My Heart Hemmed In

by Marie Ndiaye

  “My place is here,” I say.

  So was she thinking, was she secretly hoping we’d both disappear? Us, the best teachers in the school?

  “Don’t take your work too much to heart,” she says curtly.

  “I like my work, and I’m very conscientious about it,” I say.

  “Yes, but with you it’s almost virtuousness,” says the principal. “And, surely you agree, virtuousness must be…”

  She barks out a sharp, menacing laugh.

  The bell rings, and the principal remakes her expression, replacing the aggression and mockery with a neutral benevolence. That benevolence is all I want to remember of this exchange.

  I go off to collect my little students, my heart light in a way it hasn’t been for ages.

  It’s cold and gray, and the air is opaque, thick with a heavy fog risen up from the river, but at long last I have a feeling Ange and I might hope to find our way, little by little, toward better times.

  Should we, I ask myself, see what Ange suffered yesterday as the low point in our torments, and the beginning of a change for the better? Yes we should, there’s no question, no question.

  This morning I find the children’s gaze limpid and straightforward when they look at me, and when I dare to look back at them they don’t turn away, don’t show any displeasure, any sense that I deserve to be punished or destroyed. Their behavior seems almost what it used to be—a touch more timid, I must admit, more skittish, as if I were a new and perhaps unpredictable teacher, as if in short they’d forgotten the woman I was, the woman I believe they loved in perfect confidence. This muted apprehension I feel weighing on my classroom makes me sad. So here we are, I tell myself, now I have to work at becoming the person I used to be for them. Ange’s students have been sent home. He’ll be glad to hear that, he can’t stand being replaced.

  When recess comes, I head toward a little group of colleagues gathered in the schoolyard. I stop ten feet away, eyes on the ground, pretending to be preoccupied by the cleanliness of my shoes, and then, sensing a favorable vibration, friendly waves emanating from the circle, now opening up ever so slightly to make room for me, I wordlessly slip in between two of my colleagues.

  Their conversation stops short. After an awkward moment, one of them woodenly mumbles, “How’s Ange doing?”

  “He’s fine,” I say, with a lighthearted little laugh.

  “What a dreadful accident,” he says.

  “What accident?” I say. “There was no accident.”

  “It’s best to think of it as an accident,” he says, in a discouraging voice.

  I feel the vaguely sympathetic waves emitted by the little group as I drew near now beginning to fade. I even think I can feel the circle tightening again, trying to expel me. And then I speak again, softly: “Accident or no, Ange will be back very soon.”

  But Ange is dying at this very moment. Isn’t he? My darling Ange? What is that neighbor doing to Ange’s body at this moment?

  “I left him in the care of a certain Monsieur Noget,” I say, unable to repress a dismissive laugh.

  “Noget?”

  “Noget the writer?”

  Their stunned disbelief troubles me. Who is this, this Noget person? Have I ever heard that name before?

  “Yes, I suppose so,” I say, hesitating.

  “You suppose or you know? You mean the Noget?” one of the women snaps impatiently.

  My colleagues have all turned their eyes on me. Their fervid expectancy seems to fill the foggy air with a menacing hum, a strident buzz whose silencing depends on my answer. I grimace a smile, push my glasses to the very top of my nose.

  “Yes, I mean him,” I say, masking my perplexity.

  Because how is it that they’ve all heard of him and I haven’t, that the merest mention of his name dazzles them and means nothing to me?

  A pensive, moderately respectful silence follows. I stop worrying about shielding my eyes, and see no sign of anger or weariness when our gazes meet.

  “Well, that’s strange,” someone says slowly.

  “In any case,” says someone else, “your husband’s in good hands, he’s in admirable hands.”

  He sounds almost sorry he’s not in Ange’s place. Oh, when was it that someone last envied us, we who so long luxuriated in the warm, beneficent water of other people’s longing for our life, our serenity? Again I feel buoyed by an extravagant joy and confidence. Now I can’t wait to go home, to tell Ange what I’ve discovered today: that implacable will to harm us is no more. Gone, too, is the revulsion we inspired, the innocent, primitive fury that came over some people at the mere sight of us. In my optimism, I go so far as to wonder if we weren’t overestimating the gravity of what happened to us, I even wonder if we might have overestimated its reality. Were people really trying to lay us low? How ridiculous, possibly! What a sinister joke we were playing on ourselves, perhaps!

