Three Strong Women (31 page)

Exhausted and famished, they’d lain down to sleep in front of a sort of bus station where the truck had dumped them.

Other trucks, laden with their human cargo, were waiting, ready to leave.

When Khady and Lamine had awoken at dawn, numb with cold, they were covered in sand from head to foot. Khady’s leg was hurting so much that it seemed to her, in flashes, that her suffering couldn’t be real, that either she was struggling inside the cruelest nightmare of her entire life or she was already dead and was being made to understand that her death was just that: an unbearable—yet abiding—constant physical pain.

The cloth she’d used to bind her calf several days earlier was embedded in the wound.

It was damp under the grains of sand, impregnated by the seepage of a foul, reddish liquid.

She hadn’t the strength to take it off, even though she knew she
ought to—all she managed to do was gently move her leg, which was stiff and shot through with pins and needles. In the end she got up, shook the sand out of her hair and clothing.

She hopped around a bit.

On the ground sand-covered shapes were stirring.

She came back to Lamine, who was now sitting up. He’d taken his shoes off and was inspecting the soles of his feet, which the soldier’s knife had cut while searching the boy’s shoes.

A crust of dried blood made a dark line on the hard, broken skin.

She knew that the boy, though in pain, wouldn’t show it or ever speak about his wounds; she knew too that her questioning look would be met only by a deliberately gloomy expression masking his humiliation (oh, how humiliated he was, how sorry she was for him, and how upset too at not being able to take on the humiliation for him, she who could bear it, who was so little affected by it), because what convincing explanation could he give, if not of their failure, at least of such a setback occurring so early in their journey, he who had assured her that he knew the ropes, knew about all the obstacles and dangers likely to be met with on the road?

She was aware of it, she understood and accepted it: the mortification he was feeling, which left him with that blank look and made him seem remote, so different from the intense, friendly boy he had been.

Understanding it, she didn’t hold it against him.

What she didn’t then know, what would only gradually become clear but what at the time she was unequipped to envision, was that the boy was doubly humiliated, both by what had happened the day before and, as a matter of deduction, by something that hadn’t yet
happened, something that Khady, who, though not naive, was too inexperienced to have yet intuited but that he, Lamine, knew would happen: that was why—Khady would later understand—he’d felt so ashamed in her presence, ashamed both at knowing she didn’t know and ashamed at the thing itself: that was why, out of fear and unwillingness to have anything to do with Khady’s innocence, he was so withdrawn from her.

Had he, later on, said anything specific to her?

She couldn’t remember exactly.

But it seemed to her that he hadn’t.

They’d simply wandered around, each limping in a different fashion (he trying to step only on the outer edges of his feet, she hopping along with irregular steps, trying to favor her sore leg), through streets heavy with dry, dusty heat under a yellowish, shimmering, sand-colored sky.

Lamine’s close-cropped hair, face, and chapped lips were still covered with sand.

Dazed and desperate to find some shade, they’d sought out a cheap place to eat, with earthen walls and no windows, where, in the semidarkness, they’d eaten tough, stringy pieces of grilled goat’s meat and drunk Coke, both knowing that they’d no money left to pay even for this meager fare, and Lamine retreated into a bitter, heartrending detachment behind which—he perhaps thought—he could take refuge alone with his indignity without it contaminating Khady, he who knew what was going to happen while she—he perhaps believed—still did not. But she’d had an inkling when, chewing the last piece of meat and washing it down with a last gulp of Coke, her eyes had met the hostile, half-closed eyes of the woman who had served them and who, breathing noisily,
slumped on a chair in the darkest corner, had been scrutinizing the two of them, her and the boy. Khady had wondered then how they were now going to pay what they owed. In a way the woman’s unfriendly, judgmental, inquisitive gaze had given her the answer.

Throughout this period she would cling ferociously to the conviction that only the reality of physical pain had to be taken into account.

Because her body was in a permanent state of suffering.

The woman made her work in a tiny room that gave onto a courtyard at the back of the chophouse.

