by Marie Ndiaye
15. He’s not like he used to be
Noget takes my arm and leads me down a little street I know well. It’s Rue Lafayette, which runs straight into ours, just a few minutes away from that strange square I’d never seen in my life. Humiliated, I say nothing of my surprise to Noget.
Once we’re in the apartment, he cries out excitedly, “Just let me put my croque-monsieurs in the oven for ten minutes!”
My mouth suddenly fills with saliva, and I so yearn to eat that I feel a flood of gratitude toward Noget, even though I’m convinced now that his kindness is poisoned, and his cooking somehow infected.
He’s only feeding us to enslave us, I tell myself; he knows his treats keep us quiet, and every mouthful numbs us and binds us. How thrilled he must be to have the two teachers surrendering to his authority, to the force of his virtuosity with butter and fat, those same two teachers who once heaped such scorn on him!
I now think Ange and I misused our superior status, but in our defense might I swear that, if we were sometimes cruel, there was no real malice behind it (oh, we thought far too little of him to feel anything about him at all), no intention of hurting this person, that everything we did we did, I believe, innocently? But in fact, I then ask myself, isn’t that worse?
I look into our bedroom, expecting to find Ange asleep. But his feverish, dilated eyes cling to mine.
I go in, trying to take only cautious little breaths. The stench is beginning to seep into the apartment.
“You want to see my wound?” Ange asks, his tone pathetically hopeful, as if desperate for some way to keep me close by him.
I reflexively jump back as I lift up the sheet. The awful cavity in Ange’s side seems even deeper than before. It must be nearing his liver now, I tell myself, horrified. Mingled with bloody little fibers, the pus is still running into a shallow dish Noget has nestled against Ange’s side. All around the wound, the roll of curled flesh and dried blood looks like an old piece of leather, a bone gnawed by a dog. My lips quiver in anguish and pity. Choking, I murmur, “Does it hurt, my poor love?”
“Terribly,” says Ange.
He nods toward the door.
“He’s going to get hold of some morphine for me,” he softly goes on.
“And how, may I ask, is he going to do that? Get a prescription from Doctor Charre?”
In spite of me, in spite of my resolution to show Ange the most perfect tenderness and indulgence, a cold fury corrodes my words, because I can’t forget what I learned from Noget, and I look at the suffering face of the man I so loved, who was a part of me (but evidently the most secretive part, the most deceitful, the least honest?), and I picture that same face looking down at my granddaughter, the child they named Souhar, and then smiling at my son, smiling at that woman I’ve never met, and then, at bedtime, settling onto the pillow so near my own face, displaying the same utter transparency I still see in him now, even as I know he’s been telling me lies.
Can I really trust Noget? He couldn’t have made up anything that precise, I tell myself.
My only hope is that Ange had reasons both innocent and legitimate for lying to me, the same purity of soul that we had even as we treated our neighbor with such disregard. That’s my only hope, I tell myself, if I want to go on trusting in Ange—that he betrayed me out of an excess of compassion, an excess of sincerity.
“He doesn’t need a prescription to get what he wants,” Ange answers crossly. “Do you realize he knows all about my ideas on education?”
“I think I remember his claiming to, yes,” I say.
“Almost word for word, he recited my latest article, on the importance of self-denial,” says Ange, perking up a little. “He agrees with me.… A good teacher must have…a vocation for sacrifice; as he teaches he must continually remind himself that he could have…done something else, and what that something else is varies from person to person, but it must seem to him preferable in every way.… And yet he casts it aside so he can teach… He’s stifled his other ambitions, his true desire, for that task…a task far finer than any other. He’s given himself entirely…to the school. Noget… Noget shares my opinions, you know.”
I don’t answer, I look away, my lips slightly pursed, because I’ve always found Ange’s ideas on education faintly distasteful, vaguely repellent.
I force my voice to sound lively and bright.
“I saw Lanton this morning, he said to tell you hello.”
“I very much doubt that,” Ange scoffs. “He called just now. Noget gave me the phone, and…let me tell you…your dear Lanton seemed none too friendly to me.”
