Marie Ndiaye - All My Friends

* * *

He sensed a change at the Mours’ farm even before he got there, as if all around it the warm air were trembling with excitement. The big white farmyard was empty — no chickens, no dogs, only a truck bearing the name and particulars of a masonry business. Anthony’s brother was standing near the door, his back to the wall. He clutched René’s arm as he passed, his hand adorned by two rings, a tiny watch set into each.

“My father took off,” he said unemotionally.

Thinking he’d heard in this a thinly veiled threat whose motivation and nature escaped him, René said nothing. He froze in place, transparent.

“He killed all the animals before he left,” the brother went on.

“The dogs too?”

“All of them, I said. He did it in the barn. You’ll have to deal with it.”

René didn’t move, so the brother added, with a sly, cocky smirk:

“My mother said so. She said, ‘Let René deal with it.’”

He licked his greedy lips and let out a little laugh, not untinged, René was heartened to notice, by distress. And as he crossed the forlorn farmyard, so heavy with that deathly silence he’d mistaken for a breathless pause heralding some new beginning, René could feel Anthony’s brother’s fixed stare tickling his back, and he had the unsettling sense that the Mour brother had fallen into a bleak, nameless unhappiness, and didn’t even know it. But why? And what was the point? Would René not have taken fervid delight in being the brother of Anthony Mour and the son of Madame Mour, who could imbue the gesture of brushing a lock of hair from her cheek with an awareness of herself and her dignity that, even in her moments of greatest triumph (a new marriage, money coming in) or greatest pleasure, René’s mother had never managed to summon?

Heading toward the barn, René quaked with contempt for Anthony’s brother. One man was as good as another, he knew. Who could possibly think the Mour father had no equal? One man went away, soon replaced by another just like him, and the mother went on unchanged.

He spent much of the afternoon behind the barn, burying the four fine, powerful dogs that filled the Mour father with unconcealed vanity. He’d killed them cleanly, with one rifle shot apiece. As for the chickens, their throats slit, René stuffed them into a garbage bag to take home with him.

When he finally, timidly entered the kitchen, it was with a sense that his place in the Mour’s home had subtly changed. He even conceived the wild idea that with the money sent her by Anthony, Madame Mour might not be averse to buying René, since. . What other boy around here. . But if every boy in the region was for sale, what hope was there for René? Tormented, he silently approached the little table where Madame Mour sat glued to her computer, her bare legs crossed to one side, a red velvet slipper hanging from the end of one foot. The kitchen was in complete disarray. Two workmen wearing nothing but shorts were taking out the sink, a third prying off the old tiles. Catching sight of the fourth, who was busy sanding a wall, René quickly looked away, convinced that this man was his father.

He gently touched Madame Mour’s shoulder.

“Oh, it’s you, René. . Look at you, what a mess,” she murmured wearily.

He winced. It hadn’t occurred to him that his hands were red with the blood of the chickens and dogs. Madame Mour’s own cheeks were mottled and haggard, her eyes drowning in sorrow. On the computer screen, an animated image showed Anthony running through a field of astonishingly green grass. Still tall, lithe, and nude, his smile never faded as he bounded with pure, vigorous strides through ever new spaces, infinite, filled with fluorescent verdure. René glanced behind him. Now his father was surreptitiously eyeing the screen. Anger welled up in René.

“What’s happening to you?” he whispered.

“You know. . He’s gone. . My husband.”

Madame Mour’s lips were trembling.

“It was the money from Anthony. He didn’t want any part of it, in his house or his life.”

“That’s nothing to be sad about,” said René, furious. “Come on now, that’s nothing to be sad about.”

“What can you possibly know about it, my poor René?” said Madame Mour after a pause.

She froze Anthony’s picture, enlarged it for a clearer view of his body and face, his features quivering in the embrace of an unutterable happiness, then turned away from the computer, leaving Anthony’s nudity and elation displayed on the screen, consoling and breathtaking.

René noticed that his father was now staring openly at the screen. All at once his rage fell away. He felt pointless, sterile, laughable. Realizing that his father hadn’t recognized him, hadn’t even noticed him, he stopped trying to keep his back turned.

“René, I’ve found someone for you,” said Madame Mour.

Her slipper fell to the ground. René picked it up and slid it over Madame Mour’s foot, while behind him someone snickered.

* * *

And two days later René found himself by the side of the highway, waiting. With his worn little suitcase nearby in the grass, he peered into the gold and white distance beyond the dusty ribbon of concrete, untraveled at this early hour. The towering cornstalks rustled cheerily all around him. René answered them with joyous, knowing little laughs. How delicious was his mother’s surprise on learning he’d been singled out, chosen, picked — and how deep her humiliation, surely, that it was Madame Mour who’d managed to sell René, and not her, his own mother.

He was sweating with eagerness. His chest itched where he’d carefully shaved himself to imitate smooth-skinned Anthony. And the mirror had told him. . almost told him. . that he was becoming. . Could it be?

All alone, René flexed his muscles. Oh, yes, less ugly, less skinny, less. .

On the horizon, the tiny dot of a car was growing larger. Suddenly there it was, stopped in front of René, even more luxurious than the one E. Blaye had driven out to pick up Anthony Mour.

René opened the trunk, gaily tossed his shameful suitcase inside.

He sat down in the front seat: as the car silently pulled away, he finally found the courage to turn his head and see who was holding the wheel.

And a horrified cry rose to his lips, and he pressed them violently together. Nothing escaped but a moan, a submissive whimper of dread and regret. her breath.

So Brulard, Eve Brulard, slipped out of the Hotel Bellerive at the earliest possible hour, as if she knew with precision and certainty which way to set off.

She didn’t. So utterly didn’t she know that her right leg seemed intent on opposing her left leg’s decision to head toward the lake, and she stood walking in place for a few seconds before the veranda, shocked by the damp cold but still too stiff and sleepy to bother turning up the collar of her light jacket, and also vaguely telling herself, scarcely emerged from a dream: first thing this morning, if the money has come, I’ll go buy a coat. Then it occurred to her that any step she took to feel a tiny bit less cold in her jacket, turning up the collar or tugging down the sleeves, would misleadingly assure the forces guiding her luck that this little jacket was perfectly sufficient — and that, consequently, there was no need for the money. Better to act as though she didn’t even have a jacket to protect her.

It was so much colder here than where Brulard had come from.

It’s so much colder, she thought, and she gave a clenched little smile to the night clerk she could see through the glass door, preparing to make way for his daytime colleague, whose skeptical, scrutinizing gaze she studiously avoided whenever she passed by the front desk, her head high. From the start, she’d sensed that he thought her neither radiant nor carefree, despite all her efforts to seem just that. And so she’d taken to leaving her room at daybreak, heaving herself out of bed with difficulty and a dazed misery that filled her entire ill-rested body, so that she could breezily appear before the night clerk and exchange a few words on the color of the lake and the fog, painfully aware of the hurried, imprecise work she’d done on her face with foundation, tinted powder, and a shimmering lipstick up in her room, but hoping the night clerk would once again fail to see that she was still wearing the same black clothes as before, now a little shiny, and that her face, aspiring to a certain impersonal, indisputable harmoniousness with the help of the makeup, was in fact rumpled by an all-consuming exhaustion.