28. Everything we hated, everything we condemned

Catching up with my son by his car, I can feel his impatience, almost annoyance. I say nothing of the encounter I’ve just endured. He gestures toward the backseat.

My son’s car seems extremely luxurious. It’s white and huge and must be brand-new. It gleams so in the sun that my gaze can only skim its surface. I open the remarkably thick, weighty door and let myself drop—or be sucked, it almost seems—into the low, yielding black-leather seat.

Oh, the things Ange and I used to say about people who buy big cars, the fierce contempt, the furious hostility we unleashed on them, we who proudly and virtuously squeezed our ample bodies into our cramped little Twingo, smugly reflecting that we could well have afforded such-and-such a sedan whose surpassing comfort and power we saw extolled on the billboards of Cours Victor-Hugo (there and nowhere else, since we didn’t watch television), and we looked at the price and howled at the appalling stupidity of spending such sums just for that, and it thrilled us to know, and to know the other knew, that had we so chosen we too could easily have granted ourselves that mindless splendor, that vulgar embellishment of our discreet success.

And now, I tell myself, deeply pained, now I find my own son feeling the need to display himself in just such an obscene vehicle.

And those two old people in Les Aubiers who happen to be my parents, how they ran to the window when their practiced ear told them an expensive car was pulling into the parking lot! How proudly they delighted in the sight, showered with glittering sparks of that good fortune, almost honored to live in a place where such a car deigned to park for ten minutes, and not jealous, never envious, too docile for that. How I wish I could stop thinking back to that moment, how I wish I could eject them from my memory!

“Delighted to meet you,” she says, in a grave, mellifluous voice.

Sitting in front, she reaches back between the seats.

“Mama, Wilma,” says Ralph laconically.

I extend an uncertain hand. She brushes hers against it, not squeezing it, and I shiver at the touch of a warm, tender skin, telling myself that my own dry, dimpled, frightened little hand must make her feel like she’s touching a lizard.

“Good trip?” she asks.

But she’s already turned around, uninterested in my answer, or even whether I answer, and so I say nothing, impotent and desolate, feeling my capacity for reflection and judgment and perspective being drowned by the tidal wave of unconditional admiration and painful obeisance that hasn’t washed over me for so long, protected as I was by Ange’s assurance, he who could never be made to feel reverence for anything or anyone.

Now I’m just a naked body, vulnerable, piteous, ripped from its shell or its armor, and so white.

I have no work, I’m alone. There’s nothing left to save me from the sense of my own pointlessness. And—just as in my unarmed younger days, when I first met Ange’s daughters Gladys and Priscilla for example, or when I faced a certain type of mother at school, at once snooty and winning, full of scorn and innocence—this unknown Wilma, who to the best of my knowledge has no official grounds for being here beside my son like a wife, need only turn toward me with the faintest tinge of unintentional arrogance and offer me her face in three-quarters profile, her beautiful tanned face, smoothed by a liquid base whose subtle orange tint can only be detected by its contrast with the matte, lighter skin on her neck, yes, this miraculous woman, conventionally but strikingly elegant and nearer my age than my son’s, need only appear, like the fusion into one visible person of all the invisible, supreme people in this world, to make me surrender to the authority I’ve granted her, to make me stop striving for a freedom of mind and an independence of soul that I once thought I prized above all other things.

Oh, such weakness I have in me, such weakness. What’s going on with this Wilma, I ask myself, and what sort of relationship am I meant to forge with her? As Ralph’s mother, am I expected to demand some special deference?

My son starts up the engine, and I lean over slightly in my seat for a better view of Wilma’s profile. The air conditioner whirrs. It’s almost cold.

The things Ange and I used to say about air-conditioned cars and the people who buy them, the things we said about even the little I’ve seen of the life my son leads…

Her light chestnut hair nearly matches her skin; it’s shiny, straight, carefully pooled on her shoulders. A fine dark down covers her upper cheeks. Her eyes are black, like my son’s, and magnified by mascara and eye shadow.

This woman put on full makeup for an early-morning trip to the port to pick up her mother-in-law. Her plump, wide lips are an ardent, glowing shade of red. She’s wearing what looks like a beige linen pantsuit. I give a little cough, then ask, “Where’s Yasmine?”

My son is absorbed in the delicate task of maneuvering out of the parking lot and back to a wide, dusty road. I see a frown on his face. Meanwhile, the woman smiles vaguely.

“What are you talking about?” says my son, in a tone of repressed fury.

“I’m talking about Yasmine, your wife,” I say.

