Marie NDiaye - Ladivine

Whereas she, Ladivine Rivière, had earned the right to want anything at all — hadn’t she? she thought, feeling her face going dry in the dusty, baking heat.

Given all she had been through, what self-centred wish of hers could ever be thought indecent? She could only be pitied, for the rest of her life.

Your poor mother, people said to her, afterwards, in Langon.

Oh yes, poor, poor Clarisse Rivière, and poor Ladivine, having to deal with all that.

Which is why she felt no inhibition, but rather a savage, cheerless joy as she walked through the ramshackle streets of a city she was hoping would let her forget, let her stop caring.

Clarisse Rivière’s blood hadn’t flowed this far.

“Look,” Annika suddenly said, touching her arm. “Look!” she shouted to Marko and Daniel, who were walking ahead, the child now perched on his father’s shoulders.

On a folding chair sat a woman wearing the yellow gingham dress Ladivine had bought in Bordeaux.

Before her, on an enormous piece of cloth spread out on the pavement, were all their clothes, carefully folded and laid out in an elegant tonal array.

Marko turned around and came back. He seemed to be clasping Daniel’s calves not so much to support the child as to keep himself from collapsing.

He stared dully at his T-shirts, his old jeans, his blue-and-red striped bathing suit.

The woman had lowered the magazine she was reading, and now she eyed them expectantly, a stern look on her face. The yellow dress’s bodice hung slightly loose over her skinny chest.

“That was mine, and so was that, and that,” said Annika, pointing at her things, her delicate, pale face intent as she catalogued her former possessions, but at the same time detached, almost unsurprised, accepting that the clothes on display were hers no more.

“Something interest you?” the woman asked haughtily.

Marko let out a low laugh. He shook his head, chuckling in silence.

That dress didn’t really fit me anyway, thought Ladivine.

She then spotted a pair of white trousers and a long-sleeved navy-blue blouse that she knew she hadn’t brought with her, but which were beyond all doubt hers.

For example, she recognised a very faint yellowed spot on the front panel of the pants, caused, she remembered, by spattering bleach.

But she knew she’d left those two garments in her chest of drawers in Berlin, the trousers because they showed dirt, the blouse because it was corduroy, and unsuitably warm.

She felt her cheeks and brow redden in embarrassment, in perplexity, and also, oddly even to her, in fear, in the fear that Marko or Annika might observe that she’d never placed those trousers and that blouse into her suitcase — but how would they know?

And why did she feel guilty about all this? Was it because, unable to explain it, she nonetheless found it neither surprising nor frightening?

Marko had stopped laughing.

But the corners of his mouth were still turned up in a taunting smile.

“Lovely dress you’ve got on!” he threw out at the woman, in his slightly posh, supercilious English.

She answered simply:

“Thank you. I sewed it myself.”

“Did you? My wife here has one just like it. She bought it in France.”

He began to chuckle again, now menacingly, thought Ladivine in alarm.

She turned to walk away, hoping Marko would follow. But he held his ground before the display, vigorously tugging at Daniel’s calves, the one then the other, like the teats of a cow.

Numb with heat and exhaustion, the child winced but didn’t complain.

“Those French are always copying us,” said the woman, in that tone of austere rectitude that inspired in Ladivine only a fervent urge to nod along.

“Isn’t that dress a little big for you?” said Marko, starting in again.

“Stop it!” cried Ladivine. “What do you want from her, anyway?”

He gave her a surprised, reproachful, deeply suspicious glance.

“Somebody stole our things, didn’t they? Don’t you think we should go to the police?”

“Certainly not!”

Doing her best to stay calm, she added:

“There’s no point, we’d be wasting our time. You know they won’t do anything.”

“That one shouldn’t be here,” said Annika, pointing at the navyblue blouse. “You left it at home.”

“No, no, you’re mistaken, I brought it,” Ladivine hurried to answer.

And this, she realised, was her first lie to her child, a lie with no perceptible reason, not to protect her from some hard truth but only to separate herself from the family she nonetheless so loved, from that husband and those children she couldn’t or wouldn’t let into her new life.

“You left it at home,” Annika muttered stubbornly.

Ladivine shook her head, determined to deny it to the end, and silently saddened by that.

The one thing she refused to let herself do was exploit her motherly authority and order the little girl to say no more about the blouse.

She could only, her heart bleeding, accept Annika’s bewildered insistence and cling to her lie for as long as it took.

A sudden exhaustion seemed to descend over Marko. Righting Daniel before the child could slide off his shoulders, he grumbled:

“Alright, then, let’s get back to the hotel.”

The children spent the afternoon and early evening in the pool, visibly relieved not to have to go out again.

Now and then a few other guests paddled around them, fat old people with quivering, pale flesh and a disgruntled air, sometimes casting quick, wary glances at the children, pre-emptively irked.

At the edge of the pool, the palm trees had died. Their dry, pale brown leaves hung limp against the grey trunks. She reached out and took Marko’s hand, finding it cold as ice. She wanted to tell him, “Nothing’s. .”

But he spoke before her, and, not moving his head, lying stiff on the chaise longue, asked in a distant voice, thickened by the heat:

“That blue blouse, the day before yesterday. . It’s so warm. . Really, you brought that?”

“Of course I did.”

She could feel herself blushing.

“Otherwise it would be impossible,” she murmured, protected by her huge sunglasses, whose lenses almost covered her cheeks.

“Yes,” said Marko, “otherwise it would be impossible, that’s just what was bothering me.”

He squeezed her hand, and she realised the depth of his relief. He sat up, opened the guidebook, and said, more confidently:

“There’s only one thing to see here, the National Museum. It’s supposed to be interesting.”

Marko’s skin had turned precisely the colour of his goldenchestnut hair, luxuriant, wavy, untamed, the locks snaking over his thin, rippling neck. She couldn’t help reaching out to touch it. He bowed his head and gently kissed her fingers.

Fleetingly, foolishly, she prayed that she and Marko wouldn’t be parted, knowing it was unlikely, and certainly not a thing she should be wanting despite all the pain it would cause her.

What was Marko Berger’s place now?

What was his role here, if it turned out she could do without love and tenderness?

That, even more than sex, must have been what Clarisse Rivière couldn’t live without when she was abandoned at fifty, but love hadn’t worked out for her.

Their imagination running low, the children had started to quarrel. Marko stood up and called them out of the water. They shrieked in pain when their feet touched the burning hot paving tiles.

Their faces were red, overheated, their bodies pale and wrinkled and redolent of chlorine.

They looked distinctly unwell, Ladivine abruptly realised, though they had been the picture of health in Berlin.

When, thirty minutes later, the four of them emerged from the hotel to start for the National Museum, the big brown dog across the street rose to its feet, its back a bristling arch.