My Heart Hemmed In

by Marie Ndiaye

  “I can’t accept that you brought her here, that’s all,” I said to my ex-husband on our way down the stairs.

  He stopped, a faint smirk on his lips, and murmured, “So what am I supposed to live on?”

  “You’re living off of her?”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Not taking the time to think, I indignantly added, “I don’t want one more month’s rent from you, if you were ever thinking of sending it. I don’t want any money from…from Corinna Daoui’s ass.”

  “You didn’t always feel that way,” he answered.

  “Oh, that’s ancient history!”

  I was so outraged that my words came out in a screech.

  Because we used to be friends, Corinna, my ex-husband, and me, back when we were teenagers, and since Corinna, who’d dropped out of school, was the only one with any money (and because she’s also a considerate and devoted and good-hearted person), she thought nothing of paying for our outings to the pool (she has a young boy’s narrow, long body and slender, strong limbs) or skating rink. And she might have given us presents, too, she might well in fact have lavished all sorts of clothes and trinkets on us, and even books, even spiral notebooks and pens, since unlike her we were still in school. We accepted these things with pleasure but without gratitude, because we felt no real esteem for Daoui. Where did she get that money? She didn’t have to tell us—we knew. It would have been unthinkable for the reserved teenagers my ex-husband and I were to talk about such a thing with anyone, and Daoui herself never brought it up.

  We didn’t grasp the depth of her kindness, we were too young. We felt no real esteem for Daoui, no. Today, now that I can appreciate her thoughtfulness and stoicism, I can be sorry for our dismissive condescension toward that very young woman, our blind, selfish, high-school stupidity, yes, I can look back on all that with remorse. Which, I’d like to explain to Ange, in no way implies that I have to see the fifty-year-old Daoui, scrawny, cheaply dressed, probably a smoker, living in my apartment on Rue Fondaudège, as anything other than the sordid incarnation of a thing I’ll have to flee for as long as I live, a thing I must never surrender to, not even out of compassion, a thing I must even trample underfoot should it, should that detestable past, ever dare cross my path.

  “You managed to get away, and now here it is coming back to haunt you,” I said to my ex-husband.

  “You’re mean, Nadia,” he answered quietly.

  He asked if I’d ever met up with Corinna in the thirty-five years or so since Les Aubiers.

  “No,” I said, “this is the first time.”

  “You sure about that?” my ex-husband prodded me.

  I didn’t answer. He then told me what Daoui had told him, that we’d run into each other six or seven years before, as she was on her way out of La Rousselle station, where she’d been locked up for a day and a night, and I, Nadia, was on my way in, presumably to call on Lanton (explained my ex-husband). And according to Daoui she felt so bereft at the time, in such physical and emotional pain, that she couldn’t help clutching my arm and begging me to take her to a café somewhere, or at least, since I immediately refused, to give her a little money, because she didn’t even have the bus fare to get home. I pulled away (as Daoui put it, nonjudgmentally) and hurried into the police station, giving her no clear sign that I’d recognized her, but she felt certain I had.

  “Is that true?” asked my ex-husband. I admitted to nothing. I merely said it was possible, I couldn’t be expected to remember my every chance meeting with some long-ago acquaintance in Bordeaux (which actually never happens, since I live in the heart of the city where not even my brothers and sisters, not even my elderly parents, ever venture from their distant outskirts). But in fact I do remember that encounter, yes, and Daoui’s poor, grimacing face, which I later saw again several times, terrified, in my dreams. Even if she promised not to say a word, not to tell me a thing, it would have been beyond my abilities to drink a cup of coffee before such a face.

  But why didn’t I stuff a ten-euro bill into her hand? Too miserly? No, no—so why? Obviously to avoid prolonging the moment, even minutely, to avoid creating any bond between Daoui and me and so run the risk, for example, that she might try to find me on the pretext of paying me back.

