My Heart Hemmed In

by Marie Ndiaye

  I pull away, pressing myself to the window, as far as possible from that monstrous beast.

  “I didn’t know you liked dogs,” I say, slightly breathless.

  “He’s a Bordeaux mastiff,” says my son.

  “His name is Arno,” says Wilma.

  “Ah, Arno,” I say, discreetly giggling to myself.

  How horrible, how horrible, Ange and I used to think, those middle-class young people who show off by buying the biggest, scariest dog they can find and then saddling it with a human name, how horrible they are!

  Unfinished houses line the road on both sides, rusty metal rods protruding from bare cinder blocks. And now the sun is high in the sky, and I think I can smell the scent of the morning’s new, hopeful heat through the glass. I bend forward until I’m almost touching my son; I bathe the back of his neck with my mouth’s warm breath, since, I say to myself, he’s so fond of dogs now. And I also say to myself, in a burst, a fragment of a dream: My little boy’s fresh-scented neck!

  I murmur, “So, what about Yasmine?”

  My son violently slaps the center of the steering wheel. He cries, “Will you shut up?”

  I wasn’t expecting such aggression. Tears come to my eyes, reflexively, with no sadness. I see Wilma’s hand appeasingly pat my son’s bare thigh, and when she pulls it away her handprint stays behind, damp on his amber skin. She gives me a neutral, diplomatic look, appraising the forces in play here.

  “You have no idea how to behave,” says my son, through his teeth. “Mother, you make me ashamed. How dare you ask such a question in front of Wilma? That’s not done and you know it, it’s simply not done.”

  “Never mind, it doesn’t matter,” Wilma murmurs calmly.

  “It does matter,” says my son, slightly strident.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I say, distraught.

  I’d like to ask for news of the little girl in hopes of smoothing things over, but I still can’t bring myself to speak her name, that terrible “Souhar,” which to my ears sounds like a provocation, a sneer, an obscenity, even a vicious offense. Has Wilma noticed?

  “Ralph and I live a very tranquil life,” she says, as if imploring me not to speak of anything that might upset the stability of that existence.

  “Yes,” I say, “Ralph’s father said…said our granddaughter was a very quiet baby.”

  My last words drop into a heavy silence, snatched up and swallowed by that wordlessness, unbroken even by the breath of the two strangers sitting in front of me, as if they were holding it so we would share nothing, least of all the chilled air of the car. My grating breath alone fills the air, accompanied by the quick, damp, congested panting of the animal in back.

  Less because I want to hear the answer than hoping to disrupt the rhythm uniting my breath with the dog’s, I ask, “Is she doing well? The baby?”

  Again that silence, virtuous, accusing. At a loss, I turn my face to the window. What did I say that was so out of place? Are they mad at me for not saying “Souhar”? But that can’t have so struck them that they should immediately come together in this punitive silence, unless…unless they know everything, understand everything that’s troubling me…but that seems so unlikely, so unlikely…

  The SUV abruptly turns away from the road and the still sea, which looks as if it were shielding itself from the blue sky and sunshine behind the row of new or half-built villas.

  “That sea doesn’t shine,” I say.

  My son scoffs.

  “Is that the poetic style you teach your students?” he says, in a voice dripping with sarcasm. “No wonder they didn’t want anything more to do with you!”

  “I thought,” I said, exasperated, “I thought you’d turned into such a kind man, and you were determined to love me in spite of everything, just as I do you!”

  “That’s true,” says my son, immediately calm and gentle despite the fervent undercurrent that forever seems to run through him, making his voice vibrant and intense.

  Now we’re driving along a very steep gravel road that twists and turns at impossibly sharp angles. So my son lives in the mountains, I tell myself, with some foreboding.

  As the car climbs, ever more laboriously, through dark, dry clumps of arbutus and short pine trees with black trunks and bare, blackened branches, the sea shrinks to an opaque blot and finally disappears from view. And then we cross to the other side of the ridge, the shadowed side, and my heart cowers in my chest.

  The shadow is vast, stretching for miles all around us, over the forest of charred pine trees, over the deserted valley, the dark, meager river at the bottom looking from here as if it were frozen in place, paralyzed by dark ice. My son turns off the air conditioner.

  Suddenly it’s cold. The silence surprises me. Even the dog has stopped panting, as if saving its strength. My son turns on the heater. And still we climb, onward and endlessly onward, at a crawl, and it seems to me that every moment that goes by takes me further from Ange, and closer to deserting him forever, since now it will take so long to go back down to him.

  29. This is how they are

  My son and this woman, this Wilma whose age, poise, and beauty affect me more than I dare admit (I have no hold over her, no possible sway, I can’t even imagine having any, nor could I try to win her over as I did Lanton, who was young and as it happened had no mother of his own, since that woman had so many times remade her life and replaced her husbands, so many times diverted her affection onto new children, that the paltry share left to Lanton had in his eyes long since gone stale), live in a vast stone house built on the mountainside, in the village of San Augusto.

  I have to describe all this with the deepest detachment, since there’s nothing I can change. But this is not, not at all, what I was expecting to find.

  I’d so dreaded having to face my granddaughter’s name, having no further pretext, however tenuous, to protect my mouth from it, so to speak. And perhaps even more than that, I dreaded how can I say this, how can I admit to this having to realize, as I looked at the child’s face, at her eyes, the darker or lighter irises contrasting starkly or not with the whites, at her skin, creamy or otherwise, that my son had perpetuated the indignity of our bloodline.

  I couldn’t bring myself to ask my ex-husband, that innocent, good-hearted, ignorant man, what our granddaughter looked like in that way, which was in all honesty the only thing I cared about. He wouldn’t have understood if I had.

  I never watch television, I tell him. My mind isn’t like yours, it’s not clouded by all that foolishness. I learn a lot from television, says that simple man. He could say to me, he would have every right to say to me: Nadia, you know far more about evil than I do, you’re far closer to evil than I am; abstaining from TV hasn’t protected or purified you, no, by forgoing TV you haven’t leaped into some great cleansing fire; you might have, I don’t know, dived into a fetid swamp. Myself, I’m the same man I always was, deep down, however fond I am of television, he might tell me, that upright ex-husband of mine.

  But I haven’t had to examine Souhar’s little face, whatever it looks like.

  “Where’s your daughter?” I asked Ralph almost as soon as we reached his house.

  Everything was spinning; I had to lean on the car not to fall. All those twists and turns had left me dizzy. My stomach was churning. My son grumbled a few unintelligible words, scowling with a rage that might at any moment erupt to smite his poor mother in her mire of ignorance and incomprehension.

  Once it was I who could terrify him with one frown; I could bring him to tears with the tiniest hint that I might lose my temper—when was it, how old was my son, when the fear moved from one side to the other? My loving little boy was so afraid of angering me, couldn’t bear to see me upset with him for any reason at all, and then the young man he turned into was so nebulously oversensitive that I took to weighing every word I dared speak to him, even then never quite sure I wouldn’t incur his wrath, and at such times I was like some of my students, whom I see tak
ing a desperate leap into the void when I ask them a question, no doubt praying that their fall will be as lazy and endless as a fall in a dream, and that my face too will go on hovering unchanged, ever patient and gentle before their own tortured faces, until the end of time.

  I found the courage to ask, “She’s not here?”

  “No,” said my son, very sharply.

  The house that my son and this Wilma now live in looks over the valley, its back turned to the road, and it’s such a tall, austere house, of solid gray stone, that you can see it from far down the mountain, even from miles away.

  “I’m so disappointed,” I said. “I was hoping to meet my granddaughter at last.”

  “Well, you’re not going to,” said my son.

  And I’d so steeled myself for the sight of the child that I was sincerely unhappy and even distraught that she wasn’t here, not simply relieved, as I would have expected.

