Marie Ndiaye: All My Friends

I keep Werner with me as long as I can, dreading the moment when the darkness in my house turns sneering and vicious. I have nothing left. What I’ve come to realize, in a violent, blinding blaze of insight, what was conveyed to me by the unbridgeable gap separating Werner from the two others, that gap so coolly marked out by Séverine’s alien, neutral voice, what all that told me, taught me, proclaimed to me, is that I will never prevent my children from riding horseback in their ridiculous getups, never bring about the return of anyone at all to my house, never again see those days when I could hope that disgrace and despair would not irrupt into my life — and that my wife and my children now have ambitions and joys entirely independent of my existence, desires that would in fact be no different if I’d died long before. Oh, it’s all in the past, I tell myself, and everything’s happened outside of me. For did I not furtively hope that on coming home from school one evening I might find not a disapproving, sibylline Séverine but the wife and two sons who are the true masters of this house, all three of them there in the brightly-lit living room? Bringing Séverine into my house left me no less alone. Séverine’s presence was meant to remind me that I will never be young again, and at the same time that nothing, ever, will be forgiven me.

* * *

I secretly make my way into the post office, and a forgotten detail surfaces in my memory. The moment I see his pitying gaze turned toward me, I realize Séverine’s husband’s first name is Jamel. That gaze, I tell him within myself, seals your doom.

* * *

It’s a tidy little apartment building not far from the school, on the edge of the city, and no sooner have I rung the bell than a pretty little girl with watchful eyes cracks open the door. She asks me to take off my shoes, and when I leave them on the landing she nimbly snatches them up and sets them inside, explaining that nice shoes are always liable to be stolen. I question her:

“Are you Jamel’s little sister? Where’s your mother? Your father? Do you work hard in school? Is your teacher happy with you?”

I glide in my stocking feet into the dining room, tiny and well-polished, filled with flowers and framed photographs, among which, again and again, I see Séverine’s husband. A woman watching television stands up and turns off the set. She smiles tentatively when I introduce myself as Jamel’s former teacher, turns to the little girl translating my words, then turns back to me with a congenial, almost joyful air. She gestures an invitation to take a seat at the table and sits down across from me, waiting serenely. My throat is tied in knots. Poor, poor woman, I tell myself. I sigh and yawn, forcing myself to smile at the mother all the same. Her black hair gleams at her cheeks. She waits, tranquil, untouched by doubt. Finally the little girl leaves the room. I lean toward the mother, fix my tear-filled eyes on her face, and tell her what’s going to happen to her son, while, smiling and calm, trusting in the teacher, she gently nods her head, not understanding. o prove it.

She then said, too quickly, trying to conceal her unease, her excitement:

“I don’t see anything.”

“You don’t see anything?”

“Nothing at all,” she said, trembling a little.

“You ought to see something.”

And the woman who looked like Marlène Vador, and who was Marlène Vador, since she’d said so, added, teasing and vaguely put out: “Well, there’s something there, Doctor Zaka, so you ought to see it.”

“But I’m looking, and there’s nothing there, so there’s nothing there.”

She told herself she was glad there was nothing to look at more closely, as two minutes before she’d made precisely that claim without taking the time to be sure, so extraordinary, almost so frightening, did she find it to be examining Marlène Vador’s bare back, thirty years on.

Her cheeks burning and moist, she cautiously asked:

“What happened?”

“My son shoved me into. . I don’t know. . the corner of the sideboard, maybe. Not on purpose, of course.”

“Of course,” she said.

“You don’t know the first thing about it,” said Marlène Vador. “But I do, and I’m telling you. You remember the apartment? It’s so small. A big, strapping young man knocks into his mother every day and doesn’t even know it, just moving around the room, taking a breath, putting on his jacket.”

“Yes. A strapping young man.”

“It all goes so fast,” said Marlène Vador in a dreamy, pleased voice.

She bowed her head, lowered the hand pinning her lush, unchanged mass of dark hair to her temples. The locks slipped over Marlène Vador’s smooth, dusky back, hiding her satiny bra straps, but she still didn’t stand up.

Doctor Zaka patted her own chest with one hand.

Did Vador need to know how furiously her, Zaka’s, heart was pounding?

Back then, they’d always agreed that Marlène had a greater capacity for seeing and understanding a certain sort of mystery. Vador was a year older. Her parents were divorced. In the evening, her mother left her on her own and went out to have fun, brimming with naïve confidence and enthusiasm, and then came home very late, noisily, not always alone, to find a perfectly calm and idle Marlène waiting in the tiny kitchen, and that ten-year-old Marlène Vador smiled at her mother, relieved her of her high heels, her purse, skillfully wiped the makeup from her pretty face, put her to bed, and discreetly disappeared.

But today it was Marlène Vador revealing her flesh to Zaka and asking her opinion, although with some condescension. She was wearing a red bra embroidered with little black arrows.

Did she put that on for my sake? Zaka wondered.

Marlène sat still on the examination chair as Zaka looked down, pressing her thumbs into various spots around her waist, up her spine. Marlène Vador’s flesh was supple, solid, quite thin, her bones slight and rounded. With a hesitant hand, Zaka pushed aside the locks to palpate her upper back. A shiver ran down Marlène Vador’s vertebrae, and her glistening, electric hair flittered around Zaka’s hands. Those clammy, fumbling hands had taken on a mind of their own, Zaka realized in disgust.

Vador jumped up and briskly pulled on the tee-shirt she’d been holding in her lap.

“That’s enough for today,” said Vador, impatient.

And Doctor Zaka had time to observe that Marlène’s breasts were very pale beneath the red lace, and that one of those breasts bore a number of perfectly round little scars.

There was one thing Vador didn’t know, she told herself. They hadn’t set eyes on each other for some thirty years, neither had any idea of the life led by the other. But, Zaka told herself again, there was one thing Vador didn’t know, something miraculous like nothing else.

Zaka narrowed her eyes. She bit the inside of her cheeks to keep quiet. Then, her legs trembling and weak, she cautiously sat down on the chair Vador had just vacated.

“So you still live there?” Zaka asked.

“I promised never to leave. I’ve never left.”

Marlène Vador looked down severely at Zaka.

“You promised too, right? Remember?”

“Promised who?”

Zaka knew perfectly well. Her voice was nothing more than a whisper. Vador gave her a cold, acid little smile, and Zaka blushed violently as she thought to herself, abashed: she came all this way.

“You know perfectly well,” Marlène said, very softly.

The head of a wolfhound hovered on the tee-shirt just beside Zaka’s face, and she thought she heard Marlène Vador’s low voice coming from the muzzle of that beast, whose eyes were so black as to bear no expression, like Marlène’s own. Marlène was wearing close-cut red pants, high-heeled backless sandals, glasses with spangled frames. She gave Zaka a feeling of timeworn flash, of freshness long since faded, but in which Vador still believed with enough untroubled faith to counter the impression she made — so long admired and stunning, Vador’s self-assurance seemed to assert that her beauty and charm were henceforth beyond doubt. Was she beautiful? Oh yes, Zaka said to herself, a shiver running over her flesh, she had to be. Yes, she was, she thought, before Vador’s inexpressive gaze, her iris so wide that it left almost no room for the white of her eye.