Marie NDiaye - Ladivine

She would realise this, far too late.

Even before silence invaded their house, a polite, cosy, placid silence, she had already closed her ears to the things Richard Rivière and Ladivine said, though she pretended to listen, though her face and her gestures were the picture of careful attention — but only the commonplace words by which they ordered their day-to-day lives were allowed into her consciousness. The rest she was not to hear.

Because if she did she would not be able to speak without lying, and while she wasn’t lying when she was giving the man and the child all she could give of herself, she would be lying if she talked about this or that like a free woman. And for that lie the accusing face of the servant, who knew just how faithless Clarisse Rivière was, how much she already had to make up for, would never have left her in peace.

And then what more could she do, she who was already giving all she could of herself?

She was doing everything she could.

But it tortured her that she couldn’t hold back the numbness gradually overtaking her household, the cold torpor exuded in spite of her by her artificial, oblique self, until in the end she grew used to it, and came to believe this was how things were supposed to be in happy families.

She stared at her thin, mild face in the mirror, only faintly lined with delicate wrinkles at the corners of her eyelids. She couldn’t believe nothing showed in the still water of her grey-green eyes or the even crease of her slightly upturned lips.

Her light-red dyed hair was pulled into a loose chignon, her brow was pale and smooth, and two pearls gleamed opaquely on her ears. Who would ever suspect she was a woman in despair?

Like the rest of the house, the bedroom was neat and impeccably clean, not one piece of clothing in sight, everything in its place in the big blond-wood drawers, the polished wardrobes, their doors set with hard, efficient mirrors.

Clarisse Rivière still scrupulously neatened and cleaned this house they’d bought some years before, in the centre of Langon, once they had sold their little house on the outskirts, but now she hated the house as she had never hated anyone in her life. Because long before she did, that house had heard and understood what Richard Rivière said, and its old brick and stone walls would forever preserve the memory of those terrible words, unaffected, never once sighing in sympathy with her sadness.

She wanted the house to grieve and suffer as she did, she wished it would collapse and swallow them both, her who did not want to go on living, and him, Richard Rivière, who had spoken those strange, dangerous words she’d long before managed to stop hearing but which he had so often repeated that in the end she had to give in and understand them.

Did he say “I’m leaving this house, I’m going to live somewhere else”, or “I can’t go on living here, I’m leaving”?

That pretty house never reacted, as if indifferent to the insult or aware that none of this really concerned it, and neither did Clarisse Rivière, she only smiled vaguely, retied her blue dress’s belt on her hip, started out of the room, but that was when Richard Rivière put his hand on her arm and, realising she had once again succeeded in not hearing or understanding him, once again found a way to close her ears, like turning off a hearing aid, or, who knows, to make an unintelligible hash of the very clear words he’d just spoken in his patient, firm, friendly voice, he held her back with one hand as she fled, she who had sensed the threat in the air, her skin already prickling and shivering, and again he spoke those words that the house had already heard, that it had already absorbed in its thick walls, that had left it unmoved: “I’m going away, I’m leaving this house.”

Clarisse Rivière did not collapse, any more than the walls did.

But the words and their cruel meaning had pierced her defenceless skin, the delicate, creamy, lily-like flesh that Richard Rivière once never wearied of caressing and clutching, just as she loved his body of firm, dry leather, and she felt her skin closing over those words, and those words calmly, meticulously beginning to wreak their damage.

She had looked towards the window, she had seen the big chestnut tree on the square, and suddenly her hand began to itch, because, almost distracted by the memory, she could picture herself rubbing its ribbed trunk with that hand, and even now, it seemed, Richard Rivière taking that hand in his own and raising it to his lips.

Dimly, that gesture reminded her of another. Had she not, one long-ago day, pressed the servant’s hand to her mouth? Had she not tried, not to soften her mother’s sorrow, but to save herself from the pain and the knowledge of her own cruelty? And had that gesture saved her? Oh, now she didn’t know.

Now she was staring emptily into the chestnut’s leafy boughs, and, feeling Richard Rivière’s rough lips on her hand, she thought it was the trunk itself kissing her palm, the whole tree trying to redeem itself after for some reason inflicting on her a sadness she would never escape — but now she’d forgotten what it was, or even if there was anything to remember, and so she tentatively turned her eyes towards Richard Rivière and saw he was about to speak again, suspecting she hadn’t heard, which was true and false at the same time, because now she could feel a way being cleared inside her for a monstrous pain, but she had no idea where it was coming from, and with sluggish surprise she mused that the old chestnut tree patiently burrowing its roots under the asphalt on the square, if it really was that tree trying to redeem itself by exhaling a dry breath onto her hand, was in no position to torture her, that pitiful rubbish-ringed tree, and her so tall and pale in her sky-blue dress, her dainty-heeled sandals, oh, she would already have fled this room if she were not inexplicably being held back by one hand.

“I’m not sure you understand what I said,” Richard Rivière was telling her in his steadily patient voice, insistent but detached, as if conscientiously discharging a duty he knew would be difficult, “I’m going away, I don’t want to live here anymore, with you, which doesn’t mean I’ve stopped loving you, you’ll always be my. .”

A siren began to shriek, but Richard Rivière’s lips went on moving, his hand gently squeezing Clarisse’s, and his lack of reaction surprised her until she realised the awful noise was coming from her own head.

At the same moment, a fierce wave of nausea made her moan aloud.

No doubt thinking she was about to collapse, Richard Rivière took her in his arms. She could see his anxious eyes, his moving lips, but not a sound could be heard through the wail in her ears, and she shook her head, vaguely ashamed to be making a scene.

But she felt so ill, so terribly ill that her embarrassment ebbed, pushed back by a grief full of nausea, disgust and unbounded horror, which now flooded through her, making her limbs twitch, vainly trying to throw open her breast so it could get out, but her firm, solid flesh had closed over that pain like the house’s walls over Richard Rivière’s irrevocable words, and nothing, she thought, would ever dislodge it.

She rubbed her face against his shirt, inhaled the fresh, childlike smell she knew so well, thinking “So that’s what was coming to me,” with an astonishment beyond measure.

No less immense was her disbelief that nothing showed in the mirror just a few hours later. A slight lostness in her eyes might tell the servant that something was troubling her daughter when she next went to see her, but what that torment might be she would never guess.

Clarisse Rivière found no comfort in this. For the first time in her life she wished she could confide in Malinka’s mother, tell her not of her joy but her sorrow, and see that sorrow’s reflection on the servant’s face, so like her own.