Three Strong Women

by Marie Ndiaye

  He seemed younger than her, about twenty perhaps.

  With a high, shrill voice, almost like a child’s, he asked, “You okay?”

  “Yes, thanks, and you?”

  “I’m okay. My name’s Lamine.”

  She hesitated a moment, then, not quite managing to suppress a proud, almost arrogant note creeping into her voice, she told him her name: “Khady Demba.”

  He got up and sat down beside her.

  The deserted beach of grayish sand was covered in garbage (plastic bottles, rubbish bags split open, and the like), which Lamine eyed with cold detachment, looking to see if any of it could possibly still be of use, passing from one item to the next, promptly forgetting each one the moment he’d dismissed it, consigning it to oblivion as though it had never existed.

  His eyes fell on Khady’s leg. His face was twisted in horror, but he tried to hide it clumsily behind a hesitant smile.

  “You’re really hurt, aren’t you?”

  A bit peeved, she looked down in turn.

  It was a gaping wound, encrusted with dried blood covered in sand.

  The dull nagging pain seemed to get worse the more she looked at it. Khady let out a groan.

  “I know where we can get some water,” Lamine said.

  He helped her to her feet.

  She sensed the nervous strength of his rawboned, tight body, like a coiled spring, as if it were being kept firm, hardened by the constant vigilance and the privations he’d endured, no less than by his ability to blot them out, just as he seemed to negate, to banish from his mind, any object on the beach that was of no interest.

  Khady knew her own body was slim and robust, but it did not compare to this boy’s, tempered in the icy water of unavoidable deprivation, so that for the first time in her life she felt luckier than another human being.

  She checked to make sure that the wad of banknotes was still there, held in her elastic waistband.

  Then, refusing his offer of help, she walked beside Lamine toward the row of houses and shops with corrugated-iron roofs that lined the beach above the high-water mark.

  At every step, the pain intensified.

  And because, on top of that, she was very hungry, she yearned to be able to acquire an insensible, inorganic body, with no needs or desires, nothing but a tool in the service of a plan that she still knew nothing of but that she understood she’d be made to learn about.

  Well, she did know one thing. And this she knew, not as she usually knew things—that is, without knowing that she knew—but in a clear and conscious way.

  I can’t go back to the family, she said to herself, not even wondering (because it was useless) whether that was a good thing or just an extra source of unhappiness. Thinking clearly and calmly, she was well aware that she had, in a way, made a choice.

  And when Lamine had told her of his own intentions, when—in a rather strident voice interrupted by little nervous giggles when he couldn’t think of a word or seemed afraid of not being taken seriously—he’d assured her that he’d get to Europe one day or die in the attempt, that there was no other solution to his problems, it appeared to Khady that all he was doing there was making her own plan explicit.

  So, in deciding to join him, her conviction that she was now in control of the precarious, unsteady equipage that was her existence hadn’t been shaken in any way.

  Quite the opposite.

  He’d led her to a pump in the center of town so that she could wash off the sand sticking to her wound. Then he explained that he’d tried several times to leave, that he’d always been prevented by unforeseen circumstances, sometimes large impediments, sometimes small (last night it had been the ramshackle condition of the boat), but that he now had sufficient knowledge of what he might find to brave the obstacles and evade or overcome all eventualities, of which there couldn’t be that many and surely he’d seen them all.

  Khady instantly recognized that he was up to speed with things she couldn’t even imagine, and that by staying with him she’d benefit from absorbing his knowledge, instead of having to grope her own laborious way to it.

  How remarkable she found it that she hadn’t said to herself, What else can I do, in any case, but follow this boy? but rather had thought that she could take control of the situation and profit from it.

  Racked with pain, she washed her torn calf.

  The two pieces of flesh were clearly separated.

  She tore a strip off the batik that contained her belongings and wrapped it tightly around her calf, binding together the two flaps of the wound.

