Ladivine

by Marie Ndiaye

  Clarisse Rivière felt the fog parting inside her, the thick, dully buzzing cloud that kept her safely walled off from the rest of the world and filled her gaze with the gently frightened, languishing look that, she knew, made people see her as a woman untouched by guile. She felt it as a searing pain, a razor-sharp blade slicing cleanly into her mind, draining away all that now had no reason to be there, to linger there.

  It happened the moment Freddy Moliger came toward her, with his doleful face, his unsteady, ravaged body, unwholesomely thin.

  She felt it, that sudden feeling of exposure, a sense that no sheltering torpor now stood between her and this lost man!

  Alarmed, surprised at herself, she immediately thought: He has to be told that my name is Malinka. This left her shaken and grateful, like a vision that might mean her salvation, though at a great price.

  Every word Freddy Moliger spoke touched the vulnerable spot in her new sensitivity, her at long last unveiled ability to feel, and, she thought, it was as if her mother, the servant, had sent her this messenger to strip her bare and, perhaps, if she received him as she should, to free her.

  His manner was open and plain, with a shy person’s bluntness and awkward, joyless humor. Sometimes he looked at her full on, his gaze a dull blue beneath his pale-brown eyelids, and sometimes he looked at her sidelong, as if suspecting she might be trying to deceive him with an unjustifiable goodwill, watching for Clarisse’s duplicity to show. He spoke quickly and abundantly in a tangle of words, perhaps hoping this torrent would drown the grossest of the many grammatical errors he made, having of his own language only a vague notion, resentful and suspicious, because that very language looked down on him and laid traps for him, purely to expose his ineptitude.

  Her forearms crossed behind her back, she caressed the trunk of the chestnut tree and thought the time hadn’t yet come to go inside the house, its hostile walls heavy with words that never should have been spoken, with those countless cries of “Clarisse!”

  “My name is Malinka,” she whispered.

  And then she was afraid, so deep was her emotion, afraid what had happened when Richard Rivière told her he was leaving might now happen again: waves of nausea, a horrible shrieking in her ears. Because she felt shocked in much the same way, not freed, as she’d been foolish enough to believe, but terrified at what might become of her if she resolved to be Malinka again.

  And now it was done, now she’d said it, and she couldn’t take it back.

  “Malinka? They told me your name was Clarisse.”

  He nodded back toward the restaurant.

  “My name is Malinka, that’s my real name,” she said, louder now, her voice steady.

  And she felt as though she was forever turning away from the few people she was close to, her daughter Ladivine, her former husband, two or three acquaintances in the city, and toward Freddy Moliger’s rough company, where no imposture would ever again make of her a comfortably deluded woman.

  Malinka had never married, never had a child or a boyfriend. No one remembered her but her mother.

  —

  Everything Freddy Moliger told her, with an urgency she read not as egocentrism but as a fierce resolve to show himself in all his destitution so anyone making the unlikely choice to take an interest in him wouldn’t be disturbed or disappointed when bits of his past life came out, everything he told her in his slightly high-pitched, grating, disagreeable voice, every detail resonated in her with an excessive, exhausting intensity—even more powerful than if she’d lived through it all herself, and because she now felt as though she were carrying her heart outside of her body, unadorned and quivering and blood soaked from the sacrifice of her disguises.

  For the first time she felt a kinship.

  She had of course desperately loved Richard Rivière, passionately loved Ladivine and the servant, she’d given herself entirely and imperiously to her daughter and husband, but had she ever felt a kinship with them? Oh no, she didn’t think so, not as she did with Freddy Moliger.

  She had no desire to devote herself to this strange man, and she would never love him as she still loved Richard Rivière. That made no difference. She found no real pleasure in this relationship, no fulfillment, but it tormented her in a way she’d never known, through no fault of Freddy Moliger’s. She couldn’t think of him without the servant’s face appearing to her, enigmatic, unchanged, unavoidable. Quietly accusing, too, and she didn’t shy away; she took what was coming to her.

