Three Strong Women

by Marie Ndiaye

  Besides, wasn’t it what he’d implicitly promised her, when she’d phoned in distress one night and when he’d felt her resolution flagging, and he’d pointed out that she’d no chance of enjoying an enviably harmonious and well-ordered existence in an old kitchen with mismatched furnishings?

  He dialed his own number again.

  He let it ring for a long time, so long indeed that if Fanta had picked up the phone at that point he would have felt more anxiety than relief.

  Next to the phone was the local directory. To while away the time he picked it up, thumbed through it with one hand, and deliberately went straight to the name of Gauquelan, the sculptor, and with a touch of unease noted that he lived not far away, in a new development occupied by wealthy former city dwellers who, like Madame Menotti’s neighbors and to a lesser extent Madame Menotti herself, had bought rural properties that, at great expense, they were renovating.

  Later, waiting on the doorstep to say good-bye to Madame Menotti, he thought he could smell the wisteria.

  He stood there in the harsh glare of the sun. The heavy, intoxicating scent of the mauve clusters into which, drunk with gratitude, he’d plunged his nose a few weeks earlier now crept up on him once again, and he was deeply moved.

  The scent probably came, he said to himself, from the pathetic heap of wisteria by the side of the house. It was spreading its fragrance one last time. Was it not, in its own way, saying, “You’ve done nothing, you’ve never tried doing anything for me, and now it’s too late and I’m dying, slowly decomposing in my own perfume”?

  He was overwhelmed with feelings of resentment.

  To hide them, he lowered his head and stuck his hands in his back pockets.

  From one of them he pulled out a brochure of Mummy’s and brusquely handed it to Madame Menotti.

  “They’re among us,” she read aloud. Puzzled, she asked, “Who are ‘they’?”

  “Oh, the angels,” Rudy said with feigned nonchalance.

  She snickered and crumpled up the brochure without opening it.

  Feeling hurt on Mummy’s behalf and sensing his anger rising again within him, he went quickly down the steps and, almost running, returned to his car.

  He drove slowly, aimlessly, thinking there was no point in setting foot in Manille’s place again, now that his goose was thoroughly cooked.

  A feeling of pique still made it painful for him to think about his failure, because he would have loved to stomp out of Manille’s and slam the door behind him rather than find himself sacked for a gross error of calculation on a project to which he’d given so much of himself, but then the dread inspired by the vision of his future was softened by a realization that there was nothing that could be done about it, that it was all in the order of things.

  He ought not to crawl before Manille.

  His head was spinning a little.

  How had he managed to put up with such a life for four years? It was only an academic question, he realized, a purely formal, pretended bafflement, because he knew very well, actually, how people put up with long years of a paltry existence.

  What he didn’t know, rather, was how he could have fared not putting up with those bitter, pathetic years—what kind of man would he have been, what kind of man would he have become, what would have happened had he not settled for such mediocrity?

  Would it have been a good thing or would he have fallen still lower than now?

  And what would he have done with himself?

  Really, it wasn’t difficult getting used to a life of self-disgust, bitterness, and disorder.

  He’d even gotten used to a state of permanent, barely contained fury, he’d even managed, after a fashion, to get used to his frosty, fraught relations with Fanta and the child.

  At the thought that he was going to have to take a quite different view of his domestic situation he felt dizzy again, and although he’d long aspired to rekindle the love and tenderness they’d known before they’d left for France, he felt obscurely anxious. Would Fanta recognize what he’d newly become, wasn’t she too weary, too mistrustful, and too skeptical to meet him at this point he’d arrived at?

  You’ve come too late and I’m dying.

  Where could she be at this precise moment?

  Much as he longed to rejoin Fanta, he was afraid of going back home.

  There was no need, Fanta, to send me that horrid avenging bird.

  A voice kept cawing in his head: You’ve come too late, I’m dying, my feet have been cut off, I’ve fallen on the floor of your unfriendly house, you’ve come too late.

  He was hungry now and Madame Menotti’s coffee had made him terribly thirsty.

