Ladivine

by Marie Ndiaye

  She studied him when he turned his back—his tan nape, his hair, still thick and dark, the way his shoulder muscles bulged beneath his T-shirt when he lifted a box—then forgot to look away when he glanced furtively in her direction, catching her on the brink of tears, lost in thought, drained and hopeless.

  He came to her reluctantly, gave her a distant embrace, as if taking care to avoid any gesture that might give Clarisse the idea his decision was anything other than irrevocable.

  She felt that distance, and she clung to his neck, immediately thinking, Soon I won’t be able to do this anymore, and panic knotted her stomach. She bent double, silent, breathless with grief.

  Richard Rivière’s body was as familiar as her own, and she thought she knew his face more intimately than hers, more than Clarisse Rivière’s narrow, delicate face, once a certain Malinka’s, which she always looked at askance in the mirror, uncertain and ill at ease, weary of that reflection.

  She’d never stopped studying Richard Rivière’s face, in repeated but serene wonderment, no longer sure if it was handsome or not, little caring, knowing it had aged and surely changed, but seeing it in the eternal present of her love and devotion.

  How, she wondered, distraught and unbelieving, how would she ever do without that face? She might have gouged out her own eyes, had she not realized that Richard Rivière’s face would be just as absent to her blind.

  “Where will you live?” she asked dully.

  He paused for a very brief moment.

  “In Annecy. I found something there.”

  “That’s a long way from here,” she murmured, shocked.

  “Yes, it is,” he said simply, with a half shrug.

  Then—wanting to spare her, she thought, perhaps to conceal any eagerness or anticipation in his eyes as he spoke the name Annecy—he gently turned away.

  They made love one last time the night before he left, and Richard Rivière, considerate and giving as always, seemed to her almost too attentive, hurtfully so, as if trying to soothe or appease her, to ward off an anger that she thus began to feel, almost reflexively, no such thought ever having entered her mind before, rapt as she was with shame and despair.

  But no righteous anger could she feel. Were Richard Rivière’s reasons for leaving the house not perfectly valid, whatever they might be? Who was she to judge? Had she not made of the servant’s life a bitter bread?

  She pressed hard against her husband’s body, bit his neck. He flinched, but he didn’t object. She hadn’t realized she was weeping, and her tears flowed between their two conjoined breasts, mingling with their sweat, equally salty, washing away any temptation or attempt to be angry, and leaving her, as for a few seconds longer she clung to that man who was at the same time herself, her husband, and her son, horribly barren and sad.

  —

  When Richard Rivière’s SUV turned the corner and its silvery gleam disappeared, the August sun no longer illuminating the chestnut tree, dry, ignored, and alone on the asphalted square, Clarisse Rivière took a few hurried, uncertain steps down the sidewalk, as if she’d remembered that she was supposed to follow him and feared she might lose sight of the car.

  Suddenly she stopped, her legs tangling, and she nearly fell over.

  She let out a hoarse moan, sternly crossed her arms to steady herself, and then, as she was approaching the front door of the house, she caught sight of a big red-brown dog, emaciated and ungainly, in the sunlight’s almost unbearable blaze.

  It was sidling toward her, watching her with one eye, its ugly head half turned away. Her vision dimmed in terror.

  “No, absolutely not, not yet!” she shouted at the dog.

  She began to run, raced into the house, slammed the door, and pushed the bolt, turning the key in the lock.

  Then she changed her mind, tremblingly opened the door, and offered herself to the wilting heat, putting on a valiant smile but feeling her mouth and chin quivering. What did she care now, what could she care about anything now? What could possibly deserve her fear now?

  The dog had gone on its way. She saw it turn the corner, it, too; she told herself she’d been stupid and cowardly and felt by turns freezing cold and devoured by a burning flame.

  Had she not made of the servant’s life a bitter bread?

  —

  She thought she’d been fatally wounded and had only to wait for her time to come, settling into that wait with the visible detachment and resignation she was so adept at displaying.

