Marie NDiaye - Ladivine

Those words would have killed them, Clarisse Rivière sometimes thought.

And if not, if they survived, they could still never see each other again.

That was Clarisse Rivière’s greatest fear, having to give up her visits, even though they brought her only a mixed pleasure — moving, but heavy with frustration and sadness.

She entered the flat to find her mother standing near the window, where she had been watching for her to appear on the narrow pavement, and now her mother was no longer striving to put on a convincing display of surprise.

She simulated it in a lazy and half-hearted way, and perhaps, more generally, with a weariness of the very idea of performance, of the act in which they were both trapped for all time.

Clarisse Rivière would each time sense the depth of that weariness, and it would trouble her fleetingly.

Sometimes she thought they had finally burned through the many layers of silence and shame that did not so much separate as envelop them, and so had arrived at a sort of sincerity, assuming that sincerity can wear the costume of an actor.

It was, she sometimes thought, as if they could see each other perfectly through their masks, all the while knowing they would never lower them.

For the naked truth would not have allowed itself to be looked at.

“Well, what do you know, my daughter at last,” Malinka’s mother would sigh, and Clarisse Rivière no longer felt aggrieved, she smiled with a two-sided smile she never showed anywhere else, at once loving and circumspect, open and suddenly reserved.

She kissed her mother, who was short, thin, prettily built, who like her had slender bones, narrow shoulders, long, thin arms, and compact, unobtrusive features, perfectly attractive but discreet, almost invisible.

Where Malinka’s mother was born, a place Clarisse Rivière had never gone and never would go — though she had, furtive and uneasy, looked at pictures of it on the Internet — everyone had those same delicate features, harmoniously placed on their faces as if with an eye for coherence, and those same long arms, nearly as slender at the shoulder as at the wrist.

And the fact that her mother had therefore inherited those traits from a long, extensive ancestry and then passed them on to her daughter (the features, the arms, the slender frame and, thank God, nothing more) once made Clarisse Rivière dizzy with anger, because how could you escape when you were marked in this way, how could you claim not to be what you did not want to be, what you nevertheless had every right not to want to be?

But anger too had abandoned her.

Never once, in all those many years, had Clarisse Rivière been exposed.

And so, as she aged, anger too had abandoned her.

For never had Malinka been flushed out from the cover of Clarisse.

Her mother lived in this single ground-floor room, paid for in part by Clarisse Rivière, its window barred to potential burglars by a black grate.

Meticulously maintained, dusted and cleaned every day with maniacal fervour and fussiness, the room was cluttered with dowdy furniture and gewgaws, unstylish and discordant, but, in their gaudy, varnished jumble, their outlandish accumulation in so confined a space, producing an effect of unintended but friendly peculiarity, something almost clownish, in which Clarisse Rivière somewhat queasily felt right at home.

She would sit down in a crushed velvet chair with tulle-draped arms while her mother stood close by in a pose of wary, defensive stiffness that no longer had any reason to be, a lingering trace of a stance from a time long before, when there was good cause for it, when Clarisse Rivière was trying to free herself of her duty, her mission — oh, she struggled to remember it, she had wanted to have nothing more to do with Malinka’s mother, and that was very wrong.

Her mother knew there was no reason now to fear being abandoned or fled from, but in the first moments of Clarisse Rivière’s visits she maintained a vigilant pose, pretending to stand guard over her daughter who might still make a run for it, and in reality watching over herself, in her stubborn, groundless refusal to let herself go, doing her best to incarnate for them both the dramatic figure of dignity irreparably wronged.

There was no need for that, Clarisse Rivière thought, and there never had been.

She knew, like her mother, that the wrong was there all around them, in the simple fact that Malinka was visiting her mother in secret because she had decided this was how it would be, and because once that scandalous decision was made there was no going back.

There was no forgetting the wrong, and no need to express it with scowls, with a special silence that, striving to be meaningful, freighted that wrong with a slightly embarrassing lyricism.

So thought Clarisse Rivière, who nonetheless felt her tenderness grow on seeing her mother so inept in her attempts to seem grander than she could ever be.

Because Clarisse Rivière’s mother was only an ordinary woman who would have been perfectly happy with the little joys of a routine existence, who could scarcely be blamed for not always knowing what gestures to make on the stage that her daughter had forced her to tread.

She herself, Clarisse Rivière, sometimes stumbled.

Sometimes she began to weep in her armchair, sudden, violent sobs seemingly set off by some run-in with her mother, but which had no other cause than a brutal attack unleashed by her own conscience.

How can people live this way? she often wondered. Surely this was not how things were supposed to be?

But always, even through those tears, her fierce, stubborn, old resolve rose up to show her that things were just as they had to be, and so certain was that blind, stupid resolve, that savage determination from her youth, that Clarisse Rivière never feared she might abandon it in some moment of weakness.

Only in her actions did she falter.

She saw herself sobbing in the armchair, she thought herself mediocre, she thought herself an ordinary woman and a heavy-handed actress like her mother, except that for her there was no excuse. Then it passed. That moment of weakness was quickly forgotten. There remained only the slightly surprised memory of an awakening of the stubborn will that was her master, which she could not imagine defying. Why that power deep inside her had stirred she soon forgot.

Every first Tuesday of the month Malinka’s mother was handed enough money to keep her in groceries until the next visit, and a little present as well, a bottle of eau de Cologne, a fragrance burner, a genuine linen dishtowel, because she also passionately loved things and surprises, and Clarisse Rivière, who took a great deal of trouble to come up with all this, could not bring herself to give her only a curt cash-filled envelope.

Then they would sit down in the tiny kitchen and eat the dish made by her mother the previous day, veal Marengo or shepherd’s pie or cabbage stuffed with duck confit, and her mother alone spoke of her previous month’s doings and the few people she had met at the local old ladies’ club, and the fact that Clarisse Rivière could say nothing of her life, and that her mother could ask her no questions, no longer hung heavy between them.

There was a time when, on concluding her own account, Malinka’s mother would fall silent and wait, discreetly desperate, mouth halfopen, fixing her forlorn gaze, pleading but hopeless, resigned, on Clarisse Rivière’s face, which turned so cold and so hard that her mother had to look away.

And a dense, painful silence settled in, until Malinka’s mother went back to a story, any story at all, some trivial happening already recounted, and gradually Clarisse Rivière’s face became itself again, the sweet, devoted, distant face that Malinka’s mother knew and loved, so like her own.