  I happily puff out little clouds of steam as I hurry back to my classroom.

  “How good you’re all being today, children,” I say several times over the course of the afternoon.

  And then, just when I’m speaking those words for the third time, a little girl bursts into tears. I wonder if I chose the right word. Are they being good, or are they simply paralyzed by nausea? They seem unusually apathetic, as if they’ve been forced to swallow a heavy dose of tranquilizers.

  I go to the crying girl and see her hunching her shoulders, defending herself from my patting hand but at the same time resigned, not daring to beg me not to touch her. For a moment that depresses me.

  Is it starting up again already?

  I run my hand over her narrow back, her quivering shoulder blades, feeling her little frightened-bird heart pounding wildly.

  “There now,” I murmur, “no one’s going to hurt you.”

  “You’ll see,” she says, “you’ll see.”

  She sniffs, delicately pulls away. The moment she looks up, what seems to me an affection filled with pity and despair fills her eyes with tears. But I resolve not to let any grimness get in the way of the new sense of our situation I’ve found today.

  With a brisk clap of my hands, I brightly announce that everyone can now go out and play in the schoolyard for the rest of the day.

  I can’t stop myself from adding, “Since you’ve all been so good today!”

  None of them squeals in pleasure, excitement, surprised gratitude, as they would have a few months before. They hesitate for a few moments before they stand up, as if not entirely convinced this is a good idea, or one they necessarily have to obey, and then a few of them leave the classroom with a sort of tentative stiffness, and the others awkwardly follow.

  I see one boy steal a glance at my desk and chair. I try to see what he’s looking at—what can it be? He blushes, then suddenly turns deathly pale. Oh God, what was he looking at? What are they all seeing that I’m not, what is it that they know and I don’t? Where was I all this time, when I should have been seeing and knowing?

  And I notice they all keep their distance from the platform my desk sits on, and since some of them have no choice but to walk past it to get to the door, I suddenly wonder if that might be why they seemed so uneager to go out and play. There’s something there, in the corner with my things, something that scares them to death. How strange these children are! It’s going to be a long, involved process, teaching them to be normal with me again, making them forget I was ever shunned, even reviled, or maybe that I thought we were (being shunned and reviled) powerful enough to transform our students’ idea of us. Yes, so everything is our fault—the responsibility for this monstrous misunderstanding lands squarely on the two of us, my beloved Ange and me.

  We were prideful, we were too pleased with the quality of our work, we were certainly haughty and disdainful, and we vastly overrated the significance and menace of the signs people were sending to tell us we were being disagreeable, and that too we did out of pride.

  But why, I ask myself, why this wound infli
cted on Ange? Isn’t that real? Ange knowingly provoked the attack, then deliberately aggravated the wound? Or maybe there was no attack, maybe it was Ange himself who… Or could it be that nothing happened at all? Only an accident that left Ange completely undone, used as he was to having his life so well in hand?

  I spend some time straightening my classroom (as carefully as if I knew I would never be back).

  The bell rings. I put on my coat (and I feel something strange, something indefinable, but immediately banish it from my perception); I pick up my fat accordion-fold satchel and go out into the schoolyard, my coat buttoned all the way up because it’s so cold out, an unflappable smile on my lips.

  My misted-up lenses force me to look at my surroundings with a certain insulated distance. Is that why I don’t immediately see how alone I am, how vast the circle of empty space all around me, as if, I tell myself much later, I had in my hand not a satchel but a live grenade? But I notice nothing, or almost, and I’m so determined not to let my good mood slip away, so resolved to radically rethink my attitude (because our wrong-headed interpretation of the world around us did us so much harm, caused so much needless grief!), that this evening it would take an oddity far more unambiguous than this to divert me from my happy course.

