Three Strong Women

by Marie Ndiaye

  He’d had the impression that in moving there Mummy was not only submitting to, but also ratifying, even anticipating in a smug, rather nasty way, the judgment of absolute failure that, at the end of her life, a supreme authority would be handing down.

  Rudy had been burning to ask her: Was it really necessary to advertise her ruination in that manner? Hadn’t her existence in the countryside been more dignified?

  But as always with Mummy, he’d said nothing.

  His own situation seemed nothing to brag about, either!

  Besides, he’d soon realized that Mummy liked the neighborhood and that its large captive female audience made it much easier than before to peddle her stock of angelic brochures.

  She’d made friends with women the very sight of whom filled Rudy with embarrassment and sadness.

  Their bodies and faces bore all the signs of a brutal, terrible life (scars, bruises, skin turned purple through alcohol addiction). They were for the most part unemployed and willingly opened their door to Mummy, who tried to help them determine the name of their soul’s guardian and then track it down—the angel none of them had ever seen and who had never come to their aid because it had never been correctly invoked.

  Oh well, Rudy had finally said to himself, not without bitterness, Mummy was perfectly at home in her unlovely housing development.

  He wandered around a bit on the grounds, lost as usual (that happened every time he visited), going up and down the same streets without realizing it.

  Mummy’s pocket handkerchief garden was one of the few not littered with plastic toys, bits of furniture, and auto parts.

  The yellowish grass was overgrown because Mummy—completely taken up with her proselytizing—claimed no time to mow the lawn.

  Djibril got out of the car very reluctantly, leaving his schoolbag on the backseat. Rudy, getting out in his turn, grabbed it.

  He could see from the terrified look on the boy’s face that he’d just realized his father was going to leave without him.

  But he has to see his grandmother from time to time, Rudy thought, very upset.

  How distant, now, seemed the morning of this very same day when, informing Fanta he’d collect Djibril and take him to spend the night at his grandmother’s, it had dawned on him that he hadn’t so much wanted to give Mummy a nice surprise as to prevent Fanta from leaving him!

  Because why would he suddenly get it into his head to try to please Mummy that way?

  Even if he couldn’t agree with Fanta’s claim that his grandmother didn’t love Djibril—because that would be to make the mistake of seeing Mummy as an ordinary person who simply loved someone or didn’t love them—it seemed obvious to Rudy that ever since the child was born, ever since Mummy first leaned over his crib, examined his features, and found that he in no way corresponded, had no hope of ever corresponding, to her idea of a divine messenger, and so had never really taken the trouble to bond with the child: it seemed obvious to Rudy that it was this attitude—benign indifference—that Fanta had taken for hostility.

  Rudy put his hand on Djibril’s shoulder.

  He could feel the little, pointy bones.

  Djibril let his head fall against his father’s stomach. Rudy ran his fingers through the boy’s silky curls, feeling the beautifully smooth, perfect, miraculous skull.

  His eyes suddenly filled with bitter tears.

  Then he heard a cry above them, a single angry, threatening shriek.

  He took his hand away and pushed Djibril toward the garden gate, so brusquely that the boy stumbled.

  Rudy steadied him, gripping him tightly, and they crossed the overgrown lawn to the front door. Rudy thought it looked as if he were dragging the child along against his will.

  But, terrified and distraught, not daring to look up at the sky, he had no intention of letting go.

  But, moaning, Djibril shook himself loose. Rudy didn’t try to stop him.

  The child looked at him in fear and bafflement.

  Rudy forced himself to smile and banged on the door.

  If the buzzard was going to swoop down on Rudy before Mummy opened the door, what would become of his attempts at restoring his honor?

  Oh, all would then be lost!

  The door opened almost at once.

  Rudy dragged Djibril inside and closed the door.

  “Well, well,” said Mummy in a cheery voice, “what a surprise!”

  “I’ve brought Djibril to see you,” Rudy murmured, still in a state of shock.

