The Fury and Cries of Women Read online

  “We have lived in the forests for too long. Those days are gone. We must let bygone days be bygone; it is thus vital, now, that we level off our lands and rid them of all that is green.”

  Those few words were enough to incite outcry among the intellectual elite. The project to raze the city died right then and there. That was how the Olamba forests came to be preserved and later redesigned as small parks complete with amusement park attractions, natural and artificial rivers, bars and restaurants, benches, and fountains. Since that time, open-air enthusiasts would go there in small groups every weekend.

  Fifteen minutes later, Emilienne parked her car outside Dr. Obamé’s residential building. As she hurried up the stairwell, she jostled a tiny, shapeless mass, and although it surprised rather than alarmed her, it forced her to stop. In the dim shadow, she recognized the veterinarian’s son crouched against the handrail, shirtless and with a ball in his hand.

  “Alain, dear! I hope I didn’t hurt you, did I? What are you doing in these back stairwells anyway?”

  “No, ma’am,” the good-looking little boy answered with a smile. “I’m going down to play outside.”

  “Is your father upstairs?”

  “Yes! Your dog is hurt!” the boy exclaimed, leaning over to pet the animal.

  Roxanne started to whimper and wag her tail.

  Dr. Obamé lived on the tenth floor. When people asked why he chose to live in a building devoid of an elevator, he would let out a thunderous laugh and answer sharply that it was to force his family and his clientele—the owners as well as their animals—to do a little exercise. Then, in a serious tone, he would invariably add:

  “If we’re not careful, in ten years this city will be plagued by obesity, our animals included.”

  Dr. Obamé was an odd one. His clients nevertheless considered him the best veterinarian Olamba had, and they came to him despite the workout he imposed on them. Some even credited him for their decision to get back to a healthy diet and an active routine.

  The young woman was completely exhausted by the time she got to the tenth floor. Little Alain had already opened his father’s office. Emilienne struggled as she lay the dog down on the examination table, and then stroked her as she waited. Dr. Obamé, whose son had already told him they were there, came out of the adjoining room wearing a smile. He had thrown his white coat on over his jogging suit. As he examined the animal, he said, in a calm, measured voice:

  “That’s a nasty wound. It could have killed her. Your dog is fighting courageously for her life. I don’t believe I’m mistaken when I say that her struggle against death is to spare you of your pain. Look at her eyes! It looks as if she’s suffering more from the pain she sees in your eyes, from your grief-stricken face. How did she get that wretched wound?”

  Emilienne remained silent for several seconds before responding in a tone she hoped would sound convincing:

  “I don’t know exactly. Most likely it was neighborhood children throwing stones over the fence. It would not be the first time.”

  “That’s strange,” the veterinarian remarked. “It looks rather like she’s been slashed by a long, sharp object.”

  He disinfected the wound, then, after giving local anesthesia, stitched up the clean cut.

  “They are unruly,” he grumbled as he sewed up the wound. “I don’t understand children’s aggressiveness these days. Just yesterday I stopped at a gas station to fill my tank, and a gang of kids between six and ten years old appeared out of nowhere, jumped the attendant, ripped his shirt, undid his pants, and slashed the gas pump hose with a knife. All of the customers who were waiting, the station attendants, and even some passersby hurled themselves on those ten kids. A little while later, the police picked them up. When I was leaving, the firemen were getting there as well. In my day, we too would invent dangerous games, but never did we go that far.”

  “Do you think she’ll make it?” asked Emilienne, to put a stop to this narrative, which, unwittingly, she had prompted with her lie.

  “Yes, she will heal in no time,” Dr. Obamé replied, petting Roxanne’s stitched side. Buy these antibiotics no later than tomorrow,” he added as he filled out the prescription, “and bring her back in on Tuesday or Wednesday. Don’t be surprised if your dog takes on less trustful and more aggressive behavior around strangers who come to your place. Be sure to be very affectionate with her. Ah, yes! Pets are like children.”

