Marie NDiaye - Ladivine

Thirty years later, she still reproached herself for having, in the first weeks of Ladivine’s life, shown her melancholy’s unsettling face.

And Ladivine, gazing on Daniel’s pretty, loving face, felt a stab of unquellable sorrow — never again would Clarisse Rivière stanch her remorse against that child’s cool, silken neck. Worse, Daniel might have crossed her mind as she poured out her blood in her silent, deserted house, she might even have tried to cry out her grandchildren’s names, in a gargle of blood and phlegm, and realised she would never see them again.

Why should that woman’s only child, Ladivine Rivière, run the risk of hearing her mother’s killer describe her last minutes?

Why should she have to endure that, on top of everything she’d already endured?

“The trial will heal us,” Richard Rivière had said.

But the only thing that could heal her, Ladivine, was protection from the horrific details.

Nor did she want to learn of that man’s difficult childhood, of what, as Richard Rivière had told her, shocked and almost moved in spite of himself by so many failures and miseries, had irresistibly driven him, as they would no doubt say at the trial, to bullying and murder.

She wanted to know none of that, convinced that her sorrow would be even deeper and without end, because she might conceivably pity the murderer were she shown that he was a victimised child.

How not to feel sorrow and pity for all tormented children who turned into lost men?

After he’d hurt her so deeply and unendingly, she had no desire to compound her pain by imagining some part of his.

Whatever he might claim or imagine, Richard Rivière was already healed. But she, Clarisse Rivière’s daughter. .

The bus braked abruptly. Ladivine’s shoulder bumped the chest of a heavily perspiring woman.

Between her breasts, half-covered in bright blue cloth, grew a few tightly curled, longish hairs, glued down by sweat.

Ladivine mumbled an apology.

Very tall and offhand, the woman looked at her closely, then smiled and said, in that brusque, rasping English Marko and Ladivine could scarcely understand without exceptional efforts of concentration:

“Wasn’t that a beautiful wedding? Splendid party, don’t you think?”

“Excuse me?” Ladivine said after a pause.

She too was smiling, full of good will, her brow very slightly knitted.

“A beautiful wedding,” the woman said again. “Lots of money, but it was nice, well worth it. Pretty dress you had on, where did you buy it?”

Ladivine shrugged. She let her gaze drift past the woman, still smiling her polite, uninvolved smile.

The woman turned her back, and Ladivine sensed she’d been rude.

Her face turned red and hot, and she tumbled into a panicked despair, as always when she thought she’d hurt someone without knowing how or why.

What she would not have done in Berlin or Langon she did without a second thought in this packed, sweltering bus, full of people with calm, wide faces that she longed to see turn her way in friendship. She gently clasped the woman’s elbow and said:

“Forgive me, you’re right, it was a beautiful wedding. That dress, you know, I think I bought it in France.”

Swept along by an inspiration that at the time she thought must be sound, she added, her voice a little too eager even to her own ear:

“You’re talking about that yellow gingham dress, with the balloon sleeves and the wide belt that tied at the back? Yes, yes, that’s right, I bought it in Bordeaux, at the Galeries Lafayette.”

Then she remembered that dress was among the things that had disappeared with the luggage. But little matter — if this hairybreasted woman had seen her at a wedding, wearing a memorable dress, that was the only one it could be, the yellow gingham dress from Bordeaux, the nicest she owned, the most flattering to her complexion, and the one she would certainly have chosen for a ceremony of that sort.

“Oh, in France. So I won’t find one here,” the woman said simply.

And from her tone it almost seemed Ladivine herself had brought up this inane subject.

The supermarket was new, empty and frigid, standing alone in a stretch of wasteland where a few blocks of flats seemed to have burst from the red earth through sheer force of will.

They showed no sign of being lived in, nor of work in progress

— no tarpaulins, no piles of breeze blocks, no machinery of any sort. Bits of rubbish, bottles, beer cans, torn cardboard boxes dotted the uneven ground, rutted, hard and dry.

Ladivine noted that the four of them were the only ones getting off the bus, and that nothing marked the stop but a blue plastic barrel, toppled by the wind from the bus as it drove away.

Marko set it upright, his hands now red with dust.

To Ladivine’s great relief, the children were finding fun in this shopping trip beneath the fierce morning sun, in this deserted, sinister neighbourhood not yet shaded by any trace of greenery.

They ran off down the faint path to the supermarket, all glass and blue glinting metal, and soon their legs were red and their sandals dirty and all at once Ladivine’s heart swelled with joy. Her children were happy, they were running in the dirt!

She thought nothing else mattered at this moment, she thought life was easy, straightforward and good.

She took Marko’s hand, and he squeezed hers back, smiling.

“So that woman in the bus knew you?”

“She thought she recognised me; she was confusing me with somebody else,” Ladivine hurried to answer, suddenly uncomfortable but not knowing why.

Marko gave a little laugh and let go of her hand.

“Well, you’re right, you don’t have to tell me,” he cried, amused or pretending to be.

Then:

“I’ve seen several women who look like you since we came here.”

He pointed with one finger at a figure in pale blue, just emerged from the supermarket and heading towards a block of flats, pulling a cart behind her.

A voluminous cotton drape hid her body and hair. Ladivine could scarcely see her face from that distance.

Annika and Daniel were waiting patiently at the supermarket’s front door.

There was a dog standing guard, a large, muscular dog, chained to a ring sunk into the ground. It looked at them with its big, black, gentle eyes, and Ladivine was stunned to see herself in those dark pupils.

She was tempted to let them swallow her up and never come out again, imprisoned, untouchable.

How could Marko think she looked like a woman whose face he couldn’t see?

No, she had the eyes and the gaze of that dog scrutinising the customers, and had Marko more closely studied the animal’s manner he would have reached out to pet it, perhaps moved by something he did not at first recognise but which he would soon see was Ladivine’s soul.

Later, she would be unable to say with any certainty that the dog at the supermarket and the dog unfailingly waiting outside the hotel were the same.

It was possible, it was probable. But she would never be sure.

Given the prices charged at the supermarket — the only one of its kind in the city, they’d been proudly assured at the hotel — there was no question of reconstituting the whole family’s summer wardrobe. Ladivine picked out a pair of shorts, two T-shirts, a cap and a swimming costume for each of the children, and for herself a beige linen skirt with a matching blouse. The absurdly high prices gnawed at her.

She and Marko had budgeted twelve hundred euros in spending money for their three weeks in this place, and already these clothes had cost them almost three hundred.

She joined Marko as he was emerging from a dressing room, the menswear department’s sole customer.

She stifled an anxious little laugh.