Marie Ndiaye - Three Strong Women

He hung up and leaned against the wall of the phone booth.

His pale blue short-sleeved shirt was soaked. He could feel it, warm and damp, against the glass.

Ah, how tiresome, unsettling, and humiliating it all was, how he yearned to hide away and weep once his anger had cooled.

Could it be, could it be that she’d … taken to heart the words he wasn’t even certain of having uttered and which in any case he was certain of never having formulated inside his head?

He picked the receiver up again so abruptly that it slipped through his fingers, struck the glass, and dangled at the end of its cord.

From the pocket of his jeans he pulled out his ancient dog-eared address book and looked up Madame Pulmaire’s number, even though he was sure he had phoned the old bag often enough to know it by heart.

She wasn’t actually all that decrepit, hardly older than Mummy, in fact, but she put on a vieille dame act and had a conspicuous way of deigning to oblige the complicated and slightly disgusting favors that ever since they’d become neighbors Rudy was wont to request — even while she, no doubt, made it a point of honor never to ask them for anything.

As he expected, she answered straightaway.

“It’s Rudy Descas, Madame Pulmaire.”

“Ah.”

“I just wanted to know whether … whether you could go and have a peek next door and check that all’s well.”

He felt his heart thumping madly as he tried to sound casual and relaxed. Madame Pulmaire wouldn’t for a second be fooled by that, and he was prepared to pray, weeping and wailing, to Mummy’s god, that nice little god who seemed to have heard his mother’s prayers and eventually answered them, but instead he simply held his breath, sweating, chilled to the bone despite the stifling atmosphere in the phone booth, feeling suddenly isolated in a static interval (for everything round about him — the foliage of the holm oaks, the leaves on the vines, and the fluffy clouds in the petrified blue sky — seemed frozen in time, in anguished suspension). In this immobility, the only thing that could propel him forward again would be the news that Fanta was happily at home, was still in love with him, and had never stopped loving him.

That, though, Pulmaire wouldn’t be reporting, would she?

“What’s the matter, Rudy?” she murmured, in an affectedly gentle tone, “is anything wrong?”

“No, nothing in particular, I was just wondering … seeing as I don’t seem to be able to get hold of my wife …”

“Where are you phoning from, Rudy?”

Knowing that she’d no right to ask, knowing too that he wouldn’t dare tell her to get lost before she’d deigned to heave her useless imposing mound of flesh as far as the Descas household and look through the bare windows or ring the doorbell to prove that this peculiar wife he had, this Fanta, who’d run away once before, had neither run off nor collapsed in a corner somewhere of this sad little half-done-up house — oh, how weary he was of understanding Pulmaire so well, how sullied he felt by acquaintances of that sort.

“I’m in a phone booth.”

“Aren’t you at work, Rudy?”

“No!” he shouted. “What has that got to do with it, Madame Pulmaire?”

There was a silence; it was protracted, but it betrayed neither offense nor surprise. Old Pulmaire was above such childish reactions, being invested with a weighty dignity that, if Rudy had an ounce of respect, would soon make him contrite.

He could hear her panting into the receiver.

And once again, as on that morning when Fanta defied him either by her words or her silence, he couldn’t remember which (but it made him wonder whether he wouldn’t at last tell her that a man can only struggle so long to preserve his manly honor as a father, a husband, and a son, striving every day to prevent the collapse of everything he’s built, endure only for so long the same old reproaches, whether verbal or in the form of a pitiless, bitter look, and smile through it all, not batting an eyelid, as if saintliness too were one of his obligations, would he finally tell her that, he who’d been abandoned by all his friends?), he felt welling up inside him, that warm, almost sweet anger he knew he ought to resist, but that felt so good, so comforting, to let flow, that he sometimes had to wonder: Wasn’t that warm familiar anger all he had left now that he had lost everything else?

He clamped his lips onto the damp plastic.

“Would you please just move your fat ass, and go do what I ask!” he shrieked.

Madame Pulmaire hung up at once, without a word or a sigh.

He slammed his hand two or three times on the cradle, then once again dialed the telephone number of his home.

He’d now learned to call it that—“my home”—however annoying and painful that was, but the expression only matched what Fanta clearly felt, what her whole attitude betrayed, that she no longer considered the poor ramshackle house their home but solely his, and not because of its disrepair, he knew, not because of its irremediable ugliness, about which at bottom he knew she couldn’t care less, but because he’d chosen the house, given it its name, and, in a sense, had created it.

This building, he’d decided, was to be the temple in which their happiness would dwell.

Fanta was now withdrawing from the house, taking along with her the child, seven-year-old Djibril, with whom Rudy had never felt very comfortable (because he realized, without being able to do anything about it, that he frightened the little guy).

Fanta was there, having no choice but to be there, but — Rudy thought — she felt no warmth for the house, she refused to lavish any care and affection on her husband’s home, to enfold her husband’s wretched house in an anxious, maternal embrace.

Taking his cue from her, the child also occupied the house in a noncommittal way, gliding lightly over the floor, sometimes seeming to float above the ground as if wary of all contact with his father’s house, or, for that matter — Rudy thought — with his father.

Oh — he wondered, dizzy with pain, all his anger spent, the sound of the line ringing in his ear, and beyond the glass the vines and oaks and little baby clouds coming back to life in a negligible wind — what had happened to the three of them that his wife and his son, the only people he loved in the whole world (for he felt only a vague, formal, inconsequential tenderness for Mummy), should look upon him as their enemy?

“Yes?” Fanta asked, in a tone so flat, so sullen, that at first he almost thought he’d phoned Madame Pulmaire again by mistake.

He was so taken aback that his heart missed a beat.

So that was what Fanta sounded like when she was alone at home and didn’t think he was around (whereas whenever she talked to him it was in a voice so full of hardness and rancor that she trembled), so that was how, when she was herself and not with him, Fanta spoke: with such sadness, such glum disappointment, such a melancholy that the accent she’d lost was revived.

Because, as far back as he could remember, she’d always tried to conceal it, though he never quite approved of her desire to appear to come from nowhere, finding the wish even a little absurd since her features were obviously foreign, not to mention that he found the accent endearing, always connecting it with Fanta’s energy, a vitality greater than his, and with her courageous struggle since childhood to become an educated and cultured person, to escape the never-ending reality — so cold, so monotonous — of poverty.

What a cruel irony it had been that he, Rudy, had been the one to pull her back into what she, all on her own, had so courageously managed to escape, that he should have been the one to save her from all that, helping her seal her victory over the misfortune of having been born in the Colobane district, not to have buried her alive — still young and beautiful — in the depths of …