by Marie Ndiaye
How she loved her husband’s gravity, his quiet but stubborn ambition, his uninquisitiveness! The few questions he’d asked about her childhood in the suburbs of Paris she’d answered cheerfully and laconically, inventing an existence so peaceful and happy that there was nothing more to say of it. And was that not, in fact, the truth? she thought. Her father was dead by that time, and then her mother died when Clarisse was…sixteen? Seventeen? She couldn’t quite recall.
Once, and the incident soon came to seem as unreal as a dream, she spoke the name Malinka in front of her husband. She might have said something like: “Malinka’s mother once cleaned some famous people’s apartment, and you can’t imagine how filthy they were!” But it might have been another sentence entirely, because, as after a dream, she couldn’t recapture it after she’d spoken it, or rather after Richard Rivière told her she had.
He didn’t bother to ask who Malinka might be, and Clarisse only gave a quiet little laugh.
Eyes flooding with tears, she stared at her husband’s shoulder, reminding herself that she could press her face to it whenever she liked.
—
After many elaborate calculations, Richard Rivière decided they could safely take out a loan, and they bought an almost new house on the edge of Langon.
He never talked much about his work at Alfa Romeo, but Clarisse understood that his devotion, his patience, the exercises he did with a manual in the evening, striving to learn everything he needed to know about the various finance plans he might offer the customers but also to work up a smooth and persuasive pitch, all these labors, she understood, were aimed at his goal of becoming a sales manager and even, one day, the general manager of his own dealership. He obliquely admitted as much, then never brought it up again.
That reserve was just fine with Clarisse, who took to visiting Malinka’s mother the first Tuesday of each month, never saying so but never lying outright.
She simply announced that she would be going to Bordeaux the next day, and Richard Rivière never asked what she had planned, but only smiled in that way of his, which she loved more than anything else, at once tender and absent, as if nothing really interested him but what he had in his mind at that moment, something to do with his work, she imagined.
It did not escape Clarisse Rivière that she loved his sweetly inattentive smile because it proved that she lived not in the very heart of his thoughts but a little outside, in a warm place, perhaps veiled by a serene shadow.
But that was just where she wanted to be, the better to safeguard her secret, to uphold her responsibility to the servant, on whom she heaped ever-more-generous attentions.
Her love for her mother was a foul-tasting food, impossible to choke down. That food dissolved into bitter little crumbs in her mouth, then congealed, and this went on and on and had no end, the lump of fetid bread shifting from one cheek to the other, then the soft, stinking fragments that made of her mouth a deep pit of shame.
She began bringing a little gift each time she went to visit Malinka’s mother.
She noted certain changes in her mother’s personality and behavior, that woman who, when they lived in the little house, never let any sorrow or displeasure trouble her eternal good humor or shrink the enormity of her indifference, and she was so aggrieved to see the servant turning suspicious and caustic, and sometimes even belligerent, that she longed to throw herself into the river, not to die but only to float, to drift toward the sea, toward the disappearance of all memory of her and the servant’s existence, toward absolution for all the wrongs she’d done her mother.
It was only her great debt to her mother that kept her from abandoning her anew in this way. But nothing shocked her more than to hear sarcastic asides and impotent little barbs flowing from her mother’s lips, that vile vermin being vomited up. She thought fate had mixed up her face with her mother’s, that it was she who, her voice ever gentle and calm, was befouling the honor of precious stones, of diamonds, and the still-greater dignity of self-mastery.
For even the servant didn’t recognize herself.
She would snicker sardonically as Clarisse entered the apartment, then fall silent, sorry and bewildered, and clap her hand to her mouth. She would mumble an excuse, and Clarisse realized she was afraid her daughter might stop coming to visit if she was mean to her (because that, oh, that was how the servant put it).
So this, Clarisse told herself, horrified, is what she’d done to her mother.
Sinking beneath even the wildest waves would never erase such a crime.
What bitterness, now, on the servant’s perennially pinched lips, what hard mockery in her eyes!
She began to complain of fatigue and back pain. Vacuuming an office at dawn, she tripped on a chair and broke her two front teeth. She refused to have a bridge put in on the grounds that she couldn’t afford it, even though Clarisse offered to help pay. But did she not find a sour pleasure in revealing, through the thin smile that was now hers, her gaping sorrow?
She did, thought Clarisse, seeing the hole in her mother’s mouth and feeling the dough of contemptibility swelling inside hers. Her mouth was the putrid abyss, not the servant’s.
Her love for her mother was poisoning her. On leaving the servant’s, she wanted now to shriek, now to sink into the river’s clement waters.
She did no such thing, though, no such thing.
But as for the edifice of her goodness to Richard Rivière and, beyond him, to everyone she met or worked with, she built it up bit by bit, never forgetting, never wearying, in a constant, tranquil labor that was nonetheless not untouched by doubt, concerning not the need for that endeavor but its sincerity.
Could what she practiced, she sometimes wondered, really be called goodness, or, more simply, niceness and apparent submission?
And in any case, what sort of goodness was a goodness that was aware of itself?
