Three Strong Women

by Marie Ndiaye

  Manille was getting them to feel the brown leatherette covers of a pair of dark wooden stools.

  He stood beside them, infinitely patient, never pressing, never in a hurry to move on.

  The man heard Rudy’s footsteps from afar and looked up.

  Rudy thought that he gazed at him more insistently than one might ordinarily, with an affable, friendly look, and he was moved.

  Rudy had the impression that the man was making as if to raise his beret in greeting.

  And whereas he would normally have been worried and embarrassed by a gesture like that and by such an insistent gaze, fearing some unpleasantness to come, he told himself cheerfully that the man may simply just have seen him somewhere before.

  I am the spirit of the order of Dominions!

  Yes, the guy had perhaps seen one of Mummy’s tracts and, watching the haloed Rudy pass by, his heart had evidently been touched by a feeling of beatitude.

  “Art thou the one that is to take care of me?” his look seemed to ask.

  How to answer that?

  Rudy smiled broadly, something he normally avoided because he was aware that rapture, like fear, caused his lips to twist and made him look nasty.

  He mouthed, looking the guy straight in the eye, “I am the little Master of the Virtues!”

  He hurried out of the showroom.

  He was overcome by the heat in the parking lot. It brought him back down to earth.

  Not, he mumbled, that anyone could reproach him for having knowingly abandoned Fanta to her lonely exile, and as for the fact that she didn’t have the precise qualifications to teach in France, that wasn’t his fault.

  And yet what never left him was the certainty that he’d deceived her in bringing her here, since he’d turned his face away from hers and spurned the mission, implicitly accepted when they were still abroad, of watching over her.

  The thing was, he was then recovering from utter mortification!

  What a beating he received, what a beating!

  It sometimes seemed that he could still feel it whenever he raised his arms, but especially when a smell of hot fuel oil arose from the baking asphalt of Manille’s parking lot. Then with painful clarity he saw himself again lying prone on a similar asphalt surface softened by the heat, his back and shoulders crushed by sharp knees, his face swollen as he struggled to get up, to avoid all contact with the dusty, sticky tar.

  Years later, that vision still made him blush with shame and astonishment.

  But now he felt, for the first time, how automatic that response had become.

  He breathed in deeply, soaking up the acrid smell.

  He realized then that the opprobrium had left him.

  Yes, it was certainly he whom teenagers from the Lycée Mermoz had beaten up before hurling him to the ground, crushing his chest against the asphalt, and ending up pushing his face, which he’d tried to keep clear of the ground, against the surface of the courtyard. It was still his cheek that would now always bear the fine scars, it was his shoulders that still ached slightly, and yet the abjection no longer clung to him, not that he could or would pass it on to someone else, but rather because he felt he’d accepted it and that now he had the chance of freeing himself of it, as from a recurrent, unending, cold, terrifying dream to which you submit, grinning and bearing it, in the knowledge that you’re now going to be able to break free.

  He, Rudy Descas, sometime literature teacher at the Lycée Mermoz and medieval specialist, no longer embodied the infamy he’d suffered.

  He’d lost all honor and dignity and returned to France, dragging Fanta with him, knowing that the stigma would pursue him, because he’d internalized it and convinced himself that he was no more than that, even while hating it and fighting it.

  And now that he was starting to accept it, he felt a great weight had been taken off his shoulders.

  Now he could calmly and quietly review in his mind the images of that violent humiliation—and the humiliation no longer bore much relation to him as he was, at that moment, standing in the warm, dry air, and the dense, oppressive mass that had weighed down his heart and filled his chest he now saw leaving him, dissolving, as he remembered clearly the faces of the three boys who’d assaulted him and could even still smell on his nape the slightly sour breath (fear? excitement?) of the one who’d held him down—the three faces, so dusky and so beautiful in their unblemished youth, which only the day before in class with the others had looked up at him with a concentrated, innocent air as they listened to him talking about Rutebeuf.

  He saw their faces again without being upset by it.

  He wondered, “Well, what could they be doing now, those three?”

  He began walking toward his car, putting each foot down firmly for the sheer pleasure of feeling the stickiness of the tar and hearing it detach itself with a tiny sound like a kiss.

  He saw it all again without being upset by it.

  How hot it was!

  The hot poker in his anus again.

  Yes, he saw it all again and …

  What happiness, he said to himself.

  He scratched himself, not without pleasure, aware that the itching would no longer lower him into the same abyss of anger and despair, that he no longer had any reason to consider these ordinary evils as a punishment or a demonstration of his inferiority.

  He was now able to …

  He laid his fingers on the red-hot handle of the car door.

  He didn’t take them off straightaway.

  It burned him and it wasn’t pleasant, but he seemed to perceive more clearly by contrast the new lightness of his spirit, the weight lifted from his chest, and the release of his heart.

  Free at last! he said to himself.

  How was that?

  How could that be?

  He gazed for a long time around him at the big black or gray cars of his colleagues and at the road in front of the parking lot lined with warehouses and villas. He raised his head to expose his face to the infernal sun.

  Free at last!

