by Marie Ndiaye
And how it comforted him, clearly, to find a knot of reporters awaiting their chance to interview him and Ladivine outside the church, for where she’d managed to choke out only two or three flat, rehearsed sentences, he’d held forth at length, fervidly, mingling in a single vindictive rage Clarisse Rivière’s murderer, some second cousin who hadn’t even apologized for not coming to the funeral, and his own distraught mother, who, clutching his arm, regularly broke in to ask when they would finally take her back home.
He angrily jerked his arm, as if to shake her off, but she seemed to have concentrated all the vigilance and strength she had left in her fingers, and her whole body—wispy, friable, weightless—lurched in time with her son’s furious twitches.
May guilt clutch him exactly like that for as long as he lives, Ladivine wished at the time, may it burrow its barbed head into his consciousness and never be dislodged, inaccessible as a tick in the middle of his back.
Oh, she loved her father all the same, she loved him with infuriated tenderness and dismay, yes, but what, if not love, was the warm delectation that swelled her breast when she thought of Richard Rivière?
She was still going on about the wonderful wedding, almost not hearing herself, the words pouring from her mouth in gilded torrents, sparkling with a thousand evocative gleams in the sparsely furnished, dark room. The old woman stared at her with a fascinated, vaguely hurt gaze.
Suddenly she heard Wellington snort. She paused and coolly turned toward him.
“We don’t care about those people,” Wellington growled. “You know where they get their money from? I suppose you know that?”
“Not exactly,” answered Ladivine as, she thought, a tension very slowly began to take shape, something coming her way, not yet outright hostility but a stiffening, as if she’d abruptly fallen from favor.
“Well, you should have done some digging, maybe then you wouldn’t be here telling us all these things. What gives you the right to think we give a damn about those people?” asked Wellington aggressively.
“Let her talk,” the old woman implored. “I love hearing about weddings.”
“We’ve got to be going,” said Marko firmly. “The children are tired.”
“Let her talk,” the old woman sobbed.
And from the others’ complete disregard for that woman, Ladivine realized it may have been a serious mistake to rely on this old crone’s presumed influence, of which as it turned out she had none, as she wandered into fabrication.
She was counting on the sway of a crazy old lady to lend her credibility!
And yet she’d spoken so well, with so many vivid details, she could so clearly see what she’d described that she almost found herself doubting she’d invented it.
Marko had risen to his feet, imitated at once by the children, their trepidation returning in the frosty, suddenly inhospitable atmosphere.
Ladivine knew she should stand up in turn, but a leaden inertia kept her in her chair.
And, although not quite sure what she’d done wrong, she wanted to make amends.
The old woman’s still-hungry gaze latched on to hers.
“How was the dance? Did they hire an orchestra, or what? Was there waltzing, or just salsa?”
“It was the famous orchestra of the Grand Hotel Regent’s,” Ladivine murmured. “They played a little of everything, but especially rock. They had that clarinetist everyone’s talking about, Tom Evert.”
“Ladivine, we’re going!” Marko cried angrily.
“We’re going, Mama!” Annika frantically echoed.
Daniel began to sniffle. Ladivine slowly stood up, in a fog.
This time Marko dispensed with the handshakes. He merely addressed a vague wave to the silent assembly. Accusing, their huge shadows loomed on the dull-blue wall.
Someone moved beneath the fluorescent light, his shadow surged, and Marko’s eyelids began to flutter, which meant, Ladivine knew, that he was afraid.
She took Daniel’s hand and, to her faint disgust, found it clammy.
She was crushed that the evening was ending this way, the children witnessing their parents’ failure to make themselves loved, their cowardice.
Although she knew it was unfair, she was angry with Marko, both for so quickly and with such manifest gratitude accepting Wellington’s invitation and for refusing the role she herself had consented to play for the pleasure of their hosts.
