by Marie Ndiaye
When evening came, in the room down the street that she rented from her boss, she thought back over her day, pictured the moves she’d made, the way she’d stood, tried to find things that could still be improved on.
And whereas in school her fanatical urge for perfection had nothing to focus on but the protocols of existence and the parameters of her homework, here she could finally use her intelligence and acuity to the fullest, aiming to do her job in the most exemplary way, leaving, in her conduct as in her sensibilities, nothing to find fault with.
She paid vigilant attention to the tiniest details. Every morning she studied her face and hands, checked and rechecked her black skirt and beige blouse for spots, pulled her hair into a tight braid and coiled it around her head.
Then she powdered her face to give it an impersonal air, to ensure that it showed no sign of fatigue, and no emotion other than those—joy, pleasure, enthusiasm—she so wanted to display.
How she loved her face in the morning, powdered, earnest, and inanimate!
That was how Clarisse was meant to be in the eyes of the world, a wonderful girl whose good points were all you ever saw, because there were no bad ones. And how that Clarisse was loved!
—
That day, then, she handled the lunch shift alone, and as usual she never slipped up. And her name rang out from one end of the room to the other: Clarisse, when you get a moment! Hey, Clarisse, more bread! Check, please, Clarisse!
All of which left her slightly dazed and, for the first time, wearily apprehensive at the thought that her evening shift would begin just a few hours later, that she’d have to smile and be cheerful and hear her name bouncing off the walls like a rubber ball, the beguiling name that was now hers but which, when she was tired, she sometimes feared she might someday stop recognizing.
Now and then she was awoken by that nightmare: the restaurant was packed, the customers all calling at once for Clarisse, and she stood there dully, aware they meant her but unable to move her limbs because she wasn’t hearing the magic word, and when someone finally began shouting “Malinka!” she went back to work, smiling and lighthearted, but by then the room had emptied out, oh how she dreaded that stupid dream.
But she could easily fight off exhaustion, bleariness, the weird feeling, disagreeable but short-lived, that she could half see the silver letters of her new name shooting through the room.
What she found infinitely harder, that day, as the lunch rush was winding down, was seeing her mother come in, the servant, just as she remembered her, her slim hips sheathed in a checked woolen skirt, her putty-colored raincoat, the thick, woolly mass of her short hair, and her small-featured face, her distant, placid demeanor, the servant herself coming into the brasserie with the same steady, unwondering gait as if she were entering her own apartment in the house at the far end of the courtyard.
Although she must surely have seen Clarisse just as Clarisse had seen her, their eyes didn’t meet.
Motionless behind the bar where she’d just made a cup of coffee, Clarisse watched as her mother looked around and finally chose a table near the window, indifferent or oblivious to the suddenly closed, dull, frowning face of the boss, who gave Malinka’s mother an almost outraged stare, then lowered her eyes and carefully studied her watch, as if, looked at long enough, it would end up consenting to help her turn out that unwelcome customer, that lowly woman.
Lunch was nearly over, and yet, Clarisse noted, a torrent of reassuring thoughts rushing into her mind as she turned toward the big clock on the opposite wall and stared at it vacantly, it was only one thirty. Often they had customers coming in until two.
She felt her boss’s gaze on her burning cheek.
“That coffee’s getting cold.”
The voice itself was cold, metallic, indignant. Slowly Clarisse turned to look at her, and her boss’s wary, surprised eyes locked with hers, and what she saw in them, something Clarisse knew nothing of, made the woman strangely calm, though her mood was still as ugly as ever.
“You’ll have to make another cup. And then you can deal with her over there,” she said, nodding toward Malinka’s mother.
Venomously, making sure Clarisse was still looking into her aggressive, suspicious eyes, she added:
“I hope she’s not going to make a habit of coming here. That wouldn’t be good for business.”
Clarisse brought the customer his coffee. Then she drifted toward the table where her mother sat quietly waiting, her hands lying flat in front of her, her face turned to the window and the grimy, sunlit avenue, which rumbled with every passing truck.
