Ladivine

by Marie Ndiaye

  She felt herself suffocating, stifled by a light, inexorable hand.

  She wanted to struggle, but her legs wouldn’t answer her frantic commands, as if lethargy were winning out over panic even though panic was obviously right.

  Now she could clearly see the new-paved road, glistening from recent rainfall, that she was being forced to follow by this will that wasn’t her own, and she knew she didn’t want to go that way, not yet, and would have to struggle against her soul, not her body, which had no part in all this.

  But she’d never been trained in that sort of combat, lacked the weapons, the spirit.

  And that smooth new road was pulling her along, and she felt herself giving in, surrendering in anguish, weeping without tears for Marko and the children, who she knew wouldn’t be waiting at the end of that road, which had been laid out for her alone.

  And then off to one side, she caught sight of a path—a mere fleeting glimpse from the corner of her eye, she wasn’t meant to see it, but she did.

  She threw herself toward it, dealing a terrible blow to her soul.

  And her lost, hurting soul, not yet relieved, heard the path’s little pebbles crunch under the soles of her wonderful sandals, which were as one with her feet.

  And with this she could open her eyes, stretch her limbs.

  Now she was hearing all sorts of sounds, from Clarisse Rivière’s growling moans to the insects’ tiny cheeps, from Clarisse Rivière’s howls to faint creaks from the branches far above.

  It was still dark, but the darkness was sharply detailed, alive with tiny forms, clearly outlined.

  Ladivine turned her head.

  She saw her own face beside her—the curve of a full, damp cheek, a mass of strong-smelling brown hair, the scents familiar but sharper.

  She stood up and began to trot through the forest, and then, her breast swelling with pleasure, to run on her strong, slender legs.

  She thought she could go on and on running this way, without respite or fatigue.

  She emerged from the forest just as day was breaking.

  Before the Cagnacs’ house, Marko, Daniel, and Annika were climbing into the rental car.

  Once the SUV had started up and gone on its way through the clearing, Ladivine set off running again.

  Joyful and proud that she’d found them and could thus place them under her care, she let out little cries she alone could hear, immediately swept off by the rushing wind.

  The dog was there, on the other side of the street, it was there for her now, waiting for her to come out of the building each morning and head off to school, accompanied by her father and the invariably whining Daniel.

  Annika looked deep into the dog’s black eyes, unafraid. I know who you are, she thought, and the dog stared back with an austere, steady tenderness that Annika found infuriating. It seemed to be saying that it would always be watching over her, and perhaps over them, should Marko and Daniel one day take note of its presence, but Annika felt no need to be protected, and she was offended that the dog had presumed to make of itself her guardian.

  She slipped her hand into her father’s, trying to infuse in him some of her overflowing strength and rebelliousness.

  She didn’t dare admit it, but she was also afraid Marko would end up spotting the dog, and she delicately squeezed his hand and spoke any words that came to mind to keep Marko’s attention on her, his daughter Annika, who, though only eight, thought herself seasoned enough to calmly accept that her mother had chosen to look after them from inside the skin of a dog on the Droysenstrasse’s icy sidewalk, whereas her father, she thought, her poor distraught father, should he ever realize such a thing, could never accept it without even more grief than he already felt.

  Annika was unhappy with her mother for choosing this way of leaving them.

  It was November. The sidewalks were covered with packed, frozen snow, the dog’s fur was thin and sparse on its flanks.

  Nevertheless, Annika was sure nothing and no one had forced her mother to live with them in this distant, uncomfortable way, that she’d willingly chosen to shelter herself in the skin of a dog, which, though it did little to protect her from the cold, suited her better than the skin of a woman. That was how it was, Annika knew it.

  She saw no sorrow in the dog’s eyes, only a serene, stern resolve.

  The dead must have that kind of face, she thought.

  Annika was a sturdy girl, and nothing she’d realized about her mother kept her from succeeding in school or proving unfailingly happy and calm before her father, who, for his part, had to be protected from certain difficult truths.

