Ladivine

by Marie Ndiaye

  She could hardly expect the children to take trembling anxiety’s side, to embrace foolishness and pointless shame.

  In all sincerity, she couldn’t even want them to.

  On the GPS’s instructions, Marko drove down a narrow, potholed road through endless suburbs.

  Low apartment buildings of bare cement succeeded the little dirt houses roofed with mismatched sheets of corrugated tin, before which slim-hipped women with diminutive breasts beneath oversize T-shirts disapprovingly watched the SUV go by.

  Sometimes the wheels sprayed little pebbles at the houses, built close by the road.

  With this Marko slowed down, just as Ladivine was about to ask, then little by little he sped up again, his features relaxing, as if he feared that some peril might pounce on them if he drove any slower.

  He cast Ladivine glances whose tenderness she could plainly see, as well as their longing to draw her into the sphere of license and vitality forming around his new unbridled nature, but she turned away, looked out the window, her heart heavy with resentment.

  But suppose Wellington had come back to do them harm?

  Wasn’t that the most likely thing?

  Had she not in fact sensed the boy’s hatred, his feigned friendship mere groundwork for carefully calculated misdeeds?

  Marko was seeking out the children’s attention as well, wiggling his fingers at them or smiling broadly toward the backseat in the rearview mirror.

  Not trying to, by his emanations alone, Ladivine sensed, he was stirring up an odd frenzy in the children, especially Annika, an excitement at once teasing and frustrated, denied a conclusion that Marko’s provocative manner seemed to promise.

  Daniel squirmed in his seat belt, giggling as if he’d been tickled, something questioning and faintly anxious in his piercing voice, his baby voice, which he’d playfully reverted to.

  Annika was screaming with laughter as she might scream in pain, spurred on by the goad of a scandalous sexual appeal that she couldn’t understand but perceived all the same.

  This was what Marko was bringing about, this was how far he was willing to go to absolve himself—drawing the children into his miserable, guilty conscience, then corrupting them with their desperately delighted consent.

  Or was it she, Ladivine Rivière, who was looking at all this with an unwholesome eye?

  She closed her eyes, hunched forward in her seat.

  She often feared, having once been that teenage girl who slept with the uncomplicated men of her little city for money, and unable ever since to look back on those days without a shudder of dismay, almost disbelief, that she wouldn’t be able to keep a cool head with her children when the subject of their bodies came up, that she might betray her unease by a stiffness they would interpret as an odd prudishness, that she might find it hard to make clear what was perfectly fine and what to stay away from, and so she’d always found Marko’s casualness and simplicity about sex reassuring, and she’d always counted on him to fill in the children when the time came.

  But the indecent, toxic, hopeless excitement she felt in that car couldn’t be good for the children, she thought, and she knew the old Marko would never have allowed it, could never even have imagined behaving in a way that might encourage it.

  Or was she imagining things?

  Oh no, she could feel it, as plainly as she could smell Marko’s tunic’s harsh, oily scent.

  He’d decided to turn Daniel and Annika into hard, perpetually inflamed creatures, either, she thought, because he couldn’t bear to be alone in his wickedness or because he believed they might find protection in that debasement.

  And here she felt Marko had betrayed her, Marko whose uprightness and modesty and even, yes, whose cowardice she loved more than anything, not because she might somehow turn it to her advantage but because she thought it meant he would never hurt anyone, and he never had, gentle and good as Clarisse Rivière, until (at her urging?) he one day resolved to tell Lüneburg that he would rather never set foot there again.

  Ladivine had met him after two aimless years at the University of Bordeaux, which, on a whim and a friend of a friend’s vague promise of lodging, she’d left for Berlin, with no great enthusiasm, under the illusion that time and life would go by more quickly if she moved on, stupidly, because she had no plans, no hopes, because at twenty-one she felt tired and worn, and she saw Marko at the watch counter of the Hermannplatz Karstadt, where he’d recently found work, and realized that a young man like him, with his long hair, his big glasses, his delicate, kindly, calm, endlessly patient face, would never feel the need to hurt anyone at all, that there was a kind of glory about him that he didn’t work at and didn’t believe in, though that word would have made him laugh, as he was a practical man, and this serene skepticism was an element of his grace, since he had no knowledge of that grace, since he had no way of seeing it.

