by Marie Ndiaye
I should be happy to find my son delivered of that maddening bent. Why am I sad, why does it trouble me? Because he’s still as pitiless as he ever was? Because in his pitilessness and inflexibility and fierceness I see something even more dangerous for me, in spite of his furious striving for goodwill? I’d like to tell him: You’ll never be like your father, it’s too late, and that’s not how you are. Oh, I wish I could also tell him, in disgust: Don’t you see where your hapless father’s trusting heart got him? Shamelessly living off Corinna Daoui, shamelessly living in an apartment that’s not his, shamelessly redecorating a ridiculous bedroom for a little girl he must see at most a few times a year, and then, still shamelessly, showing the world and Bordeaux a kind of face he can’t understand everyone hates.
My son disappeared into the house with Arno. Then he came back and told me he’d closed the dog up in his consulting room, and I remembered my son is a doctor. Never having seen him practice, I forget that now and then.
I only knew my son as a student, so long in school that I’d vaguely decided school was an end in itself for him, not a way into the medical profession, which he’d chosen on Lanton’s advice.
With a gentle shove to the small of my back, Wilma ushered me in. The entryway is cold and dark. The stone walls are hung with masks made of wood and leather, along with pelts stretched over wooden frames, and a vast collection of stuffed wild-boar heads.
“I’ve taken up hunting, with Wilma,” my son proudly told me as I stared at the heads and imagined what Ange would have said of that carnage.
There’s no breed more despicable than hunters, Ange used to say.
“So you’ve learned to shoot?” I asked weakly.
They turned their two shining faces to me.
Every hunter in this country should be executed, Ange used to say.
“Of course,” said my son, “Wilma showed me.”
Their two faces glowed palely in the dark entryway, lit from within by pride and desire as they recalled, I imagine, their hunting trips in the scrubland, armed with the powerful weapons I later saw in their bedroom, pursuing a lone male or a frantic sow hurrying her piglets before her, reeking of terror with Arno’s snout close behind, and I later wondered if that black beast’s fear was the spice in the homemade terrines my son served. Is it horror that brings out the full flavor of meat?
And how surprised I was, later, to find that my son had become an avid cook, with a fondness for red meats, and even, it can’t be denied, a certain taste for blood.
I tried to admire the masks and heads, since my son and this woman were my hosts.
“Very beautiful,” I murmured, noting that Ralph immediately beamed with joy.
He couldn’t repress a smile, a smile like the old days, at once broad and hesitant, happy and anxious, the smile he had as a little boy.
Didn’t he smile exactly like that when he submitted a piece of homework for my verdict, or a drawing, or even a present he’d hand-made just for me, didn’t he smile just like that when it turned out his mama approved, when, for example, he introduced dear Lanton?
Then his face hardened into ardent austerity again.
“I’ll show you around,” Wilma said to me.
“Yes,” said my son, “show her around.”
And then he asked Wilma to examine me at the earliest opportunity.
30. What did she see?
Lying on the examination table in Wilma’s consulting room, I think of my son, who didn’t come along as she took me on a tour of the huge, dark house he’s been living in with this woman for I’m not sure how long—weeks, months, more than a year?
I got the impression my son never ventured upstairs, which was even colder and darker than downstairs, and divided into many rooms, all virtually empty. The only furniture in mine is a bed, a writing desk, and a chair. The bed is draped with a pink chenille coverlet, and I was so dismayed by the sight of that fabric, something I wouldn’t even put on a dog’s bed, I told myself, that I couldn’t help blushing.
Wilma noticed.
“This was all here when we moved in,” she told me. “We never have guests, so we haven’t redecorated the upstairs.”
Taking advantage of my son’s absence, I casually asked Wilma, “Where’s the baby’s room?”
“What baby?” Wilma carelessly answered.
Her cheeks turned faintly pink. She bent down and dragged my suitcase into the room so she wouldn’t have to look me in the eye.
“Well…” I said.
But the child’s name, that cursed “Souhar,” adamantly refused to cross my lips.
“You know who I mean,” I said, my voice almost desperate. “Please, please, stop pretending! My granddaughter…”
Has there been some decree that I must be punished whenever I seem to sidestep that hideous name?
“Talk to Ralph,” she interrupted.
We came back down the imposing stone stairway. In the front hall, Wilma opened a door with her key and ushered me into her consulting room.
“Are you a GP like Ralph?” I asked.
“No,” said this woman, “I’m a gynecologist.”
Then, in a gentle, professional voice: “Get undressed, mama, and lie down on the table. I’ll be right back.”
I never saw a doctor’s office in Bordeaux as modern and well equipped as Wilma’s in this humble village of San Augusto. From the rug to the armchairs, everything is fuchsia and white. The desk is a long sheet of glass on four fuchsia legs. The computer, a Mac, is the same color, and so is the pad on the examination table, and every lamp, every cabinet.
The windows look onto the deep, dark valley on one side, and the houses around the church on the other. There are no curtains. If I raise my head a little I can see the neighbors’ windows, and I imagine them seeing me too, looking at me lying naked on the table in this Wilma’s office, this gynecologist who lives with my son. Unless those houses are empty and abandoned, and there’s no human life in San Augusto but us.
