Three Strong Women (12 page)

“Where are you phoning from, Rudy?”

Knowing that she’d no right to ask, knowing too that he
wouldn’t dare tell her to get lost before she’d deigned to heave her useless imposing mound of flesh as far as the Descas household and look through the bare windows or ring the doorbell to prove that this peculiar wife he had, this Fanta, who’d run away once before, had neither run off nor collapsed in a corner somewhere of this sad little half-done-up house—oh, how weary he was of understanding Pulmaire so well, how sullied he felt by acquaintances of that sort.

“I’m in a phone booth.”

“Aren’t you at work, Rudy?”

“No!” he shouted. “What has that got to do with it, Madame Pulmaire?”

There was a silence; it was protracted, but it betrayed neither offense nor surprise. Old Pulmaire was above such childish reactions, being invested with a weighty dignity that, if Rudy had an ounce of respect, would soon make him contrite.

He could hear her panting into the receiver.

And once again, as on that morning when Fanta defied him either by her words or her silence, he couldn’t remember which (but it made him wonder whether he wouldn’t at last tell her that a man can only struggle so long to preserve his manly honor as a father, a husband, and a son, striving every day to prevent the collapse of everything he’s built, endure only for so long the same old reproaches, whether verbal or in the form of a pitiless, bitter look, and smile through it all, not batting an eyelid, as if saintliness too were one of his obligations, would he finally tell her that, he who’d been abandoned by all his friends?), he felt welling up inside him, that warm, almost sweet anger he knew he ought to resist, but that
felt so good, so comforting, to let flow, that he sometimes had to wonder: Wasn’t that warm familiar anger all he had left now that he had lost everything else?

He clamped his lips onto the damp plastic.

“Would you please just move your fat ass, and go do what I ask!” he shrieked.

Madame Pulmaire hung up at once, without a word or a sigh.

He slammed his hand two or three times on the cradle, then once again dialed the telephone number of his home.

He’d now learned to call it that—“my home”—however annoying and painful that was, but the expression only matched what Fanta clearly felt, what her whole attitude betrayed, that she no longer considered the poor ramshackle house their home but solely his, and not because of its disrepair, he knew, not because of its irremediable ugliness, about which at bottom he knew she couldn’t care less, but because he’d chosen the house, given it its name, and, in a sense, had created it.

This building, he’d decided, was to be the temple in which their happiness would dwell.

Fanta was now withdrawing from the house, taking along with her the child, seven-year-old Djibril, with whom Rudy had never felt very comfortable (because he realized, without being able to do anything about it, that he frightened the little guy).

Fanta was there, having no choice but to be there, but—Rudy thought—she felt no warmth for the house, she refused to lavish any care and affection on her husband’s home, to enfold her husband’s wretched house in an anxious, maternal embrace.

Taking his cue from her, the child also occupied the house in a
noncommittal way, gliding lightly over the floor, sometimes seeming to float above the ground as if wary of all contact with his father’s house, or, for that matter—Rudy thought—with his father.

Oh—he wondered, dizzy with pain, all his anger spent, the sound of the line ringing in his ear, and beyond the glass the vines and oaks and little baby clouds coming back to life in a negligible wind—what had happened to the three of them that his wife and his son, the only people he loved in the whole world (for he felt only a vague, formal, inconsequential tenderness for Mummy), should look upon him as their enemy?

“Yes?” Fanta asked, in a tone so flat, so sullen, that at first he almost thought he’d phoned Madame Pulmaire again by mistake.

He was so taken aback that his heart missed a beat.

So that was what Fanta sounded like when she was alone at home and didn’t think he was around (whereas whenever she talked to him it was in a voice so full of hardness and rancor that she trembled), so that was how, when she was herself and not with him, Fanta spoke: with such sadness, such glum disappointment, such a melancholy that the accent she’d lost was revived.

Because, as far back as he could remember, she’d always tried to conceal it, though he never quite approved of her desire to appear to come from nowhere, finding the wish even a little absurd since her features were obviously foreign, not to mention that he found the accent endearing, always connecting it with Fanta’s energy, a vitality greater than his, and with her courageous struggle since childhood to become an educated and cultured person, to escape the never-ending reality—so cold, so monotonous—of poverty.

