My Heart Hemmed In

by Marie Ndiaye

  “Excuse me, excuse me,” I say, “I don’t want to hear any more of this; you have to get out of here, right this minute. I cannot accept this man’s presence here,” I say to Priscilla. “We haven’t fallen so low that…”

  “Forgive me,” he says, “the fact is you’ve fallen lower than anyone ever has, but that’s neither here nor there, because, all things considered, it is not in the dubious pleasure of self-sacrifice that I find my…”

  “Really now, he’s a fine man, you don’t meet many like him anymore,” says Priscilla, giving me a pained, shocked look.

  “Won’t you please go away?” I say. “I’m begging you, Pris, make him go. It’s so terribly, terribly humiliating,” I say.

  “Will you shut your mouth?” cries Gladys. “Look at my father—he’s dying!”

  I clap my hands over my ears. How can she say such things in front of the neighbor?

  “I realized I have to stand by you, come what may,” he says, “when a little voice whirling around in my head like a frightened bird told me you were doomed, reminding me that we devoted teachers, solely and entirely consumed by our work, are not, are not at all prepared to face days such as this. Just such a calamity,” he says in his plaintive, pompous, droning voice, “could well have blighted my own existence, and I know it’s only a matter of luck that I never entered into marriage with a woman like…”

  “Oh, things aren’t as bad as all that,” I say.

  “Stop it,” Gladys begs. “My poor father, you’re torturing him!”

  “Then get this man out of here,” I say.

  He’s sitting near the bed, on a low chair, his bony knees almost level with his quivering chin, at once suspicious and eager to please. I see him discreetly clutch the two edges of the seat and settle in a little further, determined not to be dislodged. He shoots me a venomous, challenging look. I’ll go away when I’m good and ready. It’s not up to you. I intend to see my duty through to the end. His clothes are wretched, dirty, and torn. He has a long gray beard, matted into flat clumps.

  He’s never been a teacher, I find myself thinking. He’s lying, trying to ingratiate himself.

  “What school did you teach in?” I ask.

  “What could that possibly matter?” says Priscilla.

  “The Collège Voltaire, on Avenue Louis-Binot,” he says, doing his best to look dignified. “I taught history and geography.”

  “Who was the principal?” I say, pointlessly, since I have no idea.

  “At the time, it was… I’m not sure anymore… Madame Bernard?”

  “Ah,” I say, losing heart, “that could be.”

  Pressing my palms together over my chest, I murmur again, “That could be, I suppose.”

  The two daughters are standing on either side of the bed, stiff and tense, frozen in incomprehension and reproach. Those two never liked me. Always wished Daddy had stayed with Mommy, even if they themselves blithely go from one man to another with every passing year—what do I care about that now?

  I go to our bed, my ears ringing. What do I care about anything, anything, anything?

  A stifling stench of blood floods my nostrils.

  Much more alert than his daughters had led me to believe, Ange looks up at me and sees at once, I can tell, that I know what was done to him, and shame falls over us both again, that old shame we’ve come to know so well, the shame of recognizing that people see us as different from others in the most rudimentary way, even if we can’t imagine why.

  He quickly looks down again. His face is yellow and glistening. Incongruously, he’s drenched in sweat. I gently take his hand on the blood-stained sheet.

  “My darling,” I say very quietly.

  He squeezes my fingers. His breath comes in labored gasps, but I can see that he’s trying to keep his feelings to himself, as he always has.

  I whisper, “Darling.”

  Then I turn to the old man bending forward to hear, his filthy beard brushing the sheets.

  “Go home,” I say. “I’ll give you money if you’ll just go away now.”

  “I don’t need money,” he says, evidently offended.

  “Come on, leave him alone,” Ange murmurs.

  “I’ve received several inheritances in my life,” he says.

  “So now we’re going to be rude to good-hearted people,” says Gladys.

  “This is all intolerable,” I say.

  I fall to my knees by the bed. I bury my burning face in the mattress, pressing Ange’s hand to my forehead, my hair.