  He was driving slowly with all the windows down along the quiet little road, between the thuja hedges and white fences beyond which occasionally shimmered the bluish water of a swimming pool.

  Having left Madame Menotti’s area behind, he noted that the neighborhood he was now in consisted of even larger houses, even more luxuriously and more recently restored, and it occurred to him that he was deceiving himself yet again in affecting to drive without a precise destination; he was annoyed to think that he, Rudy Descas, should have been itching to prowl around Gauquelan’s place ever since noting the sculptor’s address in Madame Menotti’s sitting room, and felt he should no doubt admit having wanted to do it for quite a while, ever since he’d read about the municipality’s having awarded Gauquelan more than a hundred thousand euros for the statue—whose face so closely resembled Rudy’s—that had been installed on the rotary.

  Tortured by heat and thirst, he wondered if he was not being cast back into the dangerous eddies of that tiresome, monotonous, degrading dream that left such a bitter aftertaste and from which by sheer force of will he was just beginning to extricate himself.

  Should he not forget about Gauquelan, the man who’d inspired so much unjust, spiteful, uncalled-for rage?

  Of course he should, and that’s certainly what he was going to do—stop thinking that the man was in some mysterious, symbolic way responsible for Rudy’s rotten luck, that he’d secretly taken advantage of Rudy’s innocence to prosper while he, Rudy …

  Yes, it was absurd, but merely thinking about it made him gloomy and irritable.

  He could see again the photo in the local paper of this Gauquelan, with his missing tooth, fat face, and smug expression, and to Rudy it seemed unquestionable that the man had robbed him of something, just like all those clever, cynical people who benefit from the inability of the Rudy Descases of this world to get their grip of the brass ring.

  That pathetic artist, Gauquelan, had succeeded because Rudy was languishing in poverty. In Rudy’s eyes it was no coincidence: he couldn’t shake the notion of cause and effect.

  The other guy was growing fat at his expense.

  The idea drove him mad.

  What’s more …

  He managed a smile, he forced himself to smile, even though his dry lips were stuck together. Boy, was he thirsty!

  What’s more … it may have been silly, but that’s the way it was, it had the perfect luminosity of unprovable truth: while Rudy’s little soul was fluttering around unsuspectingly, the other had grabbed hold of it to create his despicable work, the statue of a man who looked like Rudy, even down to his pose of angry, terrified submission.

  Yes, it drove him mad to think that, although they’d never met, Gauquelan had made use of him, that people like him exploited for their own benefit the trusting ignorance and weakness of those who failed to take steps to protect themselves.

  He pulled up in front of a brand-new, black, wrought-iron gate with tips of gold. Feeling a little giddy, he said to himself that this was where Gauquelan lived, in that big house built of exposed stone blocks freshly scrubbed and pointed.

  The tiled roof was new and the windows and shutters gleamed with white paint. On the wide terrace a set of pale wooden table and chairs stood in the shade of a yellow umbrella.

  It was impossible, Rudy thought wi
th pain, to be unhappy in a house like that.

  How he’d love to live there with Fanta and the child!

  The gate was purely notional since—and this was a detail that Rudy found particularly impressive—it defended nothing: on either side of the twin stone pillars there was a gap before the privet hedge began, through which it was easy to pass.

  He got out of the car and closed the door gently.

  He slipped through the gap and strode quickly to the terrace.

  Total silence.

  These houses had huge garages, so how could you tell whether anyone was in? Where Rudy or Mummy lived, a car parked outside proved beyond a doubt that the owner was at home.

  Bending low, he went around to the back, where he found a door that he supposed opened onto the kitchen.

  He pressed the door handle down, as if, he thought, he was letting himself into his own house.

  The door opened and he went in, closing it nonchalantly behind him.

  He stopped, nevertheless, alert to any sounds.

  Then, reassured, he grabbed a bottle of water on the counter, checked that it was unopened, and drank it all, even though the water was barely chilled.

