Three Strong Women

by Marie Ndiaye

  WHEN HER HUSBAND’S parents and sisters told her what was expected of her, what she was going to have to do, Khady knew already.

  She hadn’t known what form their wish to get rid of her would take, only that the day would come when she’d be ordered to leave, that much she’d known or gathered or felt (that is to say, before tacit understanding and unexpressed feelings had gradually established knowledge and certainty) from the earliest months of her settling in with her husband’s family following his death.

  She remembered her three years of marriage not as a time of serenity, because the longing, the terrible desire for a child, had made each month a frantic climb toward a possible blessing, then, when her period came, a collapse followed by gloomy despondency before hope returned and, with it, the gradual, dazzling, breathless ascent day after day, right up to the cruel moment when a barely perceptible pain in her lower abdomen let her know that it hadn’t worked this time—no, those years had certainly been neither calm nor happy, because Khady never did get pregnant.

  Still, she thought of herself as a string stretched to the limit, strong, taut, vibrating in the impassioned confinement of these expectations.

  It seemed to her that she’d not been able to concentrate on anything, throughout those three years, other than on the rhythmic alternation of hope and disillusionment, so that disillusionment—provoked by a twinge in her groin—might quickly be followed by the stubborn, almost ridiculous surge of hope regained.

  “It’ll perhaps be next month,” she would say to her husband.

  And, careful not to show his own disappointment, he would reply in a kindly way, “Yes, for sure.”

  Because that husband of hers had been such a nice man.

  In their life together he’d given her full latitude to become that desperately taut string that resonated with every emotion, and he’d surrounded her with kindness, always speaking to her with prudence and tact, exactly as if, busy with creating a new life, she needed to be surrounded by an atmosphere of silent deference in order to be able to perfect her art and give form to her obsession.

  Never once had he complained about the overwhelming presence in their life of the baby that never got conceived.

  He’d played his part rather selflessly, she said to herself later.

  Wouldn’t he have been within his rights to complain about the inconsiderate way she pulled him toward her or pushed him away at night, depending on whether she thought her husband’s semen would be of any use at that moment, about the way, during her non-ovulating period, she made no bones about not wanting to make love, as if the expenditure of useless energy could damage the only project she then cared about, as if her husband’s seed constituted a unique, precious resource of which she was the keeper and which should never be squandered in the pursuit of mere pleasure?

  He’d never complained.

  At the time she hadn’t seen how noble his behavior was because she wouldn’t have understood that he could have complained about—or even simply rejected the legitimacy, necessity, and nobility of—the asceticism (ascetic only in a sense, since their tally of sexual encounters was impressive) that this mania to have a child subjected them.

  No, for sure, she wouldn’t have understood that at the time.

  It was only after the death of her husband, of the peaceable, kindly man she’d been married to for three years, that she was able to appreciate his forbearance. That only happened once her obsession had left her and she’d become herself again, rediscovering the person she’d been before her marriage, the woman who’d been able to appreciate the qualities of devotion and gallantry that her man possessed in abundance.

  She then felt a great unhappiness, remorse, hatred almost, about the mad desire to get pregnant that had blinded her to everything else, in particular her husband’s illness.

  Because must he not have been ill for some time to die so suddenly, early one pale morning during the rainy season? He’d scarcely gotten out of bed that day to open as usual the little café they ran in a lane in the medina.

  He’d got up and then, with a sort of choking sigh, almost a muted sob, a sound as discreet as the man himself, he collapsed at the foot of the bed.

  Still in bed herself and barely awake, at first Khady hadn’t imagined that her husband was dead, no, not for a second.

  For a long time she would blame herself about the thought that had flashed through her mind—oh, a year or more later, she was, actually, still angry with herself—about this thought: Wouldn’t it be just their rotten luck if he fell ill just at that moment, a good two weeks after her period, with her breasts feeling slightly harder and more sensitive than usual, leading her to suppose she was fertile, but if this man was so unwell as to be incapable of making love to her that evening, what a mess, what a waste of time, what a horrid letdown!

  She’d gotten up in her turn and gone over to him, and when she’d realized he was no longer breathing but just lying there inert, hunched up, his knees almost touching his chin, with one arm trapped under his head and with one innocent, vulnerable hand lying flat, palm upward, on the floor, looking, she’d said to herself, like the child he must have been, small and brave, never contrary but open and forthright, solitary and secretive under a sociable exterior, she’d seized his open palm and pressed it to her lips, tortured at the sight of so much decency in one human being. But even then stupefied grief was battling it out in her heart with an unabated, undeflated exultation at the thought that she was ovulating, and at the same moment as she was running to get help, diving into the house next door, unaware of the tears pouring down her cheeks, that part of her still obsessed with pregnancy was beginning to wonder feverishly what man could, just this once, step in for her husband to avoid missing the chance to get pregnant this month and break the exhausting cycle of hope and despair that, even as she ran shouting that her husband was dead, she saw looming, were she forced to pass up this opportunity.

