Marie NDiaye - Ladivine

Freddy Moliger was standing nearby as she opened the package, found the gift, and, an anxious intuition running through her, answered reluctantly when Freddy Moliger asked where it came from.

“It’s from my daughter, for my birthday.”

“It’s your birthday and I didn’t even know it!”

He was speaking in his high-pitched, grating voice, unsteady and heated.

“Birthdays don’t mean anything,” she said, trying to put on a smile.

“Well, they must mean something to your daughter, and to you too, since you’re happy with your present! Isn’t that right, aren’t you happy?”

She shrugged, folded the cardigan, hid it under the tissue paper.

“So why didn’t you tell me it was your birthday? What, I’m not worthy of giving you a present? Only your daughter knows how to pick out something you’ll like?”

She turned to face him and immediately realised she’d made a mistake, because she felt the fear that had flickered on in her gaze.

But she didn’t know until that moment that she’d realised something very important about Freddy Moliger, didn’t know that she’d realised it from the start, which was that, as with a dog, you had to be careful not to let him see your fear.

But at the same time she felt what she’d felt with her daughter a few days before: in the glint of boyish anger in Freddy Moliger’s eyes, in his puffed-out cheeks, she saw, she recognised her child — or rather the child he once was, but at that moment it felt as if he were hers.

A great tenderness flooded through her.

She took the cardigan back out of its package, quickly slipped it on over her dress, and ran off for her camera.

While Freddy Moliger was framing the picture on the machine’s little screen, his composure returning as quickly as his rage had erupted, she wondered if he could still see the fear in her eyes, if he could perhaps even see, should that fear now have vanished, the shadow of the fear that she knew would come back.

clarisse rivière felt herself floating back and forth on a warm, thick swell, whose density stilled any move she might try to make. She didn’t want to move anyway, because it would hurt, it would hurt terribly, she knew, if she made any attempt to change her position. She couldn’t remember if she was sitting or standing, lying or crouching, outdoors or at home, but it didn’t much matter. She had to place her faith in the mindless but confident perseverance of the heavy, dense tide now carrying her off, and when she spotted the edge of the dark, overgrown forest, its treetops towering and black against the black sky, her only thought was “I’ve never been in a deep forest”, but she put up no resistance, certain that there she would be just where she was meant to be.

slow and precise, ladivine sylla lifted each figurine, caressed it with her chamois, gazed at it meditatively for a few seconds, then put it back where it was, or, if she’d chosen to move it to a different shelf, set it aside in a shoebox.

She liked to imagine the boldest ones’ eagerness at the prospect of changing places, and the fears of the shyer ones, the very young shepherdesses, the newly weaned lambs, the dolphins and kittens, which didn’t like to be disturbed. To them she carefully explained in a half-whisper that like it or not things had to be shaken up now and then so every member of her little world would know all the others.

She herself couldn’t feel at peace if she sensed a disharmony in her trinkets’ society, and certain rainy Sundays, when a grey daylight filled her ground-floor flat, seeming to make the room even darker, she blamed her melancholy on the tension turning her figurines against one another because she hadn’t paired them up properly.

Her mind at peace, her hair carefully pulled back, she threw a cream linen jacket over her shoulders, took her shopping trolley from its place by the door, and went out.

It was a sunny Saturday in May. The narrow pavements shone, freshly cleaned, and the cramped, dingy street had the pure, comforting smell of a springtime morning.

Ladivine Sylla began to review what she would need from the market to make the nice lunch she had planned for the following Tuesday, when Malinka and that Freddy Moliger would be coming.

She could only think of him as “that Freddy Moliger”, and even this, even this distant and circumspect way of naming him stirred her so violently that she went weak at the knees.

She didn’t dare think of him simply as “Freddy”, though that familiarity would have more precisely expressed the affection and gratitude she felt for that man, because she feared the depth of her own emotion, she feared that, should she ever happen to murmur “Malinka and Freddy”, she’d have to sit down on the pavement, trembling uncontrollably.

“That Freddy Moliger” let her hold her excitement at bay.

She walked towards the market at her unhurried pace, pulling her squeaking trolley along, and with mingled pleasure and astonishment remembered Freddy Moliger’s thin face, his off-blue eyes, like stagnant water, so empty and dull when words weren’t enlivening them, and the fact that her present happiness, her fondest wish, had taken the desolate form of that stranger intrigued her endlessly. That was simply how it was, there was nothing more to understand.

That man was rescuing them both from their curse, her, Ladivine Sylla, and her daughter Malinka, the only real creature she loved in this world — how hard it was to have only her daughter to love!

Malinka had brought her that Freddy Moliger, and he’d settled into Ladivine Sylla’s life and thoughts with miraculous ease and inevitability, and she immediately realised he would free them from the spell.

What matter that he seemed such a sad case! Was that not the very sign of an envoy’s power, the perfect humility of his appearance?

She wanted to cook a leg of lamb with Soissons beans, and haricotvert bundles bound up with strips of bacon. She’d forgotten to ask when he last came if he liked his meat rare or well done, but she could get around that, she thought, by putting the lamb in the oven only when they got there, even if it meant waiting a while with a glass of wine and some finger foods. She was already, delightedly, imagining whipping up puff-pastry canapés with Roquefort or anchovies and mini-tartlets with onion jam.

That Freddy Moliger was always hungry, she’d noticed, almost gluttonous, he ate quickly, preoccupied and contemptuous, as if scorning his own appetite, but, thought Ladivine Sylla indulgently, isn’t that how those who weren’t well fed as children always wanted to seem, people used to having badly cooked, meagre helpings slammed down before them, with even less love than for a dog?

She entered the Marché des Capucins and made for the butcher’s stand she considered the best, even if, because its meat was expensive, she almost never shopped there. But for that Freddy Moliger she wanted only the finest and tenderest.

As for her daughter Malinka, she ate everything in the same way, without to-do, without interest or awareness, and she was happy with everything because food meant nothing to her.

Oh, her daughter Malinka! How heartbreaking, yes, that Ladivine Sylla had never found anyone else to love!

She’d long been convinced that Malinka kept her out of her life because she was ashamed of her, Ladivine Sylla, who couldn’t be other than what she was. Then, as the years went by, she came to believe that they were both entangled in the coils of a shared spell, bonds that Malinka could no more loosen than she could, that they were both being punished with the same cruelty, the same injustice, and this helped her bear her bitter existence and cast off all ill will towards Malinka, whom she loved since then with a purified heart, a comforted heart.