Marie NDiaye - Ladivine

Malinka had never married, never had a child or a boyfriend. No-one remembered her but her mother.

Everything Freddy Moliger told her, with an urgency she read not as egocentrism but as a fierce resolve to show himself in all his destitution so anyone making the unlikely choice to take an interest in him wouldn’t be disturbed or disappointed when bits of his past life came out, everything he told her in his slightly high-pitched, grating, disagreeable voice, every detail resonated in her with an excessive, exhausting intensity — even more powerful than if she’d lived through it all herself, and because she now felt as though she were carrying her heart outside of her body, unadorned and quivering and blood-soaked from the sacrifice of her disguises.

For the first time she felt a kinship.

She had of course desperately loved Richard Rivière, passionately loved Ladivine and the servant; she had given herself entirely and imperiously to her daughter and husband, but had she ever felt a kinship with them? Oh, no, she didn’t think so, not as she did with Freddy Moliger.

She had no desire to devote herself to this strange man, and she would never love him as she still loved Richard Rivière. That made no difference. She found no real pleasure in this relationship, no fulfilment, but it tormented her in a way she’d never known, through no fault of Freddy Moliger’s. She couldn’t think of him without the servant’s face appearing to her, enigmatic, unchanged, unavoidable. Quietly accusing, too, and she didn’t shy away, she took what was coming to her.

Was it too late to try to make of the servant’s life less bitter a bread?

Freddy Moliger told her he had grown up with his younger brother Christopher in suburban Bordeaux, between a hard-drinking mother and a father whose mildest display of bad temper was emptying his children’s satchels out their eleventh-floor window and then threatening to toss them both after their school things. Eventually they were taken from their parents and entrusted to their grandmother, a fairly benign woman, although Malinka immediately saw that Freddy Moliger was skipping over many occasions when the grandmother took out her chronic rage on the two boys with a broomstick or chopping board. He spoke of those objects in a light-hearted, almost affectionate tone, like emblems of a comical eccentricity in that woman who looked after them until he was twelve and his brother ten, and then died. Of what, Freddy Moliger never knew. He’d simply come home from school one day and found her dead on the floor of the kitchen, her heavy body stuck between the chairs and the table. The brothers were returned to their parents, who’d had two other children in the meantime. But their father couldn’t stand having them around, as Freddy Moliger put it with a sort of stoical understanding, and as if that too were merely a quirk of his father’s odd character, nothing that could be judged.

This, Malinka observed, was how Freddy Moliger always described the brutal or senseless acts by which adults had made of his childhood a torment: without rancour or reproach, no different from certain trivial events, certain minutiae he also occasionally brought up, their telling sometimes seeming to Malinka devoid of purpose or sense. Blows and cruel words, screaming and hostility were as much a part of the everyday world as the discomfort of rain on a bare head, as the fleeting itch of a mosquito bite, and none of those had anything to do with morality. Which is why, if Moliger’s father or mother suddenly took a closed fist to Freddy’s head or chest, there was no question of faulting them, any more than you could rail at the forces of nature.

Once again removed from their parents, the two brothers were placed first with one family, in the country, and then, now separated, with a second, because, Freddy Moliger calmly explained, they’d begun acting up. They were reunited at the junior high school, escaped together, stole two bottles of wine and a bag of crisps from the supermarket, then hid under a bridge, eating, drinking, drowsing, until it came time to get back on the school bus. They were unhappy in their foster homes, both because they were apart and because the families didn’t like them and secretly mistreated them. Or so at least Malinka translated Freddy Moliger’s account, because he never used fraught words, he simply described situations, answering, when she cried “They hated you, you were miserable!” that he didn’t know, that it was possible, vaguely put out, she sensed, at hearing her explain with abstractions something she had not known or experienced.

He then came to the foster families’ defence, saying “You know, my brother and I were pretty hard to handle” in an objective tone that condemned neither the adults’ cruelty and thoughtlessness nor the children’s unstable behaviour.

She came to sense that, in Freddy Moliger’s eyes, any interpretation on her part was a sign of his own deficiency, that she was only restating what he’d just said, and only because he didn’t know how to tell a story or make himself understood. This left him sullen and irritable. She noticed, and took to listening in silence.

She looked at his pallid, droop-cornered eyes, his mottled, pockmarked face, his coarse yellow hair, like a patch of grass burned by pesticide, she looked at him and thought to herself that it wasn’t easy to love and want to touch such a damaged face, she told herself that and at the same time she knew she would manage, without forcing or feigning it, not out of generosity or kindness but because the time would come when she’d want to, unstoppably, once she’d learned how to know him, Freddy Moliger, in all his strangeness.

Then she would want to caress and protect his poor face.

It would not give her the sensual pleasure she felt on stroking Richard Rivière’s handsome, healthy face, but she would learn to like it all the same, even without pleasure.

Nothing about Freddy Moliger was pleasant, but very soon Malinka couldn’t imagine doing without the feeling of her own nature being revealed, which only Freddy Moliger’s face and stories could bring her.

Not that he offered it, not that it was anything like a gift. But, though he didn’t know it, he was showing her the way into her own secrets. Oh, it wasn’t pretty, and sometimes she thought she’d never find peace again, but she wouldn’t have traded that pain for all the serenity of the life she lived before, when Richard Rivière was still with her.

Freddy Moliger was there, sitting on a chair in the kitchen with a cup of milky coffee she’d made him. She stood leaning against the sink and saw him enjoying that coffee, adding some sugar, a little more milk, exacting and sullen at the same time, feigning disdain, as if afraid that any sign it was good would summon someone to snatch away the cup, to punish him for enjoying himself when he didn’t deserve to.

Now, in bits and pieces, he was telling her that the police had come to arrest him and his brother. Though younger than he, Christopher put up an arrogant and defiant front while he himself trembled in terror, to such a degree that the police ended up letting them go, he said, so clearly finding all this coherent that she didn’t dare ask him to explain. So they left the police station, and Christopher wanted to go and play by the railway line. They were in no hurry to get back to their foster homes, especially Freddy, whose family beat him, whereas Christopher never let anyone lay a hand on him. And then, as he was crossing the tracks, Christopher was crushed by a train. Freddy ran away as fast as his legs could carry him, he ran through the farm fields and into the little woods where there wasn’t even a path, not going for help but because he was half out of his head, half out of his head, he said again in his piercing but still unemotional voice.