by Marie Ndiaye
He visited them regularly, rejoicing in their success as if it were his own.
And yet, once he’d left them, once he was back on the plane to Annecy, he couldn’t hold off a sense that the Cagnacs were not exactly letting him down but neglecting some vital duty, which he couldn’t define, to be sure, but which they should have grasped all the same, that they weren’t repaying him for everything he’d done and, in their disappointing insensitivity, never knew it.
What he wanted from them, he eventually confessed to himself, was an illumination.
About what? Oh, he didn’t know, he didn’t really want to know till the Cagnacs revealed all, both the subject of the illumination and the illumination itself.
But his friends’ indifference to his obsession now gave rise to that touch of rancor when he thought of them.
He envied them, he wished he could live in the clearing at the end of the rugged road, in that beautiful, brand-new house, on the edge of the forest no one ever ventured into.
—
He left the dealership an hour earlier than usual, claiming an important meeting.
The truth was that he wanted to call Ladivine without Clarisse around, not that she would have eavesdropped, not that she would have asked questions about Ladivine’s life, the two children, the German husband.
Such concern had her sons caused her, and still did cause her, so many reasons for sadness or melancholy had they given her, that she seemed to have prudently opted to express no opinion and endanger no affection by any involvement in Richard Rivière’s previous life.
She had thus learned of Clarisse Rivière’s murder with the same fleeting horror, the same somber, superficial sympathy, she felt for any victim of the horrible things she read about in the papers.
She’d never met Ladivine, never spoke of wanting to, and not, he was sure, out of jealousy, because there was no one less possessive than Clarisse.
She simply preferred, insofar as possible, to take no interest in the matter, to invest no sentimental capital in that relationship.
That was fine with Richard Rivière. Nevertheless, he didn’t like knowing she was in the next room when he talked with Ladivine.
She might call out to Trevor or laugh aloud at something funny on television, as she had last time, and Richard Rivière would be so unhappy that he’d want to slam down the phone.
Because it wasn’t Clarisse Rivière laughing or calling out as he talked with their beloved daughter from their house in Langon, where they would have been happy, had he only found the way to let the real Clarisse Rivière appear, had he not, perhaps, frightened her off.
It was only Clarisse, a perfectly nice woman who didn’t deserve to make him feel so disappointed.
Whom or what had he frightened away?
Before what mystery had he shown a lack of courage or depth?
He turned into his building’s parking lot and found it impossible to park. The next car’s tires intruded so far into his slot that he would be trapped in his SUV, even if he did somehow insert it into such a cramped space.
He looked up at the windows, at once fearing and hoping he might see the bony face of the aged, baby-haired woman, no doubt watching for his return and now savoring her vengeance. Did he dare go up to her apartment, firmly ask her to please leave room for his car when she parked her own? A vague disgust held him back, a feeling that he couldn’t take on such a trivial problem just before calling Ladivine. He drove out of the parking lot and down the street until he found a free space.
The mountain seemed to have eased its grip just a little, no longer pressing down on his back with all its terrible might, though his spine was still aching, and when he started toward the building he realized he was walking like an old man, shoulders hunched, head bowed.
Trevor wasn’t there. He checked to be sure, opening the door to each room, even the little laundry at the far end of the kitchen, his weariness and heartache calmed by intense relief at being alone.
This was his home, picked out on his own and furnished to his own tastes, Clarisse and Trevor having moved in two years after he bought it, such that he always felt more as if he were putting them up than sharing the apartment with them.
But since moving back Trevor so rarely went out that Richard Rivière could almost never come home without finding him there, and that got on his nerves.
He took off his business suit, put on a T-shirt and sweatpants, poured a glass of white wine.
He was so grateful to Trevor for not being there, as if the boy had done him an exceptionally kind favor, that he made a solemn vow to drive him to the doctor’s, listen closely to what the doctor said, make it abundantly clear to Trevor, even ostentatiously clear if need be, that he cared.
He would help him lose weight, help him become once more the handsome, energetic boy he used to be—such would be his promise, as soon as Trevor came home.
As usual, his pleasure at being alone was slightly diminished by this vague, restless impatience to see Trevor again and make everything different, and the suspicion that everything would be just the same, the reality of Trevor’s cold, jeering face yet again shattering the illusion that he could force the boy to let himself be loved.
Suddenly upset, he downed his wine in one go. Then he dialed his daughter Ladivine’s number.
How long since he last called her? A year, a year and a half, more?
It was almost always on her initiative that they talked on the phone or met in a Paris café. “I’m coming down to see Mama,” she used to write him now and then, in an e-mail telling of nothing more than the dismal or wonderfully mild weather they were having this year in Berlin.
I’ll be in Paris myself, he would answer.
And Ladivine was convinced that he often had business in the capital, and he did nothing to suggest otherwise, though in truth he never set foot there save to see his daughter.
This was the only way they ever met. Leaving these reunions, he felt pathetic, unworthy.
