Three Strong Women

by Marie Ndiaye

  The sweat poured down his face and neck at the very thought that she might indeed do what he’d so horrendously proposed.

  Then, almost immediately, he began to shiver violently.

  With a feeling of childlike despair he then sought to extricate himself from that cold, interminable, monotonous dream in which Fanta was about to leave him because he had in a way—even if he couldn’t remember the exact words—ordered her to, and in which nothing more horrible could now befall him. He knew that, didn’t he, because she’d already done so, already tried to do so: isn’t that true, Rudy Descas?

  He hastily banished the thought, the intolerable memory of Fanta’s flight (as he called it, to soften the blow of what had been nothing less than an act of betrayal), in favor of the monotonous cold of the interminable bad dream that, to his great surprise, his life had become, his poor, poor life.

  He opened the door of the phone booth and slipped in among the walls covered in scribbles and graffiti.

  In much the same way as he was reduced to driving around in a worn-out Nevada, he’d recently had to cancel his cell-phone contract, and this decision, which—given the tightness of his monthly budget—he should have been content to deem a not unreasonable one, seemed to him inexplicable, strange, and unjust, a form of self-inflicted cruelty, because apart from himself he knew of no one, and had never heard of anyone, who’d had to give up their cell phone.

  Even the Gypsies, who lived in a permanent encampment they’d set up below the little road, just beyond the vines planted along the slope, the green mossy roofs of whose caravans were surely visible—Rudy mused—to the new inhabitants (American or Australian) of the small chateau, even those Gypsies who were often to be seen loitering in front of Manille’s shopwindow, gazing intently and scornfully at the model kitchen displays, even they didn’t have to do without a cell phone.

  So how come—he wondered—all those people manage to have lives so much better than his?

  What kept him from being as smart as the others, when he was no stupider than they were?

  He, Rudy Descas—having long believed that his lack of shrewdness and cunning was amply compensated for by his unique sensibility, the spiritual, idealistic, and romantic scale of his ambition, by its very imprecision—was now beginning to wonder if such singularity had any value, if it wasn’t ridiculous, secretly contemptible, like a virile man confessing to a penchant for spanking and cross-dressing.

  He was trembling so much he had to have three goes at dialing his own number.

  He let it ring for a long time.

  Through the glazed walls of the phone booth his eyes wandered over the small, blond, tranquil chateau nestling in the cool shade of the dark oaks and their dense, well-kept foliage. Then his gaze returned to the glass panel, in which he contemplated his own transparent, sweaty face, as if it were imprisoned in matter, the wild stare, the blue of his eyes darkened by anguish, and in his mind’s eye he saw clearly the room in which the telephone was vainly ringing, ringing, the undecorated living room of their small house frozen in its hopeless, unfinished state, with its unpointed wall tiles, its ugly brown flooring on which stood their poor furniture: an old assortment of varnished wood and flowered upholstery (a hand-me-down from one of Mummy’s bosses), the garden table covered with a plastic tablecloth, a pine dresser, the small bookcase overflowing with books, all the sad ugliness of a place that neither an indifference to one’s surroundings nor the gay liveliness of its inhabitants could illuminate or soften. It all constituted one big eyesore that was never meant to be more than temporary, and Rudy loathed it; he was wounded by it every day, and even now, just imagining it as he stood in the phone booth, he was pained and angered by it, trapped as he was in an interminable nightmare, the unending discomfort of a cold, monotonous dream.

  Where could she be at this hour?

  She’d no doubt, as every morning, walked Djibril to the school bus stop, but she should have been back long since, so where was she, why wasn’t she answering the phone?

  He hung up and leaned against the wall of the phone booth.

  His pale blue short-sleeved shirt was soaked. He could feel it, warm and damp, against the glass.

  Ah, how tiresome, unsettling, and humiliating it all was, how he yearned to hide away and weep once his anger had cooled.

  Could it be, could it be that she’d … taken to heart the words he wasn’t even certain of having uttered and which in any case he was certain of never having formulated inside his head?

  He picked the receiver up again so abruptly that it slipped through his fingers, struck the glass, and dangled at the end of its cord.