She took care never to upset Richard Rivière, never to needle him, tease him, provoke him, and when, as he so rarely did, he lashed out at her, to answer only with silence.
Now and then she saw a brief flash of surprise or unease on her husband’s face, when she so visibly and insistently fended off some potential conflict and stared at him with her inward-looking eyes, open wide onto her own abnegation, careful to keep a grip on herself, entirely withdrawn into her vow of kindliness.
It seemed to her at such times that her eyes never blinked; she thought she could see their pale, fixed, absent reflection in Richard Rivière’s dark, puzzled gaze.
“Come on, say something,” he sometimes sighed. “You don’t have to agree.”
As if prodded into action, she tried to pull her gaze out of the pensive depths where it was contemplating Clarisse Rivière’s sacrifice and haul it back to the surface, where Richard Rivière was awaiting some word, some answer, albeit with his increasingly frequent air of having already set down his attentiveness and wandered off somewhere else, someplace more interesting.
And so, after struggling to recall the question he’d asked her, or the subject on which he’d tried to draw her into some sort of dispute, after desperately casting around in slightly nauseated panic for some more or less suitable answer, she would realize he’d forgotten all about it, that she was now speaking only to Richard Rivière’s frozen, mute, polite shadow as he fled into the distance, him and his beating heart, his untamable hair, his impatient muscles.
She took that shadow in her arms and pulled it to her. There was still a shoulder there to rest her forehead on, to cover her eyes.
Her love for Richard Rivière bathed her in sweetness and gentleness.
Was she perfectly, purely good to him? Probably not, since he was aware—his unease made it clear—of a strangeness about her, when he should have passed through her goodness without even knowing it, should even have been able to attack and defy that goodness without seeing it, no more than Clarisse herself would.
—
Her pregnancy showed so little that she thought it safe to g
o on visiting the servant up to the seventh month.
She was intrigued to find her belly’s already modest bulge becoming even more discreet when she boarded the train for Bordeaux. And when she walked into her mother’s apartment and her hand moved reflexively to her stomach, she could feel only a hard knot beneath her loose-fitting sweater, such that she once thought she was simply waking from a dream in which she’d been pregnant.
She told the servant they’d have to go two and a half months without seeing each other.
“Fine,” said the servant, her voice cold and indifferent.
Then for the first time she burst into tears, and Clarisse sat stunned and still, rubbing her chair’s velvet arms with both hands and thinking that her own narrow, sharp shoulder could at least have accommodated her mother’s moist cheek, could have covered her eyes.
—
When the child was born, she named her Ladivine. That was the servant’s first name.
—
Clarisse Rivière would remember the months after Ladivine’s birth as a time when she went badly astray, when she lost sight of the point of her promise.
She would blame this confusion on her deep happiness, which grew from intense to excessive, finally becoming unrecognizable and sometimes indistinguishable from grief. She even let herself imagine taking the baby to Bordeaux, presenting her to the servant, saying, Here! and then leaving her there, going home, having nothing more to do with the child or Malinka’s mother, whose sadness at no longer seeing Clarisse would be eased by the presence of that marvelous baby.
Once she got hold of herself, the memory of that madness tormented her. Wherever she was, she dropped everything and ran to the baby, to make sure she was there and hold her close, knowing a torrent of love would then sweep over her, painful, impenetrable, and separate from herself, as if coming from some mysterious outside and not from her own being.
Sometimes she thought this vast love for the child a burden, and she longed to be rid of it, even if it meant ridding herself of the child as well. But she didn’t know how to find pleasure in that love, nor even what exactly to do with it; she felt as though, yearning to deploy itself unconfined, it was trying to shove her consuming love for Richard Rivière to one side, along with her imperishable, wrenching love for Malinka’s mother.
Whence, no doubt, the devotion, almost the euphoria, with which she saw to the little chores that came with the baby.
Washing the tiny clothes and hanging them on the line in the garden, mashing the vegetables for the baby’s puree, the routine and utilitarian nature of those tasks held back the waves of invasive, boundless love, and although every move she made was for the sake of the child, she could in a way put the child out of her mind.
It was when she inhaled the warm, musty smell of the child’s head, when she felt that compact little body’s warmth through her clothes, that she knew she was in danger. That overpowering love unsettled her, leaving her first wary of its demands, then rebellious.
I don’t need this, she thought, feeling heavier than when she was pregnant, as if that immense love for the baby were overstuffing her already full heart.
Richard Rivière, for his part, had conceived a very simple passion for the child, and never tried to get out of caring for her.
No swollen, oversize love was trying to push him beyond his limits, or take anything away from him, or split open his chest.
—
The Rivière parents took a day to come see the child, and the moment she opened the door Clarisse felt the strange attractive force radiating from the father’s big, solid body, a force to be struggled against, she immediately thought, because there was something unpleasant about it, but also, on first meeting, something intriguing.
He had a broad, full face with delicate features and mocking eyes that let it be known, with an aggressiveness scarcely veiled by false benevolence, that he was a man who put up with no nonsense. He had enormous hands, deformed by arthritis, though he was not an old man. He stood with his forearms well away from his thighs, not so much to spare his ailing hands any painful contact, it seemed, as to show that he was unarmed, which might well be a lie, said his jeering eyes, because he had no fear of lies, and no sense of honor.
