by Marie Ndiaye
He didn’t know it, but he was awaiting a revelation, and that revelation never came, and only when he found that nothing had come, that he was as empty and unquiet as when he arrived, did he realize he’d been awaiting it.
He put on his glasses and smiled vaguely at Trevor, who was making his usual dish of pasta with cream and lardoons, facing the stove, not looking at him. He stood up, put his plate and silverware in the dishwasher.
He thought the kitchen looked dowdy, messy, and sad, and yet he’d put more money into this kitchen than any of the other four rooms.
He’d had it completely remodeled, with a slate floor and pale-gray glass tiles on the walls. The built-ins were finished in dark gray; the table was a glass plate with black metal legs.
In the early days, he and Clarisse found that kitchen so beautiful and so elegant that they scarcely dared use it, and frying was out of the question for months.
And yet here as usual was Trevor browning his lardoons on high heat, spattering grease on the gleaming black cooktop and the little tiles around it.
All sorts of things that had no place in a kitchen cluttered the marble worktop and the corner bench, its pale-rose patterned chintz now dark with wear and heavily food-stained: DVD cases, flyers, a scarf, plastic bags carefully folded in four.
The fact that Clarisse or Trevor could go to the trouble of folding a plastic bag and then simply leave it on a chair or atop the refrigerator, as if the very minimal act of folding it made it a pleasing sight, wearied Richard Rivière beyond measure.
He had an awful feeling that the irreparable loss of his kitchen’s purity was a sign of his own life’s disintegration.
He pictured the bathroom, which had also taken much thought and tens of thousands of euros, and that months-long meditation had plunged him into a state of happy beleaguerment that he didn’t regret in the least.
Spending hours on the Internet comparing total-immersion tubs, sinks carved from a single slab of sequoia, mysterious, subtle faucets, he felt intensely aware of his being, of his tense, quivering body, of his mind working to judge, to eliminate, to select, with a glorious self-assurance and the faint, thrilling terror that he might be spending far too much money.
But little matter, he applied for loans and inevitably got them, because he made a good living.
And that feeling of being at once outside and fully inside himself, in his self’s heady depths, now suddenly open and luminous but unburdened by care and remorse, by unease and difficult days—however ephemeral, that feeling was beyond price.
What did his magnificent turquoise faience-tiled bathroom look like now?
He knew all too well, and he bridled in advance at what would be waiting for him when, in a few moments, he finished his coffee and went off to brush his teeth, comb his hair: towels tossed haphazardly over the heated racks, wadded against the wall behind the bar, draped any which way in front, Trevor’s toothbrush abandoned on the glass counter, worn, disheveled, ill rinsed, and Trevor’s clothes, which he never dropped into the Grand Hôtel laundry hamper but always to one side of it, and the glass shower door that Trevor never squeegeed off, white with water stains.
It was beneath him to care so deeply about such trifles, Richard Rivière told himself. And yet…
Though he accepted the meticulous, unstoppable demolition of his life because he’d balked at the strange labor of knowing Clarisse Rivière and because, in his cowardice, he’d let that woman he once so loved race unhindered toward her perdition, he could not bear the thought of Trevor, and to a lesser degree Clarisse, carelessly or willfully befouling that existence’s setting, for it could be painful and dark, but absolutely not dirty and disordered.
“Kind of weird that Mom’s also named Clarisse, though, isn’t it?”
Trevor’s eyes were glued to his plate, his tone hurried and gruff.
“It’s a common enough name, you know,” Richard stammered.
Flustered, he gave up on making himself a cup of coffee. He left the kitchen with the disagreeable feeling that he was running away, and the suspicion that Trevor knew it.
—
No sooner was he outside than the mountain pounced on his back.
He forbade himself to look at it. Nonetheless, the image of that mountain sternly poised against the bright, blinding sky seemed to have fixed itself on his retina, because he could still see it now, even without raising his eyes, and he could feel its fearsome weight on his spine, its cold claws on the back of his neck, like a corpse latching on to him before he could shake free, before he could even think.
An aching homesickness for his native Gironde, a clement place without snowy slopes or skiers, put a lump in his throat, so fleetingly that he only had time to realize where it had come from.
His back hurt.
Stooping, he started out to the parking lot. He’d sold the SUV this morning—wasn’t that good news?
He decided to pay off one of his loans, the one he’d used to replace the bedroom’s squares of white carpet with Burmese hemp. The carpet was only two years old at the time, but the traffic lanes had gone gray, and that daily reminder of his foolishness in choosing white for the floor so gnawed at Richard Rivière that, awakened one night by the mountain’s insidious growl, he sat down at the computer and ordered twenty square yards of Burmese hemp.
He was much happier with it now, except that the hemp was so rough and the weave so coarse that he and Clarisse had to forgo the pleasure of going barefoot. He tried it at first, and his soles stung for two days.
“Monsieur Rivière, I want a word with you.”
She had the fierce, despotic air of the pampered women who seemed to abound in this neighborhood and this city, a thin, suntanned face beneath pale, fluffy hair.
