by Marie Ndiaye
Is it a little strange that she should use the very same words as Noget? She asks, almost declares, “You’re pregnant?”
“No,” I say, furious.
But my mouth is still filled with plaster, and only a gurgle comes out. Embarrassed, I clear my throat.
“On the contrary,” I say irritably, “the only reason I haven’t had my period in a while is that I’m menopausal, and it doesn’t mean you’re pregnant just because you have to go to the bathroom, right?”
And with this a sensation of great speed begins to run through my numbed muscles. Did someone hit me? Have I been drugged?
My fingers rub the coarse fabric of the seat beneath me, too small for me, I think, feeling my thighs hanging over the edges. I carefully turn my head in the direction Nathalie’s voice seemed—with a slight delay—to be coming from.
I’ve never fallen asleep so suddenly anywhere. In this dim light, I can scarcely make out her sharp profile, her downturned mouth. Her hands are holding a steering wheel. Oh, a Twingo, like the one Ange and I used to drive. The night is deep, the road deserted. Nathalie is driving so quickly that the tiny car skids and squeals at every curve.
“Slow down a little,” I say.
Several long seconds go by before she curtly shoots back: “I don’t want to miss the boat.”
Through the windshield I see only a silent, absolute darkness, unpierced by so much as the fleeting lights of a house now and then. Are we in the country, are we by the sea, are we driving through an industrial wasteland?
The road is in terrible condition, and the car lurches this way and that. Nathalie screeches to a halt beside a hedgerow. I quickly get out. My thighs are already damp with a few drops of urine. It’s so invigorating to empty myself, a warm breeze fanning my buttocks, that, protected from the darkness of the night and the darkness of all the invisible or nonexistent things around us, I forget my embarrassment at doing this in front of Nathalie. Far below me, I hear what seems a faint splash of breakers, the soft knock of smooth stones gently stirred by the waves. I take my time. My lungs swell in tranquil joy.
When I get back in the car, I find Nathalie turned to one side, looking out the window as if to make clear that she wanted to spare me the discomfort of imagining her seeing and hearing me pee.
“Thanks,” I say, cheerfully.
She starts off again. She’s panting and puffing in a weird way. Her hair’s come undone, and now it’s hiding her forehead and cheeks. She’s not the same as before. She has a strong smell all of a sudden, not unpleasant, but like nothing I know. Silently, too fast, we drive through the unbroken darkness.
Shouldn’t there be villages, shouldn’t there be supermarket parking lots with big glowing signs?
“Nathalie,” I say.
With a quarter-turn of her head, she looks toward me. I scream, I close my eyes. Then I open them again, staring resolutely straight ahead.
A dark, fleshless face, the head of a decomposed corpse, topped with a blond wig someone put there in a spirit of ridicule or the intention of causing terror.
My lips and hands are trembling. Nathalie is dead, I tell myself. How can that be? How much of all this is real?
And her wide, lipless mouth showing irregular yellow teeth, ready to clack together at any moment in a comical chatter, that’s why she’s not saying anything, why she can’t say anything ever again.
I’m far too afraid to dare look at the hands on the wheel.
Powerful hands strewn with little red hairs holding an identical wheel, Ange looking as if he’d been crammed into a toy, but today it’s a different pair of hands, though the car is exactly the same model and color.
Nathalie’s dead, I tell myself, and I’m alive, and yet she’s the one driving, and she’s been dead for a long time, and I didn’t realize it because I didn’t look at her closely enough. I’m so ashamed, and so afraid! Where is she driving me, then? Where could this specter I was stupid enough to take for a friend possibly be taking me? Unless my place now is to be a friend to shadows, and to nothing and no one else?
23. I don’t want to know her anymore
Eventually, to my great surprise, we drive past the Toulon city limits sign, signifying the endpoint of this furious race through an invisible landscape.
“We’re going to make it,” says Nathalie.
And since her voice is soft, tranquil, and human, I steal a glance at her. I see the woman from the train again—her sharp profile, her eye like a marble pressed into her flesh, her anxious mouth. I look at her hands and see long, fine fingers gripping the wheel. Deeply relieved, I let out a laugh.