  Throughout the heavy, still days that followed, the place remained grayish, but the light was bright, as if the shimmering metallic surface of the sea were diffusing a leaden glare.

  It seemed to Khady that she’d been granted a reprieve so she could steep herself in information such as she’d never acquired in twenty-five years; and discreetly, too, without appearing to learn anything, an instinctive caution having stopped her revealing to Lamine how ignorant she was.

  He’d brought her back to the courtyard their group had departed from.

  Many new people were gathered there, and the boy went around collecting orders for food and water, which he then ran to get in town.

  He never asked Khady to pay for what he’d bring back for them to eat (omelet sandwiches, bananas, grilled fish), and Khady never offered, because she’d decided never to talk about anything that hadn’t already been aired, confining herself to short replies to questions that were equally laconic, not mentioning money since Lamine didn’t, questioning him on the other hand with suppressed eagerness about the journey he was planning and the means of achieving it. On that topic she tried to conceal her hunger for information behind an air of gloomy, bored restraint; she felt a veil of morose impenetrability covering her face, just as it had done in her husband’s family, hiding her wan, tepid thoughts behind it.

  Oh, how fast her mind was working now! Sometimes it got in a muddle, as if intoxicated by its own abilities.

  It was not too sure now whether the ardent young man standing before it was Khady’s husband or a stranger called Lamine, or why exactly it had to remember everything that came out of that mouth with the hot, almost feverish breath, and it felt tempted—at rare, very brief moments—to flush itself clean and return to its previous state, where nothing was demanded of it except to avoid getting involved in anything to do with real life.

  Khady memorized, then, at nightfall, lying in the courtyard, filed away the new pieces of information in order of importance.

  What had to be kept continually in mind was this: the journey could take months, even years, as it had for a neighbor of Lamine’s who’d only reached Europe (what “Europe” was exactly, where it was situated, she put off until later to find out) five whole years after leaving home.

  This too: it was imperative to buy a passport. Lamine had reliable connections for getting one.

  And then: the boy now refused to go by sea from this coast.

  The journey would be longer, much longer, but it would go through the desert and arrive at a certain place where you had to climb to get into Europe.

  And then, and then: Lamine had said many times—his suddenly mulish, inscrutable, smooth face shining with sweat—that he didn’t mind dying if that was the price of pursuing his aim, but to go on living as he had done up till now, that he refused to do.

  Although Khady spontaneously blotted out everything to do with the boy’s earlier life, although she tried not to listen to anything she thought inessential, whatever was likely to upset or embarrass her, even, inexplicably, to fill her with a muted sadness, as if her own earliest memories were being revived rather than his, she couldn’t help retaining the fact that a stepmother—his father’s new wife after his mother’s death—had for years beaten Lamine so hard he’d almost gone mad.

  He pulled up his T-shirt to show her the pinkish, slightly puffy marks on his back.

  He’d gone to the lycée and failed the
baccalaureate twice.

  But he wanted badly to go on studying, he dreamed of becoming an engineer. (What did that mean? Khady wondered despite herself, trying hard not to get interested.)

  When after a few days she made to remove the cloth protecting her calf, it was stuck so hard to the wound that she had to wrench it off, causing such pain that she couldn’t help crying out.

  She wrapped a strip of clean cloth tightly around it.

  She limped from one corner of the courtyard to another, trying to habituate herself to the hindrance, to train her body to cope with the slower pace and constant pain, until they became a part of her that she could forget or ignore by relegating it to the status of other merely circumstantial matters, like the painful stories of Lamine’s past, that served no useful purpose but merely risked deflecting and slowing down the still budding, precarious development of her thinking by insinuating into it elements of turmoil and uncontrollable suffering.

