My Heart Hemmed In

by Marie Ndiaye

  Finally I turn away from the quays and onto Rue Domercq, which leads straight to the Saint-Jean station. Several times the tram goes by, filled with passengers clearly bound for the station, since that’s the last stop on the line. Approaching a stop just as a tram is slowing down to open its doors, I wonder if I should try one last time to get on, encouraged by the sight of the little knot of people in the shelter, shielding themselves as best they can from the damp cold of the fog. No malign force will spot me among all these people, I tell myself. For that matter, I think I see several faces and shapes just like mine. In the old days, I would never have noticed that those two women, and maybe that man too, had the first thing in common with me. Now, inspired by a new, subtle sense, I can see it. Just as I can immediately tell the difference between two smells I know well, or two familiar tastes, I can distinguish the people I look like from the crowd I once thought I belonged to, who have with perfect sincerity stopped seeing us—Ange and me and others—as in any way their equals.

  If those three dare to assume they’ll be let on the tram, I tell myself, if they feel sure enough of it to voluntarily wait in this clammy, almost fetid cold, why on earth shouldn’t I? I come closer, pressing my suitcase to my leg. The last few steps to the shelter I walk backward. Just as the tram opens its doors, I change my mind and hurry away, almost running, amid the breathless clamor of my high heels and the suitcase casters. You idiot, you simpleton, I furiously chide myself, do you really think it’s enough just to hide away in a crowd, just to go unnoticed for a few minutes? That’s childish, it’s stupid. You’ll never be able to get on. And if they can, that’s because for them things are somehow different. Maybe you’re worse than they are, or at least your punishment’s more severe. Or you’re just worse, yes, why not?

  I shudder with fear and anguish as I imagine the spectacular obstacle that would have stopped me this time, so close to my goal, from boarding the tram. A vicious blow, a terrible fall, something painful and humiliating—how moronic, when I’m only five hundred yards from the station!

  The tram glides close by me with a mocking little chirp. Pressed together in the back of the tram like the flowers of a tragic bouquet, a sad, dark nosegay destined to be crushed underfoot, my fellow-creatures’ three faces look out at me in sorrow, in pity—poor woman, having to walk, and so fat, too, so ungainly, red with cold and fatigue! That forlorn fellowship makes me angry and ashamed. How ugly they are, how wretched and defeated, I tell myself, dismayed to think those same words might come to their minds when they look at me. But are they, like me, also thinking: I want nothing to do with all that?

  21. What does she know about me?

  I just make the train to Toulon. I somewhat timidly sit down in the only seat left, beside a young woman I question with a glance, doing my best not to look too imploring. She gives me a quick, slightly desolate smile. I sink comfortably into my seat.

  I feel joy in my heart. This woman is so different from me, but she’s perfectly willing to have me beside her, unavoidably close. Sharing the central armrest, our forearms touch lightly. She doesn’t seem to notice. I’m so happy that a triumphant giggle escapes me. And still she doesn’t react, she stays turned toward the window, her fist under her chin, showing only her slender, severe profile, her thin lips peppered with little bits of dried skin she sometimes absentmindedly pulls away with her teeth. Her blond hair is tied behind her neck with a black velvet ribbon. Her skirt, her thick sweater, her hose, everything is black. Her eye is round and blue and underscored by a dark circle that twitches in time with a throbbing vein.

  The thought that this unambiguous, dominant young woman (she could have scornfully shot down any suggestion of my sitting beside her, and I wouldn’t have dared appeal to anyone to make her let me: who would ever have spoken up for me?) seems to be in the grips of some listless sorrow secretly cheers me. She’s suffering, I tell myself, oh, how she’s suffering! Maybe even more than me—is such a thing possible?