And then, all at once, we’re half blinded by a wild riot of lights, a carnival fairyland. Nathalie parks in the lot of the port. We both sit and blink for a moment before we get out. I don’t dare look Nathalie’s way too often, for fear I might find her horribly transformed again, and I’m not sure how aware she is of these spectral mutations, so I wouldn’t want to upset her with displays of fear or mistrust. It simply seems to me—and I note it with sadness and rage—that there’s no way I can like her now, because she inspires a latent, inexpressible horror inside me.
Slightly intimidated (even her!), we amble toward the glittering hulk of the ferry boat, a towering façade of flashing lights emitting a soft, saccharine music. The last passengers are just getting on. I take out my ticket, and Nathalie immediately sees I’m in first class.
“Oh, too bad,” she says, “we won’t be together.”
She seems genuinely disappointed.
“Are you going to be all right?” she asks, and so much solicitude touches and alarms me at the same time.
I don’t trust her anymore. What more does she want to show me, in what state is she sorry I won’t see her, what torments of the soul? Does she realize I wasn’t listening to a word of her outpouring of grief? Does she realize that, in a certain way that doesn’t rule out shame, I’m not sorry I wasn’t? Was she hoping to make me pay for that by exposing who knows what, even worse horrors if through some stroke of luck we’d been assigned to the same cabin?
Mumbling, I tell her I’ll manage, there’s no reason things should go badly for me now.
“Still, be careful,” Nathalie whispers. “It’s so hard for people like you, it’s so unjust…”
“What do you mean by ‘people like me’?” I ask.
She slowly shakes her head with a sad little smile, either because she doesn’t take the question seriously or because she refuses to let the answer cross her lips, to defile her mouth, and offend my ear.
“I must tell you, I don’t quite understand what you’re talking about,” I say with a certain haughtiness.
I feel a sudden surge of hate for her. She shouldn’t say such things, I tell myself, not even to be nice.
Then the disparity between our two tickets forces us into two separate lines as we enter the boat through a gap in its side, like a vicious gash in its radiant, glimmering flesh made by a wood chisel or some other such tool, puncturing and then rooting around in my husband’s tender human flesh to be sure he can never recover and come to understand just what he is or what he’s done and be filled with the idea that he deserves the evil thrust into him, and so end up resembling that evil.
24. Finally a little fun!
The table is laid with a lavish array of delicate dishware that seems meant more for decoration than for use.
“Imagine daring to eat off such beautiful things!” I say to someone, slightly giddy.
In a luxuriance of bright lights and amber gleams (vast mirrors reflecting the gold of the frames, the crystalline glassware, the shining silver), I’m sitting across from that thin, austere man, the captain, by virtue of the custom that the ship’s master distinguishes between his passengers according to their prosperity and invites those in first class to share his table and the honor of his presence.
Oh, I tell myself—happy, lighthearted, almost untroubled—isn’t it nice to be favored, and how long has it been s
ince any sort of privilege was bestowed on me?
Because the captain sees me. We’re sitting face-to-face, and he regularly sees me and smiles, the same formal rictus he shows all his guests, and so, I tell myself, almost drunk with relief, it’s as if other rules prevailed at sea, rules that don’t include recoiling in disgust from people like me, and who knows, maybe rules that don’t include bothering with or even knowing about the kind of codes that have governed Ange’s and my existence in Bordeaux all through the past year.
Because the captain sees me. I don’t look like anyone else at this table, but here I am, and those aged heads nod at me when our eyes meet, and I nod my drunken, laughing head back, my astonished, eager head. The profusion of lights hurts my eyes. Sometimes I close them to give them a break. And when I open them again nothing has changed, not the senseless extravagance of the countless dazzling lights, not the captain’s cold cordiality, not even the little nods of my tablemates’ heads, their pale faces sagging with excess, quivering, wrinkled flesh, discreet salutations making clear that we’re members of the same clan.
