by Marie Ndiaye
She still asked Malinka the same questions as when she was in grade school.
“Did you work hard today? Is your teacher happy with you?”
And she broke into a smile, as if already sure of the answer, not even listening to whatever Malinka might say, not even noticing that sometimes Malinka said nothing at all, and Malinka never took this amiss, understanding that in order to keep a light heart her mother had to maintain a cautious contact with reality, buffered by distraction and a faint, unwavering rapture.
The women who employed Malinka’s mother seemed to think highly of her.
She often brought home little presents, and once one of her employers came for coffee. Malinka and her mother made pound cake and fruit salad for the occasion.
The woman ate happily, casting inquisitive but kindly glances at Malinka. She complimented her on her hair, her fresh complexion.
“She has her father’s hair,” said Malinka’s mother, mechanically, ardently, then drifted back into the self-satisfied, benevolent, misty, slightly dim look that left her ever more rarely.
The woman suggested that she and Malinka move into an apartment she owned, three rooms on the ground floor of her building.
“You’ll find it so much more comfortable,” she said, glancing in dismay around the little room that served as both the kitchen and the servant’s quarters, “and, you know, I won’t ask much.”
Almost apologetically, she added:
“It would make me so happy to help you.”
An odd agitation suddenly came over Malinka’s mother.
She stood up a little too fast, bumped the corner of the stove.
Upset and very subtly furious, she seemed stunned that this woman had failed to see who she was, her, Malinka’s mother, whose goals were plain, who had only one ambition.
“I can’t move,” she finally mumbled. “I mean, really now, I can’t move.”
She let out a scandalized, mystified little laugh, eyebrows raised, staring almost wild eyed at the woman, who smiled uneasily and put on a waiting face.
The servant composed herself and sat down.
And she settled once more into a quiet beatitude, like easing back into a warm bath of delusion, thought Malinka, and this frightened and troubled her even more than the absurd indignation that had brought the servant to her feet.
“You understand,” said the servant in an exaggeratedly reasonable tone, undermined by her suddenly stronger accent, “we’re waiting for someone, and this address is his only way of finding us, so, you know, what’s he supposed to do if we leave? It’s simply out of the question.”
For the first time a harsh, hostile anger rushed to Malinka’s head. After the woman had gone, she cried out, astonished to find herself daring to talk to the servant this way, daring to bring up what she spoke of only by allusions:
“Well, what do you know! News to me! So now he has our address? He’s known our address these past fifteen years, and you always said he had no way to know where we lived, and he’s supposed to come looking for us when all this time he never bothered? And that’s why we can’t go live in that woman’s apartment? That’s why we’re staying in these two miserable rooms?”
Still sitting, the servant looked utterly defeated, and Malinka wished she’d kept her mouth shut.
Her anger drained away, she tried to put on a smile, horrified to think that her smile probably looked like her mother’s, similarly impersonal, misplaced, and infuriating.
Malinka’s mother was gently wringing her hands.
“I’m not sure anymore,” she said hesitantly. “You’re right, your father must not have our address, how could he? There was no way to tell him before I went away, I didn’t know how to get hold of him, I thought I’d have no trouble finding him here, I thought it was big but not that big. But if we move, then…”
“No, let’s not move,” Malinka murmured. “Everything’s just fine where we are, let’s not move.”
The servant genuinely seemed to believe, with that part of her reason Malinka couldn’t fathom, as elusive as it was maddening, that a change as major as moving would be a betrayal of the faith that sustained her in her nebulous, desperate, but confident quest for one particular face among so many others, and what did she have to help her go on imperturbably hoping but that faith, with its rituals and commandments, the very first of which was the prohibition against making any change to the life that had seen her certainty sprout and flourish, what did she have but that absurd faith, thought Malinka, to make her seem grander in her own eyes?
Oh, maybe the servant’s heart was not as unassuming as it seemed.
Her pale, smooth-skinned daughter Malinka hoped so. She fervently wanted arrogance, pride, and self-indulgence to play some part in her mother’s ridiculous optimism; she hoped she was just a little blinded by vanity.
Because while the servant was well thought of and evidently even liked by the women who employed her, Malinka realized there were others who didn’t know her, who didn’t always treat her so well.
Malinka had never seen her mother insulted to her face, but couldn’t help fearing, every day, that she might be.
Everything about her—her hopes, her fears, her embarrassments—was a betrayal of the servant.
And so she ardently hoped that a sheath of outrageous self-importance and even inflated, unwholesome pride shielded her mother’s heart with its crystalline hardness, but she doubted it, so humble did the servant continually prove, and, when she wasn’t talking about Malinka’s father, so serene and so sensible.
She doubted it.
Rather, she assumed that her mother patiently endured every affront, and that only her placidity, her slight withdrawal from the world, her inexpressive smile, helped her dismiss such things as of no great importance.
—
When Malinka’s grades began to slip, she effortlessly hid it from her mother, not fearing her anger but wanting to spare the servant any needless anxiety, because there was little her mother could do for her, and less in that realm than in any other.