  There was no need to do that, Fanta, there was no need to do that now …

  Mummy stooped down toward Djibril’s face, looked at him closely, and kissed the boy’s forehead.

  Ill at ease, Djibril wriggled.

  She stood up next to kiss Rudy, and he felt from the quivering of her mouth that she was happy and excited.

  That made him slightly anxious.

  He guessed that her feverish cheeriness was due not to their presence but to something that had happened before their arrival and that their visit would in no way disturb, being negligible, superfluous alongside this mysterious source of exultation.

  He felt jealous about that, both for himself and for Djibril.

  He placed his two hands heavily on his son’s shoulders.

  “I thought you’d like to keep him for the night.”

  “Ah!”

  Nodding gently, Mummy folded her arms, and her searching gaze played on the child’s features again as if trying to estimate his worth.

  “You could have warned me, but all right, it’ll be okay.”

  Rudy remarked with some displeasure that she seemed particularly youthful and amiable today. Her short hair had been freshly dyed, a nice ash-blond color.

  Her powdered, very pale skin was stretched over her cheekbones.

  She was wearing jeans and a pink polo shirt, and when she turned around to go into the kitchen, Rudy saw that the jeans were quite tight and hugged her narrow hips, her small buttocks, and her slender knees.

  In the tiny kitchen all in dark wood, a boy was sitting at the narrow table having his tea.

  He was dipping into a glass of milk a shortbread cookie that Rudy recognized as being like those Mummy made for special occasions.

  He was about Djibril’s age.

  He was a beautiful child with pale eyes and fair curly hair.

  Rudy nearly retched.

  He had in his mouth the taste of ham and soft white bread.

  “There, you sit down here,” Mummy said to Djibril, pointing to the other chair in front of the small table. “Are you hungry?”

  She asked that with an air of hoping that his reply would be in the negative. Djibril shook his head. He also declined her invitation to sit down.

  “It’s a little neighbor, I’ve got a new friend,” said Mummy.

  The blond child didn’t look at anyone.

  Assured, confident, he was eating happily, diligently, his lips wet with milk.

  Rudy felt certain, at that moment, that there was no other explanation for Mummy’s eager bliss, for the hard sheen of happiness on her face, than the presence in her kitchen of this boy feasting on the shortbread she’d baked for him.

  No, there was no other cause for the quivering of her lips and trembling of her skin but the boy himself.

  It was equally clear to him that he wouldn’t leave Djibril with Mummy, not that evening nor any other, and having decided this, he felt immensely relieved.

  Holding his son close he whispered in his ear, “We’re both going home, you’re not staying here, okay?”

  Then, since Djibril was probably hungry and, at least for a short time, might as well sit at Mummy’s table, Rudy pulled up a chair for him and poured him a glass of milk.

  “Come,” Mummy said to Rudy, “I’ve got something to show you.”

  He followed her into the living room filled with heavy, useless furniture, navigable only by narrow corridors with complicated angles.

  “What do you think?”
asked Mummy in a tone of feigned detachment.

  He could hear her voice trembling with desire, impatience, and delight.

  “I use him as a model, he is an excellent sitter. I won’t let go of him.”

  She let out a brief, shrill laugh.

  “In any case, no one takes care of him at home. Good heavens, he’s so beautiful, don’t you think?”

  From the table covered in pens, paper, and brochures tied together with string, she picked up a sheet of paper, which she showed to Rudy.

  It was the sketch for a more developed drawing.

  Clad in a white robe, Mummy’s little neighbor was shown flying above a group of adults frozen in what was presumably intended to look like an attitude of fear or ignorance. The execution was clumsy.

  In a strained, sharp, but delighted tone Mummy explained, “He’s there, above them, and they’ve not yet recognized him, it has not yet been granted to them to see the light, but in the next drawing they will be enlightened and their eyes will be opened and the angel will be able to take his place among them.”

  Rudy was overwhelmed by a feeling of weary disgust.