  Was it too late to try to make of the servant’s life less bitter a bread?

  Freddy Moliger told her he’d grown up with his younger brother Christopher in suburban Bordeaux, between a hard-drinking mother and a father whose mildest display of bad temper was emptying his children’s satchels out their twelfth-floor window and then threatening to toss them both after their school things. Eventually they were taken from their parents and entrusted to their grandmother, a fairly benign woman, although Malinka immediately saw that Freddy Moliger was skipping over many occasions when the grandmother took out her chronic rage on the two boys with a broomstick or cutting board. He spoke of those objects in a lighthearted, almost affectionate tone, like emblems of a comical eccentricity in that woman who looked after them until he was twelve and his brother ten, and then died. Of what, Freddy Moliger never knew. He’d simply come home from school one day and found her dead on the floor of the kitchen, her heavy body stuck between the chairs and the table. The brothers were returned to their parents, who’d had two other children in the meantime. But their father couldn’t stand having them around, as Freddy Moliger put it with a sort of stoical understanding, and as if that, too, were merely a quirk of his father’s odd character, nothing that could be judged.

  This, Malinka observed, was how Freddy Moliger always described the brutal or senseless acts by which adults had made his childhood a torment: without rancor or reproach, no different from certain trivial events, certain minutiae he also occasionally brought up, their telling sometimes seeming to Malinka devoid of purpose or sense. Blows and cruel words, screaming and hostility, were as much a part of the everyday world as the discomfort of rain on a bare head, as the fleeting tickle of a mosquito bite, and none of those had anything to do with morality. Which is why, if Moliger’s father or mother suddenly took a closed fist to Freddy’s head or chest, there was no question of faulting them, any more than you could rail at the forces of nature.

  Once again removed from their parents, the two brothers were placed first with one family, in the country, and then, now separated, with a second, because, Freddy Moliger calmly explained, they’d begun acting up. They were reunited at the collège, escaped together, stole two bottles of wine and a bag of potato chips from the supermarket, then hid under a bridge, eating, drinking, drowsing, until it came time to get back on the school bus. They were unhappy in their foster homes, both because they were apart and because the families didn’t like them and secretly mistreated them. Or so at least Malinka translated Freddy Moliger’s account, because he never used fraught words; he simply described situations, answering, when she cried “They hated you, you were miserable!” that he didn’t know, that it was possible—vaguely put out, she sensed, at hearing her explain with abstractions something she hadn’t known or experienced.

  He then came to the foster families’ defense, saying “You know, my brother and I were pretty hard to handle” in an objective tone that condemned neither the adults’ cruelty and thoughtlessness nor the children’s unstable behavior.

  She came to sense that, in Freddy Moliger’s eyes, any interpretation on her part was a sign of his own deficiency, that she was only restating what he’d just said, and only because he didn’t know how to tell a story or make himself understood. This left him sullen and irritable. She noticed, and took to listening in silence.

  She looked at his pallid, droop-cornered eyes, his mottled, pockmarked face, his coarse yellow hair, like a patch of grass burned by pesticide; she looked at him and
thought that it wasn’t easy to love and want to touch such a damaged face, she told herself that, and at the same time she knew she would manage, without forcing or feigning it, not out of generosity or kindness but because the time would come when she’d want to, unstoppably, once she’d learned how to know him, Freddy Moliger, in all his strangeness.

  Then she would want to caress and protect his poor face.

  It wouldn’t give her the sensual pleasure she felt on stroking Richard Rivière’s handsome, healthy face, but she’d learn to like it all the same, even without pleasure.

  Nothing about Freddy Moliger was pleasant, but very soon Malinka couldn’t imagine doing without the feeling of her own nature being revealed, which only Freddy Moliger’s face and stories could bring her.

  Not that he offered it, not that it was anything like a gift. But, though he didn’t know it, he was showing her the way into her own secrets. Oh, it wasn’t pretty, and sometimes she thought she’d never find peace again, but she wouldn’t have traded that pain for all the serenity of the life she lived before, when Richard Rivière was still with her.