  How, after that, how I feared I might find Corinna waiting for me outside the school! Latching onto Ange, striking up a friendship, wangling an invitation to our apartment, and then explaining to him, why not, just how much I owe her, Corinna, who made my life in Les Aubiers so much more comfortable! Corinna would have said no such thing, because she had no sense back then that we owed her anything at all.

  Or else, thinking she was doing the right thing, she would bring up my parents, those two old people living out their lives where they always had, and so Ange would learn that they weren’t dead at all as I’d claimed, and to be sure he wouldn’t give a damn that those people were still alive in their Les Aubiers project, but he’d fault me for my lie, and then I would seem a strange and ignoble person.

  Because I never think about them, I’ve forgotten their faces, I’ve almost forgotten their last name, which hasn’t been mine for so long, thanks to my marriages.

  “I don’t want to talk about Corinna anymore,” I told my ex-husband as he walked me homeward down Rue Fondaudège.

  But I couldn’t help it. The words came out of my mouth, impossible to hold back, as if pushed out by my troubled heart, my jealous heart.

  “Doesn’t it bother you,” I said, “that Corinna’s doing her work right next door to the princess’s little bedroom?”

  My ex-husband didn’t deign to answer. I sensed his embarrassment and unhappiness. A suspicion came over me.

  “She’s not playing grandmother, I hope?” I said. “I’m assuming she never so much as comes near the child?”

  “Nadia, that’s none of your business,” my ex-husband answered.

  He was holding my arm. I could feel his anger vibrating in my flesh.

  “Don’t worry, I won’t say a word about Corinna to Ralph,” I said. “I’m not going to tell him you have an old girlfriend turning tricks just through the wall of the bedroom where you so lovingly look after your granddaughter.”

  I could see that his lips were pinched and white from the effort he was making not to answer me. More gently, I asked him, “Incidentally, remind me what Ralph’s wife’s name is? The child’s mother?”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Yasmine.”

  “So who’s Wilma? Do you know her?”

  He thought for a few seconds.

  “Wilma, no, no idea,” he said.

  I let out a little “oh” of surprise.

  He didn’t notice. That was when we caught sight of Noget under the fog-shrouded linden trees on the Place de Tourny.

  19. We’ll probably never see each other again

  I spend the last night with Ange, in our bed. Although his wound seems to have stopped oozing, it’s badly infected, and the infection is beginning to spread all around. Not one inch of Ange’s flesh seems untouched. His body is deep red, his face pale, faintly gray. A painful bedsore was forming, so I helped him onto his side, and he now stays that way at all times, which complicates his eating and drinking. He doesn’t care. As a bedpan, Noget brings him a little bowl from his apartment downstairs, but Ange rarely urinates or defecates.

  “He’s only had one bowel movement this week,” Noget told me.

  Nonetheless, Ange feels obliged to eat everything Noget puts before him, and the portions are huge for someone who never gets out of bed. But he’s still as thin as ever, if not thinner. He almost never speaks anymore. The air in the room is unbreathable. Noget comes and goes, ever cheerier, youthfully carefree. He’s shaved that old beard of his, and he now seems so different, so renewed, that my feelings toward him have little by little gone from hostile mistrust to a sort of reluctant affection. He really is a different man. I have no parting instructions for
him. Whatever has to be done he will do, and he’ll do it better than me.

  It’s true, he’ll liquidate Ange better than I ever could.

  I only tell him how to go about sending Ange to come join me as soon as he’s fit to travel. After extensive calculations, I leave him three thousand euros in cash.

  “Keep trying to convince Ange to let Doctor Charre have a look at him,” I say.

  “Ange is exactly right not to want that dangerous old cretin anywhere near him,” he answers, with an inappropriate twinkle in his eye.

  I immediately ask, “What do you know about Doctor Charre?”

  “Only what I have to know,” says Noget. “That he hates people like you.”

  With a sort of puzzled curiosity, he adds: “Do you even try to keep up with things?”

  “No,” I say. “Ange and I don’t read the paper. We do listen to the radio, but only the music stations, jazz and classical.”

  “Which is why you don’t know anything about anything or anyone,” says Noget reproachfully.