  “You see, you see,” I say, as softly as I can, and there’s almost a rusted sound to my voice, a withered sound, “we’re respectful people, my darling, and it’s a fact, yes, that we couldn’t help respecting even the wrongs that were done to us, yes, a sort of mute, craven respect, and we felt that respect even for those who set out to hurt us, because whenever there’s a rule or a semblance of a rule we respect it, that’s right, and if that rule offends us, if it attacks us and makes us unhappy, we tell ourselves that rules aren’t made to please absolutely and necessarily everyone, that rules, and even semblances of rules, don’t have to make us happy, us specifically, and that on the other hand there are already a great many rules that do suit us, or favor us. And isn’t that just what you were thinking, my love, my poor darling, when you were walking behind me, trying to hide your wound with your satchel, isn’t that more or less what you were thinking: after all, nobody’s expected to want to please me by treating me exactly as I deserve, there are times, unquestionably, when I have to accept being treated in ways I don’t deserve, for the sake of a greater good I don’t see? Oh yes, it’s true, that’s more or less what you were thinking, out of pride, and that’s not good, that’s not good at all…”

  “Then you must respect me as you respect everyone around you,” that other man says triumphantly.

  He loudly blows his nose into a Kleenex, which he then crumples into a ball and drops to the floor, kicking it under the bed.

  “May I smoke?” he asks, putting on a humble face again.

  “I’ll bring you an ashtray,” says Priscilla.

  “We don’t have any ashtrays,” I mutter, “we don’t smoke. Oh, my God. No, there’ll be no smoking here.”

  I raise my head. I have a scrape on the bridge of my nose, from my glasses, which I didn’t think to take off before I pressed my head to the mattress.

  “Why are you so indulgent with this person?” I ask Ange’s two daughters.

  “Forget it, forget it,” Ange whispers, desperate for an end to this.

  He jerks his hand away and rolls over, turning his back.

  “I want to sleep,” he moans.

  “I have to see the…the wound,” I say.

  My glasses are askew, I can feel it, my skin red and hot, my hair mussed. Through her fearfulness, Gladys gives me a quick smile. Such a mean smile, bubbling up from the meanness of her very soul, carefully hidden away until now, such cruelty in that abundant flesh, and yet these are his loving, beloved daughters, two horrid girls he’d give his life for if he had to, every bit of his life.

  Priscilla, who’d discreetly slipped out, comes back into the room and with ceremonious deference bends down between the old man’s legs to lay the lid of a jam jar on the floor.

  “Your ashtray,” she says.

  He kisses her hand. His eyes are damp.

  And suppose, I suddenly say to myself, suppose it was these two who contrived to bring the neighbor into our apartment, what would that mean, what conclusions should I draw?

  No answer comes to me. I feel riddled with bewilderment, cowardice, indecision. I reach out to pull away the sheet covering Ange up to his chest, but he tugs it back with a growl and clutches it in both fists, just under his chin.

  “Let me see,” I say gently.

  “He doesn’t want anyone touching it anymore,” says Gladys. “He says it’s his right to demand that no one touch or even look at his wound.”

  She shakes her head, impotent an
d downcast, and nonetheless distant, strangely passive.

  “In that case, we’ve got to get the doctor,” I say firmly.

  Grimacing, Ange rolls onto his back. His face is unrecognizable, shrunken with pain and a sort of depthless exasperation that I’ve never seen in all our years together, that I never imagined I’d see, endlessly tolerant man that he was, forbearing, to the point, sometimes, of weakness.

  “No!” he rasps. “No, no! You understand?”

  He lets out a long moan that makes me tremble all over. I hear more than pain in it, I hear rage and confusion.

  “What are we supposed to do?” I ask imploringly. “Please, Ange, what are we supposed to do?”

  He rolls onto his side, showing us his back, still clinging to his sheet as if he were afraid I might rip it away. Then he closes his eyes, his eyelids squeezed tight, groaning quietly.

  “And you two, standing there watching! Yes, oh yes, what’s your suggestion?” I say to Ange’s two daughters.

  Priscilla kneels down by the old man. She throws back her long hair and he strokes it with one hand, discreet but not exactly furtive. I can’t repress a stunned cackle.

  “Well, really, now! So many surprises today!” I say.

  “It’s all right,” Gladys answers hurriedly.

  My head suddenly spinning, I sit down on the edge of the bed, pressed against Ange. I can feel his shivering warmth in the small of my back. He has a fever, maybe that’s why he’s acting so strangely with me.

