by Marie Ndiaye
Another boy answered, and they both began to laugh.
Lying hushed and stiff, Ladivine concentrated so hard on that voice that her head spun.
“Wellington, Wellington,” she murmured, sweat suddenly pouring down her face.
A still-doubting joy, a still-hesitant hope, kept her pinned to the bed, perhaps waiting for some unambiguous sign, perhaps afraid that rushing into the hallway might shatter any chance that it really was Wellington.
At last she carefully got out of bed, opened the door, and there, at the top of the stairs, leaning on the banister, Wellington and another boy were chatting—one of the boys, she mechanically observed, who’d served them at lunch.
She saw Wellington in profile, speaking in his languid voice, head tilted back, ever ready to laugh at his own jokes.
He was resting his weight on one leg, and his very young man’s bony hips showed under the light fabric of his Bermuda shorts.
She silently closed the door and hurried to Marko, so excited that she stumbled on the polished wooden floor, suddenly unsure how to put one foot in front of the other.
“Wellington, Wellington,” she murmured, her breast swelling with overpowering rapture.
She shook Marko’s shoulder.
He opened his eyes, immediately breaking into a smile, and reached out for her.
“Marko, Wellington’s here, I just saw him. He’s alive! He’s out in the hallway…Oh, darling, what a relief…”
He frowned, perplexed, lost, and his arms fell back to the mattress.
“What Wellington? Who are you talking about?”
“You know! The boy you…who went over the railing…”
She broke off, realizing Marko was only asking in hopes of a moment to choke back his fear.
For, beyond confusion, it was a blend of terror and deep disillusionment she saw pouring from Marko’s eyes, his suddenly ashen face, his trembling lips.
Rather than sit up on the bed, he burrowed under the covers.
She felt as if her body were slowly deflating.
“What’s the matter, Marko? Aren’t you happy? Aren’t you relieved, at least?” she whispered slowly.
“I was so happy he was dead, you can’t imagine how happy! I don’t want to see him, I don’t want to hear about him!”
He was almost shouting. Tears of rage burst from his eyes.
Then the anger faded, and there was only bewilderment, disappointment, helplessness, very like the helplessness, thought Ladivine, that had gripped Marko’s face and made her afraid for him when they first landed here.
He turned his head to one side on the pillow. His cheeks were quivering like an old man’s.
“We’ve got to go back to the Plaza, I don’t want him alive here in front of me,” he whispered. “This damn vacation, it’s like it’s never going to end!”
To Ladivine, too, their stay seemed to be stretching out endlessly before them, like their very existence to come, but she was shocked to find Marko so anguished when she herself felt only joy at the thought of it.
—
When Ladivine once again stepped out onto the graveled terrace, her feet so cozily and perfectly adapted to the new sandals that she could feel them throbbing with an eagerness to walk, an SUV pulled to a stop just in front of her, the young bride at the wheel.
It was gigantic, with a belligerent snout and dazzling silver trim.
She lowered the window and shouted to Ladivine to climb in beside her.
In the backseat, Cagnac and the groom were talking like a couple of new friends, animated and effusive.
Ladivine hoisted herself onto the seat of buttery, enveloping leather.
“What do you think, lady? I’m leaning toward this one, myself,” said the young woman, with a wink.
“But it’s the most expensive one,” said the husband, feigning torment.
Cagnac chortled, merry and obsequious.
“Isn’t it comfortable!” murmured Ladivine, reclining her seat.
The young woman turned toward the forest.
But, rather than follow one of the many lanes vanishing into the massive trees, she gently veered away and began skirting the forest’s edge, as Ladivine had seen her do before.
Then a strange, aching regret wrung her heart.
To erase it, she turned halfway around and asked Cagnac:
“That boy who works for you, Wellington…Has he been here long?”
“Wellington, Wellington,” said Cagnac, searching his memory. “Oh yes, that young one. We have him out now and then, when we need him, two or three weeks at a time, and then he goes back. Fine boy,” he added dreamily.
