by Marie Ndiaye
Rudy shouted in surprise and braked sharply.
The buzzard did not budge.
With its wings spread out across the windshield, its head turned to one side, it glared at him with a horridly severe yellow eye.
Rudy honked.
The buzzard’s whole breast shuddered. It seemed to be tightening its grip on the windshield wipers and, still giving Rudy a cold, accusing look, it screeched like an angry cat.
Slowly, he got out of the car.
He left the door open, not daring to get near the bird, which had moved its head slightly to continue watching him, now staring at him stubbornly, icily, with its other eye.
And, melting with anxious tenderness, Rudy thought, Good little god of Mummy’s, nice little father, please let nothing have happened to Fanta.
He stretched out a hand, slightly shaking, toward the buzzard.
It let go of the wipers and screeched again, angrily, in a cry of irrevocable condemnation, and flew off, flapping its heavy wings.
As it rose above Rudy’s head one of its claws grazed his forehead.
He could feel a heavy wingbeat against his hair.
He flung himself back into the car and slammed the door.
He was panting so hard that for a moment he thought the sound was being uttered by someone else—but no, these panicky, bewildered, hissing gasps were coming from his own mouth.
He grabbed the towel on the backseat and wiped his forehead.
Then he gazed for a long time, vacantly, at the bloodstained towel.
How was he going to convince Fanta that he now saw their situation in a whole new light?
How could he make her understand that, whatever he’d said to her that morning (if indeed those grotesque words he wasn’t sure of remembering had truly passed his lips), he was a changed man, and that there was no more room, in the heart of this changed man, for anger and deceit?
Probing the wound on his forehead carefully with his finger, he said to himself fearfully, It was no longer necessary, Fanta, to send that avenging bird to me—really there wasn’t …
Stunned, he set off again, driving with one hand, and with the other, unable to stop himself, fingering the crescent-shaped scratch on his forehead.
“It’s not fair,” he kept saying mechanically to himself, “it’s really not fair.”
A little farther on he stopped in front of Madame Menotti’s house.
The road was lined with modest farmhouses that wealthy couples had bought and restored, eager to conceal the buildings’ humble origins (short roof, low ceilings, narrow windows) with a good deal of lavish, meticulous interior decoration, or at least to make the shortcomings seem the result of deliberate choice, just like the copper piping, Moroccan floor tiles, and the vast bathtub set into the floor.
Rudy had realized that Madame Menotti’s modest income scarcely made it possible for her outlay ever to match her neighbors’ luxurious, obsessive extravagance, and that, for her, a new kitchen would remain the only manifestation of a sudden mad longing for comfort and splendor.
He’d also noted, with considerable anxiety and annoyance, that there was one realm in which Madame Menotti went a long way toward making up for her relative poverty. Within himself he referred to it as “wreaking almighty havoc.”
He got out of the car.
He saw at once that Madame Menotti’s wild, destructive, ham-fisted willfulness had dealt a mortal blow to an old wisteria root, thick as a tree trunk, that had been planted near the front door probably half a century earlier.
The first time Rudy had come to the house, thick bunches of sweet-smelling mauve flowers were hanging under the gutters, above the door and windows, clinging to a wire that the former owners had strung along the front of the building.
He’d stood on tiptoe to sniff the flowers, deeply moved, enchanted by so much beauty and fragrance offered free of charge, and he’d then congratulated Madame Menotti on the luxuriance of her wisteria, which reminded him, he said—oh yes, he, who never spoke of his past life, had let that slip—of the frangipani blossoms in Dara Salam.
He’d seen Madame Menotti purse her lips in a mixture of skepticism and vague annoyance—just like, he’d said to himself, a mother who had favorites being complimented on the child she didn’t care for.
In a tone of dry condescension she’d complained about having to sweep up the leaves in autumn: so much dead foliage, so many shriveled petals.
She’d shown Rudy how, at the corner of the house, she’d already dealt with an enormous bignonia that had had the nerve to let its wild tangle of orange flowers climb all over the gray roughcast walls.
The slender branches, the glossy leaves, the strong roots, the dead corollas, all that lay on the ground waiting to be thrown on the bonfire, and Madame Menotti, as the heroine of a battle she’d won hands down, had pointed to it proudly and scornfully.
Crestfallen, Rudy had followed her in a tour around the garden. There was nothing but the pathetic remnants of a struggle that had been as absurd, as ferocious, as it had been reckless.
Madame Menotti wanted to clean everything up, make the place tidy, and lay down a lawn. In a destructive frenzy she’d taken it out on the hornbeam hedge (scalped), on the old walnut tree (sawn off at the root), and on the many rosebushes (dug up). After thinking better of it, she’d replanted the rosebushes elsewhere; now they were dying.
Madame Menotti still pressed on, satisfied that her acts of vandalism had established her proprietary rights. Seeing her fat bottom wobble as she moved between two piles of hundred-year-old box that she’d uprooted, Rudy had felt that, for her, it was as if nothing better demonstrated her omnipotence than the destruction of patient labors, of the memorials to the delicate, simple taste of all those numberless ghosts who had preceded her in that house and who had planted, sown, and arranged the vegetation in the garden.
