My Heart Hemmed In

by Marie Ndiaye

  In my torment, I pointlessly repeat, “Lanton… He still loves you…”

  And we say nothing more, and in that silence I almost wish the dog would start barking again.

  His chair screeching on the tile floor, my son gets up to bring in the dessert, a chocolate mousse. The evening is cool, but he’s still wearing his shorts. His smooth, slender, slightly awkward legs could easily be a teenager’s.

  I lay a hand on my belly, feeling another, chaotic life moving inside it. I’m not hungry anymore. All this dark food disgusts me. But my son’s eyes shine once again with that tortured, almost hateful hopefulness as he sets a full bowl of his chocolate mousse before me, so I have no choice but to eat it and let out little mmms of pleasure to appease him. Every mouthful is torture. I’m not hungry! Just one more spoonful, all the same, and then another, crammed deep into my throat, until I’m about to gag—I can’t choke this mousse down… I swallow and it’s gone, sliding down, just two spoonfuls to go, they seem so enormous, insurmountable…

  My son looks on excitedly, happy to see me eating.

  And what about the thing inside me, is every mouthful bringing it new strength?

  “You should have left Ange in peace,” says my son all at once, “you shouldn’t have thrown yourself at him like you did.”

  “Thrown myself at him?”

  “You never should have…”

  My son struggles to come up with the right word, then lets out a little laugh, a hard yelp.

  “…seduced him, driven him into marrying you. If you hadn’t got your hooks into him, he wouldn’t be in this state today.”

  “You’re still mad at me for leaving your father, at your age!” I say.

  “This has nothing to do with my poor father,” says my son calmly. “It has to do with your husband, and you know exactly what I’m talking about.”

  For something to do, I scrape at my bowl, now determined not to leave behind any trace of my huge helping of chocolate mousse but too angry to care about my son’s feelings. I’m stuffed to the gills, I could burst at any moment.

  And if I did, what would that thing look like when it came out, what manner of thing would it be, and how monstrous?

  “I thought the food would be lighter and healthier here,” I whine.

  “Don’t you worry about that, mama,” says Wilma, “We’re going to take good care of you.”

  Is there a grain of truth in my son’s accusations? Why, I ask myself, heartsore, why must this ancient history be brought back to life, these ancient regrets and missteps, can’t it all be forgotten after so many years of irreproachable behavior? Why should that grace be refused me? How can that suspicion still linger in a corner of my son’s memory, a suspicion he quietly nursed at the time because he was mad at me, and then threw in my face because I was divorcing his father and he thought it wrong—the suspicion that I’d turned to Ange only to better my standing and cleanse myself of my blood?

  Oh, I wish I could say to him, such a foul broth you’re stewing in!

  “So what about your daughter? And her mother, this Yasmine,” I say, “why aren’t they here, tell me that?”

  I feel an ugly sneer on my lips. I have no real confidence in this counterattack, and my voice shakes. My son drapes himself in disdainful silence, he doesn’t even bother to turn his head.

  But he wasn’t there when, it’s true, I began to deploy all the classic moves for snaring a man, when I began to dance around Ange until I caught him in the net of my carefully practiced charms; my son wasn’t there, so what can he know of my feelings, my love for that man, that colleague I wanted and vowed I would have? You didn’t love him, my son would say, but what does he know? You didn’t love him, my presumptuous son would tell me, you only wanted to erase where you come from and who you look like—but what can a son know of his mother’s feelings for a man who isn’t his father?

  “You don’t know the first thing about love,” I say. “You ran out on Lanton…”

  “I don’t want to hear another word about that bastard,” my son shouts.

  Wilma goes out. After a moment she comes back with a long, heavy metal box and sets it down on the end of the table. It came just this morning, she tells my son, and it’s everything they’d been hoping for.

  My son lets out a cry of joy, and in spite of myself I remember him crying out just like that on the many Christmas mornings we spent on Rue Fondaudège, and while my son’s whoops brought a tender, gentle smile to my ex-husband’s lips, I myself could only scowl, incomprehensibly jealous of my son, whom I nonetheless gave everything he wanted, telling myself: I never had such a lavish Christmas, almost wanting to see him disappointed as I’d so often been at his age, before one single, sad present, ineptly chosen.

