Three Strong Women

by Marie Ndiaye

  And he, Rudy, saw all that without knowing how to convey it to Fanta.

  He contented himself—rather stupidly, he felt—with bowing to each person present, stretching his lips to form a little, quivering, awkward smile.

  He knew at that moment, with a kind of surprised wonder, that he loved her, loved her beyond measure.

  Now he was opening the door of his car and slipping inside, holding his breath.

  It was even hotter, stuffier inside the car than in the phone booth.

  Was he right not to call Fanta again?

  And suppose that she was trying, not to leave but, in her utter misery at his decision to take Djibril to Mummy’s for the night, she was trying to …?

  No, he couldn’t bear even to think of the word.

  “Oh, good little god of Mummy’s, kind little father, help me to see things clearly!

  “Help us, dear God.”

  Couldn’t he just—only for a minute—phone her, wasn’t that, actually, perhaps what she was expecting him to do at this moment?

  No (a small snickering voice murmured), actually she doesn’t care to hear the sound of your voice again until this evening, and what’s more she understands that you feel guilty and are trying somehow to make amends, even though you were only trying to stop taking the blame for all the wrangling on your own frail shoulders, an effort that has no doubt failed to win you any more respect and perhaps has even made her despise you a little more for acting tough only then to lose your nerve and come seeking her forgiveness and consolation after having offended her by telling her—is it conceivable?—to go back where she came from—can you really imagine that …

  As he switched on the ignition he shook his head in denial.

  Such a thing he, Rudy Descas, just couldn’t have said.

  Just couldn’t.

  He couldn’t restrain a little dry laugh.

  Might he have meant—ha! ha!—that she should go back to Manille?

  He was sweating profusely.

  The sweat was falling on the steering wheel and on his thighs.

  When he tried to put the car into first gear, the stick shift jammed.

  The engine stalled.

  He found himself once again wrapped in the silence that had been shattered briefly by the roar of the Nevada’s engine, and he now saw himself as forming a necessary, indisputable, and perfect part of this section of the countryside.

  He was disturbing nothing and no one, and there were no restraints on him.

  He leaned back against the headrest.

  Although he was still sweating, his heart beat less fiercely.

  He had to admit that Manille was, in his rather discreet, provincial way, a successful businessman, and that, even if he’d never gone in for water-skiing or owned any other house but the big villa he’d had built behind the firm’s premises, his manly, but sober, rather elegant, and reserved self-assurance, that particular gentleness he possessed, that of someone who could afford to be gentle because nothing threatened or frightened him, could still attract an upset, confused woman with nothing to do all day, a woman as lost as Fanta was now.

  It’s strange, he said to himself, or perhaps it’s on account of love, that I can’t forgive her, whereas with him, it was as if I understood.

  But stranger still, to tell the truth, I understand her side, too, so much so that were I a woman I could imagine yielding joyfully and easily to Manille’s uncomplicated charm—oh, how well I understand her, and how I hold it against her.

  He was caught unawares by a feeling of panic, by a sort of hallucination, and his heart stopped as he tried to envisage Manille’s bedroom, which he imagined was like the rest of the villa, vast and conventional, filled with the usual expensive trappings of contemporary interior design, and when he gently pushed open the door of this unfamiliar bedroom and saw on the huge bed, in a dazzling light, Fanta and Manille, Manille stretched out on Fanta, Rudy Descas’s wife, Manille groaning softly while his powerful haunches, his centaur’s buttocks, moved in a calm, slow rhythm that brought out the dimples in his hairy flesh, and his head rested on the neck of Fanta, Rudy Descas’s wife, the only woman Rudy Descas had ever truly loved.

  Or he could see on this bed the hindquarters of a no less vigorous man with a horse’s head panting as he lay on top of Fanta—should he kill this monster, shouldn’t he at least despise him?

  And, under Manille’s much more considerable bulk, what novel and mysterious things could she be feeling, of which he’d never know?

  Rudy was a lean, delicate man, narrow shouldered yet robust, he liked to think, but Manille—he shook his head—he didn’t want to know anything about that.

