by Marie Ndiaye
I stop to listen to the bells and catch my breath. The street is empty, swept by the north wind.
The wind roars, it drowns out the bells, and very likely they’ve stopped ringing when I think I still hear them.
I hurry onward again. I can feel my glasses’ cold, sharp frame against my petrified face. I turn onto Cours de l’Intendance, just as deserted as our street, but I keep my eyes down out of habit, a habit so quickly acquired. My glasses slip. At regular intervals, I push them up along my nose with one finger, feeling the cold of the metal frame, the faint touch of the misted lenses against my damp lashes.
6. A changeable pharmacist
“Please, oh please, a box of large compresses,” I say, as if there were some question that my money would be acceptable.
I show her the bills, opening my wallet wide and tilting it toward the cash register.
“Don’t worry,” she says, soothingly.
I glance up at her. I know her. There are no other customers, and in this perfumed warmth, in this scent of honeyed lozenges and milky ointments—the welcoming smell of knowledge and precision—I believe I can let down my guard a little. I look at her straight on, the way I used to. I had her child in my class a few years before—a boy or a girl? An endless parade of faces, pretty and attentive, a bounty of youthful perfection that in my memory melts into one single face, abstract and sweet, in shades of gray.
And was she an easygoing mother or a difficult one? She studies me intently with her dark eyes, made darker still by sadness, by pain at my plight.
“I know what happened, and I don’t approve,” she says.
She stands motionless behind the counter, as if she thought talking to me more helpful just now than filling my order. Outside the wind blows in great gusts, inaudible from where I stand at the counter looking out at the dead leaves and scraps of paper all whipping past in the same direction. Ange and his daughters are waiting for me, and the daughters, whom I’ve only known as adults, might be struggling in vain to sop up the blood flowing from their father’s side, surprised and perhaps concerned that I haven’t come home with the compresses.
But she stays where she is, broad, powerful, hieratic. She stands frozen before me by sympathy, by a need to be believed and exonerated, her affliction mingled with relief. She was expecting me, I tell myself apprehensively, but she was also afraid I might not come.
“I heard what they did to him,” she says. “Oh, no, really, I don’t agree with that. What will we have left, you know, if even teachers, if even good teachers like you and your husband…”
Her tone changes, thick with outrage and compassion. She’s stopped looking at me. Faintly anxious, she’s eyeing the glass door and the desolate avenue beyond, the brand-new tram now and then sliding by with a brief muffled hiss, brightly lit, almost empty. Doing my best to speak calmly, I say, “My stepdaughters would rather not take him to the hospital, so I really do need a large box of compresses.”
“No, no, absolutely, not the hospital,” she says, grimacing, horrified. “If he goes to the hospital, oh, who knows what state he’ll be in the next time you see him, if you ever do. They’ll tell you he expired right there in front of them and they had to incinerate him at once and you’ll know perfectly well it’s not true, but what can you do, what can you do? No, not the hospital. They won’t treat him properly.”
“Well, right now I’ve got to go home and take care of my husband.”
Again I feel tears pooling at the rims of my eyes.
“I’ll be needing those compresses,” I say. “Don’t you want to give them to me?”
“Of course I do,” she says, “and I will, because I absolutely don’t approve of what happened. I shouldn’t be helping you, but I am anyway, to show that I don’t agree, and to show you that I at least haven’t forgotten who you really are.”
She reaches under the counter and sets down a box of compresses before me. Rows of identical boxes are lined up behind her. This one must have been readied specially for me, I tell myself, on the assumption I’d be coming to the pharmacy. But why should they ever have foreseen such a thing, my coming here, pleading for compresses?
I whirl around, eager to get back to Ange and determined not to ask this woman the many questions swelling my cheeks, questions I don’t want to hear myself ask, questions that must, I know, be asked all the same. Just a little more uncertainty and confusion, I tell myself, just a little more not understanding and wondering, I tell myself, and then I’ll be ready to hear, little by little, what they all have against us, the reasons for a hatred so single-minded, so entire, so sincere. Why should I be in a hurry to hear that, since clearly those reasons aren’t rooted in anything about us we can change—why rush toward pointless denials and a forced awareness of your own failings?
But just as I reach for the door handle, the swift, silent tram glides past the pharmacy with our school’s principal on board, alone in the first car, her face turned toward the street, a calm, austere, very white face frozen in the bright lights of the tram. And all at once, as her eyes meet mine through the two panes of glass, that very still, very white face erupts in an expression of horrified surprise, of aversion and terror. She goes on staring at me until the tram turns the corner of the avenue, still with that same look of dismay, a look I’ve never in any circumstance seen on her face before.
The wind howls past the dark shopwindows. All at once a driving rain begins to fall, lashing the pharmacy door, and I let go of the handle, turning back to her, still shaken by my face’s effect on the principal’s—or was it something other than my face? Was it my being here, in this place and at this moment? Was it a menacing, furious, rebellious look I’d shown her without knowing it?
I blurt out the question I’d been trying to hold in: “What did they do to my husband?”
