Marie Ndiaye - Three Strong Women

The man was now leading her down the avenue de l’Indépendance.

Schoolboys in blue shorts and white tops were moving slowly along the pavement, holding pieces of bread that they bit into from time to time, scattering crumbs as they went, with the crows hot on their heels.

Khady hurried, caught up with her guide, and began trotting in order to stay alongside him, her flip-flops making such a racket on the asphalt that the suspicious crows flew away.

“We’re nearly there,” the man said in a neutral tone of voice, less to reassure or encourage Khady than to forestall a possible question.

She wondered then if he was embarrassed to be seen walking alongside this woman with her faded batik, short unadorned hair, and feet white with dust, whereas he, with his fitted shirt, sunglasses, and green sneakers, obviously took particular pride in his appearance and cared what people thought of him.

He crossed the avenue, turned into the boulevard de la République, and walked down toward the sea.

Khady could see crows and gulls flying in the soft pale blue sky. She was aware of watching them in their flight and was surprised, almost fearful, of this awareness, saying to herself — not clearly but limply and confusedly, her thoughts still impeded by the fog of her dreams — saying to herself, It’s been a while since I’ve come this way, to the seashore where her grandmother sent her as a child to buy fish from the boats that had just landed their catch.

She then felt so completely sure of the indisputable fact that the thin, valiant little girl haggling fiercely over the price of mullet and the woman accompanying a stranger toward a similar shore were one and the same person with a unique, coherent destiny that she was moved and felt satisfied and fulfilled. Her eyes were stinging, and she forgot the uncertainty of her situation, or, rather, its precariousness no longer appeared so serious in the dazzling radiance of such a truth.

She felt the ghost of a smile playing on her lips.

Hello, Khady, she said to herself.

She remembered how much, as a little girl, she’d enjoyed her own company, and that she never felt lonely when she was by herself but when she was surrounded by other children or by members of the numerous families that had employed her as a servant.

She remembered too that her husband, a kindly, placid, taciturn, and slightly withdrawn character, had given her the reassuring impression that she’d no need to give up her solitude and that he didn’t expect her to, any more than he imagined she’d attempt to draw him out of himself.

And for the first time perhaps since his death, as she went, half running, along the boulevard, gripping her flip-flops with her toes to keep them from falling off, as she felt on her forehead the still mild heat of the blue sky, as she heard the shrieking of the crows in their fury at being always hungry, and as she saw them at the edge of her field of vision, the innumerable dark specks in their jerky whirls, for the first time in a very long while she missed her husband, precisely because of the kind of man he had been.

She felt a knot in her chest.

Because that was such a new sensation for her.

This pain was very far from the dizzying disillusion and resentment she’d felt when — because of that unexpected death — she faced the certainty that she wouldn’t have a child anytime soon, and the bitter realization that she’d gone to all that trouble for nothing; very far, too, from the no less bitter regret at having forfeited a life that had been perfectly suitable. This feeling of hurt over her loss took her by surprise and upset her, and with her free hand — the other gripping her bundle — she struck her breasts with little taps as if to make herself believe that she suffered from a form of physical imperfection.

Oh, that was it, all right: she wanted her husband to be there — or simply to be somewhere in that vast country of which she knew only this town (even only a small part of this town), a country whose borders, extent, and shape she had merely the vaguest notion of — in the end she wanted her husband to be there so she could remember his smooth, dark, calm features and feel secure in the knowledge of that face remaining unchanged, warm and animated, waving like hers, somewhere on earth, a heavy flower on its stalk. Khady now turned her own face mechanically toward that of the stranger (“That’s where the car will pick people up, it’ll be here soon”), the unknown, disdainful face twitching disconcertingly, the living presence that Khady couldn’t fail to acknowledge beside her own, whose heat she could feel close to her cheek and whose faint odor of sweat she could smell, whereas what her husband’s face might look like now she had no idea and couldn’t even imagine.

That beloved face, she would have endured never seeing it again if she could have been sure that, even far removed from her, it was intact, warm and damp with sweat.

But the thought that it would exist forever only in the memory of a handful of people suddenly filled her with sadness and pity for her husband, and although she ached and kept hitting her chest, she couldn’t help feeling lucky.

The man had stopped at the bottom of the boulevard near a small group of people laden with packages.

Khady had put her bundle down and sat upon it.

She let her body relax and wiggled her toes on the thin plastic soles of her flip-flops.

She’d pulled her batik almost up to her knee to let the sun play on her dry, cracked, and dusty legs.

She wasn’t bothered that she didn’t matter to anyone or that no one gave her a single thought.

She was herself, she was calm, she was alive, she was still young, and she was in excellent health; every fiber of her being was savoring the kindly warmth of the early-morning sun, and her twitching nostrils gratefully sniffed the salty air blowing in off the sea, which, though not visible, she could hear just at the bottom of the boulevard like a surge of blue-green radiance in the morning light, like the glint of bronze against the soft blue of the sky.

She half closed her eyes, leaving only a slit through which to watch the man assigned to drive her pacing nervously up and down.

To drive her where?

She’d never dare ask him; in any case she didn’t want to know, not yet anyway, because, she wondered, what would her poor brain do with the information, knowing as little as it did of the world, knowing only a small number of names, names of things in everyday use but not the names of what cannot be seen, used, or comprehended.

Whenever memories of the school to which her grandmother had briefly sent her insinuated themselves into her dreams, it was all noise, confusion, jibes, and scuffles and a few vague images of a bony, mistrustful girl quick to scratch the face of anyone who attacked her, who, squatting on the tiled floor because there weren’t enough chairs, could hear (but couldn’t discern) the rapid, dry, impatient, cross words of a teacher who luckily paid her not the slightest attention, whose perpetually scandalized look (or perpetual looking for something to be scandalized by) passed over the girl without seeing her, and if the girl was content to be left in peace she wasn’t in the least afraid of that woman or of the other children, and if she put up with humiliation she wasn’t, for all that, cowed by anyone.

Khady smiled inwardly. That small, cantankerous girl was her.

She touched her right ear mechanically and smiled again at the feeling of the two separate parts of her lobe: a child had jumped on her in class and torn off her earring.

Oh no, she’d never learned or understood anything at school.

She would simply let the litany of indistinguishable words — uttered in a toneless voice by the woman with the unlovely face and annoyed expression — wash over her. She’d no idea what sort of things the words referred to; she was aware that they involved a language, French, which she could understand and even speak a little but couldn’t follow in the woman’s rapid, irascible delivery. Meanwhile, a part of her remained constantly on the alert for that group of children who might at any moment launch a surprise attack and kick or slap her when the teacher turned around to face the blackboard.