by Marie Ndiaye
—
She couldn’t believe it didn’t show.
She moved her face still closer to the mirror and a smile came to her lips. So this was what he saw when she leaned in to pick up the menu or put down the silverware, these features, slightly stiff beneath the makeup, these red lips reshaped with the pencil, and nothing more, surely, since she herself could see nothing. And she knew this was the face of a girl in love, and he didn’t.
How could he?
She smiled, beside herself with pride.
Or maybe he did, maybe he’d guessed?
Maybe at this very moment he was pressing his face to a similar mirror, in the mysterious place where he lived, studying his features, the features of a boy in love, smiling as she was smiling, overjoyed, wondering if she’d seen?
Maybe at this very moment he was imagining her smiling at her reflection, at once amazed and flush with pride at what she’d become, a girl in love, as if up to now, loving no one, never thinking of love, she’d been living with an illness, from which she’d recovered by the sheer force of her wondrous vitality?
Because that’s just what it was, it was a sickness to love only her mother, with an angry, exhausting, guilty love, so unlike her love for the boy, ardent but happy, bubbly, and light.
She could almost feel her heart, heavy with the wrong she’d done, throwing off that weight even now. So was being a girl in love also a good deed? Could she somehow make up for her cruelty to the servant by her scintillating love for a boy with sincere eyes, with a high, tremulous brow?
That boy was a proud horse, a gentle horse. His slightly damp cheeks twitched ever so slightly, she’d seen it, when he called her over to take his order.
Oh no (she smiled in spite of herself), being in love gave her too much pleasure to be a good deed.
In the mirror she saw her eyes darken and her forehead crease, just as they always did when she thought of the servant’s sorrow, but her lips went on smiling, her beautiful lips painted the violent red of an almost happy girl.
She went out into the warm street, tottering a little on the high heels she now wore, which made her legs so long, slender, and shapely, and found to her delight that the sight of her reflection in a shopwindow took her breath away.
That perfectly beautiful girl bore the perfect name of Clarisse, and by a wonderful stroke of luck she was that girl, that Clarisse, whose previous life and old name no one could guess, for, so smooth and so beautiful, she offered the world the very image of harmony and unity. How lucky to be that girl!
She took the bus, walked a little farther on to the café, in the city’s stony, proud center, where the façades were less sooty and the cobblestoned sidewalks not so narrow, not so cluttered with trash cans.
Le Rainbow had broad, glinting windows through which the men in the street could see Clarisse striding across the restaurant on her high heels, a little unsteady but tall and straight, and often she turned toward the window and smiled at those stares, which to her unending amazement confirmed that the perfect girl people couldn’t help admiring as they walked by was her.
Maybe, she mused, the boy she loved first came into the café because he’d seen her from the street, maybe he’d fallen for her simply on glimpsing that girl whose harmoniousness, definition, and serenity Clarisse hoped she expressed. How she would love that, if he confessed that he’d fallen in love with her purity!
She began to wait for him as noon neared, unworried, knowing he would come.
And when he did, he found the courage to look her in the eye, which he’d never done before, and she looked back, just as frank, just as direct, because ever since she’d fallen in love with that boy she’d lost all trace of coyness, every impulse to look away through lowered lashes.
He sat down at his customary table and she hurried over, indifferent to the other waitresses’ arch little smiles.
“Your usual Perrier with a slice of lemon?”
Just four days he’d been coming here, and she was talking to him like that!
She felt her entire face reaching out toward him in a shimmering of white teeth and sparkling pale eyes, she felt and saw her face giving itself to him like a magnificent lily proudly and trustingly presented, sure of the offering’s value, and the flexible stem of her body bent toward him, too, under the weight of that luxuriant flower.
Fleetingly, she thought of her mother—that lowly flower from the far end of the courtyard, the awful pity she felt for her.
She recovered her face as one recovers one’s composure, she dimmed it, closed it, but not so completely that the boy with the tremulous skin wouldn’t see it still shining with love for him.
She sensed that he had something to tell her, and then that, lacking the nerve and being so young, he’d thought better of it for the moment.
And so, when she came back with his drink, she took her time at his table, aware of the perhaps excessive hopefulness she exuded, like her own scent, but powerless to stop it from spreading around her and perhaps intimidating the boy. But, she wanted to cry out with a laugh, what more did she have to hope for? Just being a girl in love was so good in itself, shouldn’t it be more than enough for even the most exorbitant hopefulness?
“I don’t think I’ll…Well, I mean I know I won’t, obviously…be coming in tomorrow, or the day after, for that matter.”
What on earth was he saying, compulsively stroking his bubbling glass, sometimes staring at her in despair, sometimes studying his hands clenched around his drink?
What he was saying she understood, but not quite what it meant. Still as merry as if he’d ventured some subtle joke and she was waiting to fully grasp it before bursting into a laugh, she breathed:
“Yes? So?”
“Well, I…”
Desperately, he plunged in:
“Would you like to come with me this afternoon? Because I’m going home, I have to go back home to Langon.”
