Three Strong Women

by Marie Ndiaye

  Rudy didn’t have to close his eyes to re-create the effect of still being there or never having been there, whichever it was, the scene of his father shouting something at Salif, then, without giving him a chance to reply, hitting him hard in the face and knocking him down.

  Abel Descas had been a strong man, and however gentle, trusting, and heedless they appeared when he was asleep, his big broad hands were used to handling tools, lifting heavy loads, and carrying sacks of cement, so that a single blow of his fist had been enough to knock Salif down.

  But had Rudy really seen the tall, slim body of his father’s partner bite the dust, or had he only imagined (or dreamed about) the almost comical way Salif had been flung backward by the force of the blow?

  Suddenly he could no longer bear not knowing.

  He looked at Gauquelan’s hands and fat neck, telling himself that if he resolved to strangle the man it would not be easy, through so much flabby skin and flesh, for his thumbs to find their way to the rings of the windpipe.

  Like him, his father, he thought, must sometimes have enjoyed his fits of hot, all-consuming, intoxicating fury, but he also allowed that it had been not rage but pitiless self-control driving Abel when he’d gotten into his 4×4 parked near the bungalow and slowly, calmly, as if setting off on an errand to the village, directed its huge wheels at Salif’s body, at the unconscious form of his partner and friend, in whose mind affection and a possible taste for embezzlement had never been confused, and who therefore, if he had indeed cheated Abel, had meant no harm to the friend or even the notion of friendship, but merely, perhaps, to some simple abstraction of a colleague, a blank face.

  Still gazing at Gauquelan, Rudy stepped backward, over the doorway to the living room, and stopped once more in the hall.

  He covered his mouth with his hand, licked his palm, and nibbled it.

  He wanted to snicker, to howl, to shout insults.

  What could he do to find out?

  What would need to happen for him to know at last?

  “Oh God, oh God,” he kept repeating. “Kind, sweet, little god of Mummy’s, how can I find out, how can I get to understand?”

  For what did Mummy herself, who wasn’t there, know for certain about Rudy’s presence or absence that afternoon in front of the bungalow when Abel, as calm as a man setting off to get bread in the village, had driven over Salif’s head?

  Was it possible that Mummy had told Rudy about the short, sharp sound, like that of a big insect being squashed, that Salif’s skull had made under the wheel of the 4×4, and that Rudy had later dreamed about it until he believed he’d heard it himself?

  Mummy was quite capable, he said to himself, of having described such a sound and of having told him about Salif’s blood flowing in the dust, reaching the first flagstones of the terrace and staining the porous stone forever.

  She was well capable of that, he said to himself.

  But had she done it?

  He scratched himself frantically but to no avail.

  With eyes wide open he could clearly see the courtyard of the bungalow of corrugated iron and wood, the white pavement of the narrow terrace, and his father’s big gray vehicle crushing Salif’s head in the thick, heavy silence of a hot, white afternoon; panting with sorrow and disbelief, he could summon up the smallest details of that scene, whose colors and sounds never varied, that immutable tableau, which in his mind’s eye he could even see from different angles, as if he’d been present in several places at once.

  And in his heart of hearts he knew what his father’s intentions had been.

  Because, afterward, Abel had denied deliberately running Salif over; he’d pled jitteriness and irritation to explain the accident and his crazy driving, claiming that he’d gotten into the car with the sole idea of going for a spin to calm himself.

  Rudy knew it was nothing of the sort.

  He’d always known that his father had tried to blot the whole thing out, to convince himself that he’d never wanted to rid himself, so dishonorably, of his partner and friend who never in his heart had mixed …

  He knew that in getting into the car and turning the key Abel was after revenge on Salif, a way of sustaining the pleasure of his exultant rage by pulverizing the man he’d knocked to the ground; Rudy knew it as well as—or even better than—if he’d felt it himself, because it wasn’t his neck on the line, there was nothing to gain disputing the point.

