by Marie Ndiaye
At least that’s what I think he says.
“What’s the problem?” I say, my voice turning slightly shrill, then breaking.
He stalks off. The fog whisks him out of sight before I can even get an idea of his age or his build, any sense of a connection he might have with Ange or me. I must have misunderstood, I tell myself. That was just some generic obscenity he tossed out at me, as timid men sometimes do in this city, then scuttle off with their hands in their pockets, their heads hunched between their shoulders.
It’s still early. Cours Alsace-Lorraine is deserted. Just when I’m about to cross the street, I see the tram emerge from the milky dimness. As if it were far, far away, slowed by the fog, I hear the little bell’s pointless tinkle, which now seems to be desperately chasing after the tram rather than running along before it. I wonder whether I should step back or run across the tracks. I bound forward. The tram speeds by just behind me with a furious hiss.
The tram is looking for me, trying to catch me; it deliberately comes racing along to run me down.
Gasping, I turn around. My son’s father is sitting in the last car, his face olive in the fluorescent light, and when he sees me he smiles, with that same kindly, gentle smile he had when we were first married.
He couldn’t be driving it, could he? He couldn’t have anything to do with the way the tram is behaving, him, my son’s father?
I recognize the guilt I can never shake when I think of my ex-husband, a guilt now made sharper by that innocent, friendly smile. Yes, my son’s father is a bit self-absorbed, but he’s also innocent, and he doesn’t hold a grudge. Unlike him, I rarely forget my own long-term interests. Oh, what a loser, I sometimes think, moved and ashamed. But also: After all, what did I do that was wrong? There’s no law I defied, no obligation I didn’t scrupulously respect. What did I do? I negotiated my divorce with that man so that every possible wrong was imputed to him, and he never suspected things could have been otherwise. He owes me money to this day. More precisely, this is what troubles my conscience: I can now confess that I began my love affair with Ange long before I asked for a divorce, and, knowing my husband had no idea of my liaison with Ange, I demanded, very unjustly in moral terms, that my husband take full responsibility for the failure of our marriage, oh yes, most unjustly, because he was a stubborn man but naïve, gruff but easily manipulated, and I had only to complain of this or that (perfectly unobjectionable, in truth) aspect of his behavior to make him lose all his self-assurance, his judgment, almost his memory, and agree that he’d never been much of a husband.
“Isn’t it his fault if your son prefers men to women? Clearly it is,” Ange had told me in his wise, placid voice, when I was wondering how to go about getting a divorce.
And so I repeated to my husband, “After all, it’s your fault that our son prefers men to women, although that doesn’t bother me in the least.”
I repeated those words to my husband, knowing this side of our son’s life bothered and even tormented him. I repeated them to my husband, knowing he’d find it hard to come up with a good counterargument. But why dredge up these old stories again? Yes, my ex-husband still owes me money, but the fact that I’ve stopped asking him for it absolves me of any symbolic debt I might owe him—that’s how it seems to me.
He was an electrician when we were married, and he made a good living. I believe he gradually stopped working after the divorce—is that my fault? Was it my job to keep him on track? Really, what can you do for a man driven to self-sabotage by sadness and spite, by baseless remorse and low self-esteem? Ange and I wanted the three of us to come together in a sort of polite friendship, but he refused all our dinner invitations. Nor did he come to our little party on the birth of that baby, the ridiculously named Souhar (please God, I sometimes say to myself, appalled, may that name bring her no misery, may it not be the death of her, even!).
14. My inconstant city
I start back toward Rue Esprit-des-Lois, guiding myself by the occasional distinctive shopwindow. I can’t make out the street names in the fog. I see only a handful of people, all in a hurry. They materialize at narrow intersections, as if they’ve been waiting there, hidden behind the corner of an apartment building, listening for my footsteps so they can burst out, wordlessly startle me, then vanish into the thick white murk.
This is a figment of my overwrought mind, and I know it. I’m perfectly sane, perfectly capable, even in my mistrust and trepidation, of grasping its outlandishness. But knowing that doesn’t stop my heart, my poor fat-encased heart, from racing each time someone pops up before me, looking slightly haunted (is that real or feigned?), and fixing me with the wide-eyed stare of someone who doesn’t see the person he was expecting.