  Wilma carefully extracts an array of metal parts from the box and assembles them into a hunting rifle. She hands it to my son, who gauges its heft, lovingly strokes it. How happy he is!

  He playfully aims at my chest. And, playfully, I raise my hands.

  “Don’t shoot!” I say.

  My tone must not have been lighthearted enough. Shamefaced, my son lowers the gun.

  32. What’s going on between them?

  My first night in my son’s house is a very painful one.

  As if Wilma’s examination had granted the phenomenon inhabiting me a new confidence, even brazenness (or was it a growth spurt, I ask myself, set off by that dish of game in sauce?), my body is racked by spasms and what feels like a clawing from inside, savage and unrelenting.

  “A whole litter of cats closed up in a bag,” I say to Wilma when, unable to take any more, I finally drag myself out of bed, deep in the night, in search of aid or consolation.

  I knocked at the door to their room, and after the briefest moment Wilma opened it, still fully dressed. The room is lit by the gentle glow of a night-light. I can see many gleaming metal weapons hanging on the wall behind Wilma. My son’s brown-haired head sticks out from under the sheets, motionless. He’s sound asleep.

  “I can’t give you anything right now,” Wilma whispers, “I’m going to have to come up with a special treatment for you, mama.”

  “But I’ll never get to sleep,” I say.

  She shrugs in impotent sympathy. Then she turns away. Together we look at my son’s tousled hair, as if meticulously arranged on the pillow, undisturbed by so much as a breath—why, I ask myself, do I feel as if this woman is watching over him like a jailer?

  “This Lanton of yours,” Wilma murmurs, “Ralph never stops thinking about him—he says his name in his sleep.”

  Pensive and sad, she adds, “Ralph still loves him too, it’s clear…”

  “Lanton’s a very powerful man in Bordeaux,” I say. “He could easily hurt Ange if he wanted to.”

  “Well, what can you do, right?” says Wilma, roughly. “Good night, mama, and try to get some sleep anyway.”

  A hairy shadow growls from the bed where my son is lying still as a stone. The dog Arno jumps to the floor, its claws scraping the wood. Wilma closes the door.

  This same intimidating woman suggests to my son that he take me along on his rounds. My son happily consents.

  The early morning is bright and frigid. You’ve absolutely got to eat meat at breakfast, my son asserts, or you’ll never get through the long hours to come and the cold of the drive down. He brings out a terrine of wild rabbit with pistachios. Seeing Wilma cut a hefty piece for herself, and finding nothing else on the table but bread and a potful of coffee, I accept the slice of terrine my son hands me with his encouraging smile. Another strong dish, slightly overwhelming, but the quiet, unafraid happiness that relaxes my son’s face as I eat it, feigning hunger and pleasure, more than compensates in my mind for the difficulty of choking down wild game first thing in the morning.

  Wilma eagerly takes a second helping, almost pounces on it, wolfing down her rabbit terrine without bread, spearing it with her fork, taking long swigs of black coffee between bites.

  I hope th
is isn’t your child we’re devouring like this, I’d like to tell my son, as a joke.

  But I don’t. I can’t help thinking he’s unhappy to see me witnessing Wilma’s voracity. Still, she’s beautiful, elegant, very delicate in a mauve silk peignoir, and impervious to the cold. When she asks me to go with Ralph on his rounds, her voice is soft but commanding.

  Does she want someone keeping an eye on him at all times?

  In the entryway, Ralph lays a fur jacket over my shoulders.

  “You’ve got to cover up,” he says.

  I instinctively shrug off the wrap, and it slides to the tile floor.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, “but I hate fur!”

  He picks it up, smooths it, as if to comfort it.

  “Well, like it or not,” he says, “you’re going to have to get used to it.”

  “What do you mean by that?” I say.

  He silently heads for the door, carrying his medical bag, wearing a long deep-red leather coat.

  “Wilma told you what she saw with the speculum, is that it?” I ask.

