Marie Ndiaye: All My Friends

She’d take the bus back in the other direction, and the son wouldn’t be with her, and maybe he knew that and maybe he didn’t, it was too late now to find out. He might then abruptly refuse to get onto the bus, and the woman pictured him standing still by the roadside, calmly shaking his head and repeating, calm and incredulous: what an idea, mama, what an idea.

They were reaching the end of the road, and now they were nearing the sign that marked the stop, on the grassy strip between the fields and the highway. The sign was leaning and rusted. On it she could read the name Corneville. Could her son still do the same? She wanted to spit out at him, in her hard voice: So what do you think? You think you’re going to come home with me tonight? You think you’ll be coming home someday?

The sky suddenly cleared, and at the same instant the bus braked in front of them — appearing, the woman thought, in a flood of sunlight that nothing could have foretold. So long ago had all radiance disappeared from the atmosphere that the woman’s eyes stung. She squinted, scowled. Close at her side, the son raised his head and smiled broadly. “Mama,” he murmured, “oh, mama, isn’t it peculiar!” And, as always when he opened his mouth, she found herself irritated beyond all reason. She had to restrain herself from snapping back at him: You think there’s anything on this earth as peculiar as you? Instead, she pushed him indelicately toward the bus door, which had just opened with a sort of deep, weary sigh.

This son never showed any unhappiness at being treated little better than the dog of the house, and the woman was not unaware that she often took advantage of that, raising her voice to him, shoving him aside needlessly, but pained to see him so unaffected by these small humiliations, by his own lack of dignity, and then trying in vain, knowing perfectly well it was pointless, to rouse him to even the most fleeting fit of anger.

Nevertheless, she whispered when she asked the driver for one round-trip ticket and one one-way.

Yes, she wanted him to resist, she thought bitterly, but not about this.

The son was starting toward the narrow aisle between the two rows of seats when the driver caught sight of him. He stopped looking at the woman and stared at the son’s face, then at his back, his pale little eyes suddenly filling with wonder and, she observed, mystified, with unconcealed, cordial admiration. And when the son sat down toward the middle of the bus, on the aisle so he could stretch out his long legs, the driver went on gazing at him in the rear-view mirror with a wise smile on his lips.

The driver was not a young man.

Clutching her money, the woman waited for the thought of handing over the tickets to occur to him. He shook his head, as if trying to wake himself. Finally he turned toward her, his gaze still veiled by an airy, distracted pleasure.

As time went by and the bus rolled down the road through the fields in this sudden abundance of light, the woman noticed the other passengers often turning around toward the son, or eyeing him furtively, she saw their benevolence and delight, and she realized that the son, this endlessly troublesome son, noticed none of it. She felt her own face grow pink with guilt and incomprehension. She hid it by looking out the window. She told herself she was in this bus as if in the heart of a country so utterly foreign that every gesture of those around her was beyond her understanding. Every face was nevertheless of a type she knew well: wizened old ladies in beige raincoats, a farmer in glasses with smoked lenses, teenagers on their way home from school, a woman who resembled her in every way.

But why were they all staring at her son?

And why did the simple act of turning their gaze toward that son’s beatific, distant face seem to illuminate them with such happiness?

She couldn’t understand. None of them realized: there was no way to live with a son such as hers, and yet she thought this so utterly self-evident that people would do anything to avoid laying eyes on him.

The heat and the rumble of the bus left her drowsy. As long as the journey went on, there were no decisions of any kind to be made. She could scarcely bring herself to imagine the moment when she’d have to get off the bus and turn her thoughts to her son, and begin silently plotting.

Was this son, she suddenly thought, some animal she was going to sell at the market in Rouen? Was she ridding herself of him for personal gain? No, no — she smiled wearily — it was simply intolerable, infuriating, to have him beside you, under your roof, breathing the same air as you, this son with his mysterious manias, his stifling, monotonous thoughts.

When the bus stopped at Saint-Wandrille, the woman half rose from her seat to glance at the broad rear-view mirror. She saw exactly what she was expecting — the two pale slits of the driver’s eyes fixed on her son, on the reflection of his face over the seatbacks, the son’s handsome, calm face, she thought to herself in amazement, and she wondered, incredulous, sardonic, if the driver and all the others openly staring at the son’s face realized that that face was so beautiful and so calm only because it had no awareness of the loving attention it inspired, and so beautiful and so calm that the time had now come to put it away, never again to be seen in the streets of Corneville, and, at home, never again to burden the atmosphere with its oppressive, unendin

This woman thought that she couldn’t bear the beauty of that son’s face one moment longer — and that, in the old days, when he was still right, his face was never as handsome. No one would have turned to look at the son back when there was no need to keep from him where he was being taken. His face then had no reason to be as beautiful as it was now, since it expressed only ordinary thoughts. Nevertheless, thought the woman, rebelling, no one had the right to demand that she feel grateful or pleased at this change, no one could ask her to admire that face herself, however handsome and calm it may be.

She whispered in his ear: “I’ll be coming back to Corneville without you.”

“I know,” he said.

He smiled at her, amiable, reassuring. He went so far as to pat her arm, and then she couldn’t help confiding that she wished the bus would never stop, which the son, he told her, understood perfectly. Those other sons of hers wouldn’t have understood at all, it occurred to her, and she missed this one already. She’d be coming home alone, thank God: how she would miss him! g presence.