slaving away for twenty years or more and began going out in the evening. Although Norah and her sister never suspected it at the time, they would gather years later that their mother must have worked as a prostitute and that this activity, which her outward cheerfulness belied, was the particular form her grief took.

  Norah and her sister would return to their father’s on holiday once or twice.

  But no longer did their mother ever want to be told anything about what they’d seen there.

  She’d assumed a hard, determined look; her face was smooth under her makeup; and whatever the context, with a sarcastic curl of the lip and an angry sweep of the hand, she was given to saying, “Oh, what do I care?”

  This new demeanor and this gritty bitterness enabled her to meet exactly the kind of man she was looking for. She married a bank manager, who like her was divorced and remained her husband to this day. He was an uncomplicated, likable, and well-paid man, very kind to Norah and her sister, even to the point of—at their father’s invitation—taking them with their mother to see Sony all together for the first time.

  Their mother hadn’t seen the boy since he’d left.

  Sony was now sixteen.

  On learning that their mother had remarried, their father wasted no time inviting them, and reserving several nights’ accommodation for them in the town’s best hotel. It was as if—Norah thought—he’d been waiting for their mother to make a new life for herself before he could stop worrying that she’d try to abduct Sony.

  And that’s how they all found themselves, like a big, happy, reconstituted family, Norah and her sister, their mother and her husband, Sony and their father, seated in the hotel dining room eating local delicacies, their father and the new husband discussing calmly, with only a hint of awkwardness, the international situation, while the boy and his mother, sitting close together, shot furtive, uneasy glances at each other.

  Sony was as usual superbly turned out: he wore a dark linen suit; his skin was soft and smooth, and he had a short Afro haircut.

  Their mother’s face wore its new fixed expression. Her mouth was slightly twisted, her heavily lacquered hair was dyed pale blond, and Norah noticed as her mother asked Sony about school and his favorite subjects that she took care with her grammar and syntax, knowing that Sony was now much better educated and more refined than herself, a mortifying and uncomfortable awareness.

  Their father looked at them with a happy air of relief, as if at long last he’d managed to reconcile old enemies.

  Is that what he really thinks now? Norah wondered, cross and astonished. Has he managed to convince himself that it was Sony and our mother all these years who were unwilling to meet?

  Long before, when, wild with grief, their mother had told him on the telephone that if he refused to send Sony to spend the holidays with her she would borrow the airfare to visit her son in his house, their father had said, “If I see you getting off that plane, I’ll slit his throat and mine right before your eyes!”

  But was he really man enough to cut his own throat?

  There he was now, seated at the head of the table, handsome, charming, exquisitely polite, his cold dark eyes shining with love and pride whenever he gazed at Sony’s adorable face.

  Norah noticed that her brother never looked anyone straight in the eye. His affable, impersonal gaze flitted from one person to another without dwelling on any face in particular, and when spoken to he stared fixedly at an invisible point in the distance, without ceasing to smile or to adopt an expression of serious interest in whatever was being said to him.

  He was particularly careful, Norah thought, not to be caught unawares by their father’s gaze. Even then, even when their father looked at him and Sony glanced elsewhere, he seemed to withdraw, to curl up in the depths of his being, where he was safe from every judgment, every feeling that involved him.

  He exchanged a few words with his mother’s husband, and then with her, haltingly, because she had reached the limit of what she dared ask him.

  After the meal they went their separate ways, and although it was a few days before their departure, Sony and their mother never saw each other again and never again would their mother mention him.

  Their father had organized a lavish program of tourism, had hired a guide and a chauffeur for them, even paying for a few extra nights at one of the chalets in his holiday village in Dara Salam.

  All that, however, their mother refused, dismissing the guide and the chauffeur, and bringing forward their departure date.

  She no longer left the hotel. She just went back and forth between her room and the pool, smiling in the same mechanical, distant, very calm way that Sony did, leaving Norah and her sister to entertain the husband, who took pleasure in everything and found nothing to complain about, until the last evening, when, at a loss where to go, they took him to dinner at their father’s, and the two men chatted until two in the morning, parting with reluctance and promising to see each other again.

  That had really annoyed Norah. “He was making fun of you the whole time,” she said to the husband, with a snicker, as they went back to the hotel.

  “What? Not at all. He’s a very nice man, your dad!”

  And Norah immediately felt guilty for her spiteful remark, allowing that it was indeed perfectly possible that their father had genuinely enjoyed the company and that she was simply angry with the two of them for appearing to trivialize her mother’s immense unhappiness, and also that it was her mother, after all, who had accept
ed the unseemly idea to bring her husband to their father’s house in the obscure hope, no doubt, of provoking an almighty row, at the end of which she and Sony would be avenged and their father confounded, his cruelty having been exposed and acknowledged, but ought she not to have understood that this ideal husband was not the sort of person to make a scene?

  Their mother never saw Sony again, never once wrote to him or telephoned him, and never even mentioned his name.

  She and her husband had moved to a house in the outer suburbs. From time to time Norah brought Lucie to see her. She had the impression that since their return her mother had never stopped smiling, a faint smirk that seemed disconnected from her face floating lightly in front of her, as if she’d snatched it from Sony to mask her pain.

  Norah continued passing on to her the odd bits of news she got from Sony or their father—about Sony’s studies in London, or his return to their father a few years later—but it often seemed that their mother, through her smiles and nods, was trying not to listen.

  Norah spoke about Sony to her less and less, then stopped altogether on learning that, after getting a very good degree, he had ended up in his father’s house, and was leading a strangely passive, idle, lonely existence.

  Her heart of course often missed a beat when she thought of him.

  Should she not have gone to see him more often, or made him come and see her?

  Wasn’t he, despite his money and opportunities, just a hapless boy?

  As for Norah, she’d managed to train to become a lawyer. She’d not found life easy, but she’d kept at it.

  No one had helped her, and neither her mother nor her father had ever told her that they were proud of her.

  And yet she bore no grudge and even felt guilty about not going to help Sony in some way.

  But what could she have done?

  A devil had possessed the five-year-old boy and had never let go of him.

  What could she have done?

  That’s what she kept asking herself as she sat on the backseat of the black Mercedes driven by Masseck. As the car moved slowly down the deserted street she gazed in the rearview mirror at her father standing motionless by the gate, waiting perhaps to be alone before lofting himself heavily up again into the deep shade of the poinciana and sitting on the branch stripped and polished by his flip-flops—that was what she kept wondering as she fanned through the official documents stamped everywhere, which her father had given her: had she not, in her carelessness, really let Sony down?