  I take off my glasses. I cover my eyes with my hands and sit that way for a time, in a reflective pose but in reality powerless to force my thoughts into any kind of logical, useful progression. A torrent of incongruous words is washing through my mind. I feel distracted, in a way that seems wrong to me, even as I feel deeply lost. The harder I try to gather my thoughts, the more they elude me, and when at last I get hold of a few, they seem devoid of all interest or consequence, and so I let them drift on unhindered, and I plunge back into my incomprehensible distraction.

  Behind me, Ange has fallen completely silent. This comes as a relief, as a welcome respite. An ignoble relief, because who here is suffering the most, who here needs a respite from his torment? I lower my hands and put on my twisted glasses again. My eyes meet the old man’s. He looks worried, unless he’s pretending. On her knees close beside him, Priscilla hopefully looks up into his repugnant face.

  “I don’t know,” he says, “I don’t know, but I think…”

  “Yes?” says Gladys, pleadingly.

  “My sense is that your father is trying—your very dear father, whom I admire, although he has never honored me with a single hello, I mean a sincere and friendly hello—my sense is that he’s trying, you understand, to act as though nothing has happened…”

  “Yes, and?”

  Why does Gladys seem to be expecting some decisive revelation from this man Ange and I always mutely dismissed as an utter nonentity?

  I try to recall if we ever, at any time, overtly showed our disdain for him. A deft, hurtful, deliberate way of pretending we hadn’t seen him at his ground-floor window even as we brushed by him, a way of starting when we heard his greeting and then answering with a show of displeasure and a moment’s hesitation, then hurrying on so we wouldn’t have to hear anything he might try to add—but is that really so cruel? Is it really so strange? The one person in the building we didn’t invite in to toast my granddaughter’s birth—but are we really obliged to have fond feelings for everyone?

  No, no, nothing ever happened between us and this man. It’s simply that everything about him fills us with boredom and nausea.

  He’s stopped talking. Priscilla patiently toys with the charms on her skirt. Now and then he extends a finger toward Priscilla’s lustrous hair, strokes it without timidity or bravado, and she smiles sweetly—almost, I can’t help thinking, as if she were honored by the gesture. Meanwhile, Gladys is stomping around the room, her eyes glued to the old man.

  He demurely clears his throat.

  “Your father has always thought me a mediocrity,” he says, “or more precisely he would have thought me the lowliest creature on earth, had he ever troubled to form an opinion of me. But no, he never granted me so much as one moment of his thoughts, and the plain truth is that to him I simply didn’t exist.”

  “Can that be?” says Gladys.

  Apprehension, dismay, and perplexity mottle her face with red patches. She looks at me with something like hatred, as if accusing my influence of transforming her father into such an arrogant man. I shrug. Ange has gone back to sleep. His ignorance of the things being said about him and the innocence of his quiet snores make something petty and contemptible, I tell myself, of that ridiculous person’s words.

  “What are you trying to prove?” I say, in deep trepidation.

  “Don’t be so supercilious,” Gladys tells me.

  She’s terrified, her hands pressed to her cheeks. I realize she’s afraid this man whose words they so greedily drink in will decide to say nothing more.

  “What are you trying to prove?” I say again, hotly.

  But he pays me no mind, never glancing my way. He’s talking to Ange’s two daughters, both of them very fleshy, like their father, endowed with an abundance of hair, and both of them mothers, raising their bountiful broods together, having left various unsatisfactory husbands behind.

  “So,” he says, “your father would be very surprised to learn that I know him as well as a person can be known.”

  “No he wouldn’t, not at all,” says Priscilla.

  “He was even happy to see you come into the bedroom just now,” says Gladys.

  “Yet another surprise,” I say, with a venomous cackle. “By the way, how are the children?”

  “In any case,” he says, smugly conceding the point, “he has no idea how many years I’ve spent observing him, inspired as much by affection—the most unconditional sort of affection, you understand—as by what I might call an almost passionate admiration for his work…”

  “Yes,” I say less severely, “his work.”

  “What work?” says Priscilla.

