by Marie Ndiaye
“I don’t know,” Fanta said in a low, cold voice.
But he was convinced that she was only answering in the least compromising manner possible, and that to minimize the chance of committing herself to anything involving him in any way, be it by the merest exchange of words, had become the sole criterion of her frankness.
Besides, if he wanted (but did he really?) to be straight with himself, he thought, looking up again at the distant sunny outline of the chateau, which he sensed more than actually saw, knowing it so well that he often dreamed about it, in the course of those monotonous, cold, gray dreams he regularly had, full of precise details of which he could only have heard secondhand, though he’d no memory of doing so, from Mummy, who had perhaps filled in once or twice for the previous owners’ cleaning woman (the maid who did everything, preparing and serving the meals, the vacuuming, the ironing), and passed on her observations in that tiresome and degrading way Mummy had of feigning to scorn everything she described (the many unused fully furnished rooms, the fine china, the silver) while her droopy little pinkish eyes shone clear with frustrated longing—and now his own limpid pale eyes were once again raised toward the outline of the chateau as if that large, drab, cold house (no longer gray, perhaps …), as if it ought to be sending him any moment some resounding and definitive answer, but what could the property possibly have to tell him except that it would never be his or Fanta’s or Djibril’s, so, if he wanted to be straight with himself …
“By the way,” he said, “what if I picked Djibril up from school this evening?”
“If you like,” she replied, with an undertone of disquiet in her bland, cold voice that immediately set his teeth on edge.
“It’s been a hell of a while since I last picked him up from school, hasn’t it? He’ll be pleased not to have to catch the school bus for once.”
“Oh, I don’t know, but yes, if you like.” Her voice was wary, constrained by anxious calculation. “Make sure you get there early, otherwise he’ll already have gotten on the bus.”
“Yes, yes.”
… straight with himself, but if he’d really wanted to be straight with himself, he had to admit he wouldn’t have believed in Fanta’s sincerity, even having suddenly noticed in her voice those honest, genuine former tones of the young woman with winged feet and passionate, focused aspirations whose determination and intelligence had already taken her from the small peanut stall that as a little girl she set up every day in a Colobane street to the Lycée Mermoz, where she went on to teach French literature and prepare the children of diplomats and wealthy businessmen for the baccalaureate, this tall, upstanding woman with a domed head and close-cropped hair who’d looked him straight in the eye with completely uninhibited ease when, on an impulse, very unusual for him, he’d stroked the delicate, quivering skin between her shoulder blades lightly with the tip of his finger, something that he’d never before even …
“Fanta,” he breathed, “is everything all right?”
“Yes,” she said, cautiously, mechanically.
It wasn’t true. He knew it, he could feel it.
He couldn’t believe what she said anymore.
He nonetheless persisted in asking questions that to his mind demanded honest answers—intimate questions, questions about feelings—as if the stubborn frequency with which he conducted these interrogations might one day wear down Fanta’s current determination not to let anything slip and drop her guard.
“I’m taking Djibril to sleep at Mummy’s place tonight,” he said abruptly.
“Oh no,” she moaned, almost sobbing, unable to contain herself. Rudy felt pain gripping his heart for having made her so upset, but what else could he do?
Should he deprive Mummy of the company of her only grandchild simply because Fanta couldn’t stand being separated from him?
What else could he do?
“She hasn’t had him over much for quite a while now,” he said in a kindly, comforting tone that sounded in the earpiece so deceitful to him that he pulled the receiver away from himself in embarrassment, as if someone else, who ought to be ashamed at disguising his hypocrisy so badly, had said it.
“She doesn’t like Djibril!” Fanta blurted out.
“What? You’re completely mistaken, she adores him.”
He was speaking cheerfully and forcefully now, even though he didn’t feel in the least cheerful or forceful, not in the least bright eyed and bushy tailed, having emerged from the melancholy, depressing, and painful dream (but a dream curiously not without a glint of hope) that every conversation with Fanta now resembled.
The sonorous tones of cheerful prattle from times past floated around them.
He could discern their obscure chirping and—as his skull throbbed and the hair stuck to his forehead in the stifling heat of the phone booth—it made him nostalgic, as if he had happened to hear a recording of deceased old friends, loving, very dear friends of old.
“Oh god of Mummy’s, oh good little father who’s done so much for Mummy, if she’s to be believed, grant that Fanta …”
Even if he’d never paid much attention to Mummy’s pious enthusiasms—greeting her professions, prudent signs of the cross, and muttered invocations with a perpetually irritated, ironic smirk—he’d retained, almost in spite of himself, as a result of hearing it said so often, that the moral rectitude of a prayer was the necessary, if insufficient, condition of its fulfillment.
Where was that quality in what he was asking for?
