Marie NDiaye - Ladivine

These visits were no more than a tactic for keeping her quiet.

But how she loved that woman, even more now that she was seeing her suffer! How vile, how convoluted she felt next to the servant, who was so light, so clear, so valiant in her attachment! Clarisse knew she’d doomed herself, knew she would one day be punished for abandoning the servant. She did not like that idea, but she was not afraid.

Because once her decision was made there was no disobeying it, even in her thoughts.

She gave up her job at the brasserie and her little room near the station for a job in a downtown café and a one-bedroom flat in Floirac. She couldn’t imagine staying on, now that her boss had seen who her mother was, though she never mentioned it again. But above all it was vital that the servant should not know where she worked, not know the address where she slept, just as she had no idea that Malinka was now Clarisse, and that glorious girl, that lissom Clarisse in the clinging black skirt and tight white blouse she wore for her job, that dazzling, expertly made-up girl, always a little breathless, as if she’d been running, stuck close to the walls in the street and looked over her shoulder, again and again, to make absolutely sure that her mother was not walking behind her. She could not believe it didn’t show.

She moved her face still closer to the mirror and a smile came to her lips. So this was what he saw when she leaned in to pick up the menu or put down the silverware, these features, stiff beneath the make-up, these red lips reshaped with the pencil, and nothing more, surely, since she herself could see nothing. And she knew this was the face of a girl in love, and he did not.

How could he?

She smiled, beside herself with pride.

Or maybe he did, maybe he had guessed?

Maybe at this very moment he was pressing his face to a similar

mirror, in the mysterious place where he lived, studying his features, the features of a boy in love, smiling as she was smiling, overjoyed, wondering if she’d seen anything?

Maybe at this very moment he was imagining her smiling at her reflection, at once amazed and flushed with pride at what she had become, a girl in love, as if up to now, loving no-one, never thinking of love, she’d been living with an illness, from which she had recovered by the sheer force of her wondrous vitality?

Because that’s just what it was, it was a sickness to love only her mother, with an angry, exhausting, guilty love, so unlike her love for the boy, ardent but happy, bubbly and light.

She could almost feel her heart, heavy with the wrong she had done, throwing off that weight even now. So was being a girl in love also a good deed? Could she somehow make up for her cruelty to the servant by her scintillating love for a boy with sincere eyes, with a high, tremulous brow?

That boy was a proud horse, a gentle horse. His slightly damp cheeks twitched just a little, she’d seen it, when he called her over to take his order.

Oh no (she smiled in spite of herself), being in love gave her too much pleasure to be a good deed.

In the mirror she saw her eyes darken and her forehead crease, just as they always did when she thought of the servant’s sorrow, but her lips went on smiling, her beautiful lips painted the violent red of an almost happy girl.

She went out into the warm street, tottering a little on the high heels she now wore, which made her legs so long, slender and shapely, and found to her delight that the sight of her reflection in a shop window took her breath away.

That perfectly beautiful girl bore the perfect name of Clarisse, and by a wonderful stroke of luck she was that girl, that Clarisse, whose previous life and old name no-one could guess, for, so smooth and so beautiful, she offered the world the very image of harmony and unity. How lucky to be that girl!

She took the bus, walked a little further on to the café, in the city’s stony, proud centre, where the façades were less sooty, and the cobblestone pavements not so narrow, not so cluttered with rubbish bins.

Le Rainbow had broad, glinting windows by which the men in the street could see Clarisse striding through the restaurant on her high heels, a little unsteady but tall and straight, and often she turned towards the window and smiled at those stares, which to her unending amazement confirmed that the perfect girl people couldn’t help admiring as they walked by was her.

Maybe, she mused, the boy she loved first came into the café because he had seen her from the street, maybe he’d fallen for her simply on glimpsing that girl whose harmoniousness, definition and serenity Clarisse hoped she expressed. How she would love it if he confessed that he’d fallen in love with her purity!

She began to wait for him as midday neared, unworried, knowing he would come.

And when he did, he found the courage to look her in the eye, which he had never done before, and she looked back, just as frank, just as direct, because ever since she’d fallen in love with that boy she’d lost all trace of coyness, every impulse to look away through lowered lashes.

He sat down at his usual table and she hurried over, indifferent to the other waitresses’ arch little smiles.

“Your usual Perrier with a slice of lemon?”

Just four days he’d been coming here, and here she was talking to him like that!

She felt her whole face reaching out towards him in a shimmering of white teeth and sparkling pale eyes; she felt and saw her face giving itself to him like a magnificent lily proudly and trustingly presented, sure of the offering’s value, and the flexible stem of her body also bent towards him, under the weight of that luxuriant flower.

Fleetingly, she thought of her mother — that lowly flower from the far end of the courtyard, the awful pity she felt for her.

She recovered her face as one recovers one’s composure, she dimmed it, closed it, but not so completely that the shiver-skinned boy wouldn’t see it still shining with love for him.

She sensed that he had something to tell her, and then that, lacking the nerve and being so young, he’d thought better of it for the moment.

And so, when she came back with his drink, she took her time at his table, aware of the perhaps excessive hopefulness she exuded, like her own scent, but powerless to stop it spreading around her and perhaps intimidating the boy. But, she wanted to cry out with a laugh, what more did she have to hope for? Just being a girl in love was so good in itself, shouldn’t it be more than enough for even the most exorbitant hopefulness?

“I don’t think I’ll. . Well, I mean I know I won’t, obviously. . be coming in tomorrow, or the day after, for that matter.”

What on earth was he saying, compulsively stroking his bubbling glass, sometimes staring at her in despair, sometimes studying his hands clenched around his drink?

What he was saying she understood, but not quite what it meant. Still as merry as if he had ventured some subtle joke and she was waiting to grasp it fully before bursting into a laugh, she breathed:

“Yes? So?”

“Well, I. .”

Desperately, he plunged in:

“Would you like to come with me this afternoon? Because I’m going home, I have to go back home to Langon.”

“You want to take me with you?”

He blushed violently, misreading her.

“Forgive me, maybe it’s. . I don’t know. . forward, but I’m not. . it’s just that the idea I might never see you again made me so miserable. .”

And that teasing hopefulness dissipated at once, replaced by a joy so intense that for a moment it felt like the opposite, like the bleakest desolation, which she would have survived, so well did she know that feeling and its distinctive warmth, and so attached was she to it, as to a faithful companion. Then she realised it wasn’t that at all, and she let joy bloom unconstrained in her mind, thrown slightly off balance though she was.