by Marie Ndiaye
I go back to the door and knock loudly. Nothing. Or is there? I think I hear a quiet rustle that someone is trying and not quite managing to silence. I knock again, I whisper, “Nathalie!”
I press my ear to the door. And I strongly sense the echo of another ear on the other side of the door, just next to mine, and I hear what sounds like a bated breath and a quiet moan, and ill-contained sobs, but it could well be nothing more than the night wind, I tell myself, not believing a word of it, just as I tried to convince myself it was nothing other than the wind that was calling me, and the wind’s breath I was hearing, when, long ago, the telephone used to ring and there was nothing on the other end, no voice, only breathing, muted, sorrowful, afraid, and ashamed, paralyzed by anguish and uncertainty, which I answered with silence or a few sarcastic words meant to hide that I knew perfectly well who it was, who it was that couldn’t speak a word to me but couldn’t resist the need to hear my voice, even for a moment, I knew it wasn’t the wind but my father’s breath, or my mother’s, or maybe both at once, and how clearly I could picture them clutching the receiver and giving each other ever more desperate glances, urging each other to speak some word that wouldn’t come out, a word that faded and died as soon as it was born amid that ever fainter, ever faster and more hopeless breath, but it must be the night wind, I tell myself, pulling away from the door Nathalie won’t open because she doesn’t want to let me see her this evening. And I trudge back upstairs, telling myself that for all my life I’ve failed everyone and every situation it’s ever been my lot to experience.
27. It’s him, that’s my son
Now I’m trying to spot Nathalie in the crowd of passengers, posted by the top of the gangplank, the sunlight still pale and opaque but already almost blazing, the early morning air vibrating with the threat of an infernal heat to come.
I who so yearned to see my son again, now I find myself hoping he’ll be late, or maybe even have forgotten or neglected to come meet me at the boat, so desperate am I to see Nathalie first.
How I’d like her to drive me to my son’s house in a rented car, and this time I wouldn’t be afraid I might suddenly see her face change before my eyes, I wouldn’t be afraid of anything she might say or do, and I could unambiguously redeem myself and at the same time ask her what it is she thinks—or knows?—I am. And then beg her to forgive me, I who took care not to hear a word that she said, and promise her I’ll find some way to be a better person than I’ve been.
But, she might say with a charming and generous smile, no one expects any sort of humanity from you.
No, she’d never say such a thing. What she’d say is:
“Go see your poor parents in Les Aubiers; let these newfound aspirations to goodness take that form for a start, with a well-deserved visit to those people who’ve done you no wrong.”
“No wrong?” I’d say roughly. “But wasn’t it wrong, and very gravely wrong, to try to bind me up in the mediocrity of an existence completely enclosed in the boundaries of a neighborhood and austere rituals and incomprehensible, unyielding mistrusts of anything that wasn’t in our ways? I’d rather die than see those faces again—faces mine must look a little like now that I’ve aged some—I’d rather die than feel the pity the sight of abandoned, rejected old people always inspires, a pity mixed with remorse and nostalgia, because don’t all old people, quiet and unassuming all their lives, have a bereft or pleading look that can make your heart ache even when they’ve never done one thing to deserve your indulgence?”
But the flow of passengers slowly thins, and Nathalie isn’t among them.
Half numb with despair, I walk down the gangplank myself. I’m already hot in my black clothes, and my scalp stings and itches.
In just the few minutes since the boat docked, the intense paleness of the sky has succumbed to the invasion of an azure so elemental that the paving stones on the dock and yellow-and-white façades beyond the port seem tinted blue by it, as if no surface could resist absorbing such vigor.
Perhaps because my eyes are burning as well, I violently collide with a man at the bottom of the gangplank. My head crashes into his shoulder, my glasses fall to the ground. He lets out a little cry of pain, my teeth having jabbed him in the collarbone. I shout, “Careful, don’t step on my glasses!”