  Raising a questioning, surprised eyebrow, I tried to attract Wilma’s attention. But she looked away, like a discreet wife who knows how to mind her own business, and so I learned beyond all doubt that she wasn’t the child’s mother Yasmine. Because in the car it had occurred to me that this Wilma might be Yasmine, that Ange and I might have misremembered his marrying a Yasmine, or that she might have changed her name, decided to go by something else, as I myself would most certainly have done if my name were Yasmine.

  So maybe it’s all very simple, I’d told myself, so reassured by that idea that I almost laughed out loud.

  I’d never seen a picture of this Yasmine. My son had hurriedly informed me of his marriage, one day when I ran into him on Rue Sainte-Catherine, refusing to tell me anything more of his wife than her first name, Yasmine (or did he say Wilma?).

  My son wouldn’t tell me about his wife because I had, in his words, appropriated Lanton when he was still with him—I’d stolen Lanton away from him, even cuckolded him with Lanton, he’d said. “Symbolically, which is worse,” he’d added, seeing the disbelief on my face. Now he wanted to be sure I left his wife Yasmine in peace.

  “But,” I’d protested, “what on earth could I do to your wife, what are you afraid of?”

  He was afraid I… How can I say this without trembling? He was afraid I might teach his wife shame and self-loathing, under the cover of affection and interest.

  “But when have I ever done such a thing to anyone?” I’d cried, desperate tears spilling from my eyes. “When have I ever done such a thing?”

  My son simply gave a cruel laugh and raced off, merciless and hateful. How anyone could possibly inspire such hatred in a son, an only son, once so loving, I couldn’t begin to understand. I later learned that my son had gone off to live and work in San Augusto, taking his brand-new bride Yasmine with him, and then the little girl was born.

  “You see,” Ange had told me when we got the birth announcement, “he’s not holding a grudge, since he’s telling you you’re a grandmother.”

  “Yes,” I’d said, happy at first.

  But then the baby’s name leaped out at me, and I found myself thinking my son had sent me the announcement for that reason alone: so the six letters of the name “Souhar” would make a point that would pierce straight through my heart.

  Now that I’m here in my son’s dour house, I’ve stopped caring about that awful name. My nerves are on edge. Where are the child and her mother? Before, I dreaded the prospect of seeing them (even as I was hurt that my son had never introduced them to me), but now I’m deeply afraid for them.

  My son and this Wilma live in what seems the biggest house in the village, which is otherwise only a handful of modest gray dwellings huddled around the plain little church. Set away from the others, but close enough for the inhabitants of those shabby houses to know everything that goes on in it, my son’s enormous abode displays three rows of narrow windows on the other side of the road, and completely hides the valley from its neighbors, unless it’s shielding them from that melancholy view, in whose depths the gaze soon grows lost—the woods ravaged by recurrent fires, the motionless river, the cold shadow draped over it all.

  The fearsome sun only strikes the other slope, facing the sea. There’s no trace of that blazing heat here, but it gives off an invisible vapor that makes the air shimmer all the way to San Augusto. That faint vibration of the atmosphere can cause mirages, Wilma told me. Sometimes, she said, an expanse of water seems to be floating over the village, and if that happened to me, if I thought I could even see a reflection of palm trees in that illusory lake, then I should simply close my eyes, and the vision would be erased.

  My son had helped the dog out of the luggage compartment. He was about to let go of the collar, to set the dog free, because neither of them likes to keep it tied up or on a leash, my son and this Wilma had told me.

  “Arno’s a sweetheart,” my son had said in a slightly menacing voice, as if he expected me to openly dispute it or provoke the dog simply to prove it was vicious.

  Doesn’t he know I don’t care about dogs? That for me dogs don’t exist? That any word spoken about a dog bores me to tears? But just when he was about to let the dog go, my son suddenly pulled it back with an angry, surprised jerk. Arno was about to lunge at me.

  “That’s odd,” said my son. “Do you have a dog back home?”

  “Certainly not,” I said, still trembling at such hostility.

  “Well, he must be smelling a male dog on your clothes,” said my son, musingly.

