Ladivine

by Marie Ndiaye

  He stalked onward, caught up in a rage that covered his cheeks with red blotches.

  Stunned, Malinka scurried insensibly after him. When she caught up he gave her a smile, his serenity and cheerfulness suddenly restored, and she could feel herself burying the memory of that moment in a place where she wouldn’t easily find it again, because the whole thing was simply incomprehensible.

  She wanted to remember only Freddy Moliger’s kindness to the servant, who’d greeted him just as Malinka had hoped: as the emissary of an ardent wish to repent.

  —

  Soon she suggested that Freddy Moliger move in with her, and he appeared the next day carrying everything he owned in a bag.

  That evening they made love for the first time.

  She was nervous, she’d grown unused to pleasure and the search for it, she was thinking too much, but when she took stock of herself she found she was at ease, found that Freddy Moliger’s body caused her no aversion or sadness, and that at the same time she had no fear of disappointing him, or of being disappointed, whereas, she remembered, her immense, undiminishable love for Richard Rivière never slipped free of her self-imposed duty to live up to his expectations, her furious, consuming desire for self-sacrifice, without which she felt guilty and wicked.

  She sensed that Freddy Moliger expected nothing he couldn’t readily give.

  When he first saw her trim, long-limbed body, its slender bones invisible beneath her solid flesh, he let out a polite and admiring little cry, but his eyes were indifferent, and Malinka understood that he’d neither hoped nor feared she would have a beautiful body.

  Nothing was a problem, nothing wasn’t good enough, and it never occurred to him to think of his body as attractive or not. He was what he was, without bluff or boast, like a plant, like a stone, and beautiful or ugly his body didn’t belong to him and wasn’t his responsibility.

  He was neither an attentive nor a selfish lover, but full of a strangely neutral, almost austere gentleness, and Malinka felt free and at peace. She was still thinking too much, but she was also serene, because Freddy Moliger’s presence never challenged her to prove anything at all, no more the goodness of her soul than the perfection of her body, and because she wasn’t lying to him.

  Not that Richard Rivière had ever asked anything of her. But her entanglement in the snare of an endless striving to please did nothing to dispel the muted fear, which she felt even in their happiest days, that the most necessary discipline might be beyond her, and that only that discipline could make the thought of the servant, the bitter bread of her life, tolerable to her.

  —

  Nor did Freddy Moliger ask her to tell him about herself.

  For the first few days after he moved in she could see his gaze drifting over the photos that ornamented the walls and the shelves, of Ladivine, of Marko Berger, of the children, or of Richard Rivière, and no interest or curiosity ever shone in his eyes.

  She tried, in an offhanded, affectionate voice, to bring up her daughter Ladivine. He turned and walked out of the room, with a rudeness that wasn’t like him. Whatever was closest to her, like all talk of emotion, seemed to plunge him into an impatience he objectively recognized, as though it were someone else feeling it, and he walked off as if to get hold of himself, such that Malinka came to see in those abrupt, maddening disappearances a sign of diplomacy rather than boorishness.

  She stopped trying to tell him about her daughter and grandchildren, and about her emotions generally.

  She sometimes thought, without resentment, that Richard Rivière and Ladivine must have longed terribly to hear what she was feeling or thinking, that toward them she’d always been tender and distant, giddy with an inexpressible love and yet hard to love, and here she was finally finding her voice, and Freddy Moliger didn’t want to hear.

  She knew Richard Rivière and Ladivine probably thought her an extremely simple woman.

  Didn’t she sometimes embarrass them, in their sparse social life, with her anxious, smiling silence, her frozen face, lips always slightly parted, her amiable, wary, stubborn way of never saying anything even the slightest bit personal?

  Oh yes, surely they’d resigned themselves to thinking her slightly witless.

  Was she? She didn’t know.

  She only knew that her mind was now forever pondering thoughts that filled her with a calm, comforting passion, and that she owed this to Freddy Moliger, to the way he’d come to her that evening in the pizzeria, with his dead, desolate face, his limping form, and that, painfully, in a devastating glimpse of the inevitable, she’d abruptly realized they might rescue each other.