I bend down to retrieve them, and as I’m standing up again—my gaze climbing from the white-espadrilled feet up the long, hairless, oddly slender tan legs of this man in his wide-legged khaki shorts, a pair of pink-and-white striped briefs very visible inside them, as is even, I believe to my deep discomfort, the soft, shiny hair of the loins (and I think I detect a warm, intimate smell, clean, soaped, perfumed)—a long-ago memory of two little legs, skinny but powerful, clasping my hips and encircling my waist with such stubborn force that I had to put on an angry face to get him to loosen his grip and drop to the ground, back when I came home to the Fondaudège apartment at the end of the day and my son leaped on me like an anxious little monkey, the brutally precise memory of those limbs, warm and strong but so slight, leaves me speechless and trembling. Oh, I recognize those grown-man legs, I made them myself.
With one hand I push my glasses back on, with the other I touch my son’s thigh. He leaps back.
“Ralph, it’s me,” I say, standing up all the way.
But when I do my son’s beauty grabs me by the throat. Gasping, I put one hand to my chest. He was a very appealing young man before, but in a slightly slovenly, almost moony way. And now I see that boy with his diffuse charms, his ever-presumed but rarely displayed gifts, transformed into the archetype of glorious manhood, even more incredibly handsome than his father, my ex-husband, and I know Ange and I would once have sneered at such splendor, automatically associating it with a kind of idiocy, but, either because this is my son or because Ange’s jeering influence is waning now that I’m far away from him, Ralph’s newfound beauty awes me, intimidates me, and also saddens me terribly.
Frowning, he peers at me. He’s taken off his sunglasses to examine me more minutely. A shy, surprised smile bares his teeth.
“Mama? Is that you?”
“You don’t recognize me?” I say, feigning levity.
He can’t help looking me up and down, as if in search of some piece of me that might prove I’m the mother he remembers. It’s been so long since we last saw each other, so long. And I look back at him, not hiding my admiration or the twinge of melancholy I feel forcing my mouth into an ugly, stiff smile.
I take an awkward step forward to embrace him. And he steps toward me, a tiny reluctant step, and bows his head to let my lips graze his cheek, but he doesn’t touch me or return my kiss. Certainly, this man who turns out to be my son is a figure of stunning physical perfection, but…
A shapeless unease enfolds me, clinging, subtle, ungraspable, as if when I stepped toward my son I’d ensnared myself in a gigantic spiderweb.
What is it about him, I ask myself, that isn’t quite right?
We’re the only two left on the dock. The sunlight rebounding off the white paving stones forces my eyes into a tight little squint, and I can feel my flesh recoiling from the relentless assault of the suffocating heat. My breath is quick and unsteady.
What is it about my son’s appearance that’s not right?
“You’ve gotten so fat,” he says bluntly.
“And that bothers you?”
“As a doctor, yes,” he says.
“And as my son Ralph?” I say.
“A little, there too,” he says with a quick, flustered laugh.
“I’m going through menopause,” I say, “although some people refuse to believe it and insist on thinking I’m pregnant, how ridiculous.”
“It’s not hard to find out,” says my son.
He looks away, likely troubled by the intimate turn our conversation has taken.
He’s wearing a white linen short-sleeve shirt, strangely tight, so stretched over his broad, flat torso that the little metal buttons seem about to pop off. A
ll that—the trim, muscular figure, the narrow waist, the thin, chiseled face, the lush, curly black hair, the brown eyes rimmed with long, thick lashes—I remembered all that before, and I recognize it now. But what about the rest? The thing I can’t put my finger on, can’t yet put a name to, but whose strange source is somewhere in my son’s gaze, what is that? He’s Ralph and not Ralph at the same time, he’s my son, but my son as if with someone else’s eyes. And that someone else seems a coldly righteous man, animated by an unyielding fervor, a hermetic passion that overflows, just a little, through a discreetly but implacably dogmatic stare.
