Marie NDiaye - Ladivine

“Yes, why?” asked the mother, suddenly afraid.

“Because we can’t not, that’s how it is. It’s an order come to life. What do I care about dogs? It’s true, I don’t even like them that much. This one’s different. I had no choice.”

Richard let out a disdainful snicker. He was trying to add disdain to his hatred, Clarisse told herself, but it was beyond him, and disdain refused to take root in so pallid a heart. His gaze was dull, at once full of hate and struggling to summon up a bit of disdain with which to harden itself.

The dog began to yelp. It was jumping up and down on the patio so its head could be glimpsed through the window. It barked when its eyes met those of Clarisse or Richard’s father, then whimpered when its paws hit the ground and it was once again out of sight.

Identical to the cries of Malinka’s mother, its laments were more than Clarisse could bear.

She walked to the window and the dog hurried off around the house, glancing impatiently back at Clarisse again and again.

She suddenly realised it was headed for the child’s room, whose window looked onto the garden on the opposite side of the house. She whirled around, raced through the kitchen, ran to Ladivine’s room. She first saw the bounding dog’s huge frantic head through the glass, then the baby’s pale little face as she hiccupped and moaned in her own vomit.

She cried out, picked up the child, patted her back until she heard regular breathing and the faint beat of that soothed, very young heart.

“How did you know, you nice dog, how did you know?” she murmured, staring at the window, where the dog, now at peace, could no longer be seen.

Richard Rivière’s father had just appeared in the doorway.

For the first time Clarisse glimpsed fear in his cold eyes, but it was a respectful fear, docile, a pious fear that in no way diminished him.

She went back to visiting Malinka’s mother, leaving the child with a neighbour who would also look after her when Clarisse went back to work.

Sitting in the velvet armchair that had slowly become hers at the servant’s, her gaze wandering over the trinkets her mother had begun to surround herself with, little porcelain elephants, handbells of various sizes, vases never filled with flowers but abundantly covered with fanciful floral motifs, she listened with one ear as the servant told her of bosses and co-workers, with the monotonous insistence, the maniacal, forced intensity Clarisse noticed she always fell into when she sensed her daughter’s thoughts straying, and rather than try to lure them back she seemed to drive them insistently still further away with her mind-numbing monologues.

“What about you, how are you getting on?” she would ask at long last, her tone at once aggressive and imploring.

And Clarisse would smile and say nothing, evasive, but smiling lovingly and sincerely all the same.

But her heart was pounding, and, thinking about the baby, from whom she did not like to be separated for these few hours, she told herself how she wished she could give her mother the gift of that child. How happy the servant would be!

And undoubtedly, she would be breaking her vow never to link her existence to the servant’s, but also acquitting herself of it by so great a sacrifice, and so her responsibility to those two, to her child and her mother, would, she thought, be behind her.

Because she would then flee far from both of them, far even from Richard Rivière, not yet realising what she owed him. And would she not suffer terribly, never again seeing those three she loved far more than life?

But in truth she did not mind suffering, if it was the sorrow of love, of not having those you love close beside you.

Far more painful for her was fidelity to her irreversible decision, which was destroying Malinka’s mother over a slow flame, and her too, Clarisse Rivière, with a brighter flame, more violent, perhaps purifying, but she didn’t yet know — she did not know, and simply went on hoping in fear.

As the years went by, and Ladivine became a sweet, even-tempered girl, and Richard Rivière’s skilful salesmanship, tireless work and quiet, indestructible ambition brought him ever greater responsibilities at the dealership, Clarisse Rivière began to see that winning on one front could only mean losing on the other, that this was how it had to be, that it was a matter of her destiny.

But she led her life onward with an untrembling hand. Apart from what they were not allowed to know, she believed she gave of herself completely to Richard and Ladivine.

Every moment of her life was infused with the certainty that it could be sacrificed to those two, that it belonged above all to them, that Clarisse Rivière was to make use of it only so long as they didn’t need it. Before that man and that child who suspected nothing and enjoyed her generosity in naive good faith, she pictured herself as a slashed wineskin pouring out the very essence of joyful abnegation, of eager, almost greedy selflessness.

But that notion of her own success was undermined by the increasingly troublesome thought that her voluntary, permanent self-effacement had constructed a thin wall of ice all around her, that sometimes her daughter and husband could not understand, though they said nothing of it, perhaps knew nothing of it, why they could not reach the heart of her emotions.

And yet she must surely feel emotions, said their confused, anxious gaze, and emotions more varied than what she allowed them to see, that unending, inexorable deference, which they might well have suspected was not pure but the product of praiseworthy labour.

And might they not be tired of this, might they not be put off, perhaps, by the thought that they had to be grateful for it?

Might they not be tired and put off by such relentless generosity, the patient, unforthcoming man and the increasingly mysterious and obliging child, neither of whom, perhaps, wanted so much goodness, and wished she would let them know her in some other way too?

Clarisse Rivière felt the cold settling in, furtively filling the house, seeming to grip Richard Rivière and Ladivine, gradually encasing them too in the very delicate rime of a slightly stiff demeanour. But she didn’t know what to do so that this would not be.

She often laughed, often joked with them merrily, and her laugh was like crystal, it was brief and uncontagious. The more she devoted herself to her husband and daughter, the more she could feel them taking their distance, without defiance or resentment, as people turn away in discomfort from an incomprehensible passion.

But how frigid was the breath she exhaled.

Sometimes this left her discouraged, defeated, knowing the invisible presence of Malinka’s mother in her dark street kept her from giving her gestures and words the guilelessness that would warm them.

And she felt equally incapable of raising her daughter Ladivine by a common morality’s well-defined precepts.

No sooner was she called on to offer an opinion of some deed, to judge the appropriateness of some attitude or simply to say what she thought, good or bad, of some situation, than the servant’s silhouette appeared before her daunted eyes, seeming to defy her to judge anyone, she who had long since found herself guilty.

She fell into the habit of shrugging her shoulders, mute and distant, lips slightly pursed, when Ladivine told her of some clique that had offended another, and before the child’s upturned, questioning eyes, before the child striving to understand what to make of all this, she smiled curtly, saying nothing, and thus seeming to express her disgust at the story itself. And so Ladivine finally stopped telling her what went on at school, and Clarisse forgot that things she should know about ever happened at school.