He would gaze hungrily at the astonishing, adult, foreign face that was now Ladivine’s, sometimes touched by the shadow of an expression that fleetingly summoned up the very distant, aching memory of a little girl now gone forever, and neither this young woman he vaguely resembled nor he himself as this surprising, autonomous person’s father seemed in any way tangible.
They were the protagonists of a dream he was having in his Annecy bedroom, beneath the gaze of the hostile mountain, and when he woke his cheeks would be damp with tears because he would know none of this had existed, there’d never been a dark-eyed girl, he’d never had a child whose hand squeezed his own as they walked on the hill, behind a house by the vines.
He gazed hungrily at Ladivine’s face, and it hurt him terribly: in a moment he’d wake up, the mountain would be snickering, he’d be lost and alone.
“Berger,” said a little girl’s serious voice.
“Excuse me?” he said, caught off guard.
“Sie sind bei der Familie Berger,” she repeated, after a few seconds of silence.
He stammered:
“I’m sorry, I don’t speak German. You must be, um…”
Unable to recall Ladivine’s daughter’s name, he let out an embarrassed little laugh. He didn’t dare say who he was.
“Ich verstehe kein französisch,” she said curtly.
He heard the sound of a receiver being carelessly set down, then a brief conversation.
“Hello? This is Berger.”
The accent, like the voice, was gentle and slightly sad.
“Hello, this is Richard Rivière, Ladivine’s father.”
“Oh!”
The man seemed to come to life.
“Hello, hello, I’m very happy to…to hear you at last. It’s not true, you know, what Annika said, she understands French, she speaks it very well.”
“It’s perfectly all right,” Richard Rivière mumbled, since Berger seemed to be apologizing for his daughter.
“It’s just that she doe
sn’t want to now.”
Then he fell silent. Richard Rivière said nothing, unsure what to say, waiting for Berger to offer to put Ladivine on.
But a deep silence had settled in, peaceful, cozy, like the silence of a comfortable old married couple, and now it was already well past the point where two people can pretend they find nothing odd in each other’s muteness.
There was nothing to do, thought Richard Rivière, staring down the violet shadow-shrouded mountain through the kitchen window, but accept the awkwardness.
“How was your vacation?” he finally asked, feeling as if he’d come back from far, far away.
“Ladivine didn’t come home with us.”
“What do you mean? She stayed behind?”
“Yes,” said Berger in a barely audible voice.
Richard Rivière himself didn’t know if the cry that then burst from his lips was a cry of terror or joy or excitement, disbelief or eager affirmation of what he’d just learned. He understood only that concern had no part in it at all.
His legs went weak. He turned his back to the mountain, now fading into the darkness, and dropped onto a chair.
“But why?” he choked out.
“I don’t know. She disappeared.”
“Then how do you know she’s still there?”
“I don’t know anything,” Berger slowly repeated, as if utterly drained. “That’s what I think. That damned country swallowed her whole, you understand? You never should have suggested it.”
“You met the Cagnacs?”
“Yes. That’s where Ladivine disappeared, at their house.”
“My God, oh my God!” cried Richard Rivière. “And they have no idea?”
“No. It wouldn’t mean anything to them anyway. All they care about is selling their filthy cars.”
Berger’s tone was so desolate that Richard Rivière wanted to comfort him.
But realizing he’d forgotten this young man’s name, too, he dropped the idea.
The only name he could think of was Daniel, and he wasn’t sure it had any connection to Ladivine’s little family.
He fell silent again, pressing the telephone to his ear with all his strength as a hope full of terror and uncertainty rose up in him, and he found it at once exhilarating and shameful, because he couldn’t be sure Ladivine hadn’t freely chosen to bring him, Richard Rivière, who had for so long sought his way in the dark, the possibility of an understanding.
But what if she never came back?
In truth, he thought no such thing. He had faith in the instinct that had led him to settle the Cagnacs in that clearing, to work for their success, to want them to stay there forever.
But if it was true that Ladivine could get at what for him had always stayed hidden, he couldn’t be sure she was glad of that, that she hadn’t felt forced or cajoled into it by her father’s unspoken intentions.
What would she learn? What was there to learn? What was the place of Clarisse Rivière’s will in all this?
“Are you still there?” Berger asked.
“Yes, yes,” he whispered, starting, scarcely remembering whom he was talking to.
“I’ve made a website, haveyouseenladivine.com. I’ve got a lot of responses, but so far nothing I can take seriously.”
“It’s no use. No one will know.”
He immediately regretted his blunt words and, though impatient to hang up, added, “Oh, maybe they will. We mustn’t lose hope. Goodbye, Monsieur Berger.”
“Call me Marko.”
“Goodbye, Marko.”
“Don’t you want to talk to Daniel?” Berger almost shouted, desperate to keep him on the line. “He’s not like Annika, he’s willing to speak French.”
But Richard Rivière was petrified at the thought of conversing with an unknown little boy.
“Goodbye, Marko,” he said again, softly, and, as if to show Berger that the last thing he wanted was to be rude, he pressed the OFF button with a gentle, unaggressive finger.