  Which is why, when they set off for her school, she refused to cross the street outside the building, so they wouldn’t come face-to-face with the dog. Because if her father’s eyes met the dog’s, might he not recognize them, as if in spite of himself, and in spite of his little capacity for believing in such things?

  Ever since their return from vacation, three months before, Marko spent all his free time on the Internet, and he explained to Daniel and Annika that wherever their mother might be she would someday appear, one way or another, in the web’s inescapable universe, either in person or through someone with news of her. No one could vanish completely and forever these days, their father assured them in his weary voice.

  Her father’s sadness and fatigue pained Annika’s heart.

  But she thought he was better off thinking their mother adrift in the wide world than withdrawn into the skin of a dog, guarding her truncated, lost, unhappy family from the Droysenstrasse sidewalk. He was better off this way, he who suffered so.

  He tried to put on a good face with the children, but his sadness never left him, and Annika preferred him disconsolate to falsely lighthearted.

  He was the nicest, most thoughtful father she knew, and the best looking, too, she thought, with his lush hair, tousled because he paid it no mind, and his tan face and pale eyes and carelessness about his appearance, like some magnificent animal with no notion that anyone might think it beautiful, and no understanding of people’s admiring stares.

  Often Annika was angry with Daniel, who, rather than shield their father as she did, continually nagged at him with his whining and whims and tried to pull him away from the computer, to which Marko consented with an infallible patience and a gentleness so wistful and sad that Annika would later take Daniel aside to lecture and shame him—why try to take their father away from the one thing he thought brought him nearer their mother, that endless, painstaking search through the wilds of cyberspace?

  He was in touch now with people all over the world, always asking this single question: Have you seen Ladivine?

  And those strangers, he told them, put all their ingenuity and goodwill into the search for Ladivine Rivière, or, if they could do nothing else, into the attempt to console Marko Berger, which made Marko’s pain a little easier to bear, he added, wanting to be honest, but with a certain reluctance, Annika sensed, since his children could do nothing to unburden him of his grief, even a little.

  How furious Annika was at their mother!

  Every morning she stared at the dog with all the rage she could muster, then ignored it as it kept pace with them on the opposite sidewalk.

  And in the afternoon, when their father escaped from Karstadt for thirty minutes to come pick them up at school and hurry them back to the apartment, where they would stay on their own until his workday was done, the dog was still there, shivering, eternal, faithful to its charge and perfectly indifferent to Annika’s withering stare.

  Young though she was, and aware of her youth, of her ignorance, she believed she understood that their mother had tired of them, the children, their energy and their needs, their inevitable, daily company, their moods and their chatter. She herself, Annika, often wearied of Daniel. She felt largely responsible for her brother, and she found the burden heavy and oppressive.

  But she couldn’t forgive their mother for leaving Marko in such distress and despair.
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  Certain frigid mornings, when they had to set off for school in the dark and the leaden sky foretold yet another gray day, Daniel stamped his feet on the front step, found some pretext for refusing to go on. Bundled up stiff in his snowsuit, he would shriek:

  “I want Mama!”

  Seeing Marko’s defeated face, and feeling no less enraged, she wanted to cry out:

  Let’s bring that dog with us, let’s take it home!

  But she held back, out of pity and love for her father.

  The man was taking his time looking over the car, and Richard Rivière saw the elegant drape of his navy-blue overcoat, unbuttoned and gracefully rippling as he circled the vehicle, bent down to inspect the wheel rims, then lithely stood up again, his body visibly honed by regular exercise.

  The coat must be cashmere, he thought, and the dark-gray pinstripe suit a silk-and-wool blend. On his feet Richard Rivière had noted, with a fervid curiosity he knew well, and which always filled him with shame, a pair of polished, pointed-toe ankle boots.

  And when the man first squatted down Richard Rivière was astonished to see he was wearing raspberry-red socks.

