Marie NDiaye - Self-Portrait in Green

I look at her round face, her eyes, wildly aglow with a hope I can’t quite define.

“And what about him, what’ll happen to him?” asks Marie.

“He’s on his way to an early grave,” says my stepmother, defeated.

She then informs me that, having no family left to come home to, when she gets to France she’ll stay with my own mother while she looks for a new job and apartment. I thought my friend had completely lost touch with my mother since our high-school years: I didn’t realize they’ve been writing since the days of the Ledada, regularly exchanging photos and news, in the name of a fidelity to the past and to my father that I have some difficulty understanding. She’s kept up with all my mother’s adventures in Marseille, and so, a little dazed by the oddity of the situation, I ask her:

“Whatever became of the little girl? Bella?”

She tells me that Bella stayed behind in Marseille, with a foster family, that my mother goes down to see her twice a month, that she — my friend, that is — hopes to make the trip with my mother one day, and make Bella’s acquaintance.

“But still. . What’s going to happen to him, all alone here?” Marie asks again.

“You can’t go on loving someone who won’t eat,” my stepmother says, matter-of-factly.

We hugged her, then hugged her again, and we walked off toward the departure lounge, looking back over our shoulders now and then to see her petrified silhouette growing smaller and smaller, standing stock still on the concourse, as if she had only to stay there unmoving for a few days or weeks to finally end up on an airplane, all her problems miraculously solved behind her back, by the sheer force of her mineral inertia.

I still don’t know if my friend, if my stepmother has come back to France, and I don’t know who’s putting her up. I dream that one morning, perhaps, in fifteen years, or twenty, I’ll hear the little bell on my gate ringing, and before me I’ll see a small dark-haired girl who’ll say to me: “I’m your half-sister Bella,” in a timid, tremulous voice, with an echo of something green in it — just as her eyes will be green, and green her sweater and her trousers, so that none of this ever comes to an end.

* * *

Hearing shouts, I leaned out the window, and in the middle of the street I saw a circle of children pressed close together, bending down, gathered around something or someone. I tried to make out what it might be, but in vain. I looked again, alarmed, and thought I saw two of my own children among them. What were they doing there, absorbed and thoughtful, sometimes letting out little cries and warnings? What were they doing there, hiding their faces and blocking the street?

Between their legs I saw a dark form, moving and anxious.

I bolt out of the room, race down the big staircase. My bare feet slap loudly against the wood. I say to myself, and say again, frantic: I’ll never make it in time. And then again: Please God, let me make it in time. The steps seem to be multiplying diabolically, I feel like I’ll never get to the bottom. Down and down I run, never reaching the landing, while, from the street, I hear the children’s voices, ever more excited, unbridled.

I lay my hands on my children’s shoulders, as gently as possible.

“What’s going on here? Time to come in now,” I say.

“It ran away!”

“It was all black! It ran off, it’s quick!”

The children ask if I saw it, if I can tell them the name of what I saw. They turn their bewitched little faces toward mine. Some of them seem sated, exhausted, like lion cubs after a feast.

“Time to come in now,” I say, shivering. “No, I don’t know what that’s called,” I tell them. “I don’t think it has a name in our language.”

Since they say nothing, I add:

“To tell you the truth, I didn’t see anything. Nothing at all. What was it?”

Then the children eye each other gravely. Their lips are very red. Then they look away, and fall silent.

* * *

December 2003 — The water’s stopped rising. But in La Réole the riverside streets are submerged, and the ground floors of the modest houses are flooded. Above them, on the bridge, the passersby stand motionless, looking at the water, waiting for nothing more, only the simple spectacle of water where it’s not supposed to be.

And then. . driving slowly across the flooded plain, on the one passable road. . I wonder. . the water muddy and calm on either side of the roadway. . is the Garonne. . is the Garonne a woman in green?