Three Strong Women (11 page)

For Rudy Descas, to be charged with no other duty than that of loving Fanta would have sufficed, indeed he would have welcomed such an obligation with open arms.

But he had the feeling that it was too little for her even if she didn’t realize it, and that, having dragged her from her familiar surroundings, he owed her a lot more than a heavily mortgaged shabby little house in the country and everything pertaining to it, all the pettiness that left him quite beside himself.

And now here he was, standing on the edge of this same cheerful little road, several years after the dogs had nearly torn them both apart (but hadn’t Fanta’s coolness stopped them in their tracks, hadn’t they retreated, perhaps with a growl, intimidated by a vague awareness that she wasn’t like other human beings?), on a balmy May morning very much like this one, except that his discomfiture on that occasion had barely dented his confidence in the future, in their chances of success, in their amazing good fortune, whereas now he knew that nothing would ever turn out right.

They’d driven off in the same old Nevada from which he was now extricating himself, because, yes, it was even then a nasty out-of-date car, painted grayish blue in accordance with the prudent taste of Rudy’s mother, from whom he’d bought it when she’d abandoned it for a Clio, and since he’d been sure at the time
of soon being able to get himself something much better (an Audi or a Toyota), he’d encouraged Fanta to view their car as a rather treacherous dirty beast, sad and weary, whose last days they were patiently seeing out, never starting it up except to have it serviced.

He’d treated the poor Nevada with casual disdain, but wasn’t it now a veritable loathing he felt for its very sturdiness, the unfailing courage typical of a good old uncomplicated car, its decency almost, its selflessness?

Nothing could be more wretched, he thought, than to hate one’s car, how did I come to this and can I sink any lower? Oh yes, I can, he told himself, since that was nothing compared to what he’d said to Fanta that morning before leaving for work at Manille’s, taking the very same route that once used to cut a merry path through the vines …

What had he said to her exactly?

The wind was blowing in front of my door and it bore them away
.

He left the car door open and stood there, his knees knocking, stunned by the extent of the damage he’d very probably caused.

You can go back where you came from.

Was it possible?

He smiled weakly, nervously, unamused—no, Rudy Descas wouldn’t speak like that to the woman he so ardently wished to be loved by once again.

He raised his eyes and shielded them with his hand. Sweat was already dampening his forehead and the fair hair covering it.

Fair too was the world around him on this mild, clean morning, likewise the walls of the small chateau over there, which some foreigners (Americans or Australians, thought Mummy, ever alert for news that would feed her penchant for voluptuous lamentation)
had recently bought and restored, and so too the patches of light that danced beneath his eyelids whenever he blinked—if only they would flow at last, those tears of anger he felt weighing heavily within, pressing against his eye sockets.

But his cheeks stayed dry and his jaw remained clenched.

He heard behind him the roar of a car approaching. He crouched down at once behind the door of his own car, not keen to acknowledge the driver, who—given the setting—was very likely an acquaintance, but he straightaway succumbed to a rather doleful fit of the giggles at the thought that he was the only person in these parts who drove a blue-gray Nevada and that the vehicle betrayed the presence of Rudy Descas as surely as the silhouette of Rudy Descas himself would have done, indeed even more so, since at a distance Rudy Descas could well have looked like someone else.

For it seemed that everyone could afford to buy a car less than ten to twelve years old, everyone except him, and he couldn’t understand why.

When he stood up he realized he couldn’t now avoid being late for work, so he’d have to come up with a fairly fresh excuse as he passed through Manille’s office.

That thought was vaguely satisfying.

He knew that Manille was tired of him, of his frequent lateness, and of his grumpiness—at least that’s what Manille, a naturally affable and commercially astute man, called it whenever Rudy made it clear that keeping his own counsel figured among the basic rights that he as a poorly paid employee was prepared to defend fiercely, and although in some ways Rudy thought quite highly of Manille, he was actually glad that Manille, one of those typically
pragmatic, narrow-minded men who were astonishingly gifted, almost talented within the extremely narrow limits of their faculties, didn’t think particularly highly of him.