  “Ange has always been interested in…”

  “A number of articles,” the old man interrupts, “that your father published in first-rate journals devoted to education and new primary-school methodologies. Those articles, which I have carefully preserved, proved to me that your father was not only an intelligent and cultivated man but a genuine scholar of his profession, and since, in that profession, I myself…”

  “Liar,” I say. “Imposter.”

  “You have no right to say such things!” cries Gladys.

  “She has a talent for insults, but no idea how to put together an argument,” he says, with quiet, priestly self-assurance.

  “I know enough to want nothing to do with you,” I say. “I’m asking you to get out of my apartment.”

  He grasps the chair with both hands and holds on tight. My eyes meet his cold, black stare, cunning but not entirely devoid of a certain plaintive longing to make peace, which sends me into a fury. I leap up, jiggling the mattress and disturbing Ange’s unquiet sleep. I march over and take the old man by the shoulders, ready to dump him out of the chair if I must, but the disgust we always felt at his body, skinny and doughy at the same time, weirdly fatty here and emaciated there, his slack body, like the very incarnation of his obsequious two-facedness and almost ambiguous gender (because in spite of his beard he has the ways of a strange sort of woman), the disgust that Ange and I took a vague pleasure in feeling together makes my arms fall back to my sides.

  I stand in front of him, taut with anger, my only hope that if he saw me backing off he won’t take it for fear. The intolerable idleness of retirement, that long, dreary, official sidelining from what is, for Ange and me, virtually the sole point of existence, our work: that’s the other thing that disgusts us and makes us hate him so hungrily. An outcast, that’s what he is, and he knows it and he’s crying out for ou
r fellowship and sympathy. He could have saved himself the trouble. No work, no life.

  He sniffles. Priscilla hands him a Kleenex. He dabs at his nose and again briskly and casually tosses the crumpled Kleenex under the bed. He wipes his nostrils between his thumb and index finger.

  “I had a feeling your father would make the mistake he’s now making,” he says, “which surely goes to show that I love him and admire him just as I told you, but I also know that he suffers from a flaw, pride, which I will concede must nonetheless be counted among the forces that make your father the remarkable man you know him to be.”

  “Ange isn’t proud. That’s asinine,” I say. “Oh, I don’t want to get into a debate with you.”

  “In that case,” says Gladys in exasperation, “keep your mouth shut and let him talk.”

  “You people are in my bedroom,” I say. “Why should I have to accept that, and why should I keep quiet?”

  “Things have changed,” says Priscilla.

  “We’re only trying to help you,” he says. “Why is that so humiliating? Nothing’s humiliating if it’s what you want.”

  “There’s nothing that serious going on. We’ll deal with it,” I say.

  I feel a sudden blush cover my face. I carefully sit down against Ange’s back. Above the sheet, his gray hair is sticking up in a way he never lets anyone see, not even me, his wife. He’s always the first one up, and every morning he quickly smooths it down with hair oil. And now I can see the brown-speckled skin of his scalp through his tousled locks. I lean over him to straighten his hair, as gently as I can. But the moment I touch him he flinches violently in his sleep and begins to speak a string of muddled words. Afraid he might suddenly break into comprehensible sentences and reveal who knows what that shouldn’t be revealed in such company, I pull back. Immediately Ange is at peace again.

  With feigned humility, the other man declares:

  “And that pride, as I was saying, is not to be condemned in itself, and never have I condemned it, not even, indeed especially not, when that pride signed the veritable death warrant that your beloved father’s prejudices had decreed against my pathetic self, since, as I was telling you, I simply did not exist in his eyes. Nonetheless, let me be clear, I never held it against him. Why do all signs now show me that this same overweening pride is forcing your father to deny anything has happened to him? Oh, I can see it, I can feel it. He wants his wound to miraculously close up, just like that, and then he wants to hear no more of his having had a wound at all. He wants to go back to work, and have no one say a word to him about any of this. But you must understand, that is the worst possible attitude at this moment, and I’m here, I came here, in hopes of persuading your father not to forget his wound, as it were, do you see? Not to forget it on any pretext, not even his work or his self-respect or anything else. Because, you understand, if he does fall back into his error, if he insists on pretending that his situation is anything other than seriously compromised, then he will find, yes, that everything is even worse than before, and by far.”