Ladivine

by Marie Ndiaye

  He was surprised to feel so serene, so sure things would go his way.

  He laughed to himself, thinking that should Ladivine send him some sign from the mountain, if it was there that she wanted to announce her presence, then he would go, he would climb, he would embrace those hated slopes. He would do even that.

  A taxi stopped, and the man got out, still more resplendent than two days before, though Richard Rivière noted something furtive in his gaze, then thought no more of it.

  He did on the other hand look long and hard at the dark-gray wool suit with pink pinstripes, the very pale pink shirt, the light-gray tie, and the long, belted black coat, unbuttoned, hanging loose.

  He gave Richard Rivière a brief, slightly clammy handshake, then quickly circled the car. Suddenly he stopped in the street, groaning in dismay.

  “What’s this? It’s scratched!”

  “Scratched?”

  Richard Rivière came running to his side. The man pointed to a long scrape on the rear door.

  “That wasn’t there this morning,” Richard stammered, reflexively looking around for someone who might be able to explain.

  To his deep surprise, he felt tears welling up. He took off his glasses, looked around again, quickly wiped his eyes on his sleeve.

  “Listen,” he began, staring at an invisible point far beyond the man’s face and speaking in a professional tone that rang false to his own ears, “I can take it right now to the dealership where I work. It should be fixed by tomorrow.”

  “I can’t stay in Annecy till tomorrow, there’s no way! How much have you got on you?”

  “On me?”

  “Give me whatever you can, I’ll get it fixed myself.”

  Richard Rivière hurried, almost ran, back to his apartment and frantically rummaged under the bedroom closet’s false bottom, where he kept a store of ready cash. He grabbed the bills, counted them quickly, clipped them together, and rushed out to the street.

  “Will this do?…I have eight hundred and fifty euros.”

  The man gave him a taut, indignant smile.

  Richard Rivière felt dishonored; he didn’t know what to do with the slightly trembling hand holding out the bills.

  Finally the other man snatched them away and stuffed them into his overcoat pocket, grumbling.

  —

  He was as surprised as Clarisse to see Trevor so readily agree to be taken to the doctor, not that the boy hadn’t met the proposal with his usual contempt, but Richard Rivière sensed that he no longer quite believed in the pertinence and the usefulness of his sarcasm and fell back on it now only out of habit.

  He shrugged, let out a resigned “Why not?”

  And although, refusing to make any further concessions, he’d dressed in the least flattering clothes his wardrobe had to offer, thereby expressing his disdain for the opinion of a doctor he’d never asked to see, Richard Rivière couldn’t help feeling that Trevor had let down his guard, that he had in a sense tired of being who he was.

  And so, taking note of that modest change, he refrained from commenting on the young man’s grotesque getup.

  But it pained his heart.

  He looked away when Trevor emerged from his room in a T-shirt that bulged over his belly and breasts, ornamented in large silvery letters with the English words I NEED A GIRL—CALL 0678986, and Hawaiian swim trunks, and a sleeveless jean jacket with a dirty fleece collar.

  The thin black socks and beige tassel loafers made his feet seem tiny beneath his gargantuan calves.

  He looked like a lunatic. Richard Rivière told himself, suddenly embarrassed by his own sympathy.

  He couldn’t help feeling sorry for Clarisse, who’d done nothing, he thought, to deserve a son who looked like a pathetic mental case.

  But why did he suddenly find it so urgent to acquit himself of all his responsibilities, and more, to Clarisse and Trevor?

  Who and what were awaiting him if he left Annecy?

  His certainty that Ladivine had gone off to demand explanations and wouldn’t fail to tell him what she’d found had little by little convinced him that Clarisse Rivière herself would be coming back to him, with her sinuous body, her face unchanged but the veil lifted from her gaze, her voice lively and musical—how flat was her old voice, how cautious, how droning!

  And why should that be?

  Why believe such a thing?

  Clarisse Rivière would rise and return—but from among what dead, amid what miracles?

