Three Strong Women

PART II

THROUGHOUT THE MORNING, the thought kept coming back to him, like the vestiges of a troubling, rather degrading dream, that it would have been better, for his own sake, not to have spoken to her like that. Going around and around in his unquiet mind the idea soon became a certainty, even though he could no longer remember the precise reason for the quarrel — that painful, degrading dream of which there remained only a bitter aftertaste.

He ought never, never, to have spoken to her that way. That was all he knew about their argument, and what made it now impossible for him to concentrate, or in any way gain an upper hand, anything that could prove useful when he returned home and found himself face-to-face with her again.

Because, he thought confusedly, how was he going to assuage his own conscience if his truncated memories of their disputes served to highlight nothing but his own guilt, over and over again, as in those troubling, degrading dreams in which whatever you say, whatever you decide, you’re always the one who’s irrevocably to blame?

And — he also wondered — if he couldn’t manage to assuage his own conscience, how could he calm down and become a proper father? How could he get people to love him again?

He certainly shouldn’t speak to her like that; no man had the right.

But what had pushed him to let slip those words that ought never to be uttered by a man who passionately desired to be loved as he had always been, that was what he couldn’t recall, as if the terrible phrases (but what were they, exactly?) had exploded inside his head, obliterating everything else.

So was it fair that he felt so guilty?

If only, he thought, he could prove before his inner tribunal that he’d had good reason to get so terribly angry, he’d be in a better position to regret his behavior and his whole nature would be improved thereby.

As for his present swirl of agitated, chaotic shame, it only served to anger him.

Oh, how he longed for clarity, for some peace and quiet!

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.

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 …”

“Where are you phoning from, Rudy?”

Knowing that she’d no right to ask, knowing too that he wouldn’t dare tell her to get lost before she’d deigned to heave her useless imposing mound of flesh as far as the Descas household and look through the bare windows or ring the doorbell to prove that this peculiar wife he had, this Fanta, who’d run away once before, had neither run off nor collapsed in a corner somewhere of this sad little half-done-up house — oh, how weary he was of understanding Pulmaire so well, how sullied he felt by acquaintances of that sort.

“I’m in a phone booth.”

“Aren’t you at work, Rudy?”

“No!” he shouted. “What has that got to do with it, Madame Pulmaire?”

There was a silence; it was protracted, but it betrayed neither offense nor surprise. Old Pulmaire was above such childish reactions, being invested with a weighty dignity that, if Rudy had an ounce of respect, would soon make him contrite.

He could hear her panting into the receiver.

And once again, as on that morning when Fanta defied him either by her words or her silence, he couldn’t remember which (but it made him wonder whether he wouldn’t at last tell her that a man can only struggle so long to preserve his manly honor as a father, a husband, and a son, striving every day to prevent the collapse of everything he’s built, endure only for so long the same old reproaches, whether verbal or in the form of a pitiless, bitter look, and smile through it all, not batting an eyelid, as if saintliness too were one of his obligations, would he finally tell her that, he who’d been abandoned by all his friends?), he felt welling up inside him, that warm, almost sweet anger he knew he ought to resist, but that felt so good, so comforting, to let flow, that he sometimes had to wonder: Wasn’t that warm familiar anger all he had left now that he had lost everything else?

He clamped his lips onto the damp plastic.

“Would you please just move your fat ass, and go do what I ask!” he shrieked.

Madame Pulmaire hung up at once, without a word or a sigh.

He slammed his hand two or three times on the cradle, then once again dialed the telephone number of his home.

He’d now learned to call it that—“my home”—however annoying and painful that was, but the expression only matched what Fanta clearly felt, what her whole attitude betrayed, that she no longer considered the poor ramshackle house their home but solely his, and not because of its disrepair, he knew, not because of its irremediable ugliness, about which at bottom he knew she couldn’t care less, but because he’d chosen the house, given it its name, and, in a sense, had created it.

This building, he’d decided, was to be the temple in which their happiness would dwell.

Fanta was now withdrawing from the house, taking along with her the child, seven-year-old Djibril, with whom Rudy had never felt very comfortable (because he realized, without being able to do anything about it, that he frightened the little guy).

Fanta was there, having no choice but to be there, but — Rudy thought — she felt no warmth for the house, she refused to lavish any care and affection on her husband’s home, to enfold her husband’s wretched house in an anxious, maternal embrace.

Taking his cue from her, the child also occupied the house in a noncommittal way, gliding lightly over the floor, sometimes seeming to float above the ground as if wary of all contact with his father’s house, or, for that matter — Rudy thought — with his father.

Oh — he wondered, dizzy with pain, all his anger spent, the sound of the line ringing in his ear, and beyond the glass the vines and oaks and little baby clouds coming back to life in a negligible wind — what had happened to the three of them that his wife and his son, the only people he loved in the whole world (for he felt only a vague, formal, inconsequential tenderness for Mummy), should look upon him as their enemy?

“Yes?” Fanta asked, in a tone so flat, so sullen, that at first he almost thought he’d phoned Madame Pulmaire again by mistake.

He was so taken aback that his heart missed a beat.

So that was what Fanta sounded like when she was alone at home and didn’t think he was around (whereas whenever she talked to him it was in a voice so full of hardness and rancor that she trembled), so that was how, when she was herself and not with him, Fanta spoke: with such sadness, such glum disappointment, such a melancholy that the accent she’d lost was revived.

Because, as far back as he could remember, she’d always tried to conceal it, though he never quite approved of her desire to appear to come from nowhere, finding the wish even a little absurd since her features were obviously foreign, not to mention that he found the accent endearing, always connecting it with Fanta’s energy, a vitality greater than his, and with her courageous struggle since childhood to become an educated and cultured person, to escape the never-ending reality — so cold, so monotonous — of poverty.

What a cruel irony it had been that he, Rudy, had been the one to pull her back into what she, all on her own, had so courageously managed to escape, that he should have been the one to save her from all that, helping her seal her victory over the misfortune of having been born in the Colobane district, not to have buried her alive — still young and beautiful — in the depths of …

“It’s me, Rudy,” he said.

“Hold on a moment, there’s someone at the door.”

Now that she knew who she was speaking to, her voice became a little less sullen, as if some wary reflex had reset her reaction mechanism to prevent her from letting slip any word that he could use against her in the next bout, although to tell the truth, it was his impression that Fanta never talked back but simply met his attacks with a stubborn silence, a distant, rather sulky look, her lips swelling and her chin drooping; he, Rudy, was well aware that she chose only too carefully the little she said, knowing any word of hers could provoke his outburst, just as he knew only too well that what truly angered him was the very indifference — so deliberate, so studied — of her expression, and that the crosser he became the more Fanta walled herself off and the more he got bogged down in his fury at her disingenuous nonchalance, until he couldn’t help spitting in her face those words he would later regret so desolately even if, as on this morning, he couldn’t be sure he’d really uttered them.

How hopeless it was, he thought, didn’t she understand that a few innocent, simple words from her, spoken with the requisite warmth, would have been enough to make him once more the good, calm, affable Rudy Descas that he’d still been, it seemed to him, two or three years earlier, not very practical minded, perhaps, but curious in outlook and pretty energetic for all that, did she not understand …?

“I love you, Rudy,” or “I’ve never stopped loving you,” or even — good enough—“I’m fond of you, Rudy.”

He felt himself blushing, ashamed at these thoughts.

She understood, all right.

No entreaty, no fit of anger (but weren’t the two of a piece where he was concerned?), would ever make her say anything like that.

He was convinced that even if he beat her up and smashed her face down on the rough floor she would still say nothing, being quite incapable even of telling a white lie just to get herself off the hook.

Through the receiver he could hear Fanta’s footsteps, dragging a little as she made toward the door, then Madame Pulmaire’s high-pitched, anxious voice followed by Fanta’s murmuring. Could he, even at that remove, discern an immense weariness in his wife’s voice, or was it merely the effect of distance and his own shame?

He heard the door slam, then the lethargic progress of Fanta’s feet once again, that weary, exhausted gait evident these days from the moment she got up, as if the prospect of another day in the house she refused obstinately to concern herself with (“Why do I have to do everything around here?” he often shouted in exasperation) hobbled her slender ankles with their dry, glossy skin, those same ankles that used to dash indefatigably in their dusty pumps or sneakers through the alleyways of Colobane toward the lycée where Rudy had first set eyes on her.

Back then those ankles had seemed winged, for how else could two slender, rigid, valiant reeds covered in gleaming skin so swiftly and nimbly transport Fanta’s long, supple, youthful, muscular body, how could they, he’d wondered rapturously, but for the help of two invisible little wings, much like those that made the skin between Fanta’s shoulder blades quiver gently below the neckline of her sky-blue T-shirt as he stood behind her waiting his turn in the teachers’ line at the cafeteria of the Lycée Mermoz, how, he’d wondered, as he gazed at the bare nape of her neck, her strong dark shoulders, her delicate tremulous skin …

“That was the neighbor,” she said laconically.

“Ah.”

And since she didn’t add anything, since she didn’t specify, in that tone of gloomy sarcasm she was apt to use, the reason why Madame Pulmaire had called, he surmised that the old girl had covered for him, after a fashion, by saying nothing about his telephone call, probably inventing some mundane excuse, and he felt relieved, though at the same time embarrassed and annoyed, at becoming complicit with Madame Pulmaire, in a way, behind Fanta’s back.

Suddenly he felt deeply sorry for Fanta, because wasn’t it, if not his fault exactly, at least his doing, that the ambitious Fanta of the winged ankles no longer flew over the reddish muddy streets of Colobane, she who, though still poor, certainly, and held back by many constraints at home but, in spite of all, on her way at the lycée as a full-fledged French literature teacher, wasn’t it his doing, with his lovesick gaze, tanned features, fair hair (a lock of which always kept falling over his eyes), his fine words and serious manner, his promise of a comfortable, intellectual, altogether elevated and attractive way of life, wasn’t it his doing that she’d given up her neighborhood, her town, her homeland (so dry, red, and very hot) to end up unemployed (he should have known that she wouldn’t be allowed to teach French literature here, he ought to have made inquiries and found out what the deal was and what the consequences would be for her) out in a quiet provincial region, dragging her leaden feet through a house a little better, to be sure, than the one she’d left but that she’d refused to grace with a moment’s thought, effort, or scrutiny (she whom he’d seen so patiently, methodically sweeping the rundown two-room apartment with sea-green walls she shared in Colobane with an uncle, an aunt, and several cousins, so patiently, methodically!): if it wasn’t his fault, wasn’t it his doing, Rudy Descas’s, if she seemed trapped and lost in the icy mists of a perpetual, monotonous dream?

He, with his tanned face, the tremendously persuasive force of his wooing, his suave manners, and the unusual splendor attributed over there to his blondness, that particularly striking quality …

“Don’t you want to know why I’m calling?” he asked at last.

“Not really,” she said after a moment, her voice no longer imbued with the listless utter disillusionment that had moved him, but now with something that was almost the opposite, the controlled, metallic, perfect mastery of her French accent.

“I’d like you to tell me why we had an argument this morning. Listen, I don’t know what started that off, all that …”

That particularly striking quality of his, he recalled in the ensuing silence, a weakly panting silence that sounded as if he were phoning a far-off country with rudimentary communications, his words needing all these slow seconds to arrive, though it was only the echo of Fanta’s anxious breathing as she pondered the best way of answering his question so as to safeguard he knew not what — he dared not imagine — future interests she might have (a bubble of anger suddenly exploded in his head: what possible future could she envisage that didn’t include him?), yes, he recalled, as he let his eyes wander over the green vines with their tiny bright green grapes, over the green oaks beyond them that the property’s new owners, those Americans or Australians (who fascinated and upset Mummy because she believed the vineyard should have stayed in French hands), had pruned so savagely until the trees looked humiliated, punished for daring to let their shiny, unfading foliage grow so dense as to partially conceal the once grayish, now blond and fresh stonework of what was, after all, only a large house, though of the kind on which people in these parts bestowed the respectful name of “chateau,” yes, that particularly striking impression that his own blondness, his own freshness, made over there …

“I don’t know,” Fanta said in a low, cold voice.

But he was convinced that she was only answering in the least compromising manner possible, and that to minimize the chance of committing herself to anything involving him in any way, be it by the merest exchange of words, had become the sole criterion of her frankness.

Besides, if he wanted (but did he really?) to be straight with himself, he thought, looking up again at the distant sunny outline of the chateau, which he sensed more than actually saw, knowing it so well that he often dreamed about it, in the course of those monotonous, cold, gray dreams he regularly had, full of precise details of which he could only have heard secondhand, though he’d no memory of doing so, from Mummy, who had perhaps filled in once or twice for the previous owners’ cleaning woman (the maid who did everything, preparing and serving the meals, the vacuuming, the ironing), and passed on her observations in that tiresome and degrading way Mummy had of feigning to scorn everything she described (the many unused fully furnished rooms, the fine china, the silver) while her droopy little pinkish eyes shone clear with frustrated longing — and now his own limpid pale eyes were once again raised toward the outline of the chateau as if that large, drab, cold house (no longer gray, perhaps …), as if it ought to be sending him any moment some resounding and definitive answer, but what could the property possibly have to tell him except that it would never be his or Fanta’s or Djibril’s, so, if he wanted to be straight with himself …

“By the way,” he said, “what if I picked Djibril up from school this evening?”

“If you like,” she replied, with an undertone of disquiet in her bland, cold voice that immediately set his teeth on edge.

“It’s been a hell of a while since I last picked him up from school, hasn’t it? He’ll be pleased not to have to catch the school bus for once.”

“Oh, I don’t know, but yes, if you like.” Her voice was wary, constrained by anxious calculation. “Make sure you get there early, otherwise he’ll already have gotten on the bus.”

“Yes, yes.”

… straight with himself, but if he’d really wanted to be straight with himself, he had to admit he wouldn’t have believed in Fanta’s sincerity, even having suddenly noticed in her voice those honest, genuine former tones of the young woman with winged feet and passionate, focused aspirations whose determination and intelligence had already taken her from the small peanut stall that as a little girl she set up every day in a Colobane street to the Lycée Mermoz, where she went on to teach French literature and prepare the children of diplomats and wealthy businessmen for the baccalaureate, this tall, upstanding woman with a domed head and close-cropped hair who’d looked him straight in the eye with completely uninhibited ease when, on an impulse, very unusual for him, he’d stroked the delicate, quivering skin between her shoulder blades lightly with the tip of his finger, something that he’d never before even …

“Fanta,” he breathed, “is everything all right?”

“Yes,” she said, cautiously, mechanically.

It wasn’t true. He knew it, he could feel it.

He couldn’t believe what she said anymore.

He nonetheless persisted in asking questions that to his mind demanded honest answers — intimate questions, questions about feelings — as if the stubborn frequency with which he conducted these interrogations might one day wear down Fanta’s current determination not to let anything slip and drop her guard.

“I’m taking Djibril to sleep at Mummy’s place tonight,” he said abruptly.

“Oh no,” she moaned, almost sobbing, unable to contain herself. Rudy felt pain gripping his heart for having made her so upset, but what else could he do?

Should he deprive Mummy of the company of her only grandchild simply because Fanta couldn’t stand being separated from him?

What else could he do?

“She hasn’t had him over much for quite a while now,” he said in a kindly, comforting tone that sounded in the earpiece so deceitful to him that he pulled the receiver away from himself in embarrassment, as if someone else, who ought to be ashamed at disguising his hypocrisy so badly, had said it.

“She doesn’t like Djibril!” Fanta blurted out.

“What? You’re completely mistaken, she adores him.”

