Three Strong Women

by Marie Ndiaye

  Rudy couldn’t help admiring Manille even if he despised his trade.

  How was it that the same jeans and T-shirt or short-sleeved top, the same sort of canvas shoes, as the boss wore, always made Rudy look like some broke overgrown adolescent, even though Rudy was taller, younger, and slimmer than Manille: that he just couldn’t understand.

  He would never possess Manille’s relaxed elegance … No, he said to himself at the sight of his reflection in the second glass door, the one separating the showroom from the offices, don’t even think about it.

  It occurred to him that he had a stingy, crumpled, almost needy appearance.

  To whom could such a man, however kind, ever appeal?

  How would anyone ever notice his love of life and of others, even if he could find it again?

  How would people see it?

  He had to admit that in someone like Manille, however hardened he was by a life in business, by the unremitting calculations and the pragmatic maneuvering it required, and despite the stylish sportswear and Chaumet watches and the villa at the back of the shop—despite, that is, everything that had transformed Manille, a farmworker’s son, into a dreary provincial parvenu—one could still at once discern the amiability, kindness, and capacity for discreet compassion in his gentle, modest expression.

  And then Rudy wondered for the first time if it hadn’t been precisely that which had attracted Fanta, something he’d lost long ago, the gift for …

  He went into the office and closed the door quietly behind him.

  He felt himself turning red.

  But it was certainly that, and even if the term was pompous, there was no other word for it: the gift for … compassion.

  He’d never thought, even in the depths of his anger and grief, after Mummy (wasn’t it?) had told him about the liaison between Fanta and Manille, he’d never thought, no, that it was Manille’s wealth, and the respect and the power that went with it, that could have seduced Fanta.

  He’d never thought that.

  Now—oh yes—he understood what it was all about, and he understood it in the light of what he no longer had, for he finally understood what he no longer had, whereas he had been suffering without knowing the reason.

  The gift for compassion.

  He went to his desk and dropped down onto his swivel chair.

  Around him, in the big glass-walled room, all the desks were occupied.

  “Ah, there you are!”

  “Hi Rudy!”

  He replied with a smile and a little wave of the hand.

  On his cluttered desk, next to the keyboard, he saw a pile of leaflets.

  “Your mother brought them a little while ago.”

  Cathie’s voice, cordial but a shade anxious, reached him from the next desk, and he knew that if he turned his head his eyes would meet hers, with their questioning, slightly perplexed look.

  She would ask him in a low voice why he was three quarters of an hour late and perhaps, too, why he didn’t simply forbid Mummy to set foot in Manille’s workplace.

  So he contrived to mumble some answer that didn’t require him to look her in the eye.

  In the dazzling glare of the room the vivid pink of Cathie’s blouse shone brightly around her.

  Rudy could see it reflected in the white surface of his own desk.

  He knew too that if he turned toward Cathie he’d clearly see past her small, pale face to the other side of the picture window looking out over Manille’s villa, a big building with blue shutters, pale pink roughcast walls, and a roof of Provençal tiles, separated from the commercial premises by a simple lawn, and he couldn’t help wondering, for the nth time, painfully and fruitlessly, whether Cathie and the others, Dominique, Fabrice, and Nathalie, had watched Fanta’s comings and goings at the boss’s dream house, noticed how many times she’d entered, and why he, Rudy, had never seen her there, even though, during that terrible period when he “knew” without “really knowing” (no need to believe everything Mummy said, after all), he’d never ceased glancing at the picture window, past Cathie, who felt sorry for him and showed sympathy (so was everybody privy to his troubles?), at the villa’s fussy double doors with their wrought-iron fittings.

  How he’d suffered then!

  How ashamed, how furious he’d felt!

  All that was now long past, but he still couldn’t speak to Cathie without feelings of rage boiling up in him as he glanced at Manille’s house.

  He suddenly felt like saying to her in a dry tone that would make her uncomfortable, “But that’s pretty well the only consolation Mummy’s got left in life, distributing left and right her bundles of pathetic leaflets in support of poor cretins as lonely and idle as she is, how do you expect me to tell her to stop coming here and, really, who’s bothered by it, eh?”

  But he said nothing.

  He remained conscious of the aura of fuchsia that surrounded her and it annoyed him, because he couldn’t forget her presence.

  He pushed to one side the packet of leaflets held together with a rubber band.

  “They are in our midst.”

  The clumsy, almost laughable picture of an adult angel sitting down at a table with members of an ecstatic family, and the angel’s silly smirk.

  “They are in our midst.”

  Such inanities that kept Mummy from drowning in melancholy and antidepressants were, literally, her salvation.

  He was outraged that a Little Miss Nobody like Cathie, in the guise of trying to be helpful, would dare to suggest that he deprive Mummy of the pleasure of bringing her brochures to Manille’s place.

  What did she know about Mummy’s sad life?

  “Hey, tell me, does Manille want my mother to stop coming here?” he asked suddenly.

  He looked at Cathie, dazzled by the absurd intensity of her pink blouse. It was such an effort keeping his eyes fixed upon her face, to resist their tendency to wander, that his head started aching violently.