I almost shriek, “What did he want?”
“Something about a letter you’re supposed to give your son.”
“Yes?”
“Oh, I…I don’t know much about it.”
Ange closes his eyes, looking drained.
“If you don’t give him that letter, I’ll be the one Lanton takes it out on.”
“But how?” I say, desperate. “What will he do? He doesn’t have the right.”
“Of course not, he has no right to threaten an upstanding citizen just because he wants something or other from that citizen’s wife and stepson. Oh, of course…he has no right to do such a thing.”
Ange has fallen back into that mocking tone I can’t get used to. He’s wishing I’d let him go on about the school and those who serve it, wishing I’d sincerely delight in the knowledge that Noget admires and shares his ideas, wishing I was less flagrantly dubious of his crackpot theories.
But soon I’ll be going away, very likely for a long time, so I give Ange’s cheek a caress, and this gesture reminds me of a thousand others, fervidly loving, that Ange and I gave each other over those many years, effusions untouched by any trace of calculation.
Our youth was already behind us when we first met, but we loved each other, I tell myself, with an adolescent freshness of sentiment. There were no secret misgivings in the life we lived together; our enchantment was never sullied by memories and grievances, by recent hurts and past humiliations. I overlooked Ange’s tedious doctrines on the subject of our profession, and he never asked my opinion, so it was just as if he’d never proclaimed any such thing.
But now that this man has discussed those ideas with him, flattered him, Ange has turned vain and touchy, I tell myself; he wants me to approve and rejoice. Ange has lost the ingenuous spirit I loved more than anything else. Desperately sad, I murmur, “You remember I’m leaving next week?”
“Yes,” says Ange, gently squeezing my hand.
“I’ll send for you as soon as I can. I’ll get settled in, I’ll see where things stand, and then, even if you’re not quite recovered, I’ll arrange to have you transported.”
“Yes,” says Ange, almost indifferent.
“Isn’t that what you want?”
“Yes.”
“And Noget, do you think we can trust him?”
“Absolutely.”
I bend down over Ange, I press my mouth to his ear, even though the smell (deeply in love, I liked to lick his ear, smell his skin, not one nook of that poor body repulsed me) makes me gag. Urgently, I whisper, “Are you afraid of Noget?”
Ange jerks his head to one side, as far from me as he can. A grimace of pain contorts his mouth.
“Don’t say such idiotic things! It’s intolerable,” he spits out, exasperated.
Tears come to his eyes.
“You don’t get it, you don’t get it at all, you’re still convinced all you have to do is whisper if you don’t want to be heard, you still think there’s such a thing as privacy and secrecy! Nothing is…private between us anymore.”
Just then the door opens and Noget appears, cradling a platter of huge, steaming croque-monsieurs.
“At least you’ll be here with me when I die,” says Ange, in the teary tone he uses with Noget. “You’ll look after me, won’t you, you’ll look after my soul?”
“I made some of these croque-monsieurs with Emmental
and the others with Comté,” Noget says amiably. “As you know, Comté has more flavor, but there’s something to be said for Emmental, which lets the ham come through more.”
“I’m not very hungry,” says Ange.
“Oh,” says Noget, very severely, “you’re going to eat anyway. You must.”
16. So many things changing and vanishing
I haven’t had my period for several months now.
I know I could blame it on stress, but I have a feeling it will never come back, that my fertile days are behind me. Given my age, it seems a safe bet. Doctor Charre could tell me for sure, but I don’t dare go see him, fearing that some of Ange’s suspicions might turn out to be founded, or at least that the atmosphere I’d find in his office, assuming he consented to see me, might force me to concede that Ange has good reason to be wary of him, even if he’s been our doctor for years.
I’ve stopped going out. I keep to the apartment, half-heartedly packing my bags. The fact is, I’m afraid I’ll lose my way again out in Bordeaux, where every day the shape of things is erased by a fog as thick as the day before. I’m afraid Bordeaux wants me lost, and next time Noget won’t be there to find me.
