Three Strong Women (20 page)

His eyes met Madame Menotti’s and he remembered the wisteria. Still bearing the grudge, he looked away. Madame Menotti’s
gaze would now have appeared drained of the scandalized hatred he’d seen earlier, but he refused to meet it, thinking, I refuse to communicate with her, if that’s what she expects.

Because he had the impression that she now felt a kind of dismay that was directed at no one in particular and was actually a plea for help and support, as if they were both looking at the consequences of an act of madness committed by someone else.

He then dared to venture toward the middle of the room, toward the square worktop with its marble and slate surface containing a vast cooktop under a bell-shaped hood, the centerpiece of this petrified, intimidating spectacle that had come to represent for Madame Menotti the essence of the concept “kitchen.”

The counter was in place and the hood was attached to the ceiling.

But the cooktop was not under the hood but well to the side. Rudy understood at once that if one tried to move the counter in order to position the cooktop correctly, it would be impossible to maneuver around it easily.

Called upon to invest all his intelligence and mental stamina in making those calculations, he’d simply proved incapable of determining precisely the proper positioning of a four-burner cooktop relative to its hood.

“They’re going to give you the sack, at Manille’s,” Madame Menotti said in a flat tone of voice.

“I fear so,” murmured Rudy.

“I was going to invite a few friends in to see the kitchen tomorrow, now I’ll have to cancel all that.”

“Yes, probably a good idea,” said Rudy.

Exhausted, he drew up a chair that was still in its packaging and flopped onto it.

How was he going to persuade himself that getting fired from Manille’s wasn’t a disaster?

What would become of the three of them?

He felt all the more inept because if he’d had the guts to probe the diffuse, nagging, subliminal awareness he’d had for a while that he was guilty of a particular form of carelessness in the case of Menotti, he could have pulled back in time to correct the mistake before building work began.

But he’d simply suppressed that awareness, not to be troubled by it, in much the same way, he thought, as he’d buried, far out of reach until today, the truth about the Dara Salam boy, the whole Dara Salam saga.

What would become of the three of them if he lost his job?

“Actually, I knew it,” he murmured, “I knew I’d made a mistake!”

“Oh yes?” said Menotti.

“Yes, yes … I should have … dared to face up to the fact … to the possibility that I’d made a mistake, but I chose to close my eyes to it.”

He looked at Madame Menotti, who took off her glasses and wiped them on her T-shirt, and he noticed that her face was calm, as if, everything having been said about the matter, there was no reason to go on feeling so cross about it.

He also noticed that the woman had fine features that were usually hidden behind her heavy glasses.

What would become of them?

His mortgage payments amounted to five hundred euros a month. What was going to happen to the house, to their family life?

“Would you like a cup of coffee?” Madame Menotti asked.

Somewhat surprised, he nodded.

He remembered the pleasant smell of coffee on Manille’s breath.

“I’ve been dying for a coffee for quite some time,” he said, his eyes following Madame Menotti as she hauled herself to her feet, grabbed a coffeepot, filled it with water, and then perched on the edge of the new countertop to pour a measure of coffee into the filter.

“All the same,” he couldn’t help saying, “that wisteria can’t have been bothering you, it was so beautiful.”

Absorbed by what she was doing, Madame Menotti didn’t turn around or attempt an answer.

Her sneakers dangled above the floor.

He suddenly remembered other feet not touching the ground or scarcely appearing to touch it, the swift, indefatigable feet of Fanta flying above the pavements of Dakar, and he said to himself, That wisteria I cut down, and with bitter sweat pouring down his face he added, That’s the wisteria I cut down, it wasn’t bothering me and it was so beautiful. And he decided to leave unsaid the harsh things he’d been intending to say to Madame Menotti about the wisteria she’d cut off at the root.

A cold, bitter sweat was pouring down his face.

Nevertheless it seemed to him, in the light of what he was now prepared to admit to himself, that he was beginning to emerge from an old dream, from the old and unbearable dream in which, whatever he could say, whatever he could do …

“Here’s your coffee,” Madame Menotti said.