  She’s stark, staring mad, and in the most ridiculous way. I can’t and shouldn’t cover up for her any longer. Poor little Djibril! We’ll never set foot in here again.

  Rudy thought his mother had read his mind because at that moment she smiled tenderly at him, stroked his cheek, and patted the back of his head with her cold, damp hand. Rudy found that rather disagreeable.

  Since she was short, he could see her fairly heavy breasts revealed by the plunging neckline of her polo shirt. They appeared swollen with milk or with desire.

  He looked aside and backed away to get her to remove her hand.

  She only talks to me about boring things that get on my nerves, but the things I still need to know she won’t ever take it upon herself to tell me, because she lost interest in all that long ago.

  “Did anyone ever find out,” he began slowly, awkwardly, “who provided my father with a gun?”

  She stiffened momentarily with surprise, but that was perceptible only during the time it took her to put the sketch down and turn toward him. Her dry lips parted slightly in an annoyed, pinched smile.

  “That’s all over and done with,” she said.

  “Did anyone find out?”

  She sighed ostentatiously, coquettishly, annoyed at his insistence.

  She flopped down in an armchair, seeming almost to disappear in the flabby folds of the oversize rosy vinyl upholstery.

  “No, obviously, no one ever found out, I’m not even sure if an investigation was ever carried out, you know the country, you know how things were. When all’s said and done, what does it matter? You can get hold of anything in prison as long as you can pay for it.”

  Mummy’s voice once again took on that bitter, rancorous, flat, stubborn tone that Rudy had heard ever since she’d returned to France some thirty years earlier, and that her passion for angels and the almost professional way she disseminated her propaganda about them had made her gradually forsake.

  He heard it again, intact, unaltered, as if the memory of that time had to be accompanied by the voice and feelings associated with it.

  “Your father had the wherewithal to pay, it wasn’t a problem. He hadn’t been in Reubeuss six weeks before he’d found a way of getting hold of a revolver; as you’re well aware he knew how things were done, he knew the right people, he knew the country. He’d decided he preferred to die rather than rot in Reubeuss and endure a trial in which he knew he was bound to be convicted.”

  “He told you that? That he preferred to die?”

  “Well, not in so many words, but there are ways of implying such things. At the time, even so, I’d never have imagined he’d go that far: have a gun delivered to his cell. No, I’d never have imagined that.”

  And, as always, that sullen, bitter, vaguely whining tone in Mummy’s voice that used to so upset Rudy in the past, creating a feeling of guilt that he hadn’t managed to make her happy merely by his kindly, considerate presence at her side, by the mere fact that he existed, the only child of this lowly woman.

  “There were no individual cells, not even for six or seven people, he was in a room with sixty other men and it was so hot—or so he told me when I went to visit him—that he was practically fainting most of the time. I did what I could, I tried to get to know his guardian angel, but faced with his ill will, his negative attitude, his disbelief, what could I hope to achieve?”

  Rudy wanted to ask—nearly did ask—“Was I there when my father ran his 4×4 over Salif? Did I actually see that?”

  But a deep reluctance, a vivid, burning hatred, stopped him from uttering these words.

  How he loathed his father for obliging him to formulate such terrible questions.

  It seemed to him that whatever had really occurred between Salif and his father that afternoon, his father was at least guilty of having made it possible for such words to stick to him, even if only in the form of a question.

  Nevertheless, filled with disgust, he didn’t ask that question.

  It was Mummy who started speaking about his father again, perhaps because she’d sensed how much spite and disapproval had been conveyed by her silence.

