My Heart Hemmed In

by Marie Ndiaye

  I let out a slightly overaggressive little laugh.

  “And suppose his situation is compromised—what business is that of yours?”

  “Monsieur Noget,” he says, with a very subtle bow. “Richard Victor Noget.”

  “I wasn’t asking you anything,” I say, “and especially not your name. I’ve forgotten it already, so there.”

  “It’s a well-known name,” Priscilla murmurs.

  “If my father was awake and he heard that name, he would never believe it,” says Gladys.

  “I don’t know the name, and I don’t want to know anything about it,” I say.

  He looks at me sorrowfully, although to my deep irritation I see an insulting, sardonic glint in his eye. I try to come up with a stinging counterattack. But even as the most caustic words come to my lips, what bursts from my eyes and mouth is a torrent of sobs.

  “I’m so tired,” I say. “I’ve got to… I’ve got school tomorrow. Please, let me rest.”

  “I would advise you not to go back to that school,” he says in a tone of concern.

  “You know, I really don’t care what you advise,” I say, hiccupping pathetically, desperately trying not to.

  “We’re leaving, we’ll be back tomorrow,” says Priscilla.

  She stands up slowly, as if against her better judgment. I sense that Ange’s two daughters feel an irreparable resentment toward me, now inflamed—because over the years it had faded—by my refusal to acknowledge any decency in our neighbor, any authority, any possible intellectual kinship with us.

  A moment later he stands up in turn, equally reluctant. As if all three of them were convinced that their leaving will set off some sudden decline in Ange’s condition, as if they thought it was only their somberness, their melodramatic exaggeration of the events, that was holding him back from the abyss he’ll be thrown into by my short-sightedness and my heedlessness the moment they turn their backs, or as if they were afraid I might do something indecent or dangerous, might wrestle Ange, say, into letting me root around in his wound…

  I see them to the apartment door.

  He’s so short, so stunted and hunched that I have a clear view of the top of his head, striated by a little clutch of sad, greasy locks.

  Is he destitute? I ask myself, with a brief jolt of uneasiness, because if he is, then his poverty might move me in spite of myself.

  “Don’t forget, that school, that’s where they did…this thing to him,” he says, stopping in the doorway and turning anxiously toward me.

  “Don’t worry about me,” I say sharply.

  “This isn’t about you. It’s a general principle, in a way,” he says. “You shouldn’t go back.”

  “I will never abandon my students,” I say.

  “Your students? So you think your students have nothing to do with all this? You really think they didn’t take part, at least in spirit, or intention, or, how should I say, desire? That they didn’t overtly or covertly demand just such a display of…oh, I don’t know…of power, for example?”

  “My students aren’t like that,” I say, shocked. “They’ve changed, yes, probably from hearing too many of the vicious things their parents say, but what they feel is more confusion than hate. I’m sorry to cast aspersions on you,” I say, “but if you really were a retired teacher you’d understand my position, you’d find it perfectly clear that I can’t do anything but go back to my place in the classroom tomorrow morning. You’d understand that,” I say, “if you knew what it is to teach.”

  “Forgive her,” says Gladys. “Oh, you make us ashamed.”

  She puts her hand to her mouth and bites at the pad of her thumb, her face glowing bright red.

  “Our father would never talk to you this way, Monsieur Noget,” says Priscilla. “He’s far more cultured than Nadia, and he’d recognize your name.”

  “Your father never deigned…” he begins, slightly bemused.

  One hand on the wide-open door, my patience at an end, I wait for them to leave.

  Oh, if only I could never see any of them again. If only they’d leave us alone, if only they’d let us die in peace, if that’s how it has to be.

  Priscilla lets out a loud sigh. I see the faint shadow of a benevolence quivering in her pale, uncertain eyes. I’m so terribly tired, and I feel so dreadfully alone, that I find my will to stand up to them weakening.

  “To tell you the truth,” says Priscilla, “we came here to help look after my father, but also to urge you to go away as soon as you can, if possible with Papa and if not alone, in hopes that he’ll come join you as soon as he’s better.”

