Marie Ndiaye - Three Strong Women

“Bastard,” he’d growled mechanically, without being able to understand clearly why he was insulting the person who was giving him so much physical pleasure.

A violent pain shot through his back and shoulders.

He’d felt the neck soaked in sweat slipping through his fingers.

First his knees, then his chest, had hit the ground hard, taking his breath away.

He’d tried keeping his head as far off the ground as possible until some hand forced it down, grazing his cheek and forehead against the pebbles in the asphalt.

He’d heard the boys panting and hurling abuse at him.

Their voices were feverish but perplexed and without venom, as if the words they were hurling at him were just a part of the treatment he had brought on himself, which he’d obliged them to administer.

They were now wondering what to do with him, their literature teacher, whom they were kneeing hard in the back, not grasping, Rudy realized, quite how much they were hurting him.

Were they afraid, if they let him go, that he would attack them again?

He’d tried to mumble that it was over, that they had nothing to fear from him.

He succeeded only in dribbling on the asphalt.

His lips, crushed against the ground, had, in his attempt to move, gotten badly scraped.

Rudy switched on the ignition, put the car into reverse, and the old Nevada, chugging and smoking, moved out.

And whereas, for the past four years, he’d been studiously cultivating the theory of the profound cruelty of the three boys who, just for the hell of it, had sadistically attacked him, he knew now that it had all been a lie — oh, he’d always known it, but he’d refused to acknowledge it, and now he was refusing no longer, remembering the kindness, embarrassment, and astonishment he’d picked up from what the teenagers were saying as they held him down, unwittingly causing him a degree of pain he would never completely recover from, because they were searching for a way out of the situation that preserved their own dignity and security and also their teacher’s, showing no desire for vengeance nor any wish to go hard on him, despite the fear and suffering he’d caused the boy from Dara Salam.

He’d understood — listening to them as they talked, with stupefaction but not rancor, nervously above him — that they fully realized, with their adolescent good sense, that their teacher had probably just lost it, even if it was the last thing they would have expected from that particular teacher.

Whereas he, Rudy, in fact hated the boy from Dara Salam.

Whereas he had, in fact, up to that moment in Manille’s parking lot, hated all three of them, whom, in his heart, he’d held responsible for his forced return to the Gironde, for his troubles, for all his misfortunes.

There could be no doubt, he said to himself as he drove out of the lot and onto the road, that anger, illusion, and a general feeling of resentment had taken hold of him at that moment — when he’d chosen to cast himself as the boys’ victim rather than seeing the facts plain: that he’d long harbored feelings of hatred, wrapped up in a smiling show of friendship, an animus issuing directly from Dara Salam, where Abel Descas had murdered his business partner.

Oh yes: no doubt, he said to himself, his present state of dis grace stemmed from that, from his cowardice, from his smug self-pity.

He went back the way he’d come an hour earlier, but at the rotary he went a little farther around the statue before turning into a wide road bordered by high banks, at the end of which stood Madame Menotti’s house.

Just as he was wondering if it would be all right to ask Menotti if he could use her phone to try to get in touch with Fanta (what was she doing, good God, what was she thinking?), he saw right in front of him the pale breast and vast brown wings of a low-flying buzzard.

He took his foot off the accelerator.

The buzzard flew straight at the windshield.

It gripped the wipers with its claws. It rammed its abdomen against the glass.

Rudy shouted in surprise and braked sharply.

The buzzard did not budge.

With its wings spread out across the windshield, its head turned to one side, it glared at him with a horridly severe yellow eye.

Rudy honked.

The buzzard’s whole breast shuddered. It seemed to be tightening its grip on the windshield wipers and, still giving Rudy a cold, accusing look, it screeched like an angry cat.

Slowly, he got out of the car.

He left the door open, not daring to get near the bird, which had moved its head slightly to continue watching him, now staring at him stubbornly, icily, with its other eye.

And, melting with anxious tenderness, Rudy thought, Good little god of Mummy’s, nice little father, please let nothing have happened to Fanta.

He stretched out a hand, slightly shaking, toward the buzzard.

It let go of the wipers and screeched again, angrily, in a cry of irrevocable condemnation, and flew off, flapping its heavy wings.

As it rose above Rudy’s head one of its claws grazed his forehead.

He could feel a heavy wingbeat against his hair.

He flung himself back into the car and slammed the door.

He was panting so hard that for a moment he thought the sound was being uttered by someone else — but no, these panicky, bewildered, hissing gasps were coming from his own mouth.

He grabbed the towel on the backseat and wiped his forehead.

Then he gazed for a long time, vacantly, at the bloodstained towel.

How was he going to convince Fanta that he now saw their situation in a whole new light?

How could he make her understand that, whatever he’d said to her that morning (if indeed those grotesque words he wasn’t sure of remembering had truly passed his lips), he was a changed man, and that there was no more room, in the heart of this changed man, for anger and deceit?

Probing the wound on his forehead carefully with his finger, he said to himself fearfully, It was no longer necessary, Fanta, to send that avenging bird to me — really there wasn’t …

Stunned, he set off again, driving with one hand, and with the other, unable to stop himself, fingering the crescent-shaped scratch on his forehead.

“It’s not fair,” he kept saying mechanically to himself, “it’s really not fair.”

A little farther on he stopped in front of Madame Menotti’s house.

The road was lined with modest farmhouses that wealthy couples had bought and restored, eager to conceal the buildings’ humble origins (short roof, low ceilings, narrow windows) with a good deal of lavish, meticulous interior decoration, or at least to make the shortcomings seem the result of deliberate choice, just like the copper piping, Moroccan floor tiles, and the vast bathtub set into the floor.

Rudy had realized that Madame Menotti’s modest income scarcely made it possible for her outlay ever to match her neighbors’ luxurious, obsessive extravagance, and that, for her, a new kitchen would remain the only manifestation of a sudden mad longing for comfort and splendor.

He’d also noted, with considerable anxiety and annoyance, that there was one realm in which Madame Menotti went a long way toward making up for her relative poverty. Within himself he referred to it as “wreaking almighty havoc.”

He got out of the car.

He saw at once that Madame Menotti’s wild, destructive, ham-fisted willfulness had dealt a mortal blow to an old wisteria root, thick as a tree trunk, that had been planted near the front door probably half a century earlier.

The first time Rudy had come to the house, thick bunches of sweet-smelling mauve flowers were hanging under the gutters, above the door and windows, clinging to a wire that the former owners had strung along the front of the building.