Marie NDiaye - Ladivine

Malinka knew by sight, having crossed paths with them many times,

she gave them a nod, and he snorted.

“You say hello to that dirt?” he asked, loud enough to be heard.

“Don’t you think we’ve got too many of those people around here?

I’ll tell you what I think: they make me sick.”

He stalked onward, caught up in a rage that covered his cheeks

with red blotches.

Stunned, Malinka scurried mindlessly after him. When she

caught up he gave her a smile, his serenity and good cheer suddenly

restored, and she could feel herself burying the memory of that

moment in a place where she wouldn’t easily find it again, because

the whole thing was simply incomprehensible.

She wanted to remember only Freddy Moliger’s kindness to the

servant, who’d greeted him just as Malinka had hoped: as the emissary of an ardent wish to repent.

*

Before long she suggested that Freddy Moliger move in with her, and he appeared the next day carrying everything he owned in a bag. That evening they made love for the first time.

Although she felt tense, grown unused to pleasure and the search for it, and too lost in thought, she serenely took stock of herself and found she was at ease, found that Freddy Moliger’s body caused her no aversion or sadness, and that at the same time she had no fear of disappointing him, or of being disappointed, whereas, she remembered, her immense, undiminishable love for Richard Rivière never slipped free of her self-imposed duty to live up to his expectations, her furious, consuming desire for self-sacrifice, without which she felt guilty and wicked.

She sensed that Freddy Moliger expected nothing he couldn’t readily give.

When he first saw her trim, long-limbed body, its slender bones invisible beneath her solid flesh, he let out a polite and admiring little cry, but his eyes were indifferent, and Malinka understood that he’d neither hoped nor feared she would have a beautiful body.

Nothing was a problem, nothing wasn’t good enough, and it never occurred to him to think of his body as attractive or not. He was what he was, without bluff or boast, like a plant, like a stone, and beautiful or ugly his body didn’t belong to him, and wasn’t his responsibility.

He was neither an attentive nor a selfish lover, but full of a strangely neutral, almost austere gentleness, and Malinka felt free and at peace. She was still lost in thought, but she was also serene, because Freddy Moliger’s presence never challenged her to prove anything at all, no more the goodness of her soul than the perfection of her body, and because she wasn’t lying to him.

Not that Richard Rivière had ever asked anything of her. But the fact that she’d become entangled in the snare of an endless striving to please did nothing to dispel the muted fear, which she felt even in their happiest days, that the most necessary discipline might be beyond her, and that only that discipline could make the thought of the servant, the bitter bread of her life, tolerable to her. Nor did Freddy Moliger ask her to tell him about herself.

For the first few days after he moved in she could see his gaze drifting over the photos that ornamented the walls and the shelves, of Ladivine, of Marko Berger, of the children, or of Richard Rivière, and no interest or curiosity ever shone in his eyes.

She tried, in a casual, affectionate voice, to bring up her daughter Ladivine. He turned and walked out of the room, with a rudeness that wasn’t like him. Whatever was closest to her, like all talk of emotion, seemed to plunge him into an impatience he objectively recognised, as if it were someone else feeling it, and he walked off as if to get hold of himself, such that Malinka came to see in those abrupt, maddening disappearances a sign of diplomacy rather than boorishness.

She stopped trying to tell him about her daughter and grandchildren, and about her emotions generally.

She sometimes thought, without resentment, that Richard Rivière and Ladivine must have longed terribly to hear what she was feeling or thinking, that towards them she’d always been tender and distant, giddy with an inexpressible love and yet hard to love, and here she was finally finding her voice and Freddy Moliger did not want to hear.

She knew Richard Rivière and Ladivine probably thought her an extremely simple woman.

Didn’t she sometimes embarrass them, in their sparse social life, with her anxious, smiling silence, her frozen face, lips always slightly parted, her pleasant, wary, stubborn way of never saying anything even the slightest bit personal?

Oh yes, surely, they had resigned themselves to thinking her slightly witless.

Was she? She didn’t know.

She only knew that her mind was now forever pondering thoughts that filled her with a calm, comforting passion, and that she owed this to Freddy Moliger, to the way he’d come to her that evening in the pizzeria, with his dead, desolate face, his limping form, and that, painfully, in a devastating glimpse of the inevitable, she’d abruptly realised they might rescue each other.

Now he lived in her house, and his company never disturbed her.

He moved through the house quietly, like a wild animal, she sometimes thought, whose way was to leave only the most discreet trail.

He cooked and cleaned energetically and efficiently, telling her over and over of everything that had happened in his life, the brutal parents, the brother killed by the train, the daughter he never saw, his impassive, reedy voice wanting nothing, accusing no-one.

And, though she’d heard these same stories before, never varying, their details always precise and identical, as if, almost bored, he were recounting the story of the same old movie over and over, she went on listening with an understanding and a friendship that drove her whole being towards him, and she suffered for him, since he showed no sign of suffering, and in this way hoped to displace the rage she now realised was trying to burrow into Freddy Moliger’s heart.

Every new telling of those stories was as painful to hear as the first, perhaps more. Each time she felt Freddy Moliger’s irremediable solitude all the more poignantly.

If, she thought, she could relieve him of the anger pointlessly besieging him, which he wore himself out trying to hold back, if she could do that by enduring his tales of woe, by trying to picture his woes so completely that they could only leave her weeping and wailing inside, then maybe they wouldn’t weigh so heavily in Freddy Moliger’s mind, and he would find peace and solace.

Give it all to me, let me shoulder the burden of your miseries, she silently begged him, because I know how to deal with them. And so she listened, never flinching at even the most harrowing moments, and she filled herself with his sorrow till she choked, so he would be free of it, he who after his brother’s death had spent his life struggling on alone.

At night, in the bed she’d shared with Richard Rivière for more than twenty-five years, she took this other man in her arms, and then it was she who found peace and solace, who felt freed and delivered of all obligation.

She was simply herself, Malinka, in all the innocence of her ephemeral, precarious presence on this earth. She was never humble with him. She could be authoritarian, firm, though never hard, and her voice was always gentle.

Freddy Moliger’s habits and ways did not irritate or surprise her, except when he weakened before the onslaughts of his anger and sullenly let it submerge him, becoming a different man, at once exultant and despairing and almost greedily eager to get some good out of it, to vanish into it until he was absolved of all responsibility.

She glimpsed this most painfully in the course of a visit her daughter Ladivine would soon pay her.