Three Strong Women (16 page)

As he’d vaguely felt already, the three members of the small family seated at the table looked like Djibril, Fanta, and Rudy, and only the artist’s lack of skill shielded them somewhat from the risk of being recognized, but more than that someone had afterward attached to the angel a vigorous penis that was clearly visible under the table and seemed to emerge from a specially fitted pocket in the long white robe.

Rudy flicked through the packet of fliers.

The angel had only been mocked on the first one.

He turned the packet over and pushed it toward a corner of his desk.

He glanced at Cathie.

At the same moment she raised her eyes and frowned anxiously.

“Anything wrong, Rudy?”

He grinned sardonically.

Oh, how it hurt, and how angry he felt that it hurt.

“Who put the brochures on my desk?” he asked.

“I told you, your mother came in this morning.”

“So she herself put them there, in person?”

Cathie shrugged uncomprehendingly, slightly annoyed, and said, “I don’t see who else it could have been.”

“But you didn’t see her?”

Cathie was smiling now, but coldly, conspicuously restraining her feelings of impatience.

“Listen, Rudy, I do know that your mother came in with her … brochures, or whatever. I saw her in the lobby, but it so happens that I wasn’t at my desk when she dropped them off.”

He leaped off his chair, suddenly intoxicated with rage and pain.

But a small sad voice whispered inside him, “How can you hope to be good when you suffer the torments of the damned?” It was the voice of the calm, cheerful, seductive Rudy Descas that Rudy wanted so badly to be again, with the pitiless moral standards he set himself and the less stringent ones he applied to others.

And it was with terror and dread that he noticed Cathie flinch slightly as he approached her chair.

He felt the others around him watching him silently.

Had he become the sort of man feared by women and despised
by other men, especially strong men capable of self-restraint, like Manille?

He suddenly felt terribly unhappy, craven, useless.

He grabbed the packet of brochures and flung it on Cathie’s desk.

He hopped from one foot to the other, trying to calm the pain by rubbing his underpants against his inflamed skin.

“And that charming little joke, whose idea was that, then?” he exclaimed, indicating the angel’s penis with his finger.

Cathie glanced warily at the picture.

“No idea,” she muttered.

He picked the packet up again and went back to his desk.

One of his male colleagues, at the back of the room, clucked his tongue audibly.

“Hey! What’s your problem?” Rudy shouted. “Go to hell!”

“Now you’ve gone too far, big boy,” said Cathie drily.

“I just want my mother left out of it,” said Rudy.

He was sticking to his guns that someone had wanted to humiliate Mummy by adding an obscene doodle to her drawing. Although he’d always hated her sanctimonious propaganda and consistently refused to talk about it, the diligent passion with which she drafted and illustrated her messages, taking a lot of trouble to produce the best result that her meager talent was capable of, laid an obligation upon him, he felt, to stand up for her.

As in those threatening, implacable, irresolvable dreams where a heavy, absurd, and insurmountable obligation is laid upon you, no one but he could defend that unreasonable woman, no one but he could do it.

He recalled confusedly when and how that feeling of obligation
arose, and the memory was so embarrassing that he blushed violently. At the same moment, a pain even sharper than before pierced his anus.

“They are among us, these pure spirits, and they address us in thought, even at the table, if only to ask us to pass the salt or the bread.”

Who’s your guardian angel, Rudy, what’s his name, and what’s his position in the angelic hierarchy?

Rudy’s father had neglected his angel—treating his dog better—which is why, Mummy hinted, he’d had to endure such a sad end, because his angel had lost touch with him or had worn itself out looking for him in the dark shadows of worldliness and indifference.

While all was going well for him Rudy’s father had, out of spite or vanity, contrived to ditch his angel. Ah, men can be so arrogant!

So where—Rudy had wondered—was the guardian angel of his father’s business partner when Rudy’s father knocked him unconscious and ran over him?

Had he—the partner—been a foolhardy man, too cocksure for his own good, a person who’d delighted in giving his angel the slip? Or else did Africans in general have the misfortune of being poorly guarded, were their angels lazy and incompetent?