  As he drank, he let his eyes wander over Gauquelan’s large kitchen.

  He noticed at once that it could not have come from Manille’s, which offered nothing half as sumptuous, and that irritated him; it was as if Gauquelan had ordered from a more upmarket competitor as a way of further humiliating him.

  Nevertheless, as a kitchen connoisseur, he judged it to be a really fine one, far more sophisticated, truth be told, than anything he could have designed.

  The centerpiece was an oval counter in pink marble. It rested on a succession of white cupboards that curved elegantly, following the line of the stone.

  Hanging over the whole was a glass cube, probably the hood. It seemed to be suspended solely by the miracle of its own refinement.

  The floor, paved in traditional style with reddish sandstone flags, shone discreetly in the bright room. It looked as if it had been waxed and polished many times.

  Yes, what a marvelous kitchen, he thought in a rage, built to cater every day for a large family gathered for slow-cooked food—he could almost hear a beef stew simmering on the magnificent stove, a professional eight-burner job in shining white enamel.

  And yet the setup seemed never to have been used.

  The marble surface was dusty, and apart from the bottle of water and a plate of bananas, there was nothing to indicate that anyone cooked or ate under the varnished beams of this big room.

  Rudy crossed the kitchen and went into the hall, conscious of the lightness and suppleness of his refreshed, invincible self.

  The air conditioning bolstered his self-assurance, because he’d stopped sweating so much.

  He felt on his chest and back the cotton of his almost-dry shirt.

  Oh, he said to himself in surprise, I’m not afraid of anything now.

  He stopped in the doorway of the living room, which was situated opposite the kitchen on the other side of the hall.

  He could hear, clearly, the sound of snoring.

  Tilting his head forward, he could see an armchair. Sitting in it was a fat elderly man whom he recognized as Gauquelan from the newspaper photo.

  With one cheek resting on the wing of the armchair, the man was snoring softly.

  His hands rested palms up on his thighs, in an attitude of confidence and abandon.

  His half-open lips produced an occasional bubble of saliva that burst when he next breathed out.

  Isn’t he grotesque, Rudy said to himself, slightly out of breath.

  Snoozing peacefully like that while …

  While what? he wondered, almost suffocated by a dizzying joyful malice.

  While in his undefended house his nimble murderer prowls around him?

  A murderer with a heart full of hatred?

  He felt himself thinking clearly, rapidly.

  In one of the drawers (fully retractable, thanks to tracks with shock absorbers) of that perfect kitchen there would no doubt be found a set of butcher’s knives, the most fearsome of which could strike at Gauquelan’s heart—piercing the thick skin, the muscle, the layer of hard dense fat like that surrounding a rabbit’s small heart, thought Rudy, who occasionally bought from Madame Pulmaire at a cut rate one of the large rabbits that she kept in cages scarcely bigger than their occupants and that he was obliged to skin and gut himself even though he loathed it.

  He was going to return to the kitchen, get that fantastic knife, and plunge it into Gauquelan’s heart.

  How calm, strong, and purposeful he felt! How he loved the feeling!

  But then what?

  Who would be able to link him to Gauquelan?

  He alone was privy to the reasons he had for cursing the Gauquelans of this world.

  He thought of his old Nevada parked in front of the house and stifled a giggle.

  His ghastly car would give him away at once, but it was pretty unlikely that, in this neighborhood, and at this hour, anyone would have noticed it.

  And even if they had …

  He feared nothing now.

  He looked hard at Gauquelan. From the living room door he watched this man sleeping—a man who’d shamelessly made so much money, and whose fat hands lay limply, trustingly, on his thighs.

  Rudy’s anus began itching again. He scratched himself mechanically.

  His father, Abel Descas, had been in the habit of taking a siesta in the big, shady living room of the house in Dara Salam, where he used to sit in his wicker chair just as Gauquelan was now in his low armchair—heedless, confident, unaware of the crimes being dreamed up around him and of the crimes about to be hatched in his, for the moment, still heedless, confident mind.

