My Heart Hemmed In

by Marie Ndiaye

  Other titles by Marie NDiaye available from Two Lines Press

  Self-Portrait in Green

  All My Friends

  Originally published as: Mon coeur à l’étroit by Marie NDiaye

  © 2007 by Éditions Gallimard

  Translation © 2017 by Jordan Stump

  Two Lines Press

  582 Market Street, Suite 700, San Francisco, CA 94104

  www.twolinespress.com

  ISBN 978-1-931883-63-4

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2016962014

  Cover design by Gabriele Wilson

  Cover photo by Federica Landi / Millennium Images

  Typeset by Jessica Sevey

  13579108642

  Cet ouvrage, publié dans le cadre d’un programme d’aide à la publication, bénéficie de la participation de la Mission Culturelle et Universitaire Française aux Etats-Unis, service de l’Ambassade de France aux EU.

  This work, published as part of a program of aid for publication, received support from the Mission Culturelle et Universitaire Française aux Etats-Unis, a department of the French Embassy in the United States.

  This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

  Contents

  1.When did it start?

  2.We don’t know

  3.So many happy years

  4.Nothing to do but keep on

  5.How could I not have known?

  6.A changeable pharmacist

  7.We don’t need any friends, thanks

  8.They butchered him but good

  9.We find comfort in food, and it’s a terrible mistake

  10.Maybe it’s over?

  11.Everybody likes meat

  12.Did we offend the bad fairy?

  13.If only he were my son

  14.My inconstant city

  15.He’s not like he used to be

  16.So many things changing and vanishing

  17.In the clutches of Rue Fondaudège

  18.What we did to him

  19.We’ll probably never see each other again

  20.The tram’s playthings

  21.What does she know about me?

  22.Death at breakneck speed

  23.I don’t want to know her anymore

  24.Finally a little fun!

  25.I hold her close

  26.Too late

  27.It’s him, that’s my son

  28.Everything we hated, everything we condemned

  29.This is how they are

  30.What did she see?

  31.Bad cooking at my son’s

  32.What’s going on between them?

  33.A little golden bag, a little silver bag

  34.What have I done to that boy?

  35.He’s giving a lecture

  36.High times on Rue Esprit-des-Lois

  37.They still want to take care of their aging daughter

  38.Everyone’s better now

  1. When did it start?

  Now and then, at first, I think I catch people scowling in my direction. They can’t really mean me, can they?

  When I summon my courage and mention this to Ange, at the dinner table, he pauses for a moment, sheepish or troubled, and tells me he’s noticed the same thing with him. Looking into my eyes, he asks if I think his students have some grievance against him, or if through him they’re aiming at me, knowing I’m his wife.

  That question leaves me at a loss. What could I have done, and to whom?

  I see deep concern for me in Ange’s eyes. He wants me to tell him his students’ hostile stares are intended for him and him alone, as are even the dark glances my students give me, meant for him and no one else.

  But what could Ange have done, and to whom? Isn’t he a beloved teacher, isn’t he a discreet and perfectly honorable man?

  We finish our meal in silence, each aware of the fear gnawing at the other but neither daring to speak of it openly, because we’re both used to peace and serenity, an untroubled understanding of everything around us, and so, in a way, our own fear offends us, like something unseemly and out of place.

  2. We don’t know

  The mothers press their red-faced children to their bellies when I appear in the schoolyard. My students’ tormented stiffness makes my heart ache. What sort of wickedness are they suddenly believing in, I ask myself, that they don’t even dare to look up at me, when we once got along so well?

  Disturbed, I wonder: What have people been telling them?

  I’ve always believed that no disgrace is ever completely unearned, and that, however excessive or obtuse or cruel a reaction to a dubious reputation may be, its cause can rarely be questioned.

  You always have some idea, I thought, of the wrong you’re being blamed for. You always have some idea, I thought. But now I can only confess—knowing it’s stupid and presumptuous of me, my brow burning with shame—that I cannot begin to imagine any reason why Ange and I should have become pariahs at our school.

