Three Strong Women (21 page)

The tiled roof was new and the windows and shutters gleamed with white paint. On the wide terrace a set of pale wooden table and chairs stood in the shade of a yellow umbrella.

It was impossible, Rudy thought with pain, to be unhappy in a house like that.

How he’d love to live there with Fanta and the child!

The gate was purely notional since—and this was a detail that Rudy found particularly impressive—it defended nothing: on either side of the twin stone pillars there was a gap before the privet hedge began, through which it was easy to pass.

He got out of the car and closed the door gently.

He slipped through the gap and strode quickly to the terrace.

Total silence.

These houses had huge garages, so how could you tell whether anyone was in? Where Rudy or Mummy lived, a car parked outside proved beyond a doubt that the owner was at home.

Bending low, he went around to the back, where he found a door that he supposed opened onto the kitchen.

He pressed the door handle down, as if, he thought, he was letting himself into his own house.

The door opened and he went in, closing it nonchalantly behind him.

He stopped, nevertheless, alert to any sounds.

Then, reassured, he grabbed a bottle of water on the counter, checked that it was unopened, and drank it all, even though the water was barely chilled.

As he drank, he let his eyes wander over Gauquelan’s large kitchen.

He noticed at once that it could not have come from Manille’s, which offered nothing half as sumptuous, and that irritated him; it was as if Gauquelan had ordered from a more upmarket competitor as a way of further humiliating him.

Nevertheless, as a kitchen connoisseur, he judged it to be a really fine one, far more sophisticated, truth be told, than anything he could have designed.

The centerpiece was an oval counter in pink marble. It rested on a succession of white cupboards that curved elegantly, following the line of the stone.

Hanging over the whole was a glass cube, probably the hood. It seemed to be suspended solely by the miracle of its own refinement.

The floor, paved in traditional style with reddish sandstone flags, shone discreetly in the bright room. It looked as if it had been waxed and polished many times.

Yes, what a marvelous kitchen, he thought in a rage, built to cater every day for a large family gathered for slow-cooked food—he could almost hear a beef stew simmering on the magnificent stove, a professional eight-burner job in shining white enamel.

And yet the setup seemed never to have been used.

The marble surface was dusty, and apart from the bottle of water and a plate of bananas, there was nothing to indicate that anyone cooked or ate under the varnished beams of this big room.

Rudy crossed the kitchen and went into the hall, conscious of the lightness and suppleness of his refreshed, invincible self.

The air conditioning bolstered his self-assurance, because he’d stopped sweating so much.

He felt on his chest and back the cotton of his almost-dry shirt.

Oh, he said to himself in surprise, I’m not afraid of anything now.

He stopped in the doorway of the living room, which was situated opposite the kitchen on the other side of the hall.

He could hear, clearly, the sound of snoring.

Tilting his head forward, he could see an armchair. Sitting in it was a fat elderly man whom he recognized as Gauquelan from the newspaper photo.

With one cheek resting on the wing of the armchair, the man was snoring softly.

His hands rested palms up on his thighs, in an attitude of confidence and abandon.

His half-open lips produced an occasional bubble of saliva that burst when he next breathed out.

Isn’t he grotesque, Rudy said to himself, slightly out of breath.

Snoozing peacefully like that while …

While what? he wondered, almost suffocated by a dizzying joyful malice.

While in his undefended house his nimble murderer prowls around him?

A murderer with a heart full of hatred?

He felt himself thinking clearly, rapidly.

In one of the drawers (fully retractable, thanks to tracks with shock absorbers) of that perfect kitchen there would no doubt be found a set of butcher’s knives, the most fearsome of which could
strike at Gauquelan’s heart—piercing the thick skin, the muscle, the layer of hard dense fat like that surrounding a rabbit’s small heart, thought Rudy, who occasionally bought from Madame Pulmaire at a cut rate one of the large rabbits that she kept in cages scarcely bigger than their occupants and that he was obliged to skin and gut himself even though he loathed it.

He was going to return to the kitchen, get that fantastic knife, and plunge it into Gauquelan’s heart.

How calm, strong, and purposeful he felt! How he loved the feeling!

