Three Strong Women (10 page)

Why did he feel, as the years drifted by, his fine younger days slipping away, that only the lives of others—the lives of almost everyone around him—were proceeding naturally, gliding along an increasingly unencumbered path, already illuminated by the warm, gentle rays of the light shining at the end? It was a fact that made it possible for all the men in his acquaintance to let their guard down and adopt a relaxed, subtly acerbic attitude toward life, an attitude inspired by a discreet awareness of having acquired
wisdom at the price of perfect health, a supple, flat stomach, and a full head of hair.

Being plunged in grief, I find myself mightily dejected
.

He, Rudy, could see what this wisdom consisted of, even if his own progress seemed painfully slow, his path choked with tangled undergrowth that no light could penetrate.

From the depths of his chaos, his fragility, he felt he understood the fundamental insignificance of his suffering, and yet he was incapable of deriving any advantage from this awareness, lost as he was on the fringes of the true existence that everyone has the power to influence.

So—he said to himself—despite his forty-three summers, he, Rudy Descas, seemed yet to have acquired that knack, that easy levelheadedness, that sardonic tranquillity that he saw informing the simplest actions and the most routine utterances of other men, of people who spoke calmly and with unstudied sincerity to their children, who read newspapers and magazines with wry interest, who looked forward to a pleasant lunch with friends the following Sunday, whose success they could cheerfully make every necessary effort to ensure, never being obliged to conceal the fact that they were only just emerging from yet another squabble, from a painful, degrading dream.

I find myself mightily dejected
.

He was never, ever, granted any of that.

But why, he wondered, why?

That he’d behaved badly at such-and-such a moment and in such-and-such a situation where it had been important to measure up to the attendant joy or the tragedy,
that
he was perfectly happy
to acknowledge, but what constituted the tragedy, where was the joy, in this diminished life with his family, and what were the particular circumstances he’d been incapable of confronting as a fully formed person?

Exactly. It seemed to him that his immense fatigue—though his fury was no less considerable, Fanta would say with a snicker, adding that it was just like him to claim to be consumed, even as the perpetual muted rage he inflicted on his nearest and dearest was far more wearing on them: isn’t that right, Rudy?—that his great fatigue resulted from his efforts to steer their poor tumbrel, that load of painful, degrading dreams, in the right direction.

Had his desire to do the right thing ever been rewarded?

No, not even—no—not even acknowledged, let alone praised or honored.

In defense of Fanta, who always seemed to be blaming him silently for all their setbacks and misfortunes, he had to acknowledge that he was quick to preempt any such judgment by cultivating the feeling that he himself was vaguely accountable for all the bad luck that came their way.

As for the rare strokes of good fortune, he’d gotten into the habit of greeting them with considerable skepticism, and his mistrustful face eloquently expressed his expectation that no one would think of showing him any gratitude for the brief moment of happiness in their house since he’d had nothing to do with it.

Oh yes, Rudy was well aware of that.

He felt this look of almost nauseous suspicion starting to show on his face the moment he suggested to Fanta, for example, or to Djibril, that they go to a restaurant, or out to the canoe club for a spin, then only to see in return (as the child, unable to fathom his
father’s secret intentions, turned to catch his mother’s eye) a look of anxiety or slight dismay sweep across those two beautiful faces, so similar, his wife’s and his son’s, at which sight, unable to suppress his resentment, he’d get very cross, saying to them, “What? Aren’t you ever pleased?” whereupon the two beautiful faces of the only creatures he loved on this earth became expressionless, now revealing nothing more than a dismal indifference toward him and all his suggestions for making them happy, and a will to banish silently from their lives, their thoughts, and their feelings this surly and erratic man whom malevolent fate had obliged them to suffer for the time being, like the aftereffects of a bad, shameful dream.
Everything that was going to happen to me has happened
.