  Very well, he could go all the way despite the flush of embarrassment that he felt on the forehead he was proffering to the sky, he could very well go the whole way and test his newfound freedom by acknowledging, for the first time, that the three teenagers had not attacked him.

  What remained within him of the old Rudy Descas objected.

  But he held fast, even if the start of a panic attack, a feeling of helplessness, now made him shiver.

  He opened the car door and flopped onto the seat.

  It was stifling inside the vehicle.

  He tried, however, to take in a big lungful of this overcooked air to calm himself down and banish the fear, the awful fear that was creeping up on him at the thought that, if he admitted that the boys had not attacked him, he also had to concede that it was he, Rudy Descas, literature teacher at the Lycée Mermoz in Dakar, who’d hurled himself on one of them, prompting the two others to come to their friend’s aid.

  True?

  Yes, that’s what must really have happened, eh, Rudy?

  His eyes began to fill with acrid tears.

  He’d worked so hard at persuading himself of the contrary that he was no longer sure what was true and what wasn’t.

  He was no longer sure.

  He reached behind him, grabbed his old towel, and dabbed his eyes.

  But could he glimpse the truth and not be afflicted by it?

  Under the midday sun stretched the sizzling tar of the lycée’s vast courtyard.

  Rudy Descas was leaving the premises, happy, with a spring in his step, a young teacher loved by his pupils and by his colleagues, who included his wife, Fanta, and he had no need then—Rudy said to himself without bitterness—no need to imagine himself some minister of divine will just to feel himself haloed with benevolence and an air of subtle triumph and refined ambition.

  The tar was clinging slightly to the soles of his loafers.

  The contact had filled him with joy and he wa
s still smiling to himself as he passed through the school gate. This smile had spread like an involuntary gesture of benediction upon the three teenagers who were waiting in the meager shade of a mango tree, their faces shining in the midday sun.

  The three were all pupils of his.

  Rudy Descas knew them well.

  He felt a particular affection for them because they were black and came from modest backgrounds. One of them, he understood, was the son of a fisherman in Dara Salam, the village where Rudy and his parents had once lived.

  Sitting in his car in Manille’s parking lot, Rudy remembered what he always used to feel at that time, whenever his gaze fell on the fisherman’s son: an exaggerated, resolute, anxious friendship that bore no relationship to the boy’s particular qualities and that could suddenly turn to hatred without Rudy’s realizing it, or even understanding that hatred, until it was no longer friendship that he actually felt for his pupil.

  For the boy’s face forced him to think of Dara Salam.

  Horror-struck, he struggled against any vision of Dara Salam.

  And this struggle mutated into a disproportionate affection for the teenager, an affection that was probably hatred.

  But under the full midday sun of this unchanging, sweltering day in the dry season, as he was leaving the lycée happy and at peace with himself, his smile had enveloped the three boys equally, had flowed toward them, content, impersonal, with all the exquisiteness of an anointment.

  Had the fisherman’s son suddenly managed to guess that Rudy Descas’s extreme kindness toward him was but a desperate way of containing the antagonism his Dara Salam face inspired in his teacher?

  Was it that—the barely concealed hatred—which the teacher’s smile obviously conveyed in the off-white glare of the midday sun?

  The hot air quivered.

  No puff of wind shook the gray leaves of the mango tree.

  Rudy Descas felt so lucky, so flourishing, in those days.

  Little Djibril had been born two years earlier. He was a smiling, voluble child. His forehead was not marked with a puzzled frown. Unlike later … when he would feel afraid of his father and uncomfortable in his presence.

  Rudy had applied for a teaching post at a foreign university and his final interview with the head of the department of medieval literatures had gone splendidly. He was in no doubt, so certain about the outcome, that, out of sheer vanity, he’d already phoned Mummy to tell her he’d gotten the job.

  Your son, the guardian of your mature years, a university teacher with a doctorate in literature.

  Yes, life was good.

  Even if it wasn’t Fanta’s nature to say so, he was sure she loved him, and through him the life they’d made together in the fine apartment they’d recently rented in Le Plateau.

  He occasionally felt that Fanta loved Djibril even more than she loved him—that she loved the child with a similar, but much stronger love—whereas he’d believed that her love for him would merely be different in kind, and that he wouldn’t lose out.

  Now he thought he had lost out, that she’d rather drifted away from him.

  But it scarcely mattered.

  He then became so concerned about Fanta’s well-being that he accepted, even was pleased, that she was happy, even if it was rather at his expense.

  So, yes, in this perfect life, it was only the memories of Dara Salam, which he had to struggle with every time he saw the teenager, that foreshadowed possible disaster ahead.

  The young man had emerged from the shade of the mango tree, slowly, with effort, as if obliged to confront Rudy’s fearsome smile.

  In a calm, clear, decisive manner, he shouted:

  “Son of a murderer!”

  And, Rudy had said to himself later—and now in Manille’s parking lot was once again saying to himself—that he’d been stabbed, literally, not just by what had been said but by the calm self-assurance in the voice of the boy, who hadn’t had the tact, hadn’t even taken the trouble, to insult him.

  Without meaning to, the fisherman’s son had uttered nothing but the plain and simple truth, because that was what it was: the truth. Perhaps it was only the teacher’s smile, a false, suave smile, full of fear and hatred, that had allowed the truth to come out.