He was speaking cheerfully and forcefully now, even though he didn’t feel in the least cheerful or forceful, not in the least bright eyed and bushy tailed, having emerged from the melancholy, depressing, and painful dream (but a dream curiously not without a glint of hope) that every conversation with Fanta now resembled.

The sonorous tones of cheerful prattle from times past floated around them.

He could discern their obscure chirping and — as his skull throbbed and the hair stuck to his forehead in the stifling heat of the phone booth — it made him nostalgic, as if he had happened to hear a recording of deceased old friends, loving, very dear friends of old.

“Oh god of Mummy’s, oh good little father who’s done so much for Mummy, if she’s to be believed, grant that Fanta …”

Even if he’d never paid much attention to Mummy’s pious enthusiasms — greeting her professions, prudent signs of the cross, and muttered invocations with a perpetually irritated, ironic smirk — he’d retained, almost in spite of himself, as a result of hearing it said so often, that the moral rectitude of a prayer was the necessary, if insufficient, condition of its fulfillment.

Where was that quality in what he was asking for?

“Mummy’s nice little god, compassionate father, I beg you …”

Where was it, his honesty, he wondered, from the moment he knew (or a second Rudy within him did: a younger, sterner, more scrupulous Rudy, a Rudy as yet unspoiled by setbacks, by want of understanding and compassion, and by the need to cobble together good reasons and poor excuses for himself), where was it, the truth of the soul, he wondered, knowing full well that in proposing to take Djibril to Mummy’s for the night, he wasn’t thinking about Mummy, that uppermost in his thoughts wasn’t any concern for her pleasure and happiness, but solely his own peace of mind in thereby preventing Fanta …

Because, surely, she’d never run away without the boy — or would she?

He could only judge from what she’d done before, but if, that first time, she’d taken Djibril with her, had Manille asked her to?

Why would Manille have wanted to be saddled with the child if there’d been any chance that Fanta would have abandoned Djibril to his father’s custody?

No, no, she wouldn’t leave without Djibril. Besides, the boy was afraid of his father, and Rudy, in a sense, was afraid of him too, because the child, his own son, didn’t like him, even if, in his young mind, he was unaware of the fact, and furthermore he didn’t like the house, his father’s house …

A fresh surge of anger was threatening to drown out all rational thought. He wanted to shout into the receiver, “I’ll never forgive you for what you’ve done to me!”

He could just as well have shouted, “I love you so much, there’s no one else I love in the whole wide world, everything must go back to what it was before!”

“Okay, see you this evening,” he said.

He hung up, downcast, exhausted, and feeling stunned, as if — after a long, melancholy, agonizing dream — he had to adjust his consciousness to the ambient reality, a reality that for him, he thought, was itself frequently just a cold, interminable, unchanging nightmare; it seemed to him that he moved from one dream to another without ever finding the exit, some sort of awakening that he modestly saw as putting things in order, as organizing rationally the scattered elements of his existence.

He left the phone booth.

It was already the hottest hour of the morning.

A glance at his watch informed him that he’d be later than he’d ever been before.

So what, he said to himself, annoyed, though slightly anxious at the prospect of finding himself once again face-to-face with Manille.

If Manille had been unable to show him an iota of compassion, merely irritation and impatience, everything would have been much simpler.

Should he not detest Manille?

Wasn’t it shameful and deeply regrettable that the kindness, the pity, and (albeit barely perceptible, despite it all) the arrogance that he read in his boss’s eyes prevented his feeling the hatred he thought any normal person would have cultivated toward the man who …

Still dumbfounded, even though it had all happened two years earlier, he shook his head slowly, pondering the retribution a normal man would have formulated in his mind. It wasn’t as if he was there at Manille’s place, biding his time, just waiting for the ultimate moment to bring down an avenging fist on Manille’s head, and Manille knew this perfectly well too, so he had no fear of Rudy, had never feared him.

“So that’s how it is, eh?” Rudy wondered.

Was it admirable or was it degrading? Who knows?

He thought he could smell the holm oaks in the distance.

It was probably only the memory of that rather sour scent of their tiny silky leaves, but he thought if he breathed in gently he could indeed smell them. It cheered him up and made him almost happy to imagine himself over there, in the chateau, opening the shutters on a clear bright morning and sniffing his holm oaks, smelling the tart odor of the tiny silky leaves, every one of which belonged to him, Rudy Descas — but he would never have scalped those poor old trees as they had dared to do, those Americans or Australians who’d had the impertinence, according to Mummy, to believe themselves sufficiently French to produce the same excellent wine that …

The thought of Mummy, of her pale, bitter face, snuffed out his cheerfulness.

He was tempted to go back into the phone booth and ring Fanta again, not to check that she was still in the house (Though come to think of it, he thought, suddenly anxious), but to promise her that everything would be all right.

There, in the heat heavy with the smell of the holm oaks, he felt carried away by love and compassion.

Everything would be all right?

Based only on some vision of himself opening the shutters in their bedroom on the first floor of the chateau?

No matter, he would have liked to talk to her, to inspire her with the confidence filling his heart at this moment, as if, for once, the reality of existence coincided exactly with his daydreams, or was just about to do so.

He made as if to go back to the phone booth.

He was upset at the thought of getting back into the stifling Nevada, which smelled vaguely of dog (it sometimes seemed to him that the vehicle’s previous owners had used it as a kennel for their dog, many of whose hairs remained trapped in the felt of the seats).

He decided, however, against calling Fanta again.

He no longer had the time, did he?

And if, once again, she failed to answer, what conclusions could he draw from that, and what good would it do?

And anyway he no longer really had the time.

But she wouldn’t run away without Djibril, and the child was out of reach for the moment, wasn’t he?

He cursed himself for working that out.

He almost felt then like defending Fanta against himself and his nasty calculating ways.

Oh, what could he do, considering that he loved her?

“What else can I do, dear God, good little father, good, kind little god of Mummy’s?”

He was convinced that the flimsy, very flimsy and unstable, armature of his existence held together and only barely because, after all, Fanta was present, present more like a small hen whose clipped wings prevented her from flying over the lowest fence than like the brave independent human being whom he’d met at the Lycée Mermoz. He could hardly bear that thought, it made him feel ashamed, and he only managed to countenance it because this dreary state of affairs was merely provisional in his eyes.

It wasn’t just the lack of money — was it?

To what extent did his monthly salary of a thousand euros make him less alluring than someone like Manille?

Yes, yes (standing all alone in the ten o’clock sun, near the scorching hood of his car, and shrugging impatiently), that was true to a large extent, certainly, but what he lacked above all was faith in his own talents, in his good fortune, and in the infinitude of his youth, which once shone in the clear blue eyes he’d inherited from Mummy, which caused that hand, at once caressing and indifferent, to sweep back the lock of fair hair on his forehead, and which …

All that he’d well and truly lost, even though he wasn’t old, even though compared with others he was still almost young, all that he no longer possessed since his return to France: all that must have played an essential part in making Fanta fall in love with him.

If only — he said to himself — he could slough off this harsh, depressing, painful, degrading nightmare and rediscover, even if it only meant moving from one dream to another, the vision of Fanta and himself, bathed in golden light, walking side by side in the streets of Colobane, their naked arms brushing against each other at every step, he, Rudy, tall and tanned, talking in his strong, cheerful voice, striving already, even though he was unaware of it, to ensnare in his web of tender, flattering, bewitching words this young woman with the small shaven head, with the discreetly ironic, direct gaze, who’d pulled herself up to the level of the Lycée Mermoz, where she taught French literature to the children of army officers and prosperous businessmen; those adolescents had no idea, Rudy declaimed in his strong, cheerful voice, of the frightening determination it had required for this woman to be able to stand before them, this woman with the winged feet and the delicate quivering skin on her forehead, no idea of the time and trouble it took her to maintain the only two cotton skirts she possessed, one pink and the other white, always beautifully ironed, which she wore with a tank top, between the straps of which the delicate skin of her back, quivering as if two tiny wings …

He, Rudy Descas, had really been that charming, lighthearted, smooth-talking young man whom Fanta had eventually taken home, to the apartment with green walls where they all lived.

He remembered how his heart skipped a beat when he entered the room suffused with shimmering, vaguely funereal light.

He’d first climbed a cement staircase behind her and then walked along a gallery entered through doors with peeling paint.

Fanta had opened the last one and the greenish half light, accentuated by the window shutters, had seemed to engulf her.

He’d seen nothing but the white patch of her skirt as she’d entered the room before coming back and inviting him in, having checked, he’d supposed, that the apartment was in a fit state to be seen.

And he’d moved forward, not without shyness and some embarrassment, but chiefly it was gratitude that suddenly rendered him speechless.

Because in the greenish half light Fanta’s calm expression said, Here’s where I live, this is my home.

Her expression accepting the judgment of a foreigner with a white face (in that respect his tan made no difference!), blond hair, and smooth white hands on her well-kept but very humble home — accepting it, and together with it, the potential effects, the possible feelings of uneasiness or condescension.

Rudy could sense, could almost hear, how this woman took in everything, how shrewd, lucid, and immensely perceptive she was, but also how profoundly indifferent, out of pride, to how a man with such a white forehead, such white, smooth hands, might view her home.

She must have taken him, with his blond hair and fine words, for a wealthy, spoiled young man.

But she’d invited him home, and now, with a gesture and a word or two she was introducing him to her uncle, to her aunt, to a neighbor, and to others as well, all of them gradually revealed by the pale light, sitting at the back of the room on bare seats or threadbare velvet armchairs, silent, motionless, with a vague nod acknowledging Rudy, who felt out of place, not knowing what to do with his big hands, their pallor conspicuous in the dim light as his white forehead and long, smooth forelock must have been too.

He longed to fall at Fanta’s feet and swear to her that he wasn’t what he seemed — the tanned and ultra-confident type who spent every weekend at his Somone villa.

He longed to fall on his knees and embrace Fanta’s slender legs and tell her how grateful he was and how much he loved her for having allowed him to see what he had just seen: this austere room, these silent people who didn’t smile or pretend to be thrilled to meet him, this difficult, frugal life of hers, of which people at the Lycée Mermoz, where she arrived every day on her winged feet, in her clean, starched pink skirt, or in her white one, probably knew nothing, and of which the children of diplomats and the children of entrepreneurs, who went water-skiing in Somone every weekend — that whole group of people, who, he longed to tell her, he couldn’t abide, even though occasionally he envied them in secret — no doubt knew even less.

Oh, they certainly knew nothing about her or about the verdigris room with its heavenly glow.

The midday light now shone through the shutters on the face of the aunt, the clasped hands of the uncle, both of whom seemed to be waiting for Rudy to leave so that they could go back to what they’d been doing.

And he, Rudy, saw all that without knowing how to convey it to Fanta.

He contented himself — rather stupidly, he felt — with bowing to each person present, stretching his lips to form a little, quivering, awkward smile.

He knew at that moment, with a kind of surprised wonder, that he loved her, loved her beyond measure.

Now he was opening the door of his car and slipping inside, holding his breath.

It was even hotter, stuffier inside the car than in the phone booth.

Was he right not to call Fanta again?

And suppose that she was trying, not to leave but, in her utter misery at his decision to take Djibril to Mummy’s for the night, she was trying to …?

No, he couldn’t bear even to think of the word.

“Oh, good little god of Mummy’s, kind little father, help me to see things clearly!

“Help us, dear God.”

Couldn’t he just — only for a minute — phone her, wasn’t that, actually, perhaps what she was expecting him to do at this moment?

No (a small snickering voice murmured), actually she doesn’t care to hear the sound of your voice again until this evening, and what’s more she understands that you feel guilty and are trying somehow to make amends, even though you were only trying to stop taking the blame for all the wrangling on your own frail shoulders, an effort that has no doubt failed to win you any more respect and perhaps has even made her despise you a little more for acting tough only then to lose your nerve and come seeking her forgiveness and consolation after having offended her by telling her — is it conceivable? — to go back where she came from — can you really imagine that …

As he switched on the ignition he shook his head in denial.

Such a thing he, Rudy Descas, just couldn’t have said.

Just couldn’t.

He couldn’t restrain a little dry laugh.

Might he have meant — ha! ha! — that she should go back to Manille?

He was sweating profusely.

The sweat was falling on the steering wheel and on his thighs.

When he tried to put the car into first gear, the stick shift jammed.

The engine stalled.

He found himself once again wrapped in the silence that had been shattered briefly by the roar of the Nevada’s engine, and he now saw himself as forming a necessary, indisputable, and perfect part of this section of the countryside.

He was disturbing nothing and no one, and there were no restraints on him.

He leaned back against the headrest.

Although he was still sweating, his heart beat less fiercely.

He had to admit that Manille was, in his rather discreet, provincial way, a successful businessman, and that, even if he’d never gone in for water-skiing or owned any other house but the big villa he’d had built behind the firm’s premises, his manly, but sober, rather elegant, and reserved self-assurance, that particular gentleness he possessed, that of someone who could afford to be gentle because nothing threatened or frightened him, could still attract an upset, confused woman with nothing to do all day, a woman as lost as Fanta was now.

It’s strange, he said to himself, or perhaps it’s on account of love, that I can’t forgive her, whereas with him, it was as if I understood.

But stranger still, to tell the truth, I understand her side, too, so much so that were I a woman I could imagine yielding joyfully and easily to Manille’s uncomplicated charm — oh, how well I understand her, and how I hold it against her.

He was caught unawares by a feeling of panic, by a sort of hallucination, and his heart stopped as he tried to envisage Manille’s bedroom, which he imagined was like the rest of the villa, vast and conventional, filled with the usual expensive trappings of contemporary interior design, and when he gently pushed open the door of this unfamiliar bedroom and saw on the huge bed, in a dazzling light, Fanta and Manille, Manille stretched out on Fanta, Rudy Descas’s wife, Manille groaning softly while his powerful haunches, his centaur’s buttocks, moved in a calm, slow rhythm that brought out the dimples in his hairy flesh, and his head rested on the neck of Fanta, Rudy Descas’s wife, the only woman Rudy Descas had ever truly loved.

Or he could see on this bed the hindquarters of a no less vigorous man with a horse’s head panting as he lay on top of Fanta — should he kill this monster, shouldn’t he at least despise him?

And, under Manille’s much more considerable bulk, what novel and mysterious things could she be feeling, of which he’d never know?

Rudy was a lean, delicate man, narrow shouldered yet robust, he liked to think, but Manille — he shook his head — he didn’t want to know anything about that.

And he shook his head again, alone at the wheel of his stationary vehicle, in the silence throbbing with heat, and he felt trapped, torn by the same deeply frustrating fear that had left him transfixed, mesmerized, able to reply with only a hideous, weird little smile when someone (Madame Pulmaire, or Mummy, perhaps) had in the drawing room of some house he was visiting (so wouldn’t it have been a client’s, then?) revealed to him in a whisper what Fanta and Manille were up to, this nasty suggestion wiping the silly smirk off his face, as he could see in the mirror of the unidentified drawing room in which he stood with his legs apart, riveted now by how silly and bizarre he looked, but anything was preferable to the sight of that nasty mouth with its acrid breath that took pleasure in robbing Rudy Descas’s innocence, his lover’s credulity, anything was preferable to the spiteful tone of impotent anger (well, it must have been Mummy, because neither Madame Pulmaire nor a customer could have discussed the affair with as much animosity) summoning him to action, to spurn a woman like that.

What else could this indignant person, in a tone of such sweet reason, be suggesting (oh, it was certainly Mummy), except that any man with a remaining shred of dignity should not, could not, penetrate the very body in which there still reposed a sacred liquor, the centaur’s sperm?

