by Marie Ndiaye
“What they did to you,” Ange murmurs. “Your coat…”
He casts a terrified glance at the door.
“I’m begging you, don’t antagonize him,” he says.
“Ange, my darling, don’t torment yourself over that coat.”
I whisper those words in his ear, fervently, stroking his damp forehead, realizing he’s oblivious to it all, both my caress and my study of the wound. All he can think of is the grave problem the locked door clearly poses in his mind.
Beneath his mild demeanor, Ange was never afraid of anyone or anything. And here he is, shaking like a beaten child. My God, are our students afraid of us?
“Someone played a horrible prank on me,” I say, “and I’m angry about it; I’m going to try to find the culprit, and believe me, they haven’t heard the last of it.”
“It’s not a prank,” Ange whispers, “and you know it. It’s a crime. We’re done for. It’s all our fault, we can’t forget that.”
“That’s not how you saw it before,” I say. “He put all that in your head.”
“They tore off pieces of my flesh!”
Ange’s voice is so soft that at times I can’t hear him. His eyes dart this way and that, stricken with panic.
“He explained how mistaken we were,” he says. “He’s right, but it’s too late now to become someone else. I can never go out again. Even right here, anything can happen. Well, no doubt that’s only right. I only wish it didn’t hurt so much.”
“Let me get Doctor Charre to see you,” I beg, desperation rising inside me.
“Absolutely not.”
Ange grows more agitated. In a sudden burst of fury, he explodes at me.
“You still don’t seem to get it, you’re talking like you would have six months ago. Doctor Charre…especially not him. No one we’ve ever known…can be allowed in this room. Are you trying to speed up my death? I’d like not to be in pain, but I’m not ready to die yet.”
“What about Gladys? Priscilla?”
“They can never come here again!” cries Ange, gripped by an unnameable terror.
Am I secretly happy to hear it? Dismayed all the same, because I know Ange used to dote on his two daughters, I push back: “Your own children?”
“They think they’re doing the right thing, they think they’re helping, but…what they do to me…it’s even more horrible. No, no, they can never come near me again. They hurt me too much. They don’t listen to me, they’ve lost faith in me.… How I’ve suffered. They’d kill me, thinking they love me and…that they’re going to save me…but they don’t listen to what I say, it’s lost all…value in their eyes. They know it’s our fault.… They don’t want to be contaminated.”
“But by what?” I say.
“But by what?” he repeats, cruelly mimicking my voice, ridiculing my ignorance.
And it strikes me that I’ve never seen Ange aim any such humiliation my way, even if he might have unleashed just that kind of sullen mockery on others when I wasn’t around.
“By everything we are,” he says wearily. “We’re bad people, we’re unworthy. We were blind. You still are. My daughters are afraid they might become like me, and I can understand that, but for old Ange Lacordeyre it’s too late.”
“Will you let me treat your wound now?”
Ange shrugs. I stand up, furtively open the latch, and slip into the hallway.
He emerges from the dark living room. With one bound he’s beside me, astonishingly nimble, quick, light. He’s spying on us at every moment, and he has been all along.
“I’ve made dinner. It’s time to eat.”
“Yes,” I say.
“You must not be afraid of me,” he says in an authoritarian voice, “and you must not convince your husband to be.”
“Are you a spy?” I say brazenly. And I laugh to myself, daring to use such a word with no fear of seeming ridiculous.
By the dim light of the hallway, I see his brow furrow.
“A spy? In whose service?”
“I don’t know. No one knows less about all this than me.”
“That’s no reason to talk nonsense.”
I go into the bathroom for compresses and disinfectant. He follows on my heels.
“Is that for your husband? No, don’t you see, you mustn’t try to treat him,” he says, agitated. “He can’t be allowed to forget what they did to him!”
I lower my head, pretending to think, then walk around him, scurry to the bedroom, and quickly lock the door behind me.
Absolute silence invades the apartment. I put my ear to the door. From the other side, just against the wood, comes his calm, confident voice: “You’re not going to heal him. It’s no use. There’s nothing more we can do. That smell—do you understand?—that’s the smell of death.”
