Three Strong Women (19 page)

Rudy switched on the ignition, put the car into reverse, and the old Nevada, chugging and smoking, moved out.

And whereas, for the past four years, he’d been studiously cultivating the theory of the profound cruelty of the three boys who, just for the hell of it, had sadistically attacked him, he knew
now that it had all been a lie—oh, he’d always known it, but he’d refused to acknowledge it, and now he was refusing no longer, remembering the kindness, embarrassment, and astonishment he’d picked up from what the teenagers were saying as they held him down, unwittingly causing him a degree of pain he would never completely recover from, because they were searching for a way out of the situation that preserved their own dignity and security and also their teacher’s, showing no desire for vengeance nor any wish to go hard on him, despite the fear and suffering he’d caused the boy from Dara Salam.

He’d understood—listening to them as they talked, with stupefaction but not rancor, nervously above him—that they fully realized, with their adolescent good sense, that their teacher had probably just lost it, even if it was the last thing they would have expected from that particular teacher.

Whereas he, Rudy, in fact hated the boy from Dara Salam.

Whereas he had, in fact, up to that moment in Manille’s parking lot, hated all three of them, whom, in his heart, he’d held responsible for his forced return to the Gironde, for his troubles, for all his misfortunes.

There could be no doubt, he said to himself as he drove out of the lot and onto the road, that anger, illusion, and a general feeling of resentment had taken hold of him at that moment—when he’d chosen to cast himself as the boys’ victim rather than seeing the facts plain: that he’d long harbored feelings of hatred, wrapped up in a smiling show of friendship, an animus issuing directly from Dara Salam, where Abel Descas had murdered his business partner.

Oh yes: no doubt, he said to himself, his present state of
dis
grace stemmed from that, from his cowardice, from his smug self-pity.

He went back the way he’d come an hour earlier, but at the rotary he went a little farther around the statue before turning into a wide road bordered by high banks, at the end of which stood Madame Menotti’s house.

Just as he was wondering if it would be all right to ask Menotti if he could use her phone to try to get in touch with Fanta (what was she doing, good God, what was she thinking?), he saw right in front of him the pale breast and vast brown wings of a low-flying buzzard.

He took his foot off the accelerator.

The buzzard flew straight at the windshield.

It gripped the wipers with its claws. It rammed its abdomen against the glass.

Rudy shouted in surprise and braked sharply.

The buzzard did not budge.

With its wings spread out across the windshield, its head turned to one side, it glared at him with a horridly severe yellow eye.

Rudy honked.

The buzzard’s whole breast shuddered. It seemed to be tightening its grip on the windshield wipers and, still giving Rudy a cold, accusing look, it screeched like an angry cat.

Slowly, he got out of the car.

He left the door open, not daring to get near the bird, which had moved its head slightly to continue watching him, now staring at him stubbornly, icily, with its other eye.

And, melting with anxious tenderness, Rudy thought, Good little god of Mummy’s, nice little father, please let nothing have happened to Fanta.

He stretched out a hand, slightly shaking, toward the buzzard.

It let go of the wipers and screeched again, angrily, in a cry of irrevocable condemnation, and flew off, flapping its heavy wings.

As it rose above Rudy’s head one of its claws grazed his forehead.

He could feel a heavy wingbeat against his hair.

He flung himself back into the car and slammed the door.

He was panting so hard that for a moment he thought the sound was being uttered by someone else—but no, these panicky, bewildered, hissing gasps were coming from his own mouth.

He grabbed the towel on the backseat and wiped his forehead.

Then he gazed for a long time, vacantly, at the bloodstained towel.

How was he going to convince Fanta that he now saw their situation in a whole new light?

How could he make her understand that, whatever he’d said to her that morning (if indeed those grotesque words he wasn’t sure of remembering had truly passed his lips), he was a changed man, and that there was no more room, in the heart of this changed man, for anger and deceit?

Probing the wound on his forehead carefully with his finger, he said to himself fearfully, It was no longer necessary, Fanta, to send that avenging bird to me—really there wasn’t …

Stunned, he set off again, driving with one hand, and with the other, unable to stop himself, fingering the crescent-shaped scratch on his forehead.