  “Thank you, Doctor, and my apologies for coming and disturbing you. How much do I owe you?”

  “We’ll talk about that when she’s all better.” He handed her the prescription. “Wait, I’m going to help you bring her down. My family and I were about to go out when you arrived. But I am very happy you came. A pet is as precious as someone who is dear to you. Everyone who has ever cared for an animal knows that.”

  “Take good care of her,” he added, handing her the kennel when they were in front of the car.

  Feeling reassured, Emilienne finally relaxed. Behind the wheel of her car, she planned out the speech she was going to give her mother-in-law when she saw her.

  EYANG WAS LOUNGING on a folding chair, flipping through an old pornographic comic book that she had found by chance a long time ago in her daughter’s bathroom and brought home. In spite of her glasses, which she never took off, she squinted with sustained concentration, her eyes lingering particularly on the nude characters in the most outrageous positions. And, although she shook her head in disapproval, she kept returning to those same images.

  She didn’t understand why those indecent scenes fascinated her. Could it be because of her age, the contrast to what people of her generation usually saw, that this aroused a bizarre interest in her? And yet she had refused to watch television for three months after the first time she’d seen a naked man and woman caressing each other. Later, she’d believed that she was doing a good thing by taking all the pornographic magazines her daughter and son-in-law collected, intending to burn them. Instead of following through with her threat, though, she’d hidden them in her bathroom and under her mattress. When she knew she was alone in the house, she would take them out and look at them. During those moments of intense concentration, her lower lip would become moist, she would take off and put back on her old pair of glasses that hung on black strings from her ears, and her nose would flare.

  Hearing the car approach, Eyang hid the comic book on the chair and stretched out on top of it. She closed her eyes and feigned a light snore.

  Emilienne sat down in turn, facing her. For a while she tried to read this face overrun by wrinkles and doubtlessly malice as well. How would this living arrangement with her mother-in-law end? she wondered. It went without saying that she was becoming a threat that weighed on her like the sword of Damocles. If anything confirmed this threat, the machete blows to her dog certainly did. What would she think of next? She’d surely already revealed how calculating she could be.

  ONE DAY, when Emilienne had arrived home from work, Rékia had come to her, curled up in her arms, her eyes full of tears, and told her about the argument she’d had with her cousin and of her grandmother’s mean words: after he had deliberately knocked over his cousin’s bowl of milk, Nomé had said the following, word for word:

  “Papa Joseph loves my brother and me more than you. And Grandma says that he’s going to remarry and make Auntie Emilienne leave.”

  After she’d heard those words, Rékia pummeled her cousin with fierce blows. Her grandmother, who’d heard everything from the next room, came in to give the little girl a slap and lectured:

  “What right do you have to hit this child? All he did was tell the truth. Don’t ever forget that these two children have more rights than you do in this house!”

  EMILIENNE’S WEIGHTY silence forced Eyang to open her eyes. It was just the two of them in the house that weekend. The two boys had been home with their mother since Friday evening. Eyang shot her daughter-in-law a look of resentment and said mockingly:

  “I see
your baby is still alive.”

  “I’m so sorry you won’t be able to mourn her death,” the young woman hissed back, pulling her chair closer to the old woman. “When are you going to have the courage to confront me openly instead of attacking an innocent animal? Enough of your provocations; let’s be clear about our positions.”

  Eyang was evasive:

  “What are you talking about? You know full well it was an accident.”

  “You’re lying!” Emilienne yelled. “Do you realize that you deliberately hurled a machete at a defenseless animal? And you dare call that an accident? What exactly do you want from me?”

  “What do I want from you?”

  Eyang crossed her legs. She took off her glasses, calmly put them away in their case, and went on:

  “Instead of bearing children like other women, you raise dogs and cats. As soon as they fall sick, you put them in your car and run to have them examined by a doctor, and when they die, you buy more of them. Not to mention all the cans of food you buy for them, and the vaccinations you have them get. You ought to use all that money to treat your ailing womb. There is medicine for abnormal women like you, in case you might have forgotten!”