He pulled up sharply on the verge of the little road that every day led him straight to Manille’s headquarters as soon as he’d passed the big rotary at the center of which there now stood a curious statue of white stone, a naked man whose bent back, lowered head, and outstretched arms seemed, with terrified resignation, to be waiting for the fountain to drench him with its water when summer came around again.

Rudy had followed every stage of the fountain’s construction as he drove slowly past the rotary every morning in his old Renault Nevada before turning off toward the Manille offices, and without his noticing it, his mild curiosity had changed into embarrassment, then into a deeper unease when he thought he discerned a close resemblance between the statue’s face and his own (the same flat, square forehead, the straight but rather short nose, prominent jaw, big mouth, and angular chin so typical of proud men who know precisely where each one of their resolute steps is leading, something more comic than pathetic when one was still happy to slave
away at Manille’s, huh, Rudy?), and his distress only grew at the sight of the monstrous genitalia that the artist, a certain R. Gauquelan, who lived nearby, had carved on his hero’s crotch, causing Rudy to feel himself the subject of a cruel mockery, so pitiful was the contrast between the statue’s weak, spineless posture and its enormous scrotum.

He tried now to avoid looking at the statue as he drove past the rotary in his worn-out Nevada.

But a malevolent reflex sometimes caused him to glance at the stone face that was his own, at that large, pale figure stooping with fear, and at the testicles out of all proportion with the rest, until he’d come to resent and almost hate Gauquelan, who’d managed, Rudy read in the local paper, to sell his sculpture to the municipality for around a hundred thousand euros.

That bit of news had caused him considerable anguish.

It was, he said to himself, as if while he was still an innocent or just asleep, Gauquelan had taken advantage of him and gotten him to pose for some ridiculous pornographic photo that had made Gauquelan richer as it made Descas poorer and more grotesque—as if Gauquelan had yanked him from a tiresome dream and plunged him into a degrading one.

“A hundred thousand euros, I can’t believe it,” he’d said to Fanta, snickering to mask his distress. “No, I really can’t believe it.”

“What’s it matter?” Fanta must have replied. “How does the fact that others are doing well diminish you?” she asked, with that irritating habit, recently adopted, of appearing to look at every situation with a lofty, magnanimous detachment, abandoning Rudy
to his petty envies, which, no more than the rest of it, did she care any longer to share with him.

But she couldn’t stop him from recalling the good years not so long ago—nor reminding her of them, beseechingly—when it was one of their fondest pleasures to sit cross-legged, side by side, like two old chums in their darkened bedroom, sharing the same cigarette, and dissecting with brutal frankness the habits and personalities of their acquaintances and neighbors, and deriving from the very harshness they shared, along with a quite conscious bad faith, laughs they could never—would have never dared—share with others, but that were appropriate enough to two old friends, which, in addition to being man and wife, they genuinely were.

He wanted her to remember this, she who now affected to think that she’d never enjoyed a moment’s fun with him; but (given the groveling manner he’d been reduced to in spite of himself) it was hardly the best move he could have come up with: begging her to notice that, however it had come about, what had been was no more, that the amusing companion he might have been, once, was now probably dead and gone for good, and that it was all his fault, and his alone.

And he always came back to this intolerable aspect, the unspoken accusation grabbing him by the throat—that it was, eternally, his fault—and the more he struggled to free himself from what was strangling him, killing him, the more he shook his heavy head, the angrier he got, and the worse his crimes became.

Indeed, they’d not had any friends for a long while, and the neighbors avoided him.

Rudy Descas couldn’t care less, thinking he had enough to
worry about without troubling himself to wonder how his attitude might be putting people off, but he could no longer make fun of them with Fanta, even if she’d been inclined to want him to.

They lived isolated lives, very isolated, that’s what he had to accept.

It seemed that their friends (who were they exactly? what were their names? where had they all gone?) had drifted away as Fanta started to turn her back on him; it was as if the love she’d felt for him had, like some dazzling outsider in their midst, been the only thing they both liked and took interest in, and that once this beautiful witness had vanished into thin air, Fanta and he—but he most of all—had finally come to be seen, by all those friends, in the starkness of their banality, their poverty.