“Who are you?” I whisper.
“The illustrious Noget,” he answers sarcastically. “Isn’t that what you’ve heard people call me? You alone, in your purity, have never heard of me.”
My fingers clench against the door.
“Yes, but,” I say, very softly, not wanting Ange to overhear, “is that a crime?”
I feel so discouraged, so exhausted that I lay my face against the door as I used to on my son’s chest, or on Ange’s. I’m afraid I’ll find Ange’s furious, desperate eyes staring at me if I turn around.
Letting out a sob, lips against the door, I say, “So it’s a crime never to have heard of you?”
“Yes.” (His gentle, assured, soft, seductive voice, a voice without warmth.) “Everything you don’t know speaks against you. There are some things you really can’t not know, isn’t that so? Things you must endeavor to know and understand. Oh, you’re so…so presumptuous.”
“Nadia!” Ange calls.
My whole body jumps, as if a corpse had awakened and spoken behind me. I unstick myself from the door and slowly walk toward the bed. Have I somehow wronged Ange?
“Now I have what I need to take care of you,” I say.
A sardonic glow lights his gaunt face.
“You smell that stench coming out of me?”
“Yes, we’ll have to get you cleaned up,” I say. “Your daughters should have seen to that yesterday.”
“Come here, come here, closer,” says Ange.
He extracts one hand from under the sheet and brutally pulls me to him by my neck. I hold my breath. The smell is coming from his glistening skin as well, and his hair, and his mouth.
“Listen, I’m starving,” Ange says in my ear, “but I want it to be you who gives me the food he’s made, not him. OK? Today at lunchtime, while you were at work…” (He breaks into tears, moaning.) “He fed me at lunchtime. I never want that to happen again. But whatever you do, whatever you do, you can’t tell him, OK? Never complain to him about anything.”
“Who is he?”
“Who is he?” Ange repeats, parodying me in that hurtful new way of his.
He gives an irritable shrug. Please God, I reflexively say to myself, don’t let me come to hate this new Ange.
“Who is he?” I say stubbornly.
“The great Noget,” Ange mumbles.
I fold back the sheet, down to his legs. I manage to stifle a shudder at the sight of his wound, but the smell is so strong that I have to get away. I open the armoire, grab a big handkerchief, and tie it over my nose.
Ange looks at me, dull, morose, but with a tight little smile that so hideously expresses a sort of grim pleasure, a sneering delight rooted in the very vileness of the situation, that I can’t help crying out:
“How you’ve changed, Ange!”
“Yes, maybe a hole in the stomach does a little something to a man,” says Ange, “and maybe seeing pieces of his own flesh stuck to his wife’s coat with safety pins, maybe that does something to a man too, you’re absolutely right.”
“That was pork or rabbit meat,” I say firmly. “Everything around us is fine. We just have to convince ourselves of that.”
He throws a nervo
us, untrusting glance at the door, then whispers, “Noget doesn’t want me to forget what happened, he says I have to meditate on my wound and the multiple meanings of my suffering.”
“But there’s nothing to understand,” I say, loud and clear. “We got all worked up over nothing, out of vanity. It was nothing but vanity, Ange, that was making us think people despised us.”
I crouch down beside the bed. I start to cut away Ange’s shirt around the wound. I can hear my own breath, quick and heavy. Even with the handkerchief, the nauseating smell makes me light-headed. I dip a compress into the disinfectant, then try to sop up the pus that’s overflowed onto Ange’s stomach, under his pants, soaking the mattress and sheets. No matter how much I wipe away, more seems to gush up from deep in the wound to replace it.
“Where can it all be coming from?” I cry, demoralized.
“It’s his poor soul seeping out! Dinnertime!”
And Noget gives two loud raps on the door. Ange groans in fear and surprise. For many minutes we stay silent, listening intently for any sound from outside the room.