No, I’m not out of my mind. Why should I be so convinced that everything I see has some direct connection to me? I can’t rid myself of the feeling the whole city is spying on me. And my heart is cornered, surrounded by the baying pack, and it’s hammering on the wall of my chest, wishing it could break out of its cramped cage, my poor aging heart, my poor trembling heart. I was born right here in Bordeaux, in Les Aubiers neighborhood; I’ve spent my whole life in this city, and I love it with a fraternal tenderness, like a human soul mate. But now I find Bordeaux slipping away from me, enigmatically shunning my friendship, its streets seeming to change their look and direction (is it only the fog? I ask myself), its citizens grown hostile over the past few months (and I’d gotten used to that, and it had, over time, become bearable), seeming no longer to hate me, exactly, but to be stalking me.
I break into a labored little trot. More than once, unable to distinguish the sidewalk from the street in the bands of floating mist, I unwittingly step into traffic. Still I see no sign of Rue Esprit-des-Lois.
I stop running and hide in a doorway to think. I went past the Place de la Cathédrale, then turned right toward Rue des Trois-Conils and then Rue Sainte-Catherine, so I should have come onto Rue Esprit-des-Lois, just past the Grand-Théâtre. And yet I seem to be somewhere near Cours Victor-Hugo, which should be far behind me. How can that be? Is it only the fog? I can’t possibly have gotten lost; I’ve been walking the heart of this city, its black old heart, its cold old heart, for the past half century.
I can’t have gotten lost, I tell myself, concentrating on the need for objectivity. So it must be the city itself trying to throw me off, my beloved city, whose fidelity I thought beyond question. And what about me? Whom or what have I betrayed, assuming I understood what that guy in the cap was saying? I’ve never knowingly let anyone down, I’ve always felt outrageously responsible for my thoughts and deeds, and even other people’s. So? If my city has turned unfaithful to me, in its old, dark, ungrateful heart, I will never trust anyone again, not even my husband.
Feeling calmer now all the same, I step out of the doorway and try to get my bearings. The Musée d’Aquitaine is in front of me, I can half see its vast outline through the fog. So all I have to do is go back the way I came till I reach Tour Pey-Berland, then immediately turn right, toward Cours Alsace-Lorraine.
I retrace my steps for a hundred-some yards. There should be an intersection here, but the street goes on, very straight, a street I’m sure used to curve. I walk faster and faster. Nothing looks familiar. I’m out of the neighborhood of tall apartment buildings; now there’s nothing but little low shops, barren trees towering starkly over their roofs. This isn’t the way I’m supposed to be going at all; I don’t live in one of these suburbs.
I stop again, terrified. For a moment I turn this way and that, vainly searching for a clue. I come back to where I started. The city seems to be contorting before my eyes—here a street elongates and narrows, there the boulevard widens and winds. It’s the fog, I tell myself, it’s these long, drifting white bands distorting the sight lines. Is it really just the fog?
Oh God, who will come to my rescue? Am I being punished because I’ve so long prided myself on never seeking anyone’s help?
I tentatively walk towa
rd a newsstand, the one open business on the street. I glance at the woman behind the counter. An anxiety submerges me, deeper than mere confusion, and I hurry off as fast as I can. Like at the police station, I clearly saw that this woman and I were alike, or at least the same sort of person, the same type, different from the passers-by or Lanton, different from my colleagues or Noget, who aren’t the same as us, now I secretly know it. But where is the difference? That I don’t know yet. It’s something to do with the look on our faces, our souls’ reflection on our faces.
This faintly disgusts me, though there’s nothing ugly, exactly, in what I’ve just glimpsed. Still, it’s uncomfortable, like the accidental unveiling of some mystery usually kept covered up. That’s why I avoid asking anything of this woman. I don’t want anyone seeing us face-to-face, no third-party gaze—another customer’s, say—confirming our oneness by enfolding us both in a single sour wariness.