  Through the fog of her deep indifference to everything said around her, and even potentially said to her face, she sensed that people saw her as a humiliated woman.

  Her daughter Ladivine, who telephoned often, and her coworkers at the restaurant, and Richard Rivière himself, who dutifully called once a month and wired her money she never spent, they were all doing their best, discreetly, affectionately, sometimes with openly expressed concern, to rescue her from her humiliation.

  But she’d never felt any such thing. Nor was she humiliated that people thought her humiliated, only vaguely surprised.

  Richard Rivière’s leaving had filled her with shame, because it told her she’d failed in her attempt to offer all the love and generosity a human being might need, and more.

  For, she thought, no one could weary of such a gift if it was properly given, they’d know nothing of it, and it would filter invisibly into the tight weave of their lives.

  And yet Richard Rivière had grown sick of it, and he’d run away, that was her failure, and that was what filled her with shame, but not humiliation.

  She didn’t blame her husband, who’d done what he thought he had to; she blamed herself, and she felt ridiculous, pointless, heartless. She’d made of the servant’s life a bitter bread and in the end nothing had made up for that, though in her vanity she was convinced all this time that it had.

  —

  She paid less attention to her appearance, her dress, and her clothes weren’t as perfectly, rigorously clean as they once were. Her feet were yellowed and dry in her sandals.

  She was aware of this negligence, and sometimes it gave her a grim satisfaction, for she thought of her body as an old dog that could never be punished enough for having, say, devoured a little child.

  She settled into a long wait for death, exhausted by grief and loathing for everything around her, insensitive to everything else, frozen, and even the birth of Annika and then Daniel, whom she went to see several times in Berlin, little touched her, however hard she tried, as she took them in her arms, to revive the emotion she’d felt on embracing her own baby.

  She knew her indifference and desperate attempts to conceal it gave her a slightly hunted, fearful look. She didn’t know what to say, what to talk about, kept her mouth shut.

  When Richard Rivière called, she could scarcely summon the strength to murmur a response to his hello, and tears sprang to her eyes, trickled down her face and neck as she listened to his falsely cheerful chatter, against an indecipherable background of other lively, spirited voices that made her think he must live his life amid unending revelry.

  That didn’t hurt her. She noted it without interest, but the sound of Richard Rivière’s voice brought her ever-fresh torments. Her fingers convulsively clutched the receiver, she couldn’t catch her breath, couldn’t listen, lost in dread of the moment when he would hang up and she’d be alone again in her house, the house that knew everything and never came to her rescue.

  Please, please, come back to the house, she would say, or think she was saying, since Richard Rivière never answered, and very likely she hadn’t said a word, though she couldn’t help thinking the house must have heard her and swallowed her plea in its walls.

  Nor, certainly, did she say, I love you so, but the words rolled around and resounded in her aching skull, making such a din that Richard Rivière could only have heard them, had he not striven so insistently to fill up the moment with his own harmless, lighthearted words.

  He did come back to t
he house, though, just once.

  Not, she thought dejectedly, and perhaps because for a few minutes she’d been foolish enough to think that it was, to surrender to her love and her sorrow, to rescue her from her quiet agony.

  He was coming back to the house because his father had died in Toulouse, and so they drove off to the funeral together in Richard Rivière’s SUV.

  Three years had gone by since his leaving. Clarisse Rivière found him more handsome than before, a little more filled out, and dressed with a very studied elegance, like a prosperous, fastidious, slightly anxious man.

  She threw herself against him as soon as she opened the door, and she found a certain taste for life tentatively coming back to her, slightly dimming her grief and bewilderment. She could feel his discomfort at having her in his arms. She didn’t care. She held him close, so happy to be seeing him again, nestling her face against his neck, thinking he might be uncomfortable because in his mysterious Annecy existence there was another woman who held him like this, but not caring, lost in her joy at rediscovering Richard Rivière’s smell.