  It’s impossible. God knows I try. God knows Ange tries, all night in bed, tossing one way, trying some more, then tossing the other, when he should be deservedly enjoying the sleep we require for our responsibilities as patient, faithful, tireless teachers. I sense that Ange can no more find a comprehensible motive than I can, but we never bring up the subject, fearing our words might endow it with a terrible reality.

  We’re convinced of our innocence, but ashamed all the same.

  3. So many happy years

  We’ve been working at this school for fifteen years. We love the smell of the hallways in the early morning, when we open the doors to our orderly classrooms with no one around and the clean blackboard, the gleaming floor, all those faithful, persevering things quietly waiting, all that tranquil constancy rushing forward to meet us, in a way tenderly reminding us who we are.

  We’ve been working here for fifteen years, first as colleagues, then married, by which I mean that Ange is my husband and I, Nadia, am his wife.

  We teach in neighboring classrooms, and we very naturally came together, not rushing into it but never pretending to forestall what would have happened anyway. We love our school with a passion that only a handful of our fellow teachers can understand. Is there perhaps a little too much pride in that passion, I ask myself, beneath its veneer of devotion? Isn’t that a thing to be chastened, stifled, and then shrunk down to a more ordinary fondness for our jobs?

  This, I tell myself, not quite convinced, this might be what’s causing the violent aversion Ange and I inspire in our students, in their parents, in the principal, in our neighbors. We weren’t sufficiently humble. Our own good intentions had blinded us.

  But is that really so terrible?

  4. Nothing to do but keep on

  I walk past a little man shuffling along the edge of the sidewalk, paying him no mind.

  “Nadia!” he feebly calls out.

  It’s my husband, Ange. He has his schoolteacher satchel under one arm, carefully clasped to his torso. We walk on together to our apartment building on Rue Esprit-des-Lois, and I realize I have to slow down if I don’t want to leave Ange behind. We say nothing. We no longer dare ask each other if we had a good day, knowing perfectly well we can’t have. And so we keep silent, we walk with our heads down, our eyes on the ground to make sure we see nothing that might hurt or upset us, any sort of offense, which we will react to, we know, with only a pained silence, even more unpleasant to hear together than alone.

  It’s cold out. Come on, hurry up, I’d like to tell Ange, but I keep quiet. His jacket is hanging loose, in spite of the cold. His top shirt buttons aren’t fastened. It’s not my husband Ange’s way to be careless with his appearance, or his actions. Nonetheless, I keep quiet, for fear of drawing attention.
<
br />   Over these past few weeks, with the behavior of everyone around us mutating so intensely that it’s turned from respectful goodwill to a sort of contemptuous hatred, I’ve developed a certain sense of the situations liable to set off that behavior in one way or another. In the street, then, I’m convinced nothing will happen to us as long as we keep silent. Yes, we attract overt, venomous stares, like scavenging dogs that are so ugly they can only be looked at with loathing, but that’s all. People simply look at us and despise us like wretched dogs.

  I discreetly turn to Ange and say, under my breath, “Hurry up, it’s so cold out.”

  He seems to be breathing heavily. I see sweat on his forehead in spite of the cold. He clutches his satchel tighter and answers only with a grimace, making no attempt to speed up.

  “Are you afraid someone’s going to snatch that away?” I say, nodding at the satchel.

  A tall young man coming toward us hears the sound of my voice. His face is so pleasant, so perfectly sympathetic that at first I don’t think to be on my guard. I even begin to break into a vague smile, merely taking care not to look him in the eye. Only Ange can I now look at straight on, though I do so less and less because of the unease that comes over us both at the sight of each other’s frightened eyes, those other eyes mirroring our own panic and walling us off from all consolation, prevented from giving it and unable to take it. Even my little students I peer at from one side, looking at their neck or their ear as I speak.