He could have answered, with a snicker, “No risk of that, I haven’t been sleeping with Fanta for a long time, or, rather, she’s not been sleeping with me.”

But he could also have replied, with a cry of despair, “But it was you, Mummy, who got me taken on at Manille’s, it was you who went and begged him to give me a job! Had it not been for that, he’d never have met her!”

But he had no recollection of having opened his mouth, frozen as it was in a slack, feeble rictus.

He could see himself again, his own impassive face in the mirror, and just under it the back of the head of this woman who was still talking, still trying to drown him in vile, sneaky appeals to his male honor, and hadn’t he then thought that a simple blow to that head, with its short, dyed blond hair, would free him from this torment, hadn’t he seen himself striking Mummy to shut her up, shouting at her perhaps, just before she lost consciousness, “What do you know of honor, eh, and Dad, what did he know of it?”

But he didn’t want to think about it anymore.

It was humiliating and pointless and made you feel grubby, as if you were emerging from a recurring, interminable, stupid dream: you’re only too familiar with every painful stage of it, and even while plunged in it you know that you’re not going to be allowed to skip a single episode.

He didn’t want to think about it anymore.

He switched on the ignition again and put the car straight into second gear.

The engine protested and spluttered, then, slowly, the Nevada began to move forward, with fits and moans from every part of its ancient carcass but, he said to himself with some satisfaction, rather spunky, all things considered.

He wouldn’t think about that anymore.

He lowered the window and, steering with one hand, let his left arm hang over the hot side of the car. He could occasionally hear the melting surface of the asphalt crackling under his tires.

How he loved that sound!

He was now experiencing a gentle, delightful feeling of euphoria.

No, by Mummy’s good little god, our kind little father, he wouldn’t think about the mortifying past anymore but only about making himself worthy of the love Fanta would feel for him again if he cared to make the effort, and didn’t he just, as heaven was his witness, high, bright, and scorching hot this very morning. Why, for once, shouldn’t the best be Rudy Descas’s for the asking, the finest and the most certain of the innumerable promises offered by the sun this fine spring morning?

He suddenly burst out laughing.

The sound of his own voice enchanted him.

After all, he thought, almost surprised, he was alive, still young, and in perfect health.

Could Gauquelan himself, that crook whose loathsome sculpture he was circling around at that moment (and today he found the strength not to look at it), with his ill-gotten gains, could he claim as much?

Certainly not.

Alive, alas yes, but the photo Rudy had seen in the paper showed a man with a rather puffy, scowling face, a receding hairline, a tuft of graying hair on top, and, curiously, a gap in his front teeth, and it had occurred to Rudy then, as he now recalled, feeling slightly ashamed, that a man who got paid a hundred thousand euros for a hideous piece of sculpture should surely have been able to avoid the cameras until he got his teeth fixed.

The manner of Gauquelan’s existence was as nothing compared with Rudy’s own impressive vitality, which he — Rudy — felt throbbing in his every muscle as if he were a horse (or a centaur), a big, proud, young beast, the whole purpose of whose existence was in being a superb specimen, his spirit never again to be seized by those dreams that leave you with a pasty mouth and stale breath, any more than the spirit of a horse (or a centaur) would be.

Was Mummy alive?

After the rotary, without intending to, he accelerated sharply.

He’d no business thinking about Mummy at that moment, nor about his father; he (his father) was well and truly dead, and no one would ever remotely have thought of comparing him to a horse (or a centaur) with rippling muscles under his damp skin — damp as Rudy’s cheeks, neck, and forehead were in the un-air-conditioned car, a reaction of his system, he recognized, to his having evoked, however briefly and insignificantly, his long-dead father, the terror and astonishment always provoked in him by the thought of that white-boned skeleton formerly called Abel Descas, its very white bones and the hole neatly drilled through its skull, lying, Rudy imagined, in the hot sandy soil of the cemetery at Bel Air.

He parked the Nevada in the parking lot of Manille & Co.

Before getting out, he carefully mopped his face and neck with the towel that he kept on the backseat for this purpose and that had eventually absorbed the smell of the car.

Each time he promised himself he’d change it, then he’d forget, and so his annoyance was intense when he reached for the towel and found this nauseating rag once again, because it seemed to him that this minor testimony to his own negligence, obliging him to wipe his face with a dubious piece of cloth, represented his whole current existence in its vaguely grimy disorder.

But this morning, just as he hadn’t managed to suppress a reflex of irritation in wiping his face, he succeeded in forcing himself to let his eyes wander over the different cars parked around him and evaluate them in the most neutral manner possible, without succumbing, as he usually did, to the bitter, violent feelings of envy that he found so degrading.

So that’s what my colleagues and customers drive, he said calmly, almost ritually, to himself, as he itemized the black and gray Audis, Mercedeses, and BMWs that made the parking lot of a kitchen showroom on the outskirts of a small provincial town look like a grand hotel.

Where do they get so much money?

How are they able to extract from their hardworking existence the sums needed to buy such cars? I’ve not the slightest idea.

What’s their scheme, what knack do they possess, what’s the trick? I’ll never figure it out.

And other pointless questions like that swirled around in his furious mind as he slammed the door of the Nevada.

But he’d been able, this morning, to resist the monotonous surge of covetousness.

With a light step he crossed the lot and dimly recalled feeling much the same during an earlier time in his life when he always walked like that: light of foot and at peace with himself — yes, always like that, and looking serene and benevolent — that was the face he always showed to the world.

It all seemed so remote to him that he almost doubted it had anything to do with him — him, Rudy Descas — and not his father or someone else he’d dreamed about.

How long ago was all that?

He thought it must have been when he returned to Dakar alone, without Mummy, who’d stayed in France, shortly before he met Fanta.

He thought too, with a start, because it was a detail he’d forgotten, that for him, then, it used to seem natural, that inclination to be good and kind.

He stopped suddenly in the sun-drenched parking lot.

The smell of hot tar filled his nostrils.

He had quite a surprise when he looked not at the sky but at the bitumen under his feet.

Had he really been that lighthearted man, at peace with himself, who strode along the placid streets of Le Plateau, where he’d rented a small apartment, looking, with his fair hair and pleasantly regular features, hardly any different from the other white-faced types who he passed in the neighborhood but whose business ambitions and drive he in no way shared?

Could he really have been that man, Rudy Descas, who aspired, with calm self-scrutiny, to show himself good and just, and even more (oh, how that made him blush with surprise and embarrassment) to always distinguish good from evil in himself, never favoring the latter even when it appeared under the mask of good as happened all too often here when one was a white man with deep pockets and could for very little buy any kind of labor involving great patience and endurance?

He started walking again, slowly, toward the double glass doors of the building, adorned by the name “Manille” lit up in huge letters.

His legs had stiffened, as if suddenly robbed of the gift of lightness.

Because he wondered for the first time whether, in persuading Fanta to follow him to France, he hadn’t knowingly looked the other way and allowed evil every latitude to take possession of him, and whether he hadn’t indeed savored the feeling of acting wickedly while not appearing to do so.

Until now he’d only asked himself the question in practical terms: Had it been a good idea or a bad idea to bring Fanta here?

But oh no, it wasn’t that, it wasn’t that at all.

Put like that, the question was a ploy used by the evil comfortably lodged in him.

And, in that radiant period of his life when every morning, with an innocent heart, he left his small modern apartment in Le Plateau, he was still able to recognize the bad impulses and deceitful thoughts that sometimes entered his mind and to shoo them away by thinking the opposite, by which effort he was able to find relief and happiness, since he had only one profound desire, to be capable of loving everything around him.

But now, now — the extent of his bitterness almost made his head spin.

If he had been that man, what had happened to him, what had he done to find himself now inhabiting such an envious and brutal personage, his disposition to universal love having shrunk to encompass only the person of Fanta?

Yes, what, indeed, had he done to himself to unload, now, all this untapped, unbidden love upon a woman who had gradually wearied of his incompetence, at an age, his mid-forties, when such faults (a certain unfitness for sustained work, a tendency to entertain fantasies and to believe in schemes that were hazy at best) can no longer hope to be met with indulgence and understanding?

Not only, he said to himself as he pushed open the glass door, through which, with a cowardly sense of relief, he could discern Manille’s imposing shape, surrounded by a couple of people, customers probably, to whom Manille was demonstrating the main features of a floor model of one of his kitchens, not only had he willingly connived in the lies and corruption entering and taking possession of his soul, but on the pretext of caring for her he’d enclosed Fanta in the cold, gloomy prison of his love — for such was his love at present, endless distress, like a dream from which you struggle in vain to awake, a rather degrading and pointless dream, wasn’t that what Fanta must be enduring, and wasn’t that how he himself would feel as the victim of such a love?

Once inside he walked purposefully toward the staff offices, even though he couldn’t stop his upper lip from trembling.

He knew that this tic made him look unpleasant, almost nasty, and that it was always fear that provoked it.

At such moments his lip curled back like a dog’s.

And yet he had no need to worry about Manille — did he?

Out of the corner of his eye he watched the slow progress of the little group, and worked out that he could reach the back offices before Manille and his customers got close.

Afterward, he said to himself, Manille will have forgotten seeing me arrive so late.

All he had to do was keep out of Manille’s way for an hour or so, and all would be well.

He had time to notice that Manille looked good this morning, in his neatly ironed black T-shirt and well-cut pale jeans.

His thick gray hair was combed back, and his complexion was dark, almost golden.

Rudy could hear Manille’s slightly husky voice as he opened and shut a cupboard door, and he was sure that the customers, a drably dressed middle-aged couple with thick legs, were without realizing it succumbing to Manille’s insistent charm as he fixed his dark eyes intently on theirs, as if on the verge of passing on an important piece of personal information or making a flattering comment that he was only holding back for fear of embarrassing them.

He never gave the impression, Rudy had often observed, of trying to sell something.

Without seeming to make any effort in that direction, he managed to create the illusion of a friendly, intimate relationship that would last well beyond the eventual sale of the kitchen, which had merely been the fortuitous pretext for the birth of a friendship, and often it turned out that the tactic was quite sincere: Manille went on visiting his customers just for the pleasure of their company, and as they chatted he never abandoned the subdued tone of ardor, so delicate and restrained, that had led to the sale in the first place, so that, Rudy thought, the manner Manille adopted to overcome a client’s resistance ended up being his true way of speaking, the only one ever heard — that smooth, slightly hoarse timbre and that restrained fervor that, it must have seemed to people, would have moved him, if he couldn’t control himself, to sing their praises, to share secrets with them, even to hug them.

Rudy couldn’t help admiring Manille even if he despised his trade.

How was it that the same jeans and T-shirt or short-sleeved top, the same sort of canvas shoes, as the boss wore, always made Rudy look like some broke overgrown adolescent, even though Rudy was taller, younger, and slimmer than Manille: that he just couldn’t understand.

He would never possess Manille’s relaxed elegance … No, he said to himself at the sight of his reflection in the second glass door, the one separating the showroom from the offices, don’t even think about it.

It occurred to him that he had a stingy, crumpled, almost needy appearance.

To whom could such a man, however kind, ever appeal?

How would anyone ever notice his love of life and of others, even if he could find it again?

How would people see it?

He had to admit that in someone like Manille, however hardened he was by a life in business, by the unremitting calculations and the pragmatic maneuvering it required, and despite the stylish sportswear and Chaumet watches and the villa at the back of the shop — despite, that is, everything that had transformed Manille, a farmworker’s son, into a dreary provincial parvenu — one could still at once discern the amiability, kindness, and capacity for discreet compassion in his gentle, modest expression.

And then Rudy wondered for the first time if it hadn’t been precisely that which had attracted Fanta, something he’d lost long ago, the gift for …

He went into the office and closed the door quietly behind him.

He felt himself turning red.

But it was certainly that, and even if the term was pompous, there was no other word for it: the gift for … compassion.

He’d never thought, even in the depths of his anger and grief, after Mummy (wasn’t it?) had told him about the liaison between Fanta and Manille, he’d never thought, no, that it was Manille’s wealth, and the respect and the power that went with it, that could have seduced Fanta.

He’d never thought that.

Now — oh yes — he understood what it was all about, and he understood it in the light of what he no longer had, for he finally understood what he no longer had, whereas he had been suffering without knowing the reason.

The gift for compassion.

He went to his desk and dropped down onto his swivel chair.

Around him, in the big glass-walled room, all the desks were occupied.

“Ah, there you are!”

“Hi Rudy!”

He replied with a smile and a little wave of the hand.

On his cluttered desk, next to the keyboard, he saw a pile of leaflets.

“Your mother brought them a little while ago.”

Cathie’s voice, cordial but a shade anxious, reached him from the next desk, and he knew that if he turned his head his eyes would meet hers, with their questioning, slightly perplexed look.

She would ask him in a low voice why he was three quarters of an hour late and perhaps, too, why he didn’t simply forbid Mummy to set foot in Manille’s workplace.

So he contrived to mumble some answer that didn’t require him to look her in the eye.

In the dazzling glare of the room the vivid pink of Cathie’s blouse shone brightly around her.

Rudy could see it reflected in the white surface of his own desk.

He knew too that if he turned toward Cathie he’d clearly see past her small, pale face to the other side of the picture window looking out over Manille’s villa, a big building with blue shutters, pale pink roughcast walls, and a roof of Provençal tiles, separated from the commercial premises by a simple lawn, and he couldn’t help wondering, for the nth time, painfully and fruitlessly, whether Cathie and the others, Dominique, Fabrice, and Nathalie, had watched Fanta’s comings and goings at the boss’s dream house, noticed how many times she’d entered, and why he, Rudy, had never seen her there, even though, during that terrible period when he “knew” without “really knowing” (no need to believe everything Mummy said, after all), he’d never ceased glancing at the picture window, past Cathie, who felt sorry for him and showed sympathy (so was everybody privy to his troubles?), at the villa’s fussy double doors with their wrought-iron fittings.

How he’d suffered then!

How ashamed, how furious he’d felt!

All that was now long past, but he still couldn’t speak to Cathie without feelings of rage boiling up in him as he glanced at Manille’s house.

He suddenly felt like saying to her in a dry tone that would make her uncomfortable, “But that’s pretty well the only consolation Mummy’s got left in life, distributing left and right her bundles of pathetic leaflets in support of poor cretins as lonely and idle as she is, how do you expect me to tell her to stop coming here and, really, who’s bothered by it, eh?”

But he said nothing.

He remained conscious of the aura of fuchsia that surrounded her and it annoyed him, because he couldn’t forget her presence.

He pushed to one side the packet of leaflets held together with a rubber band.

“They are in our midst.”

The clumsy, almost laughable picture of an adult angel sitting down at a table with members of an ecstatic family, and the angel’s silly smirk.

“They are in our midst.”

Such inanities that kept Mummy from drowning in melancholy and antidepressants were, literally, her salvation.

He was outraged that a Little Miss Nobody like Cathie, in the guise of trying to be helpful, would dare to suggest that he deprive Mummy of the pleasure of bringing her brochures to Manille’s place.

What did she know about Mummy’s sad life?

“Hey, tell me, does Manille want my mother to stop coming here?” he asked suddenly.

He looked at Cathie, dazzled by the absurd intensity of her pink blouse. It was such an effort keeping his eyes fixed upon her face, to resist their tendency to wander, that his head started aching violently.

Meanwhile he felt as if a hot poker was being pushed up his anus.

“Not at all,” said Cathie, “I’m not even aware if he noticed your mother coming in.”

She smiled, surprised he could think such a thing.

Oh no, he thought, downcast, it’s starting again.