Not knowing how to fill the time, I stare at myself in the mirror, trying to make out who that woman might be, that woman who seems to be me, but whose image I can’t quite reconcile with my sense of myself. Not that I think I’m more alluring than my reflection. It’s not a question of beauty or charm or youth. It’s just that my lazy mind never adjusted to the changes taking place in my body, never registered the thick veins slowly rising up from deep inside my fat or muscle to just beneath my skin’s surface, never took note of the humble dull-brown excrescences, like tiny petals of flesh, sprouting under my arms and between my breasts, whose nipples are now more rumpled and grainy than they used to be; my lofty mind never deigned to acknowledge that the jiggling flesh on my arms and thighs will now jiggle like that for all time, just as I’ve now been excused for all time from the modest chore of containing my menstrual blood. Oh, none of these metamorphoses matter that much to me. I look at my naked body as it little by little takes on the thousand attributes of decline; I order my mind to see and remember the details of that dereliction, but I feel myself dismissing that sad, insignificant body, I feel a secret admiration for my mind’s arrogant unwillingness to dwell on my body’s banal changes.
I feel as if those two, my body and my mind, are two children of mine, and one bores and disappoints me, and the other makes me proud. Isn’t that just what I used to feel about the two very different young men who were my son and his lover Lanton? Didn’t I discreetly prefer Lanton’s company to my son’s, and of those two, wasn’t it Lanton I couldn’t imagine never seeing again?
A call to my bank confirms that Ange and I are still being paid, even though we haven’t gone back to the school. Either the principal never reported our unexcused absence to the ministry, I tell myself, or they’re trying to say that this is exactly what they want from us: they want us to stay well away, because our isolation or disappearance is worth far more to them than the money we’re costing them.
Then, two days before I’m scheduled to leave, Noget comes up from the lobby with a letter. He says: “Your son’s written you.”
“How indiscreet you are, and how rude!”
I brusquely stand up from the table where I was eating what Noget calls “breakfast,” in English: a bounteous array of goose rillettes, ham, thick slices of buttered bread, and little sugared brioches, all washed down with milky coffee. I snatch the letter from his hand and scurry to the shelter of the study, feeling myself waddle, feeling the blubbery jiggle of my hips beneath my nightgown.
I sit down on the bed. I stare at the envelope for some time before I can even think of opening it. It’s been so long since he wrote me!
The stamp shows a chalk cliff plunging into the Mediterranean. My son’s handwriting is still careful and clear, with pretty curls on the capitals, just as I taught him twenty-five years ago. This immediately fills me with pride. What if he asks me or orders me not to come?
I stand up and pace around the room, clutching the envelope to my breast, begging the letter to be kind. My emotion is so deep that my breakfast of charcuterie surges up in my throat. I stand still. The apartment is perfectly silent, as is the whole building. Outside the window, as always now, the thick fog with its sweet scent of silt.