  Freddy Moliger was there, sitting on a chair in the kitchen with a cup of milky coffee she’d made him. She stood leaning against the sink and saw him enjoying that coffee, adding some sugar, a little more milk, exacting and sullen at the same time, feigning disdain, as if afraid that any sign it was good would summon someone to snatch away the cup, to punish him for enjoying himself when he didn’t deserve to.

  Now, in bits and pieces, he was telling her that the police had come to arrest him and his brother. Though younger than he, Christopher put up an arrogant and defiant front while he himself trembled in terror, to such a degree that the police ended up letting them go, he said, so clearly finding all this coherent that she didn’t dare ask him to explain. So they left the police station, and Christopher wanted to go play by the railroad tracks. They were in no hurry to get back to their foster homes, especially Freddy, whose family beat him, whereas Christopher never let anyone lay a hand on him. And then, as he was crossing the tracks, Christopher was crushed by a train. Freddy ran away as fast as his legs could carry him, he ran through the farm fields and into the little woods where there wasn’t even a path, not going for help but simply because he was half out of his head, half out of his head, he said again in his piercing but still-unemotional voice.

  He took a sip of coffee and held the liquid in his mouth for a few seconds, lips thrust out. His eyes reddened. Malinka turned toward the sink, rinsed a glass.

  A few years after that Freddy Moliger was in prison, briefly, because he hadn’t actually done anything wrong, but he was too young, and prison messed him up, he said coldly, as if stating a general rule. Then he got married and his wife had a baby, a girl, but she met another man and disappeared one day out of the blue, taking the baby with her, meaning that Freddy Moliger never really knew the child, so to speak, which still pained him to this day. He once tried to see his daughter, when she was little, but she lived far away with her mother and the guy, and Freddy Moliger couldn’t afford the trip. And he had a feeling the mother was trying to turn the child against him so he’d leave them in peace, and then they’d be rid of Freddy Moliger.

  That’s how it was. He’d also forgotten the name of the village where Christopher was buried, and that, too, saddened him deeply, he would have liked to put flowers on the grave now and then. But as always the problem was money, because cars and trains were expensive. Not to mention, he concluded with a terse little laugh, that he’d have to think of the name of that damn village. He’d recently asked his mother, but she couldn’t remember it either, assuming she ever knew. With all this he began to drink pretty heavily, and that’s where he stood now, but his life was no worse than before. He thought things were looking up for him. Once in a while he did some work for a local farmer, in the vineyards, or picking vegetables in the summertime. He shared an apartment with two or three friends, and in the end everything was fine, except that on a sheet with his signature at the bottom he’d written that he wanted to be buried alongside his brother and didn’t know where the grave was, and that got to him.

  He was thirty-four years old, he told her, and he knew he looked fifty but didn’t care. He had a slight limp, the result of a fierce thrashing by his father twenty-five years before, and that didn’t bother him either, it never got in his way or stopped him from doing what he had to.

  Here he snickered, as if he’d cracked a good joke. And all at once Malinka realized that he had to struggle constantly against howling rage, and that, if she herself had always refrained from judging others’ acts because she was guilty of a perpetual, ongoing crime against the servant, what kept Freddy Moliger from accusing anyone was rooted less in personal, spontaneous stoicism than in the fear of seeing his anger’s terrible face come to life.

  —

  She took him to meet the servant just two days after they met.

  “Do you want to come with me to my mother’s?” she’d asked him, holding her breath.

  “Of course,” he said, surprised, happy.

  She hadn’t yet taken Freddy Moliger’s face in her hands, and she was shaken to see a stranger’s face when she looked at him. She was no less surprised by the importance that face had taken on in her life, that stranger’s face she had to work to remember when he wasn’t around.

  And yet she wanted him to see the servant, and she wanted her to be introduced to someone by Malinka for the first time before she touched and caressed his skin.