She poured some for herself and went back to sit on her chair. The plastic covering squeaked every time she moved.

They sipped their coffee in silence, and at last Rudy felt good, at peace with himself. The cold, bitter sweat on his forehead was beginning to dry, even though he realized that, objectively speaking, his situation had never been so depressing.

“I won’t find work around here,” he said calmly, as if he were talking about someone else.

And Madame Menotti replied in the same calm, detached tone of voice, licking her lips to show she’d finished her coffee and greatly enjoyed it, “No, not much chance of finding work around here.”

Slightly embarrassed, he asked, “May I use your phone?”

She led him into her sitting room and pointed to the telephone on a pedestal table.

She kept pushing her glasses up her nose to little effect, but otherwise remained motionless by his side, not so much to keep an eye on him, he gathered, as to not be left alone in her bungled kitchen.

“You don’t have a cell phone?”

“No,” he replied, “it was too expensive.”

Shame dealt a blow against the still-fragile carapace of his lucidity and self-esteem, but such attacks were routine, and he felt it was his duty not to give in to them, not to wallow in the paradoxical comfort of such a familiar sensation.

“It was really too expensive,” he repeated, “and it was something I could do without.”

“You did the right thing, then.”

“Like your kitchen,” he added, “too expensive and something you could have done without.”

Gazing rather sadly before her, she said nothing.

For Madame Menotti it was still too soon, he felt, and it was more than she was capable of, to give up the hopes of happiness, frivolity, consistency, and peace enshrined in the supposed perfection of a kitchen from Manille’s.

Besides, wasn’t it what he’d implicitly promised her, when she’d phoned in distress one night and when he’d felt her resolution flagging, and he’d pointed out that she’d no chance of enjoying an enviably harmonious and well-ordered existence in an old kitchen with mismatched furnishings?

He dialed his own number again.

He let it ring for a long time, so long indeed that if Fanta had picked up the phone at that point he would have felt more anxiety than relief.

Next to the phone was the local directory. To while away the time he picked it up, thumbed through it with one hand, and deliberately went straight to the name of Gauquelan, the sculptor, and with a touch of unease noted that he lived not far away, in a new development occupied by wealthy former city dwellers who, like Madame Menotti’s neighbors and to a lesser extent Madame Menotti herself, had bought rural properties that, at great expense, they were renovating.

Later, waiting on the doorstep to say good-bye to Madame Menotti, he thought he could smell the wisteria.

He stood there in the harsh glare of the sun. The heavy, intoxicating scent of the mauve clusters into which, drunk with gratitude, he’d plunged his nose a few weeks earlier now crept up on him once again, and he was deeply moved.

The scent probably came, he said to himself, from the pathetic
heap of wisteria by the side of the house. It was spreading its fragrance one last time. Was it not, in its own way, saying, “You’ve done nothing, you’ve never tried doing anything for me, and now it’s too late and I’m dying, slowly decomposing in my own perfume”?

He was overwhelmed with feelings of resentment.

To hide them, he lowered his head and stuck his hands in his back pockets.

From one of them he pulled out a brochure of Mummy’s and brusquely handed it to Madame Menotti.

“They’re among us,” she read aloud. Puzzled, she asked, “Who are ‘they’?”

“Oh, the angels,” Rudy said with feigned nonchalance.

She snickered and crumpled up the brochure without opening it.

Feeling hurt on Mummy’s behalf and sensing his anger rising again within him, he went quickly down the steps and, almost running, returned to his car.

He drove slowly, aimlessly, thinking there was no point in setting foot in Manille’s place again, now that his goose was thoroughly cooked.

A feeling of pique still made it painful for him to think about his failure, because he would have loved to stomp out of Manille’s and slam the door behind him rather than find himself sacked for a gross error of calculation on a project to which he’d given so much of himself, but then the dread inspired by the vision of his future was softened by a realization that there was nothing that could be done about it, that it was all in the order of things.

He ought not to crawl before Manille.

His head was spinning a little.

How had he managed to put up with such a life for four years? It was only an academic question, he realized, a purely formal, pretended bafflement, because he knew very well, actually, how people put up with long years of a paltry existence.