  He adamantly shakes his head to tell me he’s not going to answer.

  “All right, Mama, off we go,” he then says, so amiably (and with something close to tenderness in that Mama) that my lips begin to tremble, ready to stammer out something that nonetheless doesn’t come, whose very sense and intention I don’t yet know.

  A handful of women are waiting on the sidewalk in front of the house, huddled in the glimmering cold, all of them stocky like me, very dark-haired and dusky, with Wilma’s long, tapering eyes, jet black, slanting high toward their temples. They cast curious, tittering glances my way.

  In a whisper, I ask my son who they are.

  “Wilma’s patients,” he says.

  He adds that they live in the little houses clustered around the church, on the other side of the road.

  “Go look around sometime,” says my son. “They make leather masks, like the ones we have in the front hall.”

  I ask what I could possibly want with a mask. My son falls into a hesitant silence. He reaches out and unlocks the car doors from a distance. Then, for what feels like the first time, he looks me straight in the eye.

  “You can have them reproduce your loved ones’ faces,” he says. “That way they’ll be with you, hanging on the wall, they’ll see you coming and going.”

  My son puts the bag in the trunk and sits down at the wheel. I whirl around and scurry back to the house. The women watch me with laughing eyes—is it the sight of my open cardigan flapping every which way, now that I can’t button it over my stomach? I hear my son calling. Not turning around, I shout, “Just a minute, I’ll be right there!”

  I hurry into the house. My heart clenched, a heart that’s not so old anymore, my old heart now young again, stupidly beating in time with what inhuman heart?, I go to the two masks I’d seen in the entryway, facing the boar heads. They’re made of a fine, smooth light-brown leather. One shows a young woman’s face, the other a tiny girl’s. The first is grave and somber—the mouth is downturned, the black glass eyes full of an indefinable sadness. The second, the child’s, though its shape and its features are much like the other’s, is merry and joyful.

  So they’re here, I tell myself—but only here?

  A quiet rustle turns my attention toward the staircase. Wilma is watching me, motionless on the bottom step, her arms crossed over her smock. Such bulky calves for so slight a figure, I reflexively think. She seems angry, on edge. With a quick flick of her wrist, she seems to drive off my presence, erase it from reality.

  “You’re going to make Ralph late,” she says. “You should be with him!”

  “Because he’s not supposed to be alone?” I say.

  “Usually I go with him myself,” says Wilma.

  And that, I then understand, is what’s irritating her: not that I looked at the masks but that I left my son unattended.

  I go back outside. Wasn’t Ralph alone yesterday, when Wilma showed me the room, and then when she examined me? No, no, he had the dog with him, Arno was keeping an eye on him.

  A cowardly relief then comes over me: my son is here, he’s waiting for me in the car, the engine purring. Should I be helping him escape Wilma’s control, should I wish I hadn’t found him so obediently waiting? Oh, I say to myself, I don’t know, I have no idea what my son wants in all this.

  I climb in beside him, sinking into the deep seat, which smells discreetly of wild animal. My son starts off at once. A little vein is throbbing spasmodically on his temple.

  “Wilma certainly likes meat,” I say.

  Ralph snaps back, “Don’t say one word about Wilma, I don’t want to hear you start finding fault with her. Wilma’s your host, you have no right to do that here, Mama!”

  “I’m not finding fault,” I say, “I’m just saying that woman likes meat like…like a predator.”

  “Not one more word!” cries my son.

  Suddenly he’s covered in sweat. He turns down the heat. I murmur, “You almost seem like you’re afraid.”

  Slowly we drive down to the sea, leaving the cold shadow behind us, the icy, bright sky, the fearful, gray little houses huddled beneath the church.

  Little by little I feel the heat hitting the metal of the car. It works its way inside, ever more insistent. My son parks on the shoulder, frees himself from the seat belt, takes off his coat as he sits, with the precise, mechanical movements of someone who does the same thing in the same order every day.

  “I’d like to know,” I say, “is it true that you came to Bordeaux this year and saw Ange?”

  “Yes,” says my son. “He told you that?”