  “That would be the wisest course of action,” says Noget.

  “The fact is, you don’t really have a choice,” says Gladys, placating.

  I let out a sort of little laugh, an acerbic yelp. I say nothing.

  “You could go to your son’s, for example,” Gladys ventures.

  I snicker again. Rage is filling my skull with an unendurable heat. Priscilla clasps my hand and presses it to her bosom even as I shrink back.

  “For all our sakes, you must,” she says fervently.

  “If, in spite of these warnings,” he says, “you still chose not to leave, which would be a mistake, let me repeat, but if, in the end, you insisted on making that mistake, know that…I would be here, close by, no matter the conditions and circumstances.”

  “Don’t you have a son?” says Gladys.

  “If you stay, the tornado will end up sweeping us away too,” says Priscilla in a grim, weary voice.

  “I’ll always be here with you,” he says.

  I make no reply, my lips pressed tight, consumed by fury and something not far, all this aside, from an aching desire to throw myself on Priscilla’s breast and beg her to take everything in hand. But hearing this man use my weakness as a pretext to dare offer his abode as a safe harbor (because isn’t he now murmuring that he could even put us up if need be?) is simply more than I can bear. He looks at me, his eyes no longer cold or sarcastic but aglow with a hopefulness I find degrading for Ange and me both.

  “The tornado?” I shoot back at Ange’s two daughters, through gritted teeth. “For God’s sake, you’ve got nothing to worry about. You’re not like us. How could you possibly be hurt,” I say, “by anything that concerns us alone? The thing in us that’s perhaps being attacked and insulted isn’t in you at all, right?”

  “And what is that thing?” asks Gladys, challenging me.

  I hesitate, then say:

  “I can’t put a name to it. I don’t know what to call it, and I don’t know how to describe it. And even if I could,” I say, “I wouldn’t, because that would be giving in, and that would be beneath me.”

  “No, you never give in,” he says, “even if sometimes you should, just a little…”

  “I’m closing my ears,” I say. “I’m not going to listen to you anymore, not at all, ever again!”

  8. They butchered him but good

  When I go back to the bedroom, Ange is still asleep. Darkness fills the apartment—only the little lamp on the bedside table is lit. In the living room, in the kitchen, I can just make out the forms of the familiar furniture, but I feel as if I were entering an unknown domain where some tragic event has occurred, set off by a misstep on my part.

  I feel a sort of tension with the apartment I’ve kept up so lovingly and with such care. A fear stops me just when I’m about to turn on the lights in this room or that. Suppose all the furniture, all the ornaments turned out to be different from the things I picked out and knew, suppose I discovered the loveless smile of creatures mysteriously endowed with a life in some unknowable way at odds with my own, with our own? How do I know that’s not how it will be?

  The wind begins to moan again. The windows are rattling quietly. I go and close the drapes, then pull them open again. If anything happens, I want the people across the street to at least be able to see, to observe that I did nothing deliberate to provoke it.

  But the st
reet is completely dark, no light shining at any window. Every few yards the pale, silvery gleam of the streetlights illuminates the falling rain, so fine it can only be seen inside that halo.

  Does such a silence usually reign in this building at nine o’clock, I ask myself, and is the silence usually so fraught and so breathless, as if, I tell myself, almost outraged, the very silence were plotting some sort of treachery?

  And those two girls, really, how underhanded. Oh, that’s the only reason they came, to prod us into clearing out.

  My voice is low and quiet, but the sound of it makes me start.

  I hear a tiny noise, a sort of scratching at the front door. I hurry over, turn the lock (I didn’t even do that, I reflect, aghast, shivering), then press myself full length to the door, both palms and one ear against the wood. At first I hear only a muffled, distant beating, the pulsations of my own terrified heart, and then, finally, his voice—cajoling, insistent, friendly, but friendly in a false, smarmy way. Has he been standing there outside the door all this time? Or did he come creeping back up to spy on me?

