by Marie Ndiaye
Madame Rivière hadn’t bothered to come into the bedroom. She’d set the table in the kitchen, and the father was sitting and waiting before his plate with the impatient, wearied look of a man who wants to put the chore of the meal behind him and be off as quickly as possible.
Richard showed the baby to his mother, who, thought Clarisse, examined her guardedly, her eyes full of an outraged skepticism, as if this might all be a cruel joke she’d have to thwart before they could laugh at her. She clumsily took the child in her arms, then handed her back almost at once with a furious little giggle.
Later, as the meal was nearing its end and Ladivine was back asleep in her little bed, they heard crunching gravel outside on the terrace. It was the dog, pacing back and forth in front of the house, beneath the kitchen windows.
Seething, Richard asked them:
“What’s with you having that dog now? Since when are you animal lovers?”
“It’s to guard the shop,” said Madame Rivière. “You’ve got to protect yourself these days, you know.”
“It’s got nothing to do with the shop,” the father said deliberately.
He waved his fork toward the mother, not looking at her.
“That’s what she’d like to think, but that’s not it at all. Why would we have brought it here if it was supposed to be guarding the shop? Why do we take it with us wherever we go?”
“Yes, why?” asked the mother, suddenly afraid.
“Because we can’t not, that’s how it is. It’s an order come to life. What do I care about dogs? It’s true, I don’t even like them that much. This one’s different. I had no choice.”
Richard let out a disdainful snicker. He was trying to add scorn to his hatred, Clarisse told herself, but it was beyond him, and scorn refused to take root in so pallid a heart. His gaze was dull, at once full of hate and struggling to summon up some scorn with which to harden itself.
The dog began to yelp. It was jumping up and down on the terrace so its head could be glimpsed through the window. It barked when its eyes met those of Clarisse or Richard’s father, then whimpered when its paws hit the ground and it was once again out of sight.
Identical to the cries of Malinka’s mother, its laments were more than Clarisse could bear.
She walked to the window, and the dog hurried off around the house, glancing impatiently back at Clarisse again and again.
She suddenly realized it was headed for the child’s room, whose window looked onto the yard on the opposite side of the house. She whirled around, raced through the kitchen, ran to Ladivine’s room. She first saw the bounding dog’s huge frantic head through the glass, then the baby’s pale little face as she hiccupped and moaned in her own vomit.
She cried out, picked up the child, patted her back until she heard regular breathing and the faint beat of that soothed, very young heart.
“How did you know, you nice dog, how did you know?” she murmured, staring at the window, where the dog, now at peace, could no longer be seen.
Richard Rivière’s father had just appeared in the doorway.
For the first time Clarisse glimpsed fear in his cold eyes, but it was a respectful fear, docile, a pious fear that in no way diminished him.
—
She went back to visiting Malinka’s mother, leaving the child with a neighbor who would also look after her when Clarisse went back to work.
Sitting in the velvet armchair that had slowly become hers at the servant’s, her gaze wandering over the trinkets her mother had begun to surround herself with—little porcelain elephants, handbells of various sizes, vases never filled with flowers but abundantly covered with fanciful floral motifs—she listened with one ear as the servant told her of bosses and coworkers, with the monotonous insistence, the maniacal, forced intensity Clarisse noticed she always fell into when she sensed her daughter’s thoughts straying, and rather than try to lure them back she seemed to deliberately drive them still farther away with her mind-numbing monologues.
“What about you, how are you getting on?” she would ask at long last, her tone at once aggressive and imploring.
And Clarisse would smile and say nothing, evasive, but smiling lovingly and sincerely all the same.
But her heart was pounding, and, thinking about the baby, from whom she didn’t like to be separated for these few hours, she told herself how she wished she could give her mother the gift of that child. How happy the servant would be!
And to be sure, she would be breaking her vow never to link her existence to the servant’s, but also acquitting herself of it by so great a sacrifice, and so her responsibility to those two, to her child and her mother, would, she thought, be behind her.
