Marie NDiaye - Ladivine

Or was she imagining things?

Oh no, she could feel it, as plainly as she could smell Marko’s tunic’s harsh, oily scent.

He’d decided to turn Daniel and Annika into hard, perpetually inflamed creatures, either, she thought, because he couldn’t bear to be alone in his wickedness or because he believed they might find protection in that debasement.

And here she felt Marko had betrayed her, Marko whose uprightness and modesty and even, yes, whose cowardice she loved more than anything, not because she might somehow turn it to her advantage but because she thought it meant he would never hurt anyone, and he never had, gentle and good as Clarisse Rivière, until (at her urging?) he one day resolved to tell Lüneburg that he would rather never set foot there again.

Ladivine had met him after two aimless years at the University of Bordeaux, which, on a whim and a friend of a friend’s vague promise of lodging, she’d left for Berlin, with no great enthusiasm, under the illusion that time and life would go by more quickly if she moved on, stupidly, because she had no plans, no hopes, because at twenty-one she felt tired and worn, and she saw Marko at the watch counter of the Hermannplatz Karstadt, where he’d recently found work, and realised that a young man like him, with his long hair, his big glasses, his delicate, kindly, calm, endlessly patient face would never feel the need to hurt anyone at all, that there was a kind of glory about him that he didn’t work at and didn’t believe in, though that word would have made him laugh, as he was a practical man, and this serene scepticism was an element of his grace, since he had no knowledge of that grace, since he had no access to it.

She came back to the Hermannplatz Karstadt every day, and every day she pretended she was trying to decide on a watch to give Richard Rivière, who hadn’t yet left Clarisse Rivière behind in their Langon house.

Eventually she invited Marko for a cup of coffee over his midday break, a step that, by his own admission, he would never have dared take, and the next day she moved her things into Marko’s room.

He was living in a shared flat on the Mehringdamm, and his little room at the end of the passage served as their marital home for two years, while Ladivine earned her diploma as a French teacher.

And that mannerly young man, resigned to the sameness of life and the docile abandonment of his ambitions, submitting without rancour, placidly accepting the way of things, requested a transfer to the Karstadt on Wilmersdorfer Strasse when they decided to leave the little room in Kreuzberg for the Charlottenburg apartment.

And so their life had gone by, thought Ladivine in the four-wheel drive, a good life, easy and serene, made perfectly happy, for a time, by the birth of the children.

Sometimes back then she woke late at night, not to find Marko locked in battle on the balcony, not to flee the torrent of blood pouring in from Langon, carrying Clarisse Rivière’s silent cries, but simply for the immeasurable joy of gazing on Marko, Daniel and Annika’s sleeping faces, one by one, it was the anticipation of that matchless joy that pulled her from her slumbers, that made her get up and walk soundlessly through the apartment, her blood throbbing in her neck, not her mother’s blood but her own, neatly contained in vessels that no loser would ever set out to slash with a knife.

And it was Marko’s face that she looked at the longest, sometimes drowsing, then waking again with a start, but never slipping out of that ecstatic, surprised, almost incredulous meditation on a man who meant far more to her than her own life, who inspired in her an inextinguishable gratitude, whose discreet, childlike breath she greedily inhaled from his nuzzling mouth, trying to solve the mystery of Marko’s love for her, he who in his clarity seemed so much more honourable than she.

Nothing could possibly be more disturbing, she thought in the four-wheel drive, than the hard flame now burning in Marko, with which he was trying to consume Daniel and Annika.

Such a man would never again make her long to inhale his breath, she wouldn’t even want him to love her.

But was she not the cause of all this? Was it not her idea to call Richard Rivière and ask for advice, knowing that Marko would take anything her father said as an absolute truth?

And suppose, thought Ladivine in the four-wheel drive, suppose Marko wanted to be a little like Richard Rivière, suppose he was striving to attain what he saw as Richard Rivière’s marvellous force, his charming authority, the perfect certitude of his word?

Wasn’t she to blame for that too?

Without trying to, had she not, in the first years of her life with Marko, spoken of Richard Rivière in such terms that Marko could only feel crushed by the weight of his own insignificance?

On various plausible pretexts, Richard Rivière had never bothered to come and meet either the children or Marko, thereby, in her husband’s eyes, heightening his prestige, which, troublingly, grew more powerful still with the murder of Clarisse Rivière.

But instead of keeping quiet, shouldn’t Ladivine then have convinced Marko that Clarisse Rivière would still be alive had Richard Rivière stayed and looked after her, had he not so completely and so coldly abandoned her, like a wife he’d come to despise years before?

And that couldn’t be, could it?

One thing that often irritated Ladivine was that Marko never seemed to appreciate the full splendour of Clarisse Rivière’s innocence.

Yes, he treated her with the same kindness and thoughtfulness he offered everyone, but that was just it, he never showed, through a special, exceptional attitude, that he was aware of that ragged, dismantled woman’s unique grandeur, never showed that he had every reason to respect her far more than he did Richard Rivière, whom he admired childishly, without knowing him.

Oh yes, that had often infuriated Ladivine.

But, she thought in the four-wheel-drive, wasn’t that her fault? How to know?

Hadn’t she too treated Clarisse Rivière with condescension, hadn’t she hidden her tortured love under a mask of off-handedness and even, sometimes, effrontery?

How could Marko have suspected her burning desire to see Clarisse Rivière rescued and loved when she expressed it so badly, so obliquely?

He was just as casual, just as amiably distant, polite and unforthcoming with Clarisse Rivière as she was, and what could he be accused of, thought Clarisse Rivière in the four-wheel drive, except refusing to understand that he was much like Clarisse Rivière, in the special sort of drab saintliness that they shared?

But now Marko was dazzling, now he radiated a glorious, wicked flame.

Unusually, the children hadn’t yet drifted off to sleep.

Even Daniel was squirming, his eyes wide open and slightly bulging.

Ladivine thought him rapt in an unfocused pleasure that the mere presence of Marko’s body, of his flesh as if on fire beneath his pink tunic, was pretending to offer him, then suddenly snatching it away, refusing any possibility of fulfilment.

Now and then Daniel snickered, understanding nothing but, thought Ladivine, putting on the forced cynicism of a teenager who suspects some hidden meaning and doesn’t want to seem clueless. He snickered with a horrible knowing smirk, thought Ladivine, frightened.

The GPS’s silken commands landed in that electric silence like sly insinuations.

Marko was driving a little too fast on the now-deserted road, freshly asphalted, past fields of banana trees.

An amused little smile floated on his lips, ready to burst into full bloom at the slightest provocation.

How handsome he was, how appealing, how, clearly, he wished Ladivine would come over to his side and delight with him in this new, untrammelled, superior, brutal way of being!