  “Let me in,” he says. “I still have so much to tell you.”

  “You heard what I said. I have to rest.”

  I do my best to sound neutral and confident.

  “You’ve got to go home,” I say. “What’s the point of standing there in the cold?”

  My hands are wet with fear. Suddenly light-headed, I close my eyes. I’m afraid I’m going to fall, end up slumped against the door, and then, I’m not quite sure how, he’d try to get in.

  Little by little pushing the door to shift my insensible body, then finally walking in, triumphant and sinister, straight to the bedroom, lying down beside Ange, and then, perhaps, on the pretense of tending to him, opening the wound and infecting it with his filthy hands, all the while flattering what he believes to be Ange’s vanity with florid sentences… Oh, I can’t weaken now, no matter what.

  “Open the door, just for a moment, and I’ll tell you what you need to know, and then I’ll leave you in peace and be off. I am,” he says (honeyed, almost loving), “a former teacher, as you know, and that alone should ease any mistrust you may feel when I assure you I only want to protect you. Come on now, open the door,” he says, more firmly.

  “No…please…”

  “Monsieur Noget,” he says.

  “Please, Monsieur Noget, we can see about all this tomorrow,” I say, faltering in spite of myself at the insinuating gentleness of his voice, now singsong, almost like a lullaby.

  “Shall I come back tomorrow? And then you’ll be so kind as to open the door?”

  “Listen…”

  “I’ll come back tomorrow,” he says. “I’m so glad to hear you call me by my name. Speak that name in front of your husband and he’ll be deeply moved, you’ll see, deeply moved.”

  And then silence again, that dense, heavy silence unbroken by any clinking dish, any mumbling television, not even Monsieur Noget’s shambling steps, I note, headed downstairs to his apartment. I feel as if I’d gone deaf all at once.

  Unless he’s still there behind the door, intent on giving me the most literal illustration of his promise to be there for us always, from this day forward, and nothing and no one will ever drive him away, and we’ll simply have to endure that intimacy, as odious as a boil you have no choice but to live with.

  I back away into the dark living room, self-conscious, convinced I’m being watched. I tug the curtains closed. I’m sweating. I think I saw the rain coming harder now, pounding the windows—I saw it, but I can’t hear it, my mind associates it with a familiar sound, but I can’t make out that sound, as if the apartment had suddenly been fitted with some sort of impregnable insulation. And I still don’t dare turn on the lamps or spell out the frightening but indistinct thought floating to the surface of my consciousness, pressing me to concede that I have no idea what would happen, what I would see, if I let light fill the living room, where my furniture, my cherished, handsome, expensive furniture, delighted to be deceiving me, might be hiding worrisome strangers, bloodthirsty guardians. That neighbor, I tell myself, might have been sent solely to distract me from what is in fact being fomented right here in my living room, the last place I’d ever suspect.

  I stand frozen in place. My ear vigilant despite the feeling I’ve been wrapped up in cotton, I think I hear breathing. Mine? No, someone else’s, it’s coming from further away. I firmly cross my arms to keep my hands from clasping my cheeks and heightening my fear. I very slowly back away toward the bedroom. I then distinctly hear Ange’s breathing—was that him I was hearing? Was it both of us together?

  Inside the bedroom, I close the door and pull the little latch. Then, beleaguered, I sit down on the bed as gently as I can, taking care not to wake Ange. But shouldn’t he be stirring anyway? Is it normal, is it healthy to sleep so much? Deep down, I realize, I don’t want to wake him just yet, because I’m not sure I’ll recognize him, I’m afraid he might say strange things to me, I don’t want him seeing me in the near terror the ambiguities of my living room have plunged me into. Little by little I get hold of myself, begin to fight back at my imagination. Stand up, go into the other room, turn on all the lights, I whisper, and see for yourself that nothing has changed.