Clarisse was moved to recognize her mother’s tiny, delicate ear, decorated with the little gilt ring she was never without.
She staggered under her anguish and sympathy.
She’d written the servant several times, less out of duty or compassion or in hopes of reassuring her than to safeguard her own freedom, fearing her worried mother might try to have her tracked down, although asking anyone for anything wouldn’t have been like the servant at all. She always signed her letters “Your daughter, M.”
And now her mother was looking up at her with her stoical face, her lower lip quivering all the same, her two hands no longer flat on the table but turned palms up in an instinctual gesture of supplication, a plea for mercy.
We don’t know what earned us this treatment, we don’t understand it, those two calloused, tapering hands eloquently said, but what does that matter if it’s enough to ask for forgiveness, we can do that and more, whatever it takes, nothing would be beyond us…
And Clarisse waited, deeply aware of her dead-eyed gaze, a stranger’s gaze, strictly professional, but feeling her own lip tremble no matter how hard she tried to keep her mouth tightly, severely shut.
“I’d like, maybe, a sandwich?” the servant murmured questioningly.
“Yes?” Clarisse answered in the same tone, because she’d adopted that style of seeming never quite convinced of what she was saying, viscerally grasping all the mystery and charm this created, especially combined with her hushed, muffled voice.
But it wasn’t right to be charming the servant or seeming mysterious before her pleading eyes. Fleetingly, Clarisse was ashamed of her enticing voice, that display of something slightly seedy in the life she now lived.
“I’ll bring you a ham-and-butter,” she whispered, and her mother nodded, lost, smiling her mirthless smile, wanting to add something to mark the occasion and then giving up, as if warned off by some internal adviser more reasonable than herself, as if cautioned that this Clarisse was not exactly her daughter Malinka, that what was happening here was less a reunion than a first meeting.
She looked away, docile and adrift, seeming suddenly intimidated.
Clarisse pivoted on her heel, finding a reflexive and habitual pleasure in the feel of her nylon-clad thighs rubbing together.
Her boss was watching, with her sharp, slightly sardonic, experienced gaze.
Realizing the other customers had all gone on their way, Clarisse felt her face turn red, though she knew her mother hadn’t spoken her old name, Malinka. It was almost two o’clock; the café could often be deserted at this hour.
But her boss knew, she knew everything, and she looked at Clarisse without hostility, with a sort of hard sadness, as if Clarisse had deceived her but she understood why and accepted it, then her eyes once again swept over Clarisse’s long legs, narrow hips, and thin face, now probably not to measure that slender body’s resilience but to gauge its likeness to that other body, the body of the black woman sitting up very straight in her chair near the window.
—
Once her mother had eaten her sandwich and paid the check, Clarisse took her down the street to the little room where she lived.
She usually devoted these idle hours before the dinner shift to a nap, and she found herself longing to slip into her bed as usual, knowing her mother would think nothing of it, would simply settle into the room’s only chair and wait in un
broken silence. But she felt too much on edge even to think of sleep. And the thought that she might nonetheless have managed to drift off, to forget the servant’s presence, and then wake up with nothing resolved, to the revelation that her mother was there, patient, immovable, that thought humiliated and irritated her at the same time.
How she wished her mother could be happy far away, without her, how she wished that, wrapped up in her own happiness, she might lose all interest in her daughter Malinka, how she wished, even, that her mother’s love were monopolized by other children! How the weight of that unused love exhausted her, that vast but humble, mute love, irreproachable! How her own sympathy weighed on her!
“You can take off your raincoat,” she said, with some sharpness in her voice, seeing the servant meekly keeping it on out of politeness.
Her mother carefully folded the raincoat and laid it on the bed.
She stood there, her quietly approving gaze surveying the neatly made bed, the clean linoleum, the white sheer curtains at the window, and although she said nothing her silence was neither heavy nor eloquent; it was the peaceful, homey silence that once reigned in their house, the foundation of their entente.