  She doesn’t move, simply stares unseeing at the expanses of plowed earth racing by outside the windows. When the conductor asks for her ticket, no part of her reacts but her hand, which slowly drifts toward her purse. He has to ask twice, because she doesn’t hear him at first. He doesn’t ask me for anything, doesn’t even seem to notice I exist. I nap tranquilly, my hands crossed over my swollen stomach, with Noget’s food, I imagine, roiling and fermenting inside it. Occasionally half opening my eyes, I see holes appear in the fog, which soon turns to rags as we put the Gironde behind us. A little before Agen, I see the sky for the first time in months—a dull, pale blue sky, but the sky all the same, free of the cottony veil that’s settled over Bordeaux and trapped my beloved city beneath a damper of frightening thoughts and poisonous dreams.

  Eyes closed, I fall into a vague daydream of one day returning in triumph, delivering my city of its…its miasma? Its poisonous fixations, its grim vanity? Oh, I can’t remember anymore.

  I wake up in Montpellier, roused by a smell that reminds me I’m hungry, voraciously hungry. The train is almost empty now. My neighbor is nibbling at a hard-boiled egg, indifferent to the little bits of yolk falling onto her skirt.

  How hungry I am! Why didn’t Noget make me a sandwich, maybe tuna, or cheese?

  She rewraps the egg in its foil, almost untouched. I can’t stop myself. Surprised at my own audacity, I ask, “May I have the rest of your egg?”

  And that question, which I would once never have dreamed of asking, confirms my feeling that I’ve fallen even further than I thought. Realizing that I’ve become a figure of loathing, I no longer strive for irreproachable decency and honor, allowing myself to mumble or cackle audibly in public, asking my seatmate’s permission to place my teeth in the imprint of hers in the cooked egg white’s delicate metallic flesh. How abject, I tell myself, asking for such a thing, particularly when you’re a woman as portly as I am!

  My face has turned deep red. I add: “I’m sorry, I can’t think what came over me, asking you that.”

  In response, she gives me her taut little smile, which pulls back only one side of her mouth and does nothing to lessen the fierce sadness lodged in the blue of her eye, small and round as a bird’s. She holds out the ball of foil.

  “Go ahead, I’m not hungry anymore.”

  Then she rummages in the purse at her feet with a sudden haste and what seems almost a fear of disappointing me, and she pulls out a beautiful, very yellow banana, unspoiled by the tiniest black spot, and adds, “Eat this too, I don’t want it.”

  She delicately lays it on my tray. In an overpowering surge of weakness, tears come to my eyes. I free the egg from its foil. And I look at the grooves left in the white by my neighbor’s uneager, sorrowful teeth, and I bite into the egg, taking care to keep my own teeth in those tracks, scrupulously hewing to them, in a superstitious expression of my gratitude. And at the same time, I wish that were enough to chase the dull despair out of her bright little eye. For this woman’s despondency no longer brings me the slightest joy.

  Doesn’t she see anything about me to make her shrink back in horror? Or are her own torments so distracting her that she’s forgotten…all vigilance, that her vision is clouded or she’s lost all interest in the world around her? That she feels no fear of the terrible fate that might be piled atop her present sorrows merely from my mouth clamping down where her own mouth clamped down?

  The train is stopped in Marseille. It’s late afternoon. Everyone has gotten off but my neighbor. The warm, red sun casts a scarlet glow over the station’s glass roof, and at the same time inflames her emaciated face through the window, all at once giving her the illusion of an ardent, almost joyous demeanor.

  “You’re going on to Toulon as well?” I say.

  “Yes,” she says.

  “And then,” I say, my heart quivering, “I’m catching the boat to C.”

  “Me too,” she says.

  I let out a grunt to hide my delight. Any expression of pleasure in the face of such
pain would seem obscene.

  The train doesn’t start off again. No one boards. We’re alone. And night falls, sucking away any semblance of animation from the woman’s cheeks, returning the deathly livid cast to her bony forehead. Suddenly she stands up, stumbling over my knees and, before I can move, straddles my legs to step into the aisle.

  “Don’t you think it’s odd that we’re still in the station?” she asks, worried.

  “Yes, I do,” I say.

  And as I speak I feel the fear incubating in my consciousness beginning to hatch.