  If he’d fled what she’d given him so generously, that alone was worth thinking about. What he’d fled to didn’t interest her.

  Richard Rivière’s mother looked at them with an almost hostile face. She seemed not so much stricken as infuriated by her husband’s death, or rather, Clarisse realized uneasily, by its circumstances.

  Without pleasure they drank a warm, syrupy vin cuit in the little apartment where Richard Rivière was raised, above the stationery shop that the parents were still running only the month before, when they’d made the decision to retire. The mother had gone off for a mineral cure in the mountains while the father took inventory.

  “The shop was locked up, the blind was down, and your father had the dog with him, that horrible dog,” the mother said accusingly.

  Richard Rivière swirled the sweet wine in his glass, looking around him in boredom and distaste.

  “Not that same dog you brought to our house?” whispered Clarisse, with a nervous titter.

  The mother almost roared in irritation. She tried to catch Richard Rivière’s eye, but he very visibly refused. She seemed bent on rebuking him and, unable to express her outrage in a shared glance, furiously shook her head. Clarisse remembered him telling her, one day long before, that his parents habitually blamed him for their every concern and sorrow.

  “No, of course not, a different dog, the first one died ten years ago at least. But it was the same breed, and they looked so much alike you forgot it wasn’t that other one. Not to mention that your father gave it the same name.”

  She began to sob, dry eyed, her broad face contorted and creased.

  “I never wanted a dog, myself,” she whimpered, “and neither did your father, but he was convinced he didn’t have a choice.”

  When the mother got home from her cure, two weeks later, she found the father lying in the back room of the shop, his neck and part of his face ripped away. The dog was standing close by, and it growled viciously on catching sight of her.

  “They told me your father probably died of a heart attack, and then the dog went after him because it was starving. But I know that’s not it. What I think is that your father, who was in perfect health, was just doing his work, minding his own business, and that dog lunged at his throat and killed him on purpose.”

  Richard Rivière shrugged brusquely, disgusted and angry. He banged his glass of vin cuit down on the coffee table. A few drops jumped out and spattered on the varnished wood.

  “Why would you think a thing like that?” he shouted. “Have you ever heard of a dog ripping its master’s throat out for no reason?”

  “I never said for no reason,” the mother spat back. “You hear me, Son? I never said for no reason. It wanted vengeance for something, that’s what I think.”

  She leaned forward until her face almost touched Richard Rivière’s, so he couldn’t turn away.

  “Do you have nothing to feel guilty about? Are you absolutely certain your life is in order?” she whispered, with such fury in her face that Clarisse saw him close his eyes in anguish.

  “My life isn’t hurting anyone,” he murmured stoutly.

  “I hope so, for your sake,” the mother hissed, “because your father ended up paying for something or someone, and he was the most virtuous man there ever was. So, yes, I dearly hope you’ll take care to live a life no one will ever curse you for.”

  Surprised, almost insulted, Clarisse Rivière caught him glancing uncomfortably in her direction, not so much suspicious as wary and fearful.

  She gave him the nonanswer of an opaque, amiable gaze, but her slighted heart began to bleed again, protesting. Tears stung her eyes.

  Can you really not understand, she silently murmured, that I will never call down the slightest hardship on you, nor anyone’s wrath, because above all else I love you and will always see you as my husband, and you never once hurt me before the irreparable catastrophe that your leaving was for me, and even about that I’ve never felt any malice, only a grief that will never fade, which I don’t hold you responsible for, because it was me you wanted to be free of, not the house that hears everything, which means it’s my fault, can you really not see that, and believe that if anyone ever wishes sorrow on you it will never, ever be me?

  “What happened to the dog?” she hurried to say.

  “They put it to sleep, of course,” said the mother, whose fat face suddenly seemed to melt with exhaustion and sadness.