  Eyang got up, backed up a few steps, spun around, and sat back down facing Emilienne, who hadn’t moved. In her state of anger, the old woman was unrecognizable. The energy of a young woman seemed to be emanating from her shriveled-up body. Her movements and gestures expressed her stern hatred.

  Emilienne, barely managing to control her anger, gripped the armrests of her chair. Her eyelids fluttered rapidly over eyes reddened with fury and fixed on her mother-in-law with a piercing gaze.

  Eyang kept going:

  “I was right to oppose this marriage. If my son had married a girl from our part of the country, he would not have lost a child and would not be so unstable today. You have wrecked his life. Had I not been in this house, I am sure you’d have made him eat filth so that you could destroy him.”

  In response, Emilienne hurled herself at her and slapped her hard across the face. Eyang fell backward, her arms and legs writhing. She helped her back to her feet and then struck her down again.

  “I’ve had it,” she hissed. “As of tomorrow, you will leave this house, and take your grandchildren with you.”

  Emilienne stepped away from her and went to lean against the bay window.

  Sitting on the cement, Eyang dusted off her arms then straightened up, shook out her dress, and declared solemnly:

  “Poor girl! You have just done a very stupid thing. You just don’t think things through. How can you make me leave this house! If I leave here—which I will not do—you will lose my son. And, oh! Don’t think that I will stay to keep you from separating. No, no, quite the opposite, I have been waiting for this moment for a long time. I want you to be the one who leaves. And this moment has arrived.”

  She let out a nervous laugh, which was at the same time victorious.

  Emilienne raised her hand again and then held it back just as it was about to hit the old woman’s cheek. Shaking her head, she turned her back to her and headed toward the garage.

  SHE DROVE AIMLESSLY through curving roads and intersections, her eyes misty with tears. She started down winding, broken roads she’d never been on before. In that respect, she was similar to those foreigners who knew only Olamba’s main areas: the major banks, the big movie theaters, the supermarket, their workplace, and the main residential neighborhoods. In her case, she had to add the big open-air market and the neighborhoods where her parents and sister lived.

  She soon found herself in a bustling neighborhood. There, the road was not paved but was instead a red dirt road full of bumps and crevices. The roadway belonged to vehicles as well as pedestrians, who walked indifferently along the side of the road either in front of or behind the bicycles and trucks. In order to force their way through a motley and idle crowd, drivers were beeping, screaming, and yelling insults at passersby, who yelled right back at them. Small groups of men and women were carrying on and arguing in front of the bistros crammed up against one another. From outside, you could see customers of both sexes in the cafés fluttering and twisting around.

  Having forgotten her argument with her mother-in-law for a moment, Emilienne slowed down the car, in awe of the liveliness of the working-class neighborhood she was discovering for the first time. The roaring laughter and jokes all around could at times be heard above the blaring music. For the first time, she was aware of the gap that separated her from these people, so ordinary, yet at the same time radiant with a real joie de vivre.

  “What good is social success when you bear the burden of a melancholy soul? One has only to look at these men and women to understand that true success is within. Surely, they know better than I how to overcome their suffering and find great joy in simple things. They know how to have fun, laugh heartily, and marvel at the sight of thousands of stars twinkling in the sky, or simply at an animal giving birth, at all those everyday miraculous things that I no longer know how to see. My senses are so limited and so deformed that they see, hear, taste, and touch only wretched things. For a minority of people, the accumulation of possessions is nothing more than a natural way to supplement an inner richness and sense of fulfillment. For others, dupery fulfills confused souls, to camouflage the reality of a cruel existence. To appease my own confusion, I’ve held on desperately to anything that sustained my attention, until today. I had to maintain my social status. To do that, all I had to do was appear on the arm of my dear husband—when he wanted me to—in fashionable places and at official ceremonies. What hypocrisy! And I believed it! As Rochefoucault said, ‘We are all so used to disguising ourselves in front of others that in the end we become disguised to ourselves.’ And so, like most people, I’ve gone through life from one end to the other, happy to be like them and to hide, quite well, my permanent inner madness. Forgetting that the others would someday finally see me as I am. Forgetting that they, too, wear heavy, asphyxiating masks, which eventually fall and reveal them to those around them.”