And now that strange silence was taking hold of the room, filling it with homeyness and melancholy. Frightened by the dullness she felt coming over her, Clarisse rebelled. She sternly reminded herself that freedom was a duty, as was anger, even unjustified.
“So,” she said in a voice without affection, “this is where I live now.”
“Yes, it’s nice. It’s clean.”
“You must have a train to catch.”
Oh, that involuntary pleading tone in her voice, as if she had to feel endangered by any decision Malinka’s mother might make!
She felt as though she were falling into a deep hole of clinging, entangling emotions, of limp devotion and degrading resentment, with her mother looking on from the edge, untouched, superior, and pure in her unwavering love.
A hint of a heartfelt smile creased the servant’s lips. Was there not, Clarisse thought in disbelief, a kind of triumph in that smile?
Nausea washed over her, so powerless, so mediocre, did she feel.
And she knew what her mother was about to say before the words reached her ear. Living so far away, she thought herself out of range of the servant’s limitless feelings, but now they were coming back at her, and a shadowy fear that had been vaguely blighting her happiness for months was beginning to come true.
“I have a little room of my own,” her mother said serenely, still smiling that heartfelt smile, a smile not of triumph, Clarisse realized, but of perhaps childish pride.
“What room? Where?” She groaned in dismay, her dismay having already understood and anticipated the answer.
Her mother took a step away from her, no longer afraid or intimidated but suddenly exultant at this evocation of her boldness and ingenuity.
She gestured broadly toward the window.
“Over that way, by the docks. I had all our things brought down. The old house is empty, but I gave them notice, I won’t pay for nothing.”
“What about your job?” Clarisse almost shrieked.
“I’m not worried. I’ll find something here.”
The servant looked at Clarisse, and now there was no trace of a smile or sign of delight on her face, only an air of sad understanding and, just beneath it, a sort of passionate resolve, a broader stubbornness that, for a moment, wasn’t even about Malinka, or love, or the miseries of absence. Caught off guard, Clarisse felt her agitation fade a little.
Painfully aware of her weakness and unworthiness, she nonetheless stammered:
“You always said you’d never leave, because he…because my father might come looking for you.”
Her mother winced as if lashed by a blow mysteriously landing in a place she thought she could no longer feel. Distant and ethereal, her old smile came to her rescue.
“I’d rather be close to you,” she said simply, with no great ardor, merely acknowledging a fact.
Digging into her bag, she took out a piece of paper with her address written on it and laid it on a corner of the bed.
When the time came for Clarisse to head back to work, the servant walked her to the brasserie’s door, then gave her a quick kiss and strode off with her sprightly step, the step, thought Clarisse, sour and annoyed, of a person who would never want to intrude on anyone’s life.
—
The decision that showed Clarisse she could be just as fanatically obstinate as her mother first took the form of a slight coldness, little different from the coldness that filled the air when they lived together, two lowly flowers.
Then, with that decision carefully weighed and resolved, it struck Clarisse that there was no need for coldness, any more than distance or feigned dislike, that what was needed was in fact devotion and tenderness, as if to make up for the heartlessness of the decision.
This was a liberation for her, and a sincere relief, because she had no wish to be cruel.
Here, then, began a happy time for the servant.
Every two or three days Clarisse came for dinner in the little apartment her mother had rented on an alley not far from the port, and she was cheerful and chatty as she’d never been before.
She talked about the brasserie—which she would soon leave, without telling the servant—and inflated the customers’ fussiness to enliven her anecdotes. And that she never spoke of herself, that she never told of her existence away from the brasserie, never mentioned a name, an address, very likely her mother didn’t notice right away.
Only when a dubious feeling drove her to ask a few unobtrusive questions did she realize she would never get an answer, and that, in any case, Clarisse’s vague, trivial words left no room for any specific inquiry.