  Now he lived in her house, and his company never disturbed her.

  He moved through the house quietly, like a wild animal, she sometimes thought, whose way was to leave only the most imperceptible trail.

  He cooked and cleaned energetically and efficiently, telling her again and again of everything that had happened in his life—the brutal parents, the brother killed by the train, the daughter he never saw—his impassive, reedy voice wanting nothing, accusing no one.

  And though she’d heard these same stories before, never varying, their details always precise and identical, as if, almost bored, he were recounting the story of the same old movie over and over, she went on listening with an understanding and a friendship that drove her whole being toward him, and she suffered for him, since he showed no sign of suffering, and in this way hoped to displace the rage she now realized was trying to burrow into Freddy Moliger’s heart.

  Every new telling of those stories was as painful to hear as the first, perhaps more. Each time she felt Freddy Moliger’s irremediable solitude all the more poignantly.

  If, she thought, she could relieve him of the anger pointlessly besieging him, which he wore himself out trying to hold back, if she could do that by enduring his tales of woe, by trying to picture his woes so completely that they could only leave her weeping and wailing inside, then maybe they wouldn’t weigh so heavily in Freddy Moliger’s memory, and he would find peace and solace.

  Give it all to me, let me shoulder the burden of your miseries, she silently begged him, because I know how to deal with them. And so she listened, never flinching at even the most harrowing moments, and she filled herself with his sorrow till she choked, so he would be free of it, he who after his brother’s death had spent his life struggling on alone.

  At night, in the bed she’d shared with Richard Rivière for more than twenty-five years, she took this other man in her arms, and then it was she who found peace and solace, who felt freed and delivered of all obligation.

  She was simply herself, Malinka, in all the innocence of her ephemeral, precarious presence on this earth.

  —

  She was never humble with him. She could be authoritarian, firm, though never hard, and her voice was always gentle.

  Freddy Moliger’s habits and ways didn’t irritate or surprise her, except when he weakened before the onslaughts of his anger and sullenly let it submerge him, becoming a different man, at once exultant and despairing and almost greedily eager to get some good out of it, to vanish into it until he was absolved of all responsibility.

  She glimpsed this most painfully in the course of a visit her daughter Ladivine would soon pay her.

  “If it’s all the same to you, please don’t call me by my first name in front of my daughter,” she said to Freddy Moliger in an uneasy voice.

  He puffed out his cheeks and let out a little sigh of indifference.

  It wasn’t seeming to hide things from her daughter that embarrassed her; it was that she wasn’t yet ready to reveal to Ladivine that her name was Malinka.

  I’ll do that, she vowed, the day I introduce the servant to her. Because, she felt certain, that day would come.

  Already she brought Freddy Moliger along whenever she visited her mother, and he thought of those visits as a perfectly natural thing and obviously enjoyed them, and very often Malinka sat in her velvet armcha
ir and listened as the servant and Freddy cooked the meal in the little kitchen, and she heard the quiet hum of their voices sometimes interrupted by Freddy Moliger’s piercing laugh or the servant’s playfully outraged protests when he tried to take on more than she wanted.

  But with Ladivine she felt so intimidated, so self-conscious!

  Had her daughter not had every possible reason, over the past twenty years, to find her stupid and pitiable, lost, inaccessible?

  On the phone, she had no choice but to answer Ladivine’s troubled but remarkably precise, probing questions, her startled concern all too clear, as if, thought Clarisse Rivière, she was convinced her mother could only have taken up with some shady and untrustworthy man, and she had a duty to come and investigate.

  How strange to think of her mother being with any man but her father!

  And, although she would never have said so, how shocking: Clarisse Rivière could hear it in her incredulous voice, in the mundane questions she babbled out as if to prevent her mother from talking to her of love or carnal desire.

  “Does this man have a trade, does he have money?” Ladivine had asked almost at once.

  “He works here and there, when he finds something.”

  “But do you give him money? Does he ask you?”