But Rudy couldn’t care less.

He had need only of his wife and of his son—and, as he had already admitted to himself with some embarrassment, he had a lot less need of his son than of his wife, and less need still of his son per se than as some mysterious and seductive extension of his wife, as a fascinating, miraculous development of the personality and beauty of Fanta.

As for these formless shadows, those who’d acted the part of friends, all he missed were their warm, kindly looks assuring him that Rudy Descas was a nice guy, a pleasant man to be with, whose wife from a far-off place loved him unreservedly—in that gaze he was then truly himself, Rudy Descas, just as he saw himself, present in this world, and not the unlikely, discordant figure emerging from some tiresome, shameful dream that no dawn would manage to chase away.
What has become of my friends whom I loved so much and was so close to?

He looked at his watch.

He’d only five minutes before the workday started at Manille’s.

He’d stopped in front of the only telephone box around, by the side of the little road that boldly and cheerfully opened up a route between the expanses of vines.

The sun was already beating down.

Not a breath, not a scrap of shade until you got to the tall green oaks far off that surrounded the wine-producing chateau, an austere dwelling with closed shutters.

How proud he’d been when he introduced Fanta to this region where he was born, where they were going to live and prosper, and particularly to this building, the owners of which his mother knew slightly, people who made an excellent Graves that Rudy could no longer afford to drink.

He was obscurely aware that his proud delight in showing Fanta the small dark winery, almost dragging her up the drive and to the gate, up to the evergreen oaks, approaching with a confident air on the pretext that his mother knew the owners slightly (she must have substituted for their usual cleaner for a few weeks at the outside)—he was obscurely aware that this proud delight came of his having convinced himself, with no reasonable hope, that one day the property would belong to them, to Fanta and to him, that it would be passed on to them in some way, by some means as yet unknown.

This certainty had been unaffected by the three enormous dogs that had shot out from the back of the dwelling and rushed toward them, even given the sensation of pure horror that then seized him—Rudy Descas wasn’t
that
courageous a man.

Those friends have really let me down
.

Hadn’t the unleashed Dobermans wanted to punish him for his
presumptuous and absurd desires, for the heavy possessive hand he’d laid on the property, if only in his mind?

The invisible master whistled to the dogs and stopped them in their tracks. Rudy all the while was slowly backing away, holding his arm out in front of Fanta as if to dissuade her from leaping at the three monsters’ throats.

How useless and futile he’d felt on this warm spring day in the bright, tranquil silence that had followed the dogs’ retreat and their own return to the car, how pale and trembling he’d felt beside Fanta, who’d hardly batted an eyelid.

She doesn’t bear a grudge for my putting her in harm’s way, he thought, not because she is a good person, though she is, but because she’d never had an inkling that she might be in danger. Is that, he wondered, what it is to be courageous, whereas all I am is foolhardy?

For, while God was assailing me, I never saw a single one at my side
.

Out of the corner of his eye he glanced at his wife’s impassive face and at her big brown irises as she looked down at the gravel path, prodding at it absently with the end of a stick, a hazel twig she’d picked up just before the dogs came charging at them.

Something, something in the natural placidity shown by a woman who was above all an intellectual, something in the seeming unawareness of her own composure on the part of a woman who usually got to the bottom of everything: something in her appeared to defy all understanding, he thought almost admiringly, but also a trifle unnerved.

He gazed at the broad, high plane of her smooth cheek, her thick black eyelashes, her not particularly prominent nose, and the
love he felt for this unfathomable woman put the fear of God in him.

Because she was strange—too strange for him, perhaps—and he was wearing himself out trying to prove that he was a lot more than he seemed, that he wasn’t simply an ex-schoolteacher who’d come back to live in the region of his birth, but a man chosen by fate to bring something truly original to fruition.