Three Strong Women (15 page)

The smell of hot tar filled his nostrils.

He had quite a surprise when he looked not at the sky but at the bitumen under his feet.

Had he really been that lighthearted man, at peace with himself, who strode along the placid streets of Le Plateau, where he’d rented a small apartment, looking, with his fair hair and pleasantly regular features, hardly any different from the other white-faced types who he passed in the neighborhood but whose business ambitions and drive he in no way shared?

Could he really have been that man, Rudy Descas, who aspired, with calm self-scrutiny, to show himself good and just, and even more (oh, how that made him blush with surprise and embarrassment) to always distinguish good from evil in himself, never favoring
the latter even when it appeared under the mask of good as happened all too often here when one was a white man with deep pockets and could for very little buy any kind of labor involving great patience and endurance?

He started walking again, slowly, toward the double glass doors of the building, adorned by the name “Manille” lit up in huge letters.

His legs had stiffened, as if suddenly robbed of the gift of lightness.

Because he wondered for the first time whether, in persuading Fanta to follow him to France, he hadn’t knowingly looked the other way and allowed evil every latitude to take possession of him, and whether he hadn’t indeed savored the feeling of acting wickedly while not appearing to do so.

Until now he’d only asked himself the question in practical terms: Had it been a good idea or a bad idea to bring Fanta here?

But oh no, it wasn’t that, it wasn’t that at all.

Put like that, the question was a ploy used by the evil comfortably lodged in him.

And, in that radiant period of his life when every morning, with an innocent heart, he left his small modern apartment in Le Plateau, he was still able to recognize the bad impulses and deceitful thoughts that sometimes entered his mind and to shoo them away by thinking the opposite, by which effort he was able to find relief and happiness, since he had only one profound desire, to be capable of loving everything around him.

But now, now—the extent of his bitterness almost made his head spin.

If he had been that man, what had happened to him, what had
he done to find himself now inhabiting such an envious and brutal personage, his disposition to universal love having shrunk to encompass only the person of Fanta?

Yes, what, indeed, had he done to himself to unload, now, all this untapped, unbidden love upon a woman who had gradually wearied of his incompetence, at an age, his mid-forties, when such faults (a certain unfitness for sustained work, a tendency to entertain fantasies and to believe in schemes that were hazy at best) can no longer hope to be met with indulgence and understanding?

Not only, he said to himself as he pushed open the glass door, through which, with a cowardly sense of relief, he could discern Manille’s imposing shape, surrounded by a couple of people, customers probably, to whom Manille was demonstrating the main features of a floor model of one of his kitchens, not only had he willingly connived in the lies and corruption entering and taking possession of his soul, but on the pretext of caring for her he’d enclosed Fanta in the cold, gloomy prison of his love—for such was his love at present, endless distress, like a dream from which you struggle in vain to awake, a rather degrading and pointless dream, wasn’t that what Fanta must be enduring, and wasn’t that how he himself would feel as the victim of such a love?

Once inside he walked purposefully toward the staff offices, even though he couldn’t stop his upper lip from trembling.

He knew that this tic made him look unpleasant, almost nasty, and that it was always fear that provoked it.

At such moments his lip curled back like a dog’s.

And yet he had no need to worry about Manille—did he?

Out of the corner of his eye he watched the slow progress of
the little group, and worked out that he could reach the back offices before Manille and his customers got close.

Afterward, he said to himself, Manille will have forgotten seeing me arrive so late.

All he had to do was keep out of Manille’s way for an hour or so, and all would be well.

He had time to notice that Manille looked good this morning, in his neatly ironed black T-shirt and well-cut pale jeans.

His thick gray hair was combed back, and his complexion was dark, almost golden.

Rudy could hear Manille’s slightly husky voice as he opened and shut a cupboard door, and he was sure that the customers, a drably dressed middle-aged couple with thick legs, were without realizing it succumbing to Manille’s insistent charm as he fixed his dark eyes intently on theirs, as if on the verge of passing on an important piece of personal information or making a flattering comment that he was only holding back for fear of embarrassing them.