She knows my name, he told himself, surprised. He had no idea of hers, though for the nine years he’d lived in that building they’d been neighbors.
He stopped by his car, eyebrows raised in an expression of interest, automatically switching on his businessman’s smile. But she didn’t even repay him with a tight smile of her own. Her lavishly ringed hand lashed the air before her face, telling him not to bother, the time for feigned conviviality was over. He couldn’t recall the slightest disagreement with this woman.
The mountain was pressing on his spinal column with all its weight. Stifling a grimace, he leaned on the hood of his car.
“I’ve been wanting to see you for at least a week, Monsieur Rivière, but I never managed to run into you, and you’re not here during the day, there’s only that boy, not very friendly, may I say, not particularly well raised, if you understand me. In any case, this isn’t about that.”
She inhaled mightily, with a sort of refined disgust.
Through the yellowish fluff of her hair, like a very young child’s, he could see the dull-white skin of her scalp. Her face, her skeletal hands, everything else looked as if it had been seared.
“It’s that SUV of yours, Monsieur Rivière. I believe you’re allotted one single parking space, like the rest of us. Your vehicle’s so wide that I can’t get into my place when there’s a car on the other side. It takes me four or five tries, and all that because you’re encroaching. And then how am I supposed to get out without rubbing up against the next car? I literally have to extricate myself. I want it out of there, Monsieur Rivière, right now.”
To his astonishment, he saw tears in the eyes of this flinty, authoritarian woman.
But she went on staring at him, bristling and unyielding. It was he who turned away a little, rattled.
Could this be, that a tiny, unthinking act on his part had brought someone to the brink of tears?
Suddenly he was ashamed to have forced that woman to let him see her like this. He mumbled a few words of apology, then assured her the annoyance was temporary, since he’d sold the SUV.
“But you have to move it now, Monsieur Rivière, right now!”
“As a matter of fact, I was just on my way to work,” he said, to put a
n end to this.
—
The dealership was located outside the city, on the Val d’Isère road, so heavily traveled by cars laden with luges and skis that a sort of bad taste lingered in Richard Rivière’s mouth every evening.
It made him feel more exiled than ever, and different from his colleagues, not to mention from Clarisse, who’d been skiing since her earliest childhood, in a way that made him seem not just an outsider but a slightly lesser man.
He himself didn’t care, but sometimes he thought it must be annoying and embarrassing for Clarisse, as if he were forcing her to put up with an infirmity he’d kept secret, something no one could seriously consider a grave failing, perhaps even legitimate grounds for regular teasing, but nonetheless, admit it or not, one that might well end up undercutting the fragile foundations of a couple come together late in their lives.
“I so wish I could ski with you,” Clarisse would sigh, melodramatically, to show she was joking.
And yet she did say it, he understood, because she couldn’t hold in that regret, and if there was one realm in which he could never begin to rival her children’s father, a real-estate agent who in every other way wasn’t much of a husband, whom Clarisse had left almost as soon as Trevor was born, it was knowing how to ski.
Sometimes, when she couldn’t find anyone else, Clarisse invited her ex to go skiing with her. At this Richard Rivière felt only indifference.
He was simply unhappy for her, because he thought she must feel vaguely humiliated before her friends, before her ex, obliged to confess that she lived with a man who’d never strapped on a pair of skis in his life.
But she would say it without shame, he was sure, with that sweet, steadfast pride he so loved in her.
She was in the showroom, amid the cars, when he came in.
She was a saleswoman. She had a passion for her work, a way of ordering cars or dealing with sales contracts as if it were her calling, in return for which she asked neither salary nor thanks but only the joy of knowing the customer was just as delighted as she was, and the other salespeople as well, for whom she was a staunch and sensitive colleague, never seeming to expect the same devotion from them, only wanting them to feel comfortable in her company, graciously making it clear that they could leave the heavy lifting to her, as well as the slightly exhausting late-afternoon displays of good cheer.
Less driven, Richard Rivière felt cynical next to her, slightly fraudulent, burned out.
He wasn’t, he knew. He was methodical, prone to anxiousness, particularly since his move to Annecy, where he couldn’t quite resign himself to the certainty that he’d never feel at home, where the fear of a mistake in figuring a customer’s loan sometimes knotted his stomach, because what would then be questioned and judged, he thought, was not his competence but his very essence.
Clarisse came toward him with her broad, hearty smile, her warm, encouraging gaze, a reassuring sight for customers worried they might have blundered into a stupid misadventure when they walked through the dealership’s door.
She was so helpful, so cordial, so naturally likable that some of them hesitated to disappoint her by declining to commit to a purchase on the spot.
And sometimes, she’d noticed, not quite knowing why, they did their best to avoid her when they next came, to escape the barrage of an attentiveness so generous that it could be wearing, Richard Rivière had more than once thought, affectionately amused.
The showroom was empty so soon after lunch, only two salesmen chatting in one corner, hands in their pockets, swaying to and fro on their heels, their slacks’ dark-gray nylon stretched tight over their slightly ponderous rear ends.
