Marie NDiaye - Ladivine

Far more likely, she supposed, he simply shot her a look of helpless exasperation and turned away, thinking he would never again have to endure Clarisse Rivière’s excessive kindliness, and that naive, impalpable, shocking devotion he’d come to find so unbearable, and Clarisse Rivière’s preposterous ways, the comically baffled or beleaguered look that sometimes appeared in her huge eyes, the hurried trot of a walk, neck thrust out like a turtle’s, making quick work of her rare attempts at elegance and concealing the strange beauty of her long, sinuous, agile body, unknown even to her.

Richard Rivière must often have found his wife ridiculous, thought Ladivine, must have been ashamed of her in public and even more deeply ashamed for seeing her that way, but very likely Clarisse Rivière never suspected it, she who knew nothing of ridicule, who never mocked anyone, not because she was virtuous but because she was innocent, and whom some, Ladivine knew, just as Richard Rivière must have known, thought a fool because she lacked the capacity to see malice.

“I’ll call Richard,” Ladivine said, then, her heart quailing, her hands suddenly damp, and she was so relieved to hear the phone ring and ring fruitlessly in the house (or flat?) outside Annecy, where her father lived, where she’d never been, that her legs trembled and her forehead went cold, like someone miraculously saved from some deadly menace.

The second day Richard Rivière answered, and his severe, preoccupied voice turned gentle, surprised, and loving when he realised it was Ladivine. “Is that you, my girl? How are you, darling?”

And Ladivine was struck dumb, though she had no reason to suspect any disaffection on her father’s part, since it was she and she alone, she thought, who had decided they couldn’t see each other until the trial, and Richard Rivière had complained at the time, writing her long e-mails to tell her he missed her, that her resolution was unjust.

And it was, and Ladivine knew it.

But the mere thought of seeing Richard Rivière before Clarisse

Rivière had been restored to her place of quiet, pure respectability (by the grace of a severe prison sentence? and suppose that’s not how it turned out?) set off a long shiver of almost loathing resentment towards Richard Rivière, and left her heaving and breathless, like an animal driven too hard.

It was cruel, it was unjust, and she knew it.

Because what had happened was in no way his fault, because there was nothing to blame but the very thing Richard Rivière had tried to escape, Clarisse Rivière’s inability to grasp the concept of malevolence.

But Ladivine could not help thinking that horror and vileness would never have entered their lives had Richard Rivière not left Clarisse, had he sacrificed his hunger for a new life to the need to protect Clarisse Rivière.

By leaving her, he’d handed her over to savagery, which she didn’t know how to see.

She was defenceless, he’d left her that way, alone and naked and no doubt already drunk with the need to give of herself as soon as Richard Rivière’s car turned the corner.

“Hello? Are you there? Ladivine, sweetie?”

“Yes, I’m here.”

She was gasping for breath, clutching the receiver, trying to hold back the wave of anger threatening to submerge her, as always when she pictured Clarisse Rivière abandoned on the house’s front step while Richard Rivière’s four-wheel drive (was it already the Mercedes M-Class then?) sped away, filled with suitcases and boxes, gleaming dimly in the pale sunlight of that wintery Sunday, then vanished at the corner, bound for a brand-new existence that Clarisse Rivière would never be part of.

Oh, but Ladivine understood how he’d come to find life with Clarisse more than he could bear, she understood it the moment he told her, slightly sheepish but also visibly proud of himself for daring to take such a step, that he was planning to leave the house, she understood it, yes, and in a way gave him her blessing.

Was that why she so resented him now?

Because she’d wished him happiness, and had never said any such thing to Clarisse Rivière, because she might thereby have brought sorrow crashing down onto Clarisse Rivière’s poor head?

She’d wished the wrong person happiness — was that why she couldn’t forgive Richard Rivière?

Hearing him confide in her with that mixture of pride and embarrassment, she thought he needed her support, her assurance that she would not judge him, and she gave it to him, her heart pound- ing, bleeding, she gave it to him not as the daughter stunned and shocked by that man once so perfectly stable and faithful in his well-ordered life, but as the twenty-eight-year-old adult that she was, tolerant and capable of understanding the hunger for adventure (he talked like that now, that dwindling man, that weary, diffident man whose one extravagance was his passion for four-wheel drives!) that might come over a father who’d irreproachably acquitted himself of his every duty and wanted to devote the last phase of his life to himself alone.

Would she not have done better to rush straight to Clarisse Rivière, drag her out of her deserted house, bring her back to Berlin and look after her until her vast, rudderless goodness found others to take on?

She had not. It never even occurred to her.

And that, she thought, is why her anger at Richard Rivière was misplaced.

“We’re looking for somewhere to go on our next holiday,” she said in a stolid, almost blank voice. “Somewhere south. Do you. . do you have any suggestions?”

He let a moment of surprised silence go by. He was expecting me to talk about the trial, she told herself, he was thinking we’d finally talk about that damned trial, and all I want to talk about is our holiday.

But when he spoke, it was in the gentle, light-hearted, warm, infinitely fatherly voice that Richard Rivière always used with his daughter Ladivine, which, a little more than ten years before, had led her, almost forced her, to absolve him (was leaving Clarisse Rivière a misdeed, a crime, a mistake? or was it nothing of the sort?).

Because she was powerless to resist the love in her father’s voice, for her and her alone, because she was powerless to snap herself out of that enchantment and consider how to go about rescuing Clarisse Rivière, because she preferred to think he was the one who needed support.

Oh, for that she would never, ever forgive herself.

He fell silent. He let out a loud sigh, and Ladivine sensed that he wanted to bring up the trial.

A twinge of panic set her trembling again, and she was desperately looking for an excuse to hang up when she heard, behind him, distant, piercing, beguiling, a woman’s voice calling out.

“That’s Clarisse,” he whispered, “but don’t worry, she’ll never be Clarisse Rivière. Talk to you soon, sweetie.”

Ladivine just caught the echo of a fluting, cascading laugh, then Richard Rivière abruptly hung up, as if given away.

She picked up her bag and walked out into the warm, golden May street, the yellow-walled Droysenstrasse, their home since Annika’s birth eight years before, almost running in the shade of the lime trees whose dripping sap left the pavement sticky beneath her sandals.

The cloying smell of the fallen, crushed lime flowers rose up from the pavement, stronger than the scent of the clusters still hanging — cloyingly sweet, too, she thought as she raced along, was the odour of Clarisse Rivière’s spilled blood, or perhaps rank and overpowering in her tidy house, but why, she thought, feeling her own blood throbbing in her temples, why did the honeyed perfume of light, frothy, yellow-white lime flowers always remind her of what she had not seen but had a thousand times imagined, her mother’s blood brutally, abundantly spilled in the living room of her Langon house, untouched until then by anything violent or out of place?