  To his dismay, he realized he could now conceive of no other solution, that his own wish to go on living was at stake.

  If nothing happened, if Ladivine came back empty-handed, her heart cold, then nothing would ever matter to him again.

  The mountain could pounce on his back, Trevor could grab him and have his way with him, he would put up no defense, he would lie back, close his eyes.

  Had he not been awaiting just that for nine years, since he left the house in Langon?

  And would he not be waiting still, in his empty Annecy existence, had Clarisse Rivière not been killed?

  Because what explanation could he hope for, what real Clarisse could he hope to meet, if she were still living, withdrawn, hermetic, obscure, with that human wreck Moliger?

  Trevor climbed into Clarisse’s little car beside him, filling the closed, cramped space with his slightly musky odor, his loud breathing, his boredom.

  And Richard Rivière realized he’d feel guilty about Trevor if he went away, if he deserted Annecy without helping him somehow, unpleasant as Trevor was, and in spite of everything he’d put him through.

  He remembered that Trevor had dropped the southwestern accent after he brought up Moliger’s trial, three days before.

  “I have an idea for you,” he said as he drove, staring straight ahead.

  “Oh yeah?” Trevor said warily.

  “After all, I did sell that SUV. I could help you get something going, a little software business. You could go back and study for a few months, get up to speed, and then the money from the car would be yours, to help you get started.”

  “You talk to Mom about this?”

  “Not yet. But she’ll be on board, and you know it.”

  Trevor acknowledged this with a grunt.

  Glancing toward him, Richard Rivière found the young man serious, almost somber, which he took to mean that he’d struck a nerve.

  “Why would you do that?” Trevor asked in a hurried, clipped, gruff voice, as if he disapproved of the question but felt he had to ask so that everything would be clear.

  Because I’m going away, and I want to leave you with a good memory of me, because I’ve never done anything more than the minimum for you, knowing you didn’t like me, and so not much liking you either.

  But he said no such thing.

  Horrified to find himself blushing, he answered:

  “After all this time, you’re sort of my son, aren’t you?”

  Oh no, he wasn’t, and he never would be.

  How was it that even now he couldn’t forget Trevor’s many offenses, nor his own lack of love?

  He felt only compassion and a need to do his duty, to put his affairs in order and settle his debt, even if no one but he thought he owed them anything, before he took off.

  The vision of an abandoned Clarisse and Trevor tormented him.

  He would simply say he was going back to Langon, back to the house, which was still up for sale.

  Would Clarisse Rivière then come looking for him?

  To take him where, into what frightful back ways?

  In truth, he felt no fear, only burning desire and impatience.

  Trevor grunted again, his forehead wrinkled, more somber still. His left leg had started to twitch.

  —

  During their noon hour that Monday, eating lunch in the kitchen with Clarisse, he got a call from the bank.

  His banker informed him that to his deep regret the check he’d deposited five days before had been refused as a forgery, an
d the credit to his account canceled.

  “There must be some mistake,” said Richard Rivière. “I never deposited a check.”

  He smiled reassuringly at Clarisse as her brow furrowed in concern, but that smile was more for himself than for her, a dazzling forced smile that left his lips aching.

  “A check for forty-seven thousand euros, deposited on the fourteenth of this month,” the man replied, somewhat sharply. “It had your signature on the back, your account number.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  He broke off and took a deep breath, all trace of his smile gone.

  Suddenly he found his own breath foul and repellent.

  He turned his back to Clarisse and looked up at the mountain that had given up torturing him.

  The midday sun was shining on the still-green slopes, suddenly reminding him of the landscape that came with an electric train he’d been given as a child, a little mountain covered in dark-green felt overlooking a tiny chalet with doors and windows that opened.

  How he’d wished he could make himself small enough to get into that chalet and live there alone, undisturbed, far from his scolding parents, sheltered by that gentle springtime mountain!