  Rudy had dropped his briefcase.

  Without knowing or understanding what he was going to do, he’d grabbed the boy by the throat.

  Rudy was deeply shaken to feel under his thumbs the warm, moist, ringed tube of the boy’s windpipe. He remembered that more vividly than anything else, and as he squeezed the boy’s throat he recalled thinking only of the tender flesh of little Djibril, his son, whom he bathed every evening.

  Without thinking, he stopped and turned his hands over and looked at them.

  He seemed to feel again at the tips of his fingers, on the fleshy part of the first phalanges, that sensation of gentle resistance that had intoxicated him, and the floating, firm bump of the boy’s Adam’s apple that, drunk with exultant fury, he’d pressed so hard.

  It was the first time in his life that he’d suffered such a fit of anger, the first time he’d hurled himself at anyone, and it was as if he was at last discovering his true nature, what he was made of and what gave him pleasure.

  He’d heard himself groaning, gasping from the effort—unless it was the boy’s grunts that he mistook for his own.

  He’d pushed the teenager into the lycée courtyard, still clutching his throat, which he was squeezing with all his strength.

  The young man had begun to sweat profusely.

  Enough, enough of being nice, repeated a small, ferocious, triumphant voice in Rudy’s head.

  What had he said, the bastard?

  “What’s that you said, eh? Son of a murderer? Okay, then let’s be true to our blood, eh?”

  Were they of the same nature, the blood of his father’s partner that had stained forever the fine porous stone of the terrace, and Abel Descas’s own blood spattering the wall of his cell in Reubeuss prison, and the blood of this boy, the son of the Dara Salam fisherman, that would not fail to pour from his skull if Rudy managed to knock him over in the courtyard and then dash his head against the ground?

  “Bastard,” he’d growled mechanically, without being able to understand clearly why he was insulting the person who was giving him so much physical pleasure.

  A violent pain shot through his back and shoulders.

  He’d felt the neck soaked in sweat slipping through his fingers.

  First his knees, then his chest, had hit the ground hard, taking his breath away.

  He’d tried keeping his head as far off the ground as possible until some hand forced it down, grazing his cheek and forehead against the pebbles in the asphalt.

  He’d heard the boys panting and hurling abuse at him.

  Their voices were feverish but perplexed and without venom, as if the words they were hurling at him were just a part of the treatment he had brought on himself, which he’d obliged them to administer.

  They were now wondering what to do with him, their literature teacher, whom they were kneeing hard in the back, not grasping, Rudy realized, quite how much they were hurting him.

  Were they afraid, if they let him go, that he would attack them again?

  He’d tried to mumble that it was over, that they had nothing to fear from him.

  He succeeded only in dribbling on the asphalt.

  His lips, crushed against the ground, had, in his attempt to move, gotten badly scraped.

  Rudy switched on the ignition, put the car into reverse, and the old Nevada, chugging and smoking, moved out.

  And whereas, for the past four years, he’d been studiously cultivating the theory of the profound cruelty of the three boys who, just for the hell of it, had sadistically attacked him, he knew now that it had all been a lie—oh, he’d always known it, but he’d refused to acknowledge it, and now he was refusing no longer, remembering the kindness, embarrassment, and astonishment he’d picked up from what the
teenagers were saying as they held him down, unwittingly causing him a degree of pain he would never completely recover from, because they were searching for a way out of the situation that preserved their own dignity and security and also their teacher’s, showing no desire for vengeance nor any wish to go hard on him, despite the fear and suffering he’d caused the boy from Dara Salam.

  He’d understood—listening to them as they talked, with stupefaction but not rancor, nervously above him—that they fully realized, with their adolescent good sense, that their teacher had probably just lost it, even if it was the last thing they would have expected from that particular teacher.

  Whereas he, Rudy, in fact hated the boy from Dara Salam.

  Whereas he had, in fact, up to that moment in Manille’s parking lot, hated all three of them, whom, in his heart, he’d held responsible for his forced return to the Gironde, for his troubles, for all his misfortunes.

  There could be no doubt, he said to himself as he drove out of the lot and onto the road, that anger, illusion, and a general feeling of resentment had taken hold of him at that moment—when he’d chosen to cast himself as the boys’ victim rather than seeing the facts plain: that he’d long harbored feelings of hatred, wrapped up in a smiling show of friendship, an animus issuing directly from Dara Salam, where Abel Descas had murdered his business partner.

  Oh yes: no doubt, he said to himself, his present state of disgrace stemmed from that, from his cowardice, from his smug self-pity.

  He went back the way he’d come an hour earlier, but at the rotary he went a little farther around the statue before turning into a wide road bordered by high banks, at the end of which stood Madame Menotti’s house.

  Just as he was wondering if it would be all right to ask Menotti if he could use her phone to try to get in touch with Fanta (what was she doing, good God, what was she thinking?), he saw right in front of him the pale breast and vast brown wings of a low-flying buzzard.

  He took his foot off the accelerator.

  The buzzard flew straight at the windshield.

  It gripped the wipers with its claws. It rammed its abdomen against the glass.