  Astonishment gave way to envious loathing, and that, too, was an emotion he knew well, always depressed and disappointed to be feeling it, him, Richard Rivière, who aspired to be a sensible and thoughtful man, noble in his sentiments.

  Why, then, could he not help feeling jealous and frustrated when a well-dressed man had the breezy audacity to display some accessory—gaudy socks or a comical tie—that Richard Rivière would never dare buy, lest he give himself away as what he thought he was in others’ eyes, a parvenu with odd and dubious tastes?

  He was not unaware that such encounters with tall, thin, chic men also inspired in him, along with envy, an immediate, baseless respect, slightly craven and limp.

  How stupid, and how pitiful!

  He put on an aloof and superior air, checked his watch. He glanced at the ground-floor windows of his apartment building and was relieved to see no sign of movement behind the sheer curtains. He would rather Trevor not see him trying to sell the SUV to a man of this sort, exactly the type Trevor made a great show of mocking, with their tailored suits and their gym-room physiques.

  “Okay, it’s a deal,” said the man, striding athletically toward him, his tan young face friendly and, Richard Rivière fleetingly thought, almost fawning.

  “You’ll take it?” he asked, surprised.

  Collecting himself, he added:

  “You won’t be sorry.”

  The man inside Richard Rivière who forever strove to decipher a customer’s uncertainties or unspoken misgivings thought he could make out an anxious little twinge behind the smile, a touch too unwavering, and the gaze, a touch too ostentatiously frank, of this man whose elegance was perhaps also, in the end, just a little too impeccable, he thought, every detail as if carefully weighed for its charismatic effect.

  But why must those intuitions always be silenced by the Richard Rivière who was intimidated by wealth or its appearance, and anxious to sell what he had, to be rid of it, like some ill-gotten gain?

  As the free, severe, impotent part of him whispered that question in his ear, he glanced again at the ground floor of his building and saw the kitchen window ajar.

  That meant Trevor was up, eating his breakfast, perhaps observing his stepfather’s obsequious charade from his chair, with that awful little smirk he’d developed, full of smug, listless irony. Trevor’s pitiless judgments meant nothing to Richard Rivière, but he didn’t like being spied on, didn’t like feeding the young man’s mindless censoriousness at his expense.

  He turned his back to the window, irritated, and grimaced a smile at his customer, who was explaining that he was planning to give the car to his wife as a present. Yes, yes, let’s get this over with, he thought.

  His eye lit on the man’s white cotton shirt, darkened by two little sweat stains on either side of the purple polka-dot tie. A few drops of sweat, too, he observed, between the upper lip and the nose, so short and straight that it must have been artificial, surgically reshaped.

  Richard Rivière felt preoccupied, out of sorts, he didn’t know why.

  He’d forgotten about Trevor. He’d almost forgotten that an overdressed stranger was on the verge of buying a Grand Cherokee for forty-seven thousand euros without haggling, nearly five thousand more than he’d paid for it at the Jeep dealership.

  Come on, let’s get this over with, he was thinking, depressed, his mind elsewhere, but fixated in spite of himself on such trivialities as the beads of sweat glinting on the man’s suntanned skin or the way he stuck out his lower lip after every sentence to blow at the lock of hair draping his brow. The lock fluttered up, and Richard Rivière saw the pale skin, fragile and tender, at his hairline.

  He would later realize that the wide-awake Richard Rivière inside him had tried to sound the alarm. Wasn’t this man clearly nervous, though a skilled-enough actor to give himself away only by a sudden sweat in the chilly air of this autumn morning?

  He would also realize, later, that he’d refused to understand out of sadness and weariness, perhaps even that he had understood but wouldn’t accept it, because sadness had suddenly got the better of him.

  He looked past the man’s shoulders at the mountain, still covered with snow, and the bright, frozen sky beyond.