The dirty work of defending Mummy, no one but he could do it, nobody else could …

“You need to get a grip, Rudy,” said Cathie, in a tone of disappointment and reproach. “No one’s attacking your mother.”

“Okay, okay,” he mumbled, unable to ignore his physical pain, so wrapped up in it that he could scarcely breathe.

“You need to get a grip,” she said again, in an emphatic, monotonous voice.

“Okay, okay,” he repeated, almost inaudibly.

“If you don’t, Rudy, you’ll land yourself in serious trouble. Monsieur Manille is beginning to get fed up, you know, and so are we. You need to calm down and start doing your job.”

“But who scribbled on my mother’s drawing?” he whispered. “It’s so … horrid!”

He heard the glass door open, and, a few moments later, there was Manille standing in front of him with his fists on the desk, as if restraining himself from leaping at Rudy, and yet his look was kindly, almost tender, though a bit weary.

And Rudy felt something slip between them, as palpable as a fine sheet of rain. It was their mutual embarrassment, a mixture of shame and resentment shared equally, it seemed, by the two of them: Manille, on the one hand, and Rudy himself—who to his advantage still had Fanta at his side, whereas Manille had lost her—on the other.

But more recently Rudy had sensed something else, scarcely less embarrassing but also more comforting, a remarkable, inexpressible communion born of an awareness of having both loved the same woman at the same time.

He saw Manille’s eyes focusing on Mummy’s drawing.

“You see that?” Rudy asked in a shrill, febrile voice that echoed horribly in his ears.

Hearing that acrimonious tone, didn’t Manille wonder, incredulously, how it was that Fanta had finally chosen this sickly, narrow-hipped, gangly, bitter man over him, how she could have gone back to Rudy Descas, who’d long ago forfeited all honor and respect?

That was certainly, Rudy felt, precisely what he’d be thinking if he were in Manille’s shoes.

Why had Fanta come back to him, in despair and completely benumbed, as if, held captive in an implacable, irresolvable dream, she’d inflicted upon herself the absurd obligation of spending the rest of her days in a house she didn’t like, beside a man who she spurned and who had from the outset deceived her as to what he really was by passing himself off as a mild-mannered person of integrity whereas he’d always allowed untruth to reside in his heart?

Why, really, hadn’t she stayed with Manille?

The latter gestured dismissively at the packet of brochures.

“I’d like to know who played this dirty trick on my mother,” said Rudy, panting slightly.

“It’s not a big deal,” said Manille.

His breath smelled of coffee.

Rudy thought that nothing would have given him greater pleasure, at that moment, than a double espresso with sugar.

He wriggled about on his chair, gradually finding a rhythm that, without getting rid of the pain, brought some relief through strategic scratching.

“It wouldn’t have been you, by any chance?” he asked as Manille was about to say something.

“If there’s anyone I’ll never make fun of, it’s your mother,” Manille murmured with a smile.

He took his hands off the desk and stuck his thumbs in his belt, a fine black leather strap with silver studs that seemed to Rudy to sum up Manille’s personality, manly but restrained.

“You perhaps don’t remember, you were too small at the time,”
Manille said in a voice low enough so only Rudy could hear, “but my recollection is clear. Your parents and mine were neighbors, we lived in the country, in the middle of nowhere, and on Wednesdays my parents left me alone at home while they went to work, and they asked your mother to pop in from time to time to check on me. Well, your mother came by as agreed and when she saw how sad and lonely I was she took me back to your place, she gave me a nice big snack, and I had a lovely afternoon. Unfortunately that all came to an end when you left for Africa. But whenever I meet your mother I always recall those happy times, so I’d never do anything, even behind her back, that could upset her, never.”

“I see,” said Rudy.

He affected a sneering tone, but he suddenly felt almost as jealous, wretched, and disoriented as he had been when, at the age of no more than three or four, he’d seen Mummy return every Wednesday with this bigger boy about whom he knew nothing and who—he hadn’t realized until this moment—was none other than Manille. He’d had to put up with the giant shadow of the boy towering over him, with his golden legs emerging from his shorts like two pillars barring his path toward Mummy. So that was Manille!