She took to signing her report cards herself, never showing them to the servant, who seemed to forget there were such things as grades and report cards.
Clarisse Rivière would later recall that Malinka had struggled to keep up, that she’d hung on as best she could, but her downhill slide, starting in ninth grade and at first gradual, uncertain, soon took on the sudden brutality of a verdict handed down at last after a long wait.
She would remember that as a very young girl Malinka had ambitions, that she’d sensed doing well in school would bring her nearer her goals than her mother’s ignorant, vague solicitude, that she’d conscientiously striven to be worthy and, in a sense, perfect.
But she attained only perfection’s outward form, as if the great efforts she made had hidden from her the real reason for those labors.
And so she became a model of application and assiduity, a pupil so polite that her presence was often overlooked.
She turned in her homework on time, written in an elegant and readable hand, always a little longer than required so no one would suspect her of slacking off, although before so serious and so painfully intent a young face not even the sternest teacher would ever think such a thing, and those scrupulous pages, reeking of labor and terror, always drew a regretful, understanding comment and a below-average grade, inflated a little all the same, out of indulgence, in recognition of everything that was sad and unfair in all this.
Malinka never quite seemed to grasp what was asked of her. She understood only the express or unspoken laws governing the relations between pupils and teachers, which she obeyed in a mix of keen pleasure and arduous rigor, and so literally that she could have vanished without anyone noticing, so absolute was her submission to the image of a pupil who was nothing more than a pure receptive mind.
But what they were trying to teach her never found its way into her head, or lingered only a moment, then quickly faded.
Back a
t home, she sat for long hours at her desk, slightly befogged, trying in vain to connect her memories of the class with the sentences written down in her impeccable notebook.
She vibrantly remembered every detail of the teacher’s face, expression, or dress, and she could picture herself, too, as clearly as if she were studying a photograph, and she deeply admired that girl looking up at the blackboard with her perfectly attentive face.
But what had been said in that classroom, what that exemplary girl had heard and thought she understood, she couldn’t remember.
She read and reread what she’d written, and it meant nothing to her, had nothing to do with anything she’d managed to hold in her mind, itself nothing more than a magma of words and numbers, misshapen ideas, incoherent hypotheses, which she ended up laboriously dredging through in search of something she could use, almost anything, to fill up a page with her shapely, magnificent handwriting.
Sometimes she forgot she was writing sheer nonsense and abandoned herself to the pure pleasure of the presentation; she spent ages scripting the date, or marking off the margins, or crafting elaborate capital letters, all curlicues and meanders.
That lowly, solitary Malinka made what she called friends at school, but looking back Clarisse Rivière would understand that in truth it was only a little clan of two or three teenage girls that Malinka had somehow slipped into, almost unnoticed, less in hopes of remedying her loneliness than in obedience to the rules of student life as, with her keenly observant instinct, she understood them.
She knew absolutely nothing about those girls, who never spoke of personal matters in her presence and seemed to tolerate her only out of curiosity, perhaps wondering at their own tolerance, their own curiosity.
Malinka wished she could learn everything about them, as if she might thereby understand her own existence.
But, although she was so unassertive that gazes slid over her with nothing holding them back, those girls perhaps unconsciously limited their talk to everyday things whenever she came near, and it felt to Malinka like a sudden pall had been cast by the vague mass of her body, like a gray cloud blotting out the sun.
But she grew used to that, since it was her place.
She must also have known that by abandoning all hope of closeness with these girls she could consider herself excused from having to invite them over, into the house of the servant.
Because that was out of the question.
The thought of her friends meeting her mother sent her into spasms of almost amused revolt, so laughable was the idea.
She was nothing short of speechless when a teacher one day asked to meet with Malinka’s mother, looking faintly uncomfortable, as if, she told herself, all the more perplexed in that he could easily have let the matter drop there, he already knew it would never happen, because it was absurd, absurd.
But she said nothing, only nodded with her usual gravity.
He brought it up once more, she nodded once more, and then never again did she look up at him with a face hungry for approval.
And she avenged herself for that teacher’s blundering indelicacy by turning in papers untouched by her ardent desire for majesty, assignments without ornament, no curlicues, no colored underlining.
—
She turned sixteen during summer vacation, and never went back to school.
Clarisse Rivière would always remember the time that followed with a mix of incomprehension and terror, for it seemed that chance alone, or obedience to the whims of circumstance, guided the life of that girl Malinka, that empty-headed girl, as she often heard people say at the time: She’s a sweet girl, hardworking, but empty-headed.
The only fantasy she would gradually assemble involved the quarantining of her mother, the dismissal of the servant.
And since she could only subscribe to the judgment that she had nothing in her head, feeling that head fill with the single preoccupation of expelling her mother would convince her that she, Malinka, was a despicable person, her mind closed to everything but disloyalty.
The servant accepted Malinka’s decision to drop out of school without a word, perhaps because it seemed not a decision but a natural passage from one state to another, like a change of season.
