Three Strong Women Read Free Page A

trying to swallow. In vain.
    He spat out the mango pulp onto his plate.
    Tears were pouring down his cheeks.
    Norah felt her own cheeks burning.
    She got up, heard herself mumbling something, she couldn’t tell what, went over and stood behind him, and then didn’t know what to do with her hands, never before having found herself in a position either to comfort her father or to show him anything other than a stiff, forced respect tinged with resentment.
    She turned around, looking for Masseck, but after clearing the table he’d left the room.
    Her father was still weeping silently, expressionless.
    She sat down next to him and leaned forward to bring her head as close as possible to his tear-streaked face.
    She could smell, under the odor of the food and the spicy sauces, the sickly sweet scent of the rotting flowers of the big tree, and since her father kept his head lowered, she could see how grubby the shirt collar was around his neck.
    She remembered a piece of news that two or three years earlier her brother Sony had passed on but that her father hadn’t seen fit to divulge to her or her sister. She’d resented this, but before long she’d forgotten both the news and her bitterness at not having been told. The two things now went through her mind simultaneously and as a result her tone was rather acerbic even though she’d tried to make her voice sound comforting.
    “Tell me, where are your children?” she asked.
    She remembered that he’d fathered twins but couldn’t recall what gender they were.
    He looked at her, distraught.
    “My children?”
    “The last ones you had. Or so I understand. Has your wife taken them with her?”
    “The little girls? Oh, they’re here, yes,” he murmured, and turned his head. It was as if he were disappointed, as if he’d hoped that she would talk about something he didn’t know, whose implications he hadn’t grasped, something that, in a strange, magical way, would save him.
    She couldn’t contain a slight shiver of vengeful spite.
    So Sony was the only son of this man who didn’t care much for girls, or have much time for them.
    Overwhelmed, weighed down by useless, crucifying females who weren’t even pretty, thought Norah calmly, thinking of herself and her sister; they’d always had, for their father, the irremediable defect of being too much like him, that is, quite unlike their mother, and attesting to the pointlessness of his marriage to a Frenchwoman, because what good had it done him? No almost-white children, no well-built sons …
    And it had been a failure.
    Upset, overwhelmed by a feeling of ironic compassion, she laid her hand lightly on his shoulder.
    “I’d like to meet them,” she said, adding at once, so as not to give him time to ask what she meant, “your two daughters, the little girls.”
    Her father shook her hand off his fat shoulder in an involuntary gesture signifying that nothing could justify such familiarity on her part.
    He rose heavily and wiped his face on his sleeve.
    He pushed open an ugly glazed door at the other end of the room, and switched on the solitary bulb that lit another long, gray concrete corridor, off which, she recalled, doors opened onto small square rooms like monastic cells that once were inhabited by her father’s numerous kin.
    From the way their footsteps and her father’s loud irregular breathing echoed in the silence, she was sure that the rooms were now empty.
    They seemed to have been walking already for several long minutes when the corridor swung first to the left, then to the right, getting almost dark, and so stuffy that Norah nearly turned back.
    Her father stopped in front of a closed door.
    He grasped the handle and stood still for a moment with his ear against the panel. Norah couldn’t tell if he was trying to listen to something inside or was summoning up the will to open the door. But the attitude of this man, at once scarcely recognizable and illusory as ever—oh, what incorrigible