Marie NDiaye - Ladivine

The sunlight that made the sheet-metal roofs sparkle poured down on the couple’s two identically unmoving heads, as if to designate them for veneration.

The woman’s wrists and throat glimmered, laden with gold.

She took a languid step forward, very consciously offering her adorned body to their gaze, and Ladivine felt a small shock on realising that this diminutive figure in spike heels, capris and a little sailor shirt was in fact an old woman, whose long hair, dyed deep black, seemed to wrap her gaunt, tanned, heavily made-up face like a scarf.

She was neither smiling nor looking at her expectantly, but only waiting, infinitely patient and docile in her certainty of being admired, and she raised her chin a little, boldly exposing her wrinkled face, slightly smoothed over by the make-up, to the stark sunlight.

“I’m Richard Rivière’s daughter,” said Ladivine, after nodding a hello.

She couldn’t help adding, so as to say something, for she was intimidated by the woman’s imperial aloofness:

“His only child, Ladivine.”

“Yes, I know, he said you’d be coming,” the woman answered, ever so slightly bored, as if she found the obligation to speak pointless when one had only to show oneself, exhibit oneself.

“Oh, he told you?”

“Yes, a few weeks ago, on the phone.”

She realised that Richard Rivière must have talked to his friends as soon as she’d hung up, and although she could have considered that diligence a sign of his eagerness to help out, it irritated her.

Because there was little chance that either she or Marko would ever have felt the urge to rent a car and drive out to these strangers’ property were it not for “the Wellington thing”, as she privately called what had happened, and did it not seem that, from his mysterious Haute-Savoie lair, Richard Rivière had foreseen the events that would bring them to this place, and so was it not in his power, a power he’d left unused, to say or do something to forestall those events?

Shouldn’t he have put her on guard, he who claimed to know this country?

And said to her: Beware of courtly teenagers who accost you at the front door of the National Museum? Beware of the violence nestled in your heart, waiting to be roused when you meet a young man with impenetrable schemes, beware of the sympathy you might begin to feel for your own extraordinary misdeeds, your new-found longing to let go and plunge endlessly into senselessness?

Marko and the children had now joined her before the woman with the cold, serene face, not so much covered with make-up as carved from it.

Marko held out his hand, and with a weary resignation she gave him her own.

Oh, how he’d changed, how he wanted it to be seen, thought Ladivine.

Because Marko had climbed out of the car and, smiling, his back ramrod straight, had materialised in front of that woman.

The old Marko would have thought it enough simply to be there.

He glowed with pride and confidence in his pink tunic, the huge purple flowers ornamenting the front like the insignia of some ignoble order.

Ladivine was beginning to loathe that outfit.

She felt Marko’s hunger to present himself to this stranger in all his new magnificence, she sensed his pleasure that this woman had never seen him before, she saw his brazen manner, the full depth of his emancipation.

And was he not now even handsomer, far, than before?

He took the children by the shoulders to herd them before him, adorning himself with their presence, she thought.

The woman gave them a thoroughly indifferent glance, then looked again, interested, almost intrigued, and the curiosity that neither Marko’s nor Ladivine’s face had sparked in her jaded eye was now roused by Daniel and Annika’s two ardent little faces, a hint of a smile even taking shape on her crimson lips, and she looked again at Marko, now realising, now knowing what she would find on his face, thought Ladivine, and then back at the children, all the while smiling as if she’d seen something surprising and glorious, something important and wonderful, and finally she looked at Marko with her real eyes, now shining and quick, cynical, hungry, which said to him: I’ve seen your children’s lost, avid faces, and I know what manner of man you are, because we’re the same, you and I.

Marko let out a charmed little laugh. Annika feverishly echoed him.

The woman briefly caressed each child on the cheek and cried out:

“Your children are adorable.”

Which, though no surprise now for Ladivine, nonetheless displeased her, for to her mind Daniel and Annika looked anything but adorable at the moment.

She herself, had she just met them, would immediately have been wary of such children.

Would she not go so far as to think: These children are guilty? These children have done wrong, or believe they’ve done wrong, because some unnameable misdeed has been placed on their shoulders, and their sense of their own wickedness is ruining their faces and incomprehension is pinching their little noses, twisting their mouths into a detestable rictus?

“They’re very tired, they’re not quite themselves,” she said curtly.

“They look fine to me,” the woman decreed, not even bothering to glance Ladivine’s way.

“We’re not tired,” said Annika.

The children clung to Marko, rubbed their hair against his noisome tunic.

He tenderly pressed them to him.

There was something desperate, thought Ladivine, her heart bleeding, in the way they clutched at their father’s body, as if that contact alone could enlighten them on everything that was strange and different inside them, but that enlightenment never came.

Marko was embracing them with the same love and gentleness he’d always shown his children.

But perhaps they could sense that he himself no longer needed to feel and receive love, that he could now do without love, that he was strong enough for that, even as, kindness being a habit with him, he went on making the loving gestures they were used to.

Oh, come to me, she thought, my love for you is healthy and pure and I won’t force you to bear the burden of any crime.

But her thick legs, her legs like two very straight tree trunks, with no taper at the ankle, which she’d taught herself to display proudly as if fashions had changed and long, slender legs were now a curse, not a blessing, her massive legs wouldn’t let her move, wouldn’t let her run to her children, and her tongue, too, had turned sluggish and fat in her mouth, from which no sound emerged.

She could clearly see herself reaching out and pulling the children from Marko’s maleficent embrace, but her arms still hung limp at her sides, her fingers only feebly clenched against her linen skirt, sweat-stained and rumpled from the trip.

It was clear that Richard Rivière, Ladivine’s father, had, since leaving Langon years before, led a professional life as busy as it was prosperous, a life of which Ladivine had known little, and neither, surely, had Clarisse Rivière, notwithstanding the money she got from him every month, as Ladivine was aware, a sizeable sum that she never touched.

It was not long before her death that she’d told Ladivine of her refusal to make use of that money, with the stubborn, childish, patient air she sometimes had when she’d made a resolution she couldn’t or didn’t want to explain but would never go back on, though she was perfectly willing, as if to make up for her hard-headedness, to repeat tirelessly, always in the same affable voice, the simple words that expressed her decision.

She did just that when Ladivine finally voiced her surprise at everything Clarisse Rivière, her lonely, ageing mother, seemed to be giving Freddy Moliger, since Ladivine had to limit herself to the subject of gifts, oh even there blushing at her own indiscretion, and there was no question of broaching the principal subject of her fear and dismay, the sexual passion Clarisse Rivière seemed to feel for that vile man, Freddy Moliger, that loser no doubt picked up off the bar he collapsed onto each night in some Langon hostelry that stayed open past midnight.