Ladivine

by Marie Ndiaye

  Enchanted, Wellington undertook to describe each painting, one at a time, as if they were blind. That’s right, thought Ladivine, mystified, exactly as if they couldn’t see or understand what they were looking at, as if they needed Wellington’s words to help them grasp the very obvious horror of each scene.

  Not understanding English, Annika and Daniel merely stared at the paintings with a dumbstruck, fascinated gaze.

  In the next room, the gore and sensationalism far surpassed Ladivine’s grimmest fears.

  She reflexively covered Daniel’s eyes with one hand, but the boy wrenched himself away and, standing immovably in the middle of the room, turned his gaze in every direction as quick as he could, greedily, as Wellington’s fine, velvety voice gaily recounted the events of each canvas.

  “Here they’re torturing two poor old people who tried to escape, they were locked up in that cage you can see in the background, and you can tell from the broken door that they managed to escape, but look, the overseers have caught up with them, and now they’re pulling out their toenails with red-hot tongs, looks like they’re having a good time, it’s fun, they’re laughing. In this next one there’s a burning house. Who’s that trapped in the flames on the second floor? Two women and their babies, and these people down here, the masters, they’re all safe and sound now, they won’t even look their way, they’re thinking about their own children, who’ve all been rescued. Yes, that’s just how it is.”

  Marko’s lips were pinched, his jaw taut and aggrieved.

  “Is he trying to make us feel guilty or something?” he whispered in Ladivine’s ear.

  But in fact the toxin of guilt seemed to have attacked him already, she observed, saddened and anxious, knowing she herself was secretly protected.

  And in any case, Wellington rarely looked her way.

  Cool and watchful, gently severe, he kept his eyes trained on Marko’s face, as if wanting to be sure that his words were getting through, and especially that Marko made no attempt to fight them off.

  And so highly developed was Marko’s moral conscience, so long-standing and deep rooted his acknowledgment of the most horrific crimes and his compliance with a duty to be above all reproach, that he never tried to evade Wellington’s gaze but rather latched on to it, as if demanding to be told of the most unthinkable tortures, again and again, so that he might feel for his forebears the shame they themselves never felt.

  Ladivine was appalled. She told herself she should snap Marko out of that ridiculous trance and drag them all toward the exit.

  But the possibility that Wellington might be gravely insulted, the thought of so soon losing the sort of friendship he was offering them, stripped her of her courage.

  She herself, with the dog at her side, with that big all-knowing beast to rely on, felt more than a little indifferent about Wellington’s friendship.

  But she understood that Marko and the children might feel they’d abruptly been rescued from self-consciousness, boredom, and fear, thanks to a boy from this place who had chosen them as the beneficiaries of a very real and undeniable thoughtfulness.

  He knew what he was doing, she observed.

  The way he casually raised one hand before Daniel, urging the child to do the same, then slapped his palm with a wink; the courtly, understated, but winsome voice he used with Annika, visibly respectful of her femininity; the mild, intelligent glances he cast at her, Ladivine: that was all typical of a clever but not cunning boy, perceptive and perhaps, she told herself, perhaps even sincere.

  But could he not see what an aggressive thing it was to be showing them such paintings?

  The third room was all carnage, with similar victims (My ancestors, said Wellington proudly), and the very same torturers. Marko was ashen.

  He nonetheless forced himself to study each painting, and suddenly Ladivine had had enough, finding this childish.

  He didn’t have to work so hard at flattering the boy—or did he?

  Was it actually necessary?

  But weren’t those paintings just trash?

  “All right, let’s go now,” she said firmly.

  She took Marko’s arm and ordered the children to follow, noticing that they waited to see Wellington’s reaction before they obeyed.

  Gracious, charming, he turned on his heel and made for the exit himself, the children trotting gaily along at his side.

  “All those horrible things,” Ladivine whispered into Marko’s ear, “it’s too much, don’t you think? Are you sure this is the museum they recommend in the guide?”