  And he shook his head again, alone at the wheel of his stationary vehicle, in the silence throbbing with heat, and he felt trapped, torn by the same deeply frustrating fear that had left him transfixed, mesmerized, able to reply with only a hideous, weird little smile when someone (Madame Pulmaire, or Mummy, perhaps) had in the drawing room of some house he was visiting (so wouldn’t it have been a client’s, then?) revealed to him in a whisper what Fanta and Manille were up to, this nasty suggestion wiping the silly smirk off his face, as he could see in the mirror of the unidentified drawing room in which he stood with his legs apart, riveted now by how silly and bizarre he looked, but anything was preferable to the sight of that nasty mouth with its acrid breath that took pleasure in robbing Rudy Descas’s innocence, his lover’s credulity, anything was preferable to the spiteful tone of impotent anger (well, it must have been Mummy, because neither Madame Pulmaire nor a customer could have discussed the affair with as much animosity) summoning him to action, to spurn a woman like that.

  What else could this indignant person, in a tone of such sweet reason, be suggesting (oh, it was certainly Mummy), except that any man with a remaining shred of dignity should not, could not, penetrate the very body in which there still reposed a sacred liquor, the centaur’s sperm?

  He could have answered, with a snicker, “No risk of that, I haven’t been sleeping with Fanta for a long time, or, rather, she’s not been sleeping with me.”

  But he could also have replied, with a cry of despair, “But it was you, Mummy, who got me taken on at Manille’s, it was you who went and begged him to give me a job! Had it not been for that, he’d never have met her!”

  But he had no recollection of having opened his mouth, frozen as it was in a slack, feeble rictus.

  He could see himself again, his own impassive face in the mirror, and just under it the back of the head of this woman who was still talking, still trying to drown him in vile, sneaky appeals to his male honor, and hadn’t he then thought that a simple blow to that head, with its short, dyed blond hair, would free him from this torment, hadn’t he seen himself striking Mummy to shut her up, shouting at her perhaps, just before she lost consciousness, “What do you know of honor, eh, and Dad, what did he know of it?”

  But he didn’t want to think about it anymore.

  It was humiliating and pointless and made you feel grubby, as if you were emerging from a recurring, interminable, stupid dream: you’re only too familiar with every painful stage of it, and even while plunged in it you know that you’re not going to be allowed to skip a single episode.

  He didn’t want to think about it anymore.

  He switched on the ignition again and put the car straight into second gear.

  The engine protested and spluttered, then, slowly, the Nevada began to move forward, with fits and moans from every part of its ancient carcass but, he said to himself with some satisfaction, rather spunky, all things considered.

  He wouldn’t think about that anymore.

  He lowered the window and, steering with one hand, let his left arm hang over the hot side of the car. He could occasionally hear the melting surface of the asphalt crackling under his tires.

  How he loved that sound!

  He was now experiencing a gentle, delightful feeling of euphoria.

  No, by Mummy’s goo
d little god, our kind little father, he wouldn’t think about the mortifying past anymore but only about making himself worthy of the love Fanta would feel for him again if he cared to make the effort, and didn’t he just, as heaven was his witness, high, bright, and scorching hot this very morning. Why, for once, shouldn’t the best be Rudy Descas’s for the asking, the finest and the most certain of the innumerable promises offered by the sun this fine spring morning?

  He suddenly burst out laughing.

  The sound of his own voice enchanted him.

  After all, he thought, almost surprised, he was alive, still young, and in perfect health.

  Could Gauquelan himself, that crook whose loathsome sculpture he was circling around at that moment (and today he found the strength not to look at it), with his ill-gotten gains, could he claim as much?

  Certainly not.

  Alive, alas yes, but the photo Rudy had seen in the paper showed a man with a rather puffy, scowling face, a receding hairline, a tuft of graying hair on top, and, curiously, a gap in his front teeth, and it had occurred to Rudy then, as he now recalled, feeling slightly ashamed, that a man who got paid a hundred thousand euros for a hideous piece of sculpture should surely have been able to avoid the cameras until he got his teeth fixed.