He couldn’t recall the boy’s face, only the two strong legs at the level of his own face, and between them Mummy’s barely visible features.

So why had it seemed that the atmosphere in the house always changed dramatically whenever the boy entered, that it became at once livelier and more effervescent, and that with barely contained excitement Mummy would start talking and moving faster, before proposing, as if suddenly inspired, to make pancakes? Why had it always seemed to him that this boy with the sturdy legs and deep
voice could lift Mummy out of the boredom that the mere presence of Rudy failed to dispel and perhaps even exacerbated?

It was hard to escape from Rudy, and Rudy was sometimes a real drag, whereas the little neighbor of about nine or ten never asked for anything and saw Mummy as his salvation. She for her part failed to notice that the boy’s firm legs were always in Rudy’s face, how those same legs seemed to always move when Rudy did, thereby blocking his way to Mummy.

Ah, it was him, it was Manille!

Terribly shaken, Rudy was wriggling more and more in his seat.

The sunlight, still tinged with the shimmering glow of Cathie’s pink blouse, shone directly on his face through the window.

He was hot, fearfully hot.

Manille seemed to be looking at him anxiously.

Was it not extraordinary that Mummy never reminded him of that period when a big boy, relentless but low key, filled the kitchen with his fateful presence every Wednesday afternoon? Wasn’t it extraordinary that she’d never told him that the lad was Manille?

Behind his back Mummy and Manille had both shared this secret memory—why, for God’s sake?

Manille was talking to him.

Rudy could be in no doubt that Manille represented for Mummy exactly the kind of son she would’ve wanted, but was that a reason for …

Ah well, what’s it matter, after all.

He tried to understand what Manille was saying to him in his subdued, mellow voice, but a violent feeling of injustice gripped
him at the thought that Manille had always blocked Mummy and that she, for her part …

Man, was he hot!

Manille was so positioned that he was in shadow, whereas Rudy was blinded by the sun.

He then became aware of frantically rubbing his bottom against the chair until it squeaked, causing colleagues at the back of the room to turn around.

So what was Manille saying about that customer, Madame Menotti?

Without understanding exactly why, he had a sense of foreboding and unease at the mention of this customer’s name, as if he were aware of having let her down while being unable to guess in what way.

He thought he was done with Madame Menotti and her pretentious kitchen, the execution of which he’d followed from the outset, having sketched the plans himself, helped her choose the color of the wood, and discussed at length with her what kind of exhaust hood she needed. When it finally occurred to him to wonder why Manille had entrusted the whole Menotti project to Rudy’s unskilled hands, it didn’t take long to find out: Madame Menotti had phoned him at home in the middle of the night to say she’d awoken in a terrible fit of anguish—no, worse, in a hyperventilating fit such as she’d never before experienced—at the thought that the whole design project wasn’t at all to her liking and why couldn’t they simply go back to the original idea and line the walls with the main elements, why could they not go back to the drawing board regarding the entire conception of this kitchen, which, she admitted, spluttering with distress, she wasn’t
even sure she really wanted anymore, sitting there in her nightie in her beloved old kitchen, why not forget the whole thing, she felt so bad, so bad.

It had taken Rudy a good hour to remind her precisely why she’d gone to Manille in the first place: because she could no longer stand the mismatched, outdated furniture and fittings of her present kitchen; then, almost drunk with fatigue and boredom, he’d assured her that her secret longing to see her life transformed, brightened up thanks to the installation of ingenious cupboards and a retractable hood, was not an absurd hope—“Trust me, Madame Menotti,” he’d said.

He’d hung up, exhausted, but too tense to sleep.

He’d felt a spasm of hatred toward Madame Menotti, not because she’d awoken him in the middle of the night but because she’d envisaged quite simply canceling weeks of tedious, disheartening work devoted to the attempt to adapt the woman’s complicated, reckless desires to her limited budget.

Oh, the time he’d wasted in front of the computer seeking ways of including an American countertop or a trash bin that opened automatically into plans she’d approved only to have second thoughts on them, oh, the disillusionment he’d often felt realizing that he had to apply to such trivialities nothing less than his full intelligence, all his concentration and ingenuity!