And he was now discovering that Madame Menotti had cut down the wisteria.
He wasn’t surprised. He was devastated.
The little house stood there, austere, stripped bare, sadly reduced to the mediocrity, which the leaves had concealed, of the materials used in building it.
Of the magnificent plant only a short stump remained.
Rudy walked slowly toward the garden gate.
He looked at the bare facade and sobbed.
Madame Menotti had opened her door when she heard the car approaching. She found Rudy standing at the gate, his cheeks wet with tears.
She was wearing a purple tracksuit.
She had short gray hair and glasses with thick black plastic frames that made her look perpetually cross. When she took them off, Rudy had already noticed, her face was that of a helpless, lost woman.
“You’d no right to do that!” he cried.
“Do what?” Madame Menotti looked exasperated.
Then he felt in his mouth again that taste of iron, that vague taste of blood that welled up in his throat whenever he thought of Madame Menotti and of what he still had to do despite all he’d already done and that for some obscure reason, perhaps out of weariness, he’d failed to do and then forgotten about.
He now recalled only the lapse, not what the lapse had involved.
“The wisteria!” he exclaimed. “It wasn’t yours!”
“It wasn’t mine?” Madame Menotti shouted.
“It belonged … to itself, to everybody.”
His words were distorted and his voice faded away in embarrassment as he realized how futile his protest was.
It was too late, too late, in any case.
Should he not have attempted to save such an admirable wisteria?
How could he have imagined that Madame Menotti would spare it?
Once he’d witnessed her brutality toward a nature that in her eyes represented the enemy, the threat of invasion, how could he have turned his back on the wisteria, whose death sentence had been pronounced the moment she’d alluded sharply to the chore of sweeping up dead leaves?
He opened
the gate and climbed up a few steps to her door.
The house now stood isolated in the middle of its grassy plot. The sun beat down on Madame Menotti.
The wisteria had given gentle shade to this same terrace, to these same concrete steps, recalled Rudy, grief stricken, and hadn’t there also been, in the corner, a large bay tree that smelled of spices in the warm air?
Gone, the bay tree, like everything else.
“Monsieur Descas, you’re an incompetent, you’re a monster.”
His eyes still damp with tears, but indifferent to what she might be thinking (it was as if shame could no longer reach him, however hard it tried), he met Madame Menotti’s scandalized gaze.
He realized that she had gone well beyond the point of indignation, that she was now close to despair, to a sort of intoxication, wandering in a gray zone in which the slightest hitch must seem to her like a deliberate act of aggression.
He realized too that she was absolutely sincere, in her way.
A vague feeling of pity was now vying with a sense of grievance inside him. He suddenly felt downcast and very tired.
Once again his anus was itching painfully. Thinking with weary diffidence about the demise of the wisteria and without a thought for Madame Menotti’s modesty or his own, he scratched himself fiercely, vigorously, through the thickness of his jeans.
Madame Menotti appeared not to notice.
She now seemed to hesitate between the need to bring him in (he was getting an inkling as to the nature of the problem, what she held against him) and an almost equally strong desire never to have anything to do with him again.
Finally she turned on her heels and gestured to him brusquely to follow her.
She was so upset, he could see her shoulders quivering.
It was the first time he’d been back to the house since he’d come to measure for the kitchen several months earlier.
Then, as he crossed the hall and the dining room behind her, a painful process of realization began. He felt an icy grip in the pit of his stomach as the dimensions of the problem became clearer to him. Then the brutal truth hit him.
He stopped in the kitchen doorway.
Horror-struck, he had difficulty restraining a hysterical fit of the giggles.
Without realizing it he started scratching himself frantically while Madame Menotti flopped onto a chair that was still wrapped in plastic.
She kept savagely pushing her glasses up her nose, to no purpose.
Her knee was quivering uncontrollably.
“Oh my God, oh my God,” Rudy blurted out.
He felt himself blushing furiously with humiliation.
How, after so much hard work, had he managed to get his arithmetic so badly wrong?
He knew he wasn’t very good at it, but when it came to designing the kind of kitchens he despised he’d secretly taken pride in his deficiencies, so much so that his arrogance had kept him from achieving any notable improvement in his skills.
He simply didn’t wish to be good at the job.
It had seemed to him that his stubbornness was a bulwark against the complete disintegration of the erudition acquired in his former life: those arcane, those subtle bits of knowledge that he’d not had the strength, courage, or desire to cultivate and sustain and that were gradually losing their preciseness and substance.
But such an error was merely ridiculous, pitiful, and in no way a credit to the refined man he considered himself to have been; no, in no way, he thought, aghast.
He moved forward cautiously.
His eyes met Madame Menotti’s and he remembered the wisteria. Still bearing the grudge, he looked away. Madame Menotti’s gaze would now have appeared drained of the scandalized hatred he’d seen earlier, but he refused to meet it, thinking, I refuse to communicate with her, if that’s what she expects.
Because he had the impression that she now felt a kind of dismay that was directed at no one in particular and was actually a plea for help and support, as if they were both looking at the consequences of an act of madness committed by someone else.