Because, had Marko only seconded and supported her, had he chimed in with a few details of his own (but what did he know of that wedding? was it not clear that she enjoyed an awareness of things he knew nothing of?), then Wellington would have kept his opinions on that family’s fortune to himself, thought Ladivine, and nothing would remain of this whole turn of events but the memory of a remarkable gift for fitting in. But no: here they were fleeing, ashamed and afraid, what had perhaps opened its doors to them as a model household.
She thought Marko had failed her terribly, that he’d lacked faith in her and was now dragging them into his own disgrace, infecting them with his craven terror. Hot and damp, Daniel’s poor hand attested to that, as did Annika’s eyes, staring in ugly apprehension, whereas the two children had entered this room with joyful hearts, open and cordial, and ready to give of themselves without stinting.
Wellington’s sister sullenly showed them out, scuffing her soles on the concrete floor.
Obliged to open the door and lock it behind them, she had no choice but to accompany them to the threshold, but there, to chase them out into the street, she waved one arm in a sweeping gesture of contempt that eloquently expressed her real opinion of them, Ladivine noted sadly.
Then she viciously slammed the door, they heard the key turn in the lock, and Annika dissolved into tears. Ladivine thought she could so precisely feel what the little girl was feeling that she might easily weep along with her!
This rejection, this abandonment to the darkness and its possible dangers, no one even trying to make sure they could find their way back to the hotel or successfully hail a taxi, all this proved that their lives were as nothing to their hosts, and their safety, and every last one of their emotions.
“Treated like dogs,” Marko mumbled, with a slightly unconvincing snicker.
He shot her a quick, accusing glance.
“Why did you have to tell them all that, all those lies?”
“I wasn’t lying,” protested Ladivine, shocked that he’d spoken the word in front of the children.
She smoothed Annika’s hair, gently pressed her close, feeling the sob-racked little chest against her stomach.
“You weren’t lying, Mama?” asked Daniel.
“Of course not. It’s something else,” she said firmly.
She started off down the dark, empty street at a falsely decisive pace, having no idea of the way back to the hotel. The ground was sandy and shifting. She felt tiny pebbles in her sandals.
She heard Marko and the children following after her. Reassured but still vaguely angry, she didn’t look back.
For reasons she didn’t understand, her resentment, disappointment, and irritation at Marko had begun to spread to the children as well, though with somewhat less virulence.
But what fault could she find with them, what fault could anyone find with such young children that wasn’t largely one’s own doing?
All the same, she could feel them blindly siding with Marko, and she blamed them for her own powerlessness to win them over, wishing they could believe unconditionally in her prescience.
But they didn’t, no more than Marko.
From a rustling in the dark, a slight shifting of the air on the other side of the street, she knew that the dog was close by, no need to seek out the dim-yellow gleam of its eyes in the night.
It wouldn’t let her go astray, she thought, and if it was now by her side, that could only mean the hotel was this way.
—
They were back in their room far sooner than Ladivine expected, from which she concluded th
at Wellington’s neighborhood couldn’t be more than a few hundred yards from the Plaza, that it was perhaps that very neighborhood’s winding streets and metal roofs they saw gleaming in the east each morning from their window.
Who knows, with binoculars, Wellington might well be able to spy on them from his house.
In any case, they were virtually neighbors, she breezily observed to Marko, determined to make peace, taking him in her arms as the children crawled into bed, but to her surprise he heaved an irritable sigh and wearily informed her that he’d had more than enough of her mystifications, that Wellington’s house was by the corniche, and thus a long way from the hotel, as evidenced by the lateness of the hour and the children’s exhaustion, not to mention his own, for unlike some people he couldn’t retreat into grandiosity and imposture and weirdness to take his mind off fatigue and sore muscles.
“I don’t want to fight,” Ladivine said in shock.
And tears rolled down her cheeks, her first since the death of Clarisse Rivière. Discomfited, Marko put his arms around her.
