Marie NDiaye - Ladivine

He took a sip of coffee and held the liquid in his mouth for a few seconds, lips thrust out. His eyes reddened. Malinka turned towards the sink, rinsed a glass.

A few years after that Freddy Moliger was in prison again, briefly, because he hadn’t actually done anything wrong, but he was too young, and prison messed him up, he said coldly, as if stating a general rule. Then he got married and his wife had a baby, a girl, but she met another man and disappeared one day out of the blue, taking the baby with her, meaning that Freddy Moliger never really knew the child, so to speak, which still pained him to this day. He once tried to see his daughter, when she was little, but she lived far away with her mother and the guy, and Freddy Moliger couldn’t afford the trip. And he had a feeling the mother was trying to turn the child against him, so he would leave them in peace, so they would be rid of Freddy Moliger.

That’s how it was. He had also forgotten the name of the village where Christopher was buried, and that too saddened him deeply, he would have liked to put flowers on the grave now and then. But as always the problem was money, because cars and trains were expensive. Not to mention, he concluded with a terse little laugh, that he would have to remember the name of that damn village. He’d recently asked his mother, but she couldn’t remember it either, assuming she ever knew. With all this he began to drink pretty heavily, and that’s where he stood now, but his life was no worse than before. He thought things were looking up for him. Once in a while he did some work for a local farmer, in the vineyards, or picking vegetables in the summertime. He shared a flat with two or three friends, and in the end everything was fine, except that on a sheet with his signature at the bottom he’d written that he wanted to be buried alongside his brother and didn’t know where the grave was, and that got to him.

He was thirty-four years old, he told her, and he knew he looked fifty but didn’t care. He had a slight limp, the result of a fierce thrashing by his father twenty-five years before, and that didn’t bother him either, it never got in his way or stopped him doing what he had to.

Here he snickered, as if he’d cracked a good joke. And all at once Malinka realised that he had to struggle constantly against howling rage, and that, if she herself had always refrained from judging others’ acts because she was guilty of a perpetual, on-going crime against the servant, what kept Freddy Moliger from accusing anyone was rooted less in personal, spontaneous stoicism than in the fear of seeing his anger’s terrible face come to life.

She took him to meet the servant just two days after they met. “Do you want to come with me to my mother’s?” she’d asked him,

holding her breath.

“Of course,” he said, surprised, happy.

She had not yet taken Freddy Moliger’s face in her hands, and

she was surprised to see a stranger’s face when she looked at him.

She was no less surprised by the importance that face had taken on

in her life, that stranger’s face she had to work to remember when

he was not around.

And yet she wanted him to see the servant, and she wanted her

to be introduced to someone by Malinka for the first time before she

touched and caressed his skin.

In her eagerness to give her mother the gift that was Freddy

Moliger, and to hear him call her Malinka in front of the servant as

if no Clarisse Rivière had ever existed, she ignored the Tuesday rule,

just this once, and took the train to Bordeaux on a Sunday, with

Freddy Moliger at her side.

Malinka’s mother opened the door suspiciously. Tufts of hair

stuck straight out of her tight chignon, the zip of her jeans was only

halfway up.

When she was expecting her daughter, she always came to the

door impeccably dressed, not a hair out of place, thought Malinka

in a sudden wave of sadness.

The servant gave Freddy Moliger a silent, unblinking stare. “This is Freddy,” said Malinka.

He embraced the servant as naturally as could be.

“Your daughter looks just like you, madame,” he said, in a voice

even more strident than usual.

The servant’s face didn’t trouble him at all, and Malinka was so

grateful that she impulsively caressed his cheek. Freddy Moliger gave

her a pleased smile.

He stepped into the room and exclaimed over the curios decorating

her shelves, a thousand porcelain trinkets, mostly animals, cherubs,

or shepherdesses, which Malinka’s mother spent hours arranging

and rearranging, their placement governed by secret affinities. The servant stepped towards him cautiously, as she would a

slightly dangerous dog. But her eyes shone with pleasure when she

began telling Freddy Moliger the source of each object, and why

she preferred this one to that, and he urged her on with lively

questions.

Freddy Moliger was dressed in a pale green short-sleeved shirt

and beige twill trousers. He’d plastered back his dead-grass hair, and

when he wasn’t speaking his washed-out eyes also seemed dead, so

dead that the effort he seemed to expend to come back to life when he

next spoke gave his most ordinary sentences a heroic, unhoped-for,

even final quality, which, Malinka observed, commanded attention

and a slightly anxious respect.

Everything about him expressed an artless, loyal good will towards

the servant, and a sincere interest in the story behind every trinket,

in all their special features.

Next he admired the décor and the furniture of the servant’s flat,

the unlikely jumble that somehow created a strange and sophisticated whole, not that she was trying for any such effect. Then he suggested they go out to lunch, if they’d be so kind as

to invite him.

He was exceptionally cheerful. He wasn’t charming, thought

Malinka, not the least bit appealing, with his high voice, his large

pores, his straw-like hair, but so boisterous were his high spirits,

between two bouts of sepulchral blankness, when he simply stood

listening, motionless, all taste for life seeming to drain unimpeded

from his thin, tortured body, so abundant were his high spirits and

so stirring their repeated, miraculous return that Malinka found

herself irresistibly driven to look into that plain face and study it,

disorientated and moved, her hands jittering restlessly.

The servant gave a girlish cry:

“Oh yes, let’s go out to eat!”

She glanced anxiously at Malinka, as if dreading her veto. “Good idea,” said Malinka, not far from tears.

How would she ever make of the servant’s life less bitter a bread? When, at afternoon’s end, they said goodbye to the servant and

started back to the station, she thanked Freddy Moliger for his thoughtfulness towards her mother. He seemed taken aback to be

thanked for behaving, he said shrugging, as he always did. He stiffened a little. Malinka half-felt the wing of an indistinct

fear graze her cheek.

Then he shook his head, and his face went back to its usual

expression, harmless and stagnant, like an animal bled dry in the

gentle darkness of its sleep.

“It was no work at all,” he said amiably. “Your mother’s so nice.” She stopped, breathless. To her own surprise, she had to clutch

Freddy Moliger’s arm to keep from sinking to her knees on the

pavement.

“If you only knew the pain I’ve caused her,” she murmured. “Do

you think that can ever be made up for? Do you?”

But he hadn’t heard, unless he was pretending. As they passed

by a bench where two neighbourhood women sat chatting, women