Wilma comes back, now wearing a white smock, her hair tied behind her neck, her delicate face carefully made up again. I’m very uncomfortable having her see me this way, bound up in all the unhappiness of a body too long neglected. I cover my eyes with one hand. I murmur, “You know, this feels very awkward…”
“Don’t worry,” says Wilma, “I’m a doctor, nothing more.”
“I used to be pretty,” I say, suddenly powerless to shut myself up, “but, I don’t know how it happened, I lived my life, my mind was on other things, and my body, how can I say it, my body went its own way because I wasn’t bothering with it, it led its own little independent life, and of course I looked at it every day, but honestly, I didn’t see anything…”
“Relax,” says Wilma soothingly, “I’m not paying any attention to that.”
I turn my head so she won’t see my damp eyes.
The house is perfectly silent. What’s my son doing? Is he watching us? I vaguely sense other breaths than our own stirring the air in this room.
This Wilma woman comes and goes, pulling on her gloves, laying out her instruments, and I notice her beautiful plum leather pumps, and—below the hem of her violet skirt, half concealed by the smock—her oddly stout calves and thick ankles, and it moves me to see them, slight as she is in every other way. I whisper, “Isn’t my stomach strangely swollen?”
“We’ll see,” Wilma murmurs.
Her voice sounds suddenly different, heavy with foreboding. I put my feet in the stirrups, feeling my thighs wobble and jiggle. My skin isn’t fair, but varicose veins meander very visibly beneath the surface.
Wilma gently spreads my legs, slowly pushes the speculum into my vagina.
“That’s very cold,” I say, flinching slightly.
Wilma doesn’t answer. I raise my head a little and our eyes meet. Hers are filled with panic and perplexity.
She quickly gets up from her stool. She thrusts her hands deep into her pockets, goes to the street-facing window. She comes back
, sits down, looks into the speculum again. Turning a wheel, she widens the opening. I groan in pain. She immediately turns the wheel back the other way.
“So,” I say, “what do you see?”
She doesn’t answer. I ask again. Stubborn silence.
I look past her shoulder, toward the window, where a little white chicken is now standing on the outside ledge, poised on one leg in anxious but focused attention, seeming to observe me with an implacable eye. I ask, “You have chickens?”
For a moment Wilma doesn’t understand, but then she glances over her shoulder.
“Yes,” she says, as if relieved at the change of subject, “but we don’t have time to look after them, we don’t even collect the eggs. You can, if you like.”
“I’ve never done that,” I say, faintly insulted, “and I don’t know that I’ll have time either. I’ve got to go back to work. I have to find a school here.”
“That’s not going to be possible, with what you’ve got in your belly,” cries Wilma, in a strangely horrified tone.
She yanks out the speculum, drops it into a little metal pail, shoves back her stool. She stands up and tears off her gloves, almost furiously.
“Who did you make this with, mama? What have you done with your life?”
Slightly sore, I pull myself up and sit on the table, my legs hanging over the white and fuchsia checkerboard tiles. I shiver in terror.
“So… Tell me what’s wrong with me,” I say, my voice strident.
With a sigh, I add: “And what am I guilty of now?”
Wilma’s long brown eyes seem to soften in something like pity. With a slow, graceful gesture, buying time, she pulls the elastic band from her hair.
“After all,” I say, “menopause isn’t a crime.”
“Oh, mama,” she says, “that’s not what it is at all!”
“So why has my period stopped?”
She shakes her head, at a loss for words.
“In any case,” she says, “you’re not sick. There’s just… something that doesn’t look like things we know.”
Suddenly I can’t bear the thought of her saying another word. I gracelessly plop down from the table. I can feel the thing in my stomach caught off guard by the sudden movement, I feel it lurch just above my pelvis, then settle back into place and grow still.
I hurry to get dressed. Meanwhile, Wilma takes off her smock. Beneath it she has on a tight violet angora sweater. The dusky skin above her breasts is slightly slack, though her face is taut as can be. This woman who lives with my son might well be far older than I am.
Not looking at her, struggling to button my pants, I ask, “Will my stomach get any bigger?”
“Yes,” says Wilma, “I think this is just the beginning.”
“There’s no way to get rid of it?”
“This isn’t the usual kind of thing, mama. I can’t take the risk. We’ll just have to see.”
“But,” I murmur, “it’s not…demonic, is it?”
“Yes, it is,” says Wilma.
She forces out a chuckle to hide her dismay, as if it were still possible to inject a little levity into our words, or at least as if this feint were necessary, not as a mutual deception but simply as a way of going on without falling into numb horror whenever we’re together, our mouths agape in disbelief.
I have one last question for this gynecologist who lives in my son’s house and who, I say to myself, may in some way be holding my son captive.
“Could food have caused this thing?”
She raises a surprised eyebrow.
“Of course not,” she says, “it has nothing to do with food.”
