My Heart Hemmed In

by Marie Ndiaye

  I hurry out of the study and into the bedroom. I shake Ange from his open-mouthed slumber. He wakes with a start, reflexively covering his wasted face with his forearm as if to fend off a blow. This is just how Ange’s students used to defend themselves, much to Ange’s irritation, when on occasion he tried to give them a smack in the face—no, not a smack, just a swat, nothing more—but the students in question were hard kids, long used to being hit and practiced in the art of warding off blows with their skinny arms, their bony elbows, and so it was on those arms or those elbows that Ange’s hand landed, sometimes painfully, which only fueled his rage and led him to strike all the harder, to avenge himself on that insolent limb. Afterward, he was always sorry he’d lost his temper, he thought he’d let himself down. He strove to incarnate pedagogical perfection, and he saw any trace of violence as a personal failing.

  All trace of fleshiness is gone from Ange’s face. I can distinctly see the outline of his bones beneath the skin on his cheeks, his jaw.

  Is someone here mistreating Ange?

  In urgent agitation, I ask, “What’s my son’s wife’s name again?”

  “Your son’s wife?”

  His gaze darts nervously around the room, and it’s true that I’ve just wrenched him awake, but he still gives me the troubling sense that he’s stalling for time.

  I give him a severe stare.

  “What’s Ralph’s wife’s name, Ange? My granddaughter’s mother?”

  “You don’t remember?” he mumbles.

  Then, after a few minutes’ silence, pretending, I’m sure, to search through his memories: “Yasmine.”

  “Yes, that’s right,” I say, troubled, “her name is Yasmine.”

  “So why ask, if you already know?”

  Ange’s eyes seem slightly shifty. This daily accumulation of suspicions, silences, and irksome questions, when it’s always been not our rule but our way to hide nothing, to tell each other everything about everything, this mounting pile of hard, hurtful secrets makes me deeply sad. Never, I tell myself, whatever happens, never will we be able to claw our way out of such a deep pit of mistrust and ignoble suppositions.

  Noget knees open the door and comes in. Along with the jar of rillettes (his mother raises poultry in the Landes, he says; she makes these superb rillettes herself, he says, jam-packed with long, melting fibers of goose flesh) and the inevitable Bayonne ham, I see a steaming little bowl filled with something gelatinous and orange-tinged, whose powerful odor nonetheless makes me immediately secrete the yearning saliva I’m now slightly ashamed of. Ange turns his head away in apparent disgust. He can’t smell the stench of his own infection, but he’s repelled by the aroma of fine food!

  Noget quickly explains that he’s brought us a bowl of tripoux, a typical dish of the Auvergne, made with tripe, sheep’s feet, and calf’s ruffle.

  “Not from my own kitchen,” he says, apologetically.

  All of a sudden I remember my period has stopped. Lost in that thought, I distractedly lay my hand on my stomach.

  “You’re not pregnant, are you?” Noget asks.

  “No! Far from it.”

  My forehead is hot and damp with a sort of radiant happiness, an intense relief. I realize that the end of my period is the first normal thing that’s happened in months, the only one I can explain rationally, without having to weigh a whole range of hypotheses.

  As Noget goes on looking at me, scrutinizing me, the tray still in his hands, I tell him, “I’m the right age for menopause, you know.”

  “You must be mistaken,” Noget says quietly, after a pause.

  He adds, “Your son is a doctor, he’ll tell you what’s going on.”

  And once again rage washes over me.

  I storm out, leaving Noget to feed Ange (are you sure you’re not making this fuss simply to spare yourself that sight, Ange mutely begging to be left in peace and Noget filling his dry-lipped mouth with that heavy, questionable food?), quickly get dressed, and leave the apartment with my son’s letter crumpled in my cardigan pocket. My sweater is so tight around my waist and breasts that I can’t fasten the buttons.

  I rush out the front door, unthinking, gravely oppressed by indignation and the sense of a terrible injustice.

  17. In the clutches of Rue Fondaudège

  I scurry along to Rue Fondaudège. I can’t help muttering to myself, half aloud. My fury won’t stay bottled up in my skull.