  “I sold a car privately, and the buyer paid by wire transfer, just as we’d arranged. I never deposited a check for that sale.”

  “You’re absolutely certain it was a transfer?”

  “I’m not, actually,” Richard Rivière mumbled, trapped, now so worried that he could feel his strength draining away. “I saw the credit to my account, and since we’d agreed he’d be paying by transfer, I thought, obviously…And what about my signature, how could he have…”

  “I assume you signed a contract. He must have copied it, it’s not hard. I’ve heard of this happening before, you’re not the first and you won’t be the last,” said the banker, as if to console Richard Rivière.

  “What do I do now?”

  He fleetingly remembered the desperation in Berger’s last words on the telephone, his unspoken plea for Richard Rivière not to hang up just yet, hoping in vain for support or a few comforting words he could draw on when the phone call was over.

  Now it was his turn to speak in that tone—Oh God, oh God, he dully repeated to himself, and he saw the raspberry socks, the rippling overcoat, the lustrous, carefully styled brown hair.

  The man had driven away in the SUV, gunning the engine, and Richard Rivière, standing on the sidewalk, had started to lift his hand in farewell, but his dishonored, burning hand rose no higher than his shoulder.

  And when the car turned the corner, the distant, indefinable memory of a similar scene flashed through his mind, disappearing before he could catch hold of it.

  “…file a complaint,” the banker was saying, concluding a sentence that Richard Rivière hadn’t listened to. “Goodbye, Monsieur Rivière.”

  Call me Richard, he wordlessly implored him, still pressing the phone to his ear after the other man had hung up.

  —

  He took the afternoon off to go to the police station, and when he walked into the apartment, hours later, so exhausted he thought he might faint in the hallway, Trevor emerged from his room and announced that he had diabetes.

  He’d just got the results of his blood tests via the Internet, and that’s what was wrong with him, he blurted out, seeming at once anxious and strangely excited: type 2 diabetes.

  FUCK YOU, YOU FUCKING FUCK, Richard Rivière read blankly on Trevor’s green-and-black T-shirt.

  Against a black background, the big green letters undulated like tall meadow grass on the boy’s shifting flesh.

  “Type two diabetes,” Trevor repeated in a grave, pedantic voice.

  Fuck you, you fucking fuck.

  Trevor bought these T-shirts with the money Clarisse earned.

  Why did he seem so proud of himself for being sick? As if, forever failing tests, even the baccalauréat, twice, he could now tell himself he’d passed this one with flying colors?

  Well aware of his cowardice, Richard Rivière realized this meant he could put off telling Trevor he’d lost the SUV money, thinking the lab results surely outweighed the swindle.

  More than his own financial troubles, was it not the fear of letting Trevor down that had tied his stomach in knots as he waited in the police station?

  Not to mention feeling like a pitiful failure, incapable of responding to Trevor’s progress with anything but false promises, undone by his own idiocy.

  Because this was all his fault, he never should have trusted that jittery, pushy, overdressed buyer.

  And, sitting on a hard metal chair, head in his hands, he could think only of how to help Trevor make a new start all the same, relegating the money problems hanging over him to a future too uncertain to worry about.

  He couldn’t imagine how he might do it.

  He owed the bank tens of thousands of euros as it was.

  Well, he told himself, he’d just have to take out another loan.

  So he’d be mired in debt—what did he care?

  He laid an awkward hand on the boy’s shoulder.

  “We’re going to get you the best possible care,” he said stupidly.

  A hint of a derisive smile grazed Trevor’s lips, replaced at once by a thoughtful, diligent look.

  “I’ve been reading up about it on the Internet. As a matter of fact I’ve got to get back to it now.” And he lumbered quick as he could toward his room.

  It seemed to Richard Rivière, who’d almost never seen Trevor in the company of another person, that nothing had ever interested the boy like this diabetes business.

  Clarisse burst into tears when Trevor told her the news.