  Meanwhile he felt as if a hot poker was being pushed up his anus.

  “Not at all,” said Cathie, “I’m not even aware if he noticed your mother coming in.”

  She smiled, surprised he could think such a thing.

  Oh no, he thought, downcast, it’s starting again.

  He raised his buttocks feebly from the chair and balanced on the edge of the seat so that only the top of his thighs remained in contact with it.

  But the mild relief he’d hoped for failed to materialize.

  He then heard, through the fog of pain that had suddenly enveloped him, Cathie’s muffled voice.

  “It’s not like Manille to stop your mother coming, is it?”

  Rudy couldn’t now remember what he’d said or what he’d asked.

  Ah, Mummy. It wasn’t like Manille to show the slightest harshness, or to try to shoo away this ridiculous woman who really believed she could, by means of tracts written and printed in her living room—tracts that swallowed up a not inconsiderable part of her meager pension—convince kitchen salesmen of the presence of angels all around them.

  At the very most he’d …

  That familiar itch, which had taken him by surprise, he was beginning to subdue in his mind.

  He brought to bear all the old defense mechanisms (those he’d not used in quite a while, because for several months he’d been left in peace by the problem), the most immediate of which consisted in directing his thoughts toward topics having no connection with his own body, or with any other body, real or otherwise, so that, quite naturally, he started thinking intensely about Mummy’s angels, and he reached out with his fingers to bring the packet of brochures nearer to him.

  How would Mummy answer the question of whether angels ever suffered from piles?

  Wouldn’t she be happy and flattered to see him asking, with apparent seriousness, to hear him broaching …

  Stop, stop, he said to himself, in a panic. That wasn’t at all what he ought to be concentrating on.

  The pain came back, more insistent, ex
asperating.

  He had a terrible longing to scratch, no, to scrape off, to tear away, this goading, burning flesh.

  He rubbed against the edge of the chair.

  With a trembling finger he started up his computer.

  Then he looked again at the picture of the angel, the clumsily drawn figure, the naive decor sketched by Mummy, and suddenly he discerned beyond all possibility of error what his eyes had been content to skim over without any attempt at interpretation a few moments earlier.

  As he’d vaguely felt already, the three members of the small family seated at the table looked like Djibril, Fanta, and Rudy, and only the artist’s lack of skill shielded them somewhat from the risk of being recognized, but more than that someone had afterward attached to the angel a vigorous penis that was clearly visible under the table and seemed to emerge from a specially fitted pocket in the long white robe.

  Rudy flicked through the packet of fliers.

  The angel had only been mocked on the first one.

  He turned the packet over and pushed it toward a corner of his desk.

  He glanced at Cathie.

  At the same moment she raised her eyes and frowned anxiously.

  “Anything wrong, Rudy?”

  He grinned sardonically.

  Oh, how it hurt, and how angry he felt that it hurt.

  “Who put the brochures on my desk?” he asked.

  “I told you, your mother came in this morning.”

  “So she herself put them there, in person?”

  Cathie shrugged uncomprehendingly, slightly annoyed, and said, “I don’t see who else it could have been.”

  “But you didn’t see her?”

  Cathie was smiling now, but coldly, conspicuously restraining her feelings of impatience.

  “Listen, Rudy, I do know that your mother came in with her … brochures, or whatever. I saw her in the lobby, but it so happens that I wasn’t at my desk when she dropped them off.”

  He leaped off his chair, suddenly intoxicated with rage and pain.

  But a small sad voice whispered inside him, “How can you hope to be good when you suffer the torments of the damned?” It was the voice of the calm, cheerful, seductive Rudy Descas that Rudy wanted so badly to be again, with the pitiless moral standards he set himself and the less stringent ones he applied to others.

  And it was with terror and dread that he noticed Cathie flinch slightly as he approached her chair.

  He felt the others around him watching him silently.

  Had he become the sort of man feared by women and despised by other men, especially strong men capable of self-restraint, like Manille?

  He suddenly felt terribly unhappy, craven, useless.

  He grabbed the packet of brochures and flung it on Cathie’s desk.

  He hopped from one foot to the other, trying to calm the pain by rubbing his underpants against his inflamed skin.

  “And that charming little joke, whose idea was that, then?” he exclaimed, indicating the angel’s penis with his finger.

  Cathie glanced warily at the picture.

  “No idea,” she muttered.

  He picked the packet up again and went back to his desk.

  One of his male colleagues, at the back of the room, clucked his tongue audibly.

  “Hey! What’s your problem?” Rudy shouted. “Go to hell!”

  “Now you’ve gone too far, big boy,” said Cathie drily.

  “I just want my mother left out of it,” said Rudy.

  He was sticking to his guns that someone had wanted to humiliate Mummy by adding an obscene doodle to her drawing. Although he’d always hated her sanctimonious propaganda and consistently refused to talk about it, the diligent passion with which she drafted and illustrated her messages, taking a lot of trouble to produce the best result that her meager talent was capable of, laid an obligation upon him, he felt, to stand up for her.

