Ladivine

by Marie Ndiaye

  What did they have to do with these people, she thought, who sought only ordinary amusement from their vacations abroad?

  What did they care that the B. family thought they’d booked a room in a four-star Majorca hotel and ended up in a cubbyhole looking onto a malodorous airshaft? Or that the F.’s, having paid for a full-board week’s stay in Djerba, found themselves shelling out for breakfasts and bus excursions?

  She longed to reach out and turn Marko’s anxious face toward her own—that sharp-featured face she so loved, inevitably summoning up memories, faint or vivid depending on the circumstances (and sometimes only stirring up a very gentle melancholy in her heart), of the handsome Teddy Ted, the thin-cheeked, yellow-haired cowboy who in her childhood had inspired a love so passionate that she had to force herself to forget, lest she sink helplessly into despair, that he was only a character in a comic strip—and remind him that their goal with this trip was not relaxation or entertainment or an introduction to some new sport.

  Let some unscrupulous hotelier put them in a windowless room; their wish for a more clear-eyed existence would come true all the same—and maybe even more fully?

  “Oh, this stuff doesn’t matter that much,” she would say cautiously.

  He said nothing, his thin lips frozen in a cheerless smile.

  This fierce determination not to be hoodwinked, now Marko’s obsession, was heightened by his resentment of Lüneburg, and, imagining his parents darkly exulting on learning that they’d had a dreary time in a disappointing and venal land, its charms long since faded, he raced frantically from site to site, unwilling to place his faith in any, pretending to linger over an offer only to observe, in a sudden paroxysm of spite, that the prices were well beyond their means.

  Toward midnight they went to bed, their eyes weary, their minds dulled. Marko’s cheeks were so hollow that Ladivine could clearly see the form of his jawbone.

  To convince themselves that their spirit was positive all the same, they’d picked out a few possible destinations, a handful of packages that the next day they saw as the preposterous or suspect things that they were, to which their exhaustion had nearly blinded them.

  How could they ever reconcile the choice of a “Tour of the Magical Maghreb—bargain casbahs—Berber feasts—colorful folklore” with the only ambition that could justify such a trip, which was precisely to take them away from banality, from emptiness and inertia?

  Not to mention, said Marko, that his parents probably found that very same sort of flyer in their mailbox, and while there was little danger of bumping into the elder Bergers in the streets of Agadir, since they never left their own part of Germany, there were Lüneburg neighbors, people Marko had known since childhood, who might well, like them, end up at the Hôtel Igoudar, chosen for further consideration the night before because of its discounted rooms.

  He spoke with an exaggerated composure, an only faintly sarcastic detachment. His arms hung at his sides, hands slightly raised, palms up, resigned. But Ladivine saw the lids of his blue eyes twitching.

  Unthinking, she blurted out:

  “I’ll call Richard and ask what he thinks.”

  “Richard?” said Marko after a pause. “That’s a good idea, give him a call.”

  And from his relief, Ladivine, slightly taken aback, realized the depth of Marko’s admiration for Richard Rivière, even though he’d never met him and knew of him, Ladivine’s father, only what Ladivine happened to tell him, tentative, reticent, and terrified.

  But it isn’t Richard that fascinates him, she thought, it’s Richard’s tragedy, it’s what Richard’s been through.

  And what about me, she then wondered, wasn’t my loss even more terrible than Richard’s?

  She felt herself growing heavy and numb, she felt her heart go cold, as it always did when she thought of her parents, and she was grateful to the part of her mind that controlled her emotions for protecting her in this way, because with her faculties alert and her heart afire she could never have withstood the incomprehension and grief.

  And yet “I’ll call Richard,” she’d said, and those words had come to her spontaneously and for a very simple reason, which was that Richard Rivière had done some traveling, of course, but above all that he was the most sensible man she’d ever known, who, without to-do or any real desire to triumph, always calmly and quietly turned out to be right.

