by Marie Ndiaye
Next she put on a tweed pantsuit she’d found for forty euros in a secondhand shop. She’d chosen a dark-red turtleneck to go with it, and her best pair of shoes, high-heeled ankle boots, on which the trouser cuff broke ever so slightly, which she considered the height of elegance.
She went and said goodbye to her figurines, asking them to wish her luck. She clearly heard them answer, each in its own way, in its own distinctive voice.
“Luck with what?” asked the little gilded Buddha.
But she couldn’t say, not quite knowing herself.
Luck one day entering her life suddenly seemed to her so absurd an idea that she nearly laughed out loud at herself. Did she even really want such a thing? Not likely. A stroke of luck now would be grounds for alarm, she thought, and it would feel like a punishment. What could be crueler than good things coming too late, when the worst possible thing had happened?
She went off to catch the tram on the quai, a thick, silty-smelling fog in the air. She didn’t quite know what she wanted for herself, but she knew exactly what she didn’t, at any price: her words having some sort of influence.
The lawyer, that Bertin, had told her she had only to answer whatever she was asked with the utmost sincerity. She wasn’t to try to make out what they wanted from her, nor even imagine they wanted anything in particular. In a sense, that was none of her business.
Ladivine Sylla didn’t believe a word of it, though she feigned absolute confidence in Bertin.
She was convinced there were things that he wanted her to say, and he’d called her as a witness in the hope or the certainty she would say them. That was his job. From what that Freddy Moliger had told him of Ladivine Sylla, Bertin thought her worth putting on the stand, and that was fine with her, Ladivine Sylla, but she wanted her words to carry no weight in anyone’s mind, on one side or the other.
That was her only concern.
The rest, she told herself, she could handle. She’d long since stopped crying. Why should she break down there in front of all those people?
For two years she’d been buying figurines of young princes or damsels in tears, their necks bowed, their heads bent over their joined hands, and whenever she woke in the morning crushed by sadness she lined them up on the front row of her shelf, then sat down before them and stared at them for hours.
Finally she fell into the state she was seeking, between awareness and stupor, and the figurines seemed to be weeping for her, sharing in her pain, gazing on her with their suddenly living, damp, shining eyes.
In their porcelain pupils she saw her own dry, dead eyes reflected, and she felt better, and consoling words came to her lips, and she murmured those words to her poor figurines, nearly reaching out to wipe their tear-streaked cheeks.
But no one had ever come to console her, no one had ever dried her tears with a tender hand, in those early days when she wept and wept for Malinka. That’s how life was for her.
The one person she thought of when her need for solace grew so overpowering that her figurines’ good wishes were no longer enough was that Freddy Moliger. Had she dared, she would surely have paid a call on that Moliger in his prison, and she had no doubt that her sorrow would have been lightened.
She got off the tram near the courthouse, walked with some difficulty in her high heels to the foot of the stone steps.
She felt tall, slender, and very old; she imagined her face like the face of her dear little Saxony porcelain shepherdess, smooth and timeworn, thin, slightly vacant. Her scalp stung, which was good, because it made her feel alive, sharp, not dulled and lost, as she usually did since Malinka’s death.
A dog was watching her from the other side of the street.
Afraid of cats and suspicious of dogs, Ladivine Sylla deliberately looked away, not wanting to attract it.
But she did once more glance its way. It was a big brown dog, scrawny and shivering in the damp air.
A memory of Malinka surfaced in her mind, the child’s face looking up at Ladivine Sylla when she came home from work, in that tiny house at the far end of a courtyard, and herself trembling in gentle, grave astonishment when the girl’s pale eyes met her own.
Where had she come from, that child with sand-gray eyes and smooth hair but a face so like her own? And that dog, where did it come from, its dark gaze inexplicably making her think of Malinka?
She understood that it meant her no harm, and she briefly turned back toward it, breathless.
An old image of herself came to mind, as far as could be from the little shepherdess’s cold face. She saw herself at a time when she was full of fury and hate, when her face was clenched around her pinched lips, her little quivering nose. Her anger at Malinka had become a rage at the spell that was gripping them both, and then even that had waned, replaced by a sad resignation.
But, in that angry time, she would sometimes wake in the morning and feel as if she’d been running all night. Her thigh muscles ached, her nostrils were red from breathing in drizzle or mist. Over what plains had she raced, over what meadows blew that wind whose grassy scent she thought she could still smell on the down of her arms? She longed to go back to that place where the wind had whistled in her ears, where the dry, packed ground had sustained her enchanted sprint, where the light, perfumed air had swept off her anger.
Because those mornings found her weary but freed of the impotent rage that was sapping her. Gradually it came back, but less virulent—exhausted from trying to sustain itself throughout those nocturnal sprints, of which Ladivine Sylla remembered nothing, except, now and then, a sensation of trickling warmth on her back, like flowing sweat on bare skin.
She turned away from the dog and started up the steps.
How old she’d become! Who would look after her when she was still frailer, who would lower her eyelids when she was dead, who would know she had died? Would Malinka? And that dog on the other sidewalk? What messenger would she have to announce her death? Who would care?
That Freddy Moliger might be sad. He alone would still think of her now and then.
—
After a two-hour wait in a little room whose dingy corners and crannies Ladivine Sylla inspected with a critical eye to pass the time (so experienced was she in removing all manner of stains that she could see just what the cleaning lady would have needed—bleach, the right sponge, thirty minutes more—to erase the shoe prints from the tile floor, the marks left by the chair backs on the painted wall), she was finally ushered into the courtroom.