  She came back to the Hermannplatz Karstadt every day, and every day she pretended she was trying to decide on a watch to give Richard Rivière, who hadn’t yet left Clarisse Rivière behind in their Langon house.

  Eventually she invited Marko for a cup of coffee over his midday break, a step that, by his own admission, he would never have dared take, and the next day she moved her things into Marko’s room.

  He was living in a group apartment on the Mehringdamm, and his little room at the end of the hall served as their marital home for two years, while Ladivine earned her diploma as a French teacher.

  And that mannerly young man, resigned to the sameness of life and the docile abandonment of his ambitions, submitting without rancor, placidly accepting the way of things, requested a transfer to the Karstadt on Wilmersdorfer Strasse when they decided to leave the little room in Kreuzberg for the Charlottenburg apartment.

  And so their life had gone by, thought Ladivine in the SUV, a good life, easy and serene, made perfectly happy, for a time, by the birth of the children.

  Sometimes back then she woke late at night, not to find Marko locked in battle on the balcony, not to flee the torrent of blood pouring in from Langon, carrying Clarisse Rivière’s silent cries, but simply for the immeasurable joy of gazing on Marko’s, Daniel’s, and Annika’s sleeping faces, one by one; it was the anticipation of that matchless joy that pulled her from her slumbers, that made her get up and walk soundlessly through the apartment, her blood throbbing in her neck, not her mother’s blood but her own, neatly contained in vessels that no loser would ever set out to slash with a knife.

  And it was Marko’s face that she looked at the longest, sometimes drowsing, then waking again with a start, but never slipping out of that ecstatic, surprised, almost incredulous meditation on a man who meant far more to her than her own life, who inspired in her an inextinguishable gratitude, whose discreet, childlike breath she greedily inhaled from his nuzzling mouth, trying to solve the mystery of Marko’s love for her, he who in his clarity seemed so much more honorable than she.

  Nothing could possibly be more disturbing, she thought in the SUV, than the hard flame now burning in Marko, with which he was trying to consume Daniel and Annika.

  Such a man would never again make her long to inhale his breath. She wouldn’t even want him to love her.

  But was she not the cause of all this? Was it not her idea to call Richard Rivière and ask for advice, knowing that Marko would take anything her father said as an absolute truth?

  And suppose, thought Ladivine in the SUV, suppose Marko wanted to be a little like Richard Rivière, suppose he was striving to attain what he saw as Richard Rivière’s marvelous force, his alluring authority, the perfect certitude of his word?

  Wasn’t she to blame for that, too?

  Without trying to, had she not, in the first years of her life with Marko, spoken of Richard Rivière in such terms that Marko could only feel crushed by the weight of his own insignificance?

  On various plausible pretexts, Richard Rivière had never bothered to come and meet either the children or Marko, thereby, in her hu
sband’s eyes, heightening his prestige, which, troublingly, grew more powerful still with the murder of Clarisse Rivière.

  But instead of keeping quiet, shouldn’t Ladivine then have convinced Marko that Clarisse Rivière would still be alive had Richard Rivière stayed and looked after her, had he not so completely and so coldly abandoned her, like a wife he’d come to despise years before?

  And that couldn’t be, could it?

  One thing often irritated Ladivine: that Marko never seemed to appreciate the full splendor of Clarisse Rivière’s innocence.

  To be sure, he treated her with the same kindness and thoughtfulness he offered everyone, but that was just it; he never showed, through a special, exceptional attitude, that he was aware of that ragged, dismantled woman’s unique grandeur, never showed that he had every reason to respect her far more than he did Richard Rivière, whom he admired childishly, without knowing him.

  Oh yes, that had often infuriated Ladivine.

  But, she thought in the SUV, wasn’t that her fault? How to know?

