Marie Ndiaye - Three Strong Women

He was overwhelmed with feelings of resentment.

To hide them, he lowered his head and stuck his hands in his back pockets.

From one of them he pulled out a brochure of Mummy’s and brusquely handed it to Madame Menotti.

“They’re among us,” she read aloud. Puzzled, she asked, “Who are ‘they’?”

“Oh, the angels,” Rudy said with feigned nonchalance.

She snickered and crumpled up the brochure without opening it.

Feeling hurt on Mummy’s behalf and sensing his anger rising again within him, he went quickly down the steps and, almost running, returned to his car.

He drove slowly, aimlessly, thinking there was no point in setting foot in Manille’s place again, now that his goose was thoroughly cooked.

A feeling of pique still made it painful for him to think about his failure, because he would have loved to stomp out of Manille’s and slam the door behind him rather than find himself sacked for a gross error of calculation on a project to which he’d given so much of himself, but then the dread inspired by the vision of his future was softened by a realization that there was nothing that could be done about it, that it was all in the order of things.

He ought not to crawl before Manille.

His head was spinning a little.

How had he managed to put up with such a life for four years? It was only an academic question, he realized, a purely formal, pretended bafflement, because he knew very well, actually, how people put up with long years of a paltry existence.

What he didn’t know, rather, was how he could have fared not putting up with those bitter, pathetic years — what kind of man would he have been, what kind of man would he have become, what would have happened had he not settled for such mediocrity?

Would it have been a good thing or would he have fallen still lower than now?

And what would he have done with himself?

Really, it wasn’t difficult getting used to a life of self-disgust, bitterness, and disorder.

He’d even gotten used to a state of permanent, barely contained fury, he’d even managed, after a fashion, to get used to his frosty, fraught relations with Fanta and the child.

At the thought that he was going to have to take a quite different view of his domestic situation he felt dizzy again, and although he’d long aspired to rekindle the love and tenderness they’d known before they’d left for France, he felt obscurely anxious. Would Fanta recognize what he’d newly become, wasn’t she too weary, too mistrustful, and too skeptical to meet him at this point he’d arrived at?

You’ve come too late and I’m dying.

Where could she be at this precise moment?

Much as he longed to rejoin Fanta, he was afraid of going back home.

There was no need, Fanta, to send me that horrid avenging bird.

A voice kept cawing in his head: You’ve come too late, I’m dying, my feet have been cut off, I’ve fallen on the floor of your unfriendly house, you’ve come too late.

He was hungry now and Madame Menotti’s coffee had made him terribly thirsty.

He was driving slowly with all the windows down along the quiet little road, between the thuja hedges and white fences beyond which occasionally shimmered the bluish water of a swimming pool.

Having left Madame Menotti’s area behind, he noted that the neighborhood he was now in consisted of even larger houses, even more luxuriously and more recently restored, and it occurred to him that he was deceiving himself yet again in affecting to drive without a precise destination; he was annoyed to think that he, Rudy Descas, should have been itching to prowl around Gauquelan’s place ever since noting the sculptor’s address in Madame Menotti’s sitting room, and felt he should no doubt admit having wanted to do it for quite a while, ever since he’d read about the municipality’s having awarded Gauquelan more than a hundred thousand euros for the statue — whose face so closely resembled Rudy’s — that had been installed on the rotary.

Tortured by heat and thirst, he wondered if he was not being cast back into the dangerous eddies of that tiresome, monotonous, degrading dream that left such a bitter aftertaste and from which by sheer force of will he was just beginning to extricate himself.

Should he not forget about Gauquelan, the man who’d inspired so much unjust, spiteful, uncalled-for rage?

Of course he should, and that’s certainly what he was going to do — stop thinking that the man was in some mysterious, symbolic way responsible for Rudy’s rotten luck, that he’d secretly taken advantage of Rudy’s innocence to prosper while he, Rudy …

Yes, it was absurd, but merely thinking about it made him gloomy and irritable.

He could see again the photo in the local paper of this Gauquelan, with his missing tooth, fat face, and smug expression, and to Rudy it seemed unquestionable that the man had robbed him of something, just like all those clever, cynical people who benefit from the inability of the Rudy Descases of this world to get their grip of the brass ring.

That pathetic artist, Gauquelan, had succeeded because Rudy was languishing in poverty. In Rudy’s eyes it was no coincidence: he couldn’t shake the notion of cause and effect.

The other guy was growing fat at his expense.

The idea drove him mad.

What’s more …

He managed a smile, he forced himself to smile, even though his dry lips were stuck together. Boy, was he thirsty!

What’s more … it may have been silly, but that’s the way it was, it had the perfect luminosity of unprovable truth: while Rudy’s little soul was fluttering around unsuspectingly, the other had grabbed hold of it to create his despicable work, the statue of a man who looked like Rudy, even down to his pose of angry, terrified submission.

Yes, it drove him mad to think that, although they’d never met, Gauquelan had made use of him, that people like him exploited for their own benefit the trusting ignorance and weakness of those who failed to take steps to protect themselves.

He pulled up in front of a brand-new, black, wrought-iron gate with tips of gold. Feeling a little giddy, he said to himself that this was where Gauquelan lived, in that big house built of exposed stone blocks freshly scrubbed and pointed.

The tiled roof was new and the windows and shutters gleamed with white paint. On the wide terrace a set of pale wooden table and chairs stood in the shade of a yellow umbrella.

It was impossible, Rudy thought with pain, to be unhappy in a house like that.

How he’d love to live there with Fanta and the child!

The gate was purely notional since — and this was a detail that Rudy found particularly impressive — it defended nothing: on either side of the twin stone pillars there was a gap before the privet hedge began, through which it was easy to pass.

He got out of the car and closed the door gently.

He slipped through the gap and strode quickly to the terrace.

Total silence.

These houses had huge garages, so how could you tell whether anyone was in? Where Rudy or Mummy lived, a car parked outside proved beyond a doubt that the owner was at home.

Bending low, he went around to the back, where he found a door that he supposed opened onto the kitchen.

He pressed the door handle down, as if, he thought, he was letting himself into his own house.

The door opened and he went in, closing it nonchalantly behind him.

He stopped, nevertheless, alert to any sounds.

Then, reassured, he grabbed a bottle of water on the counter, checked that it was unopened, and drank it all, even though the water was barely chilled.

As he drank, he let his eyes wander over Gauquelan’s large kitchen.

He noticed at once that it could not have come from Manille’s, which offered nothing half as sumptuous, and that irritated him; it was as if Gauquelan had ordered from a more upmarket competitor as a way of further humiliating him.