  From the pocket of his jeans he pulled out his ancient dog-eared address book and looked up Madame Pulmaire’s number, even though he was sure he had phoned the old bag often enough to know it by heart.

  She wasn’t actually all that decrepit, hardly older than Mummy, in fact, but she put on a vieille dame act and had a conspicuous way of deigning to oblige the complicated and slightly disgusting favors that ever since they’d become neighbors Rudy was wont to request—even while she, no doubt, made it a point of honor never to ask them for anything.

  As he expected, she answered straightaway.

  “It’s Rudy Descas, Madame Pulmaire.”

  “Ah.”

  “I just wanted to know whether … whether you could go and have a peek next door and check that all’s well.”

  He felt his heart thumping madly as he tried to sound casual and relaxed. Madame Pulmaire wouldn’t for a second be fooled by that, and he was prepared to pray, weeping and wailing, to Mummy’s god, that nice little god who seemed to have heard his mother’s prayers and eventually answered them, but instead he simply held his breath, sweating, chilled to the bone despite the stifling atmosphere in the phone booth, feeling suddenly isolated in a static interval (for everything round about him—the foliage of the holm oaks, the leaves on the vines, and the fluffy clouds in the petrified blue sky—seemed frozen in time, in anguished suspension). In this immobility, the only thing that could propel him forward again would be the news that Fanta was happily at home, was still in love with him, and had never stopped loving him.

  That, though, Pulmaire wouldn’t be reporting, would she?

  “What’s the matter, Rudy?” she murmured, in an affectedly gentle tone, “is anything wrong?”

  “No, nothing in particular, I was just wondering … seeing as I don’t seem to be able to get hold of my wife …”

  “Where are you phoning from, Rudy?”

  Knowing that she’d no right to ask, knowing too that he wouldn’t dare tell her to get lost before she’d deigned to heave her useless imposing mound of flesh as far as the Descas household and look through the bare windows or ring the doorbell to prove that this peculiar wife he had, this Fanta, who’d run away once before, had neither run off nor collapsed in a corner somewhere of this sad little half-done-up house—oh, how weary he was of understanding Pulmaire so well, how sullied he felt by acquaintances of that sort.

  “I’m in a phone booth.”

  “Aren’t you at work, Rudy?”

  “No!” he shouted. “What has that got to do with it, Madame Pulmaire?”

  There was a silence; it was protracted, but it betrayed neither offense nor surprise. Old Pulmaire was above such childish reactions, being invested with a weighty dignity that, if Rudy had an ounce of respect, would soon make him contrite.

  He could hear her panting into the receiver.

  And once again, as on that morning when Fanta defied him either by her words or her silence, he couldn’t remember which (but it made him wonder whether he wouldn’t at last tell her that a man can only struggle so long to preserve his manly honor as a father, a husband, and a son, striving every day to prevent the collapse of everything he’s built, endure only for so long the same old reproaches, whether verbal or in the form of a pitiless, bitter look, and smile through it all, not batting an eyelid, as if saintliness too were o
ne of his obligations, would he finally tell her that, he who’d been abandoned by all his friends?), he felt welling up inside him, that warm, almost sweet anger he knew he ought to resist, but that felt so good, so comforting, to let flow, that he sometimes had to wonder: Wasn’t that warm familiar anger all he had left now that he had lost everything else?

  He clamped his lips onto the damp plastic.

  “Would you please just move your fat ass, and go do what I ask!” he shrieked.

  Madame Pulmaire hung up at once, without a word or a sigh.

  He slammed his hand two or three times on the cradle, then once again dialed the telephone number of his home.

  He’d now learned to call it that—“my home”—however annoying and painful that was, but the expression only matched what Fanta clearly felt, what her whole attitude betrayed, that she no longer considered the poor ramshackle house their home but solely his, and not because of its disrepair, he knew, not because of its irremediable ugliness, about which at bottom he knew she couldn’t care less, but because he’d chosen the house, given it its name, and, in a sense, had created it.

  This building, he’d decided, was to be the temple in which their happiness would dwell.

  Fanta was now withdrawing from the house, taking along with her the child, seven-year-old Djibril, with whom Rudy had never felt very comfortable (because he realized, without being able to do anything about it, that he frightened the little guy).