“He’s right, isn’t he?” Ange whispers, his jaw tense, his whole wasted, sallow face even more drawn than before. “It’s…it’s everything I am, it’s the very essence of…of my being oozing out of me, isn’t it?”
I try hard to laugh, but a succession of squawks is all that comes out. And yet, I tell myself, troubled, it’s true, this Ange seems less like himself all the time.
I use up the entire box of compresses. And still the pus comes, ever darker, reeking. I’m gagging behind my handkerchief. The whole room is permeated with the stench. I stand up to open the window.
“No,” shouts Ange. “I’m cold, I’m cold.”
In the unusual silence of the courtyard, the neighborhood, his whine resounds like the voice of the last man alive. It echoes so lugubriously that I gladly close the window. Now I feel an almost desperate longing to sleep. Let everyone fend for themselves, I dully say to myself, utterly drained. But my habit of thinking myself responsible for everyone around me and everything that happens to us, good or disastrous, has been with me too long to be cast off just because I want to.
I leave the room, not looking at Ange. An exquisite aroma of tomatoes and garlic slow-cooked in olive oil streams from the kitchen.
I find him patiently waiting by the table, set for two. I can’t help exclaiming, “That smells so good!”
“I made ossobuco,” he says modestly.
Can he really be our enemy when he makes dishes that so ease our pain? Is that just another medium for the spell he’s trying to cast on us?
“I avoid ossobuco,” I say, trying to put on a severe, even slightly disgusted air.
But how hungry I am, and how enticing it all is!
“I have a cousin in the Périgord who raises calves and pigs,” says Noget. “It’s the only meat I’ll eat, and the only meat I bring you. It’s a top-grade farm. There’s nothing to worry about, it won’t make you sick.”
His gentle, considerate voice makes me ashamed. I’m so hungry that a bitter liquid fills my mouth. I can’t help thinking he’s secretly studying me. But I’m so tired, so confused.
Does it really matter that much, in the end, just who this man is?
“No, I’m not afraid of that,” I say.
I take a step toward the steaming pot (which he would have rummaged through the cabinets to find) and stiffly bend over till my face is almost touching the rounds of veal simmering in their orange sauce.
“Isn’t it a little fatty?” I murmur.
“That’s the marrow,” he says. “Your husband’s very fond of marrow, isn’t he?”
“Yes,” I say, “Ange loves marrow.”
I immediately chide myself for adding, “He liked to spread it all over a piece of bread and put it under the broiler.”
“Well,” he says with a condescending little smile, “when there’s marrow in the sauce, you can hardly expect it to be light.”
“What do you want from us?” I ask. “I’m begging you, tell me straight.”
I drop onto a chair, close to him, and look straight into his unpleasant face, feeling the tremor in my chin.
“As you see,” I say, “I’ve lost all my pride.”
“All I want is to help you,” says Noget, categorically. “I have no other mission.”
“But did someone send you?”
“I work for no one,” he says.
Suddenly he looks away, and I suspect that he might well be lying, that he’s definitely lying.
Hopeless, I stand up. A sort of exhausted indifference is settling over me. I pick up one of the two plates from the table, fill it with meat and sauce. Noget carefully spoons a helping of noodles on one side, and then I leave the kitchen to go and feed Ange.
He’s moaning in his sleep. He wakes when I enter the room. Drool is flowing from the corners of his mouth.
“I’m hungry, that smells good,” he says.
For the first time in ages, he smiles.
He’s used to the stench now, I tell myself, feeling faint. I sit down on the edge of the bed. I observe that the pus is still coming. Then I put a spoonful of meat and noodles to Ange’s lips and he greedily swallows it down, and as I watch his sauce-smeared mouth open and close, and as an image drifts through my mind of Noget’s fat hands making the dish, clutching the meat, slicing the onions and tomatoes, Noget’s will endeavoring to arouse our appetite, focused solely on us and our desire to eat, I know I’ll never be able to choke down our neighbor’s homemade ossobuco, not only because I find Noget repellent but because there’s some hidden intention in his cooking, because in his unclean hands food acts as a tool for what must be, I tell myself stonily, something like our enslavement.