He raised his buttocks feebly from the chair and balanced on the edge of the seat so that only the top of his thighs remained in contact with it.

But the mild relief he’d hoped for failed to materialize.

He then heard, through the fog of pain that had suddenly enveloped him, Cathie’s muffled voice.

“It’s not like Manille to stop your mother coming, is it?”

Rudy couldn’t now remember what he’d said or what he’d asked.

Ah, Mummy. It wasn’t like Manille to show the slightest harshness, or to try to shoo away this ridiculous woman who really believed she could, by means of tracts written and printed in her living room — tracts that swallowed up a not inconsiderable part of her meager pension — convince kitchen salesmen of the presence of angels all around them.

At the very most he’d …

That familiar itch, which had taken him by surprise, he was beginning to subdue in his mind.

He brought to bear all the old defense mechanisms (those he’d not used in quite a while, because for several months he’d been left in peace by the problem), the most immediate of which consisted in directing his thoughts toward topics having no connection with his own body, or with any other body, real or otherwise, so that, quite naturally, he started thinking intensely about Mummy’s angels, and he reached out with his fingers to bring the packet of brochures nearer to him.

How would Mummy answer the question of whether angels ever suffered from piles?

Wouldn’t she be happy and flattered to see him asking, with apparent seriousness, to hear him broaching …

Stop, stop, he said to himself, in a panic. That wasn’t at all what he ought to be concentrating on.

The pain came back, more insistent, exasperating.

He had a terrible longing to scratch, no, to scrape off, to tear away, this goading, burning flesh.

He rubbed against the edge of the chair.

With a trembling finger he started up his computer.

Then he looked again at the picture of the angel, the clumsily drawn figure, the naive decor sketched by Mummy, and suddenly he discerned beyond all possibility of error what his eyes had been content to skim over without any attempt at interpretation a few moments earlier.

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!

It was at that point, perhaps, as he was offering Madame Menotti reassurances in the middle of the night, that he, for the first time — certainly never before so acutely and painfully — that he got the full measure of his world’s collapse.

He’d gone over with Madame Menotti every aspect of the kitchen, which he found grotesque, useless (built to receive each day many discriminating guests, even though she lived alone and, by her own admission, didn’t much like to cook), since that was his job, that was his life, and she couldn’t have imagined that he had aspired to a university chair or that he’d once considered himself an expert on medieval literature, because nothing showed now of the fine erudition that he’d once possessed and that was slowly fading, slowly buried under the ashes of the worries burned without end.

Those that are in wedlock resemble the fish swimming freely in the vastness of the sea …

How could he extricate himself, he’d wondered in despair, cold and lucid, from this unending, pitiless dream that was his life?

… that comes and goes at will and comes and goes so much that eventually it encounters a creel …

“She’s expecting you, go at once,” said Manille.

Could he be referring to Fanta?

Rudy was sure of one thing, that if Fanta had stopped expecting him, her husband, she wasn’t expecting Manille either. For some reason, Rudy didn’t know why, she’d found Manille a big disappointment.

Manille turned on his heel.

“I’ve got to go to Madame Menotti’s, is that it?” Rudy asked.

Without looking back at him Manille nodded, then returned to the showroom, where he’d left his two customers, a couple, sitting on barstools, their fat legs hanging awkwardly down to the ground, while he’d gone to speak to Rudy.

From far off the man smiled vaguely at Rudy.

He held his beret in his lap and Rudy could see, even at that distance, his bald pate shining over his pink forehead.

“They are in our midst!”

Might it be, he wondered, that this couple interested in a complete period kitchen in dark wood fitted with wrought-iron cupboard handles and peppered with fake wormholes formed part of the company of angels who, Mummy was certain, visited us regularly and who we could recognize if (thanks to Mummy’s brochures) our souls were made alert to their presence?

As Rudy smiled back, the man immediately looked away, inscrutable.

… in which there are several fish that have been caught by the bait within, having found it sweet of smell and good of taste, and when our fish sees it he tries hard to get inside …

Rudy got up and went over to Cathie’s desk, trying to act natural.

His anus was still burning terribly.

He picked up her phone. Cathie pursed her lips but said nothing.

As a junior salesperson he wasn’t allowed a direct line.

He dialed his own number and let it ring a dozen or so times.

He suddenly felt his forehead and hands damp with sweat.

Fanta couldn’t hear — or chose not to — or else, he thought, she couldn’t answer because she was out or …

When he put down the phone his eyes met Cathie’s. She was embarrassed, unsettled.

“It seems Madame Menotti wants to see me,” he said cheerfully.

But he was in such pain that he felt his upper lip curling into the usual rictus. Unable to stand the burning itch any longer he scratched himself briefly, frenziedly, with one hand.

“I think that Madame Menotti is hopping mad, Rudy,” Cathie said, rather regretfully, in a low voice.

“Oh? Why?”

The old vague impression that he’d fallen down on the job for Madame Menotti, not deliberately but through a negligent failure to pay close attention to his work, made his mouth suddenly feel dry.

So what had he done, or failed to do?

Madame Menotti, a lowly bank employee, didn’t have much money. She’d taken out a loan of some twenty thousand euros to finance the purchase of this kitchen, and Rudy had had to juggle with different pieces of equipment taken from several models, some of them sale items, to meet the requirements, which were hardly modest, of this hard-nosed woman who, though well versed in money matters, suddenly affected inability to grasp why her itemized wish list added up to a lot more than she’d borrowed.

In many ways he’d shown himself to be receptive, committed, on the ball.

And yet, once the whole order had been placed, a sort of unpleasant aftertaste and a threatening premonition had stayed with him … and circles about so that he finds the way through and goes inside, and trysts that he is in pleasaunce and delyte, as he trysts the others also to be, and once within he cannot go back …

Oh God, what had he done now?

Since the start of his employment at Manille’s four years ago (four years of his life!) he’d no recollection of ever having done anything exactly as it should have been done.

Either through boredom or resentment he’d piled up mistakes and peccadilloes. Some customers, when they came back for an additional purchase, recalled these lapses sufficiently well to tell Manille that this time they wanted nothing to do with Rudy Descas.

But in Madame Menotti’s case he’d gone to a lot of trouble.

“How’s your wife?” Cathie asked.

Startled, he blinked, and wriggled helplessly.

“Fine, fine.”

“And the little boy?”

“Djibril? Fine, yes, I think.”

Now she seemed to be gazing at him with the same taunting, rather distant smile as the man with the beret shortly before.

He was seized with panic.

What was she smiling about in her reddish halo?

And once within he cannot go back.

“You’ve really got no idea what Menotti wants from me?” he asked in an offhand way, knowing perfectly well that it was useless to pursue the matter but unable to make up his mind to leave without trying to get some clarification on Madame Menotti’s concerns but also on the incomprehensible trials of his own life, of his whole existence.

He cannot go back.

Cathie stared at her screen, conspicuously ignoring him.

It then struck him that once he’d left the room he wouldn’t get back in, that he wouldn’t be allowed back in, and that people preferred, for a reason he couldn’t discern, not to tell him so just yet — because they were afraid of him, perhaps?

“I did everything I could for Menotti, you know? Since I began working here I’ve never gone to so much trouble as I have over that blasted kitchen. I put in hours of uncounted overtime.”

He was calm and he could feel his face radiating the warmth of his calm, light smile.

The sharp pain in his anus was also subsiding.

Since Cathie went on stubbornly pretending not to notice his presence, and because he suddenly thought that if he didn’t come back to the office he would perhaps never see her again, he leaned down toward the tiny pink lobe of her almost translucent ear, and whispered, softly, calmly (as softly and calmly, he thought, as the young man he’d once been):

“I ought to bump off Manille, don’t you think?”

She moved her head sharply away from his.

“Rudy, just back off!”

He raised his eyes and, through the picture window, looked once again at Manille’s sunlit villa with its imposing, disproportionately large entrance bay, at this big low house very similar to those that rich businesspeople built for themselves in the part of town known as Les Almadies, and indeed very comparable, he said to himself, his heart missing a beat, yes indeed, very comparable, to the villa built by his father Abel Descas, who’d chosen to have his shutters painted not in the Provençal blue now popular everywhere but in a dark red that reminded him of his Basque origins, not suspecting, how could he—

but he cannot go back

— a red hardly less dark than the blood of his friend and partner would stain forever the very white, porous stone he’d chosen for the terrace.

Yes, Rudy thought, ambitious men like Manille or Abel Descas (whose strong legs were never obliged to graciously bend at the knee, were firmly planted on the ground) built houses that looked alike because they were the same sort of men, even though Rudy’s father would have laughed at, or rather taken umbrage at, being compared to the owner of a kitchen dealership, he — Abel Descas — who early on had left his province, crossed Spain and a bit of the Mediterranean, then Morocco and Mauritania, before pulling up in his valiant old Ford on the banks of the Senegal River, where — he straightaway said to himself, as he strove already to fashion his little family legend — he would found a vacation resort the likes of which the world had never seen.

Oh yes, Rudy thought, men of that sort, whose aims were practical but just as ardent as any aspiration of the spirit, never felt themselves struggling day after day against the icy blast of some endless, monotonous, subtly degrading dream.

Since he felt that Cathie was rigid with fear, her tiny immobile eyes striving desperately to avoid his own, he couldn’t stop himself adding, before moving away from her desk, in a slightly trembling voice:

“If you had any idea all the tenderness I’ve got stored up inside me!”

She gave an involuntary throaty gurgle.

His father and Manille, although formidable in their different ways, weren’t the sort of men to make women afraid, whereas he, good God, how had it come to that?

He picked up from his own desk Mummy’s brochures, rolled them up, and stuffed them in a trouser pocket.

He crossed the large sunlit room, aware that his colleagues were probably watching him go with relief, or contempt, or something else he could only guess at.

And yet, as he was approaching the glass door, his movements still affected by the sharp pain in his rectum, his thighs separated even though no excess of muscle pushed them away from each other (for he had slender, almost thin legs, and yet he was walking a bit like his father or Manille, men whose massive thighs forced their knees apart), he was amused at the thought that his colleagues had perhaps found in him their angel.

He moved forward, haloed in shimmering blondness, just as in the past when he left his little apartment in Le Plateau and walked calmly down the hot avenue, serenely conscious of the solid decency of his heart and the unalloyed plenitude of his honor.

He would like to have shouted to his colleagues in a nice, kindly, charming, unaffectedly cheerful way, “I am the Minister my mother talked to you about!”

Hadn’t there been a time, he remembered uneasily, when Mummy used to bleach the pale flaxen hair of her little Rudy so that it looked even blonder, almost white?

He remembered the unpleasant odor of the peroxide, which ended up making him dazed and sleepy, sitting on a stool in the kitchen of the house where Manille had just informed him he’d spent so many Wednesdays, so Rudy must have been quite young when Mummy got it into her head to inflict on him that most conventional feature of the angelic aspect, because these sessions had been interrupted when they’d left to join Rudy’s father in Africa.

Perhaps, he said to himself, Mummy had thought that the natural blondness of his hair would more than suffice over there to establish him as a seraph, or else she’d not dared to carry on with the practice in the presence of her husband, who, with incredulous, derisive bluntness, had dumped his own guardian angel and galloped off even farther into the shadows of his cynical calculations, of his more or less secret, more or less lawful, schemes and dodges.

“I’m your messenger from the order of Thrones!” he wanted to shout out, but he demurred, not wishing to look at his colleagues.

Suddenly, it pleased him to think that they would perhaps at that precise moment welcome such a revelation, as they saw him pass by in front of them with his rather stiff walk and his legs bizarrely spread, but for all that haloed with a fearsome, luminous majesty and sunny brilliance.

He hadn’t been able to protect Fanta.

He’d claimed to be the guardian, in France, of her social fragility, but he’d let her down.

He pushed the door open and entered the showroom.

Manille’s two customers were now at the stage of choosing the stools for the breakfast bar, where, Rudy was ready to bet, they were never going to eat, would never so much as lean their elbows upon to drink a cup of coffee, preferring the inconvenient little table they’d always used up till then. He knew they’d find a way of sneaking that table back into the brand-new kitchen that Manille would build for them, and when their children visited, and were astonished, almost to the point of anger, to see that they had reinstalled their greasy old table, with its grooves full of crumbs, at the end of the breakfast bar, blocking access to the fridge, they would, thought Rudy, justify themselves by saying that it was only temporary and that they would get rid of their dear table as soon as they found the right little piece of furniture for setting down their bags and cartons whenever they returned from shopping, which furnishing they still lacked.

Manille was getting them to feel the brown leatherette covers of a pair of dark wooden stools.

He stood beside them, infinitely patient, never pressing, never in a hurry to move on.

The man heard Rudy’s footsteps from afar and looked up.

Rudy thought that he gazed at him more insistently than one might ordinarily, with an affable, friendly look, and he was moved.

Rudy had the impression that the man was making as if to raise his beret in greeting.

And whereas he would normally have been worried and embarrassed by a gesture like that and by such an insistent gaze, fearing some unpleasantness to come, he told himself cheerfully that the man may simply just have seen him somewhere before.

I am the spirit of the order of Dominions!

Yes, the guy had perhaps seen one of Mummy’s tracts and, watching the haloed Rudy pass by, his heart had evidently been touched by a feeling of beatitude.

“Art thou the one that is to take care of me?” his look seemed to ask.

How to answer that?

Rudy smiled broadly, something he normally avoided because he was aware that rapture, like fear, caused his lips to twist and made him look nasty.

He mouthed, looking the guy straight in the eye, “I am the little Master of the Virtues!”

He hurried out of the showroom.

He was overcome by the heat in the parking lot. It brought him back down to earth.

Not, he mumbled, that anyone could reproach him for having knowingly abandoned Fanta to her lonely exile, and as for the fact that she didn’t have the precise qualifications to teach in France, that wasn’t his fault.

And yet what never left him was the certainty that he’d deceived her in bringing her here, since he’d turned his face away from hers and spurned the mission, implicitly accepted when they were still abroad, of watching over her.

The thing was, he was then recovering from utter mortification!

What a beating he received, what a beating!

It sometimes seemed that he could still feel it whenever he raised his arms, but especially when a smell of hot fuel oil arose from the baking asphalt of Manille’s parking lot. Then with painful clarity he saw himself again lying prone on a similar asphalt surface softened by the heat, his back and shoulders crushed by sharp knees, his face swollen as he struggled to get up, to avoid all contact with the dusty, sticky tar.

Years later, that vision still made him blush with shame and astonishment.

But now he felt, for the first time, how automatic that response had become.

He breathed in deeply, soaking up the acrid smell.

He realized then that the opprobrium had left him.

Yes, it was certainly he whom teenagers from the Lycée Mermoz had beaten up before hurling him to the ground, crushing his chest against the asphalt, and ending up pushing his face, which he’d tried to keep clear of the ground, against the surface of the courtyard. It was still his cheek that would now always bear the fine scars, it was his shoulders that still ached slightly, and yet the abjection no longer clung to him, not that he could or would pass it on to someone else, but rather because he felt he’d accepted it and that now he had the chance of freeing himself of it, as from a recurrent, unending, cold, terrifying dream to which you submit, grinning and bearing it, in the knowledge that you’re now going to be able to break free.

He, Rudy Descas, sometime literature teacher at the Lycée Mermoz and medieval specialist, no longer embodied the infamy he’d suffered.

He’d lost all honor and dignity and returned to France, dragging Fanta with him, knowing that the stigma would pursue him, because he’d internalized it and convinced himself that he was no more than that, even while hating it and fighting it.

And now that he was starting to accept it, he felt a great weight had been taken off his shoulders.

