Marie Ndiaye - Three Strong Women

Nevertheless, as a kitchen connoisseur, he judged it to be a really fine one, far more sophisticated, truth be told, than anything he could have designed.

The centerpiece was an oval counter in pink marble. It rested on a succession of white cupboards that curved elegantly, following the line of the stone.

Hanging over the whole was a glass cube, probably the hood. It seemed to be suspended solely by the miracle of its own refinement.

The floor, paved in traditional style with reddish sandstone flags, shone discreetly in the bright room. It looked as if it had been waxed and polished many times.

Yes, what a marvelous kitchen, he thought in a rage, built to cater every day for a large family gathered for slow-cooked food — he could almost hear a beef stew simmering on the magnificent stove, a professional eight-burner job in shining white enamel.

And yet the setup seemed never to have been used.

The marble surface was dusty, and apart from the bottle of water and a plate of bananas, there was nothing to indicate that anyone cooked or ate under the varnished beams of this big room.

Rudy crossed the kitchen and went into the hall, conscious of the lightness and suppleness of his refreshed, invincible self.

The air conditioning bolstered his self-assurance, because he’d stopped sweating so much.

He felt on his chest and back the cotton of his almost-dry shirt.

Oh, he said to himself in surprise, I’m not afraid of anything now.

He stopped in the doorway of the living room, which was situated opposite the kitchen on the other side of the hall.

He could hear, clearly, the sound of snoring.

Tilting his head forward, he could see an armchair. Sitting in it was a fat elderly man whom he recognized as Gauquelan from the newspaper photo.

With one cheek resting on the wing of the armchair, the man was snoring softly.

His hands rested palms up on his thighs, in an attitude of confidence and abandon.

His half-open lips produced an occasional bubble of saliva that burst when he next breathed out.

Isn’t he grotesque, Rudy said to himself, slightly out of breath.

Snoozing peacefully like that while …

While what? he wondered, almost suffocated by a dizzying joyful malice.

While in his undefended house his nimble murderer prowls around him?

A murderer with a heart full of hatred?

He felt himself thinking clearly, rapidly.

In one of the drawers (fully retractable, thanks to tracks with shock absorbers) of that perfect kitchen there would no doubt be found a set of butcher’s knives, the most fearsome of which could strike at Gauquelan’s heart — piercing the thick skin, the muscle, the layer of hard dense fat like that surrounding a rabbit’s small heart, thought Rudy, who occasionally bought from Madame Pulmaire at a cut rate one of the large rabbits that she kept in cages scarcely bigger than their occupants and that he was obliged to skin and gut himself even though he loathed it.

He was going to return to the kitchen, get that fantastic knife, and plunge it into Gauquelan’s heart.

How calm, strong, and purposeful he felt! How he loved the feeling!

But then what?

Who would be able to link him to Gauquelan?

He alone was privy to the reasons he had for cursing the Gauquelans of this world.

He thought of his old Nevada parked in front of the house and stifled a giggle.

His ghastly car would give him away at once, but it was pretty unlikely that, in this neighborhood, and at this hour, anyone would have noticed it.

And even if they had …

He feared nothing now.

He looked hard at Gauquelan. From the living room door he watched this man sleeping — a man who’d shamelessly made so much money, and whose fat hands lay limply, trustingly, on his thighs.

Rudy’s anus began itching again. He scratched himself mechanically.

His father, Abel Descas, had been in the habit of taking a siesta in the big, shady living room of the house in Dara Salam, where he used to sit in his wicker chair just as Gauquelan was now in his low armchair — heedless, confident, unaware of the crimes being dreamed up around him and of the crimes about to be hatched in his, for the moment, still heedless, confident mind.

Rudy wiped his hands — they had suddenly started sweating — on his trousers.

If his father’s business partner Salif had taken advantage of Abel’s siesta — of his afternoon nap and of his heedlessness, his confidence — to stab him, he (Salif) would no doubt still be alive, even today, and the death would have changed nothing as far as Abel’s ultimate fate was concerned, since he (Abel) would kill himself a few weeks after Salif’s murder.

Salif, Rudy recalled, had been a tall, slender man of slow, careful movements.

Had Salif stood on the threshold of the big, shady room gazing at Abel asleep, imagining that, absorbed in his strange afternoon dreams, Abel knew nothing of the crimes being plotted around him?

Had Salif so hated Rudy’s father that, despite seeing the man’s upturned palms resting on his thighs, he could have wished to kill him, or had he felt for Abel an affection in no way belied by his attempts to swindle his partner? Were these two tendencies — affection and treachery — present simultaneously in Salif’s mind and intentions, but kept distinct, so that the one never interfered with the other?

Rudy had no privileged insight into what his father’s partner Salif felt about Abel, and didn’t know if Salif had really tried to cheat or whether Abel had mistakenly jumped to that conclusion, but now Rudy’s thoughts were, despite himself, going back to the time when his father used to nap in the wicker chair. Rudy’s thighs were getting damp and his trousers were clinging to them, and the itch was back with a vengeance. Feeling confused, angry, and upset, he was starting to wriggle once more, clenching and unclenching his buttocks.

Gauquelan hadn’t stirred.

When he woke up and rubbed together those hands no longer innocent and carefree but impatient and eager to return to that contemptible métier of his that paid so well, when he laboriously hauled himself out of his dark green crushed-velvet armchair and raised his cold devious eyes to see Rudy Descas standing in the doorway, would he realize that his death — his brutal, misconstrued demise — had been dreamed up by this stranger, or would he think, rather, that he was looking at the unexpected face of a friend, mistaking that look of hatred for one of benevolence?

There must have been an afternoon, Rudy thought in a kind of panic, when his father had awoken from his siesta and from a possibly recurrent, cold, monotonous dream, had rubbed his eyes and face with hands no longer trusting but active and busy, had hauled from his wicker chair the supple heft of his trim, muscular frame, and had left the dark shady room in the quiet house, headed for Salif’s office, a bungalow not far away. He was, perhaps, still letting float hazily through his mind the vestiges of a painful, vaguely degrading dream in which his partner was trying to rob him by artificially inflating estimates for the construction of the vacation resort Abel was planning. Perhaps as he walked toward Salif’s bungalow he’d not dispelled the fallacy nurtured in some dreams that all the Africans around him had but one aim, to cheat him, even while feeling real affection for him, as Salif did, because those two impulses — friendship and deception — cohabited independently, without blending, in their minds and in their intentions.

Rudy knew he’d been somewhere on the property that afternoon when his father, perhaps carried away by the illusory certainty of a humiliating dream, had struck Salif in front of the bungalow.

He knew too that he’d been about eight or nine at the time, and that during the three years since he and Mummy had rejoined Abel in Dara Salam, a single fear occasionally tempered his bliss, a fear — though Mummy assured him it was groundless — of having perhaps one day to return to France, to the little house where, every Wednesday, a tall lad with straight, smooth legs like young beech trunks had monopolized Mummy’s attention, laughter, and love and whose mere adorable presence had transformed Rudy, age five, into a nonentity.