“And when did he come this time?”
“Oh, I’m not sure…Maybe last night.”
Cagnac sat up straighter and, avoiding Ladivine’s eye, adopted the impatient, somewhat pinched air of one who finds this subject unsuitable in the fragile, momentous midst of a test drive, of a deal in the making.
He turned to the husband and threw out a few flattering words on the young woman’s skill at avoiding the branches that sometimes blocked their way, fallen from the trees of the forest.
The husband smiled contentedly.
“So,” the young woman asked Ladivine, “what do you think?”
“Of the car? Very nice, very comfortable,” said Ladivine eagerly, guessing that her new friend, or her old friend, perhaps her lifelong friend, had her heart set on it.
She didn’t say that the bright, beckoning voices of the forest were calling her, and that beneath them she also heard a throaty, muted summons that scorned those happy little cries, a summons Ladivine would not escape.
You can listen to that happiness, the summoner said, if it helps you, but you won’t get away.
What was Clarisse Rivière doing in the forest?
Clarisse Rivière had never commanded anyone to do anything—or had she?
After her last visit, when Clarisse Rivière introduced Freddy Moliger to her daughter, who immediately conceived the most unpleasant impression of that man, she could nonetheless only concede that Moliger seemed to hold no power over Clarisse Rivière, whereas Ladivine had thought it likely or even certain that he had her mother firmly under his thumb, unable to imagine any cause but coercion and contamination for the shocking new life Clarisse Rivière had chosen.
She had in fact almost exploded at her father on the phone, having called him two or three times solely to tell him what Clarisse Rivière was doing with her life, and express her concern, and hear, she hoped, Richard Rivière’s concern echoing back.
But instead, almost silent, uncomfortable, as if he thought it was no longer his place to know of such things, he simply said in a hesitant voice that Clarisse Rivière might finally have learned how to be happy, and those trite words threw Ladivine into the icy waters of barely repressed rage, which came back to her a few months later when he called to tell her of Clarisse Rivière’s death.
“You see, you see!” she cried. “If only you’d shown a little concern, too!”
“But, my little girl, what would that have changed?” he’d answered very quietly, distraught, tears in his voice.
Ladivine thought he was trying to dodge his responsibility, that this was hardly the real question.
No one, she thought, could in good faith deny that shared, unhidden concern might have a protective force, and that Clarisse Rivière might have lived her strange, thorny new life more carefully had she felt the shared concern of a daughter who loved her and an ex-husband who didn’t hate her and was worried about her.
Or would she have behaved more foolishly still?
Or would she have decided that at her age she had no reason to think her freedom in any way limited or complicated by the groundless anxieties of two people she loved who had, each in their own way, turned away from her?
In any case, when Ladivine met her mother’s lover, her mother twice asked a favor of Moliger, and to Ladivine’s almost outraged surprise he obeyed her at once.<
br />
“Go get us some beers, would you?” Clarisse Rivière asked in a firm, confident voice as she dropped onto the blue couch, not yet soaked with her gushing blood. And then, a few minutes later:
“Maybe a little something to nibble on with these beers?”
And Moliger hurried off for a bag of potato chips from the kitchen, docile, solicitous, but always with something both derisive and furious about him, as if he had to make up for his evident pleasure in obeying with a look that expressed just the opposite, concealing that pleasure from anyone who might find it laughable.
What was Clarisse Rivière doing deep in this foreign forest?
And why did it seem, oh yes why, wondered Ladivine, that Clarisse Rivière was calling to her in her true voice, her dark, solemn, trusting voice, that the naïve, sunny songs also winging their way from deep inside the forest were meant only to attract her to what would otherwise fill her with terror?
But nothing that involved Clarisse Rivière could ever frighten her, far from it.
She hadn’t heard her mother’s whimpers or screams as her blood drained away, as she weakened with each passing second, and any unspoken appeals Clarisse Rivière might have made after Ladivine’s father left she’d refused to hear, in self-defense and embarrassment.
