Marie Ndiaye - Three Strong Women

On the other hand, what he couldn’t work out was …

Without thinking he stepped into the living room and moved toward Gauquelan.

He could now hear the sound of his own heavy breathing, to which the other man’s snoring seemed to reply with discreet solicitude, as if to encourage him to calm down and breathe more softly.

What he still couldn’t work out was whether he’d been there when his father and Salif had it out, or whether Mummy had described it so graphically that he’d come to believe he’d seen it with his own eyes.

But how and why, then — not having been there herself — could Mummy have described so vividly what she’d only heard secondhand?

Rudy didn’t have to close his eyes to re-create the effect of still being there or never having been there, whichever it was, the scene of his father shouting something at Salif, then, without giving him a chance to reply, hitting him hard in the face and knocking him down.

Abel Descas had been a strong man, and however gentle, trusting, and heedless they appeared when he was asleep, his big broad hands were used to handling tools, lifting heavy loads, and carrying sacks of cement, so that a single blow of his fist had been enough to knock Salif down.

But had Rudy really seen the tall, slim body of his father’s partner bite the dust, or had he only imagined (or dreamed about) the almost comical way Salif had been flung backward by the force of the blow?

Suddenly he could no longer bear not knowing.

He looked at Gauquelan’s hands and fat neck, telling himself that if he resolved to strangle the man it would not be easy, through so much flabby skin and flesh, for his thumbs to find their way to the rings of the windpipe.

Like him, his father, he thought, must sometimes have enjoyed his fits of hot, all-consuming, intoxicating fury, but he also allowed that it had been not rage but pitiless self-control driving Abel when he’d gotten into his 4×4 parked near the bungalow and slowly, calmly, as if setting off on an errand to the village, directed its huge wheels at Salif’s body, at the unconscious form of his partner and friend, in whose mind affection and a possible taste for embezzlement had never been confused, and who therefore, if he had indeed cheated Abel, had meant no harm to the friend or even the notion of friendship, but merely, perhaps, to some simple abstraction of a colleague, a blank face.

Still gazing at Gauquelan, Rudy stepped backward, over the doorway to the living room, and stopped once more in the hall.

He covered his mouth with his hand, licked his palm, and nibbled it.

He wanted to snicker, to howl, to shout insults.

What could he do to find out?

What would need to happen for him to know at last?

“Oh God, oh God,” he kept repeating. “Kind, sweet, little god of Mummy’s, how can I find out, how can I get to understand?”

For what did Mummy herself, who wasn’t there, know for certain about Rudy’s presence or absence that afternoon in front of the bungalow when Abel, as calm as a man setting off to get bread in the village, had driven over Salif’s head?

Was it possible that Mummy had told Rudy about the short, sharp sound, like that of a big insect being squashed, that Salif’s skull had made under the wheel of the 4×4, and that Rudy had later dreamed about it until he believed he’d heard it himself?

Mummy was quite capable, he said to himself, of having described such a sound and of having told him about Salif’s blood flowing in the dust, reaching the first flagstones of the terrace and staining the porous stone forever.

She was well capable of that, he said to himself.

But had she done it?

He scratched himself frantically but to no avail.

With eyes wide open he could clearly see the courtyard of the bungalow of corrugated iron and wood, the white pavement of the narrow terrace, and his father’s big gray vehicle crushing Salif’s head in the thick, heavy silence of a hot, white afternoon; panting with sorrow and disbelief, he could summon up the smallest details of that scene, whose colors and sounds never varied, that immutable tableau, which in his mind’s eye he could even see from different angles, as if he’d been present in several places at once.

And in his heart of hearts he knew what his father’s intentions had been.

Because, afterward, Abel had denied deliberately running Salif over; he’d pled jitteriness and irritation to explain the accident and his crazy driving, claiming that he’d gotten into the car with the sole idea of going for a spin to calm himself.

Rudy knew it was nothing of the sort.

He’d always known that his father had tried to blot the whole thing out, to convince himself that he’d never wanted to rid himself, so dishonorably, of his partner and friend who never in his heart had mixed …

He knew that in getting into the car and turning the key Abel was after revenge on Salif, a way of sustaining the pleasure of his exultant rage by pulverizing the man he’d knocked to the ground; Rudy knew it as well as — or even better than — if he’d felt it himself, because it wasn’t his neck on the line, there was nothing to gain disputing the point.

So why was he so sure?

Was it because he’d been there and seen the way the car moved and realized that it was a furious, passionate, deliberate act of will that was directing the vehicle at Salif’s head?

Rudy ran through the kitchen and out the back door, straight to the gate, and hurled himself through the gap in the hedge.

His shirt caught on the thorns. He pulled it roughly away.

Only when he was sitting in the Nevada again did he dare draw breath.

He gripped the steering wheel and lowered his head onto it.

Groaning softly, hiccupping and choking back his spit, he murmured, “What does it matter, what does it matter!”

Because that wasn’t the issue, was it?

How could he be so blind as to believe that the fundamental question was whether, on that terrible afternoon, he’d been present or not?

Because that wasn’t the issue.

It now seemed to him that fretting about this so much was just a distraction, albeit a painful one, a way of concealing the insidious progression of untruthfulness, criminality, perverse enjoyment, and insanity.

Trembling, he set off, and at the next junction turned right, to get away from Gauquelan’s house as quickly as possible.

Why did he have to, even in the worst circumstances, be so like his father?

Who expected that of him?

He could still see, from where he’d stood in the doorway, Gauquelan’s sleeping face and defenseless hands, while his own face had been deceptively calm, and he could recall his deceptively calm thoughts as he wondered in which drawer he’d find the most suitable weapon for killing Gauquelan with a single blow — he, Rudy, with his aspirations to pity and goodness, standing in the doorway of this stranger’s living room and, beneath the calm and gentle exterior of a cultivated person, planning an act that, from the point of view of pity and goodness, was inexcusable.

His teeth were chattering.

Who would ever have expected him to be as violent and abject a man as his father, and what did he have to do with Abel Descas anyway?

He, Rudy, had been a specialist in medieval literature and a competent teacher.

The very thought of building a vacation resort for profit filled him with embarrassment and loathing.

So — as he clung to the steering wheel, well aware of driving carelessly and too fast along a country road far from Gauquelan’s neighborhood — what inheritance did he feel he had to own up to?

And why should it have been necessary to keep Gauquelan from getting out of his armchair once his hands suddenly no longer seemed vulnerable and childlike …?