by Marie Ndiaye
So she would try to talk him out of it?
And on what grounds would she have sought to convince him to go on wasting away with Clarisse Rivière?
He did the one thing he could do, not uncaringly, and no reasonable person could blame him for not anticipating that his wife would end up drowning in her own blood because he wasn’t there beside her, because he wasn’t there to keep her from foolishness—to keep her from being herself, that is, to keep her from being the slightly dim Clarisse Rivière.
The sunlight that made the sheet-metal roofs sparkle poured down on the couple’s two identically unmoving heads, as if to designate them for veneration.
The woman’s wrists and throat glimmered, laden with gold.
She took a languid step forward, very consciously offering her adorned body to their gaze, and Ladivine felt a small shock on realizing that this diminutive figure in spike heels, capris, and a little sailor shirt was in fact an old woman, whose long hair, dyed deep black, seemed to wrap her gaunt, tanned, heavily made-up face like a scarf.
She was neither smiling nor looking at her expectantly, but only waiting, infinitely patient and docile in her certainty of being admired, and she raised her chin a little, boldly exposing her wrinkled face, slightly smoothed over by the makeup, to the stark sunlight.
“I’m Richard Rivière’s daughter,” said Ladivine, after nodding a hello.
She couldn’t help adding, so as to say something, for she was intimidated by the woman’s imperial aloofness:
“His only child, Ladivine.”
“Yes, I know, he said you’d be coming,” the woman answered, ever so slightly bored, as if she found the obligation to speak pointless when one had only to show oneself, exhibit oneself.
“Oh, he told you?”
“Yes, a few weeks ago, on the phone.”
She realized that Richard Rivière must have talked to his friends as soon as she’d hung up, and although she could have considered that diligence a sign of his eagerness to help out, it rankled her.
Because there was little chance that either she or Marko would ever have felt the urge to rent a car and drive out to these strangers’ property were it not for “that Wellington business,” as she’d privately named what had happened, and did it not seem that, from his mysterious Haute-Savoie lair, Richard Rivière had foreseen the events that would bring them to this place, and so was it not in his power, a power he’d left unused, to say or do something to forestall those events?
Shouldn’t he have put her on guard, he who claimed to know this country?
And said to her: Beware of courtly teenagers who accost you at the front door of the National Museum? Beware of the violence nestled in your heart, waiting to be roused when you meet a young man with impenetrable schemes, beware of the sympathy you might begin to feel for your own extraordinary misdeeds, your newfound longing to let go and plunge endlessly into senselessness?
Marko and the children had now joined her before the woman with the cold, serene face, not so much covered with makeup as carved from it.
Marko held out his hand, and with a weary resignation she gave him her own.
Oh, how he’d changed, how he wanted it to be seen, thought Ladivine.
Because Marko had climbed out of the car and, before that woman, smiling, his back very straight, he had made his appearance.
The old Marko would have thought it enough simply to be there.
He glowed with pride and confidence in his pink tunic, the huge purple flowers ornamenting the front like the insignia of some ignoble order.
Ladivine was beginning to loathe that outfit.
She felt Marko’s hunger to present himself to this stranger in all his new magnificence; she sensed his pleasure that this woman had never seen him before; she saw his brazen manner, the full depth of his emancipation.
And was he not now even more handsome, far more, than before?
He took the children by the shoulders to herd them before him, adorning himself with their presence, she thought.
The woman gave them a thoroughly indifferent glance, then looked again, interested, almost intrigued, and the curiosity that neither Marko’s nor Ladivine’s face had sparked in her jaded eyes was now roused by Daniel and Annika’s two ardent little faces, a hint of a smile even taking shape on her crimson lips, and she looked again at Marko, now realizing, now knowing what she would find on his face, thought Ladivine, and then back at the children, all the while smiling as if she’d seen something surprising and glorious, something important and wonderful, and finally she looked at Marko with her real eyes, now shining and quick, cynical, hungry, which said to him: I’ve seen your children’s lost, avid faces, and I know what manner of man you are, because we’re the same, you and I.