  I feel very slightly breathless, as I always do when the city is draped in thick fog, when I become painfully aware of the weight of my flesh, overabundant though carefully contained by dark elastic clothing, when I feel the surprising heft of my body, which took shape over the years as I looked on, vaguely amused, taken aback, dismissive. That’s not exactly me, it’s a neighbor I’m not unfond of but for whom I have to feel a burdensome, tedious, faintly degrading responsibility—oh, who cares about my body, I think, quietly pleased with myself.

  But this evening I’m breathless. I turn onto Cours du Chapeau-Rouge. Here again, is it the fog that’s distancing me from everyone else on the street? Is it that I can’t see, or are people actually steering clear of my panting self?

  The tram passes by, very close, silent and almost invisible in the dull-white mist. The tinkle of its bell sounds as if the now almost palpable air had snatched it up and clutched it tight, leaving only a little choked rattle. And I don’t glance inside, for fear I might see petrified faces, poor creatures with terror and panic in their eyes at the mere sight of me.

  Suddenly I wonder: Could it be my coat? I think back to my students, the way they all sidestepped my satchel and coat on the platform. An unfocused apprehension grips my heart. Just keep walking, I tell myself, just go on as if nothing were amiss. My coat feels heavy on my shoulders. Just keep walking, with a smile on your lips.

  Finally I reach the deserted Rue Esprit-des-Lois. I put down my satchel on the sidewalk, and then, slowly and calmly, never shedding the polite smile that will assure any neighbors spying on me through their windows that everything’s just fine now, I take off my coat. I hold it out before me and spread it wide.

  I stagger from the shock. I feel the corners of my mouth turning down. My jaw begins to tremble. Yes, yes, yes, I whisper, get hold of yourself.

  I carefully fold my coat with my shivering hands. I still have the composure to wrap the cloth around the bits of flesh stuck to it. I bundle it up, take my satchel, and walk on to the building’s front door. I keep my coat squeezed tight under one arm, even though it’s so cold out, far colder than before.

  11. Everybody likes meat

  Here he is, with his thin face, his bright, prying eyes, letting me into our own apartment. He spreads his arms. I throw my coat at him.

  “There are pieces of my husband on there,” I say.

  My knees buckle. I collapse in the doorway. I must lie prostrate like that for some time, half conscious (because I can hear all sorts of sounds from the kitchen or bedroom, the scuff of slippered feet, the whistle of the tea kettle, the clink of silverware), unable to move or speak but somehow resigned, blithely or indifferently accepting my powerlessness, as in a dream. How tedious, I think calmly, unsure what my mind means by this complaint. My weight is resting on my right hip, and it’s very painful. I desperately want to stand up, but my will seems to have parted ways with my mind, which is serenely registering the various sounds coming to it from the building or the apartment as my soul bleeds and moans.

  Three safety pins (or were they hairpins?) thrust through shreds of flesh, bits of some meat like pinkish, fibrous pork (because that’s what it was, wasn’t it?), and their size and look made me think of human flesh and so bits of Ange’s flesh, since this morning I saw—yes, you saw it, admit it—that they’d thoroughly carved up his side, sliced into it, but of course it could just as well be any sort of animal meat, and it could also be nothing more than a cruel prank, so why let it spoil your mood…

  “I warned you, you shouldn’t have gone back,” he chides me.

  A tangled, dirty gray beard, hollow cheeks pocked with fifty-year-old acne scars, a sharp, heated gaze without a single trace of sympathy.

  “Try to get up,” he says. “I’m not strong enough to lift you.”

  I’m so bulky, so ponderous. You’re just like a pillow, my son used to say as he burrowed his forehead into my wobbling bicep. Oh, my son, why aren’t you here, resilient and decisive, here with us, we who are well past the age when we can grasp what we’ve never known!

  “How’s Ange doing?” I murmur.

  He hesitates.

  “As well as can be expected,” he says.

  “I want to see him.”

  My voice is defiant and willful, as if he’d made some move to stop me from going into the bedroom.

