Marie NDiaye - Ladivine

He spoke with an exaggerated composure, an only faintly sarcastic detachment. His arms hung at his sides, hands slightly raised, palms up, resigned. But Ladivine saw the lids of his blue eyes twitching.

Unthinking, she blurted out:

“I’ll call Richard and ask what he thinks.”

“Richard?” said Marko after a pause. “That’s a good idea, give him a call.”

And from his relief Ladivine, slightly taken aback, realised the depth of Marko’s admiration for Richard Rivière, even though he’d never met him and knew of him, Ladivine’s father, only what Ladivine happened to tell him, tentative, reticent and terrified.

But it isn’t Richard that fascinates him, she thought, it’s Richard’s tragedy, it’s what Richard’s been through.

And what about me, she then wondered, wasn’t my loss even more terrible than Richard’s?

She felt herself growing heavy and numb, she felt her heart go cold, as it always did when she thought of her parents, and she was grateful to the part of her mind that controlled her emotions for protecting her in this way, because with her faculties alert and her heart afire she could never have withstood the incomprehension and grief.

And yet “I’ll call Richard,” she’d said, and those words had come to her spontaneously and for a very simple reason, which was that Richard Rivière had done some travelling, of course, but above all that he was the most sensible man she’d ever known, who, without to-do or any real desire to triumph, always calmly and quietly turned out to be right.

She’d never described him to Marko in exactly those terms, not wanting him to think she was boasting of her father, and yet the portrait she’d painted of Richard Rivière over the years, through her hesitations and reticences, in her terror and sadness, had firmly planted in Marko a fascination with Richard Rivière, whom he hadn’t met before the tragedy and of whom, afterwards, Ladivine always told him, in the breathless, gasping voice that took hold of her when the talk turned to her parents, “You’ll see him after the trial, we’ll all breathe easier then”, though she found those words unconvincing even as she spoke them, seeing no logical connection between the trial and the long-delayed meeting of her father and her husband, and sensing that Marko knew it and could have easily, gently disputed what she was saying, held back only by his good manners.

And what was, in the early days of their marriage and then the birth of the children, an odd and slightly embarrassing situation — since even the elder Bergers, indifferent to everything about Ladivine, had expressed their surprise that neither their son nor the children knew Richard Rivière — gradually took on the almost sacred status of just how it is.

Clarisse Rivière, Ladivine’s mother, had come to Berlin for the wedding, and lived long enough to see the birth of Annika and then Daniel, but not, thought Ladivine with an aching, mournful relief, to be loved by them, meaning that the children felt no pain at suddenly never seeing her again, and had even completely forgotten that she once held them in her delicate arms, delighting in their smell, their satiny skin.

Clarisse Rivière and Marko hit it off at once. They smiled at each other profusely, and sometimes, in the evening, when fatigue put a pinched look on their faces, their smiles turned slightly excessive and fanatical, so deeply did they fear some misunderstanding, one of them thinking the other bored or annoyed for some mysterious reason.

As for Richard Rivière’s absence from the wedding, while Ladivine apologised on his behalf to Marko, to their friends, to the elder Bergers, citing her father’s many responsibilities as an import car dealer, she knew, just as Clarisse Rivière cruelly knew, that Richard Rivière would have postponed any meeting to be at Ladivine’s wedding, were it not for his insurmountable fear of a face-to-face meeting with Clarisse, his ex-wife, who’d kept the name Rivière, his name, fiercely, militantly insisting that she had every right.

The mere thought of seeing her again made him quake, and Ladivine and Clarisse knew it, felt it.

Not that there was any real danger of an incident.

But, thought Ladivine, was he not far less afraid of a scene than of the naked, devouring, silent sorrow he would surely see in the eyes of that woman he’d left so long ago, who refused to give up the name Rivière, his name, keeping and displaying it like the emblem of her distress, like the one miserable treasure she’d been allowed to hold on to?

Clarisse Rivière had never complained, would never cause any trouble. Clarisse Rivière had never reproached her husband or anyone else for leaving her, for going away, had in fact helped Richard Rivière pack up his things, intent as always on sparing herself no labour, no fatigue, if her labour and fatigue could be of some use to someone.

She did all she could to make leaving easy for Richard Rivière, with the same discreet, tireless solicitude she drew on to help people out at the restaurant, far beyond what her duties required and on her own time, people who never even thought of expressing their gratitude, since she’d convinced them that for her nothing was ever a burden.

But, Ladivine sensed, Richard Rivière was not taken in by those simple ways.

Beneath her unquestioning helpfulness, he could see the wrenching sacrifice Clarisse Rivière was making for the sake of his freedom, the need for freedom he’d evoked to justify his leaving her, and whatever disregard or disdain it might earn her she did all this as if she didn’t even see the sacrifice, as if she expected no reward, whether thanks or vague shame on the part of the person obliged to her, absolutely not.

She would have been shocked and mortified had anyone suspected she hoped for such things.

Confronted with that accusation, thought her daughter Ladivine, she would have stammered, wide-eyed, one open hand rubbing the air as if to erase what had just been said:

“No need for. . Oh, no, no, it’s. . I’m just helping out.”

“Really,” she would have added, forcing out a little chuckle to show that she wasn’t a complicated person, that there was nothing behind anything she did or said, no meaning other than what was obvious and outright.

Was that true? wondered Ladivine.

It was, no question, she told herself after every visit from Clarisse Rivière, whose big, bulging, murky-water-coloured eyes seemed to grow even cloudier when she heard talk of ambiguous acts, perverse behaviour, cunning lies.

A vague, lost smile would come over her, like the smile that parted her hesitant lips when someone spoke to her in a foreign tongue, her damp eyes seeming about to well over with the anxious tears always set off in her by a failure to understand, whether the German language or other people’s behaviour, but the tears never flowed, and her smile took root and bloomed on Clarisse Rivière’s delicate, mobile, scarcely wrinkled face like an ephemeral flower of innocence.

She accepted her ignorance and pulled away, seeming to hear nothing more, making an offering of her smile, of her devoted, generous presence, just as she did when the day came for Richard Rivière to leave their house in Langon, and leave her as well, Clarisse Rivière, his wife of more than twenty-five years, helping him seal the boxes of tools, clothes and dishes he would be taking to his new home, even carrying some of those boxes downstairs, though they weighed nearly as much as she did, taking care not to bump anything, not to hurt anything, because whatever Clarisse Rivière undertook she undertook with care and conscientiousness.

Did it make Richard Rivière angry, Ladivine wondered, to see his frail, abandoned wife working so hard to make his leaving easy?