I have money, I tell myself, and here that’s what matters, it erases everything else. Isn’t that wonderful? Isn’t that simple and just? How I now hate Nathalie with her pity and her rigid ideas about “people like me,” how amiable I find these old tourists around me, who judge nothing but the presumed abundance of my means. And so, I tell myself, whatever it is I’m supposed to be isn’t inevitably and everywhere visible, and a luxury cabin on a Mediterranean ferry can blind people to it, whatever it is that I still don’t see myself!
I feel slightly lost. A waiter sets a mayonnaise-slathered half lobster before me. The captain tells a joke. Everyone laughs. I can’t help blushing, my cheeks are hot and damp. I wish he’d give it a rest, but now he’s on a roll, and basking in his success. No one’s looking at me in particular, that’s not where the danger lies.
But my heart is uneasy, the side of my heart that’s still decent, appalled, and humiliated, but meek, so very meek.
I swallow some mayonnaise, and unlike Noget’s it tastes bitter and salty, like a concoction of tears and snot. Everyone around me is still laughing, their flesh heaving, excited. The captain tells a joke. It has to do with grotesque and odious people, intolerably ugly and stupid, and it’s about Ange and me, and my ex-husband and Corinna as well. The punch line is feeble, the humor crude. Oh no, it’s not funny at all.
Is Ange being punished for marrying me? Is he marked because he ended up becoming like me, just as people take on the traits of the evil thrust into them, which doesn’t frighten them, which they even take for a good thing?
It’s not funny at all, I’d like to shout, pounding my knife on the table. The captain keeps up his banter, so amused at himself that he bursts into laughter before he’s thrown out a new quip, leaving the crowd hanging on his every word, quivering with impatience, the forks in midair, the lobster forgotten, and sometimes the pent-up laughter rebels against its confinement in their jowls and erupts before its cue, in little belching blurts. My eyes fill with tears. But I’m here, protected by my money, anonymous in this exuberant illumination—I’m here, elegantly made-up and properly coiffed, and yes I’m too fat and slightly sweaty in the heat of the lights, but aren’t we all, around this table, overweight, sweating, and worn? I’m here, and delighted to be here in spite of everything, and then I suddenly hear myself adding my forced laughter to the salvo that greets the captain’s latest sally, and then my laughter strengthens, swells, dries my eyes. Mouth agape, bent over the table, I laugh so hard my throat feels ready to rip open.
I see Nathalie walk past the double doors that separate us from the ordinary dining room, left open because of the heat. She hesitates, then stops for a second, poised on one leg. I see her looking at my cackling face, my jutting teeth. Paralyzed by my demented joy, I’m incapable of acknowledging her in any way. Oh God, I ask myself, did she hear that last joke?
25. I hold her close
And what a surprise, later in the evening, to find the cleaning lady sitting on my bunk, her back slumped in sorrow, the woman in the navy blue uniform with little gilded buttons who readies the cabins for the night, turns down the beds, checks the supply of soap and towels in the bathrooms.
Right now she’s not doing any of that. Overpowering grief is rocking her shoulders back and forth, and beneath the dark fabric of her jacket I can see the very sharp, protruding line of her vertebrae, and it’s as if she feels so profoundly sad and lost that she doesn’t care that in that bony ridge she’s baring a fragile and intimate part of herself.
“Here now, here now,” I say.
She looks up, her face crumpled in despair.
“Is there anything I can do for you?” I say, slightly uncomfortable and afraid.
“It’s nothing,” she says, “it’s not me.”
“What do you mean, it’s not you?” I say.
This woman and I are about the same age. I sit down close by her on the bunk, unsure what to do.
“There’s this lady,” she says.
A tragic grimace deforms her mouth.
“Oh,” she says, “it’s so horrible, I can’t stop thinking about it.”
A shiver runs down my back as, from the brief description she gives me, I realize she’s talking about Nathalie, whose cabin she’s just seen to.
“What was she like?” I say. “Was she…” (I choke back a nervous titter) “normal?”
“Normal? Well, of course she was, but,” says the woman, “how normal can you be when you’ve been through such a tragedy—you don’t know what happened to her?”
“No, I don’t,” I say firmly.