There was a foam mattress on the hard floor.

Khady spent most of her time lying on it, dressed in a beige slip. The woman would bring a customer in, usually a wretched-looking young man who, like Khady and Lamine, had fetched up in this town, where he scraped together a living as a houseboy, and who often on entering the hot stuffy room would cast frightened looks around him as if caught in a trap of what was hardly—Khady thought—his own desires but the machinations of the woman who tried to inveigle every diner into visiting the room at the back.

The woman would then lock the door and go away.

The man would then lower his trousers with almost anxious haste, as if it were a matter of getting a tiresome and vaguely threatening obligation over with as quickly as possible. He’d lie down on Khady, who—to avoid jolting it as best she could—would move aside her injured leg, on which the woman put a fresh bandage each day. He would then enter her, often groaning in surprise, because a recent attack of pruritus that made Khady’s vagina dry and inflamed also caused his penis some discomfort. She summoned all her mental strength to counter the multiple shooting pains in her
back, her lower abdomen, and her calf, thinking, There’s a time when it stops, feeling on her chest half hidden by the lace edging of her slip and on her neck the man’s copious sweat mingling with hers, thinking again, There’s a time when it stops, until the man finished his labors and, in a murmur of pain and disappointment, promptly withdrew.

He would then bang on the door and they would both hear the slow, heavy tread of the woman coming to open it.

Some customers would complain, saying that it had hurt, that the girl was infected.

And Khady thought with surprise, Ah, “the girl,” that’s me, almost amused to be the one referred to that way, she, Khady Demba, in all her singularity.

She would remain lying there a while after the other two had gone.

Breathing slowly, with her eyes wide open, she would calmly inspect the cracks in the pinkish walls, the corrugated-iron ceiling, and the white plastic chair under which she’d put her bundle.

Lying perfectly still, she could hear the blood throbbing calmly, softly, in her ears, and if she moved slightly, the sucking sound of her wet back on the mattress—which was also soaked in sweat—and the tiny lapping noise made by her burning vulva, and then, feeling the pain oozing gently away, overcome by the youthful, tempestuous vigor of her solid, willful physique, she would think, calmly, almost serenely, There’s a time when it stops, so calmly, so serenely, that when the woman came back not alone, as she usually did, to wash her, nurse her, and give her something to drink, but in the company of another customer whom—with a vague gesture of regret or excuse in Khady’s direction—she
would bring in: even then Khady would experience only a brief moment of dejection, weakness, and disorientation, before once more thinking calmly, There’s a time when it stops.

After imposing one customer after another upon her, the woman would take care of Khady with motherly solicitude.

She’d bring a towel and a bucket filled with cool water and gently wash Khady’s nether regions.

In the evening they would sit down together in the courtyard and Khady would eat a solid meal of goat’s meat and boiled corn washed down with Coke, keeping back a portion for Lamine.

The woman would take off Khady’s bandage, smear fat on the wound, which was swollen and foul smelling, and bind it up again with a clean piece of cloth.

And as they sat there, full up, enjoying the quiet of the cool evening, Khady would turn to look at the woman. In the dusk she could see only the outline of a round, kindly face, and it sometimes seemed to her that she’d gone back to the time of her childhood, which, although harsh, muddled, and often grim, had had its happier moments, such as when Khady sat in front of the house at her grandmother’s feet to have her hair done.

Just before nightfall, Lamine would arrive.

He slipped into the courtyard—Khady thought with a touch of pity and disgust—like a dog afraid of getting a hiding, but even more of finding his bowl empty. Lamine was at once quick and stooping, keen and furtive. Khady and the woman pretended not to notice, Khady out of delicacy and the woman out of scorn, and Lamine would pick up the full plate and carry it to Khady’s room, where the woman allowed him—or at least didn’t forbid him—to spend the night, on the unspoken proviso that he’d be gone by dawn.

Before going to bed, the woman would give Khady a small part of the money she’d earned.