  So why was he so sure?

  Was it because he’d been there and seen the way the car moved and realized that it was a furious, passionate, deliberate act of will that was directing the vehicle at Salif’s head?

  Rudy ran through the kitchen and out the back door, straight to the gate, and hurled himself through the gap in the hedge.

  His shirt caught on the thorns. He pulled it roughly away.

  Only when he was sitting in the Nevada again did he dare draw breath.

  He gripped the steering wheel and lowered his head onto it.

  Groaning softly, hiccupping and choking back his spit, he murmured, “What does it matter, what does it matter!”

  Because that wasn’t the issue, was it?

  How could he be so blind as to believe that the fundamental question was whether, on that terrible afternoon, he’d been present or not?

  Because that wasn’t the issue.

  It now seemed to him that fretting about this so much was just a distraction, albeit a painful one, a way of concealing the insidious progression of untruthfulness, criminality, perverse enjoyment, and insanity.

  Trembling, he set off, and at the next junction turned right, to get away from Gauquelan’s house as quickly as possible.

  Why did he have to, even in the worst circumstances, be so like his father?

  Who expected that of him?

  He could still see, from where he’d stood in the doorway, Gauquelan’s sleeping face and defenseless hands, while his own face had been deceptively calm, and he could recall his deceptively calm thoughts as he wondered in which drawer he’d find the most suitable weapon for killing Gauquelan with a single blow—he, Rudy, with his aspirations to pity and goodness, standing in the doorway of this stranger’s living room and, beneath the calm and gentle exterior of a cultivated person, planning an act that, from the point of view of pity and goodness, was inexcusable.

  His teeth were chattering.

  Who would ever have expected him to be as violent and abject a man as his father, and what did he have to do with Abel Descas anyway?

  He, Rudy, had been a specialist in medieval literature and a competent teacher.

  The very thought of building a vacation resort for profit filled him with embarrassment and loathing.

  So—as he clung to the steering wheel, well aware of driving carelessly and too fast along a country road far from Gauquelan’s neighborhood—what inheritance did he feel he had to own up to?

  And why should it have been necessary to keep Gauquelan from getting out of his armchair once his hands suddenly no longer seemed vulnerable and childlike …?

  Oh, thought Rudy as he swerved through the bends in the road, it wasn’t Gauquelan who should never be allowed to awaken from his siesta, with his head full of deceitful visions that rubbing his eyes couldn’t dispel, but rather Rudy’s father, a man of murderous tendencies firmly, fanatically, rooted in his heart, where friendship and anger, affection for others and the need to destroy them, mingled incessantly.

  And wasn’t it that man’s worthy heir who’d taken pleasure in throttling the Dara Salam boy and—just now—in spying on a stranger fast asleep?

  Overcome with self-loathing, Rudy recalled having wept over the murdered wisteria, and thought about his father’s habit of waxing sentimental about animals, at mealtimes occasionally talking of becoming a vegetarian, and making a show of covering his ears whenever Mummy strangled a chicken out back.

  On entering a village he slowed down and pulled up outside a grocer’s he knew slightly.

  A bell tink
led as he opened the glass door.

  The smell of cold meat, bread, and confectionary in the window made him realize how hungry he was.

  Sounds of shouting and laughter on television filtered through a curtain of plastic strips separating the shop from the grocer’s living room. The sounds grew louder as the woman slipped through the curtain, parting the strips carefully to prevent the flies coming in.

  Rudy cleared his throat.

  The woman waited, her head cocked slightly toward the back room so that she could go on listening to the program.

  In a hoarse voice he asked for a baguette and a slice of ham.

  Deftly, confidently, and (he thought, mechanically) with unwashed hands, she lifted up the shiny ham, placed it on the machine, cut a slice, popped it on the scales, then took a limp-looking baguette from a large paper bag on the floor, felt it before tossing it back and picking up another.