I hurry along the sidewalk, not knowing where my feet are taking me. I make a sharp turn into an alleyway I assume will be the Passage de l’Épée. But no, it leads to a little square I’ve never seen in my life—three benches, a statue of Montesquieu, old black paving stones—dark and perversely changeable, the heart of my city?
I thought I knew Bordeaux intimately, and now strange new pieces of that big, familiar body are in a sense daring to come to the fore. I try to read the name of this square. But I’m not a tall woman, oh, little more than five feet three, and the fog blinds me to the plaque that must surely name this place. How can I never have come this way before? Have my walks through Bordeaux become so routine over the years that I blindly overlooked whole neighborhoods of my beloved city, right in its very center, which I thought I knew as well as the thoughts in my head?
There’s a brand-new post office, some clothing stores, still closed. Relieved, I make for the post office. A man is leaning on the counter before the one window. I recognize him as Richard Victor Noget. Well, how about that? I say to myself, amazed. So I can’t be that far from Rue Esprit-des-Lois!
“Monsieur Noget!”
Never before has the sight of him brought me more comfort than fear, more pleasure than distaste.
“Oh, there you are at last—we were worried,” he says severely.
“Yes, well, I got lost,” I say.
With my panic suddenly subsiding, I have an urge to pour out my sorrows, to arouse someone’s pity.
“It’s this horrible fog,” I blurt out. “Nothing looks like itself, Bordeaux isn’t Bordeaux anymore, it’s completely changed…”
I raise one arm to wipe my forehead. In spite of the cold, I’m drenched in sweat, so terrified was I at the idea of walking in circles forever through an anonymous city, its heart gone dark.
The look on Noget’s face is closed, distant, uncomfortable. As I approach, he hurriedly slips something under the glass, toward the clerk: the letter he was just sealing. I can vaguely feel him trying to hold my gaze, staring into my eyes so I’ll keep looking back, and I sense that he’s trying to distract me from his hands. I automatically glance down at the letter the clerk has just taken. I read my son’s name upside down on the envelope. My lips begin to tremble. I look at Noget, and I see that he knows I’ve seen.
“You’re writing my son?” I say in a tiny, faltering voice. “You know my son?”
And the odious thought of my granddaughter’s name once again floods my thoughts—yes, it’s an obsession, and it makes me grit my teeth till it hurts, and for a few seconds it so consumes me that I lose all awareness of the world around me.
My mouth filling with saliva, I murmur:
“Really, of all the names in the world, why that one?”
I swallow audibly.
“How do you know my son?” I bark.
“I don’t,” says Noget.
“You’re writing to someone you don’t know?”
I let out a cynical little laugh, but my legs are weak and wobbly. I’m a woman with thick, sturdy legs, and yet suddenly they feel too weedy to support me, suddenly I’m like an enormous poppy waving back and forth on its stem.
Casually combing his beard with his fingers, Noget gives me a sharp, scrutinizing look. The sheepskin jacket he’s wearing is too big for him, and I recognize it as one of Ange’s. Well, at least someone’s getting some use out of those old things, I tell myself, all the more unconcerned in that Ange got that jacket long ago as a gift from his daughters.
“Don’t be alarmed,” Noget says soothingly. “Ange and I simply thought we’d best let your son know you’ll be coming; we knew you wouldn’t want to, but, don’t you agree, it would be indelicate to give him such a, how shall I put it, such an emotional shock…”
Has Noget ever spoken to me so gently? I burst into sobs.
“I don’t know…if that was a good idea,”
I say. Nevertheless, I feel my agitation and doubts, my confusion and hatred, flowing away with my tears, draining my fat, heavy old heart of the questions that had been choking it.
I take a deep breath and lay my hand on Noget’s arm.
“I’d like us to be friends now,” I say fervently.
He gives me a quick, slightly stiff smile.
“I don’t know if you consider your son a friend too,” (he says with the slow, serious, sententious voice I so loathe, which inevitably reminds me of his imposture, as if he were still trying to convince me he’d once been a teacher by adopting all the stereotypical ways of a pedant) “but I’m surprised you were even thinking of playing such a trick on him.”