One morning, as she was leaving for work later than usual and Malinka was still lying in bed, she observed in her calm, unsurprised voice:
“You’re not getting ready for school.”
“No,” said Malinka, “I’m not going anymore.”
And that was all. The servant nodded and went off to catch her bus.
The next day she told Malinka she’d found her a job, babysitting for a family whose apartment she sometimes cleaned.
And Malinka went off to look after the children, and neither liked it nor didn’t. Sometimes, coming home in the evening, she caught sight of her mother on the bus and pretended not to have seen her.
The servant discreetly refrained from calling out.
Her face turned resolutely to the window, Malinka felt her mother’s gentle, placid, ever-benevolent gaze on the back of her neck, and the furious pity she felt at this shook her like a first taste of strong drink, so numbed were her feelings, so dulled her thoughts.
She looked after the children all through summer vacation, which they spent with their parents on the Bay of Arcachon.
This was her first time away from the suburbs of Paris, but standing by the ocean she felt like she’d seen all this before.
The following summer, back in Arcachon, she suddenly told herself nothing was forcing her to go home to her mother.
This idea must have been inching along unbeknownst to her since the summer before, so indistinct that she never spotted it among the charmless, colorless thoughts peopling her mind, because she wasn’t surprised to find that idea blossoming inside her, nor to know precisely what she would have to do, both to protect her independence and to put herself out of reach of her mother’s love and attentions.
Nothing said she had to go on being the servant’s daughter forever, she told herself.
And with this a cold feeling filled her, but she knew that was more easily fought off than the desperate tenderness that coursed through her heart when she thought of her mother, even more utterly alone than she.
A few days after the children went home to Paris she handed in her notice and caught a train for Bordeaux, where she took a room in a modest hotel near the station.
She found work waiting tables in a café. She wrote her mother, telling her not to worry, and received no reply.
She now went by the name of Clarisse. There had been a Clarisse in her class at school, with long hair that fell over her back like a silken drape.
—
“Hey, Clarisse! Come here a sec, would you?”
“Be right there!” she answered in her happy, slightly muted voice, which she worked to make faintly breathless and interrogative, thinking people found this particularly attractive.
She always shivered in delighted surprise on hearing her new name, and although in the beginning she sometimes forgot to answer, that was all over now, and the person she’d become, this Clarisse with the beautiful, iron-straightened chestnut hair, with the smooth, breezy, winningly confident face, couldn’t hold back a twinge of refined, pitying contempt for the woman she was just a few months before, that clod who called herself Malinka and didn’t know a thing about makeup, that clueless girl with the hunted look in her eyes, that lowly girl who called herself Malinka.
She stopped setting tables and hurried toward the kitchen, where her boss was calling for her.
“We’ve got a problem—your coworker just phoned to say she won’t be in for lunch, so you’ll be all on your own,” the woman said in an anxious tone, eyeing Clarisse’s slight frame as if to measure that delicate body’s endurance.
But she knew, because Clarisse had already shown her, just how sturdy and steadfast that frail girl truly was, and Clarisse knew that she knew, and her cheeks flushed with pride and excitement.
How she loved those days when the other waitress didn’t come in, when the lunch shift was entrusted to her alone! She had to be even more efficient, resourceful, and charming than usual, even livelier and friendlier, both to keep the customers happy, make them think they hadn’t waited as long as their watches said, and to memorize the orders and never forget anything someone might ask for out of the blue.
Striding lithe and quick through the dining room, she felt triumphant, exceptional: not many waitresses could handle thirty-five customers without one complaint and never get the wrong order or table nor come across as anything but visibly and sweetly unruffled.
Apart from the cook and her boss, no one knew what a challenge that was, for the challenge was precisely never to let a customer see anything was amiss, and this made Clarisse, that clever girl, all the prouder—that clever girl she’d become! That important, irreplaceable girl!
The platefuls of grilled black sausage with mashed potatoes or roast chicken with french fries she balanced on her forearms made her vaguely and constantly nauseated, and sometimes, as she strode over the tile floor in her crepe-soled slip-ons, her disgust brought gushes of burning acid up from her stomach, but she smiled and talked, greeted and thanked, in her quavering, muffled voice, with her exquisite manners, making this Saint-Jean neighborhood brasserie feel like an upscale restaurant, and everyone found her so delightful, so charming.
And the regulars knew her by name and casually called her Clarisse, as if there were nothing odd about a girl such as her bearing that marvelous name.
No one ever guessed she’d once been a lowly Malinka, no one.
The customers loved Clarisse, so pretty, so good-humored, so good at her job, they loved her youth, which was never arrogant but innocent and fresh, and Clarisse felt it, and strove to seem even more guilelessly unaware of the privilege of being so young, so pretty, so perfectly healthy and trim.
And it was true, being young and beautiful meant nothing to her, in the end. She wanted only to be an irrefutable Clarisse, with her straightened hair, her pale eyes, her breathy voice rising up at the end of each sentence.
