Marie Ndiaye - Three Strong Women

Perhaps he’d have preferred to see her humiliated and in despair.

But he carried the whole burden of despair and humiliation. Khady felt that, without realizing it, he held it against her. That was why she’d have preferred him not to be there in the evening, filling up the cramped space with his bitterness and his silent, obscure, unjust reproaches.

She also knew that he bore a grudge over her refusal to let him now make love to her.

Her reason — the one she gave herself and the one she told him — was that her swollen, ulcerated vagina needed a rest.

But this she guessed too: Lamine was ashamed of her, and for her, as much as he was ashamed of himself.

That annoyed her.

What right had he to include her in his feelings of abjection just because he lacked her strength of spirit?

She didn’t see why she should put up with pain in her genitalia just to satisfy his needs.

Silently, wearily, she would slide down onto the mattress.

What he did all day long in the dry, suffocating heat of the town, she didn’t care to be told.

She would feel a sullen pout beginning to play on her lips, aimed at discouraging any timid wish he might have for a chat.

Meanwhile her fingers would start moving mechanically toward the wall to stroke its nooks and crannies and, just before she fell asleep, a wild surge of joy would make her exhausted body quiver all over as she recalled suddenly, pretending to have forgotten, that she was Khady Demba: Khady Demba.

She awoke one morning to find Lamine gone.

Curiously, she understood what had happened before noticing his absence; she understood as soon as she woke up and leaped toward her bundle, which was wide open. She’d left it, tightly knotted, under the chair. She pulled out its meager contents — two T-shirts, a batik, a clean empty beer bottle — and groaned as she took in what she’d guessed before remarking anything else: that all her money was gone.

It was only at that instant she realized she was alone in the room.

In her distress she started making little whimpering sounds.

She opened her mouth wide. She felt she was suffocating.

Having awoken in the certainty that something bad had been done to her, had she, during the night, heard something, or had she had one of those dreams that foretell in precise detail what’s about to happen?

She rushed out, limping so badly that she nearly fell over at every step, crossed the courtyard, and went into the chophouse, where the woman was drinking her first coffee of the day.

“He’s gone! He’s stolen everything from me!” she shouted.

She slumped down onto a chair.

With rather distant pity, the woman eyed her coldly and knowingly.

She finished her coffee, slightly spoiled by Khady’s entry, and clicked her tongue. Then she got up heavily and, taking the girl in her arms and cradling her awkwardly, promised she’d never throw her out.

“No risk of that,” Khady whispered, “with what I bring you.”

In utter dejection she thought that she’d have to start all over again, that everything had to be endured once more, and even worse, because her body was so horribly bruised, whereas the night before she’d worked out that just two or three months’ more work would suffice to enable her and Lamine to continue their journey.

As for the boy, well, she’d already forgotten him.

It wouldn’t be long before all recollection of his name and what he looked like would fade from her mind. In retrospect she would see his betrayal as just one more cruel blow of fate.

Whenever she looked back to that period, she would round down to about a year the time she’d spent at the chophouse and in the pinkish room, but she knew that it had probably lasted a great deal longer and that she, too, had gotten bogged down in the sand of the desert town, like most of the men who visited her, who’d come from several different countries and who’d been wandering around the place for years, their eyes flitting apathetically over everything but seeming to take nothing in. They’d lost count of how long they’d been there, and people back home must have thought them dead because, in their shame over their situation, they’d failed to keep in touch with their families.

With their inert and impenetrable manners, they’d often linger by Khady’s side, having seemingly forgotten what they’d come for or thought it so exhausting and pointless that in the end they preferred just to lie there, neither asleep nor really alive.

Month after month Khady got thinner and thinner.

She had fewer and fewer customers and spent a good part of her day in the semidarkness of the chophouse.

Still, her mind was clear and alert, and she was sometimes overwhelmed with joy when, alone at night, she murmured her own name and once again savored how perfectly suited it was to her self.

But she was losing weight and getting weaker all the time, and the wound in her leg was slow to heal.

One day, though, she reckoned she’d saved up enough to try to leave.

For the first time in months she went out into the street, and limping in the scorching heat she made her way to the parking lot where the trucks left from.

She came back stubbornly each day, trying to work out which of the numerous men hanging about the place she should link up with so as to be able to get onto one of the trucks.

And she was no longer surprised by the harsh, combative tone in her own hard, sexless voice as she asked questions in the few words of English she’d picked up at the chophouse, any more than she was surprised by the reflection, in a truck’s rearview mirror, of a gaunt, gray face with matted, reddish hair, a face with pinched lips and dry skin that happened, now, to be her own and of which, she thought, one couldn’t be sure it was a woman’s face, any more than it could be said that her skeletal body was a woman’s, and yet she was still Khady Demba, unique and indispensable to the orderly functioning of things in the world, even though she now looked more and more like the lost, sluggish, scrawny creatures roaming the town, in fact so much like them that she thought, What difference is there between them and me, basically? after which she laughed inwardly, delighted to have told herself a good joke, saying, It’s because I’m me, Khady Demba!

No, nothing surprised her anymore; nothing, any longer, made her afraid, not even the great weariness she felt all day long that caused her thin limbs suddenly to feel so heavy that she labored to lift a spoon to her mouth and to put one foot in front of the other.

To all that, too, she’d grown accustomed.

Now she looked upon exhaustion as the natural condition of her body.

Weeks later, in a forest the name of which she’d forgotten, among trees that were unfamiliar to her, her state of great weakness would prevent her from leaving the makeshift tent of plastic and foliage in which she was lying.

She’d no idea how long she’d been there, nor how it was possible for the sunlight filtering through the blue plastic to reveal her arms, legs, and feet that were so thin and so far gone. She felt herself weighing so heavily on the earth that it seemed gravity was causing her to sink into it as soon as she closed her eyes.

And she, Khady Demba, who was ashamed of nothing, was dying of shame at seeing herself like that: huge, unwieldy, and immovable.

A damp, strong-smelling hand was lifting her head, trying to put something into her mouth.

She tried to prevent it, because the smell of that something and of the hand holding it sickened her, but she had so little strength left that her lips parted in spite of herself and she let a sort of insipid, sticky paste slide down her gullet.

She felt cold all the time. The cold was so deep and awful that it couldn’t be assuaged either by the blanket covering her or the warm hands that occasionally massaged her.