Three Strong Women

by Marie Ndiaye

  He affected a sneering tone, but he suddenly felt almost as jealous, wretched, and disoriented as he had been when, at the age of no more than three or four, he’d seen Mummy return every Wednesday with this bigger boy about whom he knew nothing and who—he hadn’t realized until this moment—was none other than Manille. He’d had to put up with the giant shadow of the boy towering over him, with his golden legs emerging from his shorts like two pillars barring his path toward Mummy. So that was Manille!

  He couldn’t recall the boy’s face, only the two strong legs at the level of his own face, and between them Mummy’s barely visible features.

  So why had it seemed that the atmosphere in the house always changed dramatically whenever the boy entered, that it became at once livelier and more effervescent, and that with barely contained excitement Mummy would start talking and moving faster, before proposing, as if suddenly inspired, to make pancakes? Why had it always seemed to him that this boy with the sturdy legs and deep voice could lift Mummy out of the boredom that the mere presence of Rudy failed to dispel and perhaps even exacerbated?

  It was hard to escape from Rudy, and Rudy was sometimes a real drag, whereas the little neighbor of about nine or ten never asked for anything and saw Mummy as his salvation. She for her part failed to notice that the boy’s firm legs were always in Rudy’s face, how those same legs seemed to always move when Rudy did, thereby blocking his way to Mummy.

  Ah, it was him, it was Manille!

  Terribly shaken, Rudy was wriggling more and more in his seat.

  The sunlight, still tinged with the shimmering glow of Cathie’s pink blouse, shone directly on his face through the window.

  He was hot, fearfully hot.

  Manille seemed to be looking at him anxiously.

  Was it not extraordinary that Mummy never reminded him of that period when a big boy, relentless but low key, filled the kitchen with his fateful presence every Wednesday afternoon? Wasn’t it extraordinary that she’d never told him that the lad was Manille?

  Behind his back Mummy and Manille had both shared this secret memory—why, for God’s sake?

  Manille was talking to him.

  Rudy could be in no doubt that Manille represented for Mummy exactly the kind of son she would’ve wanted, but was that a reason for …

  Ah well, what’s it matter, after all.

  He tried to understand what Manille was saying to him in his subdued, mellow voice, but a violent feeling of injustice gripped him at the thought that Manille had always blocked Mummy and that she, for her part …

  Man, was he hot!

  Manille was so positioned that he was in shadow, whereas Rudy was blinded by the sun.

  He then became aware of frantically rubbing his bottom against the chair until it squeaked, causing colleagues at the back of the room to turn around.

  So what was Manille saying about that customer, Madame Menotti?

  Without understanding exactly why, he had a sense of foreboding and unease at the mention of this customer’s name, as if he were aware of having let her down while being unable to guess in what way.

  He thought he was done with Madame Menotti and her pretentious kitchen, the execution of which he’d followed from the outset, having sketched the plans himself, helped her choose the color of the wood, and discussed at length with her what kind of exhaust hood she needed. When it finally occurred to him to wonder why Manille had entrusted the whole Menotti project to Rudy’s unskilled hands, it didn’t take long to find out: Madame Menotti had phoned him at home in the middle of the night to say she’d awoken in a terrible fit of anguish—no, worse, in a hyperventilating fit such as she’d never before experienced—at the thought that the whole design project wasn’t at all to her liking and why couldn’t they simply go back to the original idea and line the walls with the main elements, why could they not go back to the drawing board regarding the entire conception of this kitchen, which, she admitted, spluttering with distress, she wasn’t even sure she really wanted anymore, sitting there in her nightie in her beloved old kitchen, why not forget the whole thing, she felt so bad, so bad.

  It had taken Rudy a good hour to remind her precisely why she’d gone to Manille in the first place: because she could no longer stand the mismatched, outdated furniture and fittings of her present kitchen; then, almost drunk with fatigue and boredom, he’d assured her that her secret longing to see her life transformed, brightened up thanks to the installation of ingenious cupboards and a retractable hood, was not an absurd hope—“Trust me, Madame Menotti,” he’d said.