  Had she, too, not treated Clarisse Rivière with condescension, had she not hidden her tortured love under a mask of offhandedness and even, sometimes, effrontery?

  How could Marko have suspected her burning desire to see Clarisse Rivière rescued and loved when she expressed it so badly, so obliquely?

  He was just as casual, just as amiably distant, polite, and unforthcoming, with Clarisse Rivière as she was, and what could he be accused of, thought Ladivine Rivière in the SUV, except refusing to understand that he was much like Clarisse Rivière, in the special sort of drab saintliness that they shared?

  But now Marko was dazzling, now he radiated a magnificent, wicked flame.

  Unusually, the children hadn’t yet drifted off to sleep.

  Even Daniel was squirming, his eyes wide open and slightly bulging.

  Ladivine thought him rapt in an unfocused pleasure that the mere presence of Marko’s body, of his flesh as if on fire beneath his pink tunic, was pretending to offer him, then suddenly snatching it away, refusing any possibility of fulfillment.

  Now and then Daniel snickered, understanding nothing but putting on a forced cynicism, thought Ladivine, like a teenager who suspects some hidden meaning and doesn’t want to seem clueless. He snickered with a horrible knowing smirk, thought Ladivine, frightened.

  The GPS’s silken commands landed in that electric silence like sly insinuations.

  Marko was driving a little too fast on the now-deserted road, freshly asphalted, past fields of banana trees.

  An amused little smile floated on his lips, ready to burst into full bloom at the slightest provocation.

  How handsome he was, how appealing, how, clearly, he wished Ladivine would come over to his side and delight with him in this new untrammeled, superior, brutal way of being!

  She remembered that Marko always needed her approval, express or implicit, in everything he did.

  Never, she was sure, had he tried to exclude her from something in which he found happiness or satisfaction, as she had with that big brown dog, and she even wondered if he was capable of any pleasure at all, of any kind, except insofar as Ladivine consented.

  Those days were gone. With all her being, with all her flesh, she could feel Marko breaking free of everything that bound his gratification to her approval.

  No less clearly, she saw the desire he still nonetheless felt, not desperate or cunning but simply companionable, to include her in his new enchantment.

  A wave of regretful, anguished nausea swept over her.

  She looked at him, that bewitching man, she remembered the deep tenderness she once felt for him, she recalled that he was the father of her children and could be hers again if she liked. She wanted to whisper, Marko, my love. She reached out to touch his shoulder.

  But just then he turned toward her, and in his eyes she thought she saw a gleam she’d never seen before, something she didn’t want to get close to for anything in the world, not even with love’s help—a joyous, arrogant rejection of decency and rectitude, of fear and compunction.

  The smile on Marko’s lips came to life, and it was his usual handsome smile, loving and slightly tremulous, put on to tempt her.

  But in his eyes was there anything other than cold calculation?

  Ladivine sensed a distance between that smile and himself, as if his malign spirit had remembered that smile and realized its power to placate her, the deployment of his new omnipotence having failed to sway her.

  Soon, she wondered, would he have even that smile to draw on?

  Because his smile was hovering at the very edges of his lips, a faraway, uncertain memory of what even now was no more, while his gaze, turned inward, was fixed on another goal, a secret goal—oh no, not even secret, Marko’s new desires radiated from his whole body, the car thrummed with those waves, forbidding the children to take refuge in sleep.

  Surprised by the sound of her own voice, Ladivine shouted:

  “Wellington!”

  Then she huddled on the edge of her seat, as far from Marko as possible.

  He sourly pretended to focus on the road ahead, roaring recklessly past overloaded old trucks and rusting, outmoded little cars whose drivers sometimes sent a vigorous gesture of hostility Marko’s way.

  “I want to see him again,” Daniel whined.

  “We’ll never see Wellington again,” said Annika, in a grave, superior voice.

  “Why not?”

  “Because Papa says so.”

  Never, in the old days, would that little girl have announced that something involving the entire family wouldn’t come to pass simply on Marko’s orders, Ladivine thought.