  She’d never described him to Marko in exactly those terms, not wanting him to think she was boasting of her father, and yet the portrait she’d painted of Richard Rivière over the years, through her hesitations and reticences, in her terror and sadness, had firmly planted in Marko a fascination with Richard Rivière, whom he hadn’t met before the tragedy and of whom, afterward, Ladivine always told him, in the breathless, gasping voice that took hold of her when the talk turned to her parents, “You’ll meet him after the trial, we’ll all breathe easier then,” though she found those words unconvincing even as she spoke them, seeing no logical connection between the trial and the long-delayed meeting of her father and her husband, and sensing that Marko knew it and could have easily, gently, disputed what she was saying, held back only by his good manners.

  And what had been, in the early days of their marriage and then after the birth of the children, an odd and slightly embarrassing situation—since even the elder Bergers, indifferent to everything about Ladivine, had expressed their surprise that neither their son nor the children knew Richard Rivière—gradually took on the almost sacred status of just how it was.

  Clarisse Rivière, Ladivine’s mother, had come to Berlin for the wedding, and lived long enough to see the birth of Annika and then Daniel, but not, thought Ladivine with an aching, mournful relief, to be loved by them, meaning that the children felt no pain at suddenly never seeing her again and had even completely forgotten that she once held them in her delicate arms, delighting in their smell, their satiny skin.

  Clarisse Rivière and Marko hit it off at once. They smiled at each other profusely, and sometimes, in the evening, when fatigue put a pinched look on their faces, their smiles turned slightly excessive and fanatical, so deeply did they fear some misunderstanding, one of them thinking the other bored or annoyed for some mysterious reason.

  As for Richard Rivière’s absence from the wedding, while Ladivine apologized on his behalf to Marko, to their friends, to the elder Bergers, citing her father’s many responsibilities as an import-car dealer, she knew, just as Clarisse Rivière cruelly knew, that Richard Rivière would have postponed any meeting to be at Ladivine’s wedding were it not for his insurmountable fear of a face-to-face meeting with Clarisse, his ex-wife, who’d kept the name Rivière, his name, fiercely, militantly insisting that she had every right.

  The mere thought of seeing her again made him quake, and Ladivine and Clarisse knew it, felt it.

  Not that there was any real danger of an incident.

  But, thought Ladivine, was he not far less afraid of a scene than of the naked, devouring, silent sorrow he would surely see in the eyes of that woman he’d left so long ago, who refused to give up the name Rivière, his name, keeping and displaying it like the emblem of her distress, like the one miserable treasure she’d been allowed to hold on to?

  Clarisse Rivière had never complained, would never cause any trouble. Clarisse Rivière had never reproached her husband or anyone else for leaving her, for going away, had in fact helped Richard Rivière pack up his things, intent as always on sparing herself no labor, no fatigue, if her labor and fatigue could be of some use to someone.

  She’d done all she could to make leaving easy for Richard Rivière, with the same quiet, tireless solicitude she drew on to help people out at the restaurant, far beyond what her duties required and on her own time, people who never even thought of expressing their gratitude, since she’d convinced them that for her nothing was ever a burden.

  But, Ladivine sensed, Richard Rivière was not taken in by those simple ways.

  Beneath her unquestion
ing helpfulness, he could see the wrenching sacrifice Clarisse Rivière was making for the sake of his freedom, the need for freedom he’d evoked to justify his leaving her, and whatever disregard or disdain it might earn her she did all this as if she didn’t even see the sacrifice, as if she expected no reward, whether thanks or vague shame on the part of the person obliged to her, absolutely not.

  She would have been shocked and mortified had anyone suspected she hoped for such things.

  Confronted with that accusation, thought her daughter Ladivine, she would have stammered, wide eyed, one open hand rubbing the air as if to erase what had just been said:

  No need for…Oh, no, no, it’s…I’m just helping out.

  Really, she would have added, forcing out a little chuckle to show that she wasn’t a complicated person, that there was nothing behind anything she did or said, no meaning other than what was obvious and outright.

  Was that true? wondered Ladivine.

  It was, no question, she told herself after every visit from Clarisse Rivière, whose big, bulging, murky water-colored eyes seemed to grow even cloudier when she heard talk of ambiguous acts, perverse behaviors, cunning lies.

