by Marie Ndiaye
As for the rare strokes of good fortune, he’d gotten into the habit of greeting them with considerable skepticism, and his mistrustful face eloquently expressed his expectation that no one would think of showing him any gratitude for the brief moment of happiness in their house since he’d had nothing to do with it.
Oh yes, Rudy was well aware of that.
He felt this look of almost nauseous suspicion starting to show on his face the moment he suggested to Fanta, for example, or to Djibril, that they go to a restaurant, or out to the canoe club for a spin, then only to see in return (as the child, unable to fathom his father’s secret intentions, turned to catch his mother’s eye) a look of anxiety or slight dismay sweep across those two beautiful faces, so similar, his wife’s and his son’s, at which sight, unable to suppress his resentment, he’d get very cross, saying to them, “What? Aren’t you ever pleased?” whereupon the two beautiful faces of the only creatures he loved on this earth became expressionless, now revealing nothing more than a dismal indifference toward him and all his suggestions for making them happy, and a will to banish silently from their lives, their thoughts, and their feelings this surly and erratic man whom malevolent fate had obliged them to suffer for the time being, like the aftereffects of a bad, shameful dream. Everything that was going to happen to me has happened.
He pulled up sharply on the verge of the little road that every day led him straight to Manille’s headquarters as soon as he’d passed the big rotary at the center of which there now stood a curious statue of white stone, a naked man whose bent back, lowered head, and outstretched arms seemed, with terrified resignation, to be waiting for the fountain to drench him with its water when summer came around again.
Rudy had followed every stage of the fountain’s construction as he drove slowly past the rotary every morning in his old Renault Nevada before turning off toward the Manille offices, and without his noticing it, his mild curiosity had changed into embarrassment, then into a deeper unease when he thought he discerned a close resemblance between the statue’s face and his own (the same flat, square forehead, the straight but rather short nose, prominent jaw, big mouth, and angular chin so typical of proud men who know precisely where each one of their resolute steps is leading, something more comic than pathetic when one was still happy to slave away at Manille’s, huh, Rudy?), and his distress only grew at the sight of the monstrous genitalia that the artist, a certain R. Gauquelan, who lived nearby, had carved on his hero’s crotch, causing Rudy to feel himself the subject of a cruel mockery, so pitiful was the contrast between the statue’s weak, spineless posture and its enormous scrotum.
He tried now to avoid looking at the statue as he drove past the rotary in his worn-out Nevada.
But a malevolent reflex sometimes caused him to glance at the stone face that was his own, at that large, pale figure stooping with fear, and at the testicles out of all proportion with the rest, until he’d come to resent and almost hate Gauquelan, who’d managed, Rudy read in the local paper, to sell his sculpture to the municipality for around a hundred thousand euros.
That bit of news had caused him considerable anguish.
It was, he said to himself, as if while he was still an innocent or just asleep, Gauquelan had taken advantage of him and gotten him to pose for some ridiculous pornographic photo that had made Gauquelan richer as it made Descas poorer and more grotesque—as if Gauquelan had yanked him from a tiresome dream and plunged him into a degrading one.
“A hundred thousand euros, I can’t believe it,” he’d said to Fanta, snickering to mask his distress. “No, I really can’t believe it.”
“What’s it matter?” Fanta must have replied. “How does the fact that others are doing well diminish you?” she asked, with that irritating habit, recently adopted, of appearing to look at every situation with a lofty, magnanimous detachment, abandoning Rudy to his petty envies, which, no more than the rest of it, did she care any longer to share with him.
But she couldn’t stop him from recalling the good years not so long ago—nor reminding her of them, beseechingly—when it was one of their fondest pleasures to sit cross-legged, side by side, like two old chums in their darkened bedroom, sharing the same cigarette, and dissecting with brutal frankness the habits and personalities of their acquaintances and neighbors, and deriving from the very harshness they shared, along with a quite conscious bad faith, laughs they could never—would have never dared—share with others, but that were appropriate enough to two old friends, which, in addition to being man and wife, they genuinely were.
He wanted her to remember this, she who now affected to think that she’d never enjoyed a moment’s fun with him; but (given the groveling manner he’d been reduced to in spite of himself) it was hardly the best move he could have come up with: begging her to notice that, however it had come about, what had been was no more, that the amusing companion he might have been, once, was now probably dead and gone for good, and that it was all his fault, and his alone.
And he always came back to this intolerable aspect, the unspoken accusation grabbing him by the throat—that it was, eternally, his fault—and the more he struggled to free himself from what was strangling him, killing him, the more he shook his heavy head, the angrier he got, and the worse his crimes became.
Indeed, they’d not had any friends for a long while, and the neighbors avoided him.
Rudy Descas couldn’t care less, thinking he had enough to worry about without troubling himself to wonder how his attitude might be putting people off, but he could no longer make fun of them with Fanta, even if she’d been inclined to want him to.
They lived isolated lives, very isolated, that’s what he had to accept.
