Marie NDiaye - Ladivine

Very unkind things were sometimes done in that crowd of children, words were sometimes spoken with the clear intention of causing damage or hurting feelings, and sometimes those acts or words were Ladivine’s, and she told her parents of them without hiding their source, and although she knew how they saw things she was always a little surprised, confused, at the way they shrugged their shoulders and vaguely ascribed these things she found so appalling to the unchanging nature of the human race, to the necessarily legitimate reasons (necessarily because all of them were) motivating this or that person or even their own daughter, Ladivine, who shouldn’t try to be perfect.

Richard Rivière and Clarisse Rivière never forgave: they never saw any wrong.

Especially Clarisse Rivière, blind to all misdeed, committing none herself.

Once in her teens, Ladivine stopped telling them what went on at school, knowing it would bring her no guidance, no lessons in right and wrong, and instinctively fearing, as she laboured to establish the precepts of her personal morality, that in her parents’ infinite indulgence she might lose her way forever.

Then, when she started secondary school, with her sexual awakening and her wonderment at the purity of her fresh, young body, with the fascinated discovery that a pretty girl’s fresh, young body is a most precious currency, she gradually forgot the unbending principles of propriety and frugality that her ardent, virtuous pre-pubescence had convinced her were necessary.

She soon made a name for herself, in the little world of Langon’s middle class, as a sort of well-bred call-girl, driven on Saturday evenings to a restaurant and a hotel in Bordeaux by divorced shopkeepers or unmarried bank clerks, who dropped her off at her door Sunday morning in their white or gunmetal-grey people carriers, sometimes one or two child seats in the back.

They honked goodbye as they drove off, and, her key in the lock, she turned around to blow them a kiss.

She did not lie to her parents. She did not tell them she was babysitting or spending the night at a friend’s.

She said: “I’m going out with a guy I know.”

She showed them the money she got, and while she sometimes saw Richard Rivière’s alert, cheerful eye briefly dimmed by a faint veil of discomfort and hesitation, Clarisse Rivière never showed that she found anything untoward about someone paying her daughter to go to bed with him.

And her daughter Ladivine was convinced that Clarisse Rivière sincerely saw no harm in it, that she was incapable of judging such a thing, because that was how it was, and whatever was had to be accepted.

Clarisse Rivière’s eyes widened in admiring surprise at the fiftyfranc notes Ladivine casually pulled from her little purse, as if Ladivine had won them in the lottery or found them on the pavement, not that she pretended to believe this, but because to her mind it was much the same — if her daughter Ladivine was earning some pocket money and seemed to enjoy her work, little matter that it was by prostituting her fresh, young body, the body of a beautiful, vigorous girl.

And Ladivine did enjoy her work, on the whole.

But she could not shake off a dark unease when she caught sight of a loving young couple, boys and girls her age pressed close together, as if seeking to erase the tiniest gap between their two bodies, and, surprised and unsettled, reflected that they were doing all this for free, and her disquiet expressed itself at home in sudden bursts of unfocused hostility stoically endured by Richard and Clarisse Rivière, who were unused to conflict, who neither enjoyed it nor knew how to quell it.

Had she found the words, Ladivine would have screamed at them:

“I never wanted this, I never wanted my first time to be with a paying customer! That’s not what I wanted at all!”

Also holding her back was the slightly desperate devotion she felt for her parents, fervent but worn and exhausted, which compelled her to protect them from her own attacks.

Would Clarisse Rivière not have answered, with her tremulous, hesitant little smile:

“But you said they were just guys, a girl can have sex with all kinds of guys nowadays, isn’t that right?”

She almost never spent the money. She stuffed the notes into an old pair of tights and shoved it under her bed, nothing more.

Besides, Richard and Clarisse Rivière gave her money, and unquestioningly bought her anything she might need.

And yet she went on making appointments with her regulars, meeting them at their place after her parents bought her a scooter, spending nights in suburban houses not unlike her own, with their beige plaster exteriors and roofs of interlocking tiles, in beds exactly like her parents’, the same model finished in light or dark laminate, and her bare feet trod the same shining, hard floor tiles as at home, white or grey, and the various rooms all looked alike, the little kitchen off the entrance with its fibreboard cabinets, the living/ dining room with its puffy leather couch, its oversized armchairs, its giant TV screen, then the passage to the bedrooms with their square windows veiled by sheer curtains, their orange or yellow imitation colour-wash wallpaper.

Never, with those men she knew well, who treated her respectfully, often even thoughtfully, did she have any contact of the sort she saw among the girls and boys in her high school, never did she feel the urge to press herself urgently to them, and neither did they.

She shared their beds with no particular pleasure, but no disgust either.

Riding home on her scooter in the dark or the first light of morning, weary, tired of life, and humiliated by the very absurdity of that sadness, since nothing was forcing her to do what she did, she thought furiously of Richard and Clarisse Rivière peacefully asleep in their bed, hating them fiercely, briefly, for the absolute freedom they’d given her, and the high opinion they would always have of her.

The Panky’s heavy steel door opened to let in the woman just as Ladivine walked by.

And the darkness inside, thick with the odour of old cigarettes, stale beer and filthy carpeting, seemed to take hold of the woman and snatch her away from the sunny world of the street, where the smell of chips, now stronger, seemed the very essence of innocent freedom.

Ladivine unconsciously picked up her pace, anxious to put the grimy façade of the Panky behind her, and the Blue Hot further on, presided over with icy indifference by women who could have been her, Ladivine Rivière, since her parents had never cautioned her against anything, and would have treated her to their blind, cheerful visits and unconditional love had she ended up turning tricks in one of these very bars.

She crossed Kaiser-Friedrich Strasse, feeling the sun-baked asphalt stick to the soles of her sandals.

Her chest was heavy with a sudden flood of affection.

How, in spite of everything, how she loved the life she had made for herself in Berlin, how afraid she was, sometimes, of losing it, out of carelessness, or failure to remember what could have been!

She realised that Germany had rescued her from Langon, and that Marko, Annika, Daniel, even the fearsome Bergers of Lüneburg, with their implacable morality, had extricated her from the flat, dull-witted stupor that Richard and Clarisse Rivière were letting her founder in.

And so she could look on the sooty façades of certain Kaiserstrasse buildings, still pockmarked with bullet holes, in the winter she could endure the long weeks of grey skies and cold, the dirty snow, she could even find a melancholy pleasure in the feeling of exile and aloneness when she happened onto an image of the eternal, radiant French countryside on television (and saw herself and her parents pedalling down a sunlit road lined with acacias or plane trees), she could look on the irremediable ugliness of neighbourhoods cheaply rebuilt fifty years earlier and in spite of it all feel deeply grateful to be living there, beneath that leaden sky, in that architectural chaos, that absence of sweetness and harmony, she who came from a region where a gentle clemency suffuses all things.