Marie NDiaye - Ladivine

She paid less attention to her appearance, her dress, and the clothes she wore were not as perfectly, rigorously clean as they once were. Her feet were yellowed and dry in her sandals.

She was aware of this negligence, and sometimes it gave her a grim satisfaction, for she thought of her body as an old dog that could never be punished enough for having, say, devoured a little child.

She settled into a long wait for death, exhausted by grief and loathing for everything around her, insensitive to everything else, frozen, and even the birth of Annika and then Daniel, whom she went to see several times in Berlin, little touched her, however hard she tried, as she took them in her arms, to revive the emotion she’d felt on embracing her own baby.

She knew her indifference and desperate attempts to conceal it gave her a slightly hunted, fearful look. She didn’t know what to say, what to talk about, kept her mouth shut.

When Richard Rivière called, she could scarcely summon the strength to murmur a response to his “hello”, and tears sprang to her eyes, trickled down her face and neck as she listened to his falsely cheerful chatter, against an indecipherable background of other lively, spirited voices that made her think that he lived his life amid unending revelry.

That didn’t hurt her. She noted it without interest, but the sound of Richard Rivière’s voice brought her ever fresh torments. Her fingers convulsively clutched the receiver, she could not catch her breath, could not listen, lost in dread of the moment when he would hang up and she’d be alone again in her house, the house that knew everything and never came to her rescue.

“Please, please, come back to the house,” she would say, or think she was saying, since Richard Rivière never answered, and it was likely she had not said a word, though she couldn’t help thinking the house must have heard her and swallowed her plea in its walls.

Nor, certainly, did she say “I love you so”, but the words rolled around and resounded in her aching skull, making such a din that Richard Rivière could only have heard them, had he not striven so insistently to fill up the moment with his own harmless, lighthearted words.

He did come back to the house, though, just once.

Not, she thought dejectedly, and perhaps because for a few minutes she’d been foolish enough to think that it was, to surrender to her love and her sorrow, to rescue her from her quiet agony.

He was coming back to the house because his father had died in Toulouse, and so they drove off to the funeral together in Richard Rivière’s four-wheel drive.

Three years had gone by since his leaving. Clarisse Rivière found him more handsome than before, a little more filled out, and dressed with a very studied elegance, like a prosperous, fastidious, slightly anxious man.

She threw herself against him as soon as she opened the door, and she found a certain taste for life tentatively coming back to her, slightly dimming her grief and bewilderment. She could feel his discomfort at having her in his arms. She did not care. She held him close, so happy to be seeing him again, nestling her face against his neck, thinking he might be uncomfortable because in his mysterious Annecy existence there was another woman who held him like this, but not caring, lost in her joy at rediscovering Richard Rivière’s smell.

If he’d fled what she had given him so generously, that alone was worth thinking about. What he’d fled to didn’t interest her.

Richard Rivière’s mother looked at them with an almost hostile face. She seemed not so much stricken as infuriated by her husband’s death, or rather, Clarisse realised uneasily, by its circumstances.

Without pleasure they drank a warm, syrupy vin cuit in the little flat where Richard Rivière was raised, above the stationery shop that the parents had still been running only the month before, when they had made the decision to retire. The mother had gone off for a mineral cure in the mountains while the father took inventory.

“The shop was locked up, the blind was down, and your father had the dog with him, that horrible dog,” the mother said accusingly.

Richard Rivière swirled the sweet wine in his glass, looking around him in boredom and distaste.

“Not that same dog you brought to our house?” whispered Clarisse, with a nervous titter.

The mother almost roared in irritation. She tried to catch Richard Rivière’s eye, but he very visibly refused. She seemed bent on rebuking him, and, unable to express her outrage in a shared glance, furiously shook her head. Clarisse remembered him telling her, one day long before, that his parents habitually blamed him for their every concern and sorrow.

“No, of course not, a different dog, the first one died ten years ago at least. But it was the same breed, and they looked so much alike you forgot it wasn’t that other one. Not to mention that your father gave it the same name.”

She began to sob, dry-eyed, her broad face contorted and creased.

“I never wanted a dog, myself,” she whimpered, “and neither did your father, but he was convinced he didn’t have a choice.”

When the mother got home from her cure two weeks later, she found the father lying in the back room of the shop, his neck and part of his face ripped away. The dog was standing close by, and it growled viciously on catching sight of her.

“They told me your father probably died of a heart attack, and then the dog went after him because it was starving. But I know that’s not it. What I think is that your father, who was in perfect health, was just doing his work, minding his own business, and that dog lunged at his throat and killed him on purpose.”

Richard Rivière shrugged in a brusque gesture of scornful anger. He banged his glass of vin cuit down on the coffee table. A few drops jumped out and spattered on the varnished wood.

“Why would you think a thing like that?” he shouted. “Have you ever heard of a dog ripping its master’s throat out for no reason?”

“I never said for no reason,” the mother spat back. “You hear me, son? I never said for no reason. It wanted vengeance for something, that’s what I think.”

She leaned forward until her face almost touched Richard Rivière’s, so he couldn’t turn away.

“Do you have nothing to feel guilty about? Are you absolutely certain your life is in order?” she whispered, with such fury in her face that Clarisse saw him close his eyes in anguish.

“My life isn’t hurting anyone,” he murmured stoutly.

“I hope not, for your sake,” the mother hissed, “because your father ended up paying for something or someone, and he was the most virtuous man there ever was. So, yes, I dearly hope you’ll take care to live a life no-one will ever curse you for.”

Surprised, almost insulted, Clarisse Rivière caught him glancing uncomfortably in her direction, not so much suspicious as wary and fearful.

She gave him the non-answer of an opaque, amiable gaze, but her slighted heart began to bleed again, protesting. Tears stung her eyes.

Can you really not understand, she silently murmured, that I will never call down the slightest hardship on you, nor anyone’s wrath, because above all else I love you and will always see you as my husband, and you never once hurt me before the irreparable catastrophe that your leaving was for me, and even about that I’ve never felt any malice, only a grief that will never fade, which I don’t hold you responsible for, because it was me you wanted to be free of, not the house that hears everything, which means it’s my fault, can you really not see that, and believe that if anyone ever wishes sorrow on you it will never, ever be me?

“What happened to the dog?” she hurried to say.