Marie NDiaye - Self-Portrait in Green

* * *

That same year, determined to put my affection for my father to the test, I accept an invitation from a Cultural Center in Ouagadougou to take part in a literary symposium, knowing that my father and his wife, who’ve left Paris and the seed shop, now live in that part of the world — although I can’t be sure it’s the same wife, my one-time friend, since, out of vanity, boredom, and restlessness, my father has never let his marriages last. Whatever I find there, I tell myself, and whoever this person is whose life he’s now sharing, in his inability to be alone, whatever I find there, I tell myself, I’ll pass no judgment, I’ll inflict no acidic or severe or sarcastic gaze on this probable new couple. I’m going to see him because he won’t come and see me, and my solicitude for him, my devotion, all those tender feelings, however tinged with regret, couldn’t bear for long the distance between us, couldn’t bear for long the years going by without seeing or speaking to each other. He doesn’t know me all that well, never having lived with me, and I think he forgets about me when he doesn’t have my face before his eyes to remind him of the girl he one day engendered. And besides, this man, my father, this anxious, intelligent, disturbingly thin man, prides himself on never opening a novel, so I know he hasn’t read my work, I know he’d rather have no notion of the reality of my books’ existence, out of respect for me in a sense, since he considers literature so ignoble a thing. All of that I can put up with today, all of that has ceased to anger me, all of that might almost strike me as funny, and in any case I no longer seize on it as grounds for recrimination. Why take it amiss? I ask myself. Isn’t it actually better this way, isn’t it best that parents not read their children’s novels? What might they find there that could possibly be good for them?

And so, invited by the Cultural Center and not by my father, I get on the plane for Ouagadougou with my oldest daughter Marie, who’s eleven. We’re met at the airport by the center’s secretary, a certain Monsieur Urbain, who already seems to know everything there is to know about us. Straight off, he asks:

“And will your father be at your talk?”

“He doesn’t know I’m here,” I say.

“Oh, of course he does, I beg your pardon,” says Monsieur Urbain.

“I hope he won’t come to the talk,” I say somewhat curtly.

I want Monsieur Urbain to understand that it would be a good idea to dissuade my father from attending the symposium.

“That’s not his world, and he wouldn’t be comfortable,” says Marie.

“He looks on literature with loathing and contempt, you understand,” I add.

Whereupon Monsieur Urbain wraps himself in a mildly irked silence, as if he were the subject of this conversation, as if my father, disguised as Monsieur Urbain, were showing his irritation at being described in this way. But I know well that my father wouldn’t be offended at all, that he’d be proud to hear himself spoken of as an enemy of novelists, for in his eyes literature is a failing. That’s why he heaps mocking disdain on men who write, men more than women, who can in fact, he believes, bear that stigma with a certain glamour, so long as they’re pretty. That’s how my father is — my father, whom, it’s very clear, you will never, by word or by deed, succeed in convincing of anything whatsoever. You can curse him, call down every possible disaster upon him, and then, without his noticing, without his even being able to imagine such a thing, find yourself forgiving him, if only so as to be humiliated no more by that needling, pointless exasperation, by that petulant, impotent rage. That’s how my father is, I then think to myself, light-heartedly. And this is how Monsieur Urbain is, who, forgetting his duties as a host, clings to his vexed silence as we drive down the narrow rutted road toward the Cultural Center. At one point, though, he turns toward us and points at a large pink stucco building, brand-new, separated from the road by an iron fence with spikes on the bars.

“That’s my house,” he says, “and it was your father,”—he adds proudly, as if taking some obscure sort of revenge (but is he avenging fathers, Africans, disparagers of literature?)—“it was your father who designed it.”

Marie and I can’t help laughing, amiably, but surely with a hint of involuntary savagery, as well.

“I’m sorry, we’re clearly not talking about the same person,” I say. “Whomever you’re thinking of, he can’t possibly be my father. My father is not an architect.”

But even as I speak these words, a hesitation, an uncertainty turns my gaze away from Monsieur Urbain’s nape. I begin to doubt my own objections. I ask:

“Really, my father’s an architect? I didn’t know.”

Then, vaguely, a very distant time comes into my memory, a time when, as a child, I might possibly have heard my father alluding to construction problems, intractable difficulties of design. Unless, I tell myself, I’m making that memory up and don’t even know it, unsettled as I am by Monsieur Urbain’s claims.

“Your poor father,” he says simply, by way of an answer.

Still fearing he might appear in the lecture hall, not wanting him to hear me speak, or to unleash a barrage of humiliating, naively belligerent questions that would only reveal the depth of his cultural ignorance and bad faith, Marie and I hire a cab to pay a call at my father’s house that very night. He lives in the outskirts of Ouagadougou, and I’m surprised to find myself being driven through a sort of tangled, ramshackle suburb, not at all the kind of genteel neighborhood he always chose to settle in. All the same, the house we pull up to is presentable, moderately large, its stucco in need of repair. A woman is sitting in the fading light of the yard. She’s my stepmother, the one I know from before, who was my great friend as a teenager. Her ample body is wrapped in a green and black boubou. She’s staring at the ground between her wide-spread legs, hands flat on her knees, still and enigmatically idle, but on seeing us she immediately sits up and comes scurrying to meet me. She clasps me to her bosom, and I feel as though I were rediscovering the softness and sweet scent of her high-school girl neck, that slightly insistent way of pressing her cheek against mine before planting the ritual kiss. Moved, I begin to wonder if it really was to see my father, and not my stepmother, that I came all this way — and then back comes the tinge of sadness that’s always veiled my thoughts about her, linked to the certainty that she abandoned her vocation, her free will, her joyousness, just to become one with this man, my father, whose life was nothing more than a long string of disenchantments, who appeared before her, my slightly gullible friend, in a beguiling aura of counterfeit ebullience, my fatuous father, so taken with himself, so jealously protective of his thinness, so little able to succeed in anything whatsoever.

Clasped in my stepmother’s arms, I don’t dare whisper in her ear: “Don’t you want to come away with us? Leave him, come on, leave him!”

Because, ever since her marriage, she’s no longer my friend and my equal. She belongs to the generation before me. And besides, do I really have the right to take such measures for the purpose of hurting my father? Why hurt him, when I’ve come here for no other reason than to show him my affection? I’m free to forget or neglect him, if I like, I’m free to consider him dead — why come here and try to do him harm? He married my friend, but that’s no reason, I tell myself, to want to punish him.

A little later, my father appears. And all those bad thoughts I was thinking, all my dreams of confiscating his wife, I choke them all back and renounce them, the moment I see my father feeling his way along the walls and realize he’s now almost blind. He pretends there’s nothing wrong, and welcomes us into his home as if he could actually see us. A kind of dull-white film on his corneas leaves his gaze opaque and empty.