  He’d hung up, exhausted, but too tense to sleep.

  He’d felt a spasm of hatred toward Madame Menotti, not because she’d awoken him in the middle of the night but because she’d envisaged quite simply canceling weeks of tedious, disheartening work devoted to the attempt to adapt the woman’s complicated, reckless desires to her limited budget.

  Oh, the time he’d wasted in front of the computer seeking ways of including an American countertop or a trash bin that opened automatically into plans she’d approved only to have second thoughts on them, oh, the disillusionment he’d often felt realizing that he had to apply to such trivialities nothing less than his full intelligence, all his concentration and ingenuity!

  It was at that point, perhaps, as he was offering Madame Menotti reassurances in the middle of the night, that he, for the first time—certainly never before so acutely and painfully—that he got the full measure of his world’s collapse.

  He’d gone over with Madame Menotti every aspect of the kitchen, which he found grotesque, useless (built to receive each day many discriminating guests, even though she lived alone and, by her own admission, didn’t much like to cook), since that was his job, that was his life, and she couldn’t have imagined that he had aspired to a university chair or that he’d once considered himself an expert on medieval literature, because nothing showed now of the fine erudition that he’d once possessed and that was slowly fading, slowly buried under the ashes of the worries burned without end.

  Those that are in wedlock resemble the fish swimming freely in the vastness of the sea …

  How could he extricate himself, he’d wondered in despair, cold and lucid, from this unending, pitiless dream that was his life?

  … that comes and goes at will and comes and goes so much that eventually it encounters a creel …

  “She’s expecting you, go at once,” said Manille.

  Could he be referring to Fanta?

  Rudy was sure of one thing, that if Fanta had stopped expecting him, her husband, she wasn’t expecting Manille either. For some reason, Rudy didn’t know why, she’d found Manille a big disappointment.

  Manille turned on his heel.

  “I’ve got to go to Madame Menotti’s, is that it?” Rudy asked.

  Without looking back at him Manille nodded, then returned to the showroom, where he’d left his two customers, a couple, sitting on barstools, their fat legs hanging awkwardly down to the ground, while he’d gone to speak to Rudy.

  From far off the man smiled vaguely at Rudy.

  He held his beret in his lap and Rudy could see, even at that distance, his bald pate shining over his pink forehead.

  “They are in our midst!”

  Might it be, he wondered, that this couple interested in a complete period kitchen in dark wood fitted with wrought-iron cupboard handles and peppered with fake wormholes formed part of the company of angels who, Mummy was certain, visited us regularly and who we could recognize if (thanks to Mummy’s brochures) our souls were made alert to their presence?

  As Rudy smiled back, the man immediately looked away, inscrutable.

  … in which there are several fish that have been caught by the bait within, having found it sweet of smell and good of taste, and when our fish sees it he tries hard to get inside …

  Rudy got up and went over to Cathie’s desk, trying to act natural.

  His anus was still burning terribly.

&nbs
p; He picked up her phone. Cathie pursed her lips but said nothing.

  As a junior salesperson he wasn’t allowed a direct line.

  He dialed his own number and let it ring a dozen or so times.

  He suddenly felt his forehead and hands damp with sweat.

  Fanta couldn’t hear—or chose not to—or else, he thought, she couldn’t answer because she was out or …

  When he put down the phone his eyes met Cathie’s. She was embarrassed, unsettled.

  “It seems Madame Menotti wants to see me,” he said cheerfully.

  But he was in such pain that he felt his upper lip curling into the usual rictus. Unable to stand the burning itch any longer he scratched himself briefly, frenziedly, with one hand.

  “I think that Madame Menotti is hopping mad, Rudy,” Cathie said, rather regretfully, in a low voice.

  “Oh? Why?”

  The old vague impression that he’d fallen down on the job for Madame Menotti, not deliberately but through a negligent failure to pay close attention to his work, made his mouth suddenly feel dry.

  So what had he done, or failed to do?

  Madame Menotti, a lowly bank employee, didn’t have much money. She’d taken out a loan of some twenty thousand euros to finance the purchase of this kitchen, and Rudy had had to juggle with different pieces of equipment taken from several models, some of them sale items, to meet the requirements, which were hardly modest, of this hard-nosed woman who, though well versed in money matters, suddenly affected inability to grasp why her itemized wish list added up to a lot more than she’d borrowed.

  In many ways he’d shown himself to be receptive, committed, on the ball.

  And yet, once the whole order had been placed, a sort of unpleasant aftertaste and a threatening premonition had stayed with him … and circles about so that he finds the way through and goes inside, and trysts that he is in pleasaunce and delyte, as he trysts the others also to be, and once within he cannot go back …

  Oh God, what had he done now?

  Since the start of his employment at Manille’s four years ago (four years of his life!) he’d no recollection of ever having done anything exactly as it should have been done.

  Either through boredom or resentment he’d piled up mistakes and peccadilloes. Some customers, when they came back for an additional purchase, recalled these lapses sufficiently well to tell Manille that this time they wanted nothing to do with Rudy Descas.

  But in Madame Menotti’s case he’d gone to a lot of trouble.

  “How’s your wife?” Cathie asked.

  Startled, he blinked, and wriggled helplessly.

  “Fine, fine.”

  “And the little boy?”

  “Djibril? Fine, yes, I think.”

  Now she seemed to be gazing at him with the same taunting, rather distant smile as the man with the beret shortly before.

  He was seized with panic.

  What was she smiling about in her reddish halo?

  And once within he cannot go back.

  “You’ve really got no idea what Menotti wants from me?” he asked in an offhand way, knowing perfectly well that it was useless to pursue the matter but unable to make up his mind to leave without trying to get some clarification on Madame Menotti’s concerns but also on the incomprehensible trials of his own life, of his whole existence.

  He cannot go back.

  Cathie stared at her screen, conspicuously ignoring him.

  It then struck him that once he’d left the room he wouldn’t get back in, that he wouldn’t be allowed back in, and that people preferred, for a reason he couldn’t discern, not to tell him so just yet—because they were afraid of him, perhaps?

  “I did everything I could for Menotti, you know? Since I began working here I’ve never gone to so much trouble as I have over that blasted kitchen. I put in hours of uncounted overtime.”

  He was calm and he could feel his face radiating the warmth of his calm, light smile.

  The sharp pain in his anus was also subsiding.

  Since Cathie went on stubbornly pretending not to notice his presence, and because he suddenly thought that if he didn’t come back to the office he would perhaps never see her again, he leaned down toward the tiny pink lobe of her almost translucent ear, and whispered, softly, calmly (as softly and calmly, he thought, as the young man he’d once been):

  “I ought to bump off Manille, don’t you think?”

  She moved her head sharply away from his.

  “Rudy, just back off!”

  He raised his eyes and, through the picture window, looked once again at Manille’s sunlit villa with its imposing, disproportionately large entrance bay, at this big low house very similar to those that rich businesspeople built for themselves in the part of town known as Les Almadies, and indeed very comparable, he said to himself, his heart missing a beat, yes indeed, very comparable, to the villa built by his father Abel Descas, who’d chosen to have his shutters painted not in the Provençal blue now popular everywhere but in a dark red that reminded him of his Basque origins, not suspecting, how could he—

  but he cannot go back

  —a red hardly less dark than the blood of his friend and partner would stain forever the very white, porous stone he’d chosen for the terrace.

  Yes, Rudy thought, ambitious men like Manille or Abel Descas (whose strong legs were never obliged to graciously bend at the knee, were firmly planted on the ground) built houses that looked alike because they were the same sort of men, even though Rudy’s father would have laughed at, or rather taken umbrage at, being compared to the owner of a kitchen dealership, he—Abel Descas—who early on had left his province, crossed Spain and a bit of the Mediterranean, then Morocco and Mauritania, before pulling up in his valiant old Ford on the banks of the Senegal River, where—he straightaway said to himself, as he strove already to fashion his little family legend—he would found a vacation resort the likes of which the world had never seen.

