Marie Ndiaye: All My Friends

Séverine unhooks her telephone from her belt. She tosses her head to shake back the bounteous curls that cover her ear, which is tiny and pierced with three holes, always left unadorned. I notice the fine lines delicately incised at the corners of her eyes. A gentle stupor keeps my gaze glued to Séverine’s cheek, her straight mouth, her small nose, and I ask myself: is this the same person? knowing perfectly well, but could my ex-student Séverine really have gone from sixteen to thirty without those many passing years in any way altering my own existence, without my having done anything other than languish and age? No, I tell myself slowly, it’s out of the question, out of the question.

Lulled by Séverine’s murmurs into the phone, I realize with a start that she’s talking to my wife. She calls her “Madame,” then the name that belonged to my wife when I met her. Séverine turns off the phone. She looks into my helpless eyes, her gaze hard, intractable, authoritarian, icy with morality and truth. Sharply, Séverine tells me she knows of the harm I did to my family, my wife having told her on learning that Séverine was in my employ. Séverine knows all there is to know about that, she assures me. Séverine glowers at me, almost fanatically sure of herself and her unassailability.

“Can I not be pardoned someday, Séverine?” I say, wretched, blindsided. “Can I never be absolved, Séverine? Someday?”

Séverine then tells me that what I did can’t be forgiven, and, in the incorruptibility of her rigor, it’s as if she herself were the victim of my misdeeds.

“Why did you marry that boy, Séverine?” I ask. “Werner’s the one you. .”

But Séverine cuts me off with a sharp bark. Séverine tells me I must never speak of her husband again, and that, should I dare do so, she will lay out all my misdeeds, all the awful things I’ve said, exhaustively catalogued for her by my wife.

Confounded, I mumble:

“What you don’t know, Séverine, is that I couldn’t always control what I said or did, that there were, Séverine, circumstances which. .”

None of that interests her, Séverine tells me. And as the fire in her yellow eyes dims I see that she means it, that the reasons for my behavior bore her in advance, that it wearies her even to consider the possibility that there might have been reasons and moments.

“Do you remember that my wife was your teacher, Séverine?” I ask her.

Séverine tells me she does.

“Then why won’t you remember that I was your teacher as well?” I explode.

Patiently, Séverine explains that my wife was an excellent teacher, and that to this day she remembers her, my wife as a teacher, with great fondness.

“Well, that hardly seems fair, Séverine.”

I snicker, but I’m devastated.

My wife and I never talked about Séverine when she was our student, my wife because in her class Séverine was a passive and unexceptional pupil, me because Séverine persecuted me in silence, disrupting my lessons with her poisonous enmity. And now that my wife has left me, abandoned me to myself and my house’s little machinations, now she’s won Séverine to her side, now she’s staked out a marvelous, unparalleled place in Séverine’s memory, when the fact is I know that my wife is a cynical and irascible teacher.

To what end should she seek to make Séverine her ally, fifteen years after the fact? And forever distance Séverine from me, Séverine and her innocent, fierce inflexibility?

My wife’s prying spirit scuttles through my house, hungry for vengeance. At school, my reputation is secure and longstanding, whereas my wife’s teaching and personality enjoy no special renown, despite all her efforts, when she left me, to gain our little clan of envious colleagues’ sympathy and approval. To be sure, now my wife’s gaze never meets mine in the hallways. To be sure, I sometimes come nose to nose with one of my sons on the playground, and how painful it is to see his eyes, having lighted on me by accident, suddenly fill with a sort of still water before he turns on his heel and flees, his gait slightly stiff, horrified.

“Is your father a swine?” I sometimes cry after him.

And to be sure, I can no longer pretend not to see that the shop teacher whose mailbox adjoins mine in our break room now lives with my wife and my children in their new house, a rival to my own. But. .

“Does your father stink so horribly, that you have to run?” I sometimes cry after my son.

My voice breaks. I no longer know my children, brought up to feel only contempt for their father. The shop teacher looks after my children alongside my wife, he raises and loves them as if they were his own, and, when I see my children’s radiant faces and, from snatches of conversation made out here and there, learn of their excellent grades, I must admit that he’s raising them in the best possible way, and when we bump elbows he unfailingly treats me with the same polite sympathy, cool and impeccable. To be sure, what better can I expect? To whom can I complain? I myself put on a cheerful, good-hearted air with everyone around me. To whom can I complain, why complain? I simply find it unjust, when my wife never seemed to trouble herself over Séverine’s future as I did, that she should now use the fact that she’s of the same sex as Séverine, and lives a happier life than my own, to prevent Séverine from looking on me with solicitude, compassion, and neutrality. Deep inside me, in a place I never go, where I would find it slightly ignoble to want to go, an urge for revolt is swelling, and it shortens my breath and sharpens my voice.

* * *

Werner clearly recalls the year when my wife was his teacher, and recalls, too, that at the time Séverine confessed to her great pleasure on heading into my wife’s classroom.

“I find that very surprising,” I say, annoyed.

Settled into one of Werner’s armchairs, legs crossed, I note with a sort of panic that boredom and impatience dull Werner’s fine, glowing face with this mention of my wife’s teaching. I know that Werner came to me only because Séverine works in my house. But I’d like to think that my incongruous presence in his own house, the house of a flourishing adult, reminds him with some nostalgia of a time when I nourished his keen mind, when it was I who paced back and forth before his raised, attentive eyes, my size, my voice, and my power all working for me at once. Werner has moved into the suburbs of our little city, amid other vast silent houses inhabited by people I loathe without having to meet them.

“What are you doing among our enemies, Werner?” I said the first day.

“Our enemies?” said Werner, not understanding.

“For you, Werner, everything’s always been easy,” I told him, severely.

His bright eye is veiled by the distant, circumspect, genteel fog with which he repels any remark he might find embarrassing for me, and then I recall that, even when I was his teacher, one slightly dimmed glance could immediately make me feel all the mediocrity of my origins, all my innate lack of finesse.

“Séverine will never come to this neighborhood,” I say crossly. “And besides, what can you possibly want with Séverine now?”

“I love her, and I want to live with her,” Werner says serenely.

But I see his upper lip trembling. This troubles me. I hadn’t expected to hear such words from his lips. I’m troubled, upset.

“Séverine should have waited for me, and, as you see,” says Werner, “she didn’t.”

“Séverine is lugubrious,” I say. “What a grim woman! Séverine, Werner, is not sexy in any way.”

“No, Séverine isn’t sexy,” says Werner.

Again, in his eyes, that sort of mist that at least partially shields him from my foolishness and vulgarity. It hurts me, it leaves me broken. For there is nothing in Werner to find fault with. Looking away, I grumble: