Three Strong Women by Marie NDiaye Page B

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, thoughshe 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 whichFanta 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