  “There’s no other explanation,” Wilma insisted.

  “I’m not hiding anything,” I said.

  All three equally irritated, we dropped the question of the dog and its feelings toward me. My son and this Wilma seemed irked, almost saddened, at not understanding the reasons for Arno’s behavior. That wounded pride and affection showed me the depth of their love for that dog.

  Don’t they have a child they should be loving like this, or is that little girl not enough for them, is she a disappointment, is she ugly, or is there too much that’s troublesome about her appearance?

  Wilma stroked the dog’s broad reddish flanks, as if seeking its forgiveness for something. She kneeled down before it, her magnificent face touching the dog’s muzzle, and said, “Go on, boy, go on.”

  And the dog licked this woman’s cheeks, nose, and mouth, this Wilma who lives with my son and who so painstakingly made herself up to come meet me this morning. The dog’s long tongue wiped away her base, her blush, her lipstick, even her mascara, and she laughed with what seemed a slightly overplayed joy.

  Then my son wanted the dog to lick his face in turn. They playfully struggled for a place before the dog’s mouth, competing for that benediction. Wilma stood up, proud and fulfilled, her face bare, white, and downy. And there was a kind of challenge in that display of her naked face, still glistening with the dog’s saliva (I could smell it, strong and sour, I could imagine the stickiness of her skin), as if this primped and preened woman were daring me to find her any less alluring like this.

  I turned away. I walked toward my son’s front door. I had no wish to see my son my little boy who was once so madly in love with me, has anyone ever loved me like that stand up covered in his dog’s spittle, displaying that same repugnant delight. My God, how lonely they must be, I told myself, to be so humbly offering themselves for Arno’s affections, even if it means having to beg.

  The cold was mild and dry. A vast shimmering blue sky encircled my son’s house and, across the road behind us, the little houses clustered around the church, silent houses that I might have sworn were deserted had I not seen, at the windows, their impeccable white curtains.

  On the doorstep, Wilma reached into her purse for a big key ring and waved me aside. My son took the dog in first, pulling it by its collar. Knowing I was behind it, the dog insistently looked back, growling, refusing to go on. A furious foam covered its pendulous black jowls.

  “You must smell like dog, there’s nothing else it can be,” my son exclaimed with a sor
t of rage in his voice.

  “Arno is very dominant,” said Wilma.

  “Maybe he senses you’re not entirely happy to have me here,” I said, as a joke.

  “That could be,” said my son, perfectly serious, even grave, with no sign of cruelty or malice.

  It was a shock to see that my son had apparently lost his sense of irony, once so highly developed that he could often be tiresome, not to mention difficult to understand, since at times it wasn’t quite clear if he was deliberately saying the opposite of what he was thinking or if he should be taken at his word.

  Today, in San Augusto, on my son’s territory, I no longer doubt the meaning of what he says. The rigorous intensity that sets his every word in a clasp of absolute literalness distances him from the son I remember more than plastic surgery ever could. Having thought that, I look at my son’s face and I’m not sure I recognize it after all. I’d be happier to hear him speaking with the strong, harsh San Augusto accent, I tell myself, than with this high-minded solemnity and earnestness he once systematically mocked, when he thought he’d heard it in some pedagogical pronouncement from Ange’s mouth or mine. He accused me of always taking everything literally, derided what he called my cluelessness at any sly provocation.

  How did my little boy, my gentle, sensitive, tender little boy, ever turn into that young man I couldn’t love?

  Never once, on the other hand, did he show the slightest impatience with my ex-husband, his father, even though that man was perfectly incapable of grasping our son’s sense of humor, his perverse turn of mind.

  Because Ralph had sensed or realized that his father’s simple goodness inevitably implied a deafness to derision, and Ralph respected him endlessly for that, and maybe he was sorry he lacked that innocence himself, and maybe, too, he resented me for—he must have thought—infecting him with a talent for seeing things from two sides, and nonetheless I hated his taste for sarcasm, his joyless laughter, and I found myself hating him too, when his jeering went on too long.