Clarisse never pretended she hadn’t heard or understood. Her self-respect recoiled at the thought of deliberate, shameful playacting. She stared at an invisible point slightly behind her mother and sat in silence with a pleasant, patient, vaguely apologetic look, letting a bubble of discomfort swell between them until the servant finally popped it with a forced chuckle or a remark on the color of the sky, and the mounting disbelief and stinging affliction in that little laugh was not lost on Clarisse, who noted it with some sadness, the calm, immovable, self-satisfied sadness of an absolutist.
Because once her decision was made there was no going back.
Only within the four walls of this little apartment did she consent to be the servant’s daughter, that girl named Malinka.
And eventually her mother realized this and gloomily accepted it, even if it sometimes mystified her at first, as if she couldn’t quite believe such a thing could be happening, that her daughter, whom she’d rejoined and reconquered, and who seemed so cordial, so present, was in fact turning away from her completely, or rejecting her even more violently than if she’d pressed both hands to her chest and shoved her beneath the wheels of a passing car.
Sadness and incomprehension put a new, embittered crease on the servant’s lips.
Sometimes, when they ran out of banalities and both sat in silence, she burst into a laugh, sarcastic or self-mocking. And Clarisse realized her mother could no longer take refuge in fantasy, in the vague and the impalpable.
She herself so suffered from the pain she inflicted on the servant, who’d done nothing to merit this punishment, that a weight settled into her chest and never went away, an alloy of grief and guilt whose volume and mass she felt every minute of the day, crushing her, smothering her.
But once her decision was made, there was no going back.
—
Very soon Malinka’s mother took a job with a cleaning service. Her hapless, dreamy mother’s long-standing gift for finding work wherever she wanted inspired a certain admiration in Clarisse Rivière, although she suspected that her mother’s vacant, infinitely mild air worked against her even as it eased her way, giving the impression, which was in fact true, that she would make fe
w demands as an employee. Her work now was cleaning city-owned buildings, late at night and early in the morning.
“For the first time in my life, I have coworkers,” she said, with that voice that gave no clue if she thought this a good thing or not.
Nevertheless, Clarisse had the feeling she wasn’t unhappy about it.
“That’s good,” she was foolish enough to say. “This way you won’t be so alone.”
“I wouldn’t feel alone at all if I had my daughter beside me,” said the servant, the bitter crease on her lips.
And it was so clear to Clarisse that she meant “on my side,” or “if my daughter weren’t my enemy,” that in a rare rush of emotion she clasped her mother’s hands and pressed them to her face.
But such surges of tenderness and contrition, even the heavy burden of her guilty conscience weighing on her rib cage and forbidding her, wherever she was, to feel fully carefree, none of that could shake her faith in the necessity of her choice, which, when she offered it up to her own judgment in the starkest terms, was to have nothing to do, ever again, with Malinka’s mother.
These visits were no more than a tactic for keeping her quiet.
But how she loved that woman, even more so now that she was seeing her suffer! How vile, how convoluted, she felt next to the servant, who was so light, so clear, so valiant in her attachment!
Clarisse knew she’d doomed herself, knew she would one day be punished for abandoning the servant. She didn’t like that idea, but she wasn’t afraid.
Because once her decision was made there was no disobeying it, even in her thoughts.
She gave up her job at the brasserie and her little room near the station for a job in a downtown café and a one-bedroom apartment in Floirac. She couldn’t imagine staying on, now that her boss had seen who her mother was, though she never mentioned it again. But above all it was vital that the servant not know where she worked, not know the address where she slept, just as she had no idea that Malinka was now Clarisse, and that that magnificent girl, that lissome Clarisse in the clinging black skirt and tight white blouse she wore for her job, that dazzling, expertly made-up girl, always a little breathless, as if she’d been running, stuck close to the walls in the street and looked over her shoulder, again and again, to make absolutely sure that her mother wasn’t walking behind her.