Now he could calmly and quietly review in his mind the images of that violent humiliation — and the humiliation no longer bore much relation to him as he was, at that moment, standing in the warm, dry air, and the dense, oppressive mass that had weighed down his heart and filled his chest he now saw leaving him, dissolving, as he remembered clearly the faces of the three boys who’d assaulted him and could even still smell on his nape the slightly sour breath (fear? excitement?) of the one who’d held him down — the three faces, so dusky and so beautiful in their unblemished youth, which only the day before in class with the others had looked up at him with a concentrated, innocent air as they listened to him talking about Rutebeuf.

He saw their faces again without being upset by it.

He wondered, “Well, what could they be doing now, those three?”

He began walking toward his car, putting each foot down firmly for the sheer pleasure of feeling the stickiness of the tar and hearing it detach itself with a tiny sound like a kiss.

He saw it all again without being upset by it.

How hot it was!

The hot poker in his anus again.

Yes, he saw it all again and …

What happiness, he said to himself.

He scratched himself, not without pleasure, aware that the itching would no longer lower him into the same abyss of anger and despair, that he no longer had any reason to consider these ordinary evils as a punishment or a demonstration of his inferiority.

He was now able to …

He laid his fingers on the red-hot handle of the car door.

He didn’t take them off straightaway.

It burned him and it wasn’t pleasant, but he seemed to perceive more clearly by contrast the new lightness of his spirit, the weight lifted from his chest, and the release of his heart.

Free at last! he said to himself.

How was that?

How could that be?

He gazed for a long time around him at the big black or gray cars of his colleagues and at the road in front of the parking lot lined with warehouses and villas. He raised his head to expose his face to the infernal sun.

Free at last!

Very well, he could go all the way despite the flush of embarrassment that he felt on the forehead he was proffering to the sky, he could very well go the whole way and test his newfound freedom by acknowledging, for the first time, that the three teenagers had not attacked him.

What remained within him of the old Rudy Descas objected.

But he held fast, even if the start of a panic attack, a feeling of helplessness, now made him shiver.

He opened the car door and flopped onto the seat.

It was stifling inside the vehicle.

He tried, however, to take in a big lungful of this overcooked air to calm himself down and banish the fear, the awful fear that was creeping up on him at the thought that, if he admitted that the boys had not attacked him, he also had to concede that it was he, Rudy Descas, literature teacher at the Lycée Mermoz in Dakar, who’d hurled himself on one of them, prompting the two others to come to their friend’s aid.

True?

Yes, that’s what must really have happened, eh, Rudy?

His eyes began to fill with acrid tears.

He’d worked so hard at persuading himself of the contrary that he was no longer sure what was true and what wasn’t.

He was no longer sure.

He reached behind him, grabbed his old towel, and dabbed his eyes.

But could he glimpse the truth and not be afflicted by it?

Under the midday sun stretched the sizzling tar of the lycée’s vast courtyard.

Rudy Descas was leaving the premises, happy, with a spring in his step, a young teacher loved by his pupils and by his colleagues, who included his wife, Fanta, and he had no need then — Rudy said to himself without bitterness — no need to imagine himself some minister of divine will just to feel himself haloed with benevolence and an air of subtle triumph and refined ambition.

The tar was clinging slightly to the soles of his loafers.

The contact had filled him with joy and he was still smiling to himself as he passed through the school gate. This smile had spread like an involuntary gesture of benediction upon the three teenagers who were waiting in the meager shade of a mango tree, their faces shining in the midday sun.

The three were all pupils of his.

Rudy Descas knew them well.

He felt a particular affection for them because they were black and came from modest backgrounds. One of them, he understood, was the son of a fisherman in Dara Salam, the village where Rudy and his parents had once lived.

Sitting in his car in Manille’s parking lot, Rudy remembered what he always used to feel at that time, whenever his gaze fell on the fisherman’s son: an exaggerated, resolute, anxious friendship that bore no relationship to the boy’s particular qualities and that could suddenly turn to hatred without Rudy’s realizing it, or even understanding that hatred, until it was no longer friendship that he actually felt for his pupil.

For the boy’s face forced him to think of Dara Salam.

Horror-struck, he struggled against any vision of Dara Salam.

And this struggle mutated into a disproportionate affection for the teenager, an affection that was probably hatred.

But under the full midday sun of this unchanging, sweltering day in the dry season, as he was leaving the lycée happy and at peace with himself, his smile had enveloped the three boys equally, had flowed toward them, content, impersonal, with all the exquisiteness of an anointment.

Had the fisherman’s son suddenly managed to guess that Rudy Descas’s extreme kindness toward him was but a desperate way of containing the antagonism his Dara Salam face inspired in his teacher?

Was it that — the barely concealed hatred — which the teacher’s smile obviously conveyed in the off-white glare of the midday sun?

The hot air quivered.

No puff of wind shook the gray leaves of the mango tree.

Rudy Descas felt so lucky, so flourishing, in those days.

Little Djibril had been born two years earlier. He was a smiling, voluble child. His forehead was not marked with a puzzled frown. Unlike later … when he would feel afraid of his father and uncomfortable in his presence.

Rudy had applied for a teaching post at a foreign university and his final interview with the head of the department of medieval literatures had gone splendidly. He was in no doubt, so certain about the outcome, that, out of sheer vanity, he’d already phoned Mummy to tell her he’d gotten the job.

Your son, the guardian of your mature years, a university teacher with a doctorate in literature.

Yes, life was good.

Even if it wasn’t Fanta’s nature to say so, he was sure she loved him, and through him the life they’d made together in the fine apartment they’d recently rented in Le Plateau.

He occasionally felt that Fanta loved Djibril even more than she loved him — that she loved the child with a similar, but much stronger love — whereas he’d believed that her love for him would merely be different in kind, and that he wouldn’t lose out.

Now he thought he had lost out, that she’d rather drifted away from him.

But it scarcely mattered.

He then became so concerned about Fanta’s well-being that he accepted, even was pleased, that she was happy, even if it was rather at his expense.

So, yes, in this perfect life, it was only the memories of Dara Salam, which he had to struggle with every time he saw the teenager, that foreshadowed possible disaster ahead.

The young man had emerged from the shade of the mango tree, slowly, with effort, as if obliged to confront Rudy’s fearsome smile.

In a calm, clear, decisive manner, he shouted:

“Son of a murderer!”

And, Rudy had said to himself later — and now in Manille’s parking lot was once again saying to himself — that he’d been stabbed, literally, not just by what had been said but by the calm self-assurance in the voice of the boy, who hadn’t had the tact, hadn’t even taken the trouble, to insult him.

Without meaning to, the fisherman’s son had uttered nothing but the plain and simple truth, because that was what it was: the truth. Perhaps it was only the teacher’s smile, a false, suave smile, full of fear and hatred, that had allowed the truth to come out.

Rudy had dropped his briefcase.

Without knowing or understanding what he was going to do, he’d grabbed the boy by the throat.

Rudy was deeply shaken to feel under his thumbs the warm, moist, ringed tube of the boy’s windpipe. He remembered that more vividly than anything else, and as he squeezed the boy’s throat he recalled thinking only of the tender flesh of little Djibril, his son, whom he bathed every evening.

Without thinking, he stopped and turned his hands over and looked at them.

He seemed to feel again at the tips of his fingers, on the fleshy part of the first phalanges, that sensation of gentle resistance that had intoxicated him, and the floating, firm bump of the boy’s Adam’s apple that, drunk with exultant fury, he’d pressed so hard.

It was the first time in his life that he’d suffered such a fit of anger, the first time he’d hurled himself at anyone, and it was as if he was at last discovering his true nature, what he was made of and what gave him pleasure.

He’d heard himself groaning, gasping from the effort — unless it was the boy’s grunts that he mistook for his own.

He’d pushed the teenager into the lycée courtyard, still clutching his throat, which he was squeezing with all his strength.

The young man had begun to sweat profusely.

Enough, enough of being nice, repeated a small, ferocious, triumphant voice in Rudy’s head.

What had he said, the bastard?

“What’s that you said, eh? Son of a murderer? Okay, then let’s be true to our blood, eh?”

Were they of the same nature, the blood of his father’s partner that had stained forever the fine porous stone of the terrace, and Abel Descas’s own blood spattering the wall of his cell in Reubeuss prison, and the blood of this boy, the son of the Dara Salam fisherman, that would not fail to pour from his skull if Rudy managed to knock him over in the courtyard and then dash his head against the ground?

“Bastard,” he’d growled mechanically, without being able to understand clearly why he was insulting the person who was giving him so much physical pleasure.

A violent pain shot through his back and shoulders.

He’d felt the neck soaked in sweat slipping through his fingers.

First his knees, then his chest, had hit the ground hard, taking his breath away.

He’d tried keeping his head as far off the ground as possible until some hand forced it down, grazing his cheek and forehead against the pebbles in the asphalt.

He’d heard the boys panting and hurling abuse at him.

Their voices were feverish but perplexed and without venom, as if the words they were hurling at him were just a part of the treatment he had brought on himself, which he’d obliged them to administer.

They were now wondering what to do with him, their literature teacher, whom they were kneeing hard in the back, not grasping, Rudy realized, quite how much they were hurting him.

Were they afraid, if they let him go, that he would attack them again?

He’d tried to mumble that it was over, that they had nothing to fear from him.

He succeeded only in dribbling on the asphalt.

His lips, crushed against the ground, had, in his attempt to move, gotten badly scraped.

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 disgrace 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.

His eyes met Madame Menotti’s and he remembered the wisteria. Still bearing the grudge, he looked away. Madame Menotti’s gaze would now have appeared drained of the scandalized hatred he’d seen earlier, but he refused to meet it, thinking, I refuse to communicate with her, if that’s what she expects.

Because he had the impression that she now felt a kind of dismay that was directed at no one in particular and was actually a plea for help and support, as if they were both looking at the consequences of an act of madness committed by someone else.

He then dared to venture toward the middle of the room, toward the square worktop with its marble and slate surface containing a vast cooktop under a bell-shaped hood, the centerpiece of this petrified, intimidating spectacle that had come to represent for Madame Menotti the essence of the concept “kitchen.”

The counter was in place and the hood was attached to the ceiling.

But the cooktop was not under the hood but well to the side. Rudy understood at once that if one tried to move the counter in order to position the cooktop correctly, it would be impossible to maneuver around it easily.

Called upon to invest all his intelligence and mental stamina in making those calculations, he’d simply proved incapable of determining precisely the proper positioning of a four-burner cooktop relative to its hood.

“They’re going to give you the sack, at Manille’s,” Madame Menotti said in a flat tone of voice.

“I fear so,” murmured Rudy.

“I was going to invite a few friends in to see the kitchen tomorrow, now I’ll have to cancel all that.”

“Yes, probably a good idea,” said Rudy.

Exhausted, he drew up a chair that was still in its packaging and flopped onto it.

How was he going to persuade himself that getting fired from Manille’s wasn’t a disaster?

What would become of the three of them?

He felt all the more inept because if he’d had the guts to probe the diffuse, nagging, subliminal awareness he’d had for a while that he was guilty of a particular form of carelessness in the case of Menotti, he could have pulled back in time to correct the mistake before building work began.

But he’d simply suppressed that awareness, not to be troubled by it, in much the same way, he thought, as he’d buried, far out of reach until today, the truth about the Dara Salam boy, the whole Dara Salam saga.

What would become of the three of them if he lost his job?

“Actually, I knew it,” he murmured, “I knew I’d made a mistake!”

“Oh yes?” said Menotti.

“Yes, yes … I should have … dared to face up to the fact … to the possibility that I’d made a mistake, but I chose to close my eyes to it.”

He looked at Madame Menotti, who took off her glasses and wiped them on her T-shirt, and he noticed that her face was calm, as if, everything having been said about the matter, there was no reason to go on feeling so cross about it.

He also noticed that the woman had fine features that were usually hidden behind her heavy glasses.

What would become of them?

His mortgage payments amounted to five hundred euros a month. What was going to happen to the house, to their family life?

“Would you like a cup of coffee?” Madame Menotti asked.

Somewhat surprised, he nodded.

He remembered the pleasant smell of coffee on Manille’s breath.

“I’ve been dying for a coffee for quite some time,” he said, his eyes following Madame Menotti as she hauled herself to her feet, grabbed a coffeepot, filled it with water, and then perched on the edge of the new countertop to pour a measure of coffee into the filter.

“All the same,” he couldn’t help saying, “that wisteria can’t have been bothering you, it was so beautiful.”

Absorbed by what she was doing, Madame Menotti didn’t turn around or attempt an answer.

Her sneakers dangled above the floor.

He suddenly remembered other feet not touching the ground or scarcely appearing to touch it, the swift, indefatigable feet of Fanta flying above the pavements of Dakar, and he said to himself, That wisteria I cut down, and with bitter sweat pouring down his face he added, That’s the wisteria I cut down, it wasn’t bothering me and it was so beautiful. And he decided to leave unsaid the harsh things he’d been intending to say to Madame Menotti about the wisteria she’d cut off at the root.

A cold, bitter sweat was pouring down his face.

Nevertheless it seemed to him, in the light of what he was now prepared to admit to himself, that he was beginning to emerge from an old dream, from the old and unbearable dream in which, whatever he could say, whatever he could do …

“Here’s your coffee,” Madame Menotti said.

She poured some for herself and went back to sit on her chair. The plastic covering squeaked every time she moved.

They sipped their coffee in silence, and at last Rudy felt good, at peace with himself. The cold, bitter sweat on his forehead was beginning to dry, even though he realized that, objectively speaking, his situation had never been so depressing.

“I won’t find work around here,” he said calmly, as if he were talking about someone else.

And Madame Menotti replied in the same calm, detached tone of voice, licking her lips to show she’d finished her coffee and greatly enjoyed it, “No, not much chance of finding work around here.”

Slightly embarrassed, he asked, “May I use your phone?”

She led him into her sitting room and pointed to the telephone on a pedestal table.

She kept pushing her glasses up her nose to little effect, but otherwise remained motionless by his side, not so much to keep an eye on him, he gathered, as to not be left alone in her bungled kitchen.

“You don’t have a cell phone?”

“No,” he replied, “it was too expensive.”

Shame dealt a blow against the still-fragile carapace of his lucidity and self-esteem, but such attacks were routine, and he felt it was his duty not to give in to them, not to wallow in the paradoxical comfort of such a familiar sensation.

“It was really too expensive,” he repeated, “and it was something I could do without.”

“You did the right thing, then.”

“Like your kitchen,” he added, “too expensive and something you could have done without.”

Gazing rather sadly before her, she said nothing.

For Madame Menotti it was still too soon, he felt, and it was more than she was capable of, to give up the hopes of happiness, frivolity, consistency, and peace enshrined in the supposed perfection of a kitchen from Manille’s.

Besides, wasn’t it what he’d implicitly promised her, when she’d phoned in distress one night and when he’d felt her resolution flagging, and he’d pointed out that she’d no chance of enjoying an enviably harmonious and well-ordered existence in an old kitchen with mismatched furnishings?

He dialed his own number again.

He let it ring for a long time, so long indeed that if Fanta had picked up the phone at that point he would have felt more anxiety than relief.

Next to the phone was the local directory. To while away the time he picked it up, thumbed through it with one hand, and deliberately went straight to the name of Gauquelan, the sculptor, and with a touch of unease noted that he lived not far away, in a new development occupied by wealthy former city dwellers who, like Madame Menotti’s neighbors and to a lesser extent Madame Menotti herself, had bought rural properties that, at great expense, they were renovating.

Later, waiting on the doorstep to say good-bye to Madame Menotti, he thought he could smell the wisteria.