What he didn’t know, rather, was how he could have fared
not
putting up with those bitter, pathetic years—what kind of man would he have been, what kind of man would he have become, what would have happened had he not settled for such mediocrity?

Would it have been a good thing or would he have fallen still lower than now?

And what would he have done with himself?

Really, it wasn’t difficult getting used to a life of self-disgust, bitterness, and disorder.

He’d even gotten used to a state of permanent, barely contained fury, he’d even managed, after a fashion, to get used to his frosty, fraught relations with Fanta and the child.

At the thought that he was going to have to take a quite different view of his domestic situation he felt dizzy again, and although he’d long aspired to rekindle the love and tenderness they’d known before they’d left for France, he felt obscurely anxious. Would Fanta recognize what he’d newly become, wasn’t she too weary, too mistrustful, and too skeptical to meet him at this point he’d arrived at?

You’ve come too late and I’m dying.

Where could she be at this precise moment?

Much as he longed to rejoin Fanta, he was afraid of going back home.

There was no need, Fanta, to send me that horrid avenging bird.

A voice kept cawing in his head: You’ve come too late, I’m dying, my feet have been cut off, I’ve fallen on the floor of your unfriendly house, you’ve come too late.

He was hungry now and Madame Menotti’s coffee had made him terribly thirsty.

He was driving slowly with all the windows down along the quiet little road, between the thuja hedges and white fences beyond which occasionally shimmered the bluish water of a swimming pool.

Having left Madame Menotti’s area behind, he noted that the neighborhood he was now in consisted of even larger houses, even more luxuriously and more recently restored, and it occurred to him that he was deceiving himself yet again in affecting to drive without a precise destination; he was annoyed to think that he, Rudy Descas, should have been itching to prowl around Gauquelan’s place ever since noting the sculptor’s address in Madame Menotti’s sitting room, and felt he should no doubt admit having wanted to do it for quite a while, ever since he’d read about the municipality’s having awarded Gauquelan more than a hundred thousand euros for the statue—whose face so closely resembled Rudy’s—that had been installed on the rotary.

Tortured by heat and thirst, he wondered if he was not being cast back into the dangerous eddies of that tiresome, monotonous, degrading dream that left such a bitter aftertaste and from which by sheer force of will he was just beginning to extricate himself.

Should he not forget about Gauquelan, the man who’d inspired so much unjust, spiteful, uncalled-for rage?

Of course he should, and that’s certainly what he was going to do—stop thinking that the man was in some mysterious, symbolic
way responsible for Rudy’s rotten luck, that he’d secretly taken advantage of Rudy’s innocence to prosper while he, Rudy …

Yes, it was absurd, but merely thinking about it made him gloomy and irritable.

He could see again the photo in the local paper of this Gauquelan, with his missing tooth, fat face, and smug expression, and to Rudy it seemed unquestionable that the man had robbed him of something, just like all those clever, cynical people who benefit from the inability of the Rudy Descases of this world to get their grip of the brass ring.

That pathetic artist, Gauquelan, had succeeded because Rudy was languishing in poverty. In Rudy’s eyes it was no coincidence: he couldn’t shake the notion of cause and effect.

The other guy was growing fat at his expense.

The idea drove him mad.

What’s more …

He managed a smile, he forced himself to smile, even though his dry lips were stuck together. Boy, was he thirsty!

What’s more … it may have been silly, but that’s the way it was, it had the perfect luminosity of unprovable truth: while Rudy’s little soul was fluttering around unsuspectingly, the other had grabbed hold of it to create his despicable work, the statue of a man who looked like Rudy, even down to his pose of angry, terrified submission.

Yes, it drove him mad to think that, although they’d never met, Gauquelan had made use of him, that people like him exploited for their own benefit the trusting ignorance and weakness of those who failed to take steps to protect themselves.

He pulled up in front of a brand-new, black, wrought-iron gate
with tips of gold. Feeling a little giddy, he said to himself that this was where Gauquelan lived, in that big house built of exposed stone blocks freshly scrubbed and pointed.