  And as her reason returned, and it began to dawn on her that this fertile period would be wasted, and likewise the months to follow, a huge disappointment—a feeling that she’d put up with all that (hope and despair) for three whole years to no purpose—contaminated her grief at this man’s death with an almost rancorous bitterness.

  Couldn’t he have waited for two or three days?

  Such thoughts did Khady still, now, reproach herself for having entertained.

  After her husband’s death the owner of the café threw her out to make way for another couple, and Khady had had no choice but to go and live with her husband’s family.

  Her own parents had handed her over to be brought up by her grandmother, long since dead, and after not seeing them during her childhood for long stretches, Khady had finally lost touch with them altogether.

  And although she’d grown up to be a tall, well-built, slender young woman with a smooth oval face and delicate features, although she’d lived for three years with this man who’d always had a kind word for her, and although she’d managed, in the café, to command respect with an attitude that was unconsciously haughty, reserved, a little frosty, and thereby preempt any taunts about her infertility—despite it all, her lonely, anxious childhood, and later her vain efforts to get pregnant, which, while suspending her in an intense, almost fanatical emotional state, had all dealt their barely perceptible but fatal blows to her precarious self-esteem: all that had conditioned her to find humiliation not in the least abnormal.

  So that, when she found herself living with in-laws who couldn’t forgive her for having no means of support and no dowry, who despised her openly and angrily for having failed to conceive, she willingly became a poor, self-effacing wretch who entertained only vague impersonal thoughts and inconsistent, pallid dreams, in the shadow of which she wandered about vacantly, mechanically, dragging her indifferent feet and, she believed, hardly suffering at all.

  She lived in a three-room rundown house with her husband’s parents, two of her sisters-in-law, and the young children of
one of them.

  Behind the house there was a backyard of beaten earth shared with the neighbors.

  Khady avoided going into the yard because she feared being peppered with sarcastic comments about her worthlessness and the absurdity of her existence as a penniless, childless widow, and when she had to go there to peel the vegetables or prepare the fish she huddled so closely inside her batik, with only her quick hands and high cheekbones showing, that people soon stopped paying her any attention and forgot all about her, as if this silent, uninteresting heap no longer merited a rude or jeering remark.

  Without pausing in her work she would slide into a kind of mental stupor that stopped her taking in what was going on around her.

  She then felt almost happy.

  She seemed to be in a blank, light sleep that was devoid of both joy and anguish.

  Early every morning she would leave the house with her sisters-in-law. All three carried on their heads the plastic bowls of various sizes that they would sell in the market.

  There they found their usual spot. Khady would squat a little to one side of the two others, who pretended not to notice her presence, and, responding with three or four raised fingers when asked the price of the bowls, she stayed there for hours on end, motionless in the noisy bustle of the market, which made her slightly dizzy and lulled her back into a state of torpor shot through with pleasing, unthreatening, pallid dreams like long veils flapping in the wind, on which there appeared from time to time the blurred face of her husband smiling his everlasting kindly smile, or, less often, the features of the grandmother who’d brought her up and sheltered her and who had been able to see, even while treating her harshly, that she was a special little girl with her own attributes and not any old child.

  So much so that she’d always been conscious of her uniqueness and aware, in a manner that could neither be proved nor disproved, that she, Khady Demba, was strictly irreplaceable, even though her parents had abandoned her and her grandmother had only taken her in because there hadn’t been a choice, and even though no being on earth needed her or wanted her around.

  She was happy to be Khady, there’d never been a chink of doubt between herself and the implacable reality of the person called Khady Demba.

  She’d even happened on occasion to feel proud of being Khady because—she’d often thought with some amazement—children whose lives seemed happy, who every day got generous helpings of chicken or fish and wore clothes to school that weren’t stained or torn, such children were no more human than Khady Demba, who only managed to get a minuscule helping of the good things in life.

  That now was still something she never doubted: that she was indivisible and precious and could only ever be herself.

  She just felt tired of existence and weary of all the humiliation she had to undergo, even if it didn’t cause her any real pain.

  All the time they were sitting together at their stall her husband’s sisters never once spoke to her.

  On the way back from the market they were still quivering with pleasure, as if all the feverish, impassioned hubbub of the crowd still filled them with excitement and they had to shake it off before getting home, and still they never stopped needling, shoving, and pinching Khady, irritated and titillated by the impregnable firmness of her body, the cold scowl on her face, knowing or surmising that she would blot everything out as soon as they began tormenting her, knowing or surmising that the most cutting remarks were transformed in her mind into reddish veils, which started to get entangled a bit, if fleetingly, with the others, her pallid beneficent dreams—knowing it, surmising it, and feeling silently irritated by it.

  Khady sometimes stepped quickly aside or began walking at a dauntingly slow pace, and the two sisters soon started losing interest in her.

  On one occasion, one of them shouted, “What’s the matter, you a mute?” when she turned around and noticed the lengthening distance between themselves and Khady.