  He came running as soon as he heard the key in the lock, and, at once frightened and pleased with himself, beaming like a child who knows he has something big to divulge, he threw that word “diabetes” in her face, then took a demure half step back, hands behind him.

  Richard Rivière found them this way, Clarisse wiping her damp cheeks with one hand, Trevor shifting his weight from one leg to the other, basking, and what struck and saddened him was not only the helpless solitude, the ordinary, trivial sorrow of these two people of no particular note, but also that they seemed to expect nothing more from him, that, though not yet aware of it, they realized he no longer lived there, with them, if he ever had.

  —

  He wasn’t worried that he hadn’t yet heard from Ladivine.

  A presage would have been nice, of course, even a simple hint that something was coming, and all day long, and at night in his dreams, he stood ready to open the way to any visit his daughter might pay him.

  When he thought of her, he no longer pictured the young woman’s face, now almost forgotten, but the guileless, quietly introspective face of the little girl. With numbing clarity, he remembered her hand in his as they went walking on the hill, even the feel of her skin, the mosquito bite on her thumb, his rough fingers absentmindedly stroking it, which she liked.

  Somewhere his beloved daughter, the child he once cherished, as he now remembered, was taking steps to flush out Clarisse Rivière—how grateful he was, and how aware that he had to welcome any form her reappearance might take!

  He confessed to himself that he’d rather Ladivine come back after the trial, the following month. The mere thought of it filled him with dread.

  He couldn’t help remembering that he’d found a sort of escape from his grief, from the feeling of horror and then unreality that had filled him on learning of Clarisse Rivière’s murder, in the many interviews he gave at the time, bewildered, faintly desperate, little understanding why anyone should ask his opinion of the murderer’s personality, of that Freddy Moliger he knew nothing of, but offering it gladly, taking a strange pleasure in it, delighting in his role, his importance.

  He’d read some of those interviews, and they made him ashamed.

  Who on earth was that Richard Rivière, he’d wondered, so assured, so informed, speaking unguarded
ly of the depth of his pain?

  Now he got up every morning with the trial on his mind, and he was horrified to think of his daughter Ladivine being there in person, and so he silently begged her to stay away, in whatever place it was she was hearing him from.

  He’d hired a lawyer to represent them both, a certain Noroit, from Bordeaux, someone he felt comfortable with, finding nothing to intimidate him in that middle-aged man’s dull, awkward appearance and plain polyester suits.

  But if Ladivine were there with him, and if once again her presence gave him the painful impression that he could only have known her in his dreams, that her face meant nothing to him in real life, and that, no matter what he might think, he was therefore now dreaming, if that happened, as it always did, telling him he would soon be waking up in his Annecy room, disoriented, desperately sad, how would he ever hold up till the end of the trial?

  Wouldn’t it be hard enough just to see Moliger, with that loser look he remembered from the photos, imagining that to this man, perhaps, Clarisse Rivière had shown her real face?

  Because otherwise, he wondered, why would Clarisse Rivière have taken up with that creep?

  It couldn’t have been sex, he thought. He had the face of a drunkard, there was something repellent about him, something ignoble that he thought a sure cure for any sort of love.

  She’d gone looking, he told himself, racked by a jealousy he’d never felt in his life, she’d gone looking for someone, anyone (preferably, perhaps, blind to what she was offering?), to reveal herself to.

  Was that it? He wasn’t sure of anything anymore.

  All he knew was that he didn’t want to see his daughter Ladivine in such circumstances.

  He wanted to see her transformed, he thought, and enlightened about Clarisse Rivière; he wanted his heart to recognize her immediately, without doubt or regret, never wondering if that woman was once the little girl whose hand he held; he wanted to see her and hear her say: I’ve brought Mama back to you.

  He would not be afraid, he thought, of either one’s new face.

  Ladivine Sylla dressed and groomed herself with even more care than usual.

  She oiled her hair, then pulled it back and bound it at her nape with an elastic band, tugging so vigorously that her scalp smarted, but she was long used to that and scarcely noticed the pain.