“Mummy’s nice little god, compassionate father, I beg you …”
Where was it, his honesty, he wondered, from the moment he knew (or a second Rudy within him did: a younger, sterner, more scrupulous Rudy, a Rudy as yet unspoiled by setbacks, by want of understanding and compassion, and by the need to cobble together good reasons and poor excuses for himself), where was it, the truth of the soul, he wondered, knowing full well that in proposing to take Djibril to Mummy’s for the night, he wasn’t thinking about Mummy, that uppermost in his thoughts wasn’t any concern for her pleasure and happiness, but solely his own peace of mind in thereby preventing Fanta …
Because, surely, she’d never run away without the boy—or would she?
He could only judge from what she’d done before, but if, that first time, she’d taken Djibril with her, had Manille asked her to?
Why would Manille have wanted to be saddled with the child if there’d been any chance that Fanta would have abandoned Djibril to his father’s custody?
No, no, she wouldn’t leave without Djibril. Besides, the boy was afraid of his father, and Rudy, in a sense, was afraid of him too, because the child, his own son, didn’t like him, even if, in his young mind, he was unaware of the fact, and furthermore he didn’t like the house, his father’s house …
A fresh surge of anger was threatening to drown out all rational thought. He wanted to shout into the receiver, “I’ll never forgive you for what you’ve done to me!”
He could just as well have shouted, “I love you so much, there’s no one else I love in the whole wide world, everything must go back to what it was before!”
“Okay, see you this evening,” he said.
He hung up, downcast, exhausted, and feeling stunned, as if—after a long, melancholy, agonizing dream—he had to adjust his consciousness to the ambient reality, a reality that for him, he thought, was itself frequently just a cold, interminable, unchanging nightmare; it seemed to him that he moved from one dream to another without ever finding the exit, some sort of awakening that he modestly saw as putting things in order, as organizing rationally the scattered elements of his existence.
He left the phone booth.
It was already the hottest hour of the morning.
A glance at his watch informed him that he’d be later than he’d ever been before.
So what, he said to himself, annoyed, though slightly anxious at the prospect of finding himself once again face-to-face with Manille.
If Manille had bee
n unable to show him an iota of compassion, merely irritation and impatience, everything would have been much simpler.
Should he not detest Manille?
Wasn’t it shameful and deeply regrettable that the kindness, the pity, and (albeit barely perceptible, despite it all) the arrogance that he read in his boss’s eyes prevented his feeling the hatred he thought any normal person would have cultivated toward the man who …
Still dumbfounded, even though it had all happened two years earlier, he shook his head slowly, pondering the retribution a normal man would have formulated in his mind. It wasn’t as if he was there at Manille’s place, biding his time, just waiting for the ultimate moment to bring down an avenging fist on Manille’s head, and Manille knew this perfectly well too, so he had no fear of Rudy, had never feared him.
“So that’s how it is, eh?” Rudy wondered.
Was it admirable or was it degrading? Who knows?
He thought he could smell the holm oaks in the distance.
It was probably only the memory of that rather sour scent of their tiny silky leaves, but he thought if he breathed in gently he could indeed smell them. It cheered him up and made him almost happy to imagine himself over there, in the chateau, opening the shutters on a clear bright morning and sniffing his holm oaks, smelling the tart odor of the tiny silky leaves, every one of which belonged to him, Rudy Descas—but he would never have scalped those poor old trees as they had dared to do, those Americans or Australians who’d had the impertinence, according to Mummy, to believe themselves sufficiently French to produce the same excellent wine that …
The thought of Mummy, of her pale, bitter face, snuffed out his cheerfulness.
He was tempted to go back into the phone booth and ring Fanta again, not to check that she was still in the house (Though come to think of it, he thought, suddenly anxious), but to promise her that everything would be all right.
There, in the heat heavy with the smell of the holm oaks, he felt carried away by love and compassion.
Everything would be all right?
Based only on some vision of himself opening the shutters in their bedroom on the first floor of the chateau?
No matter, he would have liked to talk to her, to inspire her with the confidence filling his heart at this moment, as if, for once, the reality of existence coincided exactly with his daydreams, or was just about to do so.
He made as if to go back to the phone booth.
He was upset at the thought of getting back into the stifling Nevada, which smelled vaguely of dog (it sometimes seemed to him that the vehicle’s previous owners had used it as a kennel for their dog, many of whose hairs remained trapped in the felt of the seats).
He decided, however, against calling Fanta again.
He no longer had the time, did he?
And if, once again, she failed to answer, what conclusions could he draw from that, and what good would it do?
And anyway he no longer really had the time.
But she wouldn’t run away without Djibril, and the child was out of reach for the moment, wasn’t he?
He cursed himself for working that out.
He almost felt then like defending Fanta against himself and his nasty calculating ways.
Oh, what could he do, considering that he loved her?
“What else can I do, dear God, good little father, good, kind little god of Mummy’s?”