She studied the ground at her feet, suddenly troubled by a pressure in her ears, as if she’d too quickly dived to a very great depth.
She made out a hum of voices and movements around her, and the room seemed enormous and packed. A roaring filled her ears; she staggered on her high heels. Someone caught her by the elbow and asked, she thought she made out, if she was all right.
“Yes, yes,” she mumbled, embarrassed.
Nonetheless, the person kept a grip on her until she reached the stand, where Ladivine Sylla grasped the rail in relief.
Then she dared to look up, and found only friendly, attentive gazes.
She wondered if she should turn her head to look for that Freddy Moliger, then decided against it, vaguely afraid that this act might have the same force as speech, and remembering that she wanted nothing she said to have any meaning beyond what she hoped was the perfectly neutral sense of each word.
She gave them her name, as they’d asked. Then, when they asked her to verify that she was Clarisse Rivière’s mother, and although she’d tried hard to get used to the name Malinka had chosen, an old pride flickered to life, and she couldn’t help correcting:
“My daughter’s name was Malinka.”
The lawyer she’d met with, the one who introduced himself as Bertin, representing that Freddy Moliger, asked if she’d ever met his client.
“Yes,” she answered.
He asked if she’d enjoyed that Freddy Moliger’s company.
“Yes,” she an
swered.
He asked if she’d even felt some affection for him.
“Yes,” she answered.
He asked if her daughter Malinka seemed happy with that Freddy Moliger.
“Yes,” she answered.
It took her a few seconds to grasp why her mind was desperately summoning up the image of her weeping figurines, and how they might help her now. Was it not their job to suffer in her stead?
She swallowed, once again heard a dim, piercing plaint deep inside her ears.
Her figurines were meant to do the weeping, a frantic little voice was saying over and over in her head, so her own eyes would stay dry and no one would know what she was going through. A thousand needles pricked her lower eyelids. She squeezed the rail with all her might, almost resigned, in her exhaustion, to let all her misery spill out.
But as it happened they had no further questions.
Ladivine Sylla remembered catching a glimpse of that man’s face as she turned on her heel to walk out of the courtroom.
The anguish she’d read on his features, the dumbstruck stare he fixed on her without seeming to see her, as if, through her skin and her flesh, through her old porcelain-shepherdess face, he was probing a mystery that brought him no joy: all that made her think, curious and apprehensive, that she’d be seeing him again.
And now he’d knocked at her door, now she’d offered him the velvet armchair that was Malinka’s favorite, which she could no longer bring herself to use, now they were sitting face-to-face, without awkwardness, in no hurry to speak, knowing that what had to be said would be said, and perhaps, thought Ladivine Sylla, reflecting that there was no real need to say anything.
She needed only to know that he was Richard Rivière. Anything he might say to her of Malinka seemed beside the point now.
But she doubted, from his questioning, feverish air, from the way he hunched forward in his chair, studying her, Ladivine Sylla, as if his searching gaze would eventually distract or wear down whatever it was in her that was refusing him, she doubted that he felt the same.
To put him at his ease, she’d sat down, their knees almost touching.
A pale winter light filtered into the cluttered little room. She offered him a cup of coffee, and he accepted reflexively, not even understanding what she was saying, she sensed, merely guessing that it was an offer of that kind.
And she could hear the water gurgling through the machine in her kitchen, she could hear it and look forward to the good coffee they’d soon be drinking, whereas Richard Rivière, absorbed in his quest or his wait, heard nothing, saw nothing, and never dropped that perfervid air, which she was almost tempted to mock, gently, so he would relax.
But no, that wouldn’t relax him at all. He might, she told herself, even see it as an answer.
And then Ladivine Sylla was taken by surprise, whether because she was paying too close and too proud an attention to her burbling coffeemaker or because she was having too much fun picturing the look on Richard Rivière’s face if she began poking fun at him, and she heard the scratching at the door even as she realized it must have been going on for several seconds already.
She knew at once who it was. She jumped up, startling Richard Rivière.
“It’s the dog,” she whispered.
“The dog?”
He looked toward the door, lost. The scratching had stopped. The dog was patiently waiting, knowing it had been heard, thought Ladivine Sylla.
“You didn’t see it in front of the courthouse?”
“No, I didn’t see anything,” Richard Rivière stammered.
Ladivine Sylla gently opened the door, and the big brown dog gingerly walked in on its thin, trembling legs.
She stroked the coarse fur between its small, upright ears, and the dog turned to look at her with its knowing eyes, its chaste eyes.
She felt a dizzying rush of happiness.
She was sure it had come here to tell them everything it knew, that it had endured many torments and exhaustions for no other purpose.
It was bringing Malinka’s throbbing heart back to them, and maybe, too, she thought in the ardor of her joy, the promise of a new light cast over each and every day.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Marie NDiaye was born in Pithiviers, France, in 1967; spent her childhood with her French mother (her father was Senegalese); and studied linguistics at the Sorbonne. She started writing when she was twelve or thirteen years old and was only eighteen when her first work was published. In 2001, she was awarded the prestigious Prix Femina literary prize for her novel Rosie Carpe; in 2009, the Prix Goncourt for Three Strong Women; and, in 2015, the Gold Medal for the Arts from the Kennedy Center International Committee on the Arts.
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