He never gave the impression, Rudy had often observed, of trying to sell something.

Without seeming to make any effort in that direction, he managed to create the illusion of a friendly, intimate relationship that would last well beyond the eventual sale of the kitchen, which had merely been the fortuitous pretext for the birth of a friendship, and often it turned out that the tactic was quite sincere: Manille went on visiting his customers just for the pleasure of their company, and as they chatted he never abandoned the subdued tone of ardor, so delicate and restrained, that had led to the sale in the first place,
so that, Rudy thought, the manner Manille adopted to overcome a client’s resistance ended up being his true way of speaking, the only one ever heard—that smooth, slightly hoarse timbre and that restrained fervor that, it must have seemed to people, would have moved him, if he couldn’t control himself, to sing their praises, to share secrets with them, even to hug them.

Rudy couldn’t help admiring Manille even if he despised his trade.

How was it that the same jeans and T-shirt or short-sleeved top, the same sort of canvas shoes, as the boss wore, always made Rudy look like some broke overgrown adolescent, even though Rudy was taller, younger, and slimmer than Manille: that he just couldn’t understand.

He would never possess Manille’s relaxed elegance … No, he said to himself at the sight of his reflection in the second glass door, the one separating the showroom from the offices, don’t even think about it.

It occurred to him that he had a stingy, crumpled, almost needy appearance.

To whom could such a man, however kind, ever appeal?

How would anyone ever notice his love of life and of others, even if he could find it again?

How would people see it?

He had to admit that in someone like Manille, however hardened he was by a life in business, by the unremitting calculations and the pragmatic maneuvering it required, and despite the stylish sportswear and Chaumet watches and the villa at the back of the shop—despite, that is, everything that had transformed Manille, a farmworker’s son, into a dreary provincial parvenu—one could
still at once discern the amiability, kindness, and capacity for discreet compassion in his gentle, modest expression.

And then Rudy wondered for the first time if it hadn’t been precisely that which had attracted Fanta, something he’d lost long ago, the gift for …

He went into the office and closed the door quietly behind him.

He felt himself turning red.

But it was certainly that, and even if the term was pompous, there was no other word for it: the gift for … compassion.

He’d never thought, even in the depths of his anger and grief, after Mummy (wasn’t it?) had told him about the liaison between Fanta and Manille, he’d never thought, no, that it was Manille’s wealth, and the respect and the power that went with it, that could have seduced Fanta.

He’d never thought that.

Now—oh yes—he understood what it was all about, and he understood it in the light of what he no longer had, for he finally understood what he no longer had, whereas he had been suffering without knowing the reason.

The gift for compassion.

He went to his desk and dropped down onto his swivel chair.

Around him, in the big glass-walled room, all the desks were occupied.

“Ah, there you are!”

“Hi Rudy!”

He replied with a smile and a little wave of the hand.

On his cluttered desk, next to the keyboard, he saw a pile of leaflets.

“Your mother brought them a little while ago.”

Cathie’s voice, cordial but a shade anxious, reached him from the next desk, and he knew that if he turned his head his eyes would meet hers, with their questioning, slightly perplexed look.

She would ask him in a low voice why he was three quarters of an hour late and perhaps, too, why he didn’t simply forbid Mummy to set foot in Manille’s workplace.

So he contrived to mumble some answer that didn’t require him to look her in the eye.

In the dazzling glare of the room the vivid pink of Cathie’s blouse shone brightly around her.

Rudy could see it reflected in the white surface of his own desk.

He knew too that if he turned toward Cathie he’d clearly see past her small, pale face to the other side of the picture window looking out over Manille’s villa, a big building with blue shutters, pale pink roughcast walls, and a roof of Provençal tiles, separated from the commercial premises by a simple lawn, and he couldn’t help wondering, for the
n
th time, painfully and fruitlessly, whether Cathie and the others, Dominique, Fabrice, and Nathalie, had watched Fanta’s comings and goings at the boss’s dream house, noticed how many times she’d entered, and why he, Rudy, had never seen her there, even though, during that terrible period when he “knew” without “really knowing” (no need to believe everything Mummy said, after all), he’d never ceased glancing at the picture window, past Cathie, who felt sorry for him and showed sympathy (so was everybody privy to his troubles?), at the villa’s fussy double doors with their wrought-iron fittings.