  “From now on, it’s forbidden to speak Wellington’s name,” said Marko calmly.

  Annika burst into a painful, sharp, prolonged laugh, which seemed to brighten Marko’s gloomy heart.

  To keep her company and express his approval, he began to laugh, too, his fists pounding little blows on the steering wheel.

  —

  After two monotonous hours on the perfectly straight highway, flanked by endless banana and sweet potato plantations, Marko turned onto a yellow dirt road that soon entered the forest.

  Ladivine had stopped looking back to see if Daniel and Annika were finally asleep—the atmosphere individually embracing each child was arousing enough that she could feel them holding themselves at the ready, unsure what they were waiting for but maniacally attentive to their father’s every move, his every word or sigh, anything that might give them a lead to follow, give them a place in the wake of his dazzling vigor.

  Were they afraid they might fall from Marko’s favor if they slept, and so find themselves back in Ladivine’s camp, where a tedious remorse about Wellington was accompanied by an utter inability to bring him back?

  Wellington!

  Why shouldn’t the children have concluded that their father could produce the boy whenever he pleased, and that if he didn’t want to he must have had very good reasons, whereas, manifestly, Ladivine could only cry Wellington’s name in subdued, pointless sorrow, unable even to speak of him, to summon up his image with amusing words and anecdotes?

  Wellington!

  Why, for that matter, shouldn’t the children rather be forbidden to speak that name than hear it heartlessly cried into their mystified ears by their frightened, opaque, uncommunicative mother?

  The poor little things must have feared that Ladivine would take over their minds if they slept, then drag them away from Marko’s wondrous influence, spirit them away from that radiant force.

  She turned around in her seat and caressed Daniel’s bare thigh, squeezed Annika’s calf, trying to smile reassuringly.

  The children’s flesh felt hard, clenched. They refused to meet her gaze, and she realized she was being a nuisance, but what did she care, if she didn’t want to lose them?

  Because, she thought, could she still see in them her beloved children if they turned into depraved little mons
ters?

  Wellington!

  She longed to tell them the boy was dead, and she and Marko, for all their pretensions to excellent parenting, were, with this refusal to speak of what they’d done to Wellington, lying to them.

  But it was too late, she couldn’t talk to her children now, and her children didn’t want to hear, she could tell by their averted eyes, the way their limbs tensed beneath her fingers.

  Suddenly a broad clearing appeared down the road, opening up in the forest.

  “We’re here,” said Marko.

  Ladivine felt a shared astonishment briefly reuniting her with Marko, for what they now saw was nothing like even the vaguest image they’d conjured up of Richard Rivière’s friends, whom Ladivine, not quite knowing why, had pictured as a couple of grizzled drifters temporarily stranded by a lack of funds or a need for rest, but the dozens of clearly brand-new SUVs, white, black, and gray, parked in the clearing beneath sheet-metal roofs, and the big pink stucco house, which reminded Ladivine of certain villas in Langon, revealed the presence, deep in this forest, of prosperous car dealers, and why not, thought Ladivine with a stab of ill will, since that’s what Richard Rivière had become once he left Clarisse Rivière (as if Clarisse Rivière had somehow been keeping him down), having gone from assistant manager in Langon, at the Alfa Romeo dealership he’d been hired by just out of the lycée, to the head of a Jeep dealership in the Haute-Savoie, and Ladivine always wondered how he’d settled on that area, having, to the best of her knowledge (which is to say from what Clarisse Rivière told her), never spent any time there before going off to make it, perhaps forever, his home.

  Oh yes, she’d thought on being told by her father that he now lived in Annecy, Richard Rivière had been quietly plotting his Haute-Savoie escape for some time—because how to believe that he’d rushed straight from Langon to Annecy with no plan in mind, no prospects, no idea even what the city was like?

  A couple emerged from the house and stood looking in their direction, hands shading their eyes.

  But why, the insidious little voice of common sense whispered in Ladivine’s ear, why should Richard Rivière have revealed to his daughter that he wanted to leave Clarisse Rivière and make a fresh start in Annecy?