He stood there in the harsh glare of the sun. The heavy, intoxicating scent of the mauve clusters into which, drunk with gratitude, he’d plunged his nose a few weeks earlier now crept up on him once again, and he was deeply moved.

The scent probably came, he said to himself, from the pathetic heap of wisteria by the side of the house. It was spreading its fragrance one last time. Was it not, in its own way, saying, “You’ve done nothing, you’ve never tried doing anything for me, and now it’s too late and I’m dying, slowly decomposing in my own perfume”?

He was overwhelmed with feelings of resentment.

To hide them, he lowered his head and stuck his hands in his back pockets.

From one of them he pulled out a brochure of Mummy’s and brusquely handed it to Madame Menotti.

“They’re among us,” she read aloud. Puzzled, she asked, “Who are ‘they’?”

“Oh, the angels,” Rudy said with feigned nonchalance.

She snickered and crumpled up the brochure without opening it.

Feeling hurt on Mummy’s behalf and sensing his anger rising again within him, he went quickly down the steps and, almost running, returned to his car.

He drove slowly, aimlessly, thinking there was no point in setting foot in Manille’s place again, now that his goose was thoroughly cooked.

A feeling of pique still made it painful for him to think about his failure, because he would have loved to stomp out of Manille’s and slam the door behind him rather than find himself sacked for a gross error of calculation on a project to which he’d given so much of himself, but then the dread inspired by the vision of his future was softened by a realization that there was nothing that could be done about it, that it was all in the order of things.

He ought not to crawl before Manille.

His head was spinning a little.

How had he managed to put up with such a life for four years? It was only an academic question, he realized, a purely formal, pretended bafflement, because he knew very well, actually, how people put up with long years of a paltry existence.

What he didn’t know, rather, was how he could have fared not putting up with those bitter, pathetic years — what kind of man would he have been, what kind of man would he have become, what would have happened had he not settled for such mediocrity?

Would it have been a good thing or would he have fallen still lower than now?

And what would he have done with himself?

Really, it wasn’t difficult getting used to a life of self-disgust, bitterness, and disorder.

He’d even gotten used to a state of permanent, barely contained fury, he’d even managed, after a fashion, to get used to his frosty, fraught relations with Fanta and the child.

At the thought that he was going to have to take a quite different view of his domestic situation he felt dizzy again, and although he’d long aspired to rekindle the love and tenderness they’d known before they’d left for France, he felt obscurely anxious. Would Fanta recognize what he’d newly become, wasn’t she too weary, too mistrustful, and too skeptical to meet him at this point he’d arrived at?

You’ve come too late and I’m dying.

Where could she be at this precise moment?

Much as he longed to rejoin Fanta, he was afraid of going back home.

There was no need, Fanta, to send me that horrid avenging bird.

A voice kept cawing in his head: You’ve come too late, I’m dying, my feet have been cut off, I’ve fallen on the floor of your unfriendly house, you’ve come too late.

He was hungry now and Madame Menotti’s coffee had made him terribly thirsty.

He was driving slowly with all the windows down along the quiet little road, between the thuja hedges and white fences beyond which occasionally shimmered the bluish water of a swimming pool.

Having left Madame Menotti’s area behind, he noted that the neighborhood he was now in consisted of even larger houses, even more luxuriously and more recently restored, and it occurred to him that he was deceiving himself yet again in affecting to drive without a precise destination; he was annoyed to think that he, Rudy Descas, should have been itching to prowl around Gauquelan’s place ever since noting the sculptor’s address in Madame Menotti’s sitting room, and felt he should no doubt admit having wanted to do it for quite a while, ever since he’d read about the municipality’s having awarded Gauquelan more than a hundred thousand euros for the statue — whose face so closely resembled Rudy’s — that had been installed on the rotary.

Tortured by heat and thirst, he wondered if he was not being cast back into the dangerous eddies of that tiresome, monotonous, degrading dream that left such a bitter aftertaste and from which by sheer force of will he was just beginning to extricate himself.

Should he not forget about Gauquelan, the man who’d inspired so much unjust, spiteful, uncalled-for rage?

Of course he should, and that’s certainly what he was going to do — stop thinking that the man was in some mysterious, symbolic way responsible for Rudy’s rotten luck, that he’d secretly taken advantage of Rudy’s innocence to prosper while he, Rudy …

Yes, it was absurd, but merely thinking about it made him gloomy and irritable.

He could see again the photo in the local paper of this Gauquelan, with his missing tooth, fat face, and smug expression, and to Rudy it seemed unquestionable that the man had robbed him of something, just like all those clever, cynical people who benefit from the inability of the Rudy Descases of this world to get their grip of the brass ring.

That pathetic artist, Gauquelan, had succeeded because Rudy was languishing in poverty. In Rudy’s eyes it was no coincidence: he couldn’t shake the notion of cause and effect.

The other guy was growing fat at his expense.

The idea drove him mad.

What’s more …

He managed a smile, he forced himself to smile, even though his dry lips were stuck together. Boy, was he thirsty!

What’s more … it may have been silly, but that’s the way it was, it had the perfect luminosity of unprovable truth: while Rudy’s little soul was fluttering around unsuspectingly, the other had grabbed hold of it to create his despicable work, the statue of a man who looked like Rudy, even down to his pose of angry, terrified submission.

Yes, it drove him mad to think that, although they’d never met, Gauquelan had made use of him, that people like him exploited for their own benefit the trusting ignorance and weakness of those who failed to take steps to protect themselves.

He pulled up in front of a brand-new, black, wrought-iron gate with tips of gold. Feeling a little giddy, he said to himself that this was where Gauquelan lived, in that big house built of exposed stone blocks freshly scrubbed and pointed.

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.

Rudy knew it was nothing of the sort.

He’d always known that his father had tried to blot the whole thing out, to convince himself that he’d never wanted to rid himself, so dishonorably, of his partner and friend who never in his heart had mixed …

He knew that in getting into the car and turning the key Abel was after revenge on Salif, a way of sustaining the pleasure of his exultant rage by pulverizing the man he’d knocked to the ground; Rudy knew it as well as — or even better than — if he’d felt it himself, because it wasn’t his neck on the line, there was nothing to gain disputing the point.

So why was he so sure?

Was it because he’d been there and seen the way the car moved and realized that it was a furious, passionate, deliberate act of will that was directing the vehicle at Salif’s head?

Rudy ran through the kitchen and out the back door, straight to the gate, and hurled himself through the gap in the hedge.

His shirt caught on the thorns. He pulled it roughly away.

Only when he was sitting in the Nevada again did he dare draw breath.

He gripped the steering wheel and lowered his head onto it.

Groaning softly, hiccupping and choking back his spit, he murmured, “What does it matter, what does it matter!”

Because that wasn’t the issue, was it?

How could he be so blind as to believe that the fundamental question was whether, on that terrible afternoon, he’d been present or not?

Because that wasn’t the issue.

It now seemed to him that fretting about this so much was just a distraction, albeit a painful one, a way of concealing the insidious progression of untruthfulness, criminality, perverse enjoyment, and insanity.

Trembling, he set off, and at the next junction turned right, to get away from Gauquelan’s house as quickly as possible.

Why did he have to, even in the worst circumstances, be so like his father?

Who expected that of him?

He could still see, from where he’d stood in the doorway, Gauquelan’s sleeping face and defenseless hands, while his own face had been deceptively calm, and he could recall his deceptively calm thoughts as he wondered in which drawer he’d find the most suitable weapon for killing Gauquelan with a single blow — he, Rudy, with his aspirations to pity and goodness, standing in the doorway of this stranger’s living room and, beneath the calm and gentle exterior of a cultivated person, planning an act that, from the point of view of pity and goodness, was inexcusable.

His teeth were chattering.

Who would ever have expected him to be as violent and abject a man as his father, and what did he have to do with Abel Descas anyway?

He, Rudy, had been a specialist in medieval literature and a competent teacher.

The very thought of building a vacation resort for profit filled him with embarrassment and loathing.

So — as he clung to the steering wheel, well aware of driving carelessly and too fast along a country road far from Gauquelan’s neighborhood — what inheritance did he feel he had to own up to?

And why should it have been necessary to keep Gauquelan from getting out of his armchair once his hands suddenly no longer seemed vulnerable and childlike …?

Oh, thought Rudy as he swerved through the bends in the road, it wasn’t Gauquelan who should never be allowed to awaken from his siesta, with his head full of deceitful visions that rubbing his eyes couldn’t dispel, but rather Rudy’s father, a man of murderous tendencies firmly, fanatically, rooted in his heart, where friendship and anger, affection for others and the need to destroy them, mingled incessantly.

And wasn’t it that man’s worthy heir who’d taken pleasure in throttling the Dara Salam boy and — just now — in spying on a stranger fast asleep?

Overcome with self-loathing, Rudy recalled having wept over the murdered wisteria, and thought about his father’s habit of waxing sentimental about animals, at mealtimes occasionally talking of becoming a vegetarian, and making a show of covering his ears whenever Mummy strangled a chicken out back.

On entering a village he slowed down and pulled up outside a grocer’s he knew slightly.

A bell tinkled as he opened the glass door.

The smell of cold meat, bread, and confectionary in the window made him realize how hungry he was.

Sounds of shouting and laughter on television filtered through a curtain of plastic strips separating the shop from the grocer’s living room. The sounds grew louder as the woman slipped through the curtain, parting the strips carefully to prevent the flies coming in.

Rudy cleared his throat.

The woman waited, her head cocked slightly toward the back room so that she could go on listening to the program.

In a hoarse voice he asked for a baguette and a slice of ham.

Deftly, confidently, and (he thought, mechanically) with unwashed hands, she lifted up the shiny ham, placed it on the machine, cut a slice, popped it on the scales, then took a limp-looking baguette from a large paper bag on the floor, felt it before tossing it back and picking up another.

Despite the precision of her movements he noticed her absent look, the way she kept listening for the sound coming from the television, even though not a word was audible, as if she could stay tuned just by following the varying intensity of the roar.

“Four euros sixty,” she said, without looking at him.

This provincial France he knew so well suddenly made him feel weary, oh yes — he reflected — terribly weary of inferior bread lying on the floor, of pale, damp ham, of hands like hers handling food and coins, bread and bills, in succession.

Those hands, indifferent to tainted bread, did they sometimes, he wondered, lie limp, fragile, palms up?

Then his feeling of disgust faded.

But there remained in his heart the nostalgic pang he felt whenever he remembered that during those long years spent in Dara Salam, and later in Le Plateau in the capital, he’d never felt the slightest repugnance when the hands of people serving him touched meat and coins at the same time.

Indeed he never felt any revulsion at anything, as if his joy, his well-being, his gratitude for the place had sterilized everyday transactions with a purifying fire.

Whereas here, in his own country …

As he left the shop he could hear behind him the swishing of the plastic curtain and the tinkling of the bell, then the heavy silence of midday and the thick, dry heat enveloped him.

The pavements on either side of the road were narrow, and the grayish houses all had their shutters closed.

He got back into the car.

It was so hot inside he felt slightly faint.

The very inside of his head felt hot and feeble. It wasn’t an entirely disagreeable sensation, and in no way resembled the feeling of a furnace raging inside his skull when, stretched out on the ground in the lycée courtyard, his face pressed against the asphalt, he’d felt awkward, worried hands trying gingerly and laboriously to lift him up, first by the armpits and then by the waist as he remarked to himself confusedly, But I’m not all that heavy, until he realized that the delicate hands belonged to the terrified headmistress, Madame Plat.

Despite the shooting pain in his shoulders, he’d tried to help her, and he’d felt embarrassed for the two of them, as if Madame Plat had caught him in an intimate moment that nothing in their relationship could justify their sharing.

The three boys were standing erect, gathered together in silence and calm, as if waiting for justice to be done, so sure of their version of events as to feel no hurry to explain themselves.

Rudy’s eyes had met those of the Dara Salam boy, who’d gazed back with a look of impassive, cold indifference.

He’d gently touched his Adam’s apple as if to signify, no doubt, that he was still very badly hurt.

“Do you want me to call the nurse?” Madame Plat had asked. Rudy had said he didn’t.

And although it was so hot inside his head that he couldn’t say precisely what words were going to pass his lips, he’d embarked on a passionate, confused speech intended to completely exonerate the boys.

Puzzled and mistrustful, Madame Plat looked hard at Rudy’s bloody temple and cheek.

She was a youngish laid-back woman with whom he’d always gotten along.

She was now looking at him suspiciously and somewhat fearfully. Rudy was starting to feel, as he talked, that his panicky defense of the three boys was working against him as much as them, and that Madame Plat was beginning to sense among all four some dubious, incomprehensible complicity or, worse still, some terror on his part of pupils whose vengeance he had reason to fear.

At that moment, he’d already concealed from himself what had really happened.

The truth he’d embrace in Manille’s parking lot had already gone out of his head.

And thus had he convinced himself that in clearing the boys of all responsibility for provoking the confrontation, he was lying. It was they who attacked me, he thought to himself, because his fingers had already forgotten the warm neck of the Dara Salam boy, and what he was saying to Madame Plat — out of fear or shame at seeming to be a victim — was the opposite of the truth.

Later, in Madame Plat’s office, he would stick to his guns: the boys had flung him to the ground because he’d deliberately, foolishly insulted them.

It’s not true, it’s not true, he was thinking, I’ve never hurt a fly, and his head was aching terribly and his shoulders were hurting dreadfully.

“But why did they do that? What did you say to them?” Madame Plat had asked, bewildered.

He said nothing.

She asked him again.

He still said nothing.

When he did say something, it was to affirm that the boys had been right to beat him up, because what he’d shouted at them was unforgivable.

The boys, when questioned in their turn, had said nothing. No one said anything about Monsieur Descas hurling himself at the Dara Salam boy.

Only Rudy’s version of the story had been retained, i.e., that he’d said a vile thing to the boys and had brought a brutal reaction upon himself.

Madame Plat had advised Rudy to take sick leave.

His case was considered by a disciplinary panel and, as if out of nowhere, the insult “fucking nigger” was looked into as the one he’d allegedly hurled at the three boys.

Someone had remembered that, twenty-five years earlier, Rudy’s father had humiliated and murdered his African business partner.

The disciplinary panel therefore decided to suspend Rudy.

He was panting, as if he’d been struck.

He could now, for the first time, remember that period, he could remember the smell of tar and the pressure of his fingers on the boy’s windpipe, and the old pain was stirring.

As he awaited the verdict of the disciplinary panel, he’d spent a month in the apartment in Le Plateau.

He’d begun to hate that pretty three-room apartment in a newly built block of units that ran along an avenue shaded by poinciana trees.

He only went out to take his son for walks and to shop as close to home as possible, convinced that everyone was aware of his fall from grace and was laughing at him.

Wasn’t it at that point too, he wondered, that he’d begun to dislike the child in a way he’d never owned up to and would indeed have hotly denied?

• • •

He set off and drove to the edge of the village.

He parked on a dirt track between two fields of corn, and without getting out began devouring the bread and ham, taking a bite first of the one and then the other.

Although the ham was watery and tasteless and the baguette limp, it was so good to be eating something at last that his eyes filled with tears.

But why, oh why, had he never been able to feel for Djibril the obvious love, so strong, joyous, proud, that other fathers seemed to feel toward their children?

He’d always made an effort to love his son, and that effort, previously disguised by his eagerness to please and the shortness of time actually spent with the boy, had been exposed during the long weeks he spent shut up in the apartment.

He’d have preferred then to hide away from everybody, but Djibril was there, always there, a witness to Rudy’s downfall, to his degradation and the destruction of everything he’d done to make himself a man beloved and respected.