Marko let out a charmed little laugh. Annika feverishly echoed him.
The woman briefly caressed each child on the cheek and cried out:
“Your children are adorable.”
Which, though no surprise now for Ladivine, nonetheless displeased her, for to her mind Daniel and Annika looked anything but adorable at the moment.
She herself, had she just met them, would immediately have been leery of such children.
Would she not go so far as to think: These children are guilty? These children have done wrong, or believe they’ve done wrong, because some unnameable misdeed has been placed on their shoulders, and their sense of their own wickedness is ruining their faces and incomprehension is pinching their little noses, twisting their mouths into a detestable rictus?
“They’re very tired, they’re not quite themselves,” she said curtly.
“They look fine to me,” the woman decreed, not even bothering to glance Ladivine’s way.
“We’re not tired,” said Annika.
The children clung to Marko, rubbed their hair against his noisome tunic.
He tenderly pressed them to him.
There was something desperate, thought Ladivine, her heart bleeding, in the way they clutched at their father’s body, as if that contact alone could enlighten them on everything that was strange and different inside them, but that enlightenment never came.
Marko was embracing them with the same love and gentleness he’d always shown his children.
But perhaps they could sense that he himself no longer needed to feel and receive love, that he could now do without love, that he was strong enough for that, even as, kindness being a habit with him, he went on making the loving gestures they were accustomed to.
Oh, come to me, she thought, my love for you is healthy and pure and I won’t force you to bear the burden of any crime.
But her thick legs, her legs like two very straight tree trunks, with no taper at the ankle, which she’d taught herself to proudly display as if fashions had changed and long, slender legs were now a curse, not a blessing, her massive legs wouldn’t let her move, wouldn’t let her run to her children, and her tongue, too, had turned sluggish and fat in her mouth, from which no sound emerged.
She could clearly see herself reaching out and pulling the children from Marko’s maleficent embrace, but her arms still hung limp at her sides, her fingers only feebly clenched against her linen skirt, sweat stained and rumpled from the trip.
—
It was clear that Richard Rivière, Ladivine’s father, had, since leaving Langon years before, led a professional life as busy as it was prosperous, a life of which Ladivine knew little, and neither, surely, did Clarisse Rivière, notwithstanding the money she got from him every month, as Ladivine was aware, a sizable sum that she never touched.
It was not long before her death that she’d told Ladivine of her refusal to make use of that money, with the stubborn, childish, patient air she sometimes had when she’d made a resolution she couldn’t or didn’t want to explain but would never go back on, though she was perfectly willing, as if to make up for her hardheadedness, to tirelessly repeat, always in the same affable voice, the simple words that expressed her decision.
>
She did just that when Ladivine finally voiced her surprise at everything Clarisse Rivière, her lonely, aging mother, seemed to be giving Freddy Moliger, since Ladivine had to limit herself to the subject of gifts, oh even there blushing at her own indiscretion, and there was no question of broaching the principal subject of her fear and dismay, the sexual passion Clarisse Rivière seemed to feel for that vile man, Freddy Moliger, that loser no doubt picked up off the counter he collapsed onto each night in some Langon bar that stayed open past midnight.
Arming herself with a stubborn but amiable expression, Clarisse Rivière assured her that she liked making Freddy Moliger happy, just as she told her she never withdrew a euro from the money Richard Rivière wired to her account, and didn’t want to.
Ladivine realized that her mother didn’t dare ask Richard Rivière to stop sending that money, that she wouldn’t know how to go about it without seeming aggressive or sentimental or absurdly contrary, and Richard Rivière obviously would have said no, and she would have had to come up with reasons, and so it was easier to say nothing.
But Ladivine knew that, deep in her modest, thick-skinned, battered, but unresentful heart, Clarisse Rivière thought it cruelly inconsiderate to be helped out by standing order.
She would have liked to get a letter each time, and it wouldn’t have bothered her in the least if a check was enclosed, far from it.
