Marie Ndiaye - Three Strong Women

At afternoon’s end, when the shade made the heat less oppressive, Norah went to see Sony.

She left each day at the same time, walking slowly so as not to sweat too much.

And she went over in her mind the questions she would put to Sony, well aware that he would only answer with a smile, never going back on his resolve to protect their father, but she wanted to show him that she at least was determined to save him and was therefore prepared to confront him fair and square.

She walked joyfully along the familiar street. She was at peace with herself and her body was behaving itself.

She said hello to a neighbor who was sitting at her door and thought, What good neighbors I have, and if one or another of them, the Lebanese baker or the old woman who sold sodas in the street, piped up, claiming to have known her ten years earlier, it didn’t upset her.

She accepted it humbly, without reason, as a mystery.

In the same way she’d stopped wondering why she no longer doubted that her love for her child would be rekindled once she’d done all she could for Sony, once she’d delivered them both from the devils that had sunk their claws into them when she was eight and Sony was five.

That’s the way it was.

And she was able to contemplate with equanimity and gratitude the way Jakob was taking care of the children. His way of doing it was perhaps no worse than her way, and so she was able to think of Lucie without worrying.

She was able to think of her brother Sony’s radiant expression when, in the old days, she used to throw him playfully on the bed. She could think of it now without suffering the torments of the damned.

That’s the way it was.

And she’d watch over Sony and bring him back home.

That’s the way it was.

COUNTERPOINT

HE SENSED near him a breath not his own, another presence in the branches. For some weeks now he’d been aware that he was not alone in his hideout, and patiently, without irritation, he was waiting for the stranger to reveal herself, even though he knew what was going on since it could be nothing else. He wasn’t annoyed, and in the tranquil darkness of the poinciana his heart was beating languidly and his mind was lethargic. No, he wasn’t cross: his daughter Norah was there, close by, perched among the branches now bereft of flowers, surrounded by the bitter smell of the tiny leaves; she was there in the dark, in her lime-green dress, at a safe distance from her father’s phosphorescence. Why would she come and alight on the poinciana if it wasn’t to make peace, once and for all? His heart beat languidly, his mind was lethargic. He heard his daughter breathing, and it didn’t make him angry.

T HROUGHOUT THE MORNING, the thought kept coming back to him, like the vestiges of a troubling, rather degrading dream, that it would have been better, for his own sake, not to have spoken to her like that. Going around and around in his unquiet mind the idea soon became a certainty, even though he could no longer remember the precise reason for the quarrel — that painful, degrading dream of which there remained only a bitter aftertaste.

He ought never, never, to have spoken to her that way. That was all he knew about their argument, and what made it now impossible for him to concentrate, or in any way gain an upper hand, anything that could prove useful when he returned home and found himself face-to-face with her again.

Because, he thought confusedly, how was he going to assuage his own conscience if his truncated memories of their disputes served to highlight nothing but his own guilt, over and over again, as in those troubling, degrading dreams in which whatever you say, whatever you decide, you’re always the one who’s irrevocably to blame?

And — he also wondered — if he couldn’t manage to assuage his own conscience, how could he calm down and become a proper father? How could he get people to love him again?

He certainly shouldn’t speak to her like that; no man had the right.

But what had pushed him to let slip those words that ought never to be uttered by a man who passionately desired to be loved as he had always been, that was what he couldn’t recall, as if the terrible phrases (but what were they, exactly?) had exploded inside his head, obliterating everything else.

So was it fair that he felt so guilty?

If only, he thought, he could prove before his inner tribunal that he’d had good reason to get so terribly angry, he’d be in a better position to regret his behavior and his whole nature would be improved thereby.

As for his present swirl of agitated, chaotic shame, it only served to anger him.

Oh, how he longed for clarity, for some peace and quiet!

Why did he feel, as the years drifted by, his fine younger days slipping away, that only the lives of others — the lives of almost everyone around him — were proceeding naturally, gliding along an increasingly unencumbered path, already illuminated by the warm, gentle rays of the light shining at the end? It was a fact that made it possible for all the men in his acquaintance to let their guard down and adopt a relaxed, subtly acerbic attitude toward life, an attitude inspired by a discreet awareness of having acquired wisdom at the price of perfect health, a supple, flat stomach, and a full head of hair.

Being plunged in grief, I find myself mightily dejected .

He, Rudy, could see what this wisdom consisted of, even if his own progress seemed painfully slow, his path choked with tangled undergrowth that no light could penetrate.

From the depths of his chaos, his fragility, he felt he understood the fundamental insignificance of his suffering, and yet he was incapable of deriving any advantage from this awareness, lost as he was on the fringes of the true existence that everyone has the power to influence.

So — he said to himself — despite his forty-three summers, he, Rudy Descas, seemed yet to have acquired that knack, that easy levelheadedness, that sardonic tranquillity that he saw informing the simplest actions and the most routine utterances of other men, of people who spoke calmly and with unstudied sincerity to their children, who read newspapers and magazines with wry interest, who looked forward to a pleasant lunch with friends the following Sunday, whose success they could cheerfully make every necessary effort to ensure, never being obliged to conceal the fact that they were only just emerging from yet another squabble, from a painful, degrading dream.

I find myself mightily dejected .

He was never, ever, granted any of that.

But why, he wondered, why?

That he’d behaved badly at such-and-such a moment and in such-and-such a situation where it had been important to measure up to the attendant joy or the tragedy, that he was perfectly happy to acknowledge, but what constituted the tragedy, where was the joy, in this diminished life with his family, and what were the particular circumstances he’d been incapable of confronting as a fully formed person?

Exactly. It seemed to him that his immense fatigue — though his fury was no less considerable, Fanta would say with a snicker, adding that it was just like him to claim to be consumed, even as the perpetual muted rage he inflicted on his nearest and dearest was far more wearing on them: isn’t that right, Rudy? — that his great fatigue resulted from his efforts to steer their poor tumbrel, that load of painful, degrading dreams, in the right direction.