  “Our society is too well informed as it is,” I say.

  Noget reaches out and pats my belly.

  “So, is there a baby in there?”

  “I told you, it’s menopause! You’re such an idiot.”

  Noget bursts into a loud, heartfelt laugh.

  “I don’t believe a word of it,” he says.

  Suddenly he turns serious.

  “In any case, don’t go see your Doctor Charre, he’d get rid of the fetus and never even tell you.”

  When I wake up by Ange’s side early the next morning, he’s still asleep. Noget is already there, standing at the foot of the bed in the dark. He tells me my breakfast is waiting.

  I kiss Ange’s hollow cheeks, his hot, dry lips. I dissolve into tears, to my great embarrassment, since Noget’s still in the room.

  “We’ve never been apart before,” I say quietly.

  All of a sudden Ange opens his eyes wide, gives me a vacant stare, then closes them again, as if exhausted from this close study of me.

  “Farewell, Nadia,” he murmurs. “Whatever you do, don’t come back.”

  “You’ll be coming away, my love,” I say, racked by guilt.

  Ange would never abandon me—or would he? Hand me over to a stranger, even though I was ailing, leave me deep in the slow suffocations and insidious, inexorable constrictions of a city gone bad, contracting to cut us to bits? So I should have stayed back in Les Aubiers, close by those two old people and the rest of the family? Is that where I’m supposed to be? Far from the murderous heart of the city?

  “If only you’d let yourself be treated,” I whisper in his ear, suddenly almost hopeless. “Oh, darling, then we’d be going off together…”

  He wearily shakes his head on the pillow. Then he struggles to raise his lips to my cheek.

  “So you’re going to have a baby, Nadia?”

  “No, no,” I hurry to say, “what a ridiculous idea! My period has stopped, but that’s normal at my age.”

  “Glad to hear it,” says Ange.

  He’s far too weak, I can see, to say anything more. A tear trickles from his right eye, soaks into the pillow. His skin is so hot that the damp trail immediately dries.

  I stand up and ask Noget to leave the room so I can get dressed.

  “Be quick about it,” he says. “The toast will get cold.”

  Clenched all night in the squalid warmth of the bedroom, my lungs relax and dilate painfully when I step through the doorway. I give Ange one last look. He’s drowsing, frowning severely, his lips moving slightly, as if he were scolding someone in a dream.

  “This is much too much, I can’t possibly eat all this,” I say when I walk into the kitchen.

  I see that Noget’s so-called toast is actually scones glistening with melted butter, accompanied by little fried sausages and scrambled eggs. There’s also a salad of fresh fruit crowned with whipped cream and the madeleines Noget bakes himself, deliberately letting the edges darken just a little.

  “For the road,” he says, with a benevolence so expertly feigned that I feel forced to choke down everything he’s laid out for me, and it’s all so good, despite the queasiness filling me.

  When I’m done, I feel listless and bleak. I dread going out onto the cold street. I ask Noget for a second cup of coffee, then a third. Finally I pull on my cardigan, now too tight to button.

  But where my son lives it’s hot, so unendingly hot that once I get there I’ll just roll up that cardigan, stick it in my suitcase, and forget about it.

  “Are you taking the tram?” asks Noget, very amiably.

  “Yes, it’s the only way,” I say.

  A rush of heat turns my face bright red. I can feel the sweat trickling between my breasts, beneath my undershirt. I busy myself to hide my fear.

  “It’s the only way, right?” I say again, with a little laugh, as I fasten my purse and put on a dab of pink lipstick.

  “Yes, you certainly mustn’t take a taxi,” says Noget.

  “I’m not in the habit of splurging on taxis,” I say.

  But Noget can see through me. He knows it’s simply out of caution that I’m not calling a taxi; he knows I’m afraid I’ll end up with a driver who immediately throws me out of the car or drives me into the depths of mysterious neighborhoods, where I would be lost forever.

  I take my suitcase out to the landing. I extend a hand to Noget, my fingers slightly stiff, slightly cold.