“It’s not fair,” he kept saying mechanically to himself, “it’s really not fair.”

A little farther on he stopped in front of Madame Menotti’s house.

The road was lined with modest farmhouses that wealthy couples had bought and restored, eager to conceal the buildings’ humble origins (short roof, low ceilings, narrow windows) with a good deal of lavish, meticulous interior decoration, or at least to make the shortcomings seem the result of deliberate choice, just like the copper piping, Moroccan floor tiles, and the vast bathtub set into the floor.

Rudy had realized that Madame Menotti’s modest income scarcely made it possible for her outlay ever to match her neighbors’ luxurious, obsessive extravagance, and that, for her, a new kitchen would remain the only manifestation of a sudden mad longing for comfort and splendor.

He’d also noted, with considerable anxiety and annoyance, that there was one realm in which Madame Menotti went a long way toward making up for her relative poverty. Within himself he referred to it as “wreaking almighty havoc.”

He got out of the car.

He saw at once that Madame Menotti’s wild, destructive, ham-fisted willfulness had dealt a mortal blow to an old wisteria root, thick as a tree trunk, that had been planted near the front door probably half a century earlier.

The first time Rudy had come to the house, thick bunches of sweet-smelling mauve flowers were hanging under the gutters, above the door and windows, clinging to a wire that the former owners had strung along the front of the building.

He’d stood on tiptoe to sniff the flowers, deeply moved, enchanted by so much beauty and fragrance offered free of charge, and he’d then congratulated Madame Menotti on the luxuriance of her wisteria, which reminded him, he said—oh yes, he, who never
spoke of his past life, had let that slip—of the frangipani blossoms in Dara Salam.

He’d seen Madame Menotti purse her lips in a mixture of skepticism and vague annoyance—just like, he’d said to himself, a mother who had favorites being complimented on the child she didn’t care for.

In a tone of dry condescension she’d complained about having to sweep up the leaves in autumn: so much dead foliage, so many shriveled petals.

She’d shown Rudy how, at the corner of the house, she’d already dealt with an enormous bignonia that had had the nerve to let its wild tangle of orange flowers climb all over the gray roughcast walls.

The slender branches, the glossy leaves, the strong roots, the dead corollas, all that lay on the ground waiting to be thrown on the bonfire, and Madame Menotti, as the heroine of a battle she’d won hands down, had pointed to it proudly and scornfully.

Crestfallen, Rudy had followed her in a tour around the garden. There was nothing but the pathetic remnants of a struggle that had been as absurd, as ferocious, as it had been reckless.

Madame Menotti wanted to clean everything up, make the place tidy, and lay down a lawn. In a destructive frenzy she’d taken it out on the hornbeam hedge (scalped), on the old walnut tree (sawn off at the root), and on the many rosebushes (dug up). After thinking better of it, she’d replanted the rosebushes elsewhere; now they were dying.

Madame Menotti still pressed on, satisfied that her acts of vandalism had established her proprietary rights. Seeing her fat bottom wobble as she moved between two piles of hundred-year-old
box that she’d uprooted, Rudy had felt that, for her, it was as if nothing better demonstrated her omnipotence than the destruction of patient labors, of the memorials to the delicate, simple taste of all those numberless ghosts who had preceded her in that house and who had planted, sown, and arranged the vegetation in the garden.

And he was now discovering that Madame Menotti had cut down the wisteria.

He wasn’t surprised. He was devastated.

The little house stood there, austere, stripped bare, sadly reduced to the mediocrity, which the leaves had concealed, of the materials used in building it.

Of the magnificent plant only a short stump remained.

Rudy walked slowly toward the garden gate.

He looked at the bare facade and sobbed.

Madame Menotti had opened her door when she heard the car approaching. She found Rudy standing at the gate, his cheeks wet with tears.

She was wearing a purple tracksuit.

She had short gray hair and glasses with thick black plastic frames that made her look perpetually cross. When she took them off, Rudy had already noticed, her face was that of a helpless, lost woman.