Richard Rivière thought he had only to direct his bank to wire a fixed amount on a fixed date, and then he could forget it, and that, Ladivine sensed, was what hurt Clarisse Rivière, his seeing to it that he would never have to think about her again, even just once a month.
That was why money was tight for Clarisse Rivière even before she met Freddy Moliger; she would gladly have taken Richard Rivière’s money, but she couldn’t see getting it like this, nor asking to be treated more thoughtfully, and this intransigence might have seemed an expression of wounded pride out of character for that unassuming woman, but it wasn’t that, Ladivine knew, because no one was less proud than Clarisse Rivière, less aware of her dignity; it wasn’t that, it was rather the sign of a pain that still hurt, mute and incurable, the pain that had taken Clarisse Rivière by the throat when her husband walked out of the house and she realized she, too, was now out of his life, Richard Rivière’s mysterious new life, as irreversibly as her reflection disappearing from the rearview mirror when he turned the corner.
“Your father seems to be doing pretty well” was all she’d said to Ladivine of Richard Rivière’s business, and Ladivine didn’t ask for details, almost certain her mother knew nothing more and not wanting to make her confess that ignorance aloud, Clarisse Rivière who for twenty-five years of married life had listened each evening as Richard Rivière told of the cars he’d sold or not sold, the models he particularly loved or found sadly lacking in style or finish, or design, as he liked to say.
Neither Clarisse Rivière nor Ladivine quite knew how Richard Rivière was making all that money in Annecy, and so Ladivine felt vaguely uncomfortable, almost fraudulent, as if she’d stolen her identity as his daughter, when with a broad sweep of her skinny arm the Cagnac woman showed her the fleet of SUVs, saying she hardly needed to explain whom they had to thank for all this, she and Cagnac, and after a moment Ladivine realized she meant Richard Rivière.
The Cagnac man was tanned and lean, with swept-back gray hair and espadrilles adorned with an intricate little knot.
The Cagnac woman introduced Marko and the children to him first, with a fervor that Cagnac must have seen as a sign, thought Ladivine, for a gleam of curiosity, of devout interest, immediately flickered to life in his pond-water eyes.
Marko gave him a warm greeting, so casual that he might simply have been arriving at some gathering of friends.
Did he see, Ladivine wondered, the anticipation he aroused in these strangers, full of desire and pious respect, did he see that they’d pegged him as one of them?
When at last Cagnac turned to Ladivine, his wife having left her to introduce herself, the special gleam in his eyes dimmed, that brief flame of longing and deference giving way to a slightly chilly politeness that was nonetheless immediately warmed by the words “I’m Richard Rivière’s daughter.”
Cagnac let out a cry of delight.
For a second time he clasped Ladivine’s hand, having first shaken it somewhat stiffly, and held it for a moment in his, as if to fill himself with some substance peculiar to the Rivières, or to attempt, through his daughter’s flesh, to recapture Richard Rivière’s real presence.
“We owe him so much, you know,” he said with emotion. “And your father’s often told us about you, very often.”
“Is that true?” asked Ladivine, skeptical but thrilled in spite of herself.
Though, she wondered, why should she think Richard Rivière never spoke of her to his friends?
She’d never doubted his affection for her, his only daughter, even when he proved little interested in having her come to Annecy or in meeting Marko and the children.
And when she thought of Richard Rivière, she told herself love didn’t have to mean wanting to know all about a person’s life and companions, didn’t have to mean needing to be with or talk to that person, because this, she believed, was how her father loved, with a love both abstract and unwavering, vague and absolute, incurious and unlimited.
He loved her, she told herself, and that was all there was to it.
And so she’d learned to make do without the usual displays of fatherly love, and she’d come not to mind that Richard Rivière asked after Daniel and Annika, and often sent them presents as costly as they were inappropriate, but never thought it only natural to want to meet them one day, never even seemed to believe that that was another thing he could do; she’d come not to mind that, since this was how Richard Rivière loved.