  In a disgusted voice, but as if she thought it her duty, she added:

  “But it will come back, I know it will, that one or another, exactly the same, with the same name, and it will attack anyone who deserves it.”

  —

  Only a few longtime customers and two or three neighbors came to the funeral, for the Rivière parents had never sought to make friends in their life, wholly occupied with each other and their shop.

  Clarisse held Richard’s arm, her fingers lightly caressing the fine wool of his elegant overcoat, which he’d picked out without her in a city she knew nothing of.

  The bell of despair was tolling in the distance, nonetheless. She could just make out its muffled ringing from a future in which Richard Rivière’s return to absence, once he’d driven her home and gone on his way, did not yet seem a certainty.

  After all, it was she, Clarisse Rivière, who was standing close by his side at the grave, it was she whom he suddenly looked down at with his moved, loving gaze, his tanned, full face marked with hollows and wrinkles but to her still the same as the shy young face she’d first beheld in Le Rainbow, some twenty-five years before.

  Did she not have every reason to ignore the grim thud of that all-too-familiar bell as she huddled against him in the biting wind and he patted her back with one hand to say, Don’t worry, everything will be fine?

  Maybe that baleful bell hadn’t noticed all this, its every ring counting off the dreary, dark days of loneliness past and future—Richard Rivière’s fingers brushed her hand, he turned his face to hers, no longer intimidated, no longer young or smooth, but, she thought, just as overflowing with inexpressible love as the face looking up at her when she came to take his order, long ago, at Le Rainbow.

  —

  Over and over her memory would replay those moments in the cemetery, the brief hour of perfect accord and loving harmony that had let her hold the reverberations of despair at a distance, almost inaudible.

  She was convinced that she’d felt and understood that moment accurately, hadn’t made too much of it. Her imagination hadn’t run away with her; she was of course happy to see Richard Rivière again on the morning of his arrival, but she hadn’t been hoping for anything.

  He took her home, and their conversation in the SUV was untroubled, though she noted his refusal to talk about his father and the dog when she offered a thought on the subject and saw him grow silent, his lips suddenly gray and tight.

  He pulled up to t
he house and didn’t want to come in. He hugged her, climbed back into the car, waved a final farewell, and Clarisse Rivière had a powerful feeling, so horrible and absolute that it was almost an icy relief, that she would never see him again.

  —

  It had been years now, with Richard Rivière gone, since Clarisse’s heels last clattered boldly and efficiently over the tiles of the pizzeria, where she oversaw a staff of four and still waited tables herself.

  Not that her heels were never heard striking that hard floor, but it was an incidental noise, indifferent, with no resonance of contentment and innocent pride.

  Sometimes, not realizing it, she dragged her feet. Then, a moment later, the horrible shuffling sound snapped her out of it, reminded her of the need for some semblance of dignity, and she made what felt like a heroic effort to walk properly.

  Everything meant boredom and weariness, except perhaps for her visits to the servant, when, as she sat in her bronze velvet armchair listening to her mother’s morose chatter, she forgot that she was Clarisse Rivière, or couldn’t recall who that Clarisse Rivière was, that woman whose husband had left her for Annecy, whom everyone thought humiliated but who was only ashamed of her own failure.

  The pizzeria’s manager had planned a party at the restaurant and invited Clarisse with such insistence that she felt obliged to accept, despite her deep dislike of gatherings, high spirits, and pleasantries.

  She bought a violet jersey dress that clung to her slender frame and hung down to her ankles, with pumps to match. She didn’t care about being pretty and nicely dressed. She only wanted to honor the sincere kindness of the man who’d invited her, who’d urged her to come, hoping it might lift her spirits.

  When she got home, some three hours later, Freddy Moliger was with her.

  She stopped on the square in front of her house and pressed her back to the chestnut tree, listening, with an almost violent attentiveness and concentration that surprised even her, to the detailed, meandering, alternately lyrical and chillingly bleak tale of a life of grim poverty that wreck of a man was recounting.