But then what?

Who would be able to link him to Gauquelan?

He alone was privy to the reasons he had for cursing the Gauquelans of this world.

He thought of his old Nevada parked in front of the house and stifled a giggle.

His ghastly car would give him away at once, but it was pretty unlikely that, in this neighborhood, and at this hour, anyone would have noticed it.

And even if they had …

He feared nothing now.

He looked hard at Gauquelan. From the living room door he watched this man sleeping—a man who’d shamelessly made so much money, and whose fat hands lay limply, trustingly, on his thighs.

Rudy’s anus began itching again. He scratched himself mechanically.

His father, Abel Descas, had been in the habit of taking a siesta in the big, shady living room of the house in Dara Salam, where
he used to sit in his wicker chair just as Gauquelan was now in his low armchair—heedless, confident, unaware of the crimes being dreamed up around him and of the crimes about to be hatched in his, for the moment, still heedless, confident mind.

Rudy wiped his hands—they had suddenly started sweating—on his trousers.

If his father’s business partner Salif had taken advantage of Abel’s siesta—of his afternoon nap and of his heedlessness, his confidence—to stab him, he (Salif) would no doubt still be alive, even today, and the death would have changed nothing as far as Abel’s ultimate fate was concerned, since he (Abel) would kill himself a few weeks after Salif’s murder.

Salif, Rudy recalled, had been a tall, slender man of slow, careful movements.

Had Salif stood on the threshold of the big, shady room gazing at Abel asleep, imagining that, absorbed in his strange afternoon dreams, Abel knew nothing of the crimes being plotted around him?

Had Salif so hated Rudy’s father that, despite seeing the man’s upturned palms resting on his thighs, he could have wished to kill him, or had he felt for Abel an affection in no way belied by his attempts to swindle his partner? Were these two tendencies—affection and treachery—present simultaneously in Salif’s mind and intentions, but kept distinct, so that the one never interfered with the other?

Rudy had no privileged insight into what his father’s partner Salif felt about Abel, and didn’t know if Salif had really tried to cheat or whether Abel had mistakenly jumped to that conclusion, but now Rudy’s thoughts were, despite himself, going back to
the time when his father used to nap in the wicker chair. Rudy’s thighs were getting damp and his trousers were clinging to them, and the itch was back with a vengeance. Feeling confused, angry, and upset, he was starting to wriggle once more, clenching and unclenching his buttocks.

Gauquelan hadn’t stirred.

When he woke up and rubbed together those hands no longer innocent and carefree but impatient and eager to return to that contemptible métier of his that paid so well, when he laboriously hauled himself out of his dark green crushed-velvet armchair and raised his cold devious eyes to see Rudy Descas standing in the doorway, would he realize that his death—his brutal, misconstrued demise—had been dreamed up by this stranger, or would he think, rather, that he was looking at the unexpected face of a friend, mistaking that look of hatred for one of benevolence?

There must have been an afternoon, Rudy thought in a kind of panic, when his father had awoken from his siesta and from a possibly recurrent, cold, monotonous dream, had rubbed his eyes and face with hands no longer trusting but active and busy, had hauled from his wicker chair the supple heft of his trim, muscular frame, and had left the dark shady room in the quiet house, headed for Salif’s office, a bungalow not far away. He was, perhaps, still letting float hazily through his mind the vestiges of a painful, vaguely degrading dream in which his partner was trying to rob him by artificially inflating estimates for the construction of the vacation resort Abel was planning. Perhaps as he walked toward Salif’s bungalow he’d not dispelled the fallacy nurtured in some dreams that all the Africans around him had but one aim, to cheat him, even while feeling real affection for him, as Salif did, because
those two impulses—friendship and deception—cohabited independently, without blending, in their minds and in their intentions.

Rudy knew he’d been somewhere on the property that afternoon when his father, perhaps carried away by the illusory certainty of a humiliating dream, had struck Salif in front of the bungalow.

