Three Strong Women by Marie NDiaye Read Free Book Online Page A

of his being, where he was safe from every judgment, every feeling that involved him.
    He exchanged a few words with his mother’s husband, and thenwith her, haltingly, because she had reached the limit of what she dared ask him.
    After the meal they went their separate ways, and although it was a few days before their departure, Sony and their mother never saw each other again and never again would their mother mention him.
    Their father had organized a lavish program of tourism, had hired a guide and a chauffeur for them, even paying for a few extra nights at one of the chalets in his holiday village in Dara Salam.
    All that, however, their mother refused, dismissing the guide and the chauffeur, and bringing forward their departure date.
    She no longer left the hotel. She just went back and forth between her room and the pool, smiling in the same mechanical, distant, very calm way that Sony did, leaving Norah and her sister to entertain the husband, who took pleasure in everything and found nothing to complain about, until the last evening, when, at a loss where to go, they took him to dinner at their father’s, and the two men chatted until two in the morning, parting with reluctance and promising to see each other again.
    That had really annoyed Norah. “He was making fun of you the whole time,” she said to the husband, with a snicker, as they went back to the hotel.
    “What? Not at all. He’s a very nice man, your dad!”
    And Norah immediately felt guilty for her spiteful remark, allowing that it was indeed perfectly possible that their father had genuinely enjoyed the company and that she was simply angry with the two of them for appearing to trivialize her mother’s immense unhappiness, and also that it was her mother, after all, who had accepted the unseemly idea to bring her husband to theirfather’s house in the obscure hope, no doubt, of provoking an almighty row, at the end of which she and Sony would be avenged and their father confounded, his cruelty having been exposed and acknowledged, but ought she not to have understood that this ideal husband was not the sort of person to make a scene?
    Their mother never saw Sony again, never once wrote to him or telephoned him, and never even mentioned his name.
    She and her husband had moved to a house in the outer suburbs. From time to time Norah brought Lucie to see her. She had the impression that since their return her mother had never stopped smiling, a faint smirk that seemed disconnected from her face floating lightly in front of her, as if she’d snatched it from Sony to mask her pain.
    Norah continued passing on to her the odd bits of news she got from Sony or their father—about Sony’s studies in London, or his return to their father a few years later—but it often seemed that their mother, through her smiles and nods, was trying not to listen.
    Norah spoke about Sony to her less and less, then stopped altogether on learning that, after getting a very good degree, he had ended up in his father’s house, and was leading a strangely passive, idle, lonely existence.
    Her heart of course often missed a beat when she thought of him.
    Should she not have gone to see him more often, or made him come and see her?
    Wasn’t he, despite his money and opportunities, just a hapless boy?
    As for Norah, she’d managed to train to become a lawyer. She’d not found life easy, but she’d kept at it.
    No one had helped her, and neither her mother nor her father had ever told her that they were proud of her.
    And yet she bore no grudge and even felt guilty about not going to help Sony in some way.
    But what could she have done?
    A devil had possessed the five-year-old boy and had never let go of him.
    What could she have done?
    That’s what she kept asking herself as she sat on the backseat of the black Mercedes driven by Masseck. As the car moved slowly down the deserted street she gazed in the rearview mirror at her father standing motionless by the gate,