“You’d no right to do that!” he cried.

“Do what?” Madame Menotti looked exasperated.

Then he felt in his mouth again that taste of iron, that vague taste of blood that welled up in his throat whenever he thought of Madame Menotti and of what he still had to do despite all he’d
already done and that for some obscure reason, perhaps out of weariness, he’d failed to do and then forgotten about.

He now recalled only the lapse, not what the lapse had involved.

“The wisteria!” he exclaimed. “It wasn’t yours!”

“It wasn’t mine?” Madame Menotti shouted.

“It belonged … to itself, to everybody.”

His words were distorted and his voice faded away in embarrassment as he realized how futile his protest was.

It was too late, too late, in any case.

Should he not have attempted to save such an admirable wisteria?

How could he have imagined that Madame Menotti would spare it?

Once he’d witnessed her brutality toward a nature that in her eyes represented the enemy, the threat of invasion, how could he have turned his back on the wisteria, whose death sentence had been pronounced the moment she’d alluded sharply to the chore of sweeping up dead leaves?

He opened the gate and climbed up a few steps to her door.

The house now stood isolated in the middle of its grassy plot. The sun beat down on Madame Menotti.

The wisteria had given gentle shade to this same terrace, to these same concrete steps, recalled Rudy, grief stricken, and hadn’t there also been, in the corner, a large bay tree that smelled of spices in the warm air?

Gone, the bay tree, like everything else.

“Monsieur Descas, you’re an incompetent, you’re a monster.”

His eyes still damp with tears, but indifferent to what she might
be thinking (it was as if shame could no longer reach him, however hard it tried), he met Madame Menotti’s scandalized gaze.

He realized that she had gone well beyond the point of indignation, that she was now close to despair, to a sort of intoxication, wandering in a gray zone in which the slightest hitch must seem to her like a deliberate act of aggression.

He realized too that she was absolutely sincere, in her way.

A vague feeling of pity was now vying with a sense of grievance inside him. He suddenly felt downcast and very tired.

Once again his anus was itching painfully. Thinking with weary diffidence about the demise of the wisteria and without a thought for Madame Menotti’s modesty or his own, he scratched himself fiercely, vigorously, through the thickness of his jeans.

Madame Menotti appeared not to notice.

She now seemed to hesitate between the need to bring him in (he was getting an inkling as to the nature of the problem, what she held against him) and an almost equally strong desire never to have anything to do with him again.

Finally she turned on her heels and gestured to him brusquely to follow her.

She was so upset, he could see her shoulders quivering.

It was the first time he’d been back to the house since he’d come to measure for the kitchen several months earlier.

Then, as he crossed the hall and the dining room behind her, a painful process of realization began. He felt an icy grip in the pit of his stomach as the dimensions of the problem became clearer to him. Then the brutal truth hit him.

He stopped in the kitchen doorway.

Horror-struck, he had difficulty restraining a hysterical fit of the giggles.

Without realizing it he started scratching himself frantically while Madame Menotti flopped onto a chair that was still wrapped in plastic.

She kept savagely pushing her glasses up her nose, to no purpose.

Her knee was quivering uncontrollably.

“Oh my God, oh my God,” Rudy blurted out.

He felt himself blushing furiously with humiliation.

How, after so much hard work, had he managed to get his arithmetic so badly wrong?

He knew he wasn’t very good at it, but when it came to designing the kind of kitchens he despised he’d secretly taken pride in his deficiencies, so much so that his arrogance had kept him from achieving any notable improvement in his skills.

He simply didn’t wish to be good at the job.

It had seemed to him that his stubbornness was a bulwark against the complete disintegration of the erudition acquired in his former life: those arcane, those subtle bits of knowledge that he’d not had the strength, courage, or desire to cultivate and sustain and that were gradually losing their preciseness and substance.

But such an error was merely ridiculous, pitiful, and in no way a credit to the refined man he considered himself to have been; no, in no way, he thought, aghast.

He moved forward cautiously.