That the boy was only two made no difference.

This little angel had become his fearsome, watchful guardian, the silent, mocking judge of his fall from grace.

Rudy crumpled up the wrapping paper from the ham, tossed it in the back, and ate the rest of the bread.

Then he got out of the car and went toward the first row in the cornfield to urinate.

Hearing a wingbeat, the gentle flutter of feathers in the warm, still air above his head, he looked up.

As if on cue, the buzzard dived toward him.

He raised his arms to protect his head.

Just before touching him the buzzard swerved away, shrieking with rage.

Rudy jumped in the car, reversed out of the dirt track, and drove slowly along the road.

Although when he’d finished eating he’d been ready to go back home and see Fanta, he was now gripped with fear and irritation, so he deliberately went in the other direction.

The idea crossed his mind that the bird had perhaps been trying to tell him that he should indeed go back home as quickly as possible, but he rejected it, convinced deep down that the angry buzzard was, on the contrary, indicating that he should stay well away.

He felt his head throbbing.

“What for, Fanta, what for,” he murmured.

Because wasn’t he, in a sense, now worthier of being loved than he had been that morning?

And being on that lofty perch from which she could launch an attack bird that enjoyed her full support, could she not understand that?

Just as he would never again say those absurd, cruel things he’d uttered only in the white heat of anger, the same way as he would no longer let himself fall prey to a particular kind of humiliating, impotent, comforting rage, he would try no more to charm Fanta with seductive guile, because those things he said in the apartment in Le Plateau hadn’t been intended to get at some honest truth or another but only to drag her back to France with him even at the risk (not considered at the time, almost beyond his concern) of her own downfall and the collapse of her rightful dreams.

He recalled the gentle, persuasive tones he’d managed to infuse into his voice, he who, after a month spent alone with Djibril, spoke only in a sort of hesitant croak. Then, even when Fanta came home in the evening, he felt too weary to utter more than a few words.

Quietly happy just to be back once more with her child, she took over with discreet alacrity from Rudy, even though they both knew that he hadn’t had to do very much, and she busied herself so energetically with the toddler that Rudy could pretend there was no opportunity to get a word in.

He would feel relieved and would go out and lean on the balcony, watching the sun set over the placid avenue.

Big gray or black cars were bringing home businessmen and diplomats who would pass a few servant girls returning on foot carrying plastic bags, and those women who didn’t pad wearily along flew above the pavement just as Fanta still did, seeming not to touch the ground except to use it as a springboard.

Then, sitting on opposite ends of the table, they’d eat the meal Rudy had prepared, and since by then Djibril had been put to bed, they could feign wanting to listen to the news on the radio and not have to speak to each other.

He would gaze furtively at her sometimes: at her small, shaven head, the harmonious roundness of her skull, the casual grace of her movements, her long slender hands, which, at rest, hung at right angles to a wrist that was so slender it looked as if it would snap easily, and her serious, thoughtful, conscientious air.

He was overwhelmed with love for her, but he felt too tired and depressed to show it.

Perhaps in some obscure way, too, he resented her for bringing home the daily action and images of a lycée he was no longer in touch with, her free movement in a scene from which he’d been excluded.

Perhaps, in some obscure way, he was insanely jealous.

Early on in his suspension, when he was supposed to be on sick leave only, he used to listen glumly to tidbits of news she thought would interest him, about colleagues and pupils and this and that; he’d gotten into the habit of leaving the room at that point, this evasion as effective an interruption as if he’d hit her in the mouth.

Wasn’t it to avoid doing precisely that, that he’d walk out of the room?

But once he’d been informed of the panel’s verdict — dismissal from his post and loss of his teacher’s certificate — he’d recovered the gift of smooth talking and put it at the service of his unhappiness, dishonesty, underhandedness, and envy.

He’d assured her that it was only in France that they had a future, and that through her marriage to him she was lucky to be able to go and live there.

As for what she’d do there, no problem: he’d make it his business to get her a job in a middle school or a lycée.

He knew nothing was less likely, and yet his tone became all the more eloquent as he started to be assailed by doubts, and Fanta, being naturally honest, never suspected anything, perhaps particularly because he’d reverted to his former guise of the young man in love, the fiancé with the cheerful, tanned face and pale blond forelock that he tossed back with a puff of breath or jerk of the head, so that even if Fanta knew some people whose faces were adept at dissembling and lies, whom she therefore would never have trusted, behind that loving, tanned, open face, those eyes so limpid and pale, surely nothing could be concealed.

They’d spent long days visiting members of Fanta’s extended family.

Rudy had remained on the threshold of the green-walled apartment where, a few years earlier, he’d first met the uncle and aunt who’d raised Fanta.

His excuse for not entering was that he felt unwell, but in truth he couldn’t bear to look those two old people in the eye, not because he feared his lying mask would be torn off but rather because he was afraid of betraying himself and — standing in that greenish-blue room beside Fanta as she talked in proud, confident, determined tones about all the good things that awaited them over there — of being tempted to drop everything, to say to her, “Oh, they won’t give you a teaching job in France,” and of finally telling her about the crime Abel Descas had committed long ago and about the way he’d died, about why the boys had thrown him, her husband, to the ground, because Fanta, while not believing he’d insulted the pupils exactly as people said, must have thought he’d shown them some kind of disrespect or another.

He’d stayed put, not daring to go into the apartment.

He hadn’t run away, he just hadn’t gone inside.

He’d been content to defend his interests while avoiding any risk of letting the cat out of the bag.

Feeling very tired all of a sudden, he turned off the road into a plantation of poplars.

He parked on a grassy track where the last row of poplars gave way to a wood.

He was so hot in the car he thought he’d faint.

The ham and soft white bread sat heavy in his stomach.

He got out of the car and threw himself on the grass.

The earth was cool and smelled of damp clay.

Drunk with happiness, he rolled around a bit.

Then he stretched out and lay on his back with his arms crossed above his head, and turning his face toward the sun screwed up his eyes and through the slits looked at the white trunks and their tiny silvery leaves turning reddish.

“There was no need, Fanta …”

It was at first only a black spot among others high above him in the milky sky. Then he heard, and recognized, its aggressive, bitter shriek and, when he saw it diving toward him, realized it had recognized him, too.

He leaped to his feet, jumped in the car, and slammed the door just as the buzzard landed on the roof.

He could hear its claws scraping on the metal.

He switched on the ignition and rammed the stick shift into reverse.

He saw the buzzard fly off and land on one of the middle branches of a poplar. Tall and rigid, it looked at him askance, its mottled eye full of menace.

He did a three-point turn and drove away along the track as fast as he could.

The heat was stifling. He was in anguish.

Was he ever now, he wondered, was he ever now going to be able to get out of his car without the vindictive bird pursuing him relentlessly over his old misdeeds?

And what would have happened if he hadn’t been made aware, precisely on this day, of his past misdemeanors?

Would the buzzard have appeared, would it have made itself known?

It’s so unfair, he said to himself, on the brink of tears.

When he arrived at the little school, the children were coming out of their classrooms, which were all situated on the ground floor.

One after the other each door was flung wide and, as if they’d been pressing up against it to force it open, the children tumbled out onto the playground, staggering a little, looking rather frantic as they squinted in the golden light of the late afternoon.

Rudy got out of the car and looked up at the sky.

Reassured for the time being, he went up to the gate.

In the midst of the children who, at a distance, all seemed to look alike, to such an extent that they couldn’t be told apart but formed a mass made up of the same individual multiplied bizarrely many times over, he recognized Djibril, even though, with his chestnut hair, gaily colored T-shirt, and sneakers, he differed little from the rest — that child was, of all the others, his child, and he recognized him at once.

He called out, “Hey, Djibril!”

The boy stopped in his tracks, and his wide-open, laughing mouth closed at once.

Feeling hurt and uneasy, Rudy saw his son’s lively, animated features freeze with anxiety the moment he caught sight of the man standing behind the gate and all hope that it wasn’t his father’s voice evaporated.

Rudy waved to him.

At the same time he scrutinized the sky and above the noises in the playground tried to catch the sound of a possible curse.

Djibril stared at him.

He turned around deliberately and began to run.

Rudy called out to him again, but the boy paid no more mind than if he’d seen a stranger at the gate. He was now at the far end of the playground, immersed in a ball game that was unfamiliar to Rudy.

In truth, should he not know the games his son played?

Rudy thought that like any other father he could go into the playground, walk over to his son, seize him sternly by the arm, and take him to the car.

But apart from being afraid Djibril might start crying — something he wished at all costs to avoid — he was fearful of embarking on the wide-open space of the playground.

If the buzzard arrived, doleful, pitiless, where would he hide?

He went and sat in the Nevada.

He saw the school bus arrive and the children line up in the playground ready to get in.

As Djibril was leaving the playground Rudy jumped out of the car and trotted up to the bus.

“Come here, Djibril!” he said in a tone that was both cheery and insistent. “Dad’s taking him home today,” he said to the woman supervising the children on the bus. He ought to know her, he thought, at least by sight — but was it not the first time he’d fetched Djibril from school?

The boy left the group and followed Rudy. He kept his head down as if ashamed. He looked at nothing and no one, but he tried to act natural.

He held the straps on his schoolbag at the armpits and Rudy noticed that his hands were trembling slightly.

Rudy was about to put his arm around Djibril’s shoulder in a gesture he never normally went in for. He had to think it through before doing so in order to make it look as natural as possible. Then, beside the acacias that lined the road, he saw a brown shape out of the corner of his eye.

Turning his head gingerly he looked at the calm, watchful buzzard perched at the top of one of the trees.

Frozen with terror he forgot to embrace Djibril. His arms hung stiffly and awkwardly down his sides.

It took a lot of effort to get to the car. He threw himself in with a groan. What do you want with me, what can you possibly want with me? he wondered.

The child got in the back and slammed the door with studied brusqueness.

“Why did you come and fetch me?” he asked. Rudy sensed that he was on the brink of tears and didn’t answer straightaway.

Through the car window he gazed at the buzzard, uncertain as to whether it had seen him.

His heart was beating less fiercely now.

He drove off slowly so as not to attract the buzzard’s attention. Perhaps it had learned to recognize the sound of the Nevada’s engine.

When they were out of sight of the school, driving with his left hand he turned around to face his son.

The child was frowning, anxiously and uncomprehendingly.

It made him look so much like Fanta whenever she dropped her mask of indifference and revealed what she commonly felt — anxiety and incomprehension — about her husband and their life in France, that Rudy was momentarily annoyed with the boy and the old dark, aggressive emotions toward Djibril welled up inside him once again — as if the boy had only ever existed to judge the father — emotions that had burgeoned in him when, during his suspension from the lycée, he’d spent a mortifying month of indignity and bitter regret in the child’s company.

It seemed to him now that, whatever he did, his son would blame him and be terribly afraid of him.

“I felt like coming to fetch you from school today, that’s all,” he said in his most amiable voice.

“And Mummy?” the boy almost shouted.

“What about Mummy?”

“Is she okay?”

“Yes, yes, she’s fine.”

Still a bit suspicious, Djibril nonetheless relaxed a little.

So as not to betray his own feelings, Rudy now looked straight ahead.

What did he know about how Fanta was at the moment?

“We’re going to your grandmother’s,” he said, “you can spend the night there. It’s been quite a while since you last saw her, hasn’t it? Is that okay by you?”

Djibril grunted.

Choking suddenly with emotion, Rudy realized that the child was so relieved by his assurances about Fanta that all the rest — what was going to happen to him personally — was merely of secondary importance.

“Mummy’s okay, you’re sure?” the boy asked again.

Rudy nodded without looking around.

In the rearview mirror he could see the little pale brown face with its coal-black eyes, its flat nose and quivering nostrils like a heifer’s, its thick lips, and he recognized all that and said to himself, That’s my son, Djibril, and although that statement failed to resonate, although it sank inside him, he thought, like a stone, he was beginning to see, to take measure of both the innocence and the independence of the boy whose thoughts and intentions bore no relation to Rudy’s, and who inhabited a whole intimate, secret world in which Rudy had no place.

The meaning of Djibril’s existence didn’t boil down to condemning his father — or did it?

Oh, that death sentence that the two-year-old with the stern look had seemed to pass upon his father: a man so debased, and so despised!

But the figure he saw in the rearview mirror was but a pensive — and for the moment pacified — schoolboy enjoying childhood reveries far removed from Rudy’s preoccupations: it was his son, Djibril, and he was only seven.

“Tell me, are you hungry?” Just hearing himself ask this in a voice choked with emotion made Rudy embarrassed.

Like Fanta, Djibril took time weighing his responses.

Not, Rudy imagined, to work out what he really wanted, but to avoid laying himself open to anything that might be misinterpreted, as if everything he said could later be used against him.

How did we get to this point?

What sort of man am I, that they should need to tread so carefully with me?

Feeling demoralized, he didn’t repeat his question, and Djibril remained silent.

His inscrutable face had a serious look.

Rudy felt a great awkwardness between them.

What should he say?

What did other fathers say to their seven-year-olds?

It had been so long, so long, since they’d been alone together.

Was it necessary to talk?

Did other fathers find it necessary?

“What was that game you were playing just now in school?”

“What was …?” the child repeated after a few seconds.

“You know, when you were playing with a ball. It’s not a game I know.”

Djibril’s eyes darted anxiously, hesitantly, right and left.

His mouth was half open.

He’s wondering, “What’s behind this sudden curiosity?” and since he can’t work it out, he’s looking for the best strategy, the best way to find out what underlies my question.

“It’s just a game,” the child said slowly, in a low voice.

“But what do you have to do? What are the rules?”

Rudy was trying to make his voice sound kindly and unthreatening.

He lifted himself up to smile into the rearview mirror.

But the child now seemed terror-struck.

He’s so scared he can’t think straight.

“I don’t know the rules!” Djibril almost shouted. “It’s just a game, that’s all there is to it.”

“Okay, okay, no problem. Anyway, you were enjoying yourself, weren’t you?”

The child, still not looking any less anxious, mumbled something that Rudy didn’t catch.

Rudy felt that his son was looking a bit like a half-wit. That annoyed and upset him.

Why was the child incapable of understanding that his father was only trying to get closer to him? Why didn’t he make the effort to meet his father halfway? And the high intelligence that Rudy had, perhaps smugly, always credited him with, did it still exist, had it ever existed?

Or else, finding little stimulation at the village school where the teachers were narrowminded and hardly up to much — at least that was what, deep down, Rudy felt — and oppressed by the atmosphere of sadness, resentment, and dread that prevailed at home, the boy’s intelligence had shriveled and withered, so that without it Djibril, his son, would be just like so many other children: not very interesting …

If Rudy felt no particular hostility toward mediocre children, he saw no reason to love them and didn’t think it likely that he ever would.

He was sliding into a state of bitter affliction.

He was powerless to offer his son unconditional love, so that must mean he didn’t love him. He needed good reasons to love. Was that what fatherly love amounted to? He’d never heard it described as depending on the qualities a child might or might not possess.

He looked at Djibril in the rearview mirror again; he looked at him intensely, passionately, alert to any sign of paternal feeling stirring within himself.

It was his son, Djibril; he’d recognize him even surrounded by other children.

Force of habit?

His heart was just a muddy pool into which, with a ghastly swish, everything was slipping.

Rudy’s mother lived in a tiny, low-roofed, square house in a new housing development at the end of a village consisting of only one street.

When she’d returned to France with Rudy just after Abel’s death she’d gone back to live in their old house deep in the countryside, and Rudy had gone to board at the nearest secondary school.

