Marie NDiaye - Ladivine

Watching it from the corner of her eye, Ladivine was sure she heard it growl.

Suddenly she was afraid it might charge across the street and lunge at Marko’s throat, or the children’s, unwilling, perhaps, to see her in the company of people it wasn’t responsible for. And what did that dog care that she had a husband and children, if it was not meant to bind its fate to theirs?

Their plan was to walk to the museum by the corniche road, but instead she herded Daniel and Annika towards a taxi parked before the hotel, waved Marko in with them, and then, after a moment’s hesitation and a glance at the dog, already sick at heart to be hurting and angering it this way, Ladivine too disappeared into the car.

“It’s just too hot to walk, don’t you think?” she said to Marko, slightly breathless and still trembling to think of the dog biting the children or their father to get them out of the way.

And, saying nothing to Marko about the dog, knowing she never would, and not simply because he might not believe her (he’d believe she was sincere, but would set out to show her she was mistaken, to prove that it was impossible to be guarded or spied on by an anonymous dog in the vastness of a poor, foreign city), she already felt accountable for any rash acts the dog might commit, that dog for which she’d broken her tacit accord with Marko never to keep secrets, a rule that Marko had always obeyed, she was sure, because he was a deeply virtuous and conscientious man, even a little vain about his virtue, as had she, she thought, until now, or rather until Clarisse Rivière’s death, whose horror and pointlessness had stranded her, Ladivine, her only daughter, on shores of unspeakable shame. Before the National Museum’s severe, modern façade, a very young man seemed to be waiting for them.

No sooner were they out of the taxi than he came running, lively and good-humoured, friendly as no-one had ever been in this city, which, Ladivine would later reflect, explained why they trusted him at once, something they never would have done at home with an intrusive, slick, ingratiating young man such as this, but that’s how it was, they felt fragile and alone in this place where their mere presence seemed a sound reason to treat them with indifference, even suspicion or cold hostility, and not being used to such things they found it hard to adapt, wanting deep down to be liked, to be recognised and admired as the good people they rightly thought they were.

And the welcoming, intelligently obliging but in no way obsequious look on that boy’s face found them disarmed, eager for human warmth.

He was of average height, muscular, dressed in a pair of jeans cut off at the knees and a long NBA jersey.

His hair was cropped very short, and a little gold ring set with gemstones adorned his right ear.

Oddly, thought Ladivine, he was barefoot, for all the care he took with his appearance, his delicate, hairless, adolescent feet were dirty grey and peppered with scars.

He extended a firm hand first to her, then to Marko, looking at them both with sparkling dark eyes.

Smiling an indefinable little smile, he examined Marko’s new outfit, his tunic and trousers.

Next he shook Annika’s hand with a slight, playful bow, and then Daniel’s.

“I’m Wellington,” he said in his languid accent, “as you might already know.”

Ladivine let out a little laugh.

“Why no, how could we?”

He laughed along with her, as if delighting in her repartee.

“Come with me, I’ll show you around the museum.”

“We don’t need a guide,” she exclaimed, just as Marko was avidly accepting.

She raised one hand to take back what she’d said, and she saw Marko’s relief, his eagerness to let himself be taken in hand and entertained by a spirit of congeniality.

The boy started off with the children, and she held Marko back, whispering:

“We’ll have to give him money, you know.”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

Suddenly he turned anxious again, and a little lost:

“How much?”

“I don’t know, we’ll see.”

Annika and Daniel were usually reserved children, not difficult or capricious but private and hard to charm. And yet they were already laughing with Wellington when their parents caught up with them in the entrance, and, Ladivine observed with a tiny premonitory twinge in her heart, particularly Annika, usually so restrained and aloof, who was looking up at the boy with a gaze of complete, almost love-struck trust, pushing up her hair and clasping it to the back of her head with one hand.

Suddenly this eight-year-old was a ravishing little girl.

“Now, you pick up the tickets, and I’ll wait for you here,” said Wellington in his unctuous voice.

Past the ticket-checkers, he led them into a deserted first gallery, where huge canvases very realistically depicted various massacres

— here a squadron of soldiers armed with bayonets skewering wild-eyed rioters, here three men slicing intently into the belly of a living woman pathetically endeavouring with blood-soaked hands to protect the foetus contained in that belly, there a man in an elegant suit bearing an expression of boundless disgust as he whipped the back, now a hash of flesh and blood, of an adolescent boy who must have been his servant, as the scene was set in a book-lined drawing room.

Enchanted, Wellington undertook to describe each painting as if they were blind; that’s right, thought Ladivine, mystified, exactly as if they couldn’t see or understand what they were looking at, as if they needed Wellington’s words to help them grasp the very obvious horror of each scene.

Not understanding English, Annika and Daniel merely stared at the paintings with a dumbstruck, fascinated gaze.

In the next room, the gore and sensationalism far surpassed Ladivine’s grimmest fears.

She reflexively covered Daniel’s eyes with one hand, but the boy wrenched himself away, and, standing immovably in the middle of the room, turned his gaze in every direction as quick as he could, greedily, as Wellington’s fine, velvety voice gaily recounted the events of each canvas.

“Here they’re torturing two poor old people who tried to escape, they were locked up in that cage you can see in the background, and you can tell from the broken door that they managed to escape, but look, the overseers have caught up with them, and now they’re pulling out their toenails with red-hot tongs, looks like they’re having a good time, it’s fun, they’re laughing. In this next one there’s a burning house. Who’s that trapped in the flames on the second floor? Two women and their babies, and these people down here, the masters, they’re all safe and sound now, they won’t even look their way, they’re thinking about their own children, who’ve all been rescued. Yes, that’s just how it is.”

Marko’s lips were pinched, his jaw taut and aggrieved.

“Is he trying to make us feel guilty or something?” he whispered in Ladivine’s ear.

But in fact the toxin of guilt seemed to have attacked him already, she observed, saddened and anxious, knowing she herself was secretly protected.

And in any case, Wellington rarely looked her way.

Cool and watchful, gently severe, he kept his eyes trained on Marko’s face, as if wanting to be sure that his words were getting through, and especially that Marko made no attempt to fight them off.

And so highly developed was Marko’s moral conscience, so longstanding and deep-rooted his acknowledgement of the most horrific crimes and his compliance with a duty to be above all reproach, that he never tried to evade Wellington’s gaze but rather latched onto it, as if demanding to be told of the most unthinkable tortures, again and again, so that he might feel for his forebears the shame they themselves never felt.