Khady would also turn in, going back to the pinkish room lit by a grimy bulb hanging from the tin roof.

Seeing Lamine, once so energetic, crouched in a corner scraping his plate with his spoon, made Khady feel her aches and pains all come flooding back.

Because what—beyond the faintly tired evidence of her own honor now forever secured, and the rather weary awareness of her irrevocable dignity—could she set against the incurable shame the boy felt?

Perhaps he’d have preferred to see her humiliated and in despair.

But he carried the whole burden of despair and humiliation. Khady felt that, without realizing it, he held it against her. That was why she’d have preferred him not to be there in the evening, filling up the cramped space with his bitterness and his silent, obscure, unjust reproaches.

She also knew that he bore a grudge over her refusal to let him now make love to her.

Her reason—the one she gave herself and the one she told him—was that her swollen, ulcerated vagina needed a rest.

But this she guessed too: Lamine was ashamed of her, and for her, as much as he was ashamed of himself.

That annoyed her.

What right had he to include her in his feelings of abjection just because he lacked her strength of spirit?

She didn’t see why she should put up with pain in her genitalia just to satisfy his needs.

Silently, wearily, she would slide down onto the mattress.

What he did all day long in the dry, suffocating heat of the town, she didn’t care to be told.

She would feel a sullen pout beginning to play on her lips, aimed at discouraging any timid wish he might have for a chat.

Meanwhile her fingers would start moving mechanically toward the wall to stroke its nooks and crannies and, just before she fell asleep, a wild surge of joy would make her exhausted body quiver all over as she recalled suddenly, pretending to have forgotten, that she was Khady Demba: Khady Demba.

She awoke one morning to find Lamine gone.

Curiously, she understood what had happened before noticing his absence; she understood as soon as she woke up and leaped toward her bundle, which was wide open. She’d left it, tightly knotted, under the chair. She pulled out its meager contents—two T-shirts, a batik, a clean empty beer bottle—and groaned as she took in what she’d guessed before remarking anything else: that all her money was gone.

It was only at that instant she realized she was alone in the room.

In her distress she started making little whimpering sounds.

She opened her mouth wide. She felt she was suffocating.

Having awoken in the certainty that something bad had been done to her, had she, during the night, heard something, or had she had one of those dreams that foretell in precise detail what’s about to happen?

She rushed out, limping so badly that she nearly fell over at every step, crossed the courtyard, and went into the chophouse, where the woman was drinking her first coffee of the day.

“He’s gone! He’s stolen everything from me!” she shouted.

She slumped down onto a chair.

With rather distant pity, the woman eyed her coldly and knowingly.

She finished her coffee, slightly spoiled by Khady’s entry, and clicked her tongue. Then she got up heavily and, taking the girl in her arms and cradling her awkwardly, promised she’d never throw her out.

“No risk of that,” Khady whispered, “with what I bring you.”

In utter dejection she thought that she’d have to start all over again, that everything had to be endured once more, and even worse, because her body was so horribly bruised, whereas the night before she’d worked out that just two or three months’ more work would suffice to enable her and Lamine to continue their journey.

As for the boy, well, she’d already forgotten him.

It wouldn’t be long before all recollection of his name and what he looked like would fade from her mind. In retrospect she would see his betrayal as just one more cruel blow of fate.

Whenever she looked back to that period, she would round down to about a year the time she’d spent at the chophouse and in the pinkish room, but she knew that it had probably lasted a great deal longer and that she, too, had gotten bogged down in the sand of the desert town, like most of the men who visited her, who’d come from several different countries and who’d been wandering around the place for years, their eyes flitting apathetically over everything but seeming to take nothing in. They’d lost count of how long
they’d been there, and people back home must have thought them dead because, in their shame over their situation, they’d failed to keep in touch with their families.

With their inert and impenetrable manners, they’d often linger by Khady’s side, having seemingly forgotten what they’d come for or thought it so exhausting and pointless that in the end they preferred just to lie there, neither asleep nor really alive.