He knew too that he’d been about eight or nine at the time, and that during the three years since he and Mummy had rejoined Abel in Dara Salam, a single fear occasionally tempered his bliss, a fear—though Mummy assured him it was groundless—of having perhaps one day to return to France, to the little house where, every Wednesday, a tall lad with straight, smooth legs like young beech trunks had monopolized Mummy’s attention, laughter, and love and whose mere adorable presence had transformed Rudy, age five, into a nonentity.

On the other hand, what he couldn’t work out was …

Without thinking he stepped into the living room and moved toward Gauquelan.

He could now hear the sound of his own heavy breathing, to which the other man’s snoring seemed to reply with discreet solicitude, as if to encourage him to calm down and breathe more softly.

What he still couldn’t work out was whether he’d been there when his father and Salif had it out, or whether Mummy had described it so graphically that he’d come to believe he’d seen it with his own eyes.

But how and why, then—not having been there herself—could Mummy have described so vividly what she’d only heard secondhand?

Rudy didn’t have to close his eyes to re-create the effect of still being there or never having been there, whichever it was, the scene of his father shouting something at Salif, then, without giving him a chance to reply, hitting him hard in the face and knocking him down.

Abel Descas had been a strong man, and however gentle, trusting, and heedless they appeared when he was asleep, his big broad hands were used to handling tools, lifting heavy loads, and carrying sacks of cement, so that a single blow of his fist had been enough to knock Salif down.

But had Rudy really seen the tall, slim body of his father’s partner bite the dust, or had he only imagined (or dreamed about) the almost comical way Salif had been flung backward by the force of the blow?

Suddenly he could no longer bear not knowing.

He looked at Gauquelan’s hands and fat neck, telling himself that if he resolved to strangle the man it would not be easy, through so much flabby skin and flesh, for his thumbs to find their way to the rings of the windpipe.

Like him, his father, he thought, must sometimes have enjoyed his fits of hot, all-consuming, intoxicating fury, but he also allowed that it had been not rage but pitiless self-control driving Abel when he’d gotten into his 4×4 parked near the bungalow and slowly, calmly, as if setting off on an errand to the village, directed its huge wheels at Salif’s body, at the unconscious form of his partner and friend, in whose mind affection and a possible taste for embezzlement had never been confused, and who therefore, if he had indeed cheated Abel, had meant no harm to the friend or even the
notion of friendship, but merely, perhaps, to some simple abstraction of a colleague, a blank face.

Still gazing at Gauquelan, Rudy stepped backward, over the doorway to the living room, and stopped once more in the hall.

He covered his mouth with his hand, licked his palm, and nibbled it.

He wanted to snicker, to howl, to shout insults.

What could he do to find out?

What would need to happen for him to know at last?

“Oh God, oh God,” he kept repeating. “Kind, sweet, little god of Mummy’s, how can I find out, how can I get to understand?”

For what did Mummy herself, who wasn’t there, know for certain about Rudy’s presence or absence that afternoon in front of the bungalow when Abel, as calm as a man setting off to get bread in the village, had driven over Salif’s head?

Was it possible that Mummy had told Rudy about the short, sharp sound, like that of a big insect being squashed, that Salif’s skull had made under the wheel of the 4×4, and that Rudy had later dreamed about it until he believed he’d heard it himself?

Mummy was quite capable, he said to himself, of having described such a sound and of having told him about Salif’s blood flowing in the dust, reaching the first flagstones of the terrace and staining the porous stone forever.

She was well capable of that, he said to himself.

But had she done it?

He scratched himself frantically but to no avail.

With eyes wide open he could clearly see the courtyard of the bungalow of corrugated iron and wood, the white pavement of
the narrow terrace, and his father’s big gray vehicle crushing Salif’s head in the thick, heavy silence of a hot, white afternoon; panting with sorrow and disbelief, he could summon up the smallest details of that scene, whose colors and sounds never varied, that immutable tableau, which in his mind’s eye he could even see from different angles, as if he’d been present in several places at once.

And in his heart of hearts he knew what his father’s intentions had been.

Because, afterward, Abel had denied deliberately running Salif over; he’d pled jitteriness and irritation to explain the accident and his crazy driving, claiming that he’d gotten into the car with the sole idea of going for a spin to calm himself.