She lay her forehead on his shoulder and smelled the strange, musky odor of his new tunic, the cotton stiffened by some unknown substance, something slightly oily.
“We all need some sleep,” Marko whispered.
His hair had picked up his new clothes’ strong smell, imbuing his entire person with a harshness that wasn’t his, as if he’d put on a disguise in a crude ploy to survive.
One or two hours later, she wasn’t sure, a violent noise woke her, and she thought the air conditioner must be malfunctioning.
At the same moment she realized Marko wasn’t beside her, and she saw shadows lurching and heaving on the tiny balcony.
She glanced at the children, both sound asleep.
The air-conditioning was working in its usual way, with its loud thrum that always made you wonder, before you drifted off, how sleep could possibly escape it, and its sudden, unpredictable shutdowns that, like it or not, left you lying awake waiting for it to start up again, your ear vigilant, your heart pounding and raging.
She sat up, put her feet on the carpet.
Now she could make out Marko’s form, which seemed to be grappling with another, shorter and slighter.
Marko’s back hit the glass door’s metal frame, again making the noise that had roused her.
She stood up, took a few steps forward, hiccupping in terror. What was she supposed to do? Call the front desk, ask for help?
She felt as lost as a child with no experience of the world.
She pictured herself picking up the phone and saying “Help!” in a muffled shout, but even as those images took shape in her mind she was moving toward the balcony, pulling aside the sheer curtains, stammering, “Marko?”
He was wearing only his underwear, and the other one was in jeans and a T-shirt, barefoot like Marko.
She’d recognized him a few seconds before, but she hesitated to utter his name.
Even given the circumstances, wasn’t she relieved to see Wellington before her, and not, as she’d vaguely feared from her bed, the big brown dog standing on its back legs? And Marko throttling that big brown dog as it panted in the dark?
Which would she have come running to rescue?
But no, it was only Wellington, thank God, she thought (not exactly a thought, more a sequence of sensations, first terror, then relief), and he seemed to be yielding to Marko’s calm, silent violence as he bent Wellington’s back over the railing.
Wellington rasped in pain.
And then, calm and silent, as if he knew just what he was doing, thought Ladivine, dumbstruck, as if he’d been awaiting this moment to grasp at long last what his strength was for, the unforeseen strength of a thin, gangly, peaceable man, the strength of an urbanite finally free to erupt, Marko clasped Wellington’s legs and flipped him over the railing.
They heard the adolescent’s surprised moan, then the thud of his body landing six floors below.
A stunned “Oh!” escaped Ladivine, as if she couldn’t believe that this sound, like a heavy bundle falling onto hard ground, had been caused by Marko’s act, by his calm, silent, inflexible will, as if there were no conceivable link between the surprise revelation of Marko’s calm, silent violence and a teenage boy’s body dropping onto a concrete terrace.
She leaned out, hoping to catch sight of Wellington, a string of singsong, almost lighthearted sentences running through her muddled mind—He’s about to get up and run off into the night, Should we call him a taxi, We’ll stop by tomorrow and apologize, What on earth for—but she had only enough time to make out a still, dark shape on the pale-gray pavement before Marko jerked her back inside.
He locked the balcony door, drew the curtain.
Then he went to the children, studied their sleeping faces in turn, almost suspiciously, Ladivine thought.
He wants to be sure they’re asleep, but what would he do if they weren’t?
His breath was loud and wild. Then he began to pant like a dog.
Little by little his face relaxed as he looked at the children.
The cold, quiet, self-assured fury that had clenched it and hardened it was now fading away.
He mechanically pulled the sheet up to cover Daniel’s shoulders, wandered aimlessly around the room for a moment.
Ladivine gently lay down again. She was shaking so hard that the bed creaked.
Marko turned on the water in the bathroom, then came back and lay down in turn, his hair and cheeks still wet.
“Marko, Marko,” murmured Ladivine, surprised at her own anguish-choked voice.