He’d gone to university in Bordeaux (he remembered the infinite desolation of the gray streets, the campus located far away in the dreary suburbs), and it was to the same old, isolated house that he occasionally went to visit Mummy.

Then, after taking his finals, he’d gone back to Africa and was appointed to a teaching post at the Lycée Mermoz.

Five years ago, after getting fired, when he’d returned to France under a cloud with Fanta and Djibril in tow, he’d found that his mother had left her house for that little villa with tiny square windows and a roof that, like a low forehead, made the whole place look mulish and stupid.

From the word go, he’d felt ill at ease in this neighborhood of houses that all looked alike, built on bare rectangular plots now artlessly graced with tufts of pampas grass and a few replanted Christmas trees!

He’d had the impression that in moving there Mummy was not only submitting to, but also ratifying, even anticipating in a smug, rather nasty way, the judgment of absolute failure that, at the end of her life, a supreme authority would be handing down.

Rudy had been burning to ask her: Was it really necessary to advertise her ruination in that manner? Hadn’t her existence in the countryside been more dignified?

But as always with Mummy, he’d said nothing.

His own situation seemed nothing to brag about, either!

Besides, he’d soon realized that Mummy liked the neighborhood and that its large captive female audience made it much easier than before to peddle her stock of angelic brochures.

She’d made friends with women the very sight of whom filled Rudy with embarrassment and sadness.

Their bodies and faces bore all the signs of a brutal, terrible life (scars, bruises, skin turned purple through alcohol addiction). They were for the most part unemployed and willingly opened their door to Mummy, who tried to help them determine the name of their soul’s guardian and then track it down — the angel none of them had ever seen and who had never come to their aid because it had never been correctly invoked.

Oh well, Rudy had finally said to himself, not without bitterness, Mummy was perfectly at home in her unlovely housing development.

He wandered around a bit on the grounds, lost as usual (that happened every time he visited), going up and down the same streets without realizing it.

Mummy’s pocket handkerchief garden was one of the few not littered with plastic toys, bits of furniture, and auto parts.

The yellowish grass was overgrown because Mummy — completely taken up with her proselytizing — claimed no time to mow the lawn.

Djibril got out of the car very reluctantly, leaving his schoolbag on the backseat. Rudy, getting out in his turn, grabbed it.

He could see from the terrified look on the boy’s face that he’d just realized his father was going to leave without him.

But he has to see his grandmother from time to time, Rudy thought, very upset.

How distant, now, seemed the morning of this very same day when, informing Fanta he’d collect Djibril and take him to spend the night at his grandmother’s, it had dawned on him that he hadn’t so much wanted to give Mummy a nice surprise as to prevent Fanta from leaving him!

Because why would he suddenly get it into his head to try to please Mummy that way?

Even if he couldn’t agree with Fanta’s claim that his grandmother didn’t love Djibril — because that would be to make the mistake of seeing Mummy as an ordinary person who simply loved someone or didn’t love them — it seemed obvious to Rudy that ever since the child was born, ever since Mummy first leaned over his crib, examined his features, and found that he in no way corresponded, had no hope of ever corresponding, to her idea of a divine messenger, and so had never really taken the trouble to bond with the child: it seemed obvious to Rudy that it was this attitude — benign indifference — that Fanta had taken for hostility.

Rudy put his hand on Djibril’s shoulder.

He could feel the little, pointy bones.

Djibril let his head fall against his father’s stomach. Rudy ran his fingers through the boy’s silky curls, feeling the beautifully smooth, perfect, miraculous skull.

His eyes suddenly filled with bitter tears.

Then he heard a cry above them, a single angry, threatening shriek.

He took his hand away and pushed Djibril toward the garden gate, so brusquely that the boy stumbled.

Rudy steadied him, gripping him tightly, and they crossed the overgrown lawn to the front door. Rudy thought it looked as if he were dragging the child along against his will.

But, terrified and distraught, not daring to look up at the sky, he had no intention of letting go.

But, moaning, Djibril shook himself loose. Rudy didn’t try to stop him.

The child looked at him in fear and bafflement.

Rudy forced himself to smile and banged on the door.

If the buzzard was going to swoop down on Rudy before Mummy opened the door, what would become of his attempts at restoring his honor?

Oh, all would then be lost!

The door opened almost at once.

Rudy dragged Djibril inside and closed the door.

“Well, well,” said Mummy in a cheery voice, “what a surprise!”

“I’ve brought Djibril to see you,” Rudy murmured, still in a state of shock.

There was no need to do that, Fanta, there was no need to do that now …

Mummy stooped down toward Djibril’s face, looked at him closely, and kissed the boy’s forehead.

Ill at ease, Djibril wriggled.

She stood up next to kiss Rudy, and he felt from the quivering of her mouth that she was happy and excited.

That made him slightly anxious.

He guessed that her feverish cheeriness was due not to their presence but to something that had happened before their arrival and that their visit would in no way disturb, being negligible, superfluous alongside this mysterious source of exultation.

He felt jealous about that, both for himself and for Djibril.

He placed his two hands heavily on his son’s shoulders.

“I thought you’d like to keep him for the night.”

“Ah!”

Nodding gently, Mummy folded her arms, and her searching gaze played on the child’s features again as if trying to estimate his worth.

“You could have warned me, but all right, it’ll be okay.”

Rudy remarked with some displeasure that she seemed particularly youthful and amiable today. Her short hair had been freshly dyed, a nice ash-blond color.

Her powdered, very pale skin was stretched over her cheekbones.

She was wearing jeans and a pink polo shirt, and when she turned around to go into the kitchen, Rudy saw that the jeans were quite tight and hugged her narrow hips, her small buttocks, and her slender knees.

In the tiny kitchen all in dark wood, a boy was sitting at the narrow table having his tea.

He was dipping into a glass of milk a shortbread cookie that Rudy recognized as being like those Mummy made for special occasions.

He was about Djibril’s age.

He was a beautiful child with pale eyes and fair curly hair.

Rudy nearly retched.

He had in his mouth the taste of ham and soft white bread.

“There, you sit down here,” Mummy said to Djibril, pointing to the other chair in front of the small table. “Are you hungry?”

She asked that with an air of hoping that his reply would be in the negative. Djibril shook his head. He also declined her invitation to sit down.

“It’s a little neighbor, I’ve got a new friend,” said Mummy.

The blond child didn’t look at anyone.

Assured, confident, he was eating happily, diligently, his lips wet with milk.

Rudy felt certain, at that moment, that there was no other explanation for Mummy’s eager bliss, for the hard sheen of happiness on her face, than the presence in her kitchen of this boy feasting on the shortbread she’d baked for him.

No, there was no other cause for the quivering of her lips and trembling of her skin but the boy himself.

It was equally clear to him that he wouldn’t leave Djibril with Mummy, not that evening nor any other, and having decided this, he felt immensely relieved.

Holding his son close he whispered in his ear, “We’re both going home, you’re not staying here, okay?”

Then, since Djibril was probably hungry and, at least for a short time, might as well sit at Mummy’s table, Rudy pulled up a chair for him and poured him a glass of milk.

“Come,” Mummy said to Rudy, “I’ve got something to show you.”

He followed her into the living room filled with heavy, useless furniture, navigable only by narrow corridors with complicated angles.

“What do you think?” asked Mummy in a tone of feigned detachment.

He could hear her voice trembling with desire, impatience, and delight.

“I use him as a model, he is an excellent sitter. I won’t let go of him.”

She let out a brief, shrill laugh.

“In any case, no one takes care of him at home. Good heavens, he’s so beautiful, don’t you think?”

From the table covered in pens, paper, and brochures tied together with string, she picked up a sheet of paper, which she showed to Rudy.

It was the sketch for a more developed drawing.

Clad in a white robe, Mummy’s little neighbor was shown flying above a group of adults frozen in what was presumably intended to look like an attitude of fear or ignorance. The execution was clumsy.

In a strained, sharp, but delighted tone Mummy explained, “He’s there, above them, and they’ve not yet recognized him, it has not yet been granted to them to see the light, but in the next drawing they will be enlightened and their eyes will be opened and the angel will be able to take his place among them.”

Rudy was overwhelmed by a feeling of weary disgust.

She’s stark, staring mad, and in the most ridiculous way. I can’t and shouldn’t cover up for her any longer. Poor little Djibril! We’ll never set foot in here again.

Rudy thought his mother had read his mind because at that moment she smiled tenderly at him, stroked his cheek, and patted the back of his head with her cold, damp hand. Rudy found that rather disagreeable.

Since she was short, he could see her fairly heavy breasts revealed by the plunging neckline of her polo shirt. They appeared swollen with milk or with desire.

He looked aside and backed away to get her to remove her hand.

She only talks to me about boring things that get on my nerves, but the things I still need to know she won’t ever take it upon herself to tell me, because she lost interest in all that long ago.

“Did anyone ever find out,” he began slowly, awkwardly, “who provided my father with a gun?”

She stiffened momentarily with surprise, but that was perceptible only during the time it took her to put the sketch down and turn toward him. Her dry lips parted slightly in an annoyed, pinched smile.

“That’s all over and done with,” she said.

“Did anyone find out?”

She sighed ostentatiously, coquettishly, annoyed at his insistence.

She flopped down in an armchair, seeming almost to disappear in the flabby folds of the oversize rosy vinyl upholstery.

“No, obviously, no one ever found out, I’m not even sure if an investigation was ever carried out, you know the country, you know how things were. When all’s said and done, what does it matter? You can get hold of anything in prison as long as you can pay for it.”

Mummy’s voice once again took on that bitter, rancorous, flat, stubborn tone that Rudy had heard ever since she’d returned to France some thirty years earlier, and that her passion for angels and the almost professional way she disseminated her propaganda about them had made her gradually forsake.

He heard it again, intact, unaltered, as if the memory of that time had to be accompanied by the voice and feelings associated with it.

“Your father had the wherewithal to pay, it wasn’t a problem. He hadn’t been in Reubeuss six weeks before he’d found a way of getting hold of a revolver; as you’re well aware he knew how things were done, he knew the right people, he knew the country. He’d decided he preferred to die rather than rot in Reubeuss and endure a trial in which he knew he was bound to be convicted.”

“He told you that? That he preferred to die?”

“Well, not in so many words, but there are ways of implying such things. At the time, even so, I’d never have imagined he’d go that far: have a gun delivered to his cell. No, I’d never have imagined that.”

And, as always, that sullen, bitter, vaguely whining tone in Mummy’s voice that used to so upset Rudy in the past, creating a feeling of guilt that he hadn’t managed to make her happy merely by his kindly, considerate presence at her side, by the mere fact that he existed, the only child of this lowly woman.

“There were no individual cells, not even for six or seven people, he was in a room with sixty other men and it was so hot — or so he told me when I went to visit him — that he was practically fainting most of the time. I did what I could, I tried to get to know his guardian angel, but faced with his ill will, his negative attitude, his disbelief, what could I hope to achieve?”

Rudy wanted to ask — nearly did ask—“Was I there when my father ran his 4×4 over Salif? Did I actually see that?”

But a deep reluctance, a vivid, burning hatred, stopped him from uttering these words.

How he loathed his father for obliging him to formulate such terrible questions.

It seemed to him that whatever had really occurred between Salif and his father that afternoon, his father was at least guilty of having made it possible for such words to stick to him, even if only in the form of a question.

Nevertheless, filled with disgust, he didn’t ask that question.

It was Mummy who started speaking about his father again, perhaps because she’d sensed how much spite and disapproval had been conveyed by her silence.

“He’d convinced himself that he was done for,” she continued in her caustic, plaintive, monotonous voice, “that the police investigation, or whatever it was, considered him guilty as hell and so wouldn’t be impartial, whereas it could already be proved that this Salif had indeed swindled him, I could see that right away when I went through your father’s papers. It was, after all, justified, I don’t mean the blows and the rest, but the anger, the fight, because this Salif, when all’s said and done he should have been your father’s best friend out there, it was your father who’d given him board and lodging and taken him on as his business partner, and there Salif goes and starts doing the one thing Abel couldn’t forgive or even understand: cheating him outrageously, without a hint of a problem between them, not a change in Salif’s smile or friendly voice whenever they met. All that could have been said at the trial. I went through every estimate Salif had drawn up, for bricklaying, joinery, and plumbing, and I went to see the contractors and lo and behold they were all one way or another in cahoots with Salif or with Salif’s wife and God knows who else, it jumped right out at you that they were inflated, those estimates, and that Salif had worked it all out, how he was going to be able to line his pocket along the way. Me, I could never understand how Abel could trust that one so blindly, you have to watch your back constantly over there, people are out to jew you the whole time. Friendship, that doesn’t exist over there. They may believe in God, but the angels, they despise, think they’re funny. When you went back there to try to make a living, I knew it wouldn’t work out, I was certain of it, and as you can see, it didn’t work out.”

“If it didn’t work out,” said Rudy, “it was because of my father, not the country.”

She snickered with a little triumphant acrimony.

“That’s what you think. You’re too white and too blond, naturally they would have taken you for a ride, they would have done everything to destroy you. Even love, that doesn’t exist over there. Your wife, she married you out of self-interest. They don’t know what love is, all they think about is money and status.”

He left the room and returned to the kitchen. He felt his anger assuaged, almost eliminated, by his intoxicating, invigorating decision never to visit Mummy again, and he thought, She can come if she feels like it, thinking too, Manille & Co., that’s all over and done with, what joy, to feel young, light as a bird, in the way he hadn’t since the time he’d first met Fanta and walked down the boulevard de la République in the warm, pale, dazzling morning light, in the simple, clear awareness of his own honesty and goodness.

Slumped on his chair, Djibril hadn’t touched his milk or shortbread.

The other boy was still eating with concentration and delight. Djibril looked at him with glum alarm.

“You see, he wasn’t hungry,” Mummy said as she walked in.

Outside, as they moved toward the car, Rudy put his arm around Djibril and had the sense of having glimpsed on the ground, just in front of the Nevada, an indistinct lump of something that had no reason to be there.

But the thought was so fleeting and superficial and, besides, he was so proud and happy to be taking Djibril home to Fanta that he forgot what his eyes had perhaps seen almost as soon as he’d wondered whether his eyes had seen anything.

He let Djibril in and dropped the schoolbag at his feet, and for the first time in ages — it troubled Rudy to think — the child shot him a big wide smile.

He got in too and started the engine.

“Home,” he said with gusto.

The car moved forward.

It passed over a big, soft, dense mass that threw it slightly off balance.

“What was that?” asked Djibril.

A few yards on Rudy pulled over.

“Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,” he murmured.

The child had turned and was looking out of the rear window.

“We’ve run a bird over,” he said in his clear voice.

“It’s nothing,” Rudy muttered, “it doesn’t matter now.”

COUNTERPOINT

WAKING FROM her daily siesta, emerging from hazy, satisfied dreams, Madame Pulmaire gazed for a moment at her hands resting contentedly on her thighs then looked toward the living-room window opposite her armchair and saw on the other side of the hedge her neighbor’s long neck and small delicate head that seemed to emerge from the bay tree like a miraculous branch, an unlikely sucker looking at Madame Pulmaire’s garden with big wide eyes and with lips parted in a big, calm smile that greatly surprised her because she couldn’t ever remember seeing Fanta look happy. Hesitantly, shyly, she raised a rather stiff, withered hand flecked with liver spots, and waved it slowly from right to left. And the young woman on the other side of the hedge, the strange neighbor called Fanta who’d only ever looked at Madame Pulmaire with a blank expression, raised her hand too. She waved to Madame Pulmaire, she waved to her slowly, deliberately, purposefully.