I try to stand up, but an inertia holds me down, something resigned and defeated inside me, something remorseful and weary, and I lower my head, trembling, my nape exposed, accepting the blow and the awful weight of the axe, the fearsome jolt of the inevitable end.
“Her husband,” says the woman, wringing her hands on her clenched thighs, “and her two little children, she showed me their pictures, a boy and a girl and the husband, all wearing big smiles, a beautiful family, you know, and he took the children away on vacation to a house they’d rented, and she wasn’t there because she was going to come join them later, she had work, and the house caught fire in the middle of the night and the little boy was burned but he got out, and then the husband tried to get the little girl from her room and it was too late and they both burned, the father and the child, can you imagine? Burned to death, you understand. The boy’s in the hospital, third-degree burns, that’s why she’s going there, to see him. There were four of them and now there’s just the two, the little boy in such terrible pain under his bandages and her, the mother, all alone. She told me all about it but she never cried, and I don’t know why, I’m the one crying…I don’t know why…”
So devastated that my whole face is frozen, my jaw locked, I feel obligated to mumble, “It’ll be all right…”
My voice is breathy, inaudible. The woman collapses into my arms, her head on my breast, overcome with emotion. Through the graying roots of her red-dyed hair I can see the ice-blue skin of her scalp. I see my own tremulous hand clumsily smoothing that two-toned hair, clumsily massaging that exposed, shining skull, cold as a polished gem. The woman sobs gently, submissively. No doubt she can hear my pounding heart, I tell myself, my shamed, sorry heart, she can hear it, and what does she think of it?
Now patting that stranger’s damp brow, my hand has taken on the regular rhythm of the ferry’s rocking. It’s been a long time since I last held someone in sympathy, with no disgust getting in the way, as it did after Ange was attacked. Wasn’t it my father and mother I last pressed to my shoulder, the day I left Les Aubiers, with all the compassion that came with my certainty that I’d never come back, and their having no idea, such that even then, even as I was lying to them, telling myself I would never come visit them and they’d never dare, with their hesitant faces and imprecise, jagged speech, neve
r dare venture into the city in hopes of seeing me, even then I felt infinitely sad for them?
26. Too late
First it’s an old man in pajama bottoms who opens his door, and I beg his pardon and knock at the next one, which is answered by a young man, and so on all down the second-class corridor, very oddly, since there’s nowhere Nathalie can possibly be if not here, in one of these cabins.
I want to tell her I understand her grief now, and I’m sorry for her—I don’t think I could go on if there were no way of telling her that. That vital necessity, that frenzied, violent need to find the woman I’d hurt with my silence, my seeming indifference, keeps me scurrying up and down the corridor even after it’s become perfectly clear Nathalie isn’t here.
But, I say to myself, how could she have gone on being so thoughtful and kind, how could she have seen my disinterest in her story and gone on offering me her help, the support of her efficient, practical will? I certainly couldn’t have… Oh God, oh God, I have to kneel at her feet, nothing less… Maybe she thought there was no point expecting so much from a woman of my kind? Did my rudeness and heartlessness simply fit in with her idea of the way people like me typically react, people she takes pleasure in protecting, as it happens, because she’s a charitable, tolerant soul? In the end, it doesn’t matter, it’s unbearable, it’s unthinkable that she should be somewhere on this boat, asleep or awake, with no idea of the things I must tell her and show her—that she should be living and breathing so close by, bearing the scar of that unforgivable insult…
And I remember the few words I’d recalled on the train when she was done talking to me, I remember the fire and the children. “My God, my God,” I mumble, staggering over the corridor’s floral carpet.
Where is she, what does she look like now? I haven’t seen her—or maybe I didn’t recognize her?
Just then, at the far end of the hall, I see the cleaning woman disappearing into the stairway that leads belowdecks, the woman whose tear-soaked cheek was pressed to my bosom not long before. I call out, I run to the stairwell. I frantically ask her for Nathalie’s cabin number. And when she tells me it’s 150, I don’t dare contradict her. I don’t quite remember who answered when I knocked at cabin 150, but I know it wasn’t Nathalie. Could she be with someone else?