  She can’t be late for Toulon, she tells me, she can’t miss that boat, and I see her long, slender legs pacing back and forth, lashing the fabric of her skirt with a sound like a sail flapping in the wind—and that wind, oh how we begged it to come up at last and make the sails of our catamaran snap and swell when we set out, Ange and I, on the bright, tranquil waters of the Arcachon basin, seeing the villa Ange inherited from his parents growing ever smaller in the sparkling summer-morning light, back on the bright, tranquil shore we’d just left, and I said to myself, even in the very heart of that bliss, am I really this woman who has no other divinity to implore than the wind, the pleasure craft’s friend, and if so how did I turn into her, and is it right, or should I regret it, and should I feel sorry for abandoning the dreary, unyielding religion of my scolding old parents, who, unbeknownst to Ange (his pretty purple cap with the transparent visor, his mirrored sunglasses, his healthy, sweet smell), are at this moment languishing in their Les Aubiers housing project, not knowing they’re dead, not knowing I claimed that they were, but perhaps now and then feeling—in their necks, to which they abruptly clap an astonished hand, or in their chests, or in their bellies—the mysterious bite of that curse, who might well be wasting away, withered by an unseen torment and silently supposing that that pain comes to them from the daughter who went away, who never visits or calls, not once in thirty-five years, and then I realize that she’s talking to me as she paces up and down the aisle on her long, stiff, stork-like legs, her sad, bitter face just barely lit by the bluish ceiling lights and the glow from the station, sudden shadows running across that pale, bleak face in time with her strides, bringing out the bones beneath.

  I’m angry at myself for missing the start of what she was saying. I struggle to recall what I must have heard but not listened to, not realizing she was talking to me, and so I lose the thread of what she’s saying now. I drift back into a daydream, back into aloneness—and none too soon, I tell myself, because don’t I dread and loathe the mere idea of hearing the intimate details of other people’s lives? Oh, it’s not the same at all with her, this woman who was willing to let food touched by her mouth enter the dark place that is mine. But I’m lost all the same, and now I can’t follow or even understand anything she’s saying. A few scattered words—fire, far away, remains—that I can’t connect to anything at all. But I do feel the weight of an unhealable sorrow. That shapeless burden is already settling onto me, weighing me down. Still, how I wish I could come together with her grief, try to distract it with good thoughts. But now that cold, hard mistrust I know so well is freezing my uneasy heart, now I’m secretly relieved to know nothing of this woman’s sadness, even if my gratitude to her is far keener than my relief is to me, or my icy mistrust.

  How can I fight back that reflex? I sink further into self-loathing, into a horror of what I am and can’t help but be, until in a blinding flash of almost cosmic understanding (the deceptive, unbounded enlightenment that sometimes comes with an excess of alcohol), I finally see and accept and endorse the cause of our tribulations, Ange and me and all the others just like us—like us not so much physically as in the depths of their self-centered souls.

  Now the woman is silent. Her emotion has left her slightly breathless. I look down—she thinks I know her now, she doesn’t know what a louse she’s bared her soul to! What’s happened to her, what secrets has she been telling me? I wish I could know, in just a few precise, dry, impersonal words.

  Night has fallen. The woman asks my name and I tell her, not daring to ask hers, thinking she might already have said.

  “My name’s Nathalie,” she murmurs, raising her arms to retie the bow in her hair.

  She adds: “I don’t think this train’s going to go any farther, shouldn’t we be getting off?”

  I hoist myself out of my seat.

  “But now how will we get to Toulon?” I ask, in a voice made sharp and plaintive by anxiety.

  An aged conductor in a white uniform walks past on the deserted platform. Stepping off the train before me, Nathalie stops him and imperiously asks where the train for Toulon is.

  “There aren’t any more trains tonight, you’ll have to wait till morning,” he answers, as if surprised at our ignorance.

  Then, after one look at our two shocked faces, he breaks into a run, the tails of his jacket bouncing off his voluminous buttocks, and when Nathalie begins to jog after him, calling out, demanding information and explanations, he speeds up and disappears from view.

  “I think he was scared of us,” she says, with her gloomy, misshapen little smile.

  I want to test her.

  “You’re right, and why would that be?” I ask.