He took her hand, pressed it to his breast. He whispered:
“He was here to harm us, I’m sure of it. Rob us, kill us, who knows, maybe both?”
“But how…how could he have climbed onto the balcony?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he went through the next room. If I hadn’t woken up in time…”
He began to sob, like a dog, Ladivine thought again, in stifled yelps.
She pressed up against him and stroked his thin back, his delicate, hard shoulders, herself feeling fluid and limp, her boundaries erased, her body a liquid flesh spreading freely.
For the first time since they landed in this country, since she noticed the big dog before the hotel, she felt her fate bound up with Marko’s and the children’s just as it was before, no indecipherable exception now covering her, protecting her.
The thing in this place that didn’t like Marko, or Daniel or Annika, the thing determined to mortally test them, had tonight turned to her, abruptly wiping out any complicity between this land and her privileged self.
At this she felt more resentment than fear. She sensed that a vast undertaking would now have to be started anew, that she would now discover the true difficulty of that task, whereas before it had all happened without her even knowing it.
When she saw that Marko had gone back to sleep, she pulled away to a cool spot on the mattress.
Suddenly she was disgusted by the touch of Marko’s skin, the warm odor of his breath.
Wasn’t it like sharing a bed with Clarisse Rivière’s killer, inhaling the air expelled with his every tranquil breath, caressing his faintly pulsating skin?
Perhaps Wellington’s firm young skin was still moist and warm, she told herself, but Clarisse Rivière’s was most certainly now half eaten by vermin.
And as for breath, oh the air Marko and that man were inhaling swelled with the air Wellington could no longer breathe, nor Ladivine’s mother.
She shook Marko awake by one shoulder.
“What if he’s not dead?” she whispered. “We have to call an ambulance. He might still be breathing.”
“That’s impossible—did you see how far down it was?”
His voice was flat and irritable.
“I don’t want to save that guy’s life,” he went on. “I don’t want any trouble for someone who came here to hurt my children. I don’t want to hear another word about him, you underst
and, I don’t care if he’s dying or dead down there.”
He choked up on those words, and Ladivine realized that the thought of the boy slowly expiring on the concrete weighed on him all the same.
“He could have been coming to warn us, to save us…,” she murmured miserably.
“Save us? From what?”
“That’s just it, we don’t know. Maybe he was the only one who did…”
She thought she could feel him shrugging in the dark.
“People around here,” he said after a moment, “well, you’ve seen how they are. If we call an ambulance, if we tell them what happened…they could kill us, you know that. Darling, I’m so tired.”
He drew closer, but she gingerly pushed him away, her mind still on Clarisse Rivière’s killer, who was very likely asleep at this moment, his moist, warm skin faintly pulsating, his breath tranquil and gentle, his nostrils and mouth blithely inhaling and exhaling the air he’d robbed Ladivine’s mother of forever.
So, she reflected, shivering in dismay, Marko had to disgust her for the first time in their lives, she had to feel this tormented revulsion at his pulsing, living skin for her to dare turn her mind to the man who’d killed Clarisse Rivière in the Langon house three years before, her cautious, frightened mind, which until tonight fled that man’s very name, and which now, beside a Marko whose skin had been sullied, whose breath was corrupted, consented to remember it.
The man who killed Clarisse Rivière was named Freddy Moliger.
She repeated that name to herself until it stopped hurting.
Because ever since the murder any hint of a similar string of syllables left her breathless, and tortured her brain like a searing migraine.
And now, next to a sleeping, untouchable Marko, she could let her lips form Freddy Moliger’s name, let it reverberate in her head like a grimly tolling bell, somber as the knell that rang in the modest church on the Carrefour de Libération, amid the noise of the passing cars, on the day of Clarisse Rivière’s funeral.
She lay quiet and still, taking care not to touch Marko’s skin, her fingers mechanically smoothing the sheet over her stomach as Freddy Moliger’s name slowly sounded its lugubrious, clear tones in her head.