Because she would then flee far from both of them, far even from Richard Rivière, not yet realizing what she owed him. And would she not suffer terribly, never again seeing those three she loved far more than life?
But in truth she didn’t mind suffering, if it was the sorrow of love, of not having those you love close beside you.
Far more painful for her was fidelity to her irreversible decision, which was destroying Malinka’s mother over a slow flame, and her, too, Clarisse Rivière, with a brighter flame, more violent, perhaps purifying, but she didn’t yet know—she didn’t know, and simply went on hoping in fear.
—
As the years went by, and Ladivine became a sweet, even-tempered girl, and Richard Rivière’s skillful salesmanship, tireless work, and quiet, indestructible ambition brought him ever-greater responsibilities at the dealership, Clarisse Rivière began to see that winning on one front could only mean losing on the other, that this was how it had to be, that it was a matter of her destiny.
But she led her life onward with an untrembling hand.
Apart from what they weren’t allowed to know, she believed she gave of herself completely to Richard and Ladivine.
Every moment of her life was infused with the certainty that it could be sacrificed to those two, that it belonged above all to them, that Clarisse Rivière was to make use of it only so long as they didn’t need it. Before that man and that child who suspected nothing and enjoyed her generosity in naïve good faith, she pictured herself as a slashed wineskin pouring out the very essence of joyful abnegation, of eager, almost greedy selflessness.
But that notion of her own success was undermined by the ever-more-troublesome thought that her voluntary, permanent self-effacement had constructed a thin wall of ice all around her, that sometimes her daughter and husband couldn’t understand, though they said nothing of it, perhaps knew nothing of it, why they couldn’t get at her in the heart of her emotions.
And yet she must surely feel emotions, said their confused, anxious gazes, and emotions more varied than what she allowed them to see, that unending, inexorable deference, which they might well have suspected was not pure but the product of very laudable hard work.
And might they not be tired of this, might they not be put off, perhaps, by the thought that they had to be grateful for it?
Might they not be tired and put off by such relentless generosity, the patient, unforthcoming man and the increasingly mysterious and obliging child, neither of whom, perhaps, wanted so much goodness and wished she would let them know her in some other way, too?
Clarisse Rivière felt the cold settling in, furtively filling the house, seeming to grip Richard Rivière and Ladivine, gradually encasing them, too, in the very delicate rime of a slightly stiff demeanor. But she didn’t know what to do so that this wouldn’t be.
She often laughed, often joked with them merrily, and her laugh was like crystal, it was brief and noncontagious. The more she devoted herself to her husband and daughter, the more she could feel them taking their distance, without defiance or resentment, as people turn away in discomfort from an incomprehensible passion.
But how frigid was the breath she exhaled.
Sometimes this left her discouraged, defeated, knowing the invisible presence of Malinka’s mother in her
dark street kept her from giving her gestures and words the guilelessness that would warm them.
And she felt equally incapable of raising her daughter Ladivine by a common morality’s well-defined precepts.
No sooner was she called on to offer an opinion of some deed, to judge the appropriateness of some attitude, or simply to say what she thought, good or bad, of some situation than the servant’s silhouette appeared before her daunted eyes, seeming to defy her to judge anyone, she who had long since found herself guilty.
She fell into the habit of shrugging her shoulders, mute and distant, lips slightly pursed, when Ladivine told her of some clique that had offended another, and before the child’s upturned, questioning eyes, before the child striving to understand what to make of all this, she smiled curtly, saying nothing, and thus seeming to express her disgust at the story itself. And so Ladivine finally stopped telling her what went on at school, and Clarisse forgot that things she should know about ever happened at school.
She would realize this far too late.
Even before silence invaded their house, a polite, cozy, placid silence, she had already closed her ears to the things Richard Rivière and Ladivine said, though she pretended to listen, though her face and her gestures were the picture of careful attention—but only the commonplace words by which they ordered their day-to-day lives were allowed into her consciousness. The rest she was not to hear.