  Khady couldn’t prevent her mind from taking that in. The expression surprised her by revealing what, without realizing it, she already knew: that she hadn’t opened her mouth in quite a long while.

  The chattering in her dreams, made up vaguely of the voice of her husband, her own, and that of a few nameless people from the past, had given her the impression that she had been speaking from time to time.

  She was seized with a sudden panic: if she forgot how words were formed and uttered, could she count on having a future, even a tiresome one?

  She sank back into numb indifference.

  But she made no effort to say anything, fearing that she mightn’t succeed and that a strange, disturbing sound would reach her ears.

  When her in-laws—backed up by their two daughters, who, for once, were content to listen in silence—told Khady she had to go, they didn’t expect her to reply, because they weren’t asking her a question but giving her an order, and, although her apathy was now being tempered by anxiety, Khady said nothing, asked nothing, believing perhaps that by her silence she avoided the risk of their intentions concerning her person acquiring greater precision, of her departure becoming a reality, as if, she would later tell herself, her husband’s parents had the slightest need to hear their words answered by any words of hers in order to be assured of the reality and validity of what they were proposing.

  No, they had no need to hear anything she might have to say, none whatever. Khady knew that for them she simply did not exist.

  Because their only son had married her against their wishes, because she had not produced a child, and because she enjoyed no one’s protection, they had tacitly, naturally, without animus or ulterior motive, separated her from the human community, and so their hard, narrow, old people’s eyes made no distinction between the shape called Khady and the innumerable forms of animals and things that also inhabit the world.

  Khady knew they were wrong, but she had no way of telling them so other than by being there and looking obviously like them. But she knew that would not be enough, and she’d ceased concerning herself with proving to them that she was human.

  So she listened in silence, focusing on the patterned skirts worn by her two sisters-in-law sitting on each side of their parents on the old sofa, their hands lying palms up on their thighs, with a guileless fragility that wasn’t in the women’s nature but that all of a sudden presaged their death—which unveiled and prefigured the innocent vulnerability of their faces when they would be dead—and those defenseless hands were so similar to those of her husband, their brother, after his life had suddenly left him that Khady felt a lump in her throat.

  Her mother-in-law’s voice—dry, monotonous, threatening—was still spelling out what must have been, Khady thought distantly, a number of disagreeable recommendations, but she was no longer making any effort to understand.

  She barely heard about someone called Fanta, a cousin who’d married a white man and was now living in France.

  She opened her mind once again to those insipid pipe dreams that had for her stood in place of thoughts ever since she’d first come to live with these people, forgetting, indeed being quite incapable of remembering, her terror a few moments earlier at the notion of having to leave, not that she wished to stay (she wished for nothing), but as she believed those dreams would not survive such a radical change in her situation, and she would have to ponder, undertake, and decide a number of things (including where to go), no prospect, given her present languor, could have been more terrifying.

  Gray snakes on a yellow ground biting their tails, and cheery women’s faces, brown on a red ground above the inscription “Year of the African Woman,” adorned the cloth from which the sisters had made themselves skirts; the snakes and faces, repeated several times, were monstrously crushed by the folds of the fabric, and they danced in a cruel ring inside her head, displacing the kind, cloudy face of her husband.

  It seemed to Khady that the two sisters, whose gaze she normally avoided, were gazing at her derisively.

  One of
them straightened her skirt without taking her eyes off Khady, and now her hands, as they smoothed the fabric insistently, seemed to Khady as dangerous, provocative, and indecipherable as they’d earlier appeared helpless and artless when upturned and at rest.

  Khady was hugely relieved when with a wave of her hand her mother-in-law indicated that she was done and that Khady could leave the room.

  She’d no idea what had just been said to her about the circumstances of her departure—when she’d leave, where she’d go, with what aim, or how—and since for the next few days no one spoke to her again or paid her any mind, and she went to market as usual, the worrying possibility of her world being turned upside down got mixed up in her head with the memory of the printed snakes and faces, taking on their phantasmagorical and absurd character before sliding into the oblivion to which all pointless dreams are consigned.

  Then one evening her mother-in-law prodded her in the back.

  “Get your things,” she said.

  And since she was afraid Khady might take what didn’t belong to her, she spread out on the floor of their shared bedroom one of Khady’s batiks, placing on it the only other one she herself possessed, together with an old faded blue T-shirt and a piece of bread wrapped in newspaper.

  She folded the batik carefully and tied the four corners together.

  Then slowly, with an air of solemnity full of pique and regret, she drew a wad of cash from her bra, and (knowing that Khady had no bra of her own?) slid her hand roughly under Khady’s belt and into the top of her panties, tucking the money between the elastic and the skin, which she scratched with her yellow nails.

  She added a piece of paper folded in four, which contained, she said, the cousin’s address.

  “When you get over there, to Fanta’s, you’ll send us money. Fanta must be wealthy now, she’s a teacher.”

  Khady lay down on the mattress she shared with her sister-in-law’s children.