  “I don’t know, it doesn’t matter,” she says after a few moments of silence.

  She smiles her tragic, one-sided smile again and looks me straight in the eye, as if defying me to make her say anything more, or to placate me, the way you might smile at an old lady or a little child, but, far from placated by that bright, round eye suffused with inconsolable sorrow and also with the sort of trust and closeness she finds in the thought that she’s told me her story, far from reassured, I look away, my gaze wandering this way and that. All of a sudden I find something worrisome in that face of hers.

  It’s too strange, I tell myself, the contrast of that round eye and that gaunt face, of sorrow and authority, of her beauty as a whole and the almost ugliness of the details; that pointed noise, those hollow cheeks, that sparse hair. It’s too strange, I tell myself again, not only that she doesn’t push me away but that she seems eager to draw me to her and keep me close. Because rather than give me a wave and go on her way, now she’s saying in her beautiful, vigorous voice:

  “Come on, we’ll rent a car.”

  “You think?” I say, startled.

  “It’s that or miss the boat,” she says.

  “I can’t miss it,” I say, on the brink of tears.

  “And neither can I, right?” she says, staring at me.

  And with that the melancholy darkness absorbs every trace of blue in her eye, and, desperate for something to do, I reach for my suitcase, hating myself, almost drunk on that hatred. I follow her down the platform, not daring to walk beside her. Because I might be a nuisance, because the fleeting glance of some passerby might unjustly associate her with me. But we run into no one on the platform. It’s barely eight o’clock in the evening, and this whole huge station seems to be empty.

  “My ticket does say the train goes to Toulon,” I grumble.

  “Yes, that’s a shame,” she says after another brief silence that makes me think she’s weighing her words to keep from hurting my feelings or worrying me or because she wants to lull me into complacency.

  “I’m going to ask for my money back for the Marseille to Toulon part,” I go on.

  “Don’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “What good can it do to complain?” she says quietly, still walking on. “You may not be in any position. And it’ll only end up being your fault anyway. They’ll show you you were mistaken in one way or another.”

  “But what about you, didn’t you make the same mistake? You were planning to go on to Toulon, weren’t you?”

  “Yes, yes. In my case, there was no reason why the train shouldn’t take me to Toulon,” she says hesitantly.

  “It stopped in Marseille because of me?”

  She doesn’t answer. At first I’m sh
ocked, then simply befuddled. Panic pushes me toward her until I’m clinging to her heels. She’s carrying a big black purse over her shoulder, and nothing more.

  “Why do I never know anything?” I croak.

  “Don’t you watch television?”

  “No, my husband and I are opposed to television,” I say, this time with some firmness.

  But the image of Ange slowly dying in our bed sends a piercing sorrow coursing through me. The words I was about to speak on the subject of television stay stuck in my throat.

  Once in the meagerly lit lobby, Nathalie heads straight for the Europcar counter. Vast pools of shadow submerge the corners of the room in a vagueness that seems aswarm with activity, though I can’t see a soul, and I tell myself that this darkness must hold the ghostly, agitated, unhappy trace of everyone who’s passed through here all day, and then I wonder if they might still be there and I simply don’t see them, so I look away, my eyes fixed on Nathalie’s back, resolving, since I must make a choice, to put myself entirely in her hands.

  I hear her speaking quietly to the clerk, the only person in sight, to my eyes at least, in the lobby. She holds out her credit card.

  “I’ll pay you back,” I say.

  “Don’t worry, it’s fine,” she says.

  And I’m relieved, and, all at once, ignobly cheerful.

  22. Death at breakneck speed

  And now, like an eel in the mud, I’m emerging from a viscous torpor, my lips sticky, my eyes heavy, my bladder intolerably full.

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” I murmur hoarsely.

  My jaw is so numb that I palpate it cautiously, almost expecting to find it shattered by some fist’s mighty blow. But no, I feel only the sticky spume of sleep on my lips. I hear Nathalie’s voice as if from a tremendous distance, muted and slowed, struggling to make its way through the clouds—which I’m convinced I could touch, if only I had the strength to raise my hand—of my somnolence.