  Oh yes, Rudy thought, men of that sort, whose aims were practical but just as ardent as any aspiration of the spirit, never felt themselves struggling day after day against the icy blast of some endless, monotonous, subtly degrading dream.

  Since he felt that Cathie was rigid with fear, her tiny immobile eyes striving desperately to avoid his own, he couldn’t stop himself adding, before moving away from her desk, in a slightly trembling voice:

  “If you had any idea all the tenderness I’ve got stored up inside me!”

  She gave an involuntary throaty gurgle.

  His father and Manille, although formidable in their different ways, weren’t the sort of men to make women afraid, whereas he, good God, how had it come to that?

  He picked up from his own desk Mummy’s brochures, rolled them up, and stuffed them in a trouser pocket.

  He crossed the large sunlit room, aware that his colleagues were probably watching him go with relief, or contempt, or something else he could only guess at.

  And yet, as he was approaching the glass door, his movements still affected by the sharp pain in his rectum, his thighs separated even though no excess of muscle pushed them away from each other (for he had slender, almost thin legs, and yet he was walking a bit like his father or Manille, men whose massive thighs forced their knees apart), he was amused at the thought that his colleagues had perhaps found in him their angel.

  He moved forward, haloed in shimmering blondness, just as in the past when he left his little apartment in Le Plateau and walked calmly down the hot avenue, serenely conscious of the solid decency of his heart and the unalloyed plenitude of his honor.

  He would like to have shouted to his colleagues in a nice, kindly, charming, unaffectedly cheerful way, “I am the Minister my mother talked to you about!”

  Hadn’t there been a time, he remembered uneasily, when Mummy used to bleach the pale flaxen hair of her little Rudy so that it looked even blonder, almost white?

  He remembered the unpleasant odor of the peroxide, which ended up mak
ing him dazed and sleepy, sitting on a stool in the kitchen of the house where Manille had just informed him he’d spent so many Wednesdays, so Rudy must have been quite young when Mummy got it into her head to inflict on him that most conventional feature of the angelic aspect, because these sessions had been interrupted when they’d left to join Rudy’s father in Africa.

  Perhaps, he said to himself, Mummy had thought that the natural blondness of his hair would more than suffice over there to establish him as a seraph, or else she’d not dared to carry on with the practice in the presence of her husband, who, with incredulous, derisive bluntness, had dumped his own guardian angel and galloped off even farther into the shadows of his cynical calculations, of his more or less secret, more or less lawful, schemes and dodges.

  “I’m your messenger from the order of Thrones!” he wanted to shout out, but he demurred, not wishing to look at his colleagues.

  Suddenly, it pleased him to think that they would perhaps at that precise moment welcome such a revelation, as they saw him pass by in front of them with his rather stiff walk and his legs bizarrely spread, but for all that haloed with a fearsome, luminous majesty and sunny brilliance.

  He hadn’t been able to protect Fanta.

  He’d claimed to be the guardian, in France, of her social fragility, but he’d let her down.

  He pushed the door open and entered the showroom.

  Manille’s two customers were now at the stage of choosing the stools for the breakfast bar, where, Rudy was ready to bet, they were never going to eat, would never so much as lean their elbows upon to drink a cup of coffee, preferring the inconvenient little table they’d always used up till then. He knew they’d find a way of sneaking that table back into the brand-new kitchen that Manille would build for them, and when their children visited, and were astonished, almost to the point of anger, to see that they had reinstalled their greasy old table, with its grooves full of crumbs, at the end of the breakfast bar, blocking access to the fridge, they would, thought Rudy, justify themselves by saying that it was only temporary and that they would get rid of their dear table as soon as they found the right little piece of furniture for setting down their bags and cartons whenever they returned from shopping, which furnishing they still lacked.