Marie NDiaye - Ladivine

Marko read the letter, then handed it to her without a word, and she deciphered it slowly and laboriously, astonished to hear such language from people she’d feared precisely for their rudimentary minds, their limited vocabulary, which often led them to express themselves in a blunt and, for her who was used to more urbane ways, disconcerting manner. She looked up, not knowing what to think, surprised, wanting to ask Marko to translate some of the sentences.

But his glance stopped her, and made her blush with a pity beyond words.

Never, in her husband’s pale eyes, had she seen such bewilderment, such grief.

For the first time she glimpsed the child he once was, sensitive, no doubt easily hurt, few signs of whom could be seen in the confident, slightly aloof man he’d become, who appealed to her precisely because he so rarely allowed himself to be troubled.

She reached out to touch his cheek. But that would have been a mistake, would have humiliated him and brought no consolation.

She pushed the letter aside, turned away, and although they always talked about everything, neither would ever again speak of the letter from Lüneburg, nor of Marko’s parents, whose names they would soon utter only when the children now and then posed some question concerning them.

Though they said nothing of it, it was clear that they would never again call Marko’s parents to see what was new, that they would not, that June, go to the Karstadt store to buy a birthday present for Marko’s mother.

It seemed to her, but she couldn’t discuss it with Marko, that by writing “You are free” the elder Bergers had in effect delivered them of the impossibility of being angry.

She was angry with them for the pain they had caused Marko, and she was certain that Marko was equally angry and perhaps even outraged at his parents, whose decisions, until this question of their holidays came up, he had always obeyed, whose wishes he’d respected even when his own were very different, as when they had obliged him to find a trade and give up on a veterinary degree, which to his parents’ mind took too long to achieve and offered no guarantees.

From the tension in his face, the new hardness in his gaze, she sensed the sharpness and durability of his anger, but she also sensed that he was not unhappy to be feeling and cultivating this newfound right to hate his parents, that it made him seem bigger in his own eyes, and bound him more tightly to his own will, heretofore often feeble because subjugated to his parents’, which was implacable, enigmatic and savage.

His voice became firmer, there was a hint of aggression in his humour, and even that she understood and respected. The dog followed her to the vast walled lot set aside for the tourist market, wedged between the beach and the road.

There, as if finding such a place beneath its dignity, it sat down by the entrance and watched her, from the greatest possible distance.

It knew, she thought, that she would have to come through this same gate to start back for the hotel.

Were there some other way out, the dog would surely have stayed close by her heels.

It knew she would come through this same gate again, she thought. And it would be there, sitting in the dust, in the heat, its long tongue hanging out and its chest heaving, and the watchful look in its black eye would give her no clue, convinced though she was that its vigilance was intended for her alone, by which to decide if it was spying on her or protecting her, if she should flee it or revel in its care.

That didn’t concern her. The question was moot for her now.

Because even were the dog spying on her, its watchfulness made her feel safe, not so much in the streets — perfectly sedate, as it happens — of this big, unfamiliar city, but more broadly, safe from sorrow or unhappiness, failure or ruin.

She walked through the market stands with her new stride, at once lazy and confident, loose and firm, looking at everything and knowing she’d buy nothing because she and Marko now had to avoid all unnecessary expense, but not wanting anything anyway, neither fabric nor pottery nor metal bangles, simply happy as she thought she’d never been before (because anxiety had always subtly spoiled her most joyful moments, the birth of her children or the completion of her degree), feeling her healthy, familiar, faithful body move freely through the warmth, her thoughts wandering this way and that, unencumbered, weighed down by no worry, no incomprehension.

She could, if she wanted to, or if the miracle of this new outlook had not come to pass, easily find something to torment herself with, she knew that.

But it was as if, rather than deposit her in another land, the plane had delivered her to a universe apart, where she could finally feel the happiness of being herself free of existence’s gravitational pull.

Is this what death is like? she wondered. Could she have died and not remembered?

But what she was feeling bore all the hallmarks of life at its fullest, particularly her awareness of her warm, rounded body, lightly dressed in pale linen, which she guided through the stands, she thought, smiling to herself, simply for the pleasure of enjoying its perfect mechanics.

She stopped at a straw hut that sold mango juice.

She put her elbows on the counter, ordered a drink, and the young brown-skinned woman who puréed the pieces of mango, added water, and poured the nectar into a glass was not a stranger, though this was the first time she’d seen her.

She recognised the woman’s very motions, her precise way of peeling the fruit and then pulling the flesh from the stone — she’d seen all that before, exactly the same, no less than the high, smooth forehead, the little dark mouth, the cheek slashed by a thick scar, the faded red T-shirt and the pointed cones of her breasts underneath.

Down to the tiniest moment, she’d experienced all this before, though she’d never been to this market — how she raised the glass to her lips and saw that the rim wasn’t clean, saw the lingering trace of other lips, slightly sticky, perhaps crusted with sugar, and how she deliberately placed her own lips on that residue and found no distaste in her untroubled heart.

In what dream had she as it were made a date with this woman and this glass and this thick juice, whose sweetness in her throat was exactly what she’d already known, though she’d never before drunk the juice of a freshly-puréed mango?

With a frivolous little laugh that she did her best to make re- assuring, she asked:

“Have you seen me before?”

“Where? Here?”

“Here or somewhere else.”

The woman looked at her, slowly shook her head, then at once turned away, as if dreading another idiotic question and embarrassed in advance for them both.

“Well, I’ve seen you before, but I can’t recall when.”

And with good reason, she thought, if it was in one of those dreams that seem so perfectly real you wake up convinced that you really did travel somewhere, that there are no such things as oneiric visions, only realities you assume to be dreams, even though you see yourself with no age, and the seasons have no tang.

Suddenly eager to strike up a friendship, to confide in this woman and rouse her curiosity, she nearly added:

You were wearing this same pale red T-shirt, and I could see the shape of your breasts underneath it. I drank this same mango juice, which you served me in just the same way. Isn’t that incredible? I have a husband and two children, a girl and a boy, and I went out this morning and left them sleeping at the hotel. We have troubles, but in a way we’re very lucky too.

Instead, she only gave her an insistent smile.

And the woman was still stubbornly looking down, refusing that dubious alliance.