Slowly she puts her hand to her mouth. For a moment, seeing a shiver come over her face, I’m convinced she’s about to be transformed, like the marble-visaged principal, the excessive, grandiloquent, ghostly-faced principal, into an effigy of repulsion. But no, she quietly coughs into her hand and nothing more. Remarkable self-control, I tell myself, because she was just about to let out a cry, or at least a groan, in her surprise at seeing my face again when I’d just turned and started for the door. She never guessed she’d have to keep up the struggle of looking at me face-to-face, and her concentration and vigilance had waned.
“What did they do to my husband?” I say, in agony.
“You don’t know?” she said. “Do you want to know?”
“I don’t want to, but I believe I should want to,” I say.
“Yes,” she says, “I understand.”
Cloying compassion, here too, as if seeping from the punctured sac of her purulent heart. Her face now set back on course, so to speak, the course of mercy, enveloping me in its warmth, in its gentleness, in its self-satisfied goodwill.
She opens her mouth but says nothing, hesitant, overwhelmed.
I recognize her. She was on the school advisory board a few years ago, an ardent mother, heavy-hipped, quarrelsome, rarely pleased. I recognize her, because a field trip I’d organized had roused her indignation, on the grounds that the museum we visited housed several photographs of mingled fleshes, white, cold thighs, blue-veined feet pressing on white, cold buttocks. That face now stricken, as if she’d once loved me and were never going to see me again and couldn’t do anything about it. This intimacy puts me off, the exposure of these emotions.
“In that case I must tell you, yes, I have no choice,” she says.
“No time,” I say, hugging the bag of compresses with all my might.
But, however I wish I could leave, I don’t, held back by the exaltation in her damp gaze, her hesitations, her labored playing for time. Now there’s nothing more to stop her from telling me what has to be told, what I must make myself want to hear, nothing, not even if the principal’s wan, distraught face suddenly appeared at the window, not even if customers came in and
saw her talking to me, bent toward a face, mine, that must inspire silence and nothing more. In a flash of panic I think of Gladys and Priscilla struggling to stanch the blood, and I picture Ange, whose concern for me, since I’m taking so long to come home, might at this very moment be sapping the little strength he has left.
But as for her, nothing will stop her from telling her story now.
“It’s no one’s fault,” she says, her breath coming fast, “but it’s also everyone’s fault. My daughter told me about it. She didn’t do anything, she only saw it; she didn’t object because those horrible ideas have infected her too, they’re infecting even innocent children now, no matter how I try to…to make her understand that she mustn’t…that it’s not right. My God, how hard it is to make people understand when something’s not right.… Don’t you agree, Madame?”
“But in this case specifically, what is it that’s not right?” I say. “What would be right? I still don’t know what you’re talking about,” I go on after a pause, a little dazed at hearing myself called Madame.
How long has it been since someone last called me that? Terms of respect are forbidden: people simply yell out my last name, that or an offhanded “Hey!”
“Everything you’re being made to endure,” she says, “as if you were guilty, but people were forbidden to punish you and so everyone’s taking their vengeance in their own way.”
She’s talking as fast as she can, anxious that someone might come walking in, though her fear now is not that she’ll be caught talking to me but that she won’t be able to finish her story. She’s not telling me the truth, I say to myself. She doesn’t know what the truth is. That child told her something, but she, the mother, doesn’t know anything.
“That’s not the truth,” I tell her in spite of myself, my ears thrumming.
Surprised, slightly indignant, she says, “It most certainly is.”
I squeeze the box of compresses so hard that the cardboard buckles beneath my fingers. My chin quivers with a sudden anger, almost hatred.
“When you don’t know what you’re talking about, you keep your mouth shut,” I whisper fiercely. “These things you’re telling me don’t make any sense. What am I supposed to do with this nonsense? There is no way,” I say, “that all this has anything to do with my husband. There is simply, simply no way, and that’s all there is to it.”
She takes a step back, looking neutrally into my eyes, and asks, “Why?”
“Why?” I repeat, confounded. Because such atrocities do not happen to a sympathetic, respectful man, a man who is innocent in every way. It’s just plain common sense, and isn’t that reason enough to refuse to hear one more word of this garbage?
I say nothing. I shrug, numbed by the continual wail of the wind. Softly, with a sort of gentle impartiality, she says:
“So to you, if such things ever do happen, they have to involve someone other than your husband?”
“That’s right,” I say.
My voice is weak. She gives me a curious, studying look.
“That’s right,” I say.
“But,” she says (there’s a dull-white paste clinging to her moist lips, and I savagely wipe my own, now smelling the sourness of her breath, remembering her belligerent, irate face during the board meetings, horrified to find that woman with her insatiable need to chastise and complain now feeling sorry for me, wanting to help me), “but,” she says, “why should any other man than your husband, any other no-longer-young man, unlikely to put up a fight, why should any such man deserve to have done to him what you don’t want to believe has been done to your husband? No man in this city deserves it, but your husband doesn’t deserve it any less than another!”