  “Well, goodbye.”

  “Goodbye,” says Noget.

  Just as his hand touches mine, my chest quakes with one single sob, dry and violent.

  “Save him,” I say. “I’m begging you, Monsieur Noget…”

  “It’s a little late for that, don’t you think?” cries Noget, suddenly angry. “If you hadn’t looked down on me so…”

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I say, very quickly. “I do regret it, you know.”

  We stare at each other, awkwardly. I pick up my suitcase and start trundling down the stairs. Noget doesn’t offer to help. I hear him close the door behind me almost as soon as I’ve turned around.

  20. The tram’s playthings

  Rue Esprit-des-Lois is dark and silent. The white glow of the few streetlights meant to illuminate it is immediately swallowed up by the fog.

  I pull my suitcase along by its handle, and the rattle of the casters on the uneven sidewalk seems loud enough to wake the whole street, but the soot-colored façades show no sign of life. I’ve put on my high-heeled ankle boots for the trip. The sound of the heels on the concrete is the kind that foreshadows a crime. That click-clack, so feminine, so tempting. I hurry along as fast as I can, my chest tight. But then the frantic hammering of my heels expresses my fear, and so makes it worse.

  I can’t go on living in this city. It scares me, it’s killing me a little at a time. Let me at least get away before it can clutch at my heels to pull me down!

  I’m completely breathless by the time I reach the Place de la Bourse. There, the orange-tinted lights are so plentiful and so powerful that they cut through the fog and cast a bright blaze over the vast square, over the cold splendor of the restored, magically white façades. This excess of uncanniness makes my head swim. An empty square so brilliantly lit—oh, to what end? I ask myself.

  My footsteps resound even louder on the new white paving stones. Nowhere could one be more obviously in the center of the arena. Dragging my big lurching suitcase, I scurry across the square to the tram stop. I see the tram coming from the Place des Quinconces, or rather I sense it, an incandescent mass, as if white-hot from its own lights, which liquefy the fog all around it.

  I step toward the tracks. I gracelessly raise my hand, all the while telling myself there’s no need, that the tram surely stops at every station.

  It races by, so fast that the rush of cold air makes me stagger. I take a step back. He must not have seen my hand, I tell myself—I was too half-hearted about raising it. He or it? The driver, whom
I didn’t even see, or the tram itself?

  I sit down on the bench, shivering. For all I know that tram wasn’t in service, for all I know the cars were all empty. It came up too fast, wreathed in a light far too dazzling for me to see anything inside.

  In front of me, beyond the street and the quay, the river is steaming with fog. I can smell its silty breath, the malodorous cold rising up from the black water.

  The hiss of another oncoming tram makes me jump to my feet. I reach out, shake my hand—again the tram zooms right by me, again its extraordinary speed and the pallid blaze of its windows leave me dazed. Soon a third, then yet another glide by, right before my eyes, ignoring my signals—none of them stop at the Place de la Bourse.

  I’ll miss my train if I wait any longer, so I decide to stop trying. I set off down Quai Richelieu, pulling my suitcase behind me. The night is still pitch black. Many trams go by, in both directions. After a hundred yards or so I cautiously turn around and see a tram at the stop I’ve just left. A handful of passengers are getting off, glowing like torches under the lights of the square.

  Don’t all the trams stop at the Place de la Bourse?

  I’m not making much progress. The train station is still far away, my legs are limp. For the first time in a long while, I feel violently humiliated.

  Because just when I was placing all my faith in the tram, all my hope, that very tram rejected me.

  Suddenly I just want to give up, turn around and go home, back to Ange, lie down at his side and slip with him into mindless slumber, interrupted only by Noget’s furtive appearances to stuff us with food. And yet I keep walking, knowing I’ll go on even when contrary ideas urge me to turn back. I still love life, stupidly, brutally. Oh no, I’m not tired of living, and isn’t that what now repels me most about my dear, my very dear Ange: his untellable, avid, disgruntled traffic with death, the way he’s giving his body over to decay? I never want to see that again.