  For the first time in a long time, she suddenly had a burning desire to mingle with those people toward whom she had always been indifferent. At that moment, those lower-class men and women were no longer the common folk, but were instead human beings, and she needed them to calm her inner agitation.

  After she’d circled Nomba Square three times, she parked on a rutted part of the sidewalk strewn with broken glass. Before she stepped away from the car, she made sure to crack the back windows to keep Roxanne from suffocating, then walked timidly into the first bistro she came across. Emilienne sat down at the only open table in a corner of the rectangular room. Although at first she was frightened by the intoxicated, buzzing human mass, she sat down all the same, bowing her head in resolute submission. The waiter’s attentive “What’ll you have, Madame?” made her look up. Without giving it any thought, she ordered a beer and let her timid eyes graze slowly over the customers of this place that was so new to her.

  At the bar, laughing, drunken customers grumbled or gave each other rough taps on the shoulder. Six sweaty couples were dancing the rumba, taking wide, helter-skelter steps along a narrow dance floor. Four women seated at another table were brandishing wine bottles. The first one to empty hers was applauded by the three others. As she brought her glass to her mouth, Emilienne’s startled gaze lingered again upon the crowd in front of the bar, as they clinked their glasses and bottles together. In response to the catcalls of the guy sitting next to her, a woman yanked the sleeve of her dress so far off her shoulder that it exposed her drooping breast, bulging with crisscrossed veins. Then, in a fit of nervous laughter, she grabbed her breast with both hands and started caressing her aggressor with it. The audience chuckled. As Emilienne witnessed this odd spectacle, trying to take it all in, a voice rang out above the hubbub in the room.

  “That’ll teach you, pal,” it said. “You young executives come over here to flaunt your preppy clothes in fron
t of the poor. Tell me, your tailor wouldn’t be Balmain, by any chance?”

  Emilienne seemed to have forgotten her own social status and moved her chair over to the left so that she could get a better view of the scene. The guy who’d just spoken belched so loudly his head knocked the center beam that supported the roof frame. The impact was so great that the drunkard then collapsed on some chairs, which smashed to pieces. Obviously his buddies had seen this a thousand times before and looked away from the spectacle. Not wanting to draw any further attention, the young preppy exec smoothed out his beige suit and backed up toward the door. As if it were, in turn, telling him off, the 1970s record player screeched repeatedly over the scratched record. Disappointed, the dancers clamored in outrage and started shouting, “Music! Music!” A man with a pimply face and a bloated belly came out from behind the bar and leaned over the player. Half the people left; it was as if they had needed this cacophony to hide from themselves, and alcohol was no longer doing the trick.

  “And what if this setting, this exuberance were another way for all these people gathered here to hide from their existential problems? So I’m not wrong to think that only a minute minority of individuals have found inner peace. I am sure, though, that they still know how to laugh and sing.”

  Emilienne did not have time to ponder her thoughts, because shouts to the owner were quickly turning to threats. Through all that commotion two young people emerged, arms around each other’s waist, and it was they who in some way gave more weight to her argument.

  “Man!” the hoarse voice boomed out from the little guy, “I’m saying that the best way to avoid seeing what’s happening around us is to drown ourselves in alcohol. I drink and smoke weed so my family doesn’t eat me alive. It’s the truth: the family is what’s wrong with our society. Your blood brother snatches up your wife; your mother’s jealous and doesn’t want you to marry; your father, getting to retirement age, can’t stand the fact that you have a job and a better salary than his; your uncle can’t deal with you being better educated and distinguished than his son. And that whole world is working against you in all the ways they can . . . and the paradox is they say it’s ‘for your own good.’ ”