And so, if Clarisse Rivière was now calling her in her true voice, her dark, solemn, trusting voice, she would come running with all the fervor of her uneasy conscience, her remorse-choked affection.
—
When Marko came down to dinner that evening, Ladivine’s first thought was that her husband had been handed a death sentence.
Neither Marko nor the children had left their rooms all afternoon, and Ladivine, feeling uncomfortable for the Cagnacs, had tried to keep their hosts company, though she saw she was disturbing them as they dealt with the SUV’s sale to the young couple, typing up papers, a purchase contract, flattering and fussing over them to make sure, Ladivine realized, that they didn’t get any ideas about backing out.
Doing her best to seem carefree, she drifted from room to room on the ground floor, where the Cagnacs had a large office decorated with automotive posters, and everywhere she went she furtively looked around, trying to see Wellington.
Should she come face-to-face with the boy, she told herself, she’d have to beg his forgiveness, however real or serious or otherwise the thing she and Marko had done to him.
Yes, she told herself, humbling herself before Wellington was no sacrifice at all, and no apology on her part could erase all the terrible things Marko had thought about the boy, and the appalling happiness he found in his certainty that he’d destroyed him.
Wouldn’t she simply be trying to show him her joy that he was alive?
Not that she could seriously hope to find Marko relieved, for the moment, to see Wellington on his feet and evidently unhurt.
But when, with the children beside him, he entered the dining room where Ladivine and the Cagnacs were waiting, he had the face of a man condemned.
Wordlessly, with a wan smile, he pulled out his chair and slid into it.
And Ladivine didn’t need to study the Cagnacs to know that those two, that inflexible man and woman, had just dropped the blade onto Marko’s neck, moved more by disgust than by cruelty.
Gone was the Cagnac woman’s avid pleasure on discovering Marko’s beautiful, glorious face just that morning.
She impatiently tore at her bread, and her lean, flat, clenched person radiated such coldness, such hostility, that Ladivine thought she saw Marko shiver.
She’d never seen him so low, so wretched and uncertain.
Although angry with him for that, although mortally angry, she felt a violent, painful pity.
Yes, Wellington! she wanted to shout in Marko’s face. Be happy for him, and for us, instead of dragging the children into your defeat!
Because with one glance at Annika and Daniel she’d seen everything.
Their poor little bewildered faces, anguished and empty, no longer turned to their father but downcast over their wringing hands, bore witness to a disaster that was already total and, as if already past, beyond all repair.
Just that morning, Ladivine thought in dismay, the children were ready to go over to Marko’s radiant, cruel side, and now his fall had left them as devastated as if they’d learned he was dead.
How furious she was!
Could she not fill them with delight at Wellington’s return?
But what had they known of Wellington?
“Something wrong, kids?” asked Cagnac grumpily.
Annika and Daniel didn’t look up. Ladivine wasn’t sure they’d even heard.
“They must be tired,” Marko whispered.
The Cagnac woman let out a snide, almost contemptuous guffaw.
She shot Marko a look that would be the last she bestowed on him, thought Ladivine, a look heavy with disdain, disappointment, almost torment.
The Cagnac woman could not be wrong.
If Marko were simply tired or ill, she would never have treated him this way.
She could see he was no longer the man she’d met a few hours before, and if she didn’t yet know the reason for his fall (because how could she, about Wellington?), the mere fact that he could let himself slump into melancholy and terror showed quite clearly that he had, in a sense, fooled her—her, the incorruptible Cagnac woman. Wellington, Wellington, Ladivine repeated to herself, in a quiet, singing little voice.
The Cagnac woman called out:
“Wellington!”
She yawned wide, like a wild animal, showing her teeth, her bluish tongue.
Wellington hurried in with a salad bowl full of beef snout in vinaigrette.