  The fog is still there, as it is every day, and I’ve come to think it will never lift again, that it’s become a part of Bordeaux’s character, its very essence, that this fog is the city’s breath, in a sense, as if, I tell myself, some deep-seated, stubborn, perhaps incurable illness were rotting my beloved city’s entrails, and that’s why its breath has become so unwholesome.

  There’s no danger if I follow Fondaudège, I tell myself through my gritted teeth, I can always turn around and go on till I cross Place de Tourny, and then I’ll be back on Rue Esprit-des-Lois.… But, oh, how dare he, how can he be so…so brazen, he who was always so…timid, so polite. How can he…imply I’m a thief, his own mother…and a thief who can’t be reasoned with, who refuses to talk things through…to understand, when I’ve spent my entire adult life trying to understand others…my son most of all… And then this talk of that stranger, that Wilma, and the insinuation that I was in love with Lanton… What a despicable joke, how idiotic! Like saying I’d fallen in love with my own son, yes, that would be every bit as stupid and offensive. And yet he’s willing to let me come see him, out of the goodness of his heart; he’s on his way to full-fledged sainthood, apparently… What a joke! So my son is a pure soul, but not a word about the baby, about…Souhar; what does it mean, this silence about my granddaughter, as if there’d never been a baby at all, or she can’t be spoken of anymore—but to protect whom? to protect what? Or maybe I’m not worthy of being told about my own granddaughter? Is there some danger of befouling the baby, or of bringing misery down on her fragile newborn head, that would come with simply writing her name in a letter to Grandmamma Nadia?

  I stalk down the street, furiously stretching my cardigan over my stomach. Soon I’m gasping for breath, unused as I am to exercise, but I keep walking down the interminable, unchanging Rue Fondaudège, not wanting to go home until I’ve walked off my agitation. Eventually I look at my watch and find I’ve been walking for almost an hour. A fear comes over me. Fondaudège is a very long street, but not so long that I can briskly follow it for an hour without it making a turn and taking on a new name. As I recall, Fondaudège becomes Rue Croix-de-Seguey; it stops being Fondaudège after maybe a little less than a mile. And yet here I am still walking down Rue Fondaudège, not as fast as before, wondering if I’ve already come too far from home.

  The cafés and shops have all disappeared. There’s nothing but modest houses, soot-stained apartment buildings. I’m not going to turn around, I resolutely tell myself, until I reach the end of the street. Bordeaux is my town, and haven’t I walked this Rue Fondaudège hundreds of times since I was a child?

  I can feel my rage at my son (“my little heart,” I so long called him, and now here he is forsaking his mother’s old heart) waning as my anxiety swells, because this street is very visibly not coming to an end. I feel I’ve gone too far to simply turn back, because that would be showing an ominous acceptance of this aberration, granting that Rue Fondaudège is no longer the Fondaudège I’ve always known, which is impossible, which simply cannot be possible.

  Once I’ve carefully studied her face, I ask a woman coming toward me, “Excuse me, what’s the name of this street, please?”

  “Fondaudège,” she shrugs, pointing to the sign above our heads on the wall. “Rue Fondaudège.”

  “And how long before I reach the end of it?”

  “It’s a very long street, you know,” the woman says as she walks away.

  With tiny, cautious steps, I keep going.

  The street has begun to feel familiar—tiny storefronts with grayin
g plaster, long-closed repair shops, doctors’ and dentists’ offices with dusty windows and dingy curtains—though I don’t recognize anything in particular, as is so often the case in my city nowadays, now that the fog has settled in, but all at once I stop short, or rather I realize my feet have stopped short, at an apartment building half masked by scaffolding, in mid-renovation. My throat tightens in foreboding.

  Oh, yes, I reluctantly tell myself, that’s right, it was here.