  Fanta was there, having no choice but to be there, but—Rudy thought—she felt no warmth for the house, she refused to lavish any care and affection on her husband’s home, to enfold her husband’s wretched house in an anxious, maternal embrace.

  Taking his cue from her, the child also occupied the house in a noncommittal way, gliding lightly over the floor, sometimes seeming to float above the ground as if wary of all contact with his father’s house, or, for that matter—Rudy thought—with his father.

  Oh—he wondered, dizzy with pain, all his anger spent, the sound of the line ringing in his ear, and beyond the glass the vines and oaks and little baby clouds coming back to life in a negligible wind—what had happened to the three of them that his wife and his son, the only people he loved in the whole world (for he felt only a vague, formal, inconsequential tenderness for Mummy), should look upon him as their enemy?

  “Yes?” Fanta asked, in a tone so flat, so sullen, that at first he almost thought he’d phoned Madame Pulmaire again by mistake.

  He was so taken aback that his heart missed a beat.

  So that was what Fanta sounded like when she was alone at home and didn’t think he was around (whereas whenever she talked to him it was in a voice so full of hardness and rancor that she trembled), so that was how, when she was herself and not with him, Fanta spoke: with such sadness, such glum disappointment, such a melancholy that the accent she’d lost was revived.

  Because, as far back as he could remember, she’d always tried to conceal it, though he never quite approved of her desire to appear to come from nowhere, finding the wish even a little absurd since her features were obviously foreign, not to mention that he found the accent endearing, always connecting it with Fanta’s energy, a vitality greater than his, and with her courageous struggle since childhood to become an educated and cultured person, to escape the never-ending reality—so cold, so monotonous—of poverty.

  What a cruel irony it had been that he, Rudy, had been the one to pull her back into what she, all on her own, had so courageously managed to escape, that he should have been the one to save her from all that, helping her seal her victory over the misfortune of having been born in the Colobane district, not to have buried her alive—still young and beautiful—in the depths of …

  “It’s me, Rudy,” he said.

  “Hold on a moment, there’s someone at the door.”

  Now that she knew who she was speaking to, her voice became a little less sullen, as if some wary reflex had reset her reaction mechanism to prevent her from letting slip any word that he could use against her in the next bout, although to tell the truth, it was his impression that Fanta never talked back but simply met his attacks with a stubborn silence, a distant, rather sulky look, her lips swelling and her chin drooping; he, Rudy, was well aware that she chose only too carefully the little she said, knowing any word of hers could provoke his outburst, just as he knew only too well that what truly angered him was the very indifference—so deliberate, so studied—of her expression, and that the crosser he became the more Fanta walled herself off and the more he got bogged down in his fury at her disingenuous nonchalance, until he couldn’t help spitting in her face those words he would later regret so desolately even if, as on this morning, he couldn’t be sure he’d really uttered them.

  How hopeless it was, he thought, didn’t she understand that a few innocent, simple words from her, spoken with the requisite warmth, would have been enough to make him once more the good, calm, affable Rudy Descas that he’d still been, it seemed to him, two or three years earlier, not very practical minded, perhaps, but curious in outlook and pretty energetic for all that, did she not understand …?

  “I love you, Rudy,” or “I’ve never stopped loving you,” or even—good enough—“I’m fond of you, Rudy.”

  He felt himself blushing, ashamed at these thoughts.

  She understood, all right.

  No entreaty, no fit of anger (but weren’t the two of a piece where he was concerned?), would ever make her say anything like that.

  He was convinced that even if he beat her up and smashed her face down on the rough floor she would still say nothing, being quite incapable even of telling a white lie just to get herself off the hook.

  Through the receiver he could hear Fanta’s footsteps, dragging a little as she made toward the door, then Madame Pulmaire’s high-pitched, anxious voice followed by Fanta’s murmuring. Could he, even at that remove, discern an immense weariness in his wife’s voice, or was it merely the effect of distance and his own shame?