  The manner of Gauquelan’s existence was as nothing compared with Rudy’s own impressive vitality, which he—Rudy—felt throbbing in his every muscle as if he were a horse (or a centaur), a big, proud, young beast, the whole purpose of whose existence was in being a superb specimen, his spirit never again to be seized by those dreams that leave you with a pasty mouth and stale breath, any more than the spirit of a horse (or a centaur) would be.

  Was Mummy alive?

  After the rotary, without intending to, he accelerated sharply.

  He’d no business thinking about Mummy at that moment, nor about his father; he (his father) was well and truly dead, and no one would ever remotely have thought of comparing him to a horse (or a centaur) with rippling muscles under his damp skin—damp as Rudy’s cheeks, neck, and forehead were in the un-air-conditioned car, a reaction of his system, he recognized, to his having evoked, however briefly and insignificantly, his long-dead father, the terror and astonishment always provoked in him by the thought of that white-boned skeleton formerly called Abel Descas, its very white bones and the hole neatly drilled through its skull, lying, Rudy imagined, in the hot sandy soil of the cemetery at Bel Air.

  He parked the Nevada in the parking lot of Manille & Co.

  Before getting out, he carefully mopped his face and neck with the towel that he kept on the backseat for this purpose and that had eventually absorbed the smell of the car.

  Each time he promised himself he’d change it, then he’d forget, and so his annoyance was intense when he reached for the towel and found this nauseating rag once again, because it seemed to him that this minor testimony to his own negligence, obliging him to wipe his face with a dubious piece of cloth, represented his whole current existence in its vaguely grimy disorder.

  But this morning, just as he hadn’t managed to suppress a reflex of irritation in wiping his face, he succeeded in forcing himself to let his eyes wander over the different cars parked around him and evaluate them in the most neutral manner possible, without succumbing, as he usually did, to the bitter, violent feelings of envy that he found so degrading.

  So that’s what my colleagues and customers drive, he said calmly, almost ritually, to himself, as he itemized the black and gray Audis, Mercedeses, and BMWs that made the parking lot of a kitchen showroom on the outskirts of a small provincial town look like a grand hotel.

  Where do they get so much money?

  How are they able to extract from their hardworking existence the sums needed to buy such cars? I’ve not the slightest idea.

  What’s their scheme, what knack do they possess, what’s the trick? I’ll never figure it out.

  And other pointless questions like that swirled around in his furious mind as he slammed the door of the Nevada.

  But he’d been able, this morning, to resist the monotonous surge of covetousness.

  With a light step he crossed the lot and dimly recalled feeling much the same during an earlier time in his life when he always walked like that: light of foot and at peace with himself—yes, always like that, and looking serene and benevolent—that was the face he always showed to the world.

  It all seemed so remote to him that he almost doubted it had anything to do with him—him, Rudy Descas—and not his father or someone else he’d dreamed about.

  How long ago was all that?

  He thought it must have been when he returned to Dakar alone, without Mummy, who’d stayed in France, shortly before he met Fanta.

  He thought too, with a start, because it was a detail he’d forgotten, that for him, then, it used to seem natural, that inclination to be good and kind.

  He stopped suddenly in the sun-drenched parking lot.

  The smell of hot tar filled his nostrils.

  He had quite a surprise when he looked not at the sky but at the bitumen under his feet.

  Had he really been that lighthearted man, at peace with himself, who strode along the placid streets of Le Plateau, where he’d rented a small apartment, looking, with his fair hair and pleasantly regular features, hardly any different from the other white-faced types who he passed in the neighborhood but whose business ambitions and drive he in no way shared?

  Could he really have been that man, Rudy Descas, who aspired, with calm self-scrutiny, to show himself good and just, and even more (oh, how that made him blush with surprise and embarrassment) to always distinguish good from evil in himself, never favoring the latter even when it appeared under the mask of good as happened all too often here when one was a white man with deep pockets and could for very little buy any kind of labor involving great patience and endurance?

  He started walking again, slowly, toward the double glass doors of the building, adorned by the name “Manille” lit up in huge letters.

