Marie Ndiaye - Three Strong Women

He looked at his watch.

He’d only five minutes before the workday started at Manille’s.

He’d stopped in front of the only telephone box around, by the side of the little road that boldly and cheerfully opened up a route between the expanses of vines.

The sun was already beating down.

Not a breath, not a scrap of shade until you got to the tall green oaks far off that surrounded the wine-producing chateau, an austere dwelling with closed shutters.

How proud he’d been when he introduced Fanta to this region where he was born, where they were going to live and prosper, and particularly to this building, the owners of which his mother knew slightly, people who made an excellent Graves that Rudy could no longer afford to drink.

He was obscurely aware that his proud delight in showing Fanta the small dark winery, almost dragging her up the drive and to the gate, up to the evergreen oaks, approaching with a confident air on the pretext that his mother knew the owners slightly (she must have substituted for their usual cleaner for a few weeks at the outside) — he was obscurely aware that this proud delight came of his having convinced himself, with no reasonable hope, that one day the property would belong to them, to Fanta and to him, that it would be passed on to them in some way, by some means as yet unknown.

This certainty had been unaffected by the three enormous dogs that had shot out from the back of the dwelling and rushed toward them, even given the sensation of pure horror that then seized him — Rudy Descas wasn’t that courageous a man.

Those friends have really let me down .

Hadn’t the unleashed Dobermans wanted to punish him for his presumptuous and absurd desires, for the heavy possessive hand he’d laid on the property, if only in his mind?

The invisible master whistled to the dogs and stopped them in their tracks. Rudy all the while was slowly backing away, holding his arm out in front of Fanta as if to dissuade her from leaping at the three monsters’ throats.

How useless and futile he’d felt on this warm spring day in the bright, tranquil silence that had followed the dogs’ retreat and their own return to the car, how pale and trembling he’d felt beside Fanta, who’d hardly batted an eyelid.

She doesn’t bear a grudge for my putting her in harm’s way, he thought, not because she is a good person, though she is, but because she’d never had an inkling that she might be in danger. Is that, he wondered, what it is to be courageous, whereas all I am is foolhardy?

For, while God was assailing me, I never saw a single one at my side .

Out of the corner of his eye he glanced at his wife’s impassive face and at her big brown irises as she looked down at the gravel path, prodding at it absently with the end of a stick, a hazel twig she’d picked up just before the dogs came charging at them.

Something, something in the natural placidity shown by a woman who was above all an intellectual, something in the seeming unawareness of her own composure on the part of a woman who usually got to the bottom of everything: something in her appeared to defy all understanding, he thought almost admiringly, but also a trifle unnerved.

He gazed at the broad, high plane of her smooth cheek, her thick black eyelashes, her not particularly prominent nose, and the love he felt for this unfathomable woman put the fear of God in him.

Because she was strange — too strange for him, perhaps — and he was wearing himself out trying to prove that he was a lot more than he seemed, that he wasn’t simply an ex-schoolteacher who’d come back to live in the region of his birth, but a man chosen by fate to bring something truly original to fruition.

For Rudy Descas, to be charged with no other duty than that of loving Fanta would have sufficed, indeed he would have welcomed such an obligation with open arms.

But he had the feeling that it was too little for her even if she didn’t realize it, and that, having dragged her from her familiar surroundings, he owed her a lot more than a heavily mortgaged shabby little house in the country and everything pertaining to it, all the pettiness that left him quite beside himself.

And now here he was, standing on the edge of this same cheerful little road, several years after the dogs had nearly torn them both apart (but hadn’t Fanta’s coolness stopped them in their tracks, hadn’t they retreated, perhaps with a growl, intimidated by a vague awareness that she wasn’t like other human beings?), on a balmy May morning very much like this one, except that his discomfiture on that occasion had barely dented his confidence in the future, in their chances of success, in their amazing good fortune, whereas now he knew that nothing would ever turn out right.

They’d driven off in the same old Nevada from which he was now extricating himself, because, yes, it was even then a nasty out-of-date car, painted grayish blue in accordance with the prudent taste of Rudy’s mother, from whom he’d bought it when she’d abandoned it for a Clio, and since he’d been sure at the time of soon being able to get himself something much better (an Audi or a Toyota), he’d encouraged Fanta to view their car as a rather treacherous dirty beast, sad and weary, whose last days they were patiently seeing out, never starting it up except to have it serviced.

He’d treated the poor Nevada with casual disdain, but wasn’t it now a veritable loathing he felt for its very sturdiness, the unfailing courage typical of a good old uncomplicated car, its decency almost, its selflessness?

Nothing could be more wretched, he thought, than to hate one’s car, how did I come to this and can I sink any lower? Oh yes, I can, he told himself, since that was nothing compared to what he’d said to Fanta that morning before leaving for work at Manille’s, taking the very same route that once used to cut a merry path through the vines …

What had he said to her exactly?

The wind was blowing in front of my door and it bore them away .

He left the car door open and stood there, his knees knocking, stunned by the extent of the damage he’d very probably caused.

You can go back where you came from.

Was it possible?

He smiled weakly, nervously, unamused — no, Rudy Descas wouldn’t speak like that to the woman he so ardently wished to be loved by once again.

He raised his eyes and shielded them with his hand. Sweat was already dampening his forehead and the fair hair covering it.

Fair too was the world around him on this mild, clean morning, likewise the walls of the small chateau over there, which some foreigners (Americans or Australians, thought Mummy, ever alert for news that would feed her penchant for voluptuous lamentation) had recently bought and restored, and so too the patches of light that danced beneath his eyelids whenever he blinked — if only they would flow at last, those tears of anger he felt weighing heavily within, pressing against his eye sockets.

But his cheeks stayed dry and his jaw remained clenched.

He heard behind him the roar of a car approaching. He crouched down at once behind the door of his own car, not keen to acknowledge the driver, who — given the setting — was very likely an acquaintance, but he straightaway succumbed to a rather doleful fit of the giggles at the thought that he was the only person in these parts who drove a blue-gray Nevada and that the vehicle betrayed the presence of Rudy Descas as surely as the silhouette of Rudy Descas himself would have done, indeed even more so, since at a distance Rudy Descas could well have looked like someone else.

For it seemed that everyone could afford to buy a car less than ten to twelve years old, everyone except him, and he couldn’t understand why.