  “You’ll have to get up first,” he says.

  I carefully roll over, hoist myself up on all fours, puffing, little caring that Monsieur Noget is right there.

  The illustrious Noget! What a joke!

  I struggle to my feet, leaning against the wall.

  “Where’s my coat?”

  “I took it down to the trash,” says Noget. “I showed it to Ange, and then I threw it away.”

  “You shouldn’t have shown it to him. He doesn’t need to face that sort of idiocy on top of everything else. It’s just kids playing a filthy trick.”

  He doesn’t answer. I can hear his very slightly labored breathing. His gaze softens, and I can see that for him everything is already settled.

  “It’s every bit as serious,” he says, “as what they did to Ange yesterday.”

  “How do you know they did something to Ange? How do you know he didn’t do it himself? I mean,” (my voice turns combative, insistent) “how do you know he didn’t aggravate an injury somebody caused without meaning to, because he wanted to be shattered completely, because he wanted a valid reason for disappearing?”

  And no, that’s nothing like what the pharmacist told me, but why place more faith in her words than in any other equally plausible scenario? The pharmacist wasn’t a witness, and no one has told me they saw anything firsthand.

  “You’re barking up the wrong tree completely,” he says, infuriated. “You refuse to see the source of the trouble.”

  “No one will explain what it is,” I say tartly.

  But I don’t want to know. I don’t want to know exactly what it is.

  He runs his fingers through his beard, his shaggy hair. With a sort of cautious reticence, as if anxious not to offend me, he says:

  “You two, it must be said, have…an inappropriate attitude toward life—unacceptable, from certain points of view, and I would even add, forgive me, obscene—and of course that in no way justifies people tormenting you, and indeed no one would be tormenting you if it were only that, but since there’s also, as you know, as you suspect…your face, and the look on your face…”

  “What’s wrong with my face?” I say, feeling myself blush.

  He briefly looks away. This is the first time I’ve seen him sincerely uncomfortable.

  “Oh, I know,” I hurry to answer.

  And for the first time, too, his discomfort
spreads to me, and I want it to go away. I brush off my clothes, straighten my glasses. My bra has come unhooked. My breasts joggle under my sweater with every move I make.

  “I still haven’t seen my husband,” I say.

  “He was…he was gravely shocked by your coat,” he says, feigning concern.

  He can hardly hide his delight, his unwholesome excitement. He’s the source of the trouble. And I’ve left the man who means more to me than any other in his hands. What weakness could have made me do that?

  Emboldened by a very cold anger, I slip my hands under my sweater and rehook my bra, staring fiercely into his slightly veiled, fascinated gaze.

  “Incidentally, my colleagues seem to have heard of you,” I say with a scoff.

  “Oh, really?” he says.

  I get the feeling he’s pleased and flattered to hear it, but not surprised. Like someone long used to being recognized, being noticed. Head high, I walk past him toward the bedroom. I go in and close the door behind me, turning the latch. One bedside lamp dimly lights the room.

  “Don’t lock the door,” Ange whispers.

  Wincing, he props himself up on one elbow. I nearly gag from the stench.

  “He’ll think you don’t trust him.”

  “So what?” I say. “Of course I don’t trust that stranger. Remember how we hated him?”

  “I never hated him,” says Ange, with a kind of pained fury.

  He drops back onto the pillow, gasping, exhausted. I’m finding it hard to breathe myself. The smell of decay is unbearable. I open the window, and the frigid air pours into the room.

  “Oh, please,” Ange says wearily. “It’s so cold. I can’t…I can’t stand it.”

  He begins to weep quietly. I close the window and kneel beside him. I’m making such an enormous, torturous effort not to sob along with him that it almost distracts me, almost takes my mind off all this.

  Ange’s cheeks are sunken and glistening. I gently pull at the sheet to uncover him down to his hips, gazing perfidiously into his eyes, aware that I’m taking advantage of his weakness. The wound is black. The dried blood has become a lumpy, ragged crust. A green-gray liquid is pooled around the rim. That purulence, that’s where the awful smell is coming from.