Marie NDiaye - Ladivine

A dim memory briefly came back to her, a night spent with a co-worker at Le Rainbow who took her to his place while his wife was away, with whom she’d made love for the first time, quietly aware that she wanted only to cast off her virginity, which she then saw, she no longer quite understood why, as a burden, and she’d set her sights on that friendly man on the theory that he’d know what to do. And it was fast, cold and conscientious, like an expertly performed operation. And now, before this boy she loved, she was happy to have it behind her.

She saw his high forehead, tanned beneath the luxuriance of his thick, straight hair, his brown eyes slightly veiled by uncertainty (maybe he’s a virgin, she told herself in a flood of protective tenderness), she saw his dusky, just barely pink skin, his full lips, the vigorous health of a very young man in the springtime of his life, and she silently mused that she would never love another like him, and silently thought of her existence to come and imagined it wholly devoted to two commandments that were two aspects of one single charge, to renounce Malinka’s mother and adore Richard Rivière, but never to fail in even her tiniest duty towards either.

Because, in all that time, she would never once skip her monthly visit to the servant, just as, she thought, she would never break her promise of absolute, passionate love for Richard Rivière. They married three months later in Langon’s town hall, on a Thursday, so it wouldn’t seem like a special occasion.

The elder Rivières came from Toulouse for the day, and Clarisse, who hadn’t yet met them, thought she could feel the mother’s particularly dubious gaze studying her head to toe, with no attempt at discretion.

When their eyes met Clarisse had to look away. The mother paid Clarisse a dishonest compliment on her interesting hair. Asking her maiden name, and hearing Clarisse stammer out the name of the servant as flatly and neutrally as she could, she enquired where it came from.

“From the North,” Clarisse mumbled.

And she knew Madame Rivière didn’t believe her, and also that, in a spirit of something like tact, Madame Rivière would never speak of it to Richard.

Clarisse found a job as a salesgirl in a clothes shop, then quit it to sign on as a waitress in a newly opened pizzeria.

The work was harder, but she loved taking the stage amid that unvarying spectacle, hearing the furious little music of her heels tapping the tile floor, feeling her arm muscles tense and harden when she brought out the plates, her response perfectly calibrated to the demands of the task, just as she loved the feeling, at the end of a shift, as she sat with a cigarette in the now clean, empty room, of having once again successfully transmuted potential disarray, with the customers pouring in and all demanding quick service, into a smooth and efficient mechanism, so discreet as to seem effortless, of which, with her clacking heels, her youthful muscles, her quick thinking, she was at once the inventor and one of the gears.

She never told herself this in so many words, but she understood her new status made her love her work all the more.

Because she was now Clarisse Rivière, and that Clarisse Rivière had a husband who sometimes came to pick her up at the pizzeria, and everyone could see them together, affable and charming and wonderfully normal, and when they talked about her they would say: “You know, Clarisse Rivière?” never guessing that she might bear any other name or be anything other than she appeared, a simple and ordinary person.

And that awareness never left her as she strode briskly between the tables, the awareness that she was a married woman who would be named Clarisse Rivière until the end of her days, and never again, because now that was all over forever, a very young girl with no link to the world save the painful sense that she didn’t legitimately belong to it.

How she loved her husband’s gravity, his quiet but stubborn ambition, his uninquisitiveness! The few questions he had asked about her childhood in the suburbs of Paris she’d answered cheerfully and laconically, inventing an existence so peaceful and happy that there was nothing more to say of it. And was that not, in fact, the truth? she thought to herself. Her father was dead by that time, and then her mother died when Clarisse was. . sixteen? seventeen? She couldn’t quite recall.

Once, and the incident soon came to seem as unreal as a dream, she spoke the name Malinka in front of her husband. She might have said something like: “Malinka’s mother once cleaned some famous people’s apartment, and you can’t imagine how filthy they were!” But it might have been another sentence entirely, because, as after a dream, she couldn’t recapture it after she’d spoken it, or rather after Richard Rivière told her she’d spoken it.

He didn’t bother to ask who Malinka might be, and Clarisse only gave a quiet little laugh.

Eyes flooding with tears, she stared at her husband’s shoulder, reminding herself that she could press her face to it whenever she liked.

After many elaborate calculations, Richard Rivière decided they could safely take out a loan, and they bought an almost new house on the edge of Langon.

He never talked much about his work at Alfa-Romeo, but Clarisse understood that his devotion, his patience, the work and reading he did in the evening to learn everything he needed to know about the various finance plans he might offer the customers but also to work up a smooth and persuasive pitch, all these labours, she understood, were aimed at his goal of becoming a sales manager and even, one day, the general manager of his own dealership. He hintingly admitted as much, then never brought it up again.

That reserve was just fine with Clarisse, who took to visiting Malinka’s mother the first Tuesday of each month, never saying so but never lying outright.

She simply announced that she would be going to Bordeaux the next day, and Richard Rivière never asked what she had planned, but only smiled in that way of his, which she loved more than anything else, at once tender and absent, as if nothing really interested him but what he had in his mind at that moment, something to do with his work, she imagined.

It did not escape Clarisse Rivière that she loved his sweetly inattentive smile because it proved that she lived not in the very heart of his thoughts but a little outside, in a warm place, perhaps veiled by a serene shadow.

But that was just where she wanted to be, the better to safeguard her secret, to uphold her responsibility to the servant, on whom she heaped ever more generous attentions.

Her love for her mother was a foul-tasting food, impossible to choke down. That food dissolved into bitter little crumbs in her mouth, then congealed, and this went on and on and had no end, the lump of fetid bread shifting from one cheek to the other, then the soft, stinking fragments that made of her mouth a deep pit of shame.

She began bringing a little gift each time she went to visit Malinka’s mother.

She noted certain changes in her mother’s personality and behaviour, that woman who, when they lived in the little house, never let any sorrow or displeasure trouble her eternal good humour or lessen the extent of her disengagement, and she was so aggrieved to see the servant turning suspicious and caustic, and sometimes even belligerent, that she longed to throw herself into the river, not to die but only to float, to drift towards the sea, towards the disappearance of all memory of her and the servant’s existence, towards absolution for all the wrongs she had done her mother.

It was only her great debt to her mother that kept her from abandoning her anew in this way. But nothing shocked her more than to hear sarcasm and feeble little digs flowing from her mother’s lips, that vile vermin being vomited up. She thought fate had mixed up her face with her mother’s, that it was she who, her voice ever gentle and calm, was befouling the honour of precious stones, of diamonds, and the still greater dignity of self-mastery.