  “Yes,” answered Marko, in a halting, confused voice. “But the paintings they talk about aren’t anything like this. I can’t understand it!”

  Lowering his voice, he added, urgent and anxious, “How much do we give him?”

  “Two euros’ worth,” said Ladivine.

  She was exasperated by the fear she sensed oozing from Marko’s every pore, the fear of not living up to expectations, of not being generous enough, grateful enough, deserving enough of others’ approval.

  There was a time when she loved that torment of Marko’s, that excessive conscientiousness.

  Lately she often thought it misplaced, faintly ridiculous.

  How she missed the innocence of Clarisse Rivière!

  —

  Wellington knocked three times on the very low door of a cinder-block house with a red sheet-metal roof.

  Suddenly it was dark. One blink and it’s nighttime, thought Ladivine, and just a few seconds before the sun was so blinding.

  She found it equally strange that they’d become Wellington’s guests, even if at the time it had seemed perfectly natural to be following him out to this distant neighborhood.

  Ladivine had simply assumed that Wellington had nowhere special to go and was thus sticking with them, falling in with their vague plan to watch the sun set over the sea (How silly, she would later tell herself, amused, since the sun didn’t set here, but literally vanished), but now here they were standing before Wellington’s house, as he told them, at precisely the early evening hour assigned to dinner in this rigid country.

  Winding, narrow, the dirt street ran through an unbroken succession of shabby little bare-cement huts, old bicycles chained up out front with gigantic locks.

  The prospect of an evening at Wellington’s filled Daniel and Annika with delight.

  And indulging one’s children’s delights, reflected Ladivine, often led to imprudence. For were it just she and Marko, she said to herself, she would never have accepted this invitation to a stranger’s house in a remote neighborhood of a city she didn’t know.

  Were it only the two of them, she would have run the risk of offending Wellington, and they would have gone back to the hotel without for one moment worrying about maintaining and even cultivating an unwholesome friendship with that teenage boy.

  As they stood waiting to be let in, a feeling of being watched from behind forced Ladivine to turn around.

  She made out a pair of dark eyes glinting in the night, a few yards farther on, down a little hill from the street.

  The dog had found her.

  Sitting very straight, ears pricked up, watchful but calm, it stared at her with its neutral gaze, perhaps waiting, she then thought, perhaps waiting for some sign from her, no, not even that, a breath, a thought, and with that it would come take her away to some mysterious place with no name.

  She shivered and quickly turned around again.

  Before the closed door, Wellington was losing patience.

  He began to pound on it with his fists, bellowing, and when it finally opened, he bitterly upbraided the girl at the door in a language that Ladivine thought something like English stripped of all gentleness, only the harshest sounds left.

  He introduced the girl as his sister, then thoroughly and categorically denounced her, as if to excuse the long delay, along with the girl herself, since, plagued as she was by so many deficiencies, she could certainly be slow to react as well.


  The girl let him talk, limply scratching her arm.

  She smiled into space, neither friendly nor hostile, simply detached, absent.

  To her we don’t even exist, thought Ladivine, she wouldn’t care if we died right here on the spot or ran away or collapsed in the street.

  This disturbed and upset her.

  Because she herself cared deeply about that girl’s existence the moment she saw her face, her existence and almost her happiness, for which, had it been possible, she would gladly have given some small part of herself: time, a little money, thought, or emotion.

  Wellington ushered them down a hallway dimly lit by a single naked bulb, then across a pitch-black courtyard and into a vast room where a small crowd had just sat down to dinner.

  Apart from a long table of dark-green plastic and matching chairs, the room was bare.

  Every plate was laden with chunks of sweet potato and lamb in sauce, lit by a fly-specked fluorescent tube unevenly diffusing a flickering, greenish light.

  Intimidated, Annika and Daniel retreated to the darkest corner of the room. But Wellington went and gently led them back, talking to them in a soothing voice, as if to a couple of skittish kittens.