What a cruel irony it had been that he, Rudy, had been the one to pull her back into what she, all on her own, had so courageously
managed to escape, that he should have been the one to save her from all that, helping her seal her victory over the misfortune of having been born in the Colobane district, not to have buried her alive—still young and beautiful—in the depths of …

“It’s me, Rudy,” he said.

“Hold on a moment, there’s someone at the door.”

Now that she knew who she was speaking to, her voice became a little less sullen, as if some wary reflex had reset her reaction mechanism to prevent her from letting slip any word that he could use against her in the next bout, although to tell the truth, it was his impression that Fanta never talked back but simply met his attacks with a stubborn silence, a distant, rather sulky look, her lips swelling and her chin drooping; he, Rudy, was well aware that she chose only too carefully the little she said, knowing any word of hers could provoke his outburst, just as he knew only too well that what truly angered him was the very indifference—so deliberate, so studied—of her expression, and that the crosser he became the more Fanta walled herself off and the more he got bogged down in his fury at her disingenuous nonchalance, until he couldn’t help spitting in her face those words he would later regret so desolately even if, as on this morning, he couldn’t be sure he’d really uttered them.

How hopeless it was, he thought, didn’t she understand that a few innocent, simple words from her, spoken with the requisite warmth, would have been enough to make him once more the good, calm, affable Rudy Descas that he’d still been, it seemed to him, two or three years earlier, not very practical minded, perhaps, but curious in outlook and pretty energetic for all that, did she not understand …?

“I love you, Rudy,” or “I’ve never stopped loving you,” or even—good enough—“I’m fond of you, Rudy.”

He felt himself blushing, ashamed at these thoughts.

She understood, all right.

No entreaty, no fit of anger (but weren’t the two of a piece where he was concerned?), would ever make her say anything like that.

He was convinced that even if he beat her up and smashed her face down on the rough floor she would still say nothing, being quite incapable even of telling a white lie just to get herself off the hook.

Through the receiver he could hear Fanta’s footsteps, dragging a little as she made toward the door, then Madame Pulmaire’s high-pitched, anxious voice followed by Fanta’s murmuring. Could he, even at that remove, discern an immense weariness in his wife’s voice, or was it merely the effect of distance and his own shame?

He heard the door slam, then the lethargic progress of Fanta’s feet once again, that weary, exhausted gait evident these days from the moment she got up, as if the prospect of another day in the house she refused obstinately to concern herself with (“Why do I have to do everything around here?” he often shouted in exasperation) hobbled her slender ankles with their dry, glossy skin, those same ankles that used to dash indefatigably in their dusty pumps or sneakers through the alleyways of Colobane toward the lycée where Rudy had first set eyes on her.

Back then those ankles had seemed winged, for how else could two slender, rigid, valiant reeds covered in gleaming skin so swiftly and nimbly transport Fanta’s long, supple, youthful, muscular
body, how could they, he’d wondered rapturously, but for the help of two invisible little wings, much like those that made the skin between Fanta’s shoulder blades quiver gently below the neckline of her sky-blue T-shirt as he stood behind her waiting his turn in the teachers’ line at the cafeteria of the Lycée Mermoz, how, he’d wondered, as he gazed at the bare nape of her neck, her strong dark shoulders, her delicate tremulous skin …

“That was the neighbor,” she said laconically.

“Ah.”

And since she didn’t add anything, since she didn’t specify, in that tone of gloomy sarcasm she was apt to use, the reason why Madame Pulmaire had called, he surmised that the old girl had covered for him, after a fashion, by saying nothing about his telephone call, probably inventing some mundane excuse, and he felt relieved, though at the same time embarrassed and annoyed, at becoming complicit with Madame Pulmaire, in a way, behind Fanta’s back.