  But I don’t. The heavy darkness surrounds me. Even Ange’s presence seems charged with danger, with unknowable perils. As long as he’s asleep, the menace is quiet. And so, taking pains not to look at him, my own husband, the man I once felt so at one with, I stay perfectly still. I stare at the little latch on the door. I would certainly feel a heartfelt horror if I were to see that little latch move and burst open, succumbing to a mighty force applied from the living room, but I’ve so thoroughly convinced myself it’s going to happen that I’m almost exasperated to see it not happening. At least, I say to myself, at least let me know what or who I’m facing. But even if the door did suddenly burst open, would I know? Would I be capable of understanding what I saw before me? And would I see anything before me at all? Those questions torment me.

  The wind is howling in the back courtyard, outside the bedroom’s only window. I bend over the bed to peer through the glass. Below me I see Noget, bareheaded in the rain, emptying his trash into the dumpster. Suddenly he looks up and our gazes meet. He gives me a faint smile, licking his lips back and forth. Nothing is left of his humility, his repellent desire for conciliation at all costs—nothing is left of all that, only the brazenly unveiled expression of a precise, confident intention. I’ll get you. Just you wait. I’ll get you, and we’ll be…friends?

  I quickly turn away from the window, my heart full of hatred and spite. What’s the next step in his plans for Ange and me? And what, I ask myself, is Ange’s two daughters’ role in it? And even Ange’s, in his possibly simulated sleep? No, wounded as he is, Ange couldn’t possibly be feigning anything at all, and besides it’s not in his nature. But what exactly is his nature now? In such an aberrant situation, so deeply contrary in its brutality to the man he is? I have no idea, I tell myself, disheartened. I have no idea.

  A desire then comes over me, a desire I would immediately struggle to choke back had I not spotted Noget’s voracious gaze a moment before, a desire I’d do all I could to choke back had I not half decided that Ange is only pretending to sleep—oh no, I say to myself, he’s asleep, like a poor tortured animal slipping into semi-unconsciousness between two beatings. I do nothing to quell that desire, and neither does it disturb me, at least not enough to keep my fingers still and my body stiff and slumped on the mattress.

  I kneel on the bed. With one hand I grasp the little bedside lamp, and with the other I turn back the sheet that covers Ange up to his chin. What I then see rips a moan of horror from my throat.

  Ange hasn’t woken. The lamp wobbles in my hand. The little chain of the switch tinkles against the base. Oh God oh God oh God. I try to hold it more firmly, but in vain, and the little chain tinkles in time with my trembling. Oh God, oh almighty God. I want to pu
t the sheet back, but my fingers are clutching the blood-stained fabric, creasing and crumpling it, powerless to lift it.

  Ange begins to shake his head this way and that on the pillow, as if gravely tormented by the little pings of the chain against the lamp base. See, then, see then if you love me, and don’t ever forget what you see.

  I murmur, “Oh, my poor, poor darling.”

  And I wish Ange would open his eyes to give me a serene, nonchalant gaze, and so show me he’s not troubled in the least by his wound, that it is indeed his body the wound has punctured, but only temporarily, and only because it pleased him to give it a home. But Ange’s eyes remain closed, his lids squeezed tight. He merely shakes his head on the pink-sweat-drenched pillow (is there blood in his hair?), and I think I detect, in his suffering, in his obstinate sleep, a stubborn resentment toward me.

  Ange has never shown any trace of rancor at anything I do. Our marriage has always been marked not by passion or exaltation but by concord, and our harmony is sometimes of the sort that defines indestructible friendship, the kind we read about in books, since neither Ange nor I have ever had friends we didn’t end up parting ways with. And so I cannot understand the silent, outraged animosity seeping from Ange’s clenched body. I immediately blame it on his two daughters. What they might have done, what they may have said, I have no idea. I remember the oddly fixed gaze of their children, the few times I met them, something very cold, cynical, and sardonic in their pale little faces—that’s how those two women’s children are. But doesn’t Ange feel only the deepest affection for those children? What his daughters might have transformed while I was away, might have transformed in this apartment, around Ange, inside him, I don’t know.