  He heard the door slam, then the lethargic progress of Fanta’s feet once again, that weary, exhausted gait evident these days from the moment she got up, as if the prospect of another day in the house she refused obstinately to concern herself with (“Why do I have to do everything around here?” he often shouted in exasperation) hobbled her slender ankles with their dry, glossy skin, those same ankles that used to dash indefatigably in their dusty pumps or sneakers through the alleyways of Colobane toward the lycée where Rudy had first set eyes on her.

  Back then those ankles had seemed winged, for how else could two slender, rigid, valiant reeds covered in gleaming skin so swiftly and nimbly transport Fanta’s long, supple, youthful, muscular body, how could they, he’d wondered rapturously, but for the help of two invisible little wings, much like those that made the skin between Fanta’s shoulder blades quiver gently below the neckline of her sky-blue T-shirt as he stood behind her waiting his turn in the teachers’ line at the cafeteria of the Lycée Mermoz, how, he’d wondered, as he gazed at the bare nape of her neck, her strong dark shoulders, her delicate tremulous skin …

  “That was the neighbor,” she said laconically.

  “Ah.”

  And since she didn’t add anything, since she didn’t specify, in that tone of gloomy sarcasm she was apt to use, the reason why Madame Pulmaire had called, he surmised that the old girl had covered for him, after a fashion, by saying nothing about his telephone call, probably inventing some mundane excuse, and he felt relieved, though at the same time embarrassed and annoyed, at becoming complicit with Madame Pulmaire, in a way, behind Fanta’s back.

  Suddenly he felt deeply sorry for Fanta, because wasn’t it, if not his fault exactly, at least his doing, that the ambitious Fanta of the winged ankles no longer flew over the reddish muddy streets of Colobane, she who, though still poor, certainly, and held back by many constraints at home but, in spite of all, on her way at the lycée as a full-fledged French literature teacher, wasn’t it hi
s doing, with his lovesick gaze, tanned features, fair hair (a lock of which always kept falling over his eyes), his fine words and serious manner, his promise of a comfortable, intellectual, altogether elevated and attractive way of life, wasn’t it his doing that she’d given up her neighborhood, her town, her homeland (so dry, red, and very hot) to end up unemployed (he should have known that she wouldn’t be allowed to teach French literature here, he ought to have made inquiries and found out what the deal was and what the consequences would be for her) out in a quiet provincial region, dragging her leaden feet through a house a little better, to be sure, than the one she’d left but that she’d refused to grace with a moment’s thought, effort, or scrutiny (she whom he’d seen so patiently, methodically sweeping the rundown two-room apartment with sea-green walls she shared in Colobane with an uncle, an aunt, and several cousins, so patiently, methodically!): if it wasn’t his fault, wasn’t it his doing, Rudy Descas’s, if she seemed trapped and lost in the icy mists of a perpetual, monotonous dream?

  He, with his tanned face, the tremendously persuasive force of his wooing, his suave manners, and the unusual splendor attributed over there to his blondness, that particularly striking quality …

  “Don’t you want to know why I’m calling?” he asked at last.

  “Not really,” she said after a moment, her voice no longer imbued with the listless utter disillusionment that had moved him, but now with something that was almost the opposite, the controlled, metallic, perfect mastery of her French accent.

  “I’d like you to tell me why we had an argument this morning. Listen, I don’t know what started that off, all that …”

  That particularly striking quality of his, he recalled in the ensuing silence, a weakly panting silence that sounded as if he were phoning a far-off country with rudimentary communications, his words needing all these slow seconds to arrive, though it was only the echo of Fanta’s anxious breathing as she pondered the best way of answering his question so as to safeguard he knew not what—he dared not imagine—future interests she might have (a bubble of anger suddenly exploded in his head: what possible future could she envisage that didn’t include him?), yes, he recalled, as he let his eyes wander over the green vines with their tiny bright green grapes, over the green oaks beyond them that the property’s new owners, those Americans or Australians (who fascinated and upset Mummy because she believed the vineyard should have stayed in French hands), had pruned so savagely until the trees looked humiliated, punished for daring to let their shiny, unfading foliage grow so dense as to partially conceal the once grayish, now blond and fresh stonework of what was, after all, only a large house, though of the kind on which people in these parts bestowed the respectful name of “chateau,” yes, that particularly striking impression that his own blondness, his own freshness, made over there …