  The man stops short when he draws even with me. He begins rubbing his hands on his thighs, and he barks, “What? What?”

  “It’s all right,” I say.

  The cold air seeps under my collar. I feel it flowing down my back, I feel myself wincing. A sudden urge to urinate tenses my bladder. He then says, “You looking at me? You smiling at me? What right do you have to smile at me, you filth?”

  To my surprise, I read apprehension in his pretty almond-shaped eyes. I’m not relieved to see it. On the contrary, my fear only grows.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Really,” I say, “I don’t know.”

  “Oh sure, you don’t know,” he says.

  He takes a half step toward me. His lips are blue with anger and cold. A dense steam streams through them, and I can feel its warmth on my face. He leans back, then abruptly snaps forward and spits on my forehead. I wear my hair in bangs, and now they’re damp with his spittle. It’s nothing, I tell myself, just a little wetness on my hair, it’s nothing.

  I press my legs tightly together, careful to look no higher than his chest, and I see that chest rising and falling in his snug red sweater, stirred by a fear scarcely less violent than my own. What’s he afraid of, I ask myself, what’s he afraid of? Slowly the chest backs away, then disappears from view.

  I hear footsteps behind me, my husband Ange trudging forward again. So, I tell myself, Ange stopped. He waited for that incident to be over, I tell myself, that altercation, whose cause escapes me but whose effect I can feel on my cold forehead, with that boy in the simply knit sweater, the kind I used to make for my son, to swathe my son’s shallow chest in loving, warm red wool. Ange was right, I tell myself, to keep out of it. What good can come of confronting the fury and fear of square-shouldered, brutish-handed young men?

  I start off again, not turning back, acknowledging our shared shame. It’s cold out. I remember that Ange’s jacket is open, his top shirt buttons undone, in spite of the cold.

  We live on a quiet street, populated mostly by retired teachers Ange and I have come to view with a certain arrogance, because we find deep fulfillment in our work, and the idea that anyone might blithely settle for an existence deprived of that work surprises us and strikes us as suspect.

  “Poor people, poor people,” he whispers as I walk past his window, on our building’s ground floor.

  He whispered those very same words just this morning, when Ange and I set off for our school. I stop and say, “What is this?”

  And then: “Really, how dare you talk to us like that?”

  This man’s cloying, ostentatious sympathy grates on me, this man we hold in such low regard. Nonetheless, I stay where I am, cold or no, staring sternly at my neighbor’s cheek. Ange has caught up with me. He’s gasping for breath. I say to him, “He won’t explain why he thinks it’s all right to pity us morning and evening, it’s irritating.”

  “Oh, what does it matter?” Ange pants.

  And as the old man gazes on him with a pity so overblown that his eyes brim with tears, Ange squares his shoulders and gravely sets his lips.

  “Oh, poor people,” the man repeats, his compassion seemingly roused by the effort Ange is expending to quell it.

  Without nodding goodbye, I open the front door and climb the two floors to our landing. I can hear Ange’s loud, labored breath far behind me, and I tell myself I should have waited and helped him up the stairs, carrying his satchel and holding his arm, but the fear of finding out what it is that’s suddenly weakened the unfailingly sturdy, robust man that Ange is keeps me from coming to his aid.

  Ange doesn’t need anyone, I tell myself. It’s cold out, and he hasn’t even bothered to button his jacket and shirt, I tell myself, because he has a constitution like iron.

  I begin bustling about our cozy little apartment, pretending I have things to do, and when Ange finally comes in I don’t look up at him. I can only hear his quick little breaths, and a wheeze of the sort that punctuates a snorer’s sleep. Ange drops into an armchair. The satchel slips to the floor. He spreads his arms, gingerly lays his head against the chair’s back.

  “So,” I say, frightened, “what’s the matter?”—dimly sensing what’s wrong, or the nature of the disaster that’s befallen us, but doing my best, with questions and gestures (“What’s the matter?” I say again, slowly raising my hands to my cheeks), to put off the moment when I can no longer pretend I don’t know, pretend I haven’t seen.