Because if she did she wouldn’t be able to speak without lying, and while she wasn’t lying when she was giving the man and the child all she could give of herself, she would be lying if she talked about this or that like a free woman. And for that lie the accusing face of the servant, who knew just how faithless Clarisse Rivière was, how much she already had to make up for, would never have left her in peace.
And then what more could she do, she who was already giving all she could of herself?
She was doing everything she could.
But it tortured her that she couldn’t hold back the numbness gradually overtaking her household, the cold torpor exuded in spite of her by her artificial, oblique self, until in the end she grew used to it, and came to believe this was how things were supposed to be in happy families.
—
She stared at her thin, mild face in the mirror, only faintly lined with delicate wrinkles at the corners of her eyelids. She couldn’t believe nothing showed in the still water of her gray-green eyes or the even crease of her slightly upturned lips.
Her light-red dyed hair was pulled into a loose chignon, her brow was pale and smooth, and two pearls gleamed opaquely on her ears. Who would ever suspect she was a woman in despair?
Like the rest of the house, the bedroom was neat and impeccably clean, not one piece of clothing in sight, everything in its place in the big blond-wood drawers, the polished armoires, their doors set with hard, efficient mirrors.
Clarisse Rivière still scrupulously neatened and cleaned this house they’d bought some years before, in the center of Langon, once they’d sold their little house on the outskirts, but now she hated the house as she’d never hated anyone in her life.
Because long before she did, that house had heard and understood what Richard Rivière said, and its old brick and stone walls would forever preserve the memory of those terrible words, unaffected, never once sighing in sympathy with her sadness.
She wanted the house to grieve and suffer as she did, she wished it would collapse and swallow them both, her who didn’t want to go on living, and him, Richard Rivière, who had spoken those strange, dangerous words she’d long before managed to stop hearing but which he’d so often repeated that in the end she had to give in and understand them.
Did he say “I’m leaving this house, I’m going to live somewhere else” or “I can’t go on living here, I’m leaving”?
That pretty house never reacted, as if indifferent to the insult or aware that none of this really concerned it, and neither did Clarisse Rivière, she only smiled vaguely, retied her blue dress’s belt on her hip, started out of the room, but that was when Richard Rivière put his hand on her arm and, realizing she’d once again succeeded in not hearing or understanding him, once again found a way to close her ears, like turning off a hearing aid, or, who knows, to make an unintelligible hash of the very clear words he’d just spoken in his patient, firm, friendly voice, he held her back with one hand as she fled, she who had sensed the threat in the air, her skin already prickling and shivering, and again he spoke those words that the house had already heard, that it had already absorbed in its thick walls, that had left it unmoved: “I’m going away, I’m leaving this house.”
No more than the walls, Clarisse Rivière did not collapse.
But the words and their cruel meaning had pierced her defenseless skin, the delicate, creamy, lilylike flesh that Richard Rivière once never wearied of caressing and clutching, just as she loved his body of firm, dry leather, and she felt her skin closing over those words, and those words calmly, meticulously, beginning to wreak their damage.
She’d looked toward the window, she’d seen the big chestnut tree on the square, and suddenly her hand began to itch, because, almost distracted by the memory, she could picture herself rubbing its ribbed trunk with that hand, and even now, it seemed, Richard Rivière taking that hand in his own and raising it to his lips.
Dimly, that gesture reminded her of another. Had she not, one long-ago day, pressed the servant’s hand to her mouth? Had she not tried, not to soften her mother’s sorrow, but to save herself from the pain and the knowledge of her own cruelty? And had that gesture saved her? Oh, she didn’t know anymore.
