Three Strong Women Read Online Free PDF Page B

others was so small, seemingly used up in his youth in his relationship with his old mother, long dead, whom Norah had never known.
    It’s true he’d shown some affection toward Sony, his only son.
    But what need had he for a new family, this unfeeling man, incomplete, detached?
    He was already eating when she reentered the living room. He was sitting at the table as on the previous evening, dressed in the same pale shabby clothes, his face bent over his plate, stuffing himself with porridge, so that she had to wait until he’d finished and had hurled himself backward, as if after enormous physical exertion, panting and sighing. Only then could she ask, looking him straight in the eye, “Now, what’s this all about?”
    That morning her father had a look that was even more evasive than usual.
    Was it because he knew that she’d seen him in the poinciana?
    But how could that embarrass him, this cynical man who had never batted an eyelid over much more degrading situations?
    “Masseck!” he shouted hoarsely.
    He then asked Norah, “What’ll you have? Tea? Coffee?”
    She tapped on the table lightly with her fist, thinking, with a vacant, worried air, that it was time for Lucie and Grete to get up and go to school, and that Jakob would perhaps have forgotten to set his alarm clock, which would mean that the whole day would bear the mark of failure and neglect. But wasn’t she herself much too virtuous, punctual, and scrupulous? Wasn’t she in reality that tiresome woman whom she reproached Jakob for painting her as?
    “Coffee?” asked Masseck, offering her a full cup.
    “Will you please tell me why I’ve come?” she said calmly, looking her father in the eye.
    Masseck scurried away.
    Her father then started breathing so violently and with such difficulty that Norah leaped from her chair and went up to him.
    She stood there, awkwardly, and would have put her question to him again if she’d been able.
    “You must go and see Sony,” he murmured painfully.
    “Where’s Sony?”
    “In Reubeuss.”
    “What on earth’s Reubeuss?”
    No answer.
    He breathed less painfully, slumped in his chair, his belly sticking out, surrounded by the syrupy odor of poinciana flowers in full bloom.
    Then she was deeply moved to see tears running down his gray cheeks.
    “It’s the prison,” he said.
    She took a step, almost a leap, backward.
    “What’ve you done with Sony?” she cried out. “You were supposed to be looking after him!”
    “He was the one who committed the offense, not me,” he whispered, almost inaudibly.
    “What offense? What’s he done? Oh God, you were supposed to be taking care of him and bringing him up properly!”
    She stepped back and sank onto her chair.
    She gulped down the coffee, which was acrid, lukewarm, and tasteless.
    Her hands trembled so much that she dropped the cup onto the glass-topped table.
    “That’s another broken cup!” her father said. “I spend all my time buying crockery in this house.”
    “What did Sony do?”
    He got up, shaking his head, his old wizened face ravaged by the impossibility of talking.
    “Masseck will drive you to Reubeuss,” he croaked.
    He walked backward toward the door to the corridor, slowly, as if trying to escape without her noticing.
    His toenails were long and yellow.
    “So,” she asked calmly, “is that why there’s no one here anymore? Is that why everyone has left?”
    Her father’s back met the door; he groped behind him, opened it, and scurried away down the corridor.
    Once, in a meadow in Normandy, she’d seen an old abandoned donkey whose hooves had grown so much he could hardly walk.
    Her father was quite capable of trotting along when it suited him!
    Her immense feeling of resentment lit up her mind and sharpened her thoughts.
    No one, nothing, could ever excuse their father for his failure to keep Sony on the straight and narrow.
    Because when, thirty years earlier, wishing to abandon their mother and France and his dead-end