  I spot a rip in Ange’s shirt, a blood-soaked hole more or less over his liver.

  “My darling,” I say, “my darling.”

  I’m a taciturn and reserved person by nature, and I’m not in the habit of saying such things to Ange. But I say again, “My darling, my darling,” pressing and kneading my cheeks, wanting to go to him but powerless to move my legs, managing only to say once again words I ordinarily never speak: “Ange, oh, my darling.”

  5. How could I not have known?

  “You’ve got to come over,” I say.

  Which they immediately do, practical, efficient, both of them tall and husky like Ange but animated by a vivacity that I assume must be continually refreshed by the sway of the long, tinkling Indian skirts they’ve been wearing since they were teenagers, indifferent to changing fashions. Their faces are much alike, and I often mix up their names.

  They kneel down before their father, concerned and watchful but showing no shock or surprise, as if, I tell myself, bewildered, this were a situation they’ve already foreseen, already thought through, almost studied. They must have trained for this moment, I tell myself. But how can that be, when I had no idea, when I saw nothing?

  In hushed tones, I tell them that Ange refuses to go to the hospital—that’s why I called.

  “It’s not reasonable,” I say, with a perplexed little shrug.

  “On the contrary, it’s perfectly reasonable,” says the one who must be named Gladys.

  “The hospital is out of the question,” says the other, possibly Priscilla.

  She gives me a surprised, very slightly offended look.

  “You know,” she says, “they’ll give him all kinds of trouble at the hospital.”

  “What sort of trouble?” I say reflexively.

  But in truth, I’m in no hurry to know.

  “So what should we do?” I hasten to ask.

  Attentive, efficient, Ange’s two daughters busy themselves by the armchair as Ange sits and watches in silence. He listens to us, looks at us, not even pretending to be to
o weak to give his opinion. He has some other reason for keeping it to himself.

  I’m standing a few steps away, and although it seems obvious that I have a part to play in the care Gladys and Priscilla are undertaking to give Ange, and essential that I play it, I don’t make a move. I clasp my hands over my stomach, fingers knotted. I simply smile at Ange whenever our eyes meet, and he gives me a clenched, tortured smile in return.

  I can feel his shame as keenly as my own, like a riptide carrying both of us off together, leaving us to drift for a moment, then sweeping us up again, but never letting us touch, never embrace. Beneath my feet I hear the familiar little sounds of the neighbors.

  “It’s dinnertime,” I say.

  “Bring us warm water, compresses, and alcohol,” says Gladys.

  “Oh God, I think we’re out of compresses,” I say.

  Tears spill from my eyes.

  “Run and get some from the pharmacy,” says Priscilla.

  “I can ask the woman next door,” I say.

  “The time when you can ask anyone for anything is long gone,” says Gladys or Priscilla. “Hurry, go buy some.”

  I put on my coat and rush out into the cold, now gone dark. I jog toward the pharmacy, stumbling, muttering incoherently. I hear the bells we knew so well, the cheery seven-o’clock carillon that not long ago still announced, simply and affectionately, that it was time to stop preparing our next day’s lessons and sip a first glass of good wine (whereupon Ange would say: “Isn’t this the sweetest moment of all?” with a playfulness that I felt and understood and loved, because we both knew that our workdays were made of nothing but sweet moments, among which we couldn’t possibly choose the best), and now those friendly bells are ringing and I’m tottering on the icy sidewalk, eyes on the ground, unable to hold back a low murmur of “What’s happening to us, what’s happening to us”; now I feel myself becoming so estranged from my own existence that I couldn’t say which faces are real, our faces as Ange and I relish our daily aperitif in the serenity of our blameless conscience or our faces this evening, separated by calamity and incomprehension, so unlikely does it seem that those two situations could be contained in one single reality.