Marie NDiaye - Ladivine

Had she told him, “My daughter sent me this cardigan from Berlin for my birthday”?

Sargent stiffly bent down and picked up the magazine, while Ladivine, sitting perfectly still, feeling the sudden scowl on her face, vowed not to apologise.

Sargent tapped on the crumpled page.

“It says here the trial’s starting soon. Your poor mother. I had no idea. They mention you too, the victim’s daughter.”

Ladivine felt herself blushing. Sweat was flowing from beneath her bare arms, dampening her pink dress.

Her students didn’t yet understand French well enough to follow Sargent’s words, but Ladivine felt dishonoured before them.

Because who but a thoughtless daughter and a blameworthy family deserved to be exposed in the sordid true-crime pages for all the world to see?

“I suppose you’ll have to go,” Sargent went on in her breathy, lachrymose voice. “To the trial. Don’t worry, I’ll take your students.”

“No, no,” said Ladivine briskly. “This is none of your business. I’m not going.”

She’d spoken angrily in spite of herself, her raised voice sending a ripple of unease, she realised, through her intrigued, watchful students.

To her great surprise, Sargent backed away, vaguely raising two conciliatory hands to Ladivine and giving her a glance unmistakably tinged with almost fearful respect, which, superimposed on her excitement but not concealing it, gave her the dewy-eyed air of a woman in love.

At the same time, she displayed the magazine once again.

And Ladivine looked deep into Clarisse Rivière’s astonished eyes, achingly contemplating the little white rounded collar, the cardigan buttoned up to the top, picturing the knife plunging into the fine skin over her jawbone, just under her ear.

Gripped by a sudden nausea, she caught herself with one hand on the table, then fainted at Sargent’s feet.

She never doubted that the dog would follow her when she came out of the market and started serenely back for the hotel, and so it did, that big, emaciated, grave-eyed brown dog, and she took care not to walk too quickly, because she thought it must be hungry and thirsty, though she had yet to see it display any need to eat or drink, urinate or defecate.

The dog seemed to be bound to her, committed to protecting or tracking her, body and soul.

Whom or what should she thank or curse for this she did not know.

But never once, from the start, had she felt the slightest fear or unease, though she realised early on that the dog was following her every step and she knew nothing of its intentions.

She abandoned herself, perhaps more thoroughly than she should, she told herself now and then, to the trust it inspired in her.

But she was tired of wariness, tired of expecting the worst, of fearing the future on her children’s behalf, of fearing, on her children’s behalf, life itself.

Sometimes she wished that by some miracle they could already be old, so she could stop being afraid for them, so she could be sure they’d get by in one way or another.

Now such thoughts never came to her. Was it the dog, was it the place?

And yet they’d got off to such a rough start in this country so warmly recommended by Richard Rivière, as if Ladivine’s vanished father had resolved to counter Marko’s admiration with a cold, sardonic, definitive rebuttal, or as if, she told herself, contemplatively and without rancour, her father had to grasp at and make use of anything that might keep Ladivine from the trial.

Was he secretly hoping she’d never come home?

Not, for there was no question he loved her, because of some unimaginable catastrophe, but on the contrary because she’d found such happiness and serenity here that she would gratefully make herself a prisoner of the place?

Was it him, Richard Rivière, who had cloaked himself in the skin of that dog, was that him trying to hold her spellbound?

But I’m not set on going to the trial, not in the least, I’m not sure I can bear it, and shouldn’t he know that?

Keeping her head down, she slunk into the Plaza’s airconditioned lobby and hurried to the lifts.

She preferred not to be seen by the staff or the manager, who sometimes stood at the front desk and looked at her, she thought, with a mix of irritation and contempt.

Everyone in the hotel knew the Berger family had lost their bags at the airport. Ladivine sensed that this misadventure had earned them no sympathy, that it aroused only stern disapproval, untrusting and disdainful, particularly in the manager, so obsequious with the other guests, either, she thought, because he suspected her and Marko of hoping to get out of paying the bill with the claim that they’d lost everything or because he took them for a couple of ninnies who didn’t know enough to keep an eye on their things.

She silently entered the room, immediately enveloped by stifling warmth and a musty smell.

She pressed a button by the door to start up the clamorous air conditioner, and it was as if she’d set off the alarm clock — Marko springing up in the bed, startled, exhausted (what new sources of fatigue had he gone to find in sleep’s depths?), the children recoiling in their cots, two rusty, squeaking old things hastily assembled by an employee in one corner of the room the night they arrived, when they found no sign of the promised second king-size bed (so they were no different from the disgruntled tourists whose recriminations Marko had so ravenously absorbed from the Internet, so they too would soon be venting their spleen on the travel sites, so they were, oh, neither more nor less than a couple of suckers who can be counted on not to stand up for themselves even when they know they’ve been had?).

She came in, lively and fresh, still jubilant from her morning outing.

How could they lie there macerating in their night-time sweat, sticky with heat and troubled sleep?

“It’s 11.30 already,” she cried in her vivacious voice.

Actually, they’d all woken somewhere around seven, stifling and sweating in the room’s hellish humidity.

The air conditioner made such a racket that on the first night they’d decided to make do without it. But it was hard to fall asleep in the heat, and they all woke up early.

They waited for eight o’clock to come and then went down to breakfast, after which Ladivine went out while Marko and the children headed back up to bed, not so much, thought Ladivine, to sleep as to fill up a daunting expanse of vacant time.

Because that, incredibly, was what was happening: it seemed Marko would rather pretend to be resting than leave the hotel, even though the hotel turned out to be far less pleasant and comfortable than they’d been led to believe by a host of photos and comments.

And — Ladivine wasn’t quite sure, so dimly did she remember her phone call with Richard Rivière — it might have been her father himself who’d recommended the Plaza.

But the room was small and cramped, and the window couldn’t be opened, guests being expected to endure the air conditioner’s horrible din.

A once pale green carpet, now dull grey and mottled with stains, covered the floor even in the bathroom, where it stank from spattering water.

And what else? Ladivine was reluctant to list all the hotel’s many deficiencies, finding in that mentality something small-minded and subtly demeaning.

But she couldn’t completely shake off the feeling of dereliction, of ambient, vainly concealed filth that the Plaza had given her from the first day — nothing specific to complain of, she told herself, only an atmosphere of decrepitude, exacerbated or ineptly camouflaged by sordid half-measures.

And that, among other things, was what surprised her about Marko’s insistence on going back to the room after breakfast, as if the disasters that greeted their arrival had convinced him there were still graver troubles to be feared if he ventured out onto the street, as if, disheartened, he’d decided to take no chances and hole up in the hotel until the time came to leave — but, she wondered, who or what was he afraid of?