  Despite the precision of her movements he noticed her absent look, the way she kept listening for the sound coming from the television, even though not a word was audible, as if she could stay tuned just by following the varying intensity of the roar.

  “Four euros sixty,” she said, without looking at him.

  This provincial France he knew so well suddenly made him feel weary, oh yes—he reflected—terribly weary of inferior bread lying on the floor, of pale, damp ham, of hands like hers handling food and coins, bread and bills, in succession.

  Those hands, indifferent to tainted bread, did they sometimes, he wondered, lie limp, fragile, palms up?

  Then his feeling of disgust faded.

  But there remained in his heart the nostalgic pang he felt whenever he remembered that during those long years spent in Dara Salam, and later in Le Plateau in the capital, he’d never felt the slightest repugnance when the hands of people serving him touched meat and coins at the same time.

  Indeed he never felt any revulsion at anything, as if his joy, his well-being, his gratitude for the place had sterilized everyday transactions with a purifying fire.

  Whereas here, in his own country …

  As he left the shop he could hear behind him the swishing of the plastic curtain and the tinkling of the bell, then the heavy silence of midday and the thick, dry heat enveloped him.

  The pavements on either side of the road were narrow, and the grayish houses all had their shutters closed.

  He got back into the car.

  It was so hot inside he felt slightly faint.

  The very inside of his head felt hot and feeble. It wasn’t an entirely disagreeable sensation, and in no way resembled the feeling of a furnace raging inside his skull when, stretched out on the ground in the lycée courtyard, his face pressed against the asphalt, he’d felt awkward, worried hands trying gingerly and laboriously to lift him up, first by the armpits and then by the waist as he remarked to himself confusedly, But I’m not all that heavy, until he realized that the delicate hands belonged to the terrified headmistress, Madame Plat.

  Despite the shooting pain in his shoulders, he’d tried to help her, and he’d felt embarrassed for the two of them, as if Madame Plat had caught him in an intimate moment that nothing in their relationship could justify their sharing.

  The three boys were standing erect, gathered together in silence and calm, as if waiting for justice to be done, so sure of their version of events as to feel no hurry to explain themselves.

  Rudy’s eyes had met those of the Dara Salam boy, who’d gazed back with a look of impassive, cold indifference.

  He’d gently touched his Adam’s apple as if to signify, no doubt, that he was still very badly hurt.

  “Do you want me to call the nurse?” Madame Plat had asked. Rudy had said he didn’t.

  And although it was so hot inside his head that he couldn’t say precisely what words were going to pass his lips, he’d embarked on a passionate, confused speech intended to completely exonerate the boys.

  Puzzled and mistrustful, Madame Plat looked hard at Rudy’s bloody temple and cheek.

  She was a youngish laid-back woman with whom he’d always gotten along.

  She was now looking at him suspiciously and somewhat fearfully. Rudy was starting to feel, as he talked, that his panicky defense of the three boys was working against him as much as them, and that Madame Plat was beginning to sense among all four some dubious, incomprehensible complicity or, worse still, some terror on his part of pupils whose vengeance he had reason to fear.

  At that moment, he’d already concealed from himself what had really happened.

  The truth he’d embrace in Manille’s parking lot had already gone out of his head.

  And thus had he convinced himself that in clearing the boys of all responsibility for provoking the confrontation, he was lying. It was they who attacked me, he thought to himself, because his fingers had already forgotten the warm neck of the Dara Salam boy, and what he was saying to Madame Plat—out of fear or shame at seeming to be a victim—was the opposite of the truth.

  Later, in Madame Plat’s office, he would stick to his guns: the boys had flung him to the ground because he’d deliberately, foolishly insulted them.

  It’s not true, it’s not true, he was thinking, I’ve never hurt a fly, and his head was aching terribly and his shoulders were hurting dreadfully.

  “But why did they do that? What did you say to them?” Madame Plat had asked, bewildered.

  He said nothing.

  She asked him again.

  He still said nothing.