Suddenly he felt deeply sorry for Fanta, because wasn’t it, if not his fault exactly, at least his doing, that the ambitious Fanta of the winged ankles no longer flew over the reddish muddy streets of Colobane, she who, though still poor, certainly, and held back by many constraints at home but, in spite of all, on her way at the lycée as a full-fledged French literature teacher, wasn’t it his doing, with his lovesick gaze, tanned features, fair hair (a lock of which always kept falling over his eyes), his fine words and serious manner, his promise of a comfortable, intellectual, altogether elevated and attractive way of life, wasn’t it his doing that she’d given up her neighborhood, her town, her homeland (so dry, red, and very hot) to end up unemployed (he should have known
that she wouldn’t be allowed to teach French literature here, he ought to have made inquiries and found out what the deal was and what the consequences would be for her) out in a quiet provincial region, dragging her leaden feet through a house a little better, to be sure, than the one she’d left but that she’d refused to grace with a moment’s thought, effort, or scrutiny (she whom he’d seen so patiently, methodically sweeping the rundown two-room apartment with sea-green walls she shared in Colobane with an uncle, an aunt, and several cousins, so patiently, methodically!): if it wasn’t his fault, wasn’t it his doing, Rudy Descas’s, if she seemed trapped and lost in the icy mists of a perpetual, monotonous dream?

He, with his tanned face, the tremendously persuasive force of his wooing, his suave manners, and the unusual splendor attributed over there to his blondness, that particularly striking quality …

“Don’t you want to know why I’m calling?” he asked at last.

“Not really,” she said after a moment, her voice no longer imbued with the listless utter disillusionment that had moved him, but now with something that was almost the opposite, the controlled, metallic, perfect mastery of her French accent.

“I’d like you to tell me why we had an argument this morning. Listen, I don’t know what started that off, all that …”

That particularly striking quality of his, he recalled in the ensuing silence, a weakly panting silence that sounded as if he were phoning a far-off country with rudimentary communications, his words needing all these slow seconds to arrive, though it was only the echo of Fanta’s anxious breathing as she pondered the best way of answering his question so as to safeguard he knew not what—he dared not imagine—future interests she might have (a bubble of anger suddenly exploded in his head: what possible future could
she envisage that didn’t include him?), yes, he recalled, as he let his eyes wander over the green vines with their tiny bright green grapes, over the green oaks beyond them that the property’s new owners, those Americans or Australians (who fascinated and upset Mummy because she believed the vineyard should have stayed in French hands), had pruned so savagely until the trees looked humiliated, punished for daring to let their shiny, unfading foliage grow so dense as to partially conceal the once grayish, now blond and fresh stonework of what was, after all, only a large house, though of the kind on which people in these parts bestowed the respectful name of “chateau,” yes, that particularly striking impression that his own blondness, his own freshness, made over there …

“I don’t know,” Fanta said in a low, cold voice.

But he was convinced that she was only answering in the least compromising manner possible, and that to minimize the chance of committing herself to anything involving him in any way, be it by the merest exchange of words, had become the sole criterion of her frankness.

Besides, if he wanted (but did he really?) to be straight with himself, he thought, looking up again at the distant sunny outline of the chateau, which he sensed more than actually saw, knowing it so well that he often dreamed about it, in the course of those monotonous, cold, gray dreams he regularly had, full of precise details of which he could only have heard secondhand, though he’d no memory of doing so, from Mummy, who had perhaps filled in once or twice for the previous owners’ cleaning woman (the maid who did everything, preparing and serving the meals, the vacuuming, the ironing), and passed on her observations in that tiresome
and degrading way Mummy had of feigning to scorn everything she described (the many unused fully furnished rooms, the fine china, the silver) while her droopy little pinkish eyes shone clear with frustrated longing—and now his own limpid pale eyes were once again raised toward the outline of the chateau as if that large, drab, cold house (no longer gray, perhaps …), as if it ought to be sending him any moment some resounding and definitive answer, but what could the property possibly have to tell him except that it would never be his or Fanta’s or Djibril’s, so, if he wanted to be straight with himself …

“By the way,” he said, “what if I picked Djibril up from school this evening?”