Marie NDiaye - Ladivine

The boy was fingering his glass again, still not lifting it to his lips.

He seemed distraught at what he’d let himself say, and perhaps convinced all was lost.

She forced her face to mirror the happiness she was feeling, the radiant gratitude, forced it to drop its dramatic, dumbfounded look, which, although more eloquently expressive of the depth of her emotion, might give the boy the idea he had shocked and upset her.

“That’s wonderful,” she whispered. “I’ve never been to Langon, for one thing, and. . yes, yes, I want to stay there with you, oh I do, oh yes.”

He found the courage to raise his unbelieving eyes to hers, and now, from the serious, stunned, stupefied look on his face, it might just as well have been that she had given him some dire piece of news.

This is how we’ll be at our wedding, this is how the mayor will see us when he marries us, so in love that we’ll seem like absolute idiots, totally lost, she thought, in time with the familiar radiant carillon sounding noon from the church next door, her lips, finally unbound, stretching into a perfectly fulfilled smile.

Was it then, Clarisse Rivière would later wonder, that she’d first vowed forever to be good to Richard Rivière, a vow that would determine the whole of her life with him?

Because she must have realised, then or just a little later, that there was no other escape from what she had deliberately done to the servant, Malinka’s mother, who was never to know of Clarisse Rivière, never to delight in anything good that happened to her daughter, never to broaden her narrow circle to include those her daughter loved most, on whom she herself might lavish her vast, unused love — no, no other escape from that violence, that shame, than the deepest, most indisputable goodness in every other way.

Claiming not to be feeling well, Clarisse punched out and went to join the boy who’d hurried off to get his car from down the street, now waiting for her before the café, engine running.

He took her to her flat in Floirac to pack a few things. Then, on the way to Langon, they spoke of this and that with a spontaneity and an animation that delighted them both, and sometimes made them look at each other, amused and proud and observing themselves from a shared distance, like parents moved by their children’s behaviour.

She stole a glance at him, that boy with the thick black hair, the dusky complexion, the sharp features, and that face, that body, at once slender and solid, seemed in no way removed from her own, seemed in no way to live and move in a space and a manner not yet known to her.

And so she found nothing intimidating in the boy’s dense physical presence at her side. Impulsively running her fingers through his hair, she felt nothing new, as though she’d done just the same thing many times before. There was nothing foreign to her, she marvelled serenely, in the young man’s physical being. She felt she knew the scent of his skin, the shape of his fingernails, the way his muscles flexed beneath the fabric of his trousers when he braked or accelerated, and she loved it all, she told herself, she loved every fragment of his carnal reality as surely as she knew and loved her own body.

He sold cars for a living, he told her, he worked at the new Alfa Romeo dealership in Langon, and they had sent him to Bordeaux for a four-day training seminar.

“I love cars,” he said with a bashfulness she found adorable.

Clarisse was enchanted to find him already wanting to confess his weaknesses and hoping not to displease her too terribly should she happen to harbour some special contempt for car buffs.

He continued in the same vein, as if eager to make a clean breast of all his least charming features: his parents ran a stationery shop in Toulouse, he rarely saw them, they “didn’t think the same way”, his father was exceptionally prone to anger, it had become too much to take.

He glanced her way, and although trembling inside she gave him an encouraging smile — her turn was coming, and she’d have to lie, the lie to come was already parching her mouth, and what would become of her vow to be good and her promise of irreproachable love if she started out telling lies to the boy she was in love with, so deeply in love?

“You don’t have to love your parents, right, if they don’t deserve it?” he blurted out, with an emotion so ill-contained that she realised he was revealing a sentiment as difficult to feel as it was to express, and so offering her his absolute trust at its most tender and troubled, his heart laid bare in the cup of his outstretched, trembling hands.

“Of course you don’t,” she said with conviction.

But, she thought, her throat tightening, suppose your mother more than deserves your love and you don’t let her have it, suppose you keep it all to yourself, what to think of a person like that? If you’re ashamed of your mother and keep her as far out of your life as you can, what kind of person are you then?

She found herself envying his certainty that he did not have to love his parents, not to mention the fact that there were two of them, supporting each other in their meanness. She then had a vision so brief that she didn’t have time to be outraged or aggrieved, but the feeling persisted darkly inside her after she’d forgotten where it came from: the vision of a Clarisse grown old, with no-one left to support her in her meanness, whose children never visited, all too aware of what she truly was.

“My parents are dead, and in any case my father never came forward,” she answered in an ugly squawk that surprised and shocked even her.

He let out a sad little “oh”, then briefly and tenderly put his hand on her thigh. His fingers were short, but it was a strong, well-shaped hand, and Clarisse gently clasped it and pressed it to her lips, feeling she’d known that hand for a very long time, and could at this very moment, without hesitation or effort, lick every one of its fingers, give them delicate little bites.

“Clarisse isn’t exactly my real name, but that’s what they call me,” she managed to add.

He parked in a little street on the edge of Langon, before an old grey roughcast house, whose upper floor he rented.

The street lay empty and silent in the warm, bright afternoon sun. Cats were sleeping in the shadowy corners of doorways, and suddenly Clarisse remembered the courtyard of her childhood, the cats much like these, scruffy and thankless, that sometimes came begging for food, and her mother’s inexplicable fear of them, almost as deep as her fear of dogs, on the subject of which she’d one day let slip that beneath their skin they contained human beings stricken with a terrible curse. How could anyone believe such a thing? But Clarisse avoided them all the same, and that day she was vaguely unhappy to find a cat sleeping on the house’s front step.

She took off her high heels and climbed the stairs barefoot before the boy. Already it felt just like coming home after a few days’ holiday!

He had a big room at the top, just under the roof, tidy and white, with a waxed wooden floor. He took her to a window and pointed out the river, sparkling and very green between two houses, and the white sunlight, as if bleached, erased by its own brightness.

Then they stood face to face, not yet daring to embrace but knowing they would, and waiting for that moment with a fervent, solemn emotion, and a patient one as well, because, thought Clarisse evasively, they knew that moment was at hand, so close, and they were lost in proud surprise at what they had already done, running off together far from Bordeaux, and now knew they would soon take each other in their arms and pull each other close, and they waited, dazed with love, fear and joy.

How young they were! thought Clarisse, and she felt a reverence for their youthfulness.