12. Did we offend the bad fairy?
Two days later I grudgingly call Gladys.
One of her children answers. When I’m done introducing myself, he lets out a cry and drops the phone. Several minutes of silence go by. I wait, the receiver pressed to my ear, having come to accept that my most ordinary acts will now arouse the most incongruous reactions.
I’m standing at the big living-room window, and I see the rain falling in Rue Esprit-des-Lois, and the dark façades across the way, the balconies no neighbor ever steps out onto anymore, at least not when I’m here. In our building too, people seem to have moved away—because whatever happened to the Foulques, the Dumezes, the Bertauxs, all those fine, quiet couples who just eight months ago packed this very living room, glasses of champagne all around, toasting my granddaughter’s birth?
We’d invited everyone in the building, apart from Noget. Now I never see them around anymore, I don’t hear them, their cars even seem to be gone from the street. Was that a mistake, then, spurning Noget and showering everyone else with various expressions of our cordial feelings, our faintly condescending esteem? Yes, it’s true, Ange and I have always felt vaguely superior to our neighbors and colleagues. As for Noget, the queasy aversion he inspired in us was almost hatred, unquestionably.
“Is that you, Nadia?” says Gladys’s voice at last, slightly distant and veiled, as if she’d taken the precaution of laying a piece of cloth between her mouth and the telephone.
“Yes, it’s me,” I say. “I gave your son quite a scare, didn’t I? The one who answered the phone?”
Gladys ignores my chirpy tone. She doesn’t make a sound. A shiver runs down the back of my neck. I quickly turn toward the living room doorway, but I see no sign of anyone. Which of course doesn’t mean I’m alone.
“You and Priscilla haven’t come to see your papa,” I say.
“No,” says Gladys after a long pause.
Her voice is even fainter than before. I force myself to go on:
“He’s not well at all.”
“I didn’t think so,” says Gladys.
Her answer comes after a few seconds of silence, as if it took that long for my voice to reach her, or as if she had to weigh every word, every intonation, b
efore she could even think of speaking to me. But, I ask myself, what cruel misuse could I possibly make of Gladys’s words?
“You promised you’d be back,” I say, slightly lost. “It’s just a little strange…”
“We’re learning to separate from him,” says Gladys.
Her voice has become almost inaudible. Suddenly frantic, sensing that this conversation will be our last, that Gladys will never again answer my calls, I shout into the receiver, “Hey, Gladys!”
“Well,” says Gladys, “I think I’ll be hanging up now.”
“Wait! I have to tell you, both of you, that…I’m going away.”
Stinging tears fill my eyes. All the same, I stand firmly on my two feet, looking out at the lashing rain, to deprive the being clearly hidden in my living room of the pleasure of seeing me collapse.
“Yes?” says Gladys, further away all the time. “You’re going away, you say?”
“To my son’s. But, oh, Gladys, I’ll have to leave Ange behind, he’s in no shape to travel.”
I speak very quickly to keep Gladys with me a little longer, that woman I’ve so often wished I could never see again, exasperated by her hostility, pragmatism, and ostentatious saintliness when she came for a visit, for instance.
“Ange will stay here, in the care of our neighbor,” I say, feeling an unbearable shame, “but you two must come and see him, keep an eye on him, or…oh God… Please, Gladys…”
“I’m going to hang up now. I do have children, you know. Oh, Papa never should have had anything to do with you… I’m hanging up…”
“You will come, won’t you, Gladys?”
I press the receiver to my ear so hard it burns.
I then see one corner of a curtain being lifted up in an apartment across the street. The Chinese student who lives there—yet another I haven’t seen on the sidewalk for months, for so long that I thought she’d gone away too—is standing with her forehead against the glass. Our eyes meet. She gives me a quick smile. I find that comforting beyond all reason. I remember she used to walk around stark naked behind her sheer curtains, and when Ange saw her he looked away in anger and said, “That little whore, who does she think she is? I’m going to call the cops on her if she keeps that up.”