A wolfhound came in with the parents, a big, healthy, powerful beast. Clarisse backed away.
“Don’t be afraid,” said the father. “He’s with us, he’s very well behaved.”
Richard had gone out for bread, and he came back just then. A surprised, vaguely irritated look crossed his face, as if he’d forgotten his parents were coming, which couldn’t be true, thought Clarisse, since he’d gone out specially to buy bread for four. His suddenly unhappy face settled into a guarded expression, just this side of rude.
He murmured a greeting to his father, still keeping his distance.
Filled with a compassion she’d never before felt for her husband, an almost disinterested sympathy, Clarisse sensed that he was shielding himself from the crushing physical authority, the simultaneously attractive and repellent omnipotence that had entered the house with his father. How strange to see Richard trembling, he who ordinarily showed no fear of anyone!
She went and stood at his side, their arms touching.
She could feel him quivering in turmoil and sterile distress, like a dog, she told herself. He seemed to be trying to fight off a will stronger than his own, and that will was serenely waiting for him to give in and bow down, and Richard was still clinging to his anger and pride, and the other will saw that and laughed, requiring neither anger nor pride to maintain itself.
So Richard Rivière’s father laughed off his son, thought Clarisse, moved, because he knew Richard’s frail crutches would soon break, that his anger would tire and his pride falter, no longer at all sure of its reason for being.
Stiff but trembling, Richard didn’t say a word, as if the energy he was burning to stand up to his father and keep up his dignity forbade any further exertion.
Clarisse showed the parents into the living room, babbling, describing what they could plainly see, the simple, brightly colored furniture she and Richard had picked out, the pale-yellow wallpaper they’d hung. The parents nodded, never offering a compliment, the mother dubious and reserved, the father snide and uninterested.
Richard stood off to one side, arms crossed, and Clarisse thought he looked exhausted and drained beneath his still fiercely tensed face, as if his sense of himself couldn’t quite keep up with his real nature, which, weak and helpless before the father, was, unbeknownst to him, already showing itself in his vacillating gaze, in his mouth’s drooping corners.
“Let’s go see the baby,” said Clarisse, having heard a faint squeal.
She started down the hallway, then stopped short at the room’s open door. Her hands instinctively sprang out toward the two sides of the jamb, as if to prevent anyone entering.
The wolfhound was lying on Ladivine’s bed, a little crib whose bars were lowered on one side so the baby could be picked up more easily, and its outstretched head, lightly grazing the child’s, had a deathly stillness about it.
Equally still, Clarisse saw in a single sweeping glance, were the baby’s body, her colorless face, her wide eyes looking deep into the dog’s staring gaze, as if she’d plunged into an abyss of sibylline knowledge and perhaps become lost.
Yet Clarisse had the strong sense of a bond not to be rashly broken, a secret union with no immediate danger for the child. Not for a moment did she doubt the dog’s good intentions.
She heard a horrified cry behind her and felt herself being violently shoved forward. Richard burst into the room, snatched up the baby, and clasped her to him, turning his back to the dog as a shield for the child.
“Get that thing out of here!” he screamed toward the hallway, where his parents were standing.
He backed toward the wall, scarlet with fear and indignation.
The father calmly stepped in. Clarisse saw his eyes study the scene just as hers had a mom
ent before and, no less quick and assured, decide that the danger was not where it seemed. This troubled her. She felt at peace, nonetheless, and very comfortably pure, as if washed clean from within by an intuition higher and wiser than hers, which had chosen her.
“I never want to see that dog in this house again!” Richard shouted furiously.
Clarisse noted that he was taking care not to look at the dog, still sprawled on the bed watching him, dark and serene, silent and proper.
Something struck her, clear as day: that well-behaved dog had the same eyes as Malinka’s mother.
Richard’s father began to stroke its flanks, speaking tenderly into its ear, not to placate it, Clarisse told herself, because he wasn’t afraid of it, but to erase any offense.
The dog stretched its legs, yawned, deigned to get down from the bed.
The father gently grasped its collar—once again, thought Clarisse, not to control it but as if taking the arm of a dear friend—and the two of them left the room without a glance Richard’s way. He sighed in ostentatious relief. He rocked and caressed the child, who had begun to cry.
“That was close,” he said accusingly.
Did he mean to include her in this censure, because she hadn’t rushed forward to snatch the baby away from the dog’s maw?
Clarisse wasn’t sure, but she preferred not to know.
Her certainty that the dog had come to the child’s room not to harm her but to teach her was twisting and turning inside her, and it troubled her like an unwholesome temptation of disloyalty to Richard Rivière. Shouldn’t she have told him of that certainty, wouldn’t he have understood it, found reassurance in it? Oh no, he wouldn’t have understood, and his inability would have made clear to Clarisse what she already knew, that no breath had come to him to show him the way into the dog’s mysterious soul.
She couldn’t help seeing it as a sign of Richard’s weakness that this inspiration had steered clear of him but had entered his father’s heart.