It seemed that their friends (who were they exactly? what were their names? where had they all gone?) had drifted away as Fanta started to turn her back on him; it was as if the love she’d felt for him had, like some dazzling outsider in their midst, been the only thing they both liked and took interest in, and that once this beautiful witness had vanished into thin air, Fanta and he—but he most of all—had finally come to be seen, by all those friends, in the starkness of their banality, their poverty.
But Rudy couldn’t care less.
He had need only of his wife and of his son—and, as he had already admitted to himself with some embarrassment, he had a lot less need of his son than of his wife, and less need still of his son per se than as some mysterious and seductive extension of his wife, as a fascinating, miraculous development of the personality and beauty of Fanta.
As for these formless shadows, those who’d acted the part of friends, all he missed were their warm, kindly looks assuring him that Rudy Descas was a nice guy, a pleasant man to be with, whose wife from a far-off place loved him unreservedly—in that gaze he was then truly himself, Rudy Descas, just as he saw himself, present in this world, and not the unlikely, discordant figure emerging from some tiresome, shameful dream that no dawn would manage to chase away. What has become of my friends whom I loved so much and was so close to?
He looked at his watch.
He’d only five minutes before the workday started at Manille’s.
He’d stopped in front of the only telephone box around, by the side of the little road that boldly and cheerfully opened up a route between the expanses of vines.
The sun was already beating down.
Not a breath, not a scrap of shade until you got to the tall green oaks far off that surrounded the wine-producing chateau, an austere dwelling with closed shutters.
How proud he’d been when he introduced Fanta to this region where he was born, where they were going to live and prosper, and particularly to this building, the owners of which his mother knew slightly, people who made an excellent Graves that Rudy could no longer afford to drink.
He was obscurely aware that his proud delight in showing Fanta the small dark winery, almost dragging her up the drive and to the gate, up to the evergreen oaks, approaching with a confident air
on the pretext that his mother knew the owners slightly (she must have substituted for their usual cleaner for a few weeks at the outside)—he was obscurely aware that this proud delight came of his having convinced himself, with no reasonable hope, that one day the property would belong to them, to Fanta and to him, that it would be passed on to them in some way, by some means as yet unknown.
This certainty had been unaffected by the three enormous dogs that had shot out from the back of the dwelling and rushed toward them, even given the sensation of pure horror that then seized him—Rudy Descas wasn’t that courageous a man.
Those friends have really let me down.
Hadn’t the unleashed Dobermans wanted to punish him for his presumptuous and absurd desires, for the heavy possessive hand he’d laid on the property, if only in his mind?
The invisible master whistled to the dogs and stopped them in their tracks. Rudy all the while was slowly backing away, holding his arm out in front of Fanta as if to dissuade her from leaping at the three monsters’ throats.
How useless and futile he’d felt on this warm spring day in the bright, tranquil silence that had followed the dogs’ retreat and their own return to the car, how pale and trembling he’d felt beside Fanta, who’d hardly batted an eyelid.
She doesn’t bear a grudge for my putting her in harm’s way, he thought, not because she is a good person, though she is, but because she’d never had an inkling that she might be in danger. Is that, he wondered, what it is to be courageous, whereas all I am is foolhardy?
For, while God was assailing me, I never saw a single one at my side.
Out of the corner of his eye he glanced at his wife’s impassive face and at her big brown irises as she looked down at the gravel path, prodding at it absently with the end of a stick, a hazel twig she’d picked up just before the dogs came charging at them.
Something, something in the natural placidity shown by a woman who was above all an intellectual, something in the seeming unawareness of her own composure on the part of a woman who usually got to the bottom of everything: something in her appeared to defy all understanding, he thought almost admiringly, but also a trifle unnerved.
He gazed at the broad, high plane of her smooth cheek, her thick black eyelashes, her not particularly prominent nose, and the love he felt for this unfathomable woman put the fear of God in him.
Because she was strange—too strange for him, perhaps—and he was wearing himself out trying to prove that he was a lot more than he seemed, that he wasn’t simply an ex-schoolteacher who’d come back to live in the region of his birth, but a man chosen by fate to bring something truly original to fruition.
For Rudy Descas, to be charged with no other duty than that of loving Fanta would have sufficed, indeed he would have welcomed such an obligation with open arms.
But he had the feeling that it was too little for her even if she didn’t realize it, and that, having dragged her from her familiar surroundings, he owed her a lot more than a heavily mortgaged shabby little house in the country and everything pertaining to it, all the pettiness that left him quite beside himself.
And now here he was, standing on the edge of this same cheerful little road, several years after the dogs had nearly torn them both apart (but hadn’t Fanta’s coolness stopped them in their tracks, hadn’t they retreated, perhaps with a growl, intimidated by a vague awareness that she wasn’t like other human beings?), on a balmy May morning very much like this one, except that his discomfiture on that occasion had barely dented his confidence in the future, in their chances of success, in their amazing good fortune, whereas now he knew that nothing would ever turn out right.
They’d driven off in the same old Nevada from which he was now extricating himself, because, yes, it was even then a nasty out-of-date car, painted grayish blue in accordance with the prudent taste of Rudy’s mother, from whom he’d bought it when she’d abandoned it for a Clio, and since he’d been sure at the time of soon being able to get himself something much better (an Audi or a Toyota), he’d encouraged Fanta to view their car as a rather treacherous dirty beast, sad and weary, whose last days they were patiently seeing out, never starting it up except to have it serviced.