He knew that Manille would have liked and respected him, and even excused his difficult personality, had Rudy shown some skill at getting customers to purchase new kitchens; he knew that Manille would not have considered a capacity to generate income for the firm as anything more than simple competence in a particular field, just as he knew that in Manille’s eyes he was neither skilled nor clever nor committed, nor even—as if by way of compensating for his utter uselessness—merely pleasant.

Manille only kept him on, Rudy thought, out of a peculiar form of indulgence, a complicated sort of pity, because why, really, would Manille pity him?

What did he know about Rudy’s precise circumstances?

Oh, very little, since Rudy never confided in anyone, but a wily, amiable, if unpolished sort like Manille must have realized that in his way Rudy was just a square peg in a round hole and that in a crunch it behooved people like him—people who felt perfectly happy with their place in the world—to protect someone like Rudy.

So Rudy understood Manille’s reasoning even if Manille would never have put it quite like that.

Though grateful, he felt humiliated by the situation.

Go to hell, I don’t need you, you crummy little man, to hell with your country kitchens business.

But what’ll become of you, Rudy Descas, when Manille, genuinely upset and sincerely sorry but unable to conceal the fact that you brought it all upon yourself, finally shows you the door?

He was sure it was his Mummy that he owed his job to, though
she would never have admitted having gone to talk to Manille (or that she’d had to beg him, the corner of her drooping eyelids damp and pink, her long nose red with shame at what she was asking of him), or confessed that the reason Rudy had had to seek work in the first place was so painful he couldn’t summon up the courage to raise the issue with her.

Yeah, I couldn’t care less about Manille.

How could he waste time thinking about Manille when he couldn’t recall his exact words to Fanta that morning, which he should never have uttered in the first place, because it was clear that if she decided to take them literally, they would rebound on him in the most terrible way imaginable, and that he would achieve the precise opposite of what for some time now he’d been striving for.

You can go back where you came from.

He was going to phone her and ask her to repeat the exact words he’d used during their furious quarrel and to tell him what had sparked it.

It wasn’t possible he’d said that to her.

His belief that he had, in fact, came from his tendency to feel guiltier than he really was, to accuse himself where she was concerned of the worst, because she was incapable of nasty thoughts or duplicitous designs, being so helpless and—quite rightly—so disappointed, so disappointed!

The sweat poured down his face and neck at the very thought that she might indeed do what he’d so horrendously proposed.

Then, almost immediately, he began to shiver violently.

With a feeling of childlike despair he then sought to extricate himself from that cold, interminable, monotonous dream in which
Fanta was about to leave him because he had in a way—even if he couldn’t remember the exact words—ordered her to, and in which nothing more horrible could now befall him. He knew that, didn’t he, because she’d already done so, already tried to do so: isn’t that true, Rudy Descas?

He hastily banished the thought, the intolerable memory of Fanta’s flight (as he called it, to soften the blow of what had been nothing less than an act of betrayal), in favor of the monotonous cold of the interminable bad dream that, to his great surprise, his life had become, his poor, poor life.

He opened the door of the phone booth and slipped in among the walls covered in scribbles and graffiti.

In much the same way as he was reduced to driving around in a worn-out Nevada, he’d recently had to cancel his cell-phone contract, and this decision, which—given the tightness of his monthly budget—he should have been content to deem a not unreasonable one, seemed to him inexplicable, strange, and unjust, a form of self-inflicted cruelty, because apart from himself he knew of no one, and had never heard of anyone, who’d had to give up their cell phone.

Even the Gypsies, who lived in a permanent encampment they’d set up below the little road, just beyond the vines planted along the slope, the green mossy roofs of whose caravans were surely visible—Rudy mused—to the new inhabitants (American or Australian) of the small chateau, even those Gypsies who were often to be seen loitering in front of Manille’s shopwindow, gazing intently and scornfully at the model kitchen displays, even they didn’t have to do without a cell phone.

So how come—he wondered—all those people manage to have lives so much better than his?