Clarisse brushed his cheek with her lips. She wore high heels for work, making her face more or less level with his, petite though she was.
As usual, he stared intently at her face, longer than he should in such everyday circumstances, a face he’d known for six or seven years.
And as always he hid his disappointment by murmuring whatever came to mind, always intended to please her in one way or another, for she must never know how let down he was, since it was in no way her fault.
“I sold the Cherokee, the guy didn’t even bargain.”
She raised a triumphant thumb.
She was plump, vital, her body an assemblage of firm curves. Her face was open and simple, unmysterious, but Richard Rivière was forever hoping another face might show behind it, a face he wouldn’t know but would immediately recognize as the real face of Clarisse Rivière, not the one he’d been wed to for twenty-five years but the one he’d never managed to seek out and find, he thought, behind the impersonal, irreproachable, innocent woman he’d ended up leaving, too bored and frustrated to go on.
He knew what he was waiting for, that apparition on Clarisse’s face, and he silently berated himself for his credulity and duplicity.
Because the face that she offered him, suspecting none of this, was nakedly trusting.
But he couldn’t help himself, and he searched those features for some revelation: at long last, he desperately hoped, he would know who Clarisse Rivière had been.
The two women had nothing in common apart from their name, but the fact that this was the face of a Clarisse, that it was stamped and suffused with those very syllables, authorized him, quite logically, he thought, by the rules of his own irrationality, not to lose hope that he might one day see Clarisse Rivière’s real face showing through.
What that face would be he had no idea.
He knew only this: the sight of that face would instantly fill the great emptiness he had in him, amid a tangle of insipid material longings, petty terrors, annoyances.
He would feel less guilty, he would almost feel redeemed, if Clarisse Rivière’s soul did him the mercy of showing him the face that he couldn’t find before.
She would still be alive had he tried to reach her back then—but why had she striven so to stop him?
Why had she set out to make herself impossible to love, transformed herself into a figure without qualities, the image of a fleshless, evanescent, unbearable perfection?
From her intent, faintly questioning air, he sensed that Clarisse was saying something about Trevor.
He pretended to listen, nodded as a thought came to his mind and transfixed him with sorrow.
That Moliger, her killer, had he seen Clarisse Rivière’s real face? Did he see it as he watched her die? Or before, when he lived with her?
“He’d be more likely to go if you took him,” Clarisse was saying. “I think he’s embarrassed to go to the doctor with his mother. That’s the only reason he doesn’t want to, I’m sure of it. And one of us has to be with him, you know how he is, he’ll never tell us everything the doctor says if it makes him uncomfortable.”
“A doctor?” he echoed.
“He’s not in good health at all, not at all.”
“He eats too much,” he murmured, distant, bored.
“Oh, not that much, for his size and his age. Young people have to eat a lot, everybody knows that.”
“He eats too much,” he said again, now aware that he was annoying her but unwilling to promise to take Trevor anywhere. “Incidentally, I sold the Cherokee.”
“I know, you just told me.”
“Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure!”
Being an unaggressive, fundamentally generous woman, she chose to let the matter drop.
She gave a little laugh and patted his cheek, like a mother.
Her brown-dyed hair fell in waves around her full, opaque face, which was only itself, innocent and trustworthy.
And Richard Rivière was torn between the respect he owed that face and his yearning to see it fade away to reveal the other.
He spent the afternoon at his computer, studying the supply of available cars.
He regularly left his desk, when people came in and the salesmen were all busy, to keep the waiting customers company.
He offered them coffee,
asked a few questions, affable, assiduous, informed, but his mind wasn’t there, and without even knowing it he summoned up memories of the hundreds of times he’d done this before—smile, ask questions, point the customer toward a salesman—because he was thinking about none of that.
His thoughts jumped from subject to subject, free of his control.
And perhaps because he remembered resolving to call his daughter Ladivine, he thought of the Cagnacs, and an unpleasant feeling started to nag at him, something dark and jealous that he wasn’t used to, that took him by surprise.
The Cagnacs were the only friends he’d made in Annecy.
They’d met at the dealership, five years before, and their Périgord roots had had far more to do with their pull on him than their quick, fuss-free decision to buy the most expensive car of the line.
The Cagnacs were in the restaurant business at the time, bored and wanting a change.
And Richard Rivière took them to that country he’d already visited alone several times.
He’d chosen it purely by chance, he told them sincerely, because at the time that’s what he thought, as he was searching the Internet for a sunny vacation spot one night, and everything he found there enchanted him, and not a year had passed since that he didn’t go back, and Clarisse never came with him, and never asked.
And it occurred to him, since his friends the Cagnacs were looking for a new direction in life, to suggest that they open a dealership there.
He’d seen to getting them settled, doing far more than a new friendship demanded, with a zeal and a generosity that even left the Cagnacs a little leery.
But they soon realized he’d take no cut from their profits.
Richard Rivière knew he was too scrupulous, too honest, he had too much confidence in his own integrity, for their suspicions to last.
Saintlike, never seeking to defend or justify himself, his devotion never flagging, he held fast to the strange joy of setting the Cagnacs up in their business.