  Marko circled the table, shaking everyone’s hand, slim and charming in his pink suit, his face sallow in the fluorescent light, and Ladivine admired his confidence, his casual, easy manner.

  Nonetheless, she chose not to imitate him, thinking there was no need to go to such lengths. She simply glanced around the table and threw out a collective hello.

  Wellington disappeared, then immediately returned with more chairs, and everyone slid aside to make room, silent but with a goodwill Ladivine found reassuring.

  She’d blamed her discomfort and guardedness on her reluctance to intrude, but from the intensity of her relief she realized she’d been fearing a trap, and her tablemates’ mute civility allowed her to put that suspicion aside.

  But she was unhappy with Marko for never even considering the possibility that Wellington was luring them into an ambush, for so readily trusting in a friendliness that back in Europe would have put a skeptical, leery smile on his face.

  Why, here, could he be so easily convinced that a young stranger had taken a sincere liking to them?

  It was immature and unworthy of him, Ladivine told herself crossly.

  But she had to concede that their hosts seemed determined to prove Marko right, and to persuade her that he was guilty of neither credulity nor blindness, that he had shown only the soundest of judgment.

  Some ten adults of various ages were sitting around the table. Ladivine saw them all quietly trying to put the new guests at ease, even Wellington’s sister, whom Ladivine first found so coldly dismissive and who was now keeping a discreet eye on the platefuls of tasty lamb stew she’d efficiently served, ready, Ladivine guessed, to leap up as soon as they were empty and bring out a second helping.

  Sitting across from Ladivine, an old woman nodded and smiled each time their eyes met.

  A man who might have been Wellington’s father cut the lamb shanks into little pieces on Daniel’s plate, having seen the boy’s difficulties with his dull knife.

  That handsome, thin-faced man was dressed in a light-green short-sleeved shirt. Ladivine couldn’t take her eyes off it, her head swimming slightly.

  Hadn’t Marko packed that shirt for this trip, with the tone-on-tone crest on the breast pocket?

  She hoped neither Marko nor Annika would notice, as if, once again, her own responsibility were caught up in something repugnant, something deeply ignoble.

  To avoid drawing their attention to that shirt, she resolutely looked away from the man, whose chest, more ample than Marko’s, strained the buttons every time he inhaled.

  Now she was feeling more at ease.

  Her tablemates didn’t talk much, but those who did now and then break the silence did so in careful English, articulating clearly, looking now at Marko, now at Ladivine, making themselves easily understood.

  Marko was always quick to answer. He praised the food, which was excellent, he offered his warmest thanks.

  And Ladivine knew he meant it, because she herself was gripped by an unexpected euphoria in this atmosphere of slightly austere but placid, reassuring conviviality, from which all threat of tasteless jokes or complicated humor seemed to have been banished.

  It struck her that Clarisse Rivière would have enjoyed this sort of company, she who, on meeting new people, always worried she might not be able to follow their conversation. Clarisse Rivière was too modest, too self-effacing, to fear being mocked, and when she was, and when she realized it, she laughed along heartily.

  But clever wordplay made her uncomfortable. She could neither enjoy it nor laugh at it, and she never knew how to answer.

  “What did you think of the wedding?” asked the friendly old lady across from Ladivine, misinterpreting the sudden panic on Ladivine’s face and repeating the question still more slowly and clearly.

  Ladivine cast an anxious glance Marko’s way. He was talking with Wellington and no doubt hadn’t heard. On the other hand, she caught Annika giving her a questioning stare, having almost certainly grasped the word “wedding.”

  She leaned as far across the table as she could, her face almost touching the old lady’s, and hurriedly whispered, “It was a beautiful ceremony, everything was lovely.”

  Cheeks burning, she prayed the old lady would leave it at that.