Now she was staring emptily into the chestnut’s leafy boughs, and, feeling Richard Rivière’s rough lips on her hand, she thought it was the trunk itself kissing her palm, the entire tree trying to redeem itself after for some reason inflicting on her a sadness she would never escape—but now she’d forgotten what it was, or even if there was anything to remember, and so she tentatively turned her eyes toward Richard Rivière and saw he was about to speak again, suspecting she hadn’t heard, which was true and false at the same time, because now she could feel a way being cleared inside her for a monstrous pain, but she had no idea where it was coming from, and with sluggish surprise she mused that the old chestnut tree patiently burrowing its roots under the asphalt on the square, if it really was that tree trying to redeem itself by exhaling a dry breath onto her hand, was in no position to torture her, that pitiful trash-ringed tree, and her so tall and pale in her sky-blue dress, her dainty-heeled sandals, oh, she would already have fled this room if she weren’t inexplicably being held back by one hand.
“I’m not sure you understand what I said,” Richard Rivière was telling her in his steadily patient voice, insistent but detached, as if conscientiously discharging a duty he knew would be difficult. “I’m going away, I don’t want to live here anymore, with you, which doesn’t mean I’ve stopped loving you, you’ll always be my…”
A siren began to shriek, but Richard Rivière’s lips went on moving, his hand gently squeezing Clarisse’s, and his lack of reaction surprised her until she realized the awful noise was coming from her own head.
At the same moment, a fierce wave of nausea made her moan aloud.
No doubt thinking she was about to collapse, Richard Rivière took her in his arms. She could see his anxious eyes, his moving lips, but not a sound could be heard through the wail in her ears, and she shook her head, vaguely ashamed to be making a scene.
But she felt so ill, so terribly ill, that her embarrassment ebbed, pushed back by a grief full of nausea, disgust, and unbounded horror, which now flooded through her, making her limbs twitch, vainly trying to throw open her breast so it could get out, but her firm, solid flesh had closed over that pain like the house’s walls over Richard Rivière’s irrevocable words, and nothing, she thought, would ever dislodge it.
She rubbed her face against his shirt, inhaled the fresh, childlike smell she knew
so well, thinking, So that’s what was coming to me, with an astonishment beyond measure.
No less immense was her disbelief that nothing showed in the mirror just a few hours later. A slight lostness in her eyes might tell the servant that something was troubling her daughter when she next went to see her, but what that torment might be she would never guess.
Clarisse Rivière found no comfort in this. For the first time in her life she wished she could confide in Malinka’s mother, tell her not of her joy but her sorrow, and see that sorrow’s reflection on the servant’s face, so like her own.
When she called her daughter Ladivine in Germany the next day, she would tell her of Richard Rivière’s decision in a halting but calm, steady voice, and Ladivine’s palpable sadness would come as a balm to her, but then she would realize Richard Rivière had already told her, and, suddenly embarrassed, she would say nothing of her desperate need for consolation.
“I’m fine,” she would murmur in response to Ladivine’s question. “Yes, yes, I’m fine.”
She would later admit to herself that, against all reason, she was hoping Ladivine might rush straight to Langon, try to talk her father out of going away, press her to her young, vigorous, supple breast, and then everything would be just as it was, Richard Rivière would once again climb into his SUV every morning to go off and sell cars, carefree as ever, quietly, humbly, but visibly proud of his success, while she set off on foot, her jaunty heels clacking smartly over the paving stones, for the pizzeria where she now oversaw the waitstaff, and maybe Ladivine would move home again, watch over them, open her father’s eyes to the reality of their love.
Because they were in love, weren’t they? Clarisse Rivière, at least, felt an unmingled passion for her husband, unquestioning and uncritical.
But no such thing was happening.
The memory of the way it actually was came roaring back at her whenever she let herself drift into that daydream, or in the earliest hours of the morning, and she returned to reality with tears streaming down her cheeks.
Richard Rivière was still there beside her, cordial, watchful, and distantly polite in a way that stung her cruelly. He was packing up his things, and Clarisse lent a hand, though she could see he didn’t like it, that it embarrassed him and, strangely, angered him.