“And I’m tired of people condemning me as a vindictive mother, or a mother who can’t even love her own son,” I say sharply.
“I’ve learned that your son is a doctor, married, with a family…”
“He has one child, a daughter,” I say, in an agonized murmur. “Her name is Souhar.”
“That doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter.”
I cry out, “Yes it does, it’s so ridiculous!”
“If you’d just let me finish,” he says, raising his voice. “So your son is settled, he’s chosen to place the obstacle of distance between his new life and Bordeaux, because although he’s always had a harmonious relationship with his stepfather, with Ange, he quite clearly found it intolerable to live in the same city as his mother.”
I can’t believe what I’m hearing. I gasp in shock.
“Ange would never have told you any such thing! If my son ran away from anyone, and let’s say he did, though nothing could be less certain, it can only have been his father, my ex-husband!”
“Really?” Noget exclaims.
I see a gleam of cruel joy in his eyes, a vicious delight. I take a step back.
Any attempt at friendship or peace with an enemy is seen as a sign of weakness.
I put my arm over my face to fend off a blow. But Noget doesn’t move.
“In that case,” he gleefully goes on, “how do you explain that when he recently came through Bordeaux it was his father your son went to see and to show his child, and even to stay with, I believe, and how in that case do you explain that he chose to keep you in the dark, that he didn’t even come show you his little Souhar, or introduce his wife? Strange, isn’t it, for a son who’s not afraid of his mother?”
“But how do you know all this?” I say.
I feel slightly light-headed. I taste bile in my throat, my breath is bitter. Inappropriately, I can’t help thinking it’s been a long time since breakfast.
I moan, “I’m so hungry I could eat a whole roast!”
“I’ve made croque-monsieurs,” Noget says cheerily. “Not the kind they give you in cafés, with the dry edges and the cut-rate ham, because, you see, I make my own sandwich bread, I cut it into thick slices that I brown in butter, then I lay on the best Comté cheese I know and a fine piece of old-fashioned ham, and then on the top slice, just under the cheese, do you know what I put on to keep everything tender and moist? A thin layer of béchamel sauce, that’s what. But to answer your questi
on: Ange told me, of course; how would I ever have guessed on my own?”
“Ange doesn’t know all the details,” I say weakly.
My stolid heart, my weakening, stolid heart, keep on bravely beating in your prison of fat!
Trying to assert myself a little, I add, “I can’t eat croque-monsieurs, I need something light.”
“Actually, I believe,” says Noget, “no, I’m certain that Ange himself met your son and his wife and child at some point during their short stay in Bordeaux. That’s what your son wanted, and I imagine he advised Ange not to mention it to you so you wouldn’t be needlessly hurt, unless it was Ange who decided not to tell you. Evidently Ange and your son were very happy, very moved to see each other. Ange also told me how thrilled he was to see little Souhar’s face at last.”
“No, no, you’re making that up,” I say.
I smile, very consciously feigning a superior, disdainful expression.
“I most certainly am not,” says Noget, vexed.
“I’ve heard quite enough about this,” I say a little too loudly. “The things that go on in families, you know…”
I whisk the air with both hands. An oddly acidic, pungent sweat runs down my forehead, despite the cool air in the post office, and I note that Noget and the clerk are giving me a cautious, uncertain stare.
Am I such a perfidious woman, then? I thought I was exemplary, respectful, and kind—could I have been that wrong?
I step outside. For a few seconds I’d hoped that the fog might have lifted, that I’d see the square differently, recognize it as a place not among my usual haunts, to be sure, but which I could at least remember passing through sometime long ago. But even if the fog’s thinned a little, nothing seems familiar. The statue of Montesquieu is made of green-tinged, mossy stone, the benches are old. A half-dozen streets set off from the square. I have no idea which I should follow to go home, no idea where in Bordeaux I may be. I even find myself doubting that I’m in Bordeaux at all. But if not, where would I be, I who never travel?