What kept him from being as smart as the others, when he was no stupider than they were?

He, Rudy Descas—having long believed that his lack of shrewdness and cunning was amply compensated for by his unique sensibility, the spiritual, idealistic, and romantic scale of his ambition, by its very imprecision—was now beginning to wonder if such singularity had any value, if it wasn’t ridiculous, secretly contemptible, like a virile man confessing to a penchant for spanking and cross-dressing.

He was trembling so much he had to have three goes at dialing his own number.

He let it ring for a long time.

Through the glazed walls of the phone booth his eyes wandered over the small, blond, tranquil chateau nestling in the cool shade of the dark oaks and their dense, well-kept foliage. Then his gaze returned to the glass panel, in which he contemplated his own transparent, sweaty face, as if it were imprisoned in matter, the wild stare, the blue of his eyes darkened by anguish, and in his mind’s eye he saw clearly the room in which the telephone was vainly ringing, ringing, the undecorated living room of their small house frozen in its hopeless, unfinished state, with its unpointed wall tiles, its ugly brown flooring on which stood their poor furniture: an old assortment of varnished wood and flowered upholstery (a hand-me-down from one of Mummy’s bosses), the garden table covered with a plastic tablecloth, a pine dresser, the small bookcase overflowing with books, all the sad
ugliness of a place that neither an indifference to one’s surroundings nor the gay liveliness of its inhabitants could illuminate or soften. It all constituted one big eyesore that was never meant to be more than temporary, and Rudy loathed it; he was wounded by it every day, and even now, just imagining it as he stood in the phone booth, he was pained and angered by it, trapped as he was in an interminable nightmare, the unending discomfort of a cold, monotonous dream.

Where could she be at this hour?

She’d no doubt, as every morning, walked Djibril to the school bus stop, but she should have been back long since, so where was she, why wasn’t she answering the phone?

He hung up and leaned against the wall of the phone booth.

His pale blue short-sleeved shirt was soaked. He could feel it, warm and damp, against the glass.

Ah, how tiresome, unsettling, and humiliating it all was, how he yearned to hide away and weep once his anger had cooled.

Could it be, could it be that she’d … taken to heart the words he wasn’t even certain of having uttered and which in any case he was certain of never having formulated inside his head?

He picked the receiver up again so abruptly that it slipped through his fingers, struck the glass, and dangled at the end of its cord.

From the pocket of his jeans he pulled out his ancient dog-eared address book and looked up Madame Pulmaire’s number, even though he was sure he had phoned the old bag often enough to know it by heart.

She wasn’t actually all that decrepit, hardly older than Mummy, in fact, but she put on a
vieille dame
act and had a conspicuous
way of deigning to oblige the complicated and slightly disgusting favors that ever since they’d become neighbors Rudy was wont to request—even while she, no doubt, made it a point of honor never to ask them for anything.

As he expected, she answered straightaway.

“It’s Rudy Descas, Madame Pulmaire.”

“Ah.”

“I just wanted to know whether … whether you could go and have a peek next door and check that all’s well.”

He felt his heart thumping madly as he tried to sound casual and relaxed. Madame Pulmaire wouldn’t for a second be fooled by that, and he was prepared to pray, weeping and wailing, to Mummy’s god, that nice little god who seemed to have heard his mother’s prayers and eventually answered them, but instead he simply held his breath, sweating, chilled to the bone despite the stifling atmosphere in the phone booth, feeling suddenly isolated in a static interval (for everything round about him—the foliage of the holm oaks, the leaves on the vines, and the fluffy clouds in the petrified blue sky—seemed frozen in time, in anguished suspension). In this immobility, the only thing that could propel him forward again would be the news that Fanta was happily at home, was still in love with him, and had never stopped loving him.

That, though, Pulmaire wouldn’t be reporting, would she?

“What’s the matter, Rudy?” she murmured, in an affectedly gentle tone, “is anything wrong?”

“No, nothing in particular, I was just wondering … seeing as I don’t seem to be able to get hold of my wife …”