  Clarisse Rivière felt sad for both of them, for Ladivine, who thought she had to interrogate her like this, and for herself, who didn’t dare tell her, however gently, that it was none of her business.

  “Yes, sometimes. When he needs it. I have more money than he does, it’s no problem.”

  Ladivine went quiet, less so she could think all this over than so she could come up with a new line of attack—for that was how Clarisse Rivière saw these questions, in spite of herself, knowing there was nothing but solicitude behind them, and yet for the first time in her life she didn’t feel guilty toward Ladivine or Richard Rivière, or eternally obliged to them.

  But she’d trained them to treat her like a foolish woman, ever indebted, elusive, easily taken in, and so she could hardly blame Ladivine for feeling concerned, or for talking to her like she was a child.

  “Papa…Richard once told me you don’t take the money he sends you,” Ladivine began, uncomfortable.

  Clarisse Rivière hurried to come to her rescue:

  “That used to be true, but not since a couple of weeks ago.”

  “Now that this man—”

  “Freddy Moliger,” she very quietly broke in.

  “Now that this Moliger’s with you?”

  “Yes. We’re living it up, you know,” she added with a forced little laugh.

  But on the other end of the line Ladivine wasn’t laughing.

  After another silence, she asked Clarisse Rivière’s permission to come see her, to come down to Langon, as she said.

  Freddy Moliger greeted this as he did every piece of news involving Malinka’s family life, with that amalgam of boredom and feigned arrogance thinly plastered over his displeasure, rage very visibly thrashing and growling below it.

  “You’re fond of my mother, aren’t you?” asked Malinka anxiously. “So why not my daughter?”

  “Your mother’s a pitiful nobody, and that’s why I like her, and she feels the same about me,” he said gruffly.

  She remembered those words when Ladivine walked through the door, and she saw her daughter’s hesitant eyes turn toward Freddy Moliger, then immediately dart in alarm toward a corner of the room, then another, and then finally come back, veiled, slightly fixed, uncordial, to Freddy Moliger’s shoulder or neck, her lips forcing themselves into a more or less polite smile.

  And Clarisse Rivière thought of what he’d said and suddenly saw the truth in it. She blushed in pity and sadness.

  She tried to look at Freddy Moliger through Ladivine’s eyes: she saw his skinny alcoholic legs, his bony, slightly misshapen hips, his fleshy red cheeks, his bad teeth; she saw the apathetic but untrusting and secretive expression on his averted face; she saw his strawlike hair, still wet where he’d parted it.

  Ladivine could see nothing beyond that physical misery; she could see none of the ravaged kinship that bound her, Clarisse Rivière, to Freddy Moliger, could know nothing of the salutary impoverishment denuding her heart ever since she’d learned, for one thing, to suffer for Freddy Moliger, and, for another, to caress that damaged body with pleasure and tenderness, and find it soft beneath her fingers.

  Ladivine could know nothing of this, very likely refused even to imagine it, and looking through her eyes Clarisse Rivière could only understand.

  And she pitied her daughter for having to tolerate this, the presence of such a man in the house where her parents once lived in harmony.

  But she felt a far sharper pity for Freddy Moliger, who couldn’t escape the anxious, troubled stare of Malinka’s daughter, having realized even before she laid eyes on him that he would be neither loved nor appreciated, just as he’d sensed before the servant laid eyes on him that she would be fond of him, that she would have no choice but to be fond of him, in her own misery.

  Clarisse Rivière sat down on the blue couch and, though feeling an infinite sadness, brightly asked Freddy Moliger to bring them a beer.

  “And maybe a little something to nibble on, honey?”

  Was she trying to show Ladivine how docile Freddy Moliger was?

  She then realized that she was afraid they might somehow prevent her from keeping this man by her side, on the pretext, say, that he had an unhealthy hold over her. But that was absurd, she told herself, quickly reassured. No one had the power to forbid her anything, nor try to protect her against her will.

