Marie NDiaye - Ladivine

He had a broad, full face with delicate features and mocking eyes that let it be known, with an aggressiveness scarcely veiled by false benevolence, that he was a man who put up with no nonsense. He had enormous hands, deformed by arthritis despite his young age. He stood with his forearms well away from his thighs, not so much to spare his ailing hands any painful contact, it seemed, as to show that he was unarmed, which might well be a lie, said his jeering eyes, because he had no fear of lies, and no sense of honour.

A large dog came in with the parents, a big, healthy, powerful beast. Clarisse backed away.

“Don’t be afraid,” said the father, “he’s with us, he’s very well behaved.”

Richard had gone out to buy bread, and he came back just then. A surprised, vaguely irritated look crossed his face, as if he’d forgotten his parents were coming, which couldn’t be true, thought Clarisse, since he’d gone out specially to buy bread for four. His suddenly unhappy face settled into a guarded expression, just this side of rude.

He murmured a greeting to his father, still keeping his distance.

Filled with a compassion she had never before felt for her husband, an almost disinterested sympathy, Clarisse sensed that he was shielding himself from the crushing physical authority, the simultaneously attractive and repellent omnipotence that had entered the house with his father. How strange to see Richard trembling, he who ordinarily showed no fear of anyone!

She went and stood at his side, their arms touching.

She could feel him quivering in turmoil and sterile distress, like a dog, she told herself. He seemed to be trying to fight off a will stronger than his own, and that will was serenely waiting for him to give in and bow down, and Richard was still clinging to his anger and pride, and the other will saw that and laughed, requiring neither anger nor pride to maintain itself.

So Richard Rivière’s father laughed off his son, thought Clarisse, moved, because he knew Richard’s frail crutches would soon break, that his anger would tire and his pride falter, no longer at all sure of its reason for being.

Stiff but trembling, Richard didn’t say a word, as if the energy he was burning to stand up to his father and keep up his dignity forbade any further exertion.

Clarisse showed the parents into the sitting room, babbling, describing what they could plainly see, the simple, brightly coloured furniture she and Richard had picked out, the pale yellow wallpaper they’d had hung. The parents nodded, never offering a compliment, the mother dubious and reserved, the father snide and uninterested.

Richard stood off to one side, arms crossed, and Clarisse thought he looked exhausted and drained beneath his still fiercely tensed face, as if his sense of himself could not quite keep up with his real nature, which, weak and helpless before the father, was, unbeknownst to him, already showing itself in his vacillating gaze, in his mouth’s drooping corners.

“Let’s go and see the baby,” said Clarisse, having heard a faint squeal.

She started down the passage, then stopped short at the room’s open door. Her hands instinctively sprang out towards the two sides of the jamb, as if to prevent anyone entering.

The dog was lying on Ladivine’s bed, a little crib whose bars were lowered on one side so the baby could be picked up more easily, and its outstretched head, lightly grazing the child’s, had a deathly stillness about it.

Equally immobile, Clarisse saw in a single sweeping glance, were the baby’s body, her colourless face, her wide eyes looking deep into the dog’s staring gaze, as if she’d plunged into an abyss of sibylline knowledge and perhaps become lost.

Yet Clarisse had the strong sense of a bond not to be rashly broken, a secret union with no immediate danger for the child. Not for a moment did she doubt the dog’s good intentions.

She heard a horrified cry behind her, and felt herself being violently shoved forward. Richard burst into the room, snatched up the baby, and clasped her to him, turning his back to the dog as a shield for the child.

“Get that thing out of here!” he screamed out at the passage, where his parents were standing.

He backed towards the wall, scarlet with fear and indignation.

The father calmly stepped in. Clarisse saw his eyes study the scene just as hers had a moment before, and, no less quick and assured, decide that the danger was not where it seemed. This troubled her. She felt at peace, nonetheless, and very comfortably pure, as if washed clean from within by an intuition higher and wiser than hers, which had chosen her.

“I never want to see that dog in this house again!” Richard shouted furiously.

Clarisse noted that he was taking care not to look at the dog still sprawled on the bed watching him, dark and serene, silent and proper.

Something struck her, clear as day: that well-behaved dog had the same eyes as Malinka’s mother.

Richard’s father began to stroke its flanks, speaking tenderly into its ear, not to placate it, Clarisse told herself, because he wasn’t afraid of it, but to erase any offence.

The dog stretched its legs, yawned, deigned to get down from the bed.

The father gently grasped its collar, once again, thought Clarisse, not to control it but as if taking the arm of a dear friend, and the two of them left the room without a glance Richard’s way. He sighed in ostentatious relief. He rocked and caressed the child, who had begun to cry.

“That was close,” he said accusingly.

Did he mean to include her in this censure, because she had not rushed forward to snatch the baby away from the dog’s maw?

Clarisse wasn’t sure, but she preferred not to know.

Her certainty that the dog had come to the child’s room not to harm her but to teach her was twisting and turning inside her, and it troubled her like an unwholesome temptation of disloyalty to Richard Rivière. Shouldn’t she have told him of that certainty, wouldn’t he have understood it, found reassurance in it? Oh no, he wouldn’t have understood, and his inability would have made clear to Clarisse what she already knew, that no breath had come to him to show him the way into the dog’s mysterious soul.

She couldn’t help seeing it as a sign of Richard’s weakness that this inspiration had steered clear of him, but had entered his father’s heart.

Madame Rivière had not bothered to enter the bedroom. She had set the table in the kitchen, and the father was sitting and waiting before his plate with the impatient, wearied look of a man who wants to put the chore of the meal behind him and be off as quickly as possible.

Richard showed the baby to his mother, who, thought Clarisse, examined it guardedly, her eye full of an outraged scepticism, as if this might all be a cruel joke she’d have to thwart before they could laugh at her. She clumsily took the child in her arms, then handed her back almost at once, with a furious little giggle.

Later, as the meal was nearing its end and Ladivine was back asleep in her little bed, they heard crunching gravel on the patio. It was the dog, pacing back and forth in front of the house, beneath the kitchen windows.

Seething, Richard asked them:

“What’s with you having that dog now? Since when are you animal lovers?”

“It’s to guard the shop,” said Madame Rivière. “You’ve got to protect yourself these days, you know.”

“It’s got nothing to do with the shop,” the father said with deliberation.

He waved his fork towards the mother, not looking at her.

“That’s what she’d like to think, but that’s not it at all. Why would we have brought it here if it was supposed to be guarding the shop? Why do we take it with us wherever we go?”