  A vague, lost smile would come over her, like the smile that parted her hesitant lips when someone spoke to her in a foreign tongue, her damp eyes seeming about to well over with the anxious tears always set off in her by a failure to understand, whether the German language or other people’s behavior, but the tears never flowed, and her smile took root and bloomed on Clarisse Rivière’s delicate, mobile, scarcely wrinkled face like an ephemeral flower of innocence.

  She accepted her ignorance and pulled away, seeming to hear nothing more, making an offering of her smile, of her devoted, generous presence, just as she did when the day came for Richard Rivière to leave their house in Langon, and leave her as well, Clarisse Rivière, his wife of more than twenty-five years, helping him seal the boxes of tools, clothes, and dishes he would be taking to his new home, even carrying some of those boxes downstairs, though they weighed nearly as much as she did, taking care not to bump anything, not to hurt anything, because whatever Clarisse Rivière undertook she undertook with care and conscientiousness.

  Did it make Richard Rivière angry, Ladivine wondered, to see his frail, abandoned wife working so hard to make his leaving easy?

  Far more likely, she supposed, he simply shot her a look of helpless exasperation and turned away, thinking he would never again have to endure Clarisse Rivière’s excessive kindliness and that naïve, impalpable, shocking devotion he’d come to find so unbearable, and Clarisse Rivière’s preposterous ways, the comically baffled or beleaguered look that sometimes appeared in her huge eyes, the hurried trot of a walk, neck thrust out like a turtle’s, making quick work of her rare attempts at elegance and concealing the strange beauty of her long, sinuous, agile body, unknown even to her.

  Richard Rivière must often have found his wife ridiculous, thought Ladivine, must have been ashamed of her in public and even more deeply ashamed of himself for seeing her that way, but very likely Clarisse Rivière had never suspected it, she who knew nothing of ridicule, who never mocked anyone, not because she was virtuous but because she was innocent, and whom some, Ladivine knew, just as Richard Rivière must have known, thought a fool because she lacked the capacity to see malice.

  —

  “I’ll call Richard,” Ladivine had said, then, her heart quailing, her hands suddenly damp, and she was so relieved to hear the phone ring and ring fruitlessly in the house (or apartment?) outside Annecy, where her father lived, where she’d never been, that her legs trembled and her forehead went cold, like someone miraculously saved from some deadly menace.

  The second day Richard Rivière answered, and his severe, preoccupied voice turned gentle, surprised, and loving when he realized it was Ladivine.

  “Is that you, Daughter? How are you, my love?”

  And Ladivine was struck dumb, though she had no reason to suspect any disaffection on her father’s part, since it was she and she alone, she thought, who’d decided they couldn’t see each other until the trial, and Richard Rivière had complained at the time, writing her long e-mails to tell her he missed her, that her resolution was unjust.

  And it was, and Ladivine knew it.

  But the mere thought of seeing Richard Rivière before Clarisse Rivière had been restored to her place of quiet, pure respectability (by the grace of a severe prison sentence? and suppose that’s not how it turns out?) set off a long shiver of almost loathing resentment toward Richard Rivière and left her heaving and breathless, like an animal driven too hard.

  It was cruel, it was unjust, and she knew it.

  Because what had happened was in no way his fault, because there was nothing to blame but the very thing Richard Rivière had tried to escape, Clarisse Rivière’s inability to grasp the concept of malevolence.

  But Ladivine couldn’t help thinking that horror and vileness would never have entered their lives had Richard Rivière not left Clarisse, had he sacrificed his hunger for a new life to the need to protect Clarisse Rivière.

  By leaving her, he’d handed her over to savagery, which she didn’t know how to see.

  She was defenseless, he’d left her that way, alone and naked and no doubt already drunk with the need to give of herself as soon as Richard Rivière’s car turned the corner.

  “Hello? Are you there, kid? Ladivine?”

  “Yes, I’m here.”