  Rudy wiped his hands—they had suddenly started sweating—on his trousers.

  If his father’s business partner Salif had taken advantage of Abel’s siesta—of his afternoon nap and of his heedlessness, his confidence—to stab him, he (Salif) would no doubt still be alive, even today, and the death would have changed nothing as far as Abel’s ultimate fate was concerned, since he (Abel) would kill himself a few weeks after Salif’s murder.

  Salif, Rudy recalled, had been a tall, slender man of slow, careful movements.

  Had Salif stood on the threshold of the big, shady room gazing at Abel asleep, imagining that, absorbed in his strange afternoon dreams, Abel knew nothing of the crimes being plotted around him?

  Had Salif so hated Rudy’s father that, despite seeing the man’s upturned palms resting on his thighs, he could have wished to kill him, or had he felt for Abel an affection in no way belied by his attempts to swindle his partner? Were these two tendencies—affection and treachery—present simultaneously in Salif’s mind and intentions, but kept distinct, so that the one never interfered with the other?

  Rudy had no privileged insight into what his father’s partner Salif felt about Abel, and didn’t know if Salif had really tried to cheat or whether Abel had mistakenly jumped to that conclusion, but now Rudy’s thoughts were, despite himself, going back to the time when his father used to nap in the wicker chair. Rudy’s thighs were getting damp and his trousers were clinging to them, and the itch was back with a vengeance. Feeling confused, angry, and upset, he was starting to wriggle once more, clenching and unclenching his buttocks.

  Gauquelan hadn’t stirred.

  When he woke up and rubbed together those hands no longer innocent and carefree but impatient and eager to return to that contemptible métier of his that paid so well, when he laboriously hauled himself out of his dark green crushed-velvet armchair and raised his cold devious eyes to see Rudy Descas standing in the doorway, would he realize that his death—his brutal, misconstrued demise—had been dreamed up by this stranger, or would he think, rather, that he was looking at the unexpected face of a friend, mistaking that look of hatred for one of benevolence?

  There must have been an afternoon, Rudy th
ought in a kind of panic, when his father had awoken from his siesta and from a possibly recurrent, cold, monotonous dream, had rubbed his eyes and face with hands no longer trusting but active and busy, had hauled from his wicker chair the supple heft of his trim, muscular frame, and had left the dark shady room in the quiet house, headed for Salif’s office, a bungalow not far away. He was, perhaps, still letting float hazily through his mind the vestiges of a painful, vaguely degrading dream in which his partner was trying to rob him by artificially inflating estimates for the construction of the vacation resort Abel was planning. Perhaps as he walked toward Salif’s bungalow he’d not dispelled the fallacy nurtured in some dreams that all the Africans around him had but one aim, to cheat him, even while feeling real affection for him, as Salif did, because those two impulses—friendship and deception—cohabited independently, without blending, in their minds and in their intentions.

  Rudy knew he’d been somewhere on the property that afternoon when his father, perhaps carried away by the illusory certainty of a humiliating dream, had struck Salif in front of the bungalow.

  He knew too that he’d been about eight or nine at the time, and that during the three years since he and Mummy had rejoined Abel in Dara Salam, a single fear occasionally tempered his bliss, a fear—though Mummy assured him it was groundless—of having perhaps one day to return to France, to the little house where, every Wednesday, a tall lad with straight, smooth legs like young beech trunks had monopolized Mummy’s attention, laughter, and love and whose mere adorable presence had transformed Rudy, age five, into a nonentity.

  On the other hand, what he couldn’t work out was …

  Without thinking he stepped into the living room and moved toward Gauquelan.

  He could now hear the sound of his own heavy breathing, to which the other man’s snoring seemed to reply with discreet solicitude, as if to encourage him to calm down and breathe more softly.

  What he still couldn’t work out was whether he’d been there when his father and Salif had it out, or whether Mummy had described it so graphically that he’d come to believe he’d seen it with his own eyes.

  But how and why, then—not having been there herself—could Mummy have described so vividly what she’d only heard secondhand?