  She similarly let her eyes flit across the faces of the people who arrived ever more numerous each day in the courtyard—and her look, she knew, was neutral, cold, and a permanent discouragement to anyone attempting conversation, not because she was afraid of being asked something (she had no fear of that) but because her mind panicked at the mere possibility of hearing about painful, complicated lives and being told at great length about things she found difficult to understand since she lacked the principles for interpreting matters in life that others seemed to possess as a matter of course.

  One day the boy took her through narrow, sandy streets to a barber shop where a woman in the back took photos of her.

  A few days later he came back with a worn, creased, blue booklet that he gave Khady, telling her she was now called Bintou Thiam.

  His eyes had a look of pride, triumph, and self-assurance that put Khady slightly on guard.

  She had a passing feeling that she was becoming feeble again and subject to the decisions, knowledge, and inscrutable intentions of others. Through sheer weariness she was briefly tempted to accept this subordination, to stop thinking about anything and to let her mind once again drift in the milky flow of its dreams.

  Feeling a little disgusted, she pulled herself together.

  She thanked the boy with a nod.

  She felt terrible shooting pains in her calf that made it hard for her to think straight.

  But though still determined not to discuss money unless he did, she couldn’t ignore the issue, nor the fact that Lamine had bought a passport for her and was behaving as if it were obvious that she had no money, or that one way or another she’d pay later—that worried her to the point that she sometimes wished he’d disappear, vanish from her life.

  But she was becoming attached to his eager features, his adolescent voice.

  She surprised herself by looking at him with pleasure, almost with tender amusement, when, hopping about the courtyard like the delicate birds with long spindly legs that she remembered seeing as a child on the beach (although she thought she couldn’t now remember what they were called, she could see that everything had a name even if she didn’t know it, and realized with embarrassment she’d once believed that only those things whose names she knew possessed one), he moved from one group to another, busying himself with a spirited, childlike innocence that inspired confidence.

  He was possessed of a particular intuition.

  She was beginning to grow impatient, but never for a moment thought to complain about it, when he announced they’d be leaving the next day. It was as if—she thought—he’d guessed that without realizing it she was starting to get bored, and had decided it was a bad thing: but why?

  What could that matter to him?

  Oh, she certainly felt affection for the boy.

  That night, in the darkness of the courtyard where they were lying, she felt him moving close to her, hesitantly, as if unsure of her reaction.

  She didn’t rebuff him; rather, she encouraged him by turning toward him.

  She pulled her batik up and, carefully rolling the banknotes in them, slipped her panties off and laid her head on them.

  It was years since she’d made love: not once since her husband’s death.

  She carefully stroked the boy’s heavily scarred back and was surprised at the same time by the extreme lightness of his body and by the almost excessive gentleness and delicacy (because she could barely feel he was there) with which he moved within her. Almost as a reflex, recalled by the sensation of a body on top of hers, even one so different from her husband’s compact, heavy frame, there came back to her the prayers to be got with child which she’d never ceased murmuring at the time and which had prevented her having an orgasm by distracting her from the necessary concentration on her own pleasure.

  She vehemently chased all such prayers away.

  She was filled with a kind of well-being, a sort of physical comfort—nothing more pointed than that, nothing at all like what her sisters-in-law giggled and sighed about between themselves—but it made Khady feel happy and grateful to the boy.

  As he pulled away from her he inadvertently bumped against her calf.

  An explosion of pain tore through Khady.

  She was panting and almost fainted.

  She could hear Lamine murmuring anxiously in her ear and—suffering so much that she felt surprised, almost detached, a stranger to a self that was in such violent pain—she said to herself, Who ever cared about me the way he does, this lad, and so young too! I’m lucky, I’m really lucky …

  Before dawn they clambered onto an open-bed truck where so many people were already huddling that it seemed impossible for Khady to find any room for herself.

  She perched on a pile of sacks in the back, high up above the wheels.

  Lamine advised her to grip the string on the packaging firmly so as not to fall off.

  He was sitting astride a box right next to her and Khady could smell on their arms, pressed close together, the slightly sharp odor of his sweat mingling with hers.