He’d treated the poor Nevada with casual disdain, but wasn’t it now a veritable loathing he felt for its very sturdiness, the unfailing courage typical of a good old uncomplicated car, its decency almost, its selflessness?
Nothing could be more wretched, he thought, than to hate one’s car, how did I come to this and can I sink any lower? Oh yes, I can, he told himself, since that was nothing compared to what he’d said to Fanta that morning before leaving for work at Manille’s, taking the very same route that once used to cut a merry path through the vines …
What had he said to her exactly?
The wind was blowing in front of my door and it bore them away.
He left the car door open and stood there, his knees knocking, stunned by the extent of the damage he’d very probably caused.
You can go back where you came from.
Was it possible?
He smiled weakly, nervously, unamused—no, Rudy Descas wouldn’t speak like that to the woman he so ardently wished to be loved by once again.
He raised his eyes and shielded them with his hand. Sweat was already dampening his forehead and the fair hair covering it.
Fair too was the world around him on this mild, clean morning, likewise the walls of the small chateau over there, which some foreigners (Americans or Australians, thought Mummy, ever alert for news that would feed her penchant for voluptuous lamentation) had recently bought and restored, and so too the patches of light that danced beneath his eyelids whenever he blinked—if only they would flow at last, those tears of anger he felt weighing heavily within, pressing against his eye sockets.
But his cheeks stayed dry and his jaw remained clenched.
He heard behind him the roar of a car approaching. He crouched down at once behind the door of his own car, not keen to acknowledge the driver, who—given the setting—was very likely an acquaintance, but he straightaway succumbed to a rather doleful fit of the giggles at the thought that he was the only person in these parts who drove a blue-gray Nevada and that the vehicle betrayed the presence of Rudy Descas as surely as the silhouette of Rudy Descas himself would have done, indeed even more so, since at a distance Rudy Descas could well have looked like someone else.
For it seemed that everyone could afford to buy a car less than ten to twelve years old, everyone except him, and he couldn’t understand why.
When he stood up he realized he couldn’t now avoid being late for work, so he’d have to come up with a fairly fresh excuse as he passed through Manille’s office.
That thought was vaguely satisfying.
He knew that Manille was tired of him, of his frequent lateness, and of his grumpiness—at least that’s what Manille, a naturally affable and commercially astute man, called it whenever Rudy made it clear that keeping his own counsel figured among the basic rights that he as a poorly paid employee was prepared to defend fiercely, and although in some ways Rudy thought quite highly of Manille, he was actually glad that Manille, one of those typically pragmatic, narrow-minded men who were astonishingly gifted, almost talented within the extremely narrow limits of their faculties, didn’t think particularly highly of him.
He knew that Manille would have liked and respected him, and even excused his difficult personality, had Rudy shown some skill at getting customers to purchase new kitchens; he knew that Manille would not have considered a capacity to generate income for the firm as anything more than simple competence in a particular field, just as he knew that in Manille’s eyes he was neither skilled nor clever nor committed, nor even—as if by way of compensating for his utter uselessness—merely pleasant.
Manille only kept him on, Rudy thought, out of a peculiar form of indulgence, a complicated sort of pity, because why, really, would Manille pity him?
What did he know about
Rudy’s precise circumstances?
Oh, very little, since Rudy never confided in anyone, but a wily, amiable, if unpolished sort like Manille must have realized that in his way Rudy was just a square peg in a round hole and that in a crunch it behooved people like him—people who felt perfectly happy with their place in the world—to protect someone like Rudy.
So Rudy understood Manille’s reasoning even if Manille would never have put it quite like that.
Though grateful, he felt humiliated by the situation.
Go to hell, I don’t need you, you crummy little man, to hell with your country kitchens business.
But what’ll become of you, Rudy Descas, when Manille, genuinely upset and sincerely sorry but unable to conceal the fact that you brought it all upon yourself, finally shows you the door?
He was sure it was his Mummy that he owed his job to, though she would never have admitted having gone to talk to Manille (or that she’d had to beg him, the corner of her drooping eyelids damp and pink, her long nose red with shame at what she was asking of him), or confessed that the reason Rudy had had to seek work in the first place was so painful he couldn’t summon up the courage to raise the issue with her.
Yeah, I couldn’t care less about Manille.
How could he waste time thinking about Manille when he couldn’t recall his exact words to Fanta that morning, which he should never have uttered in the first place, because it was clear that if she decided to take them literally, they would rebound on him in the most terrible way imaginable, and that he would achieve the precise opposite of what for some time now he’d been striving for.
You can go back where you came from.
He was going to phone her and ask her to repeat the exact words he’d used during their furious quarrel and to tell him what had sparked it.
It wasn’t possible he’d said that to her.
His belief that he had, in fact, came from his tendency to feel guiltier than he really was, to accuse himself where she was concerned of the worst, because she was incapable of nasty thoughts or duplicitous designs, being so helpless and—quite rightly—so disappointed, so disappointed!