He then dared to venture toward the middle of the room, toward the square worktop with its marble and slate surface containing a vast cooktop under a bell-shaped hood, the centerpiece of this petrified, intimidating spectacle that had come to represent for Madame Menotti the essence of the concept “kitchen.”
The counter was in place and the hood was attached to the ceiling.
But the cooktop was not under the hood but well to the side. Rudy understood at once that if one tried to move the counter in order to position the cooktop correctly, it would be impossible to maneuver around it easily.
Called upon to invest all his intelligence and mental stamina in making those calculations, he’d simply proved incapable of determining precisely the proper positioning of a four-burner cooktop relative to its hood.
“They’re going to give you the sack, at Manille’s,” Madame Menotti said in a flat tone of voice.
“I fear so,” murmured Rudy.
“I was going to invite a few friends in to see the kitchen tomorrow, now I’ll have to cancel all that.”
“Yes, probably a good idea,” said Rudy.
Exhausted, he drew up a chair that was still in its packaging and flopped onto it.
How was he going to persuade himself that getting fired from Manille’s wasn’t a disaster?
What would become of the three of them?
He felt all the more inept because if he’d had the guts to probe the diffuse, nagging, subliminal awareness he’d had for a while that he was guilty of a particular form of carelessness in the case of Menotti, he could have pulled back in time to correct the mistake before building work began.
But he’d simply suppressed that awareness, not to be troubled by it, in much the same way, he thought, as he’d buried, far out of reach until today, the truth about the Dara Salam boy, the whole Dara Salam saga.
What would become of the three of them if he lost his job?
“Actually, I knew it,” he murmured, “I knew I’d made a mistake!”
“Oh yes?” said Menotti.
“Yes, yes … I should have … dared to face up to the fact … to the possibility that I’d made a mistake, but I chose to close my eyes to it.”
He looked at Madame Menotti, who took off her glasses and wiped them on her T-shirt, and he noticed that her face was calm, as if, everything having been said about the matter, there was no reason to go on feeling so cross about it.
He also noticed that the woman had fine features that were usually hidden behind her heavy glasses.
What would become of them?
His mortgage payments amounted to five hundred euros a month. What was going to happen to the house, to their family life?
“Would you like a cup of coffee?” Madame Menotti asked.
Somewhat surprised, he nodded.
He remembered the pleasant smell of coffee on Manille’s breath.
“I’ve been dying for a coffee for quite some time,” he said, his eyes following Madame Menotti as she hauled herself to her feet, grabbed a coffeepot, filled it with water, and then perched on the edge of the new countertop to pour a measure of coffee into the filter.
“All the same,” he couldn’t help saying, “that wisteria can’t have been bothering you, it was so beautiful.”
Absorbed by what she was doing, Madame Menotti didn’t turn around or attempt an answer.
Her sneakers dangled above the floor.
He suddenly remembered other feet not touching the ground or scarcely appearing to touch it, the swift, indefatigable feet of Fanta flying above the pavements of Dakar, and he said to himself, That wisteria I cut down, and with bitter sweat pouring down his face he added, That’s the wisteria I cut down, it wasn’t bothering me and it was so beautiful. And he decided to leave unsaid the harsh things he’d been intending to say to Madame Menotti about the wisteria she’d cut off at the root.
A cold, bitter sweat was pouring
down his face.
Nevertheless it seemed to him, in the light of what he was now prepared to admit to himself, that he was beginning to emerge from an old dream, from the old and unbearable dream in which, whatever he could say, whatever he could do …
“Here’s your coffee,” Madame Menotti said.
She poured some for herself and went back to sit on her chair. The plastic covering squeaked every time she moved.
They sipped their coffee in silence, and at last Rudy felt good, at peace with himself. The cold, bitter sweat on his forehead was beginning to dry, even though he realized that, objectively speaking, his situation had never been so depressing.
“I won’t find work around here,” he said calmly, as if he were talking about someone else.
And Madame Menotti replied in the same calm, detached tone of voice, licking her lips to show she’d finished her coffee and greatly enjoyed it, “No, not much chance of finding work around here.”
Slightly embarrassed, he asked, “May I use your phone?”
She led him into her sitting room and pointed to the telephone on a pedestal table.
She kept pushing her glasses up her nose to little effect, but otherwise remained motionless by his side, not so much to keep an eye on him, he gathered, as to not be left alone in her bungled kitchen.
“You don’t have a cell phone?”
“No,” he replied, “it was too expensive.”
Shame dealt a blow against the still-fragile carapace of his lucidity and self-esteem, but such attacks were routine, and he felt it was his duty not to give in to them, not to wallow in the paradoxical comfort of such a familiar sensation.
“It was really too expensive,” he repeated, “and it was something I could do without.”
“You did the right thing, then.”
“Like your kitchen,” he added, “too expensive and something you could have done without.”
Gazing rather sadly before her, she said nothing.
For Madame Menotti it was still too soon, he felt, and it was more than she was capable of, to give up the hopes of happiness, frivolity, consistency, and peace enshrined in the supposed perfection of a kitchen from Manille’s.
