Marie NDiaye - Ladivine

Ladivine was appalled. She told herself she should snap Marko out of that ridiculous trance and drag them all to the exit.

But the possibility that Wellington might be gravely insulted, the thought of so soon losing the sort of friendship he was offering them, stripped her of her courage.

She herself, with the dog at her side, with that big all-knowing beast to rely on, felt more than a little indifferent about Wellington’s friendship.

But she understood that Marko and the children might feel they’d abruptly been rescued from self-consciousness, boredom and fear, thanks to a boy who made his home in this country and had chosen them as the beneficiaries of a very real and undeniable thoughtfulness.

He knew what he was doing, she observed.

The way he casually raised one hand in front of Daniel, urging the child to do the same, then slapped his palm with a wink; the courtly, understated, but winsome voice he used with Annika, visibly respectful of her femininity; the mild, intelligent glances he cast at her, Ladivine: that was all typical of a clever but not cunning boy, perceptive and perhaps, she told herself, perhaps even sincere.

But could he not see what an aggressive thing it was to be showing them such paintings?

The third room was all carnage, with similar victims (my ancestors, said Wellington proudly), and the very same torturers. Marko was ashen.

He nonetheless forced himself to study each painting, and suddenly Ladivine had had enough, finding this childish.

He didn’t have to work so hard at flattering the boy — or did he?

Was it actually necessary?

But weren’t those paintings just trash?

“Alright, let’s go now,” she said firmly.

She took Marko’s arm and ordered the children to follow, noticing that they waited to see Wellington’s reaction before they obeyed.

Gracious, charming, he turned on his heels and made for the exit himself, the children trotting gaily along at his side.

“All those horrible things,” Ladivine whispered into Marko’s ear, “it’s too much, don’t you think? Are you sure this is the museum they recommend in the guide?”

“Yes,” answered Marko, in a halting, confused voice. “But the paintings they talk about aren’t anything like this. I can’t understand it!”

Lowering his voice, he added, urgent and anxious:

“How much do we give him?”

“Two euros’ worth,” said Ladivine.

She was exasperated by the fear she sensed oozing from Marko’s every pore, the fear of not living up to expectations, of not being generous enough, grateful enough, deserving enough of their approval.

There was a time when she loved that torment of Marko’s, that excessive conscientiousness.

Lately she often thought it misplaced, faintly ridiculous.

How she missed the innocence of Clarisse Rivière! *

Wellington knocked three times on the very low door of a cinderblock house with a red sheet-metal roof.

Suddenly it was dark. One blink and it’s night-time, thought Ladivine, and just a few seconds ago the sun was so blinding.

Equally strange, to her mind, was the fact that they’d become Wellington’s guests, even if at the time it had seemed perfectly natural to be following him out to this distant neighbourhood.

Ladivine had simply assumed that Wellington had nowhere special to go, and was thus sticking with them, falling in with their vague plan to watch the sun set over the sea (how silly, she would later tell herself, amused, since the sun didn’t set here, but literally vanished), but now here they were standing before Wellington’s house, as he told them, at precisely the early-evening hour assigned to dinner in this rigid country.

Winding, narrow, the dirt street ran through an unbroken succession of shabby little bare-cement huts, old bicycles chained up at the front with gigantic locks.

The prospect of an evening at Wellington’s filled Daniel and Annika with delight.

And indulging one’s children’s delights, reflected Ladivine, often led to imprudence. For were it just she and Marko, she told herself, she would never have accepted this invitation to a stranger’s house in a remote district of a city she didn’t know.

Were it only the two of them, she would have run the risk of offending Wellington, and they would have gone back to the hotel without for one moment worrying about maintaining and even cultivating an unwholesome friendship with that teenaged boy.

As they stood waiting to be let in, a feeling of being watched from behind forced Ladivine to turn around.

She made out a pair of dark eyes glinting in the night, a few metres further on, down a little hill from the street.

The dog had found her.

Sitting very straight, ears pricked up, watchful but calm, it stared at her with its neutral gaze, perhaps waiting, she then thought, perhaps waiting for some sign from her, no, not even that, a breath, a thought, and with that it would come to take her away to some mysterious place with no name.

She shivered and quickly turned around again.

Before the closed door, Wellington was losing patience.

He began to pound on it with his fists, bellowing, and when it finally opened, he bitterly upbraided the girl at the door in a language that Ladivine thought something like English stripped of all gentleness, only the harshest sounds left.

He introduced the girl as his sister, then thoroughly and categorically denounced her, as if to excuse the long delay, along with the girl herself, since, plagued as she was by so many deficiencies, she could certainly be slow to react as well.

The girl let him talk, limply scratching her arm.

She smiled into space, neither friendly nor hostile, simply detached, absent.

To her we don’t even exist, thought Ladivine, she wouldn’t care if we died right here on the spot, or ran away, or collapsed in the street.

This disturbed and upset her.

Because she herself cared deeply about that girl’s existence the moment she saw her face, her existence and almost her happiness, for which, had it been possible, she would gladly have given some small part of herself: time, a little money, thought, or emotion.

Wellington ushered them down a passage dimly lit by a single naked bulb, then across a pitch-black courtyard and into a vast room where a small crowd had just sat down to dinner.

Apart from a long table of dark green plastic and matching chairs, the room was bare.

Every plate was laden with chunks of sweet potato and lamb in sauce, lit by a fly-specked fluorescent tube unevenly diffusing a flickering, greenish light.

Intimidated, Annika and Daniel retreated to the darkest corner of the room. But Wellington went and gently led them back, talking to them in a soothing voice, as though to a couple of skittish kittens.

Marko circled the table, shaking everyone’s hand, slim and charming in his pink suit, his face sallow in the fluorescent light, and Ladivine admired his confidence, his casual, easy manner.

Nonetheless, she chose not to imitate him, thinking there was no need to go to such lengths. She simply glanced around the table and threw out a collective hello.

Wellington disappeared, then immediately returned with more chairs, and everyone slid aside to make room, silent but with a good will Ladivine found reassuring.

She’d blamed her discomfort and guardedness on her reluctance to intrude, but from the intensity of her relief she realised she’d been fearing a trap, and her tablemates’ mute civility allowed her to put that suspicion aside.

But she was unhappy with Marko for never even considering the possibility that Wellington was luring them into an ambush, for so readily trusting in a friendliness that back in Europe would have put a sceptical, embarrassed smile on his face.