A warm, heavy breath mists my ear. I feel a hairy tickle on the back of my neck. I snap my head to one side. A dog’s gaping maw has just appeared by my face, as if threatening to rip me apart should I say one more word. That dog must have been sleeping in the far back—is it obeying some unspoken command from my son, surging up just when I ask him a question?

I pull away, pressing myself to the window, as far as possible from that monstrous beast.

“I didn’t know you liked dogs,” I say, slightly breathless.

“He’s a Bordeaux mastiff,” says my son.

“His name is Arno,” says Wilma.

“Ah, Arno,” I say, discreetly giggling to myself.

How horrible, how horrible, Ange and I used to think, those middle-class young people who show off by buying the biggest, scariest dog they can find and then saddling it with a human name, how horrible they are!

Unfinished houses line the road on both sides, rusty metal rods protruding from bare cinder blocks. And now the sun is high in the sky, and I think I can smell the scent of the morning’s new, hopeful heat through the glass. I bend forward until I’m almost touching my son; I bathe the back of his neck with my mouth’s warm breath, since, I say to myself, he’s so fond of dogs now. And I also say to myself, in a burst, a fragment of a dream: My little boy’s fresh-scented neck!

I murmur, “So, what about Yasmine?”

My son violently slaps the center of the steering wheel. He cries, “Will you shut up?”

I wasn’t expecting such aggression. Tears come to my eyes, reflexively, with no sadness. I see Wilma’s hand appeasingly pat my son’s bare thigh, and when she pulls it away her handprint stays behind, damp on his amber skin. She gives me a neutral, diplomatic look, appraising the forces in play here.

“You have no idea how to behave,” says my son, through his teeth. “Mother, you make me ashamed. How dare you ask such a question in front of Wilma? That’s not done and you know it, it’s simply not done.”

“Never mind, it doesn’t matter,” Wilma murmurs calmly.

“It does matter,” says my son, slightly strident.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I say, distraught.

I’d like to ask for news of the little girl in hopes of smoothing things over, but I still can’t bring myself to speak her name, that terrible “Souhar,” which to my ears sounds like a provocation, a sneer, an obscenity, even a vicious offense. Has Wilma noticed?

“Ralph and I live a very tranquil life,” she says, as if imploring me not to speak of anything that might upset the stability of that existence.

“Yes,” I say, “Ralph’s father said…said our granddaughter was a very quiet baby.”

My last words drop into a heavy silence, snatched up and swallowed by that wordlessness, unbroken even by the breath of the two strangers sitting in front of me, as if they were holding it so we would share nothing, least of all the chilled air of the car. My grating breath alone fills the air, accompanied by the quick, damp, congested panting of the animal in back.

Less because I want to hear the answer than hoping to disrupt the rhythm uniting my breath with the dog’s, I ask, “Is she doing well? The baby?”

Again that silence, virtuous, accusing. At a loss, I turn my face to the window. What did I say that was so out of place? Are they mad at me for not saying “Souhar”? But that can’t have so struck them that they should immediately come together in this punitive silence, unless…unless they know everything, understand everything that’s troubling me…but that seems so unlikely, so unlikely…

The SUV abruptly turns away from the road and the still sea, which looks as if it were shielding itself from the blue sky and sunshine behind the row of new or half-built villas.

“That sea doesn’t shine,” I say.

My son scoffs.

“Is that the poetic style you teach your students?” he says, in a voice dripping with sarcasm. “No wonder they didn’t want anything more to do with you!”

“I thought,” I said, exasperated, “I thought you’d turned into such a kind man, and you were determined to love me in spite of everything, just as I do you!”

“That’s true,” says my son, immediately calm and gentle despite the fervent undercurrent that forever seems to run through him, making his voice vibrant and intense.

Now we’re driving along a very steep gravel road that twists and turns at impossibly sharp angles. So my son lives in the mountains, I tell myself, with some foreboding.

As the car climbs, ever more laboriously, through dark, dry clumps of arbutus and short pine trees with black trunks and bare, blackened branches, the sea shrinks to an opaque blot and finally disappears from view. And then we cross to the other side of the ridge, the shadowed side, and my heart cowers in my chest.

The shadow is vast, stretching for miles all around us, over the forest of charred pine trees, over the deserted valley, the dark, meager river at the bottom looking from here as if it were frozen in place, paralyzed by dark ice. My son turns off the air conditioner.

Suddenly it’s cold. The silence surprises me. Even the dog has stopped panting, as if saving its strength. My son turns on the heater. And still we climb, onward and endlessly onward, at a crawl, and it seems to me that every moment that goes by takes me further from Ange, and closer to deserting him forever, since now it will take so long to go back down to him.