  When he did say something, it was to affirm that the boys had been right to beat him up, because what he’d shouted at them was unforgivable.

  The boys, when questioned in their turn, had said nothing. No one said anything about Monsieur Descas hurling himself at the Dara Salam boy.

  Only Rudy’s version of the story had been retained, i.e., that he’d said a vile thing to the boys and had brought a brutal reaction upon himself.

  Madame Plat had advised Rudy to take sick leave.

  His case was considered by a disciplinary panel and, as if out of nowhere, the insult “fucking nigger” was looked into as the one he’d allegedly hurled at the three boys.

  Someone had remembered that, twenty-five years earlier, Rudy’s father had humiliated and murdered his African business partner.

  The disciplinary panel therefore decided to suspend Rudy.

  He was panting, as if he’d been struck.

  He could now, for the first time, remember that period, he could remember the smell of tar and the pressure of his fingers on the boy’s windpipe, and the old pain was stirring.

  As he awaited the verdict of the disciplinary panel, he’d spent a month in the apartment in Le Plateau.

  He’d begun to hate that pretty three-room apartment in a newly built block of units that ran along an avenue shaded by poinciana trees.

  He only went out to take his son for walks and to shop as close to home as possible, convinced that everyone was aware of his fall from grace and was laughing at him.

  Wasn’t it at that point too, he wondered, that he’d begun to dislike the child in a way he’d never owned up to and would indeed have hotly denied?

  • • •

  He set off and drove to the edge of the village.

  He parked on a dirt track between two fields of corn, and without getting out began devouring the bread and ham, taking a bite first of the one and then the other.

  Although the ham was watery and tasteless and the baguette limp, it was so good to be eating something at last that his eyes filled with tears.

  But why, oh why, had he never been able to feel for Djibril the obvious love, so strong, joyous, proud, that other fathers seemed to feel toward their children?

  He’d always made an effort to love his son, and that effort, previously disguised by his eagerness to please and the shortness of time actually spent with the boy, had been exposed during the long weeks he spent shut up in the apartment.

  He’d have preferred t
hen to hide away from everybody, but Djibril was there, always there, a witness to Rudy’s downfall, to his degradation and the destruction of everything he’d done to make himself a man beloved and respected.

  That the boy was only two made no difference.

  This little angel had become his fearsome, watchful guardian, the silent, mocking judge of his fall from grace.

  Rudy crumpled up the wrapping paper from the ham, tossed it in the back, and ate the rest of the bread.

  Then he got out of the car and went toward the first row in the cornfield to urinate.

  Hearing a wingbeat, the gentle flutter of feathers in the warm, still air above his head, he looked up.

  As if on cue, the buzzard dived toward him.

  He raised his arms to protect his head.

  Just before touching him the buzzard swerved away, shrieking with rage.

  Rudy jumped in the car, reversed out of the dirt track, and drove slowly along the road.

  Although when he’d finished eating he’d been ready to go back home and see Fanta, he was now gripped with fear and irritation, so he deliberately went in the other direction.

  The idea crossed his mind that the bird had perhaps been trying to tell him that he should indeed go back home as quickly as possible, but he rejected it, convinced deep down that the angry buzzard was, on the contrary, indicating that he should stay well away.

  He felt his head throbbing.

  “What for, Fanta, what for,” he murmured.

  Because wasn’t he, in a sense, now worthier of being loved than he had been that morning?

  And being on that lofty perch from which she could launch an attack bird that enjoyed her full support, could she not understand that?

  Just as he would never again say those absurd, cruel things he’d uttered only in the white heat of anger, the same way as he would no longer let himself fall prey to a particular kind of humiliating, impotent, comforting rage, he would try no more to charm Fanta with seductive guile, because those things he said in the apartment in Le Plateau hadn’t been intended to get at some honest truth or another but only to drag her back to France with him even at the risk (not considered at the time, almost beyond his concern) of her own downfall and the collapse of her rightful dreams.