  “If you fall, the driver won’t stop and you’ll die in the desert,” Lamine whispered.

  He’d given her a leather flask filled with tepid water.

  Khady had seen him give the driver a wad of bills, explaining that he was paying for her too, then he’d helped her onto the truck, since her leg seemed to have become so heavy she couldn’t manage it alone.

  Lamine’s barely contained excitement—which he attempted to conceal by fussy, precise gestures (such as frequently checking that the top of the water bottle was screwed on tight) and by continual warnings, repeated in a soft, slow voice (“Hang on tight, if you fall off the driver won’t stop and you’ll die in the desert”)—she could sense from the slight twitch of his face: she found herself infected by his slightly intoxicated eagerness, so that she felt neither afraid nor humiliated at being helped in the simplest ways by the boy, nor by the constant support he gave her, such as cupping his hands together to give her a leg up onto the truck; none of that called into question the idea she now had of her own independence, of being free from constraints imposed by the will of others. In much the same manner she endeavored not to see, in the money that Lamine had given the driver on her behalf, anything that amounted to a personal commitment on her part.

  For Khady Demba, all that was of no consequence.

  If it pleased Lamine to play a crucial role in her liberation, she was sincerely grateful to him for that—yes, she felt a great deal of affection for the boy, but it didn’t make her accountable in any way.

  Her head was spinning a little.

  There was no relief now from the intense pain in her leg. It mingled with a feeling of joy that also appeared to be urging her fiercely onward.

  As it moved off, the truck juddered so violently she was nearly thrown from her perch.

  Lamine grabbed her in the nick of time.

  “Hold on tight, hold on tight!” he shouted in her ear, and close up in the rosy light of dawn she could see his thin, hollow cheeks a
nd the pale chapped lips he moistened often with his tongue, and his eyes: a bit wild, a bit frantic, she thought, like those dark and terrified eyes of a large yellowish dog that had been cornered in the market by women armed with sticks determined to make it pay for the theft of a chicken—Lamine’s were just like the dog’s eyes, filled with innocent terror, that had met hers in the market and pierced her numb, cold heart and had for a brief moment aroused strong feelings of sympathy and shame.

  Was it for her that Lamine had been so afraid?

  She was to recall, with dull remorse but without bitterness, how very attentive Lamine had been toward her.

  She would remember all that, never thinking, however, that he’d sought to deceive her. In thinking back to his concern for her, the sadness she would feel, though at some remove, would be more for him than herself: it would be the boy’s fate that would affect her to the point of shedding a few cold tears, whereas she would judge her own destiny dispassionately, almost with detachment, as if she, Khady Demba, who had never wagered on life as much hope as Lamine did, had no reason to complain about losing everything.

  She had not lost much, she would think, insisting with that imponderable pride, that discreet, unshakable assurance, I’m me, Khady Demba, even as she would get up, with sore thighs, the lips of her hot, inflamed vagina still swollen, up from that sad excuse for a mattress—a piece of grayish, stinking foam, actually—that throughout those long months was to be her place of work.

  She’d not lost much, she thought.

  Because, however great her exhaustion or intense her affliction, she would never regret that period of her life when her mind wandered in the foggy, numbing protective confinement of her frozen dreams, the time she lived with her husband’s family.

  Nor would she have missed for anything the years of her marriage when the longing to get pregnant occupied every thinking moment.

  Truth to tell, she would regret nothing, even while plunged in the reality of a horrific present that she could see only too clearly, to which she would apply thinking full of both pragmatism and pride (she would never have pointless feelings of shame, she would never forget the value of the human being she was: Khady Demba, honest and true)—a reality that above all she considered transitory, convinced that this period of suffering would have an end, and that while she would certainly not be rewarded (she couldn’t believe she was owed anything for having suffered) she would simply move on to something else. She didn’t yet know what that would be, but she was curious to find out.