“He’s very proud of you,” Cagnac went on.
He cocked his head, narrowed his eyes.
“But you’re not how I pictured you. Completely different. And yet he described you so often, it’s strange.”
She could feel her breath coming heavier, hotter, her scalp prickling.
She scratched her head with a sort of fury, hoping Cagnac would say nothing more.
“We thought you’d be thin and light haired,” said the Cagnac woman in her cold, jaded voice.
“That’s how my mother is, I mean was,” Ladivine murmured.
“He never mentioned your mother.”
“Well, they were divorced,” she said, with a disagreeable sense of defending herself.
“He never told us he’d been married, not to mention divorced. He only talked about you, his daughter, and actually we had the idea you were Clarisse’s daughter.”
“Well, yes, that’s right, my mother’s name was Clarisse,” said Ladivine with a forced little laugh, feeling the blood drain from her cheeks and lips, her mouth at once horribly dry.
“We must not be talking about the same Clarisse. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. What do you say we sit down to lunch?”
Cagnac was probably afraid he’d said too much, thought Ladivine, relieved, and neglected his duty to be discreet where his friend Richard Rivière was concerned.
And although she had no desire to go on talking of Clarisse Rivière, although she was in fact delighted at this change of subject, she was astounded to find words crossing her lips, immediately wishing she could cram them back down her throat.
“My mother was murdered in her house in Langon,” she said hurriedly. “The trial will be starting soon.”
“Let’s go eat, since you’re here,” said the Cagnac woman. “We’ll make do with whatever’s on hand.”
Had she not heard her?
Marko and the children were looking away, toward the gleaming cars, at once uneasy and distant, thought Ladivine, as if unconcerned by all this but nonetheless embarrassed for her, Ladivine, who couldn’t seem to get into the spirit of things.
She’d never spoken so plainly of
what happened to Clarisse Rivière in front of Daniel and Annika.
And yet there was no dismay in their faces, in their eyes, still fixed on the shining SUVs, nothing troubled or tense.
The Cagnacs were heading toward the house with Marko close behind, one hand on each child’s shoulder.
“The real Clarisse Rivière must not be forgotten!” Ladivine sobbed aloud. “Who will remember her if not us? After all, she was…she was a very good woman!”
Marko turned around and gave her a cautious smile.
He’s trying to shut me up. Well, it won’t be that easy.
In two furious strides, she was beside him.
She then realized that a strap on her sandal had broken, where the delicate leather bands crossed.
She squatted down as Marko and the children went inside, and now she was alone on the gravel walkway, in the heavy, scorching silence, now with tears in her eyes she was remembering Clarisse Rivière’s gold sandals and yellowed, calloused heels and the shame they’d made her feel for her mother, because they made her seem like an unrefined woman doing her sad best to dress up.
Were her own heels not also dry and cracked, in the dust of that walkway?
And her legs, whose brown hairs were beginning to grow back, her doughy legs, what leap could they make to propel her away from the Cagnac house in case of danger?
Far, far in the distance, she thought she heard a dog bark.
The strap was beyond a quick fix. She’d have to clench her toes to hold the sandal in place as she walked.
—
“This was all his idea, our opening a dealership in the forest,” Cagnac was explaining. “We came out to this country with him two or three years ago, and he told us it was only his second visit, but he led us straight here, as if he’d been thinking of it for some time, and he said, ‘This is where you should build,’ and he dealt with leasing the land, all the paperwork, he found an architect for the house, all in just a few days. We trusted him, but still, he seemed so sure of himself that it scared us a little, we were half convinced he was going to swindle us in some way or other. I said to him, ‘Richard, what’s the scam?’ And if that made him mad, then we’d drop the whole thing then and there and never see him again, but he hardly even blinked, he just smiled his friendly smile and told us it wasn’t his way to deceive his friends. And we went back to Annecy, and that’s where we sealed the deal. He sends us practically new cars, almost never driven, and then we sell them here, and you know what, it’s going well, there’s a real demand.”
