Marie NDiaye - Ladivine

She felt no contempt for the servant, her peculiar mother.

But she could not help believing that her mother might indeed one day come home with her grocery bags, her rain-soaked overcoat and the lush-haired man who had jubilantly allowed her to see his face in the street.

And were that man ever to come to pick her up at school, she knew, she would not be afraid to call him her father.

No disbelief or disgust would curl the other girls’ lips on hearing that truth or that lie, she wasn’t sure which, but maybe if it was a lie her own lips would stay pressed tight in a bitter crease.

Her face would be like her father’s, that man who until now had let his love rain down on heads other than hers, leaving her and her mother in their vulnerable aloneness.

But, she understood, her face would be like her father’s.

And another realisation hit her at the same time, with the violence of a thing long known but never quite grasped, now abruptly revealed in all its simplicity: being that woman’s daughter filled her with a horrible shame and fear.

Oh, she was also ashamed of her shame and her fear, particularly because she was painfully aware of her mother’s fragility, she who had no protector to rely on and was nonetheless wary of no-one.

But stronger still was her repugnance at the thought of letting it be seen, even simply in the street, on the bus, before strangers, that she was the daughter of a woman of no consequence.

From her earliest childhood, Clarisse Rivière would realise, she had done nothing but spurn her mother, and her mother had pretended not to notice, and perhaps had not noticed, in a way, having found another explanation for her daughter’s coldness than the simple scandal of her own appearance, her own face.

Because that was a truth Malinka’s mother would never be able to bear.

And Malinka knew it, in her despairing, furious love, because she could read the servant’s emotions better than the servant herself.

She pulled away from her mother, renounced her before the world, seeing no other way.

She always took care to walk at some distance from her, and she was delighted to see that the people around them never included them both in the same knowing glance, the impenetrable woman and the beautiful teenager with the thick, curly hair, inherited, the marvelling servant assured her, from her many-splendoured father.

At fifteen Malinka heightened the natural pallor of her face with wan make-up.

She felt a boundless, remorseful, stifling tenderness for the servant.

She secretly watched her in the evening, studying her face, looking for any flaw in her good cheer, any decline in her confidence that she would one day bring about the appearance of the man who, the servant was sure, had once loved her, and loved her still, but did not know where to find her.

It was up to her, Malinka’s mother, not only to recognise him in the street, but also, in some mysterious way, to make him appear, and for that small miracle the force of her own assurance might be enough.

Her good cheer never faltered, but over time it turned slightly abstract, as if her habitual happiness and optimism were making her forget she had fewer reasons for those emotions than when, as a very young woman, newly arrived here with the child in her belly, she founded her hope and her joy on the enchanted sense that every single day this land worked miracles more unlikely than a longed-for face’s sudden appearance in the midst of a crowd.

Her good cheer was waning and weakening, but not her will to be cheerful, and the servant’s gaze turned a little unfocused, very discreetly unhinged.

She asked Malinka, then in senior school, the same question as when she was in primary school.

“Did you work hard today? Is your teacher happy with you?”

And then she broke into a smile, as if already sure of the answer, not even listening to whatever Malinka might say, not even noticing that sometimes Malinka said nothing at all, and Malinka never took this amiss, understanding that in order to keep a light heart her mother’s contact with reality had to be cautious, buffered by distraction and a faint, unwavering rapture.

The women who employed Malinka’s mother seemed to think highly of her.

She often brought home little presents, and once one of her employers came for coffee. Malinka and her mother made pound cake and fresh fruit salad for the occasion.

The woman ate happily, casting inquisitive but kindly glances at Malinka. She complimented her on her hair, her cool complexion.

“She has her father’s hair,” said Malinka’s mother, mechanically, ardently, then drifted back into the self-satisfied, benevolent, misty, slightly dim look that left her ever more rarely.

The woman suggested that she and Malinka move into a flat she owned, three rooms on the ground floor of her building.

“You’ll find it so much more comfortable,” she said, glancing with dismay around the little room that served as both the kitchen and the servant’s bedroom, “and, you know, I won’t ask much.”

Almost apologetically, she added:

“It would make me so happy to help you.”

An odd agitation suddenly came over Malinka’s mother.

She stood up a little too fast, bumped into the corner of the stove.

Upset and subtly furious, she seemed stunned that this woman had failed to see who she was, her, Malinka’s mother, whose goals were plain, who had only one ambition.

“I can’t leave,” she finally mumbled. “I mean, really now, I can’t leave.”

She let out a scandalised, mystified little laugh, eyebrows raised, staring almost wild-eyed at the woman, who smiled uneasily and put on a waiting face.

The servant composed herself and sat down.

And she settled once more into a quiet beatitude, like easing back into a warm bath of delusion, thought Malinka, and this frightened and troubled her even more than the absurd indignation that had brought the servant to her feet.

“You understand,” said the servant in an exaggeratedly reasonable tone, undermined by her suddenly stronger accent, “we’re waiting for someone, and this address is his only way of finding us, so, you know, what’s he supposed to do if we leave? It’s simply out of the question.”

For the first time a harsh, hostile anger rushed to Malinka’s head. After the woman had gone, she cried out, astonished to find herself daring to talk to the servant this way, daring to bring up what she spoke of only by allusions:

“Well, what do you know! News to me! So now he has our address? He’s known our address these past fifteen years, and you always said he had no way to know where we lived, and he’s supposed to come looking for us when all this time he never bothered? And that’s why we can’t go and live in that woman’s flat? That’s why we’re staying in these two miserable rooms?”

Still sitting, the servant looked utterly defeated, and Malinka wished she had kept her mouth shut.

Her anger drained away, she tried to put on a smile, horrified to think that her smile probably looked like her mother’s, similarly impersonal, misplaced and maddening.

Malinka’s mother began to wring her hands.

“I’m not sure anymore,” she said hesitantly. “You’re right, your father must not have our address, how could he? There was no way to tell him before I went away, I didn’t know how to get hold of him, I thought I’d have no trouble finding him here, I thought it was big, but not that big. But if we move, then. .”

“No, let’s not move,” Malinka murmured. “Things are fine right here, let’s not move.”

The servant genuinely seemed to believe, with that part of her reason Malinka could not fathom, as elusive as it was maddening, that a change as major as moving would be a betrayal of the faith that sustained her in her nebulous, desperate, but confident quest for one particular face among so many others, and what did she have to help her go on imperturbably hoping but that faith, with its rituals and commandments, the very first of which was the prohibition against making any change to the life that had seen her certainty sprout and flourish, what did she have but that absurd faith, thought Malinka, to make her seem grander in her own eyes?