Emotion overcomes her. She shakes her head and reaches out for my hand. She changes her mind. She quickly pulls away. She goes on:
“That’s what you must understand, oh please won’t you understand, that…there’s nothing special about you and your husband. It’s not you, not exactly you that this ugliness is attacking, and besides, who around here even knows you? Apart from a few people who, like me… But no, it’s not you, it’s…how can I put it…the untouchability of what you are, your…your stiffness, your purity, your manner, your habits, oh, how can I put it…”
“We’re exactly like you,” I say.
“So you think,” she says, “but, oh God, you don’t understand, and I don’t know how to… You’re so different, so profoundly…excessive, but either you don’t know it or, who knows, you refuse to see it, although, once again, this isn’t exactly about you as such, and…and the disgust and hostility you inspire in some people, not me, oh not me, is something you can’t feel toward yourselves, at least not yet, and… Forgive me, this is so hard.… You have something in your face that people can’t stand to see…not on any face… and it’s something truly repugnant, not for me, no, not yet, although…that will come, perhaps, how can a person fight off the arguments, the quiet influence of the atmosphere… It’s very hard, and my own daughter, a child who so loved her teacher, who so loved you, my own daughter came home spouting such absurdities about you and your husband that I didn’t recognize her, such a shy, such a nice little girl, so I turned away without a word, I was shaking, I walked out of the house, I thought some sort of demon had taken hold of her, I went away so I wouldn’t hear anything more, but no, it wasn’t that, nothing supernatural about it, only the same spiteful revulsion that everyone’s begun to feel toward people like you and your husband, which keeps growing and growing, and well yes, it’s not easy to resist, it’s not easy at all…”
“So it’s a sort of fashion, is that what you’re trying to say?” I ask.
“No,” she answers, “it’s a rage!”
She breaks into a laugh, a fierce, nervous laugh that pulls back her lips, reveals her gums, and with a little shiver of distaste I recognize it as the laugh that greeted my protestations of good faith at the board meeting where this woman ripped me apart with her straight, healthy pharmacist teeth.
My God, I tell myself dully, and now, now support and friendship from my enemy! Does she even remember that?
“So you’re thinking it will just go away on its own?” she says. “No, seriously, you have no idea what’s going on. I think it’s time you… I mean, yes, it’s time you were aware of it.”
A rush of damp air hits me from behind. Imperceptible a moment before, the hiss of the tram can clearly be heard receding down the tracks in the roaring wind.
She sweeps a feverish hand over the counter, as if to erase any trace of a connection between us. The man closes the door behind him, and the sound of the wind suddenly stops.
I hunch my shoulders, slightly ducking my head. The back of my neck is burning hot. Then he raises his axe, still dripping with the blood of his first victim, the luckless schoolteacher, and with one mighty blow brings it crashing down onto the skull of…
She says, “Good evening, Monsieur.”
She gives me a discreet gesture, three fingers swiftly wiggling my way: Get out! I see trepidation in her gaze, softened by mercantile good cheer.
Slowly I turn away. Then, eyes on the floor, I hurry out, hearing a groan from my throat that surprises and shames me. Because he didn’t have an axe, he was guilty of no bloodshed, had no evil designs on anyone’s skull.
7. We don’t need any friends, thanks
Through the door I hear the tinkling rustle of their full Indian skirts.
I can’t begin to say how much time has gone by since I left the apartment. I hurried all the way home, once again encountering the number 8 tram as it went by in the other direction, the principal still or again on board, her pallid face deliberately turned, I thought, to the driver’s back, forced in a sense by her will or her fear to avoid looking out the window no matter what. But in truth I read nothing particularly disturbing on that face in the few seconds it took the silent tram to graze past me (I was just about to cross the tracks, I jumped back), harshly illuminating me with the white
light of its wagons, so sharp and intense that it casts a lunar glow far into the distance on either side.
My heart is almost joyous. My absurd, gleeful heart! No harm has come to me, no axe has split my brow, no fist has crushed my chest, no insult has spewed from…
A frigid rain is falling. The avenue is deserted, scattered with pale patches of light. Nonetheless, my heart is almost joyous. No stranger has tried to hurt me, so far.
I push open the door, greeted by their grave, tight-lipped air. One daughter’s eyes are red, I notice, a woman I know as detached and remote.
“I have the compresses,” I say in a choked voice.
“Oh, what’s the use?” says Gladys.
“We don’t know what to do,” says Priscilla.
They lead me to our bedroom. Everything in me refuses to go in, but I force my legs to move and follow Gladys into the little room where Ange and I sleep every night, where I don’t believe anyone but us has ever set foot for as long as we’ve lived in this apartment. Only one lamp is lit, on my side of the bed.
He croaks, “Here’s your wife.”
“What’s he doing here?” I say, in a surge of repugnance.
Priscilla turns around and sees my disgust. She says, “He came up, he wanted to make himself useful.”
“I’ve brought you bread and ham,” says the old man.
“You never should have let him in,” I say, exasperated. “Oh God, that…that horrid neighbor!”
He goes on:
“And I’ve brought you some wine, too, good wine from my terroir, to show you that I at least am not afraid to share with you, to share bread, wine, and ham, that’s what I’m saying. And I am the only one in this building, and I do mean the only one, who harbors such feelings for you, and not only, as you might think, because your profession is the very one that was my own pride and joy for…”