  As in those threatening, implacable, irresolvable dreams where a heavy, absurd, and insurmountable obligation is laid upon you, no one but he could defend that unreasonable woman, no one but he could do it.

  He recalled confusedly when and how that feeling of obligation arose, and the memory was so embarrassing that he blushed violently. At the same moment, a pain even sharper than before pierced his anus.

  “They are among us, these pure spirits, and they address us in thought, even at the table, if only to ask us to pass the salt or the bread.”

  Who’s your guardian angel, Rudy, what’s his name, and what’s his position in the angelic hierarchy?

  Rudy’s father had neglected his angel—treating his dog better—which is why, Mummy hinted, he’d had to endure such a sad end, because his angel had lost touch with him or had worn itself out looking for him in the dark shadows of worldliness and indifference.

  While all was going well for him Rudy’s father had, out of spite or vanity, contrived to ditch his angel. Ah, men can be so arrogant!

  So where—Rudy had wondered—was the guardian angel of his father’s business partner when Rudy’s father knocked him unconscious and ran over him?

  Had he—the partner—been a foolhardy man, too cocksure for his own good, a person who’d delighted in giving his angel the slip? Or else did Africans in general have the misfortune of being poorly guarded, were their angels lazy and incompetent?

  The dirty work of defending Mummy, no one but he could do it, nobody else could …

  “You need to get a grip, Rudy,” said Cathie, in a tone of disappointment and reproach. “No one’s attacking your mother.”

  “Okay, okay,” he mumbled, unable to ignore his physical pain, so wrapped up in it that he could scarcely breathe.

  “You need to get a grip,” she said again, in an emphatic, monotonous voice.

  “Okay, okay,” he repeated, almost inaudibly.

  “If you don’t, Rudy, you’ll land yourself in serious trouble. Monsieur Manille is beginning to get fed up, you know, and so are we. You need to calm down and start doing your job.”

  “But who scribbled on my mother’s drawing?” he whispered. “It’s so … horrid!”

  He heard the glass door open, and, a few moments later, there was Manille standing in front of him with his fists on the desk, as if restraining himself from leaping at Rudy, and yet his look was kindly, almost tender, though a bit weary.

  And Rudy felt something slip between them, as palpable as a fine sheet of rain. It was their mutual embarrassment, a mixture of shame and resentment shared equally, it seemed, by the two of them: Manille, on the one hand, and Rudy himself—who to his advantage still had Fanta at his side, whereas Manille had lost her—on the other.

  But more recently Rudy had sensed something else, scarcely less embarrassing but also more comforting, a remarkable, inexpressible communion born of an awareness of having both loved the same woman at the same time.

  He saw Manille’s eyes focusing on Mummy’s drawing.

  “You see that?” Rudy asked in a shrill, febrile voice that echoed horribly in his ears.

  Hearing that acrimonious tone, didn’t Manille wonder, incredulously, how it was that Fanta had finally chosen this sickly, narrow-hipped, gangly, bitter man over him, how she could have gone back to Rudy Descas, who’d long ago forfeited all honor and respect?

  That was certainly, Rudy felt, precisely what he’d be thinking if he were in Manille’s shoes.

  Why had Fanta come back to him, in despair and completely benumbed, as if, held captive in an implacable, irresolvable dream, she’d inflicted upon herself the absurd obligation of spending the rest of her days in a house she didn’t like, beside a man who she spurned and who had from the outset deceived her as to what he really was by passing himself off as a mild-mannered person of integrity whereas he’d always allowed untruth to reside in his heart?

  Why, really, hadn’t she stayed with Manille?

  The latter gestured dismissively at the packet of brochures.

  “I’d like to know who played this
dirty trick on my mother,” said Rudy, panting slightly.

  “It’s not a big deal,” said Manille.

  His breath smelled of coffee.

  Rudy thought that nothing would have given him greater pleasure, at that moment, than a double espresso with sugar.

  He wriggled about on his chair, gradually finding a rhythm that, without getting rid of the pain, brought some relief through strategic scratching.

  “It wouldn’t have been you, by any chance?” he asked as Manille was about to say something.

  “If there’s anyone I’ll never make fun of, it’s your mother,” Manille murmured with a smile.

  He took his hands off the desk and stuck his thumbs in his belt, a fine black leather strap with silver studs that seemed to Rudy to sum up Manille’s personality, manly but restrained.

  “You perhaps don’t remember, you were too small at the time,” Manille said in a voice low enough so only Rudy could hear, “but my recollection is clear. Your parents and mine were neighbors, we lived in the country, in the middle of nowhere, and on Wednesdays my parents left me alone at home while they went to work, and they asked your mother to pop in from time to time to check on me. Well, your mother came by as agreed and when she saw how sad and lonely I was she took me back to your place, she gave me a nice big snack, and I had a lovely afternoon. Unfortunately that all came to an end when you left for Africa. But whenever I meet your mother I always recall those happy times, so I’d never do anything, even behind her back, that could upset her, never.”

  “I see,” said Rudy.