Marie Ndiaye - All My Friends

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All My Friends: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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A moody and beautiful reflection on relationships, and how our idea of the world too often fails to match reality,
delivers five stories that probe the boundaries between individuals to mediate on how well we really know anybody, including ourselves. Written in hypnotic prose with characters both fully fleshed and unfathomable,
opens with the fraught love story of a man who has fallen for his housekeeper, his student of many years ago. Losing his grip as he feels his own family turning against him, he plots romance between the housekeeper and an old friend, whom he thinks is perfect for her. Later NDiaye gives us the harsh tale of a young boy longing to escape his life of poverty by becoming a sex slave — just like the beautiful young man that lived next door. And when a woman takes her mentally challenged son on a bus ride to the city, they both know that she’ll return, but he won’t. Chilling, provocative, and touching, this is an unflinching look at the personal horrors we fight every day to suppress — but in
they’re allowed to roam free.

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She gave Jimmy a gentle cuff on the chin. He scowled. Defying him, but purring, wheedling, she asked:

“How did you find out where I was? Who told you? Oh, never mind, I don’t want to know.”

Lulu’s pale adolescent face suddenly drifted into Brulard’s memory, replacing the face that had occupied her every thought since the previous Saturday, that broad, serious face, thoughtful and worn, whose solicitous gravity Brulard’s unquiet mind ceaselessly summoned up, and each time she came back from the bank she reassured herself a little with the memory of that dignity, of that loyalty, just as she did when, every evening before slipping into the hotel’s narrow bed, she found herself forced to acknowledge that another day had gone by with no phone call — Lulu’s sweet face, round-cheeked, confident, and tender, which Brulard hadn’t seen one last time before she went away, Lulu having spent all that Saturday at a friend’s, and would she have left had Lulu’s eyes been upon her, would she have raced off toward an exciting new life? Yes, yes, Brulard told herself, paralyzed by melancholy, she most certainly would have, for can you forego the possibility of a windfall of fate, of a miraculous down payment on freedom from doubt and monotony? Who would willingly spurn such a grace bestowed without explanation, with no need for thanks or gratitude? Who? — except, in her day, old mother Brulard, whose immortality in the form of a stern mountain was perhaps her only reward for her many renunciations.

Brulard’s drifting thoughts came and went around Lulu. She felt a dribble of saliva on her chin and realized she was drooling. She wiped her face with the back of her hand, thinking: It’s the exhaustion. If I could only. . Who’s stopping me?

But was it even imaginable that Jimmy would let her sleep?

He was talking with the clerk. Eyelids pinched with exhaustion, she let her gaze linger on Jimmy’s slender back, oddly youthful in that bottle-green, scraped leather jacket — which was strange, she thought, because she’d seen it as burgundy just a short while before, and she’d thought: is burgundy a tolerable color for an article of clothing, and now she found it to be, or saw it as, the same conscientious green as the hotel’s armchairs, which several guests just out of the dining room were approaching, preparing to drop heavily into them, and now they were sitting there, exhaling deeply, murmuring gravely, waiting for the sun to warm the shores of the lake, as if they had a time without limit before them, a distended, opulent time. How wonderful it will be, Brulard thought, to be old. Oh, how wonderful it would be to be rich.

She backed very discreetly toward the elevator, eyes trained on Jimmy. He was bantering with the clerk, swaying his hips and slightly raising his shoulders, and Brulard told herself she would slip away to her room, lock herself in, and sleep till early afternoon. For all she knew Jimmy would be gone when she woke, and perhaps she would even have forgotten his coming, perhaps even, in an abrupt return of mystery and good luck, she might find, languishing in one of those armchairs, the man for the love of whom she was here, alone and needy under the watch of the hated mountain.

Jimmy’s dog barked after her. That filthy animal’s onto me, Brulard thought. Supple, feline, Jimmy immediately glided across the lobby to her side.

“There’s only one free room,” he said, his brow anxious. “You’re not going to. . ”

“Why not?”

She gave a feverish, incredulous little laugh.

“As far as I’m concerned, I’m on vacation,” Jimmy said, with a strangely pleased air.

Sliding airily over the wooden floor, as if letting himself be wafted along unawares, he arrived at the side of the silent, apathetic Swiss couple in the armchairs. He tossed the cinema program that Brulard had left at the counter onto the woman’s thighs. In his low, cajoling voice, she heard him intoning:

“There. . That’s Eve Brulard, look. . She’s my wife, she has a part in this film. It’s a. . wonderful film. I recommend. . ”

She thought she could also hear him telling them of a lemon-yellow scarf that stayed stuck in a car door as it started off.

“What about your wife? Inside the car, or out?” the man asked, bending down to hear better.

Jimmy burst into a charming laugh. Suddenly alarmed, the dog began to bark. Jimmy didn’t seem to notice, and Brulard observed that the clerk, so brusque with her, so clearly distressed to be mixed up with her in anything slightly strange or ridiculous, scarcely glanced up at the dog, before, with an understanding, fraternal little smile, going back to his work.

“I’ve never worn a scarf in my life,” Brulard heard, as she tentatively wandered past the Swiss couple, both of them still young and childishly blond and giving her an indifferent, dubious glance, as if, thought Brulard, they weren’t entirely convinced she was there.

“Yes, you did, you did — and a yellow scarf, furthermore,” the man insisted. “That day, you tied a yellow scarf around your neck.”

“A wonderful, wonderful film,” Jimmy said again, ingratiating and obsequious, with a certain lively, quick-witted grace.

But, wondered Brulard, what did he really want from these people? Or did he not want anything from them at all, but wanted only to keep her from leaving, by creating a diversion from her distress, from her sorrow — for surely one glance at Brulard’s face had shown him she hadn’t found that state of joy and superiority without which her flight had no purpose?

* * *

A sort of gauzy veil imprisoned Brulard’s head as she walked through the flag-draped streets, Jimmy on her right, holding her elbow so delicately that at first she didn’t feel it, and when she did finally take note of that discreet support, the unpleasantness of having to express anything at all dispensed her from stepping away from Jimmy. Was he desperately wanting to touch her before he never had the chance again? Or was this a way of holding her captive, of pretending that, so gently herded, she’d allow herself to be led, unresisting, to the train, to the house?

Those days are over, she wanted to tell him, my life’s different now, and I’m so far away from you that. . But she feared that the slightest word might shatter her skull.

The dog trotted along obediently on her left. Framed by Jimmy and his hideous dog, Brulard felt pathetic, ridiculous. A wave of pity and anger welled up inside her. A vague indignation struggled to poke through her fogged thoughts, born, she knew well, of a painful awareness that she was not going to be left alone.

“Lovely town,” Jimmy was saying. “Ah, how nice.”

And then, whispering a still-stunned desolation into her ear:

“Why did you go away? Why?”

Brulard looked, unseeing, at the pale yellow and almond green facades, the luxurious shop windows, the souvenir stores with awnings weighed down by multiple cowbells, a whole landscape that she now knew so well, having paced through it each day since she came here, and toward which she had come to feel only resentment. Those same little flower-decked bridges straddling the canals, those same cobblestone streets, overlooked by those same charming balconies that Jimmy was now stopping to admire, his chin raised and his hand pressed visor-like to his forehead, letting out half stifled gasps of pleasure, had seen her morning after morning, fighting back a mounting despondency, an everless-latent panic, as she made her way back from the bank where the same circumspect, taciturn woman had once again shaken her head and tersely informed her that no deposit had been made to her account, and Brulard had learned to despise this whole delightful setting, wondering in panic to what extent all these pretty things were laughing at her.

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