Oh, it’s mystifying, because what once defined my son’s personality—to the point, often, of obnoxiousness—was the very opposite of what I see here today: it was an unremitting, tedious irony applied to everything indiscriminately, a limp, disdainful distance he inevitably put between himself and anything that happened. I remember, for instance, the remote, vaguely sardonic look on his face as he told me he was leaving Lanton, the way he watched me, waiting to pounce at my first sign of distress (because I was so fond of Lanton, so fond) and viciously mock it, as if it were unseemly and grotesque, rather than exceptional and praiseworthy, for a mother to dote on her son’s lover instead of her son himself.
And now there’s no trace of ridicule left in the eyes of this man poised on his shaved legs, boldly offering his face to the merciless sun—there’s only something severe and intransigent, almost brutal.
I open my purse and take out Lanton’s letter.
“Here,” I say, “I don’t want to forget this, it’s from Lanton.”
He takes it from me with a steady hand. He crumples the letter into a ball, looks around as if in search of a trash can. Evidently failing to spot one, he stuffs the letter into the pocket of his shorts.
“You have to answer him,” I say anxiously, “or he’ll think I didn’t give it to you.”
“Who cares?” says my son.
“But if he thinks I didn’t obey him, he’ll avenge himself on Ange,” I say softly.
“Don’t believe everything he tells you,” says my son.
And his hard, categorical tone is meant to announce that the question is closed.
He picks up my suitcase. With that, his lips begin to tremble. He stammers, “Oh, Mama…”
A moment later he gets hold of himself. He purses his lips, turns his back to me, and starts toward the parking lot with my suitcase in his hand. And I watch him walk off, resolute, ever so slightly solemn, my son who used to shamble aimlessly in tennis shoes, slouching and slump-shouldered, along the sidewalks of Bordeaux, adrift on his own boredom. How straight and tall he stands now! How this arid land has hardened him!
I walk after him, feeling the fiery paving stones through the soles of my ankle boots.
A tall man whose face seems familiar, wearing a baseball cap with a transparent visor, comes walking toward us. He passes by my son without a glance, but he stops when he reaches me. The faint shadow of his visor tints his cheeks and forehead violet. Seeing me keep walking, he leaps straight in front of me. Now I have no choice but to stop. My legs are rubbery with fear. In a shrill little voice, I call out: “Ralph!”
The man lets out a contemptuous laugh. I can’t help thinking I should know who he is—should and would, if I weren’t such a coward.
“Ralph!”
But my son is already far ahead, and doesn’t hear.
“Ralph!”
Isn’t that anger I now hear in my voice, the same blinding, dizzying anger, feeding on its own energy, that used to take hold of me, and afterward leave me deeply troubled, when my son was slow to loosen the little legs firmly clamped around my waist after he’d bounded into my arms, and that anger made me forget my strength and not see the excessiveness of my reaction, because sometimes I pushed him off so roughly that he fell backward in the entryway of the apartment. And one day his skull must have struck the floor in a worrisome way, that must have happened at least once, immediately snuffing out my senseless rage, throwing me to the floor beside him to take him in my arms and rock him, wretched, silently praying that he might forget this scene and tell no one of it, and never hold this one memory of his mother in his mind.
The man spits at my feet, a dry, unproductive hack. He blurts out a word I don’t understand, hearing only the end: “yer.” I shout in terror. He walks around me and stalks off, jumps over a chain barring access to the boats, and disappears behind a freight container.
28. Everything we hated, everything we condemned
Catching up with my son by his car, I can feel his impatience, almost annoyance. I say nothing of the encounter I’ve just endured. He gestures toward the backseat.
My son’s car seems extremely luxurious. It’s white and huge and must be brand-new. It gleams so in the sun that my gaze can only skim its surface. I open the remarkably thick, weighty door and let myself drop—or be sucked, it almost seems—into the low, yielding black-leather seat.
Oh, the things Ange and I used to say about people who buy big cars, the fierce contempt, the furious hostility we unleashed on them, we who proudly and virtuously squeezed our ample bodies into our cramped little Twingo, smugly reflecting that we could well have afforded such-and-such a sedan whose surpassing comfort and power we saw extolled on the billboards of Cours Victor-Hugo (there and nowhere else, since we didn’t watch television), and we looked at the price and howled at the appalling stupidity of spending such sums just for that, and it thrilled us to know, and to know the other knew, that had we so chosen we too could easily have granted ourselves that mindless splendor, that vulgar embellishment of our discreet success.
