Marie Ndiaye - Three Strong Women

But she’d invited him home, and now, with a gesture and a word or two she was introducing him to her uncle, to her aunt, to a neighbor, and to others as well, all of them gradually revealed by the pale light, sitting at the back of the room on bare seats or threadbare velvet armchairs, silent, motionless, with a vague nod acknowledging Rudy, who felt out of place, not knowing what to do with his big hands, their pallor conspicuous in the dim light as his white forehead and long, smooth forelock must have been too.

He longed to fall at Fanta’s feet and swear to her that he wasn’t what he seemed — the tanned and ultra-confident type who spent every weekend at his Somone villa.

He longed to fall on his knees and embrace Fanta’s slender legs and tell her how grateful he was and how much he loved her for having allowed him to see what he had just seen: this austere room, these silent people who didn’t smile or pretend to be thrilled to meet him, this difficult, frugal life of hers, of which people at the Lycée Mermoz, where she arrived every day on her winged feet, in her clean, starched pink skirt, or in her white one, probably knew nothing, and of which the children of diplomats and the children of entrepreneurs, who went water-skiing in Somone every weekend — that whole group of people, who, he longed to tell her, he couldn’t abide, even though occasionally he envied them in secret — no doubt knew even less.

Oh, they certainly knew nothing about her or about the verdigris room with its heavenly glow.

The midday light now shone through the shutters on the face of the aunt, the clasped hands of the uncle, both of whom seemed to be waiting for Rudy to leave so that they could go back to what they’d been doing.

And he, Rudy, saw all that without knowing how to convey it to Fanta.

He contented himself — rather stupidly, he felt — with bowing to each person present, stretching his lips to form a little, quivering, awkward smile.

He knew at that moment, with a kind of surprised wonder, that he loved her, loved her beyond measure.

Now he was opening the door of his car and slipping inside, holding his breath.

It was even hotter, stuffier inside the car than in the phone booth.

Was he right not to call Fanta again?

And suppose that she was trying, not to leave but, in her utter misery at his decision to take Djibril to Mummy’s for the night, she was trying to …?

No, he couldn’t bear even to think of the word.

“Oh, good little god of Mummy’s, kind little father, help me to see things clearly!

“Help us, dear God.”

Couldn’t he just — only for a minute — phone her, wasn’t that, actually, perhaps what she was expecting him to do at this moment?

No (a small snickering voice murmured), actually she doesn’t care to hear the sound of your voice again until this evening, and what’s more she understands that you feel guilty and are trying somehow to make amends, even though you were only trying to stop taking the blame for all the wrangling on your own frail shoulders, an effort that has no doubt failed to win you any more respect and perhaps has even made her despise you a little more for acting tough only then to lose your nerve and come seeking her forgiveness and consolation after having offended her by telling her — is it conceivable? — to go back where she came from — can you really imagine that …

As he switched on the ignition he shook his head in denial.

Such a thing he, Rudy Descas, just couldn’t have said.

Just couldn’t.

He couldn’t restrain a little dry laugh.

Might he have meant — ha! ha! — that she should go back to Manille?

He was sweating profusely.

The sweat was falling on the steering wheel and on his thighs.

When he tried to put the car into first gear, the stick shift jammed.

The engine stalled.

He found himself once again wrapped in the silence that had been shattered briefly by the roar of the Nevada’s engine, and he now saw himself as forming a necessary, indisputable, and perfect part of this section of the countryside.

He was disturbing nothing and no one, and there were no restraints on him.

He leaned back against the headrest.

Although he was still sweating, his heart beat less fiercely.

He had to admit that Manille was, in his rather discreet, provincial way, a successful businessman, and that, even if he’d never gone in for water-skiing or owned any other house but the big villa he’d had built behind the firm’s premises, his manly, but sober, rather elegant, and reserved self-assurance, that particular gentleness he possessed, that of someone who could afford to be gentle because nothing threatened or frightened him, could still attract an upset, confused woman with nothing to do all day, a woman as lost as Fanta was now.

It’s strange, he said to himself, or perhaps it’s on account of love, that I can’t forgive her, whereas with him, it was as if I understood.

But stranger still, to tell the truth, I understand her side, too, so much so that were I a woman I could imagine yielding joyfully and easily to Manille’s uncomplicated charm — oh, how well I understand her, and how I hold it against her.

He was caught unawares by a feeling of panic, by a sort of hallucination, and his heart stopped as he tried to envisage Manille’s bedroom, which he imagined was like the rest of the villa, vast and conventional, filled with the usual expensive trappings of contemporary interior design, and when he gently pushed open the door of this unfamiliar bedroom and saw on the huge bed, in a dazzling light, Fanta and Manille, Manille stretched out on Fanta, Rudy Descas’s wife, Manille groaning softly while his powerful haunches, his centaur’s buttocks, moved in a calm, slow rhythm that brought out the dimples in his hairy flesh, and his head rested on the neck of Fanta, Rudy Descas’s wife, the only woman Rudy Descas had ever truly loved.

Or he could see on this bed the hindquarters of a no less vigorous man with a horse’s head panting as he lay on top of Fanta — should he kill this monster, shouldn’t he at least despise him?

And, under Manille’s much more considerable bulk, what novel and mysterious things could she be feeling, of which he’d never know?

Rudy was a lean, delicate man, narrow shouldered yet robust, he liked to think, but Manille — he shook his head — he didn’t want to know anything about that.

And he shook his head again, alone at the wheel of his stationary vehicle, in the silence throbbing with heat, and he felt trapped, torn by the same deeply frustrating fear that had left him transfixed, mesmerized, able to reply with only a hideous, weird little smile when someone (Madame Pulmaire, or Mummy, perhaps) had in the drawing room of some house he was visiting (so wouldn’t it have been a client’s, then?) revealed to him in a whisper what Fanta and Manille were up to, this nasty suggestion wiping the silly smirk off his face, as he could see in the mirror of the unidentified drawing room in which he stood with his legs apart, riveted now by how silly and bizarre he looked, but anything was preferable to the sight of that nasty mouth with its acrid breath that took pleasure in robbing Rudy Descas’s innocence, his lover’s credulity, anything was preferable to the spiteful tone of impotent anger (well, it must have been Mummy, because neither Madame Pulmaire nor a customer could have discussed the affair with as much animosity) summoning him to action, to spurn a woman like that.

What else could this indignant person, in a tone of such sweet reason, be suggesting (oh, it was certainly Mummy), except that any man with a remaining shred of dignity should not, could not, penetrate the very body in which there still reposed a sacred liquor, the centaur’s sperm?