  Ladivine took her to the Galeries Lafayette in Bordeaux, and all the way there Clarisse Rivière silently refused to speak of Freddy Moliger, just as she refused to let Ladivine buy her an outfit for her birthday.

  She thought it would be a betrayal to accept a gift from someone who’d taken so strong a dislike to Freddy Moliger.

  Because Ladivine clearly loathed him, with an unreasoning, frightened, irreparable loathing that left Clarisse Rivière as uncomfortable as some vile obscenity. In the eyes of her daughter who knew her so little, he could only be a creep who’d wormed his way into her life solely to take advantage of the naïve woman that, through her own fault, she would always be for Ladivine.

  She glanced sidelong at her daughter’s preoccupied face as Ladivine somewhat roughly pulled a yellow gingham dress from its hanger, held it up to her firm, opulent body, and looked at her questioningly. For a second, in the tiny contraction of her mouth, in her one raised eyebrow, Clarisse Rivière saw the little girl she’d raised and pampered, she recognized her child and lost her nerve: How could she ever confess to her daughter that she was Malinka, and that a certain servant was leading her solitary, bitter, forever-ruined life just a few streets away?

  Several days after Ladivine left, she got a beige cardigan with little mother-of-pearl buttons in the mail.

  Freddy Moliger was standing nearby as she opened the package, found the gift, and, an anxious intuition running through her, answered reluctantly when Freddy Moliger asked where it came from.

  “It’s from my daughter, for my birthday.”

  “It’s your birthday and I didn’t even know it!”

  He was speaking in his high-pitched, grating voice, unsteady and heated.

  “Birthdays don’t mean anything,” she said, trying to put on a smile.

  “Well, they must mean something to your daughter, and to you, too, since you’re happy with your present! Isn’t that right, aren’t you happy?”

  She shrugged, folded the cardigan, hid it under the tissue paper.

  “So why didn’t you tell me it was your birthday? What, I’m not worthy of giving you a present? Only your daughter knows how to pick out something you’ll like?”

  She turned to face him and immediately realized she’d made a mistake, because she felt the fear that had flickered on in her gaze.

  But she didn’t know unti
l that moment that she’d realized something very important about Freddy Moliger, didn’t know that she’d realized it from the start, which was that, as with a dog, you had to be careful not to let him see your fear.

  But at the same time she felt what she’d felt with her daughter a few days before: in the glint of boyish anger in Freddy Moliger’s eyes, in his puffed-out cheeks, she saw, she recognized, her child—or rather the child he once was, but at that moment it felt as if he were hers.

  A great tenderness flooded through her.

  She took the cardigan back out of its package, quickly slipped it on over her dress, and ran off for her camera.

  While Freddy Moliger was framing the picture on the machine’s little screen, his composure returning as quickly as his rage had erupted, she wondered if he could still see the fear in her eyes, if he could perhaps even see, should that fear now have vanished, the shadow of the fear that she knew would come back.

  Clarisse Rivière felt herself floating back and forth on a warm, syrupy swell, whose thickness stilled any move she might try to make. She didn’t want to move anyway, because it would hurt, it would hurt terribly, she knew, if she made any attempt to change her position. She couldn’t remember if she was sitting or standing, lying or crouching, outside or at home, but it didn’t much matter. She had to place her faith in the mindless but confident perseverance of the heavy, viscous tide now carrying her off, and when she spotted the edge of the dark, overgrown forest, its treetops towering and black against the black sky, her only thought was, I’ve never been in a deep forest, but she put up no resistance, certain that there she would be just where she was meant to be.

  Slow and precise, Ladivine Sylla lifted each figurine, caressed it with her chamois, gazed at it meditatively for a few seconds, then put it back or, if she’d chosen to move it to a different shelf, set it aside in a shoe box.

  She liked to imagine the boldest ones’ eagerness at the prospect of changing places, and the fears of the shier ones, the very young shepherdesses, the newly weaned lambs, the dolphins and kittens, which didn’t like to be disturbed. To them she carefully explained in a half whisper that like it or not things had to be shaken up now and then so every member of her little world would know all the others.