And now, I tell myself, deeply pained, now I find my own son feeling the need to display himself in just such an obscene vehicle.
And those two old people in Les Aubiers who happen to be my parents, how they ran to the window when their practiced ear told them an expensive car was pulling into the parking lot! How proudly they delighted in the sight, showered with glittering sparks of that good fortune, almost honored to live in a place where such a car deigned to park for ten minutes, and not jealous, never envious, too docile for that. How I wish I could stop thinking back to that moment, how I wish I could eject them from my memory!
“Delighted to meet you,” she says, in a grave, mellifluous voice.
Sitting in front, she reaches back between the seats.
“Mama, Wilma,” says Ralph laconically.
I extend an uncertain hand. She brushes hers against it, not squeezing it, and I shiver at the touch of a warm, tender skin, telling myself that my own dry, dimpled, frightened little hand must make her feel like she’s touching a lizard.
“Good trip?” she asks.
But she’s already turned around, uninterested in my answer, or even whether I answer, and so I say nothing, impotent and desolate, feeling my capacity for reflection and judgment and perspective being drowned by the tidal wave of unconditional admiration and painful obeisance that hasn’t washed over me for so long, protected as I was by Ange’s assurance, he who could never be made to feel reverence for anything or anyone.
Now I’m just a naked body, vulnerable, piteous, ripped from its shell or its armor, and so white.
I have no work, I’m alone. There’s nothing left to save me from the sense of my own pointlessness. And—just as in my unarmed younger days, when I first met Ange’s daughters Gladys and Priscilla for example, or when I faced a certain type of mother at school, at once snooty and winning, full of scorn and innocence—this unknown Wilma, who to the best of my knowledge has no official grounds for being here beside my son like a wife, need only turn toward me with the faintest tinge of unintentional arrogance and offer me her face in three-quarters profile, her beautiful tanned face, smoothed by a liquid base whose subtle orange tint can only be detected by its contrast with the matte, lighter skin on her neck, yes, this miraculous woman, conventionally but strikingly elegant and nearer my age than my son’s, need only appear, li
ke the fusion into one visible person of all the invisible, supreme people in this world, to make me surrender to the authority I’ve granted her, to make me stop striving for a freedom of mind and an independence of soul that I once thought I prized above all other things.
Oh, such weakness I have in me, such weakness. What’s going on with this Wilma, I ask myself, and what sort of relationship am I meant to forge with her? As Ralph’s mother, am I expected to demand some special deference?
My son starts up the engine, and I lean over slightly in my seat for a better view of Wilma’s profile. The air conditioner whirrs. It’s almost cold.
The things Ange and I used to say about air-conditioned cars and the people who buy them, the things we said about even the little I’ve seen of the life my son leads…
Her light chestnut hair nearly matches her skin; it’s shiny, straight, carefully pooled on her shoulders. A fine dark down covers her upper cheeks. Her eyes are black, like my son’s, and magnified by mascara and eye shadow.
This woman put on full makeup for an early-morning trip to the port to pick up her mother-in-law. Her plump, wide lips are an ardent, glowing shade of red. She’s wearing what looks like a beige linen pantsuit. I give a little cough, then ask, “Where’s Yasmine?”
My son is absorbed in the delicate task of maneuvering out of the parking lot and back to a wide, dusty road. I see a frown on his face. Meanwhile, the woman smiles vaguely.
“What are you talking about?” says my son, in a tone of repressed fury.
“I’m talking about Yasmine, your wife,” I say.
A warm, heavy breath mists my ear. I feel a hairy tickle on the back of my neck. I snap my head to one side. A dog’s gaping maw has just appeared by my face, as if threatening to rip me apart should I say one more word. That dog must have been sleeping in the far back—is it obeying some unspoken command from my son, surging up just when I ask him a question?
