The Good Denis

When—after I'd long hesitated, lost my nerve, thought better of it—I finally gathered the strength to ask my decreasingly lucid mother if she remembered a certain scene that still brought an ache to my grownup heart, she gave me a mystified, offended stare, a stare of virtuous indignation, and then, collecting herself, answered gently, as you might answer a very old person who, you realize, didn't mean to say such a ridiculous thing, that what I was talking about not only hadn’t happened but could not, in any case, possibly have happened.

- Marie NDiaye

My father, of whose face and voice I had no memory, who was preserved in my childhood recollections only as a tall form, enormous, eminent, and dark, could not have walked out of our apartment in 1969, could not, closing the door behind him, have left the weeping woman I could only vaguely picture but whose sobs, whose despair, in the tiny entryway of that modest apartment, had always had for me the sting of a genuine memory. My father could not have abandoned her, my mother claimed, since in the first month of that year she herself had gone to live with another man, a certain Denis, who with the deepest goodness had also taken in the very young child that I then was.

It was she, my unsteady-minded mother asserted, who had left my father, not the other way around.

And how, she murmured in a voice now disappointed, now accusing, depending on whether the morning had found her weak and drained or full of vigor, how was it that I had not the slightest memory of that exceptionally kind and decent Denis?

Denis, a custodian at the Malakoff primary school where my mother had spent a few months substituting for the fourth-grade teacher, had immediately agreed—since he’d fallen in love with my mother, had even fallen under her spell, she would say with a sort of pained modesty, and apparently had no children—to learn to love and care for me as if I were his own daughter.