  And although I don’t want to, I push open the door, which puts up the same resistance it always did, and I automatically brace myself and lean forward to force it open wider, just as I’ve done hundreds and hundreds of times, because I lived here for many years with my ex-husband, before I met Ange. What mystifies me is that we lived at the very start of Rue Fondaudège, not an hour’s walk down the street. Or, I ask myself, does it merely seem farther because I’ve grown older? No, that’s no explanation, I’ve been walking at a very good clip.

  Why has my period stopped?

  My mood has turned sullen and sour. I can’t help feeling that, for bad reasons and in an act of covert blackmail, my son is forcing me to do something I don’t want to do, something there is in fact no reason why I should do. And I have no obligation to obey my son in this or in anything else.

  And yet here I am on the stairs I’ve climbed so many times, clutching the sticky banister—here I am slightly breathless at the door to what was once my apartment, and if I say “was once,” it’s because I don’t live here anymore, but for the sake of the truth and my own sense of dignity I must make it clear that I still own this apartment on Rue Fondaudège. In the divorce settlement, my lawyer (he came to the little party I threw to welcome Souhar’s birth, and then, as if by some deliberate choice, we never spoke again, even though we’d become almost friends, and come to think of it haven’t all that evening’s guests inexplicably disappeared from our life, from the building, the street?) managed to have me awarded full ownership of the apartment my ex-husband and I bought together, yes, it’s true, it’s true. I’ve been renting it to my son’s father, for a modest sum, ever since.

  What you don’t know, I’d like to shriek at my son, is that your father hasn’t paid his rent in months, and I haven’t asked him and I never will, over Ange’s objections, Ange who thinks your father is taking advantage of me, but I don’t care that that man might be cheating me, I don’t care, precisely because he’s your father and my ex-husband and I once loved him boundlessly.

  The little brass plate that announced that my ex-husband was an electrician is now gone from beneath the buzzer, I see.

  He had a good reputation, he had to turn away customers, he worked for people with big houses in the Bourse and Grand-Théâtre neighborhoods. Is it my fault if that smart, capable, highly sought-after man couldn’t endure the sorrow of our separation or get over the upheaval of the divorce? That was the problem, I wish I could tell my son; it was his weakness of character, his excessive attachment to the status quo, that was what set off his decline, that and nothing else. Not, as you insinuate, because I’d reduced him to poverty, and it’s true that I did well by the settlement, but there was plenty of money left over for him to lead a perfectly fine life, if only he hadn’t chosen the path of self-pity, defeat, and disinterest.

  There’s no reason why I should be here, I tell myself, deeply angry.

  He’ll help me escape from Fondaudège before it saps my last ounce of strength or suddenly coils around me and chokes the life out of me; I’ll never get away on my own, now it’s Fondaudège’s turn to wreak its vengeance for whatever it is I’ve done!

  I summon my courage and press the buzzer, just as I used to do when I came home late from school, for the pleasure of hearing my little heart’s feet slapping the floor. He would undo the latch, leap into my arms, and nestle against me, even though he was already a big boy by then. My son must have tried hard to forget that, and yet, I tell myself, almost triumphant, his soul today is built on the unbridled love he felt for me back then, which kept him clasped to my breast for so long that I had to detach him, gently push him aside so I could come in—the soul he has today, so cold to me, is made of that too!

  That was what I loved about Lanton, my son’s lover. He wasn’t ashamed to hold me in his arms for many long minutes when I went to see him in his office at the police station, he felt no need to hide his deep fondness—that was what I so loved about Lanton, the innocence of his displays of affection.

  Was that childish of him, was it sappy? Was it ridiculous? How stiff my son seemed next to him, how preposterously sarcastic and distant.

  A second press of the buzzer, and, just when I’m about to be off, at once relieved to have been spared a meeting with my ex-husband and dreading the thought of going back to my struggles with Rue Fondaudège, the door cracks open.

  “What is it?” he anxiously whispers.

  “Don’t be afraid, it’s only me,” I say, showing my face through the opening to reassure him.

  He recoils, as if he’s seen some terrifying apparition.

  “What do you want from me now?”