  His legs had stiffened, as if suddenly robbed of the gift of lightness.

  Because he wondered for the first time whether, in persuading Fanta to follow him to France, he hadn’t knowingly looked the other way and allowed evil every latitude to take possession of him, and whether he hadn’t indeed savored the feeling of acting wickedly while not appearing to do so.

  Until now he’d only asked himself the question in practical terms: Had it been a good idea or a bad idea to bring Fanta here?

  But oh no, it wasn’t that, it wasn’t that at all.

  Put like that, the question was a ploy used by the evil comfortably lodged in him.

  And, in that radiant period of his life when every morning, with an innocent heart, he left his small modern apartment in Le Plateau, he was still able to recognize the bad impulses and deceitful thoughts that sometimes entered his mind and to shoo them away by thinking the opposite, by which effort he was able to find relief and happiness, since he had only one profound desire, to be capable of loving everything around him.

  But now, now—the extent of his bitterness almost made his head spin.

  If he had been that man, what had happened to him, what had he done to find himself now inhabiting such an envious and brutal personage, his disposition to universal love having shrunk to encompass only the person of Fanta?

  Yes, what, indeed, had he done to himself to unload, now, all this untapped, unbidden love upon a woman who had gradually wearied of his incompetence, at an age, his mid-forties, when such faults (a certain unfitness for sustained work, a tendency to entertain fantasies and to believe in schemes that were hazy at best) can no longer hope to be met with indulgence and understanding?

  Not only, he said to himself as he pushed open the glass door, through which, with a cowardly sense of relief, he could discern Manille’s imposing shape, surrounded by a couple of people, customers probably, to whom Manille was demonstrating the main features of a floor model of one
of his kitchens, not only had he willingly connived in the lies and corruption entering and taking possession of his soul, but on the pretext of caring for her he’d enclosed Fanta in the cold, gloomy prison of his love—for such was his love at present, endless distress, like a dream from which you struggle in vain to awake, a rather degrading and pointless dream, wasn’t that what Fanta must be enduring, and wasn’t that how he himself would feel as the victim of such a love?

  Once inside he walked purposefully toward the staff offices, even though he couldn’t stop his upper lip from trembling.

  He knew that this tic made him look unpleasant, almost nasty, and that it was always fear that provoked it.

  At such moments his lip curled back like a dog’s.

  And yet he had no need to worry about Manille—did he?

  Out of the corner of his eye he watched the slow progress of the little group, and worked out that he could reach the back offices before Manille and his customers got close.

  Afterward, he said to himself, Manille will have forgotten seeing me arrive so late.

  All he had to do was keep out of Manille’s way for an hour or so, and all would be well.

  He had time to notice that Manille looked good this morning, in his neatly ironed black T-shirt and well-cut pale jeans.

  His thick gray hair was combed back, and his complexion was dark, almost golden.

  Rudy could hear Manille’s slightly husky voice as he opened and shut a cupboard door, and he was sure that the customers, a drably dressed middle-aged couple with thick legs, were without realizing it succumbing to Manille’s insistent charm as he fixed his dark eyes intently on theirs, as if on the verge of passing on an important piece of personal information or making a flattering comment that he was only holding back for fear of embarrassing them.

  He never gave the impression, Rudy had often observed, of trying to sell something.

  Without seeming to make any effort in that direction, he managed to create the illusion of a friendly, intimate relationship that would last well beyond the eventual sale of the kitchen, which had merely been the fortuitous pretext for the birth of a friendship, and often it turned out that the tactic was quite sincere: Manille went on visiting his customers just for the pleasure of their company, and as they chatted he never abandoned the subdued tone of ardor, so delicate and restrained, that had led to the sale in the first place, so that, Rudy thought, the manner Manille adopted to overcome a client’s resistance ended up being his true way of speaking, the only one ever heard—that smooth, slightly hoarse timbre and that restrained fervor that, it must have seemed to people, would have moved him, if he couldn’t control himself, to sing their praises, to share secrets with them, even to hug them.