  She was gasping for breath, clutching the receiver, trying to hold back the wave of anger threatening to submerge her, as always when she pictured Clarisse Rivière abandoned on the house’s front step while Richard Rivière’s SUV (was it already the M-Class then?) sped away, filled with suitcases and boxes, gleaming dimly in the pale sunlight of that wintery Sunday, then vanished at the corner, bound for a brand-new existence that Clarisse Rivière would never be part of.

  Oh, but Ladivine understood how he’d come to find life with Clarisse more than he could bear; she understood it the moment he told her, slightly sheepish but also visibly proud of himself for daring to take such a step, that he was planning to leave the house; she understood it, yes, and in a way gave him her blessing.

  Was that why she so resented him now?

  Because she’d wished him happiness, and had never said any such thing to Clarisse Rivière, because she might thereby have brought sorrow crashing down onto Clarisse Rivière’s poor head?

  She’d wished the wrong person happiness—was that what she couldn’t forgive Richard Rivière for?

  Hearing him confide in her with that mixture of pride and embarrassment, she thought he needed her support, her assurance that she wouldn’t judge him, and she gave it to him, her heart pounding, bleeding, she gave it to him not as the daughter stunned and shocked by that man once so perfectly stable and faithful in his well-ordered life, but as the twenty-eight-year-old adult that she was, tolerant and capable of understanding the hunger for adventure (he talked like that now, that dwindling man, that weary, diffident man whose one extravagance was his passion for SUVs!) that might come over a father who’d irreproachably acquitted himself of his every duty and wanted to devote the last phase of his life to himself alone.

  Would she not have done better to rush straight to Clarisse Rivière’s, drag her out of her deserted house, bring her back to Berlin, and look after her until her vast, rudderless goodness found others to take on?

  She hadn’t. It never even occurred to her.

  And that, she thought, was why her anger at Richard Rivière was misplaced.

  “We’re looking for someplace to spend our next vacation,” she said in a stolid, almost blank voice. “Somewhere south. Do you…do you have any suggestions?”

  He let a moment of surprised silence go by. He was expecting me to talk about the trial, she told herself, he was thinking we’d finally talk about that damned trial, and all I want to talk about is our vacation.

  But when he spoke, it was
in the gentle, lighthearted, warm, infinitely fatherly voice that Richard Rivière always used with his daughter Ladivine, which, some ten years before, had led her, almost forced her, to absolve him. (Was leaving Clarisse Rivière a misdeed, a crime, a mistake? Or was it nothing of the sort?)

  Because she was powerless to resist the love in her father’s voice, for her and her alone, because she was powerless to snap herself out of that enchantment and consider how to go about rescuing Clarisse Rivière, because she preferred to think he was the one who needed support.

  Oh, for that she would never, ever forgive herself.

  He fell silent. He let out a loud sigh, and Ladivine sensed that he wanted to bring up the trial.

  A twinge of panic set her trembling again, and she was desperately looking for an excuse to hang up when she heard, behind him, distant, piercing, beguiling, a woman’s voice calling out.

  “That’s Clarisse,” he whispered, “but don’t worry, she’ll never be Clarisse Rivière. Talk to you soon, kid.”

  Ladivine just caught the echo of a fluting, cascading laugh, then Richard Rivière abruptly hung up, as if given away.

  She picked up her satchel and walked out into the warm, golden Maytime street, the yellow-walled Droysenstrasse, their home since Annika’s birth eight years before; she almost ran in the shade of the linden trees whose dripping sap left the sidewalk sticky beneath her sandals.

  The cloying smell of the fallen, crushed linden flowers rose up from the pavement, stronger than the scent of the clusters still hanging—cloyingly sweet, too, she thought as she raced along, was the odor of Clarisse Rivière’s spilled blood, or perhaps rank and overpowering in her tidy house, but why, she thought, feeling her own blood throbbing in her temples, why did the honeyed perfume of light, frothy yellow-white linden flowers always remind her of what she hadn’t seen but a thousand times imagined, her mother’s blood brutally, abundantly spilled in the living room of her Langon house, untouched until then by anything violent or out of place?