“You want to take me with you?”
He blushed violently, misreading her.
“Forgive me, maybe it’s…I don’t know…forward, but I’m not…it’s just that the idea I might never see you again made me so miserable…”
And that teasing hopefulness dissipated at once, replaced by a joy so intense that for a moment it felt like the opposite, like the bleakest desolation, which she would have survived, so well did she know that feeling and its distinctive warmth, and so attached she was to it, in a way, like a faithful companion. Then she realized it wasn’t that at all, and she let joy bloom unconstrained in her mind, thrown slightly off balance though she was.
The boy was fingering his glass again, still not lifting it to his lips.
He seemed distraught at what he’d let himself say, and perhaps convinced all was lost.
She forced her face to mirror the happiness she was feeling, the radiant gratitude, forced it to drop its dramatic, dumbfounded look, which, although more eloquently expressive of the depth of her emotion, might give the boy the idea he’d shocked and upset her.
“That’s wonderful,” she whispered. “I’ve never been to Langon, for one thing, and…yes, yes, I want to stay there with you, oh I do, oh yes.”
He found the courage to raise his unbelieving eyes to hers, and now, from the serious, stunned, stupefied look on his face, it might just as well have been her who’d given him some dire piece of news.
This is how we’ll be at our wedding, this is how the mayor will see us when he marries us, so in love that we’ll seem like absolute idiots, totally lost, she thought, in time with the familiar radiant carillon sounding noon from the church next door, her lips, finally unbound, stretching into a perfectly fulfilled smile.
Was it then, Clarisse Rivière would later wonder, that she’d first vowed to forever be good to Richard Rivière, a vow that would shape the whole of her life with him?
Because she must have realized, then or just a little later, that there was no other escape from what she’d deliberately done to the servant, Ma
linka’s mother, who was never to know of Clarisse Rivière, never to delight in anything good that happened to her daughter, never to broaden her narrow circle to include those her daughter loved most, on whom she herself might lavish her vast, unused love—no, no other escape from that violence, that shame, than the deepest, most indisputable goodness in every other way.
Claiming not to be feeling well, Clarisse punched out and went to join the boy who’d hurried off to get his car from down the street, now waiting for her before the café, engine running.
He took her to her apartment in Floirac to pack a few things. Then, on the way to Langon, they spoke of this and that with a spontaneity and an animation that delighted them both and sometimes made them look at each other, amused and proud and observing themselves from a shared distance, like parents moved by their children’s behavior.
She stole a glance at him, that boy with the thick black hair, the dusky complexion, the sharp features; and that face, that body, at once slender and solid, seemed in no way removed from her own, seemed in no way to live and move in a space and a manner not yet known to her.
And so she found nothing intimidating in the boy’s dense physical presence at her side. Impulsively running her fingers through his hair, she felt nothing new, as though she’d done just the same thing many times before. There was nothing foreign to her, she marveled serenely, in the young man’s physical being. She thought she knew the scent of his skin, the shape of his fingernails, the way his muscles flexed beneath the fabric of his trousers when he braked or accelerated, and she loved it all, she told herself, she loved every fragment of his carnal reality as surely as she knew and loved her own body.
He sold cars for a living, he told her, he worked at the new Alfa Romeo dealership in Langon, and they’d sent him to Bordeaux for a four-day training seminar.
“I love cars,” he said with a bashfulness she found adorable.
Clarisse was enchanted to find him already wanting to confess his weaknesses and hoping not to displease her too terribly should she happen to harbor some special contempt for car buffs.
He continued in the same vein, as if eager to make a clean breast of all his least charming features: his parents ran a stationery shop in Toulouse, he rarely saw them, they “didn’t think the same way,” his father was exceptionally prone to anger, it had become too much to take.
He glanced her way, and although trembling inside she gave him an encouraging smile—her turn was coming, and she’d have to lie, the lie to come was already parching her mouth, and what would become of her vow to be good and her promise of irreproachable love if she started out telling lies to the boy she was in love with, so deeply in love?
“You don’t have to love your parents, right, if they don’t deserve it?” he blurted out, with an emotion so ill-contained that she realized he was revealing a sentiment as difficult to feel as it was to express, and so offering her his absolute trust at its most tender and troubled, his heart laid bare in the cup of his outstretched, trembling hands.
“Of course you don’t,” she said with conviction.
But, she thought, her throat tightening, suppose your mother more than deserves your love and you don’t let her have it, suppose you keep it all to yourself, what to think of a person like that? If you’re ashamed of your mother and keep her as far out of your life as you can, what kind of person are you then?
She found herself envying his certainty that he didn’t have to love his parents, not to mention the fact that there were two of them, supporting each other in their meanness. She then had a vision so brief that she didn’t have time to be outraged or aggrieved, but the feeling persisted darkly inside her after she’d forgotten where it came from: the vision of a Clarisse grown old, with no one left to support her in her meanness, whose children never visited, all too aware of what she was.
“My parents are dead, and in any case my father never came forward,” she answered in an ugly squawk that surprised and shocked even her.
