Marie NDiaye - Ladivine

“If it’s all the same to you, please don’t call me by my first name in front of my daughter,” she said to Freddy Moliger in an uneasy voice.

He puffed out his cheeks and let out a little sigh of indifference. It wasn’t seeming to hide things from her daughter that embarrassed her, it was the thought that she wasn’t yet ready to reveal to Ladivine that her name was Malinka.

I’ll do that, she vowed, the day I introduce the servant to her. Because, she felt certain, that day would come.

Already she brought Freddy Moliger along whenever she visited her mother, and he thought of those visits as a perfectly natural thing and obviously enjoyed them, and very often Malinka sat silent and attentive in her velvet armchair as the servant and Freddy cooked the meal in the little kitchen, and she heard the quiet hum of their voices sometimes interrupted by Freddy Moliger’s piercing laugh or the servant’s playfully outraged protests when he tried to take on more than she wanted.

But with Ladivine she felt so intimidated, so self-conscious!

Had her daughter not had every possible reason, over the past twenty years, to find her stupid and pitiable, lost, inaccessible?

On the phone, she had no choice but to answer Ladivine’s troubled but remarkably precise, probing questions, her startled concern all too clear, as if, thought Clarisse Rivière, she was convinced her mother could only have taken up with some shady and untrustworthy man, and she had a duty to come and investigate.

How surprising it was that her mother was with a man other than her father!

She would never have said so, but it was shocking as well, Clarisse Rivière could hear it in her incredulous voice and her flood of mundane questions, as if to prevent her mother from talking to her of love or carnal desire.

“Does this man have a trade, does he have money?” Ladivine had asked almost at once.

“He works here and there, when he finds something.”

“But do you give him money? Does he ask you?”

Clarisse Rivière felt sad for the both of them, for Ladivine who thought she had to interrogate her like this, and for herself who didn’t dare tell her, however gently, that it was none of her business.

“Yes, sometimes. When he needs it. I have more money than he does, it’s no problem.”

Ladivine went quiet, less so she could think all this over than so she could come up with a new line of attack — for that was how Clarisse Rivière saw these questions, in spite of herself, knowing there was nothing but solicitude behind them, and yet for the first time in her life she did not feel guilty towards Ladivine or Richard Rivière, or eternally obliged to them.

But she’d trained them to treat her like a foolish woman, ever indebted, elusive, easily taken in, and so she could hardly blame Ladivine for feeling concerned, or for talking to her like a child.

“Papa. . Richard once told me you don’t cash the cheques he sends you,” Ladivine began, uncomfortable.

Clarisse Rivière hurried to come to her rescue:

“That used to be true, but not since a couple of weeks ago.”

“Now that this man. .”

“Freddy Moliger,” she very quietly broke in.

“Now that this Moliger’s with you?”

“Yes. We’re living it up, you know,” she added with a forced little laugh.

But on the other end of the line Ladivine wasn’t laughing.

After another silence, she asked Clarisse Rivière’s permission to come and see her, to come down to Langon, as she said.

Freddy Moliger greeted this as he did every piece of news involving Malinka’s family life, with that amalgam of boredom and feigned arrogance thinly plastered over his displeasure, rage very visibly thrashing and growling below it.

“You’re fond of my mother, aren’t you?” asked Malinka, anxiously. “So why not my daughter?”

“Your mother’s a pitiful nobody, and that’s why I like her, and she feels the same about me,” he said gruffly.

She remembered those words when Ladivine walked through the door and she saw her daughter’s hesitant eyes turn towards Freddy Moliger, then immediately dart in alarm towards a corner of the room, then another, and then finally come back, veiled, slightly fixed, uncordial, to Freddy Moliger’s shoulder or neck, her lips forcing themselves into a more or less polite smile.

And Clarisse Rivière thought of what he’d said and suddenly saw the truth in it. She blushed in pity and sadness.

She tried to look at Freddy Moliger through Ladivine’s eyes, she saw his skinny alcoholic legs, his bony, slightly misshapen hips, his fleshy red face, his bad teeth, she saw the apathetic but untrusting and secretive expression on his averted face, she saw his straw-like hair, still wet where he’d parted it.

Ladivine could see nothing beyond that physical misery, she could see none of the ravaged kinship that bound her, Clarisse Rivière, to Freddy Moliger, could know nothing of the salutary impoverishment denuding her heart ever since she’d learned, for one thing, to suffer for Freddy Moliger, and, for another, to caress that damaged body with pleasure and tenderness, and find it soft beneath her fingers.

Ladivine could know nothing of this, very likely refused even to imagine it, and looking through her eyes Clarisse Rivière could only understand.

And she pitied her daughter for having to tolerate this, the presence of such a man in the house where her parents once lived in harmony.

But she felt a far sharper pity for Freddy Moliger, who couldn’t escape the anxious, troubled stare of Malinka’s daughter, having realised even before she laid eyes on him that he would be neither loved nor appreciated, just as he’d sensed before the servant laid eyes on him that she would be fond of him, that she would have no choice but to be fond of him, in her own misery.

Clarisse Rivière sat down on the blue couch, and, though feeling an infinite sadness, brightly asked Freddy Moliger to bring them a beer.

“And maybe a little something to nibble on, dear?”

Was she trying to show Ladivine how docile Freddy Moliger was?

She then realised that she was afraid they might somehow prevent her from keeping this man by her side, on the pretext, say, that he had an unhealthy hold over her. But that was absurd, she told herself, suddenly reassured. No-one had the power to forbid her anything, nor try to protect her against her will.

Ladivine took her to the Galeries Lafayette in Bordeaux, and all the way there Clarisse Rivière silently refused to speak of Freddy Moliger, just as she refused to let Ladivine buy her an outfit for her birthday.

She thought it would be a betrayal to accept a gift from someone who’d taken so strong a dislike to Freddy Moliger.

Because Ladivine clearly loathed him, with an unreasoning, frightened, irreparable loathing that left Clarisse Rivière as uncomfortable as some vile obscenity. In the eyes of her daughter who knew her so little, he could only be a creep who’d wormed his way into her life solely to take advantage of the naive woman that, for Ladivine, through her own fault, she would always be.

She glanced sidelong at her daughter’s preoccupied face as Ladivine somewhat roughly pulled a yellow gingham dress from its hanger, held it up to her firm, opulent body, and looked at her questioningly. For a second, in the tiny contraction of her mouth, in her one raised eyebrow, Clarisse Rivière saw the little girl she’d raised and pampered, she recognised her child and lost her nerve: how could she ever confess to her daughter that she was Malinka, and that a certain servant was leading her solitary, bitter, forever ruined life just a few streets away?

Several days after Ladivine left, she got a beige cardigan with little mother of pearl buttons in the post.