  Marko would never understand her lying like this, her pretending to have taken part in festivities she knew nothing of, and he would find such behavior good cause for reproach and concern—but if somewhere in this city there was a woman so like her that the one could be confused with the other, what could Ladivine do but accept that confusion? Nothing could seem more suspicious than denying you’ve been in a place where people are certain they saw you.

  Best to just play along, so no one will be embarrassed or think you odd or suspect.

  So thought Ladivine, though she wasn’t sure she could explain her reasoning to Marko or Annika.

  And to herself she confessed that she found a certain pleasure in being taken for another, for a woman invited to a memorable wedding in this enigmatic city, that somehow it flattered her.

  “We weren’t there,” the old woman resumed, “but I heard there was money involved, lots of money. They must have thought we weren’t good enough to be invited, even though we’re more or less cousins, on the bride’s side.”

  She seemed to be waiting for some sort of acquiescence, which Ladivine accorded her with a nod.

  “What was the meal like? Were there several fish dishes?”

  Ladivine gave her a quick “There were,” but, far from discouraging the old lady, her laconic answers only inflamed her curiosity, as if Ladivine were coyly withholding the choicest details.

  “How was the fish cooked? And what did they serve with it? What about the wine? What was the wine like?”

  “It was a very good Graves, and they had monkfish à l’américaine and shark in green sauce and one more I don’t know the name of, it was grilled, in big boneless pieces.”

  She spoke very quickly and quietly, hoping that Marko, if he heard her, wouldn’t be able to follow her words.

  “What about the bride’s gown?” the old lady asked eagerly.

  “The gown…it must have been ivory faille satin, with a lace bodice and a big ribbon for the belt.”

  “Was it long?”

  “Very long, several yards of fabric at least.”

  “And what about you, what were you wearing?”

  “A yellow gingham dress, with balloon sleeves.”

  And then, unsure just what was urging her on, perhaps vanity, perhaps a desire to please the old lady, perhaps simply a lifelong fondness for telling tales, Ladivine found herself recounting the whole wedding as if she’d been there, now unconcerned that Marko or Annika might hear.

  A mischievous “I’ll show you” was ringing defiance’s
merry little bells in her head.

  And little by little the entire table fell into a listening silence as she described the ceremony in lavish detail, not knowing where it was coming from, not wanting to.

  She told of the church’s simple decorations, the slightly shrill organ, which played “Ave Maria,” and the bride’s entrance (a little late, no doubt because of a traffic jam, since everyone had come by car) on the arm of her father, who was dressed all in gray, from his panama hat to his cotton lisle socks, which showed when he sat down in the front row.

  She also described the profusion of lilies and white gladioli, recalling as she spoke that it was at Clarisse Rivière’s funeral that she’d seen those flowers, losing her way a little, downing a gulp of water, eyes lowered, smiling a smile that she knew must seem forced, then struggling to start up again in the expectant silence, to recapture the pleasure still making her heart pound, struggling to push aside the memory of Clarisse Rivière’s funeral and the abundance of luxurious flowers ordered by Richard Rivière, greatly outnumbering the attendees and saturating the little Église de la Libération in Langon with their horribly cloying and sensual perfumes.

  No one had come to the Mass, then the cemetery, but a handful of Clarisse Rivière’s coworkers, two or three neighbors, and Richard Rivière’s aged mother, confused and whimpering, who was living out her life in a retirement home near Toulouse and begged, disoriented, to be taken back as quickly as possible, seeing in all this a ploy to get her out of that place, which she hadn’t left for over fifteen years, not even to run an errand, convinced that someone was after her room and her things. As for Clarisse Rivière’s side, she was an only child, her parents long dead, and no cousin, no aunt or uncle, had taken the trouble to come.

  And so, Ladivine thought at the time, frozen in sorrow, it was as if Clarisse Rivière had secretly deserved her degrading death, despite everything Richard Rivière had done, surrounding the altar with that heap of intoxicating flowers, in his attempt to honor her.