He let out a sad little “Oh,” then briefly and tenderly put his hand on her thigh. His fingers were short, but it was a strong, well-shaped hand, and Clarisse gently clasped it and pressed it to her lips, feeling she’d known that hand for a very long time and could at this very moment, without hesitation or effort, lick every one of its fingers, give them delicate little bites.
“Clarisse isn’t exactly my real name, but that’s what they call me,” she managed to add.
He parked in a little street on the edge of Langon, before an old gray stucco house, whose upper floor he rented.
The street lay empty and silent in the warm, bright afternoon sun. Cats were sleeping in the shadowy corners by the entryways, and suddenly Clarisse remembered the courtyard of her childhood, the cats much like these, scruffy and thankless, that sometimes came begging for food, and her mother’s inexplicable fear of them, almost as deep as her fear of dogs, on the subject of which she’d one day let slip that beneath their skin they contained human beings stricken with a terrible curse. How could anyone believe such a thing? But Clarisse avoided them all the same, and that day she was vaguely unhappy to find a cat sleeping on the house’s front step.
She took off her high heels and climbed the stairs barefoot before the boy. Already it felt just like coming home after a few days’ vacation!
He had a big room on the upper story, just under the roof, tidy and white, with a waxed wooden floor. He took her to a window and pointed out the river, sparkling and very green between two houses, and the white sunlight, as if bleached, erased by its own brightness.
Then they stood face-to-face, not yet daring to embrace but knowing they would, and waiting for that moment with a fervent, solemn emotion, and a patient one as well, because, thought Clarisse evasively, they knew that moment was at hand, and they were lost in proud surprise at what they’d already done, running off together far from Bordeaux, and now knew they would soon take each other in their arms and pull each other close, and they waited, dazed with love, fear, and joy.
How young they were! thought Clarisse, and she felt a reverence for their youthfulness.
A dim memory briefly came back to her, a night spent with a coworker at Le Rainbow who took her to his place while his wife was away, with whom she’d made love for the first time, quietly aware that she wanted only to cast off her virginity, which she then saw, she no longer quite understood why, as a burden, and she’d set her sights on that friendly man on the theory that he’d know what to do. And it was fast, cold, and conscientious, like an expertly performed operation. And now, before this boy she loved, she was happy to have it behind her.
She saw his high forehead, tan beneath the luxuriance of his thick, straight hair, his brown eyes slightly veiled by uncertainty (maybe he’s a virgin, she told herself in a flood of protective tenderness), she saw his dusky, just barely pink skin, his full lips, the vigorous health of a very young man in the springtime of his life, and she silently mused that she would never love another like him, and silently thought of her existence to come and imagined it wholly devoted to two commandments that were two aspects of a single charge, to renounce Malinka’s mother and adore Richard Rivière, but never to fail in even her tiniest duty toward either.
—
Because, in all that time, she would never once skip her monthly visit to the servant, just as, she thought, she would never break her promise of absolute, passionate love for Richard Rivière.
—
They married three months later in Langon’s city hall, on a Thursday, so it wouldn’t seem like a special occasion.
The elder Rivières came from Toulouse for the day, and Clarisse, who hadn’t yet met them, thought she could feel the mother’s particularly dubious gaze studying her head to toe and doing nothing to hide it.
When their eyes met, Clarisse had to look away. The mother paid Clarisse a dishonest compliment on her interesting hair. Asking her maiden name, and hearing Clarisse stammer out the name of the servant as flatly and neu
trally as she could, she inquired where it came from.
“From the north,” Clarisse mumbled.
And she knew Madame Rivière didn’t believe her, and also that, in a spirit of something like tact, Madame Rivière would never speak of it to Richard.
—
Clarisse found a job as a salesgirl in a clothes shop, then quit it to sign on as a waitress in a newly opened pizzeria.
The work was harder, but she loved taking the stage amid that unvarying spectacle, hearing the furious little music of her heels tapping the tile floor, feeling her arm muscles tense and harden when she brought out the plates, her response perfectly calibrated to the demands of the task, just as she loved the feeling, at the end of a shift, as she sat with a cigarette in the now-clean, empty room, of having once again successfully transmuted potential disarray, with the customers pouring in and all demanding quick service, into a smooth and efficient mechanism, so discreet as to seem effortless, of which, with her clacking heels, her youthful muscles, her quick thinking, she was at once the inventor and one of the gears.
She never told herself this in so many words, but she understood her new status made her love her work all the more.
Because she was now Clarisse Rivière, and that Clarisse Rivière had a husband who sometimes came to pick her up at the pizzeria, and everyone could see them together, affable and charming and wonderfully normal, and when they talked about her they would say: “Clarisse Rivière, you know?” never guessing that she might bear any other name or be anything other than she appeared, a simple and ordinary person.
And that awareness never left her as she strode briskly between the tables, the awareness that she was a married woman who would be named Clarisse Rivière until the end of her days, and never again, because now that was all over forever, a very young girl with no link to the world save the painful sense that she didn’t legitimately belong to it.