Clarisse came home a few minutes later, with her slightly forced cheerfulness, her festive, overplayed, self-perpetuating enthusiasm, the work of her good-hearted spirit, thought Richard Rivière, grateful even if he couldn’t join in.
Because he could well imagine how hard it must be, after a long day at the dealership, to dig deep into oneself and draw out some semblance of joie de vivre just to keep everyone happy.
Clarisse had a special hatred of sullenness, of brooding silences heavy with vague resentments.
When the three of them were together she took care never to leave Trevor and Richard in the same room alone, fearing the emanations of spite and aversion she would feel spreading through the apartment, like toxic gas.
Sometimes Richard Rivière caught a helpless grimace on her still lips when she turned away to open the refrigerator and, thinking no one was watching, allowed her face to surrender to her real feelings, weariness, a longing to be alone, concern for Trevor and the two others, the twins she never heard from, who for all she knew might be dead or injured in a serious accident, no one knowing who to call.
Richard Rivière knew all that, felt indebted to Clarisse, because nothing could keep her down, because she was never ashamed, because she always tried to do what was best.
He also knew he would never have dreamed of embarking on a love affair with this woman, his colleague since he first arrived in Annecy, were her name not Clarisse.
But that evening, in light of what Berger had told him, his irrational, enduring hope that Clarisse Rivière’s marvelous face might one day show itself seemed pointless and sad.
Something much bigger had come to pass.
Since he hadn’t been granted the power to do so himself, it was his daughter Ladivine who would find her way through certain realms and return with a revelation that would finally bring peace to her tortured father.
How he loved her at that moment! How he wished those two could once again be together, Ladivine and Clarisse Rivière with her real face, and talk of him with the same love he felt for them!
He was a long way from Annecy, a long way from Clarisse and Trevor, at long last free of the mountain’s baleful grip.
Through the window he looked at it, dark against the night sky, and his unburdened thoughts flew off far beyond it, his old foe frightened him no longer.
—
His one reunion with Clarisse Rivière, the day of his father’s funeral, very nearly led him to abandon his life in Annecy, and the apartment he was outfitting with such anxious care, and Clarisse and the young Trevor, who’d moved in just the year before, and his work, where he could do no wrong.
He’d come close to giving all that up, and he trembled in retrospective terror all the way home.
Because the Clarisse Rivière he’d found waiting was in every way the one he’d realized he couldn’t go on living with.
In her liquid gaze he saw only her usual abstraction, slightly heartless despite its show of deep kindliness, the same strange, ghostly presence that had troubled him more with each passing year.
She seemed to be there, with her delicate, sinuous body, her beautiful face, unlined, as if polished, satin smooth, but her being was somewhere else, bound to something he couldn’t understand, beyond his reach.
Clarisse Rivière was often awkward, shy beyond reason, unsure of herself—but that very diffidence had no depth to it.
Richard Rivière sometimes thought her a mere illusion of a human being, not wanting to be, perhaps not knowing she was: that he couldn’t say.
But her actions that day were those of a love without rancor, entire and intact.
She threw herself into his arms, pressed against him with all her might.
He recognized the feel of the firm, serpentine body he once so loved.
And as he also recognized, unnerved, almost frightened, the emptiness in her vague and impersonal gaze, and something he could only call coldness, which made him stiffen in incomprehension and discomfort, he felt for the first time an
overpowering desire to see the real Clarisse Rivière.
Because, he understood only then, this wasn’t her.
He’d never seen or tried to see the real Clarisse Rivière, never realized or wanted to realize that he lived with her semblance alone.
And now it hit him, now he was ready to come back and live in Langon.
Might he also have heard, his ear now more acute, a muted appeal, a desperate plea from the very thing he didn’t know?
But then they went to his mother’s little apartment in Toulouse, and that hateful old woman told them the repugnant story of the dog that supposedly devoured the elder Rivière, insinuating that it was all Richard’s fault, like everything else that had gone wrong in the world since his birth.
It was always Richard’s fault.
He felt wearied, sour, impatient, emotions he’d forgotten in Annecy.
Then, vaguely but with an aversion clear enough to keep him from going back to Clarisse Rivière, he remembered another dog, long, long before, when Ladivine was just a baby; he recalled Clarisse Rivière and his father very oddly coming together, against him in a way, he who lacked at that moment something his father seemed to possess, he didn’t know what.
—
Twenty-four hours after he’d shown the Cherokee to the man with the raspberry socks, Richard Rivière found the agreed-upon sum credited to his account.
He immediately called the buyer, invited him to come by that evening and pick up the car.
He paced lazily back and forth on the sidewalk as he waited, carefully studying his surroundings.
He felt watchful but calm, ready for anything.
No matter how Ladivine chose to reveal herself, he’d be prepared to accept her, and there was, he thought, nothing he could not now understand and say yes to.
The mountain was finally leaving him in peace.
He didn’t tell himself that he’d beaten it, only that it had decided not to bother with him any longer, for there was a mightier force reigning over him now.
He was watching for his daughter’s return, wherever she might be coming from.
In one way or another, she would be bringing Clarisse Rivière back to him.