  “He’d convinced himself that he was done for,” she continued in her caustic, plaintive, monotonous voice, “that the police investigation, or whatever it was, considered him guilty as hell and so wouldn’t be impartial, whereas it could already be proved that this Salif had indeed swindled him, I could see that right away when I went through your father’s papers. It was, after all, justified, I don’t mean the blows and the rest, but the anger, the fight, because this Salif, when all’s said and done he should have been your father’s best friend out there, it was your father who’d given him board and lodging and taken him on as his business partner, and there Salif goes and starts doing the one thing Abel couldn’t forgive or even understand: cheating him outrageously, without a hint of a problem between them, not a change in Salif’s smile or friendly voice whenever they met. All that could have been said at the trial. I went through every estimate Salif had drawn up, for bricklaying, joinery, and plumbing, and I went to see the contractors and lo and behold they were all one way or another in cahoots with Salif or with Salif’s wife and God knows who else, it jumped right out at you that they were inflated, those estimates, and that Salif had worked it all out, how he was going to be able to line his pocket along the way. Me, I could never understand how Abel could trust that one so blindly, you have to watch your back constantly over there, people are out to jew you the whole time. Friendship, that doesn’t exist over there. They may believe in God, but the angels, they despise, think they’re funny. When you went back there to try to make a living, I knew it wouldn’t work out, I was certain of it, and as you can see, it didn’t work out.”

  “If it didn’t work out,” said Rudy, “it was because of my father, not the country.”

  She snickered with a little triumphant acrimony.

  “That’s what you think. You’re too white and too blond, naturally they would have taken you for a ride, they would have done everything to destroy you. Even love, that doesn’t exist over there. Your wife, she married you out of self-interest. They don’t know what love is, all they think about is money and status.”

  He left the room and returned to the kitchen. He felt his anger assuaged, almost eliminated, by his intoxicating, invigorating decision never to visit Mummy again, and he thought, She can come if she feels like it, thinking too, Manille & Co., that’s all over and done with, what joy, to feel young, light as a bird, in the way he hadn’t since the time he’d first met Fanta and walked down the boulevard de la République in the warm, pale, dazzling morning light, in the simple, clear awareness of his own honesty and goodness.

  Slumped on his chair, Djibril hadn’t touched his milk or shortbread.

  The other boy was still eating with concentration and delight. Djibril lo
oked at him with glum alarm.

  “You see, he wasn’t hungry,” Mummy said as she walked in.

  Outside, as they moved toward the car, Rudy put his arm around Djibril and had the sense of having glimpsed on the ground, just in front of the Nevada, an indistinct lump of something that had no reason to be there.

  But the thought was so fleeting and superficial and, besides, he was so proud and happy to be taking Djibril home to Fanta that he forgot what his eyes had perhaps seen almost as soon as he’d wondered whether his eyes had seen anything.

  He let Djibril in and dropped the schoolbag at his feet, and for the first time in ages—it troubled Rudy to think—the child shot him a big wide smile.

  He got in too and started the engine.

  “Home,” he said with gusto.

  The car moved forward.

  It passed over a big, soft, dense mass that threw it slightly off balance.

  “What was that?” asked Djibril.

  A few yards on Rudy pulled over.

  “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,” he murmured.

  The child had turned and was looking out of the rear window.

  “We’ve run a bird over,” he said in his clear voice.

  “It’s nothing,” Rudy muttered, “it doesn’t matter now.”

  COUNTERPOINT

  WAKING FROM her daily siesta, emerging from hazy, satisfied dreams, Madame Pulmaire gazed for a moment at her hands resting contentedly on her thighs then looked toward the living-room window opposite her armchair and saw on the other side of the hedge her neighbor’s long neck and small delicate head that seemed to emerge from the bay tree like a miraculous branch, an unlikely sucker looking at Madame Pulmaire’s garden with big wide eyes and with lips parted in a big, calm smile that greatly surprised her because she couldn’t ever remember seeing Fanta look happy. Hesitantly, shyly, she raised a rather stiff, withered hand flecked with liver spots, and waved it slowly from right to left. And the young woman on the other side of the hedge, the strange neighbor called Fanta who’d only ever looked at Madame Pulmaire with a blank expression, raised her hand too. She waved to Madame Pulmaire, she waved to her slowly, deliberately, purposefully.