He set it on the table, stirred the chopped snout to coat it with dressing, and his gestures were at once expert and slightly perfunctory, as if, however it may seem, he was only playing a role that he could abandon whenever he pleased.
Yes, Ladivine told herself, this was the Wellington they’d met at the National Museum, the young man with the long, slender limbs, the protruding hips, the resourceful, independent, clever, very faintly arrogant manner.
She found herself studying his walk as he circled the table to pour a taste of wine into Cagnac’s glass.
Was he limping?
Perhaps he was dragging one foot a little, or was he just sidestepping a chair leg?
She didn’t yet dare try to catch his eye to learn, from the way he looked back at her, whether she and Marko were guilty of something.
But what would the neutrality of that reserved, professional gaze ever say?
Sitting clenched in his chair, an anguished grimace on his lips, eyes half closed, Marko was beyond even pretending to be simply a tired guest, and in any case the Cagnacs had lost all interest in him.
And when Wellington approached to fill his glass, Marko pressed his fists to his closed eyes and began to moan quietly.
“I can’t take this anymore, I can’t take it,” he stammered.
Wellington broke into a suave, knowing smile.
He nimbly stepped away from Marko and walked out of the room, as if he’d got what he came for and now had only to disappear.
“I want to go home!” cried Daniel.
“Papa, Papa!” howled Annika, eyes wide with terror.
“I can’t take it anymore, I can’t take it…”
“This is intolerable!” cried the Cagnac woman.
She hammered at the tabletop with the handle of her knife. Annika stood up and awkwardly put her arms around Marko’s shoulders as he repeated, at once leaden and fervid, perhaps drunk on his own surrender:
“I can’t take it anymore, I can’t take it…”
—
Later that evening, with Marko and the children up in their rooms and the Cagnacs closed away in their office on the pretext of urgent work to be done, Ladivine went out and walked toward the forest in the gathering darkness.
A deep calm slowed her thoughts, freed her footsteps of an
y imaginary burden.
Never hesitating, and although the forest’s edge was already dark, and remembering, too, that she was not a brave woman, she started down a narrow path.
Her first thought was that she was entering the domain of a silence so full and so thick that it hurt her ears like a deafening roar, and she almost gave up, almost turned back.
But then she made out the gentle, secret, insinuating appeal she’d heard from the newlyweds’ SUV, that dark sigh, like a heavy beast dying or in labor, calling Clarisse Rivière to her mind just as clearly as if her mother’s face had suddenly appeared on the half-moon above her.
That afternoon’s happy, sprightly little voices had gone silent.
There remained only that fearsome plaint, that breath exhaled by a breast at once anguished and resigned, but resolute, quietly unyielding in its determination to convince her.
Ladivine walked onward, with no fear in her gait.
The path snaked through the tall trees with their alien perfumes, through the brambles, the big bloodred flowers bursting out on their stout stems, sprouting like mushrooms from the roots.
How far am I supposed to go? she wondered half aloud, simply curious, as if to someone responsible for guiding her, someone who might conceivably answer.
Tiring, she sat down at the foot of a tree and pressed her back to the smooth, warm trunk.
Behind her she heard footsteps lightly treading the leaves and twigs.
Guessing who it was coming to join her, if not why—but her faith was blind—she didn’t turn her head as it came to her side and lay down against her legs.
It stank of humus, sweat, and exertion.
Once that smell would have disgusted her, but knowing how far it had come to find her, and what fidelity, what courage, lay behind it, she inhaled it with pleasure and gratitude.
Her eyes closing, she lay on her side, one arm under her head, the other draped over her friend, as she did in the bed she shared with Marko.
The night was warm and peaceful, stirred only by Clarisse Rivière’s unrelenting sigh.
And Ladivine felt herself falling asleep, violently aware that she was sinking, tumbling into a world she might well find unpleasant or paralyzingly frightening.
She tried to break free, struggling to open her eyes, but it was as if a will more powerful and assured than her own was holding her back and forbidding her to make a sound, to voice an objection.