He was convinced that the flimsy, very flimsy and unstable, armature of his existence held together and only barely because, after all, Fanta was present, present more like a small hen whose clipped wings prevented her from flying over the lowest fence than like the brave independent human being whom he’d met at the Lycée Mermoz. He could hardly bear that thought, it made him feel ashamed, and he only managed to countenance it because this dreary state of affairs was merely provisional in his eyes.
It wasn’t just the lack of money—was it?
To what extent did his monthly salary of a thousand euros make him less alluring than someone like Manille?
Yes, yes (standing all alone in the ten o’clock sun, near the scorching hood of his car, and shrugging impatiently), that was true to a large extent, certainly, but what he lacked above all was faith in his own talents, in his good fortune, and in the infinitude of his youth, which once shone in the clear blue eyes he’d inherited from Mummy, which caused that hand, at once caressing and indifferent, to sweep back the lock of fair hair on his forehead, and which …
All that he’d well and truly lost, even though he wasn’t old, even though compared with others he was still almost young, all that he no longer possessed since his return to France: all that must have played an essential part in making Fanta fall in love with him.
If only—he said to himself—he could slough off this harsh, depressing, painful, degrading nightmare and rediscover, even if it only meant moving from one dream to another, the vision of Fanta and himself, bathed in golden light, walking side by side in the streets of Colobane, their naked arms brushing against each other at every step, he, Rudy, tall and tanned, talking in his strong, cheerful voice, striving already, even though he was unaware of it, to ensnare in his web of tender, flattering, bewitching words this young woman with the small shaven head, with the discreetly ironic, direct gaze, who’d pulled herself up to the level of the Lycée Mermoz, where she taught French literature to the children of army officers and prosperous businessmen; those adolescents had no idea, Rudy declaimed in his strong, cheerful voice, of the frightening determination it had required for this woman to be able to stand before them, this woman with the winged feet and the delicate quivering skin on her forehead, no idea of the time and trouble it took her to maintain the only two cotton skirts she possessed, one pink and the other white, always beautifully ironed, which she wore with a tank top, between the straps of which the delicate skin of her back, quivering as if two tiny wings …
He, Rudy Descas, had really been that charming, lighthearted, smooth-talking young man whom Fanta had eventually taken home, to the apartment with green walls where they all lived.
He remembered how his heart skipped a beat when he entered the room suffused with shimmering, vaguely funereal light.
He’d first climbed a cement staircase behind her and then walked along a gallery entered through doors with peeling paint.
Fanta had opened the last one and the greenish half light, accentuated by the window shutters, had seemed to engulf her.
He’d seen nothing but the white patch of her skirt as she’d entered the room before coming back and inviting him in, having checked, he’d supposed, that the apartment was in a fit state to be seen.
And he’d moved forward, not without shyness and some embarrassment, but chiefly it was gratitude that suddenly rendered him speechless.
Because in the greenish half light Fanta’s calm expression said, Here’s where I live, this is my home.
Her expression accepting the judgment of a foreigner with a white face (in that respect his tan made no difference!), blond hair, and smooth white hands on her well-kept but very humble home—accepting it, and together with it, the potential effects, the possible feelings of uneasiness or condescension.
Rudy could sense, could almost hear, how this woman took in everything, how shrewd, lucid, and immensely perceptive she was, but also how profoundly indifferent, out of pride, to how a man with such a white forehead, such white, smooth hands, might view her home.
She must have taken him, with his blond hair and fine words, for a wealthy, spoiled young man.
But she’d invited him home, and now, with a gesture and a word or two she was introducing him to her uncle, to her aunt, to a neighbor, and to others as well, all of them gradually revealed by the pale light, sitting at the back of the room on bare seats or threadbare velvet armchairs, silent, motionless, with a vague nod acknowledging Rudy, who felt out of place, not knowing what to do with his big hands, their pallor conspicuous in the dim light as his white forehead and long, sm
ooth forelock must have been too.
He longed to fall at Fanta’s feet and swear to her that he wasn’t what he seemed—the tanned and ultra-confident type who spent every weekend at his Somone villa.
He longed to fall on his knees and embrace Fanta’s slender legs and tell her how grateful he was and how much he loved her for having allowed him to see what he had just seen: this austere room, these silent people who didn’t smile or pretend to be thrilled to meet him, this difficult, frugal life of hers, of which people at the Lycée Mermoz, where she arrived every day on her winged feet, in her clean, starched pink skirt, or in her white one, probably knew nothing, and of which the children of diplomats and the children of entrepreneurs, who went water-skiing in Somone every weekend—that whole group of people, who, he longed to tell her, he couldn’t abide, even though occasionally he envied them in secret—no doubt knew even less.
Oh, they certainly knew nothing about her or about the verdigris room with its heavenly glow.
The midday light now shone through the shutters on the face of the aunt, the clasped hands of the uncle, both of whom seemed to be waiting for Rudy to leave so that they could go back to what they’d been doing.