  In her eagerness to give her mother the gift that was Freddy Moliger, and to hear him call her Malinka in front of the servant as if no Clarisse Rivière had ever existed, she ignored the Tuesday rule, just this once, and took the train to Bordeaux on a Sunday, with Freddy Moliger at her side.

  Malinka’s mother opened the door suspiciously. Tufts of hair stuck straight out of her tight chignon, the zipper of her jeans was only half up.

  When she was expecting her daughter, she always came to the door impeccably dressed, not a hair out of place, thought Malinka in a sudden wave of sadness.

  The servant gave Freddy Moliger a silent, unblinking stare.

  “This is Freddy,” said Malinka.

  He embraced the servant as naturally as could be.

  “Your daughter looks just like you, madame,” he said, in a voice even more strident than usual.

  The servant’s face didn’t trouble him at all, and Malinka was so grateful that she impulsively caressed his cheek. Freddy Moliger gave her a pleased smile.

  He stepped into the room and exclaimed over the curios decorating her shelves, a thousand porcelain trinkets, mostly animals, cherubs, or shepherdesses, which Malinka’s mother spent hours arranging and rearranging, their placement governed by secret affinities.

  The servant stepped toward him cautiously, as she would a slightly dangerous dog. But her eyes shone with pleasure when she began telling Freddy Moliger the source of each object, and why she preferred this one to that, and he urged her on with lively questions.

  Freddy Moliger was dressed in a pale-green short-sleeved shirt and beige twill pants. He’d plastered back his dead-grass hair, and when he wasn’t speaking his washed-out eyes looked just as dead, so dead that the effort he seemed to expend to come back to life when he next spoke gave his most ordinary sentences a heroic, unhoped-for, even final quality, which, Malinka observed, commanded attention and a slightly anxious respect.

  Everything about him expressed an artless, loyal goodwill toward the servant, and a sincere interest in the story behind every trinket, in all its special features.

  Next he admired the decor and the furniture of the servant’s apartment, the unlikely jumble that somehow created a strange and sophisticated whole, not that she was trying for any such effect.

  Then he suggested they go out to lunch, if they’d be so kind as to invite him.

  He was exceptionally cheerful. He wasn’t charming, thought Malinka, not the least bit appeal
ing, with his high voice, his large pores, his strawlike hair, but so boisterous were his high spirits, between two bouts of sepulchral blankness, when he simply stood listening, motionless, all taste for life seeming to drain unimpeded from his thin, tortured body, so abundant was his good cheer and so stirring its repeated, miraculous return that Malinka found herself irresistibly driven to look into that plain face and study it, disoriented and moved, her hands jittering restlessly.

  The servant gave a girlish cry:

  “Oh yes, let’s go out to eat!”

  She glanced anxiously at Malinka, as if dreading her veto.

  “Good idea,” said Malinka, not far from tears.

  How would she ever make of the servant’s life less bitter a bread?

  When, at afternoon’s end, they said goodbye to the servant and started back to the station, she thanked Freddy Moliger for his thoughtfulness toward her mother. He seemed taken aback to be thanked for—he shrugged—doing just what he always did.

  He stiffened a little. Malinka half felt the wing of an indistinct fear graze her cheek.

  Then he shook his head, and his face went back to its usual expression, harmless and stagnant, like an animal bled dry in the gentle darkness of its sleep.

  “It was no work at all,” he said amiably. “Your mother’s so nice.”

  She stopped, breathless. To her own surprise, she had to clutch Freddy Moliger’s arm to keep from sinking to her knees on the pavement.

  “If you only knew the pain I’ve caused her,” she murmured. “Do you think that can ever be made up for? Do you think so?”

  But he hadn’t heard, unless he was pretending. As they passed by a bench where two neighborhood women sat chatting, women Malinka knew by sight, having crossed paths with them many times, she gave them a nod, and he snorted.

  “You say hello to that dirt?” he asked, loud enough to be heard. “Don’t you think we’ve got too many of those people around here? I’ll tell you what I think: they make me sick.”