31. Bad cooking at my son’s
The three of us are together for dinner in the cold, gray dining room my son and this woman have made a permanent exposition of their hunting exploits. The stone walls are covered with framed photographs of one or the other in hunting garb, holding a pheasant or crane by its legs, or standing with one thick army boot pressed to the bloodied breast of a wild boar or roe, always smiling the broad, martial, joyless smile of someone who kills not for survival or pleasure but in the firm belief that it has to be done for the common good. Wilma’s smile is wholehearted, sharp, with no sign of regret or constraint, but the grin on my son’s beautiful, bowed lips seems slightly forced, with a very faint hesitation, a hint of a quiver.
We sit down at the oak table, brown and massive like all the furniture in this room. The dog Arno barks from inside my son’s office, with only a door standing in its way.
“He’s used to being with us, he doesn’t understand what’s happening,” says my son, tense and irritable.
“You talk about that animal like it was your child,” I say.
My son’s face contracts and closes. The night is dark outside the narrow windows. Between barks, the silence is absolute.
My son has put a dish of dark meat in wine-colored sauce on the table, and now he’s doling out a generous portion, blushingly telling me he spent many long hours cooking this game—oh, how proud he is, I can see, to be regaling me with a dinner he cooked himself.
How can I now hope to undo what I spent twenty years creating, how can I deliver my son of his anxious, angry eagerness for his mother’s judgment—what do you care about my pronouncements, I wish I could tell him, they’re no better than any others!
My son gives Wilma a helping even more plentiful than mine, and then parsimoniously serves himself.
“You were nagging me about being fat,” I say loudly, struggling to make myself heard over the dog’s protests, “but how do you expect me to lose any weight if you give me so much to eat?”
My son looks at me. I see compassion in his eyes.
He murmurs, “Wilma explained; now I see why you looked pregnant, forgive me.”
I waggle a frantic hand at him, retreating. I categorically refuse to talk about the thing I have in me.
I begin to eat. The strong, complicated taste of the meat and sauce immediately startles and exhausts me. My jaws are heavy with fatigue; all at once I find it impossibly arduous to chew and at the same time focus on what I’m tasting so I can come up with something to say about it. I can only tell my son it’s very good, I’m too tired to say anything more.
In reality it isn’t good at all, it’s heavy and gristly and aggressive. Is this supposed to be some sort of test?
My son casts me a wary glance, and then, as I look back at him with a steadfast affection, his whole handsome face suddenly glows with happiness and I see the child I loved to see looking like this, a child who is still alive, then, beneath the features of this resentful, tense adult, this resentful, vindictive adult who’s a stranger to me, so hard to like, so different from Lanton with whom I felt a kinship the first time we met, whom I loved, yes, more than my son, so much so that his death would have left me adrift in despair, which my son’s wouldn’t have, it might even have come as a secret relief, ridding my life of the burden our resentful, unquiet relationship had become, and no such name as “Souhar” would have infected my tranquility, but if, when my son’s face suddenly lights up like a lamp, I can once again see the child I loved, then can’t I also learn to love the man he is now, just a little, a man whose resentment and unquiet rancor so imperfectly conceal the child I loved, but did I really love him, did I love him as I should…
I put down my fork, wipe my lips. My stomach is thrashing. No one can see it under the table.
“Ralph!”
My son jumps. The dog stops barking, and silence encircles us.
“You have to answer Lanton’s letter,” I say. “You absolutely must.”
“Do you know what he wants me to do?” says Ralph, icily.
“No,” I say.
“So how can you demand that I answer him,” says Ralph, “if you have no idea what he wants?”
He moodily pushes away his plate. Wilma reaches out and strokes his head. Trying to calm himself, my son takes a deep breath.
“All I know,” I stru
ggle to say, “is that you’re putting Ange’s life in danger if you don’t answer Lanton.”
He stands up, furious.
“You see what a monster he is,” cries my son, “and it seems like you’re still protecting him!”
“It’s not him I’m protecting,” I say, “it’s Ange.”
“But there’s no hope for Ange,” says my son.
He slowly sits down again. I close my eyes, my ears ringing. Suddenly my son’s rage subsides, and he murmurs, “He wants me to come back to Bordeaux, he wants us to get back together.”
“Yes,” I say, despairing, “he still loves you.”
I begin to weep.
“So what about my poor Ange?”
“Apparently he’s doomed anyway,” says my son.
I ask, “Who told you that?”
“Richard Victor Noget,” says my son.
“He’s the one who’s killing him,” I say.
“No, I don’t think he is,” says my son. “I think it’s you, Mama.”
Anger dries my eyes. I shout, “I have never, do you hear me, never done anything to hurt Ange!”
“You didn’t know you were doing it,” says my son, in a soothing tone that frightens me more than anything, “but you led him into something you shouldn’t have. In the beginning, he should never have had any problems, he was innocent.”
He turns toward Wilma, as if to explain a situation to someone who can’t fully grasp it:
“Mama’s husband Ange came from a good family, had a good upbringing, never felt unworthy.”
“That’s true,” I say. “What’s that got to do with anything?”
“He never should have married you,” says my son, “unless you moved away, far away from Bordeaux.”
“Ange would never have wanted to leave Bordeaux,” I say.
“Well, he’s never going to leave his beloved city again,” says my son, with wrenching sadness.
