by Marie Ndiaye
“All it took was you going away,” says Noget coldly.
The readers behind me are beginning to lose patience. Just as I’m leaving, Noget clutches my arm and pulls me back.
“So, Nadia,” he purrs, “your stomach’s much smaller now, did you deliver my child?”
“No, of course not,” I say, “it was menopause.”
I giggle nervously, uncomfortable to be talking of such things with him.
“You’re lucky,” he says.
He lets go of me, waves me off to make way for the people waiting behind me.
I leave the community center, take a few steps down the sidewalk. A tall man bumps my shoulder.
“Excuse me,” he says.
He has a baseball cap pulled down low on his head. In the mauve shadow of the visor, he gazes vaguely into my eyes for a moment. Then he races off, as if he were afraid I might try to hold him back.
At my parents’ house, I find my son paying his daily visit to Souhar. The little girl is delighted to see him, and she covers his cheeks with kisses as he cuddles her and half sings endearments into her ear. My father and mother are there too, sitting side-by-side, slightly slumped, tired.
When my son looks up from Souhar’s shoulder, I see that his face is glistening with tears.
“Papa’s dead,” he tells me.
Stunned, I ask stupidly, “Papa?”
I walk my son back to his car. Sitting down at the wheel, he says to me, “It was Lanton, your dear Lanton, who gave me the news. He called me.”
“You see?” I say.
“Somehow or other he killed Papa, I’m sure of it,” says Ralph. “He seemed so triumphant.”
He slams the door. As usual, he gives me a little wave. I see him wipe his eyes as the car turns away and drives off. Through the window I can still make out the back of his head, his delicate nape, and the distance accentuates the feeling I always got from my son, that in his oversized car he’s not a man but a lost little boy trying to put on a good front, and like every day I feel a pang of commiseration in my heart—my benign, gentle heart, my old, placated heart.
Slowly I walk back to my parents’ house. I can feel the dense heat of the paving stones through the soles of my sandals. And already I can hear my mother’s shrill, shaky voice as she sings for Souhar.
The hurt is gone, gone from inside of me,
And now I can dance.
The hurt ran away, quick as lightning,
I can dance!
Every day my mother, that stubborn old woman, makes a dish of buttered semolina and grilled chicken or fried fish with eggplant or tomato. I eat that food without a trace of doubt or fear, I swallow it gratefully. And when I come into the kitchen and smell the butter melting in the piping-hot semolina, I can’t help but think it was this, this semolina crumbled each morning by honest fingers, that helped rid my stomach of the thing that had taken it over.
Because, I say to myself, where could that thing—that black, glistening, fast-moving thing I saw slide over the floor of my room one night as I was undressing for bed—possibly have sprung from if not my own body? A quick, black, glistening thing that left a faint trail of blood on the floor, all the way to the door.
If, I say to myself, if someone forced me to tell of it as precisely as possible, if I had no choice but to tell of it and describe it, what would come to my mind as a way of comparing that quick, black, glistening thing to something familiar is an eel—a short, fat eel, though the thing might have been hairy, its fur smoothed and stuck down by something wet, blood or mucus.
That elusive thing left a faint trail all the way to the door.
I immediately scrubbed down the floor with a sponge. And, assuming my parents, still watching one of their favorite shows at that hour—a show about desperate people trying to locate missing loved ones—never turned their eyes toward that fleeing thing when, as it must certainly have, it crossed through the kitchen, then no one saw it, no one could later prove any link between it and myself, and set out, for example, to bring it back to me.
My parents laugh heartily at the television, like children. Sometimes, too, they’re moved to the depths of their souls. They wish I would watch that show with them—but how could I ever do such a thing?
My husband and I never had a television, I almost told them, with a touch of arrogant aggression.
Happily, those words never crossed my lips.
After lunch, seizing the opportunity of naptime, I call Lanton. The sound of his voice throws me into such disarray that at first I can’t speak.
“Hello! Hello!” he says, annoyed.
Finally I whisper, “Lanton…”
“Oh, it’s you, Nadia,” he says, his voice suddenly quiet and tense.
He says nothing more. I can hear his breathing, heavy and fast.
“I miss you terribly,” he then says, “terribly. You know, I think…” (He forces out a little laugh to hide his discomfort.) “I kind of think I can’t live without you,” he says. “I can’t live a good life without you.”
“Lanton,” I say, struggling over my words, “did you do something to hurt Ralph’s father, my ex-husband? Ralph thinks you did. Is that true, Lanton?”
“That nobody,” says Lanton, “he dared to come back and see me about his stupid ID card. I got rid of him, that’s all.”
“Got rid of him,” I say, “what does that mean, Lanton?”
“I don’t want to talk about that guy, please don’t make me,” says Lanton, almost breathless. “Nadia?”
“Goodbye, dear Lanton,” I say.
I hang up and sit for a long time, unable to move, prostrate on my parents’ little stool by the telephone.
Naptime over, I take Souhar out to the beach, pushing her stroller along the boardwalk. I half sing her name as I walk, Souhar, little Souhar, do you want a little golden bag or a little silver bag? Bent forward, her back to me, looking all around, the child nonetheless tells me by her nodding head and shivering shoulder blades that those words fill her with joy, even if she doesn’t yet fully understand them.
And now she stretches out one arm to show me a sight that amuses her. A man and a woman are running along the beach, holding hands, leaping and bounding like two young goats. But they haven’t been young for a long time, you can see it from here: the man is gray-haired, the woman wizened and ropy. They throw themselves onto the sand, roll around, stand up again, so happy they seem unhinged. They come toward Souhar and me, and we watch, standing still in our tracks.
I know them. Oh, I tell myself, I know them well.
The man is Ange, and the woman, in a short turquoise dress, is Corinna Daoui. Ange is wearing a white T-shirt and a linen suit. His face is fresh and healthy, he has a vacationer’s tan. Even Daoui has lost the blue-gray tint decades of cigarettes and poverty had given her.
Neither surprised nor embarrassed to have run into me, they each give me a kiss, one after the other, two identical noisy kisses on my cheeks, like family. I shift my weight from one foot to the other, clutching the stroller handles. Both at the same time (immediately laughing out loud at having spoken together), they ask, “So what’s new with you?”
I wave away the question with a vague gesture and a forced smile. I look deep into Ange’s eyes—but there’s no covert message inside them, and they return to me only an expression of well-being and a perfectly untroubled conscience.
“Let’s go have a drink,” says Daoui.
“Yes,” says Ange, “or a quick coffee.”
“I can’t,” I say, “I have to get home with my granddaughter.”
Daoui then exclaims over the beauty of the child, her marvelous black curls. In a muted voice, I quickly ask Ange, “So you’re better now?”
He looks at me with a vague, slightly perplexed eye, as if he were searching his memory for some clue to my meaning.
“Oh yes,” he finally says, “of course, yes.”
He pulls up his T-shirt, puts his finger to a pink scar on his side.
Daoui puts her arm around him, kisses his neck.
“And…what about work?” I say, breathless.
“I’ve got my class back again,” says Ange, “and Corinna will be working at the school as well, helping the children who have trouble keeping up.”
“We go home the day after tomorrow,” says Daoui. “You sure you don’t want to come for a drink?”
I weakly shake my head. Daoui takes my hand and presses it to her heart. Ange lays an impersonal little kiss on the corner of my mouth. Smiling, cordial, they walk off, arms around each other’s waists.
I start off again, pushing Souhar homeward.
My mother’s voice greets us as soon as we turn onto the street, her little-bell voice, wafted along on the warm, tremulous air.
Mama, so many problems,
Some people know things,
I don’t know anything,
So many problems, Mama!