  Nine years he’d been living in Annecy, and he’d never got used to the mountains. They left him cold, wary, vaguely hostile, because he enjoyed none of the pleasures they seemed to offer, and he found them unfriendly, stupid, and portentous in the way they loomed over the city.

  He’d never wanted to learn how to ski, he didn’t like the atmosphere of the resorts, the pointlessness of such arduous exertions.

  Sometimes he woke with a start in the night, shivering as if shaken by a huge icy hand, and then he got up, went to the window, and found the mountain looking at him in the dull-gray darkness.

  The idea that it would always be there, when he got up and when he lay down and long after he was dead, immovably there and watching, discouraged him.

  He would lie down again with the disagreeable feeling that he wasn’t his own master, that at any moment the mountain could blow a cold breath down his neck.

  It could feel his dislike, and it scorned him, that was what he was thinking, and he had no one to tell of it.

  “I’d like to be paid by wire transfer,” he heard himself announcing, his voice almost hostile.

  “Of course,” the man answered warmly.

  Richard Rivière took a contract from his briefcase and handed it to the man, who sat down behind the wheel of the car to look it over.

  He stayed outside, shivering, suddenly unable to rejoice at having so effortlessly made a sale that would bring him a tidy profit. What would he do now, what desire would enliven the days to come?

  For the past several months, ever since he took out a loan to buy that SUV for resale, each new day dawned with that question, which he’d managed to turn into something exciting and even ennobling: Would this be the day that he sold the car?

  Much of the pleasure he felt on waking each morning, much of the good cheer he displayed both at home and at work, came from the idea of earning five thousand euros for doing virtually nothing. And now it was done, and he felt only a weary gloom, and now he dreaded the prospect of an existence stripped of that motivation.

  And what, for that matter, would he do with the money? Nothing tempted him that he didn’t already own, and what did he actually have? Nothing much, compared with what his colleagues or wife thought important.

  Sometimes he thought he spent money only to justify his urge to make money, and he alone knew his enthusiasm was feigned, that his interest in clothes, and now even in cars, was an act, borrowed from a personality he scarcely remembered as his own, now alien to him, and unpleasant, too. Outings to the city’s most lavish restaurants, multicourse menus, pricey wines he couldn’t appreciate, every delight he fe
lt obliged to indulge in left him bored or withdrawn.

  Nothing in this world, he thought, quite met his desires, but what those desires were he couldn’t say.

  That reticence before everything that should have made him happy, everything he seemed to want from his work, from his cogitations and calculations, dated back to the year after he’d left Langon. Oh, he saw it now, even if he’d denied it at first. He saw it.

  He was sick, in a way, but his illness had no name, and wasn’t easily described, even to himself. Was it nostalgia?

  It wasn’t what he once knew, what once was, that he missed, what he missed was what should have been, or could have been, had he only known how to go about it.

  Because he missed not Clarisse Rivière but the woman Clarisse Rivière should or could have been, a woman he didn’t know, a woman he couldn’t so much as imagine, and that, he thought, was nobody’s fault but his own.

  Looking through the windshield, he saw the man sign his name at the bottom of the contract, where he himself had already signed. That was that.

  The buyer got out of the car, displaying a broad expanse of raspberry socks and, just above them, two slender shins, orange tanned and hairless like his face and his soft hands, every fingernail highlighted by a white pencil line under the tip.

  There was something comical about such fastidious grooming, Richard Rivière said to himself, and yet once again he felt inadequate before that younger, taller, fitter, better-looking man; he felt horribly heavy and worn and provincial.

  At such times he always feared a resurgence of the faint southwestern accent he’d struggled to disguise even when he lived in that part of France, as a precaution, on the theory that losing it couldn’t possibly hurt and might one day prove useful and because it made him secretly proud not to speak like his parents. But his accent hadn’t gone away, he knew, he’d only tamed it, and emotion could always bring it back. He had particular difficulty saying cette rather than c’te, and so at work never referred to a car as cette voiture, sticking to the far less risky ce véhicule.