How he’d suffered then!

How ashamed, how furious he’d felt!

All that was now long past, but he still couldn’t speak to Cathie
without feelings of rage boiling up in him as he glanced at Manille’s house.

He suddenly felt like saying to her in a dry tone that would make her uncomfortable, “But that’s pretty well the only consolation Mummy’s got left in life, distributing left and right her bundles of pathetic leaflets in support of poor cretins as lonely and idle as she is, how do you expect me to tell her to stop coming here and, really, who’s bothered by it, eh?”

But he said nothing.

He remained conscious of the aura of fuchsia that surrounded her and it annoyed him, because he couldn’t forget her presence.

He pushed to one side the packet of leaflets held together with a rubber band.

“They are in our midst.”

The clumsy, almost laughable picture of an adult angel sitting down at a table with members of an ecstatic family, and the angel’s silly smirk.

“They are in our midst.”

Such inanities that kept Mummy from drowning in melancholy and antidepressants were, literally, her salvation.

He was outraged that a Little Miss Nobody like Cathie, in the guise of trying to be helpful, would dare to suggest that he deprive Mummy of the pleasure of bringing her brochures to Manille’s place.

What did she know about Mummy’s sad life?

“Hey, tell me, does Manille want my mother to stop coming here?” he asked suddenly.

He looked at Cathie, dazzled by the absurd intensity of her pink blouse. It was such an effort keeping his eyes fixed upon her face,
to resist their tendency to wander, that his head started aching violently.

Meanwhile he felt as if a hot poker was being pushed up his anus.

“Not at all,” said Cathie, “I’m not even aware if he noticed your mother coming in.”

She smiled, surprised he could think such a thing.

Oh no, he thought, downcast, it’s starting again.

He raised his buttocks feebly from the chair and balanced on the edge of the seat so that only the top of his thighs remained in contact with it.

But the mild relief he’d hoped for failed to materialize.

He then heard, through the fog of pain that had suddenly enveloped him, Cathie’s muffled voice.

“It’s not like Manille to stop your mother coming, is it?”

Rudy couldn’t now remember what he’d said or what he’d asked.

Ah, Mummy. It wasn’t like Manille to show the slightest harshness, or to try to shoo away this ridiculous woman who really believed she could, by means of tracts written and printed in her living room—tracts that swallowed up a not inconsiderable part of her meager pension—convince kitchen salesmen of the presence of angels all around them.

At the very most he’d …

That familiar itch, which had taken him by surprise, he was beginning to subdue in his mind.

He brought to bear all the old defense mechanisms (those he’d not used in quite a while, because for several months he’d been left in peace by the problem), the most immediate of which consisted in directing his thoughts toward topics having no connection
with his own body, or with any other body, real or otherwise, so that, quite naturally, he started thinking intensely about Mummy’s angels, and he reached out with his fingers to bring the packet of brochures nearer to him.

How would Mummy answer the question of whether angels ever suffered from piles?

Wouldn’t she be happy and flattered to see him asking, with apparent seriousness, to hear him broaching …

Stop, stop, he said to himself, in a panic. That wasn’t at all what he ought to be concentrating on.

The pain came back, more insistent, exasperating.

He had a terrible longing to scratch, no, to scrape off, to tear away, this goading, burning flesh.

He rubbed against the edge of the chair.

With a trembling finger he started up his computer.

Then he looked again at the picture of the angel, the clumsily drawn figure, the naive decor sketched by Mummy, and suddenly he discerned beyond all possibility of error what his eyes had been content to skim over without any attempt at interpretation a few moments earlier.