  “No,” I say. “He didn’t tell me a thing.”

  Humiliation and sadness weigh on me. I feel stupid and bitter, ill-treated. And yet Ange and I never kept secrets—oh, did I ever love him as much as I said, how can I be sure? And would I have loved him if he hadn’t given me a chance at a good Bordeaux life, respectable and superior, how can I be sure?

  My son stops the car in a hospital parking lot, in a little seaside city with low white houses and palm trees so tall their slender summits lash back and forth in the burning hot wind. A stiff breeze slaps our faces as soon as we open the doors. My son is dressed in Bermuda shorts and a Hawaiian shirt. I wonder if I should take off my cardigan.

  I’m marked, I tell myself, with the very visible sign of something ugly and loathsome, even if it doesn’t have a name. In the end, I leave my sweater in the car. I catch up with my son in the hospital, then follow him up to the children’s ward, where, he says, there’s a little patient he visits every day. He opens the door to a room, shows me in.

  And from her chair by the bed, not standing up, Nathalie gives me a smile, or rather, her white chapped lips briefly open in a sign of friendly recognition, almost immediately erased by her usual sorrow.

  To one side, I glimpse the vague shape of a child’s bandaged—oh, I’m not ready to look at that yet.

  My son takes Nathalie’s hands in his.

  “So, little man, how’s it going this morning?” he then says toward the bed (and he bends over the child with such outright tenderness that he could easily be the boy’s father).

  Nathalie rubs her forehead, pushing aside her pale hair. The child doesn’t answer, and she quietly tells my son that it’s not going well. Then she turns her limpid, red-rimmed eyes toward me. Grief has bent her lips into a stiff little smile, like a smirk. I slowly take the three steps separating me from her chair, which she seems helpless to stand up from, held down by sorrow or weariness or trepidation (maybe he won’t die as long she keeps her eyes trained on him?), and just as slowly, gracelessly, I kneel down before her and lay my forehead on her thighs.

  A few seconds go by, and then I stand up, my hands now replacing my forehead on Nathalie’s thighs to push myself up. Did I put too much weight on her muscles? She grimaces in pain.

  I back toward the door—oh, I make very sure not to look at the bed.<
br />
  Embarrassed, my son pretends not to notice. He talks to the child in a comforting, lighthearted voice, but he did see me prostrate myself, and it made him uncomfortable, maybe even irritated and ashamed. I stammer out a goodbye and flee. The door slams behind me, making all the others shudder.

  33. A little golden bag, a little silver bag

  Back in the parking lot, by my son’s car, I realize there’s no way I can wait for him in this heat.

  I circle around the hospital and start down a shady street lined by the tall whitewashed walls of houses whose courtyards or gardens are tucked away out of sight. The few women I meet are short and brown-haired. They greet me with reserved but benevolent nods, and sometimes a word I don’t understand, in a language nonetheless close to my own, as if the heat and humidity had dilated that language’s sounds, opened its vowels, slowed its pace.

  As I walk past a half-open door, something stops me in my tracks—a faraway melody, a reedy singsong that part of me recognizes, the other part remembering nothing and telling me to keep walking, my feet of two minds, one crashing into the other.

  I listen closely. The coolness of the room beyond this half-open door is suffused with a smell I think I know—or do I?

  I feel myself shiver, cold sweat trickling over me. I want to get away, but I stay where I am, watching for something.

  I can hear the song more clearly now, and the voice, a very old woman’s voice, a timeworn voice, but still steadfast, tenacious—I know that voice, oh how I know it, just as I know the words:

  Come dance, my little golden bag,

  Come dance,

  God stands over all,

  Come dance to the sound of the balafon,

  Little white hen, come dance!

  Didn’t I once struggle to repeat those very words after the woman who sang them to me in the voice I now hear, however weakened and wavering with age—a patient, happy voice, stubborn beneath its seeming humility?

  Come dance, my little silver bag!

  No, there’s no song I know as well, as profoundly as this one, even if I’ve forgotten I know it, even if I took great care never to sing it to anyone. Suddenly the voice goes silent, as if it knew someone was lurking and listening.