  His voice is hoarse and unsteady, but even now, even ravaged by anxiety and disillusion, it vibrates in my ear in an intimate, familiar way, immediately calling to mind all the many times it spoke to me sweetly and freely. Although I have no wish to revisit the site of the life we lived together, us and our son, I hear myself asking, “Can I come in for a minute?”

  Weren’t those the best years of my life? All three of us together on Rue Fondaudège? My ex-husband grudgingly opens the door all the way and lets me into what is in reality my own apartment.

  18. What we did to him

  He guides me down the street, holding my wrist, not to keep me from fleeing, I think, nor for a chance to be close to me, but perhaps simply to protect me on this street that’s gone to such lengths to lead me astray, even if, I tell myself, on a street with no tram line I’m already at far less risk of an intentional accident.

  I’m thinking of asking him if, as someone who rides it, he’s noticed the dark designs the tram has on certain people’s lives. I don’t. Why should I be confiding in him, why should I trust my ex-husband, a trust he would soon betray? Because I long for just that with all my being, because I so wish I could go back to those Fondaudège days, when neither of us could even imagine being wronged by the other, so much so that when I started lying to my ex-husband about Ange, I didn’t even realize I was lying, unconsciously convinced that I was incapable of duplicity, every bit as incapable as he was.

  We walk through the cold, damp air, the persistent smell of silt that fills the city. My ex-husband lets out a surprised little laugh.

  “Really,” he says, “I don’t see how you could have gotten lost. Look, here we are at the Place de Tourny, nothing’s changed.”

  “That’s because you’re here with me,” I tell him, not backing down. “The geography only changes when I’m alone. It’s perfectly logical, don’t you see, if the point is to give me a sign. But it’s a sign I don’t know how to decipher.”

  He coughs quietly, faintly uncomfortable. He’s not in good health, and I feel bad for him.

  “Are you just going to keep getting fatter and fatter?” he suddenly asks.

  “Really, now, that’s none of your business,” I say, offended. “I imagine the food will be healthier at our son’s.”

  Eager to put a stop to any further discussion of my weight, I quickly add, “I’ve stopped getting my period; it’s menopause coming on.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I am,” I shoot back.

  “It could be something else,” my ex-husband says with a frown.

  Just then, as we stood stopped by the fountain on the Place de Tourny, under the mist-shrouded bare branches of the linden trees, I spy Noget walking toward us. My ex-husband has seen him too.

  “That’s Richard Victor Noget!” he says, amazed.

  “You know him?”


  He gives me an incredulous look.

  “Don’t you?”

  “I do now, now that he comes to our apartment every day,” I say softly, “now that he makes all our meals and looks after Ange like some sweet-talking jailer hovering over his prisoner. I’d never heard of him until he wormed his way into our life.”

  I don’t dare confess to my ex-husband that when things were going fine for Ange and me we looked on our neighbor Noget with horror and contempt. I don’t dare reveal such a thing, foreseeing his skepticism, and then his dismay, because the timid stare he’s giving Noget overflows with respect.

  Irritated, I ask him, “And how have you heard of this Noget?”

  “Well, I don’t know! Hasn’t everyone? I think he’s written some books.”

  “Then how is it I’ve never heard his name in my life, and why didn’t I know the first thing about him until he essentially moved in with us?”

  My ex-husband turns to look at me. His gaze seems to turn away inside of him, to veil itself with a cloud of caution, uncertainty, or reticence, which brings a pang to my heart, because I know that look well. This man I so loved, now older and frailer, often hid behind a gaze grown suddenly opaque to tell me without having to say it that some question I’d asked was misplaced, or ridiculous, or foolish, and was in any case outside his sphere, and he didn’t even want to try to answer.

  Nonetheless, he whispers, “The trouble with you is you only know what you want to know.”

  “But it’s not as if I somehow went out of my way not to hear about this Noget,” I said. “I mean, really, it’s not my fault if my eye never happened to land on his name. Has he been on television?”

  “Of course he has,” says my ex-husband, with a tinge of impatience.

  “We don’t have a television,” I say.

  “There’s your problem,” says my ex-husband.