Marie Ndiaye - Three Strong Women

“I’m your messenger from the order of Thrones!” he wanted to shout out, but he demurred, not wishing to look at his colleagues.

Suddenly, it pleased him to think that they would perhaps at that precise moment welcome such a revelation, as they saw him pass by in front of them with his rather stiff walk and his legs bizarrely spread, but for all that haloed with a fearsome, luminous majesty and sunny brilliance.

He hadn’t been able to protect Fanta.

He’d claimed to be the guardian, in France, of her social fragility, but he’d let her down.

He pushed the door open and entered the showroom.

Manille’s two customers were now at the stage of choosing the stools for the breakfast bar, where, Rudy was ready to bet, they were never going to eat, would never so much as lean their elbows upon to drink a cup of coffee, preferring the inconvenient little table they’d always used up till then. He knew they’d find a way of sneaking that table back into the brand-new kitchen that Manille would build for them, and when their children visited, and were astonished, almost to the point of anger, to see that they had reinstalled their greasy old table, with its grooves full of crumbs, at the end of the breakfast bar, blocking access to the fridge, they would, thought Rudy, justify themselves by saying that it was only temporary and that they would get rid of their dear table as soon as they found the right little piece of furniture for setting down their bags and cartons whenever they returned from shopping, which furnishing they still lacked.

Manille was getting them to feel the brown leatherette covers of a pair of dark wooden stools.

He stood beside them, infinitely patient, never pressing, never in a hurry to move on.

The man heard Rudy’s footsteps from afar and looked up.

Rudy thought that he gazed at him more insistently than one might ordinarily, with an affable, friendly look, and he was moved.

Rudy had the impression that the man was making as if to raise his beret in greeting.

And whereas he would normally have been worried and embarrassed by a gesture like that and by such an insistent gaze, fearing some unpleasantness to come, he told himself cheerfully that the man may simply just have seen him somewhere before.

I am the spirit of the order of Dominions!

Yes, the guy had perhaps seen one of Mummy’s tracts and, watching the haloed Rudy pass by, his heart had evidently been touched by a feeling of beatitude.

“Art thou the one that is to take care of me?” his look seemed to ask.

How to answer that?

Rudy smiled broadly, something he normally avoided because he was aware that rapture, like fear, caused his lips to twist and made him look nasty.

He mouthed, looking the guy straight in the eye, “I am the little Master of the Virtues!”

He hurried out of the showroom.

He was overcome by the heat in the parking lot. It brought him back down to earth.

Not, he mumbled, that anyone could reproach him for having knowingly abandoned Fanta to her lonely exile, and as for the fact that she didn’t have the precise qualifications to teach in France, that wasn’t his fault.

And yet what never left him was the certainty that he’d deceived her in bringing her here, since he’d turned his face away from hers and spurned the mission, implicitly accepted when they were still abroad, of watching over her.

The thing was, he was then recovering from utter mortification!

What a beating he received, what a beating!

It sometimes seemed that he could still feel it whenever he raised his arms, but especially when a smell of hot fuel oil arose from the baking asphalt of Manille’s parking lot. Then with painful clarity he saw himself again lying prone on a similar asphalt surface softened by the heat, his back and shoulders crushed by sharp knees, his face swollen as he struggled to get up, to avoid all contact with the dusty, sticky tar.

Years later, that vision still made him blush with shame and astonishment.

But now he felt, for the first time, how automatic that response had become.

He breathed in deeply, soaking up the acrid smell.

He realized then that the opprobrium had left him.

Yes, it was certainly he whom teenagers from the Lycée Mermoz had beaten up before hurling him to the ground, crushing his chest against the asphalt, and ending up pushing his face, which he’d tried to keep clear of the ground, against the surface of the courtyard. It was still his cheek that would now always bear the fine scars, it was his shoulders that still ached slightly, and yet the abjection no longer clung to him, not that he could or would pass it on to someone else, but rather because he felt he’d accepted it and that now he had the chance of freeing himself of it, as from a recurrent, unending, cold, terrifying dream to which you submit, grinning and bearing it, in the knowledge that you’re now going to be able to break free.

He, Rudy Descas, sometime literature teacher at the Lycée Mermoz and medieval specialist, no longer embodied the infamy he’d suffered.

He’d lost all honor and dignity and returned to France, dragging Fanta with him, knowing that the stigma would pursue him, because he’d internalized it and convinced himself that he was no more than that, even while hating it and fighting it.

And now that he was starting to accept it, he felt a great weight had been taken off his shoulders.

Now he could calmly and quietly review in his mind the images of that violent humiliation — and the humiliation no longer bore much relation to him as he was, at that moment, standing in the warm, dry air, and the dense, oppressive mass that had weighed down his heart and filled his chest he now saw leaving him, dissolving, as he remembered clearly the faces of the three boys who’d assaulted him and could even still smell on his nape the slightly sour breath (fear? excitement?) of the one who’d held him down — the three faces, so dusky and so beautiful in their unblemished youth, which only the day before in class with the others had looked up at him with a concentrated, innocent air as they listened to him talking about Rutebeuf.

He saw their faces again without being upset by it.

He wondered, “Well, what could they be doing now, those three?”

He began walking toward his car, putting each foot down firmly for the sheer pleasure of feeling the stickiness of the tar and hearing it detach itself with a tiny sound like a kiss.

He saw it all again without being upset by it.

How hot it was!

The hot poker in his anus again.

Yes, he saw it all again and …

What happiness, he said to himself.

He scratched himself, not without pleasure, aware that the itching would no longer lower him into the same abyss of anger and despair, that he no longer had any reason to consider these ordinary evils as a punishment or a demonstration of his inferiority.

He was now able to …

He laid his fingers on the red-hot handle of the car door.

He didn’t take them off straightaway.

It burned him and it wasn’t pleasant, but he seemed to perceive more clearly by contrast the new lightness of his spirit, the weight lifted from his chest, and the release of his heart.

Free at last! he said to himself.

How was that?

How could that be?

He gazed for a long time around him at the big black or gray cars of his colleagues and at the road in front of the parking lot lined with warehouses and villas. He raised his head to expose his face to the infernal sun.

Free at last!

Very well, he could go all the way despite the flush of embarrassment that he felt on the forehead he was proffering to the sky, he could very well go the whole way and test his newfound freedom by acknowledging, for the first time, that the three teenagers had not attacked him.