Dear Mama, my dear little mama, what will you think of that beginning? I imagine you reading those first words and feeling a sort of shock at that unexpected pleasure, your son Ralph addressing you with every sign of affection when there’s no reason you should feel any affection at all from poor Ralph, as you well know, and so I imagine you on the verge of tears and pleased deep inside to find that the love of a son always wins out in the end, that duty always wins out, that the mother always wins out! You know how to cry, even if your real eye stays dry, by which I mean the eye you never show. All the same, you know how to cry like any normal person. My dear mama, let me get to the point. First of all, I forbid you to rebuke or criticize me in any way. You’re raising an eyebrow, pretending not to understand what I mean. You understand perfectly well. Even when you’re not saying a word, you’re questioning, judging, accusing. That I will no longer accept. I will accept it no longer because I am a man. But are you capable of grasping that incontrovertible fact? Second, you must accept that changes can take place independent of your will or knowledge. In a general sense, I can’t live in this world. You never knew that, did you? People like you can imagine only what they themselves feel, nothing else exists. I look around me and I see two houses and a tree and a sheet-metal hut and one single cloud against the blue sky. That’s all I see. I tell myself that my dog, here beside me, might see other elements of this reality, or elements of a different reality, parallel to this one, that I can’t even imagine. That’s how you are: nothing can be real except what you see. But I’m still stuck in argumentation and recrimination, and that’s not what I wanted. All I have to do is say things to you and I find myself dragged into the realm of combat and conflict, which I’ve come to hate more than anything. That I will no longer accept. I can’t live in this world, as I told you. But I’ve grown used to it. I find a certain pleasure in my new existence. I like my work. I’m a new man. Just this morning I delivered a woman, and the baby was stillborn, which isn’t a bad thing, since in that woman’s arms the child’s life would quickly and inevitably have become a living hell: she’s an alcoholic, half numb to the world, unreachable. I looked after her well. I comforted her. I filled out all sorts of papers on her behalf. As you see, I am a determined man. So you were driven out of your school? Now you understand that, even for you, school was not a safe haven. Do you understand that? Your beloved school! How you must have suffered! For a long time I was jealous of your school and your students, but won’t you be jealous of my patients? I believe I’ve forgiven you everything, because I am a new man. For that I owe a great debt to Wilma. It matters little to me or to her if you like Wilma or not, it’s not at all certain you’ll be taken with Wilma as you were with Lanton, so taken it made me jealous and angry. Wilma will be less your type. Who knows? Maybe you’ll even fall in love with my dear Wilma, and I won’t be able to compete, and I’ll have to pack my bags! I’m joking, you understand. I am a new man. I have a whole long list of grievances against you. I’ve decided to keep them to myself, I don’t want my grievances dragging me down. Nonetheless, when I think you were planning to show up here unannounced, I feel rage gnawing away at me little by little. For goodness’ sake, why can’t you be sincere and straightforward with me? My father is sincere and straightforward, and I think I’m a man who inspires people to treat him in that same way, a NEW MAN. But you? I’m stating my case, I’m doing my best to convince you, and all the while I know there’s no point. Among all the other aspects of my new—and, I hope, I hope, definitive—personality, there is kindness. I’ve become kind. And so I will be happy to
welcome you, dear Mama, like the KIND NEW MAN I am. As a doctor, I see abominations every day. As a man, as the man I am now, I transfigure that ugliness, and so come almost to love it, and then I forget it. That’s my process. The woman this morning, the one I helped bring the dead child into the world, deserves to be called a Madonna every bit as much as the one true Madonna, of whom we actually know nothing, isn’t that so? Can you guarantee that the Virgin Mary wasn’t a drunk? You can’t! I love everyone around me, I love the poor human race. It wouldn’t be right to envelop the whole world in my love and compassion and not include you, Mama, and so I envelop you in my love and my pity. I’ll see you soon, then. I can’t yet pull the thorn of resentment from my heart—my heart isn’t perfect, and that thorn has been there for so long—but we’ll see. Incidentally, you absolutely must repay my father the money you took from him. He needs it more than you do, the poor man. You probably don’t know it, but he’s in deep financial trouble, if not outright broke. You robbed him blind. You have to repay him. They drove you out of school, fine. But for what? I can’t get a clear picture from here. Was it undeserved? Isn’t there anything you did wrong? It seems a little much to claim that they fired you for no reason. I’m counting on you to explain all this. Think of my father, try to be ashamed: he’s destitute!
Your son, Ralph
Anger submerges me in a cold numbness.
I reread the letter, that dishonest, underhanded letter written to me by my own son, my only child—how did he ever come to this? To these heights of mendacity, of grotesque lyricism? Oh, I say to myself, my son’s become a mystic, how could it be that in the very prime of his life he turned into exactly the kind of person I, his own mother, most loathe, by what subtle intuition, what mysterious perceptiveness did he understand me so well that he could remake himself as a mystic, knowing my deep loathing for that turn of mind, that posturing, self-important approach to life? And then there’s this Wilma—who is he talking about?
