Marie NDiaye - Ladivine

The Cagnacs were heading towards the house with Marko close behind, one hand on each child’s shoulder.

“The real Clarisse Rivière must not be forgotten!” Ladivine sobbed aloud. “Who will remember her if not us? After all, she was. . she was a very good woman!”

Marko turned around and gave her a cautious smile.

He’s trying to shut me up. Well, it won’t be that easy.

In two furious strides, she was beside him.

She then realised that a strap on her sandal had broken, where the delicate leather bands crossed.

She squatted down as Marko and the children went inside, and now she was alone on the gravel path, in the heavy, scorching silence, now with tears in her eyes she was remembering Clarisse Rivière’s gold sandals and yellowed, callused heels and the shame they made her feel for her mother, because they made her seem like an un- refined woman doing her sad best to dress up.

Were her own heels not also dry and cracked, in the dust of that path?

And her legs, whose brown hairs were beginning to grow back, her doughy legs, what leap could they make to propel her away from the Cagnac house in case of danger?

Far, far in the distance, she thought she heard a dog bark.

The strap was beyond a quick fix. She’d have to clench her toes to hold the sandal in place as she walked.

“This was all his idea, our opening a dealership in the forest,” Cagnac was explaining. “We came out to this country with him two or three years ago, and he told us it was only his second visit, but he led us straight here, as if he’d been thinking of it for some time, and he said, ‘This is where you should build,’ and he dealt with leasing the land, all the paperwork, he found an architect for the house, all in just a few days. We trusted him, but still, he seemed so sure of himself that it scared us a little, we were half convinced he was going to swindle us in some way or other. I said to him, ‘Richard, what’s the scam?’ If that had angered him, then we’d have dropped the whole thing then and there and never seen him again, but he hardly even blinked, he just smiled his friendly smile and told us it wasn’t his way to deceive his friends. And we went back to Annecy, and that’s where we sealed the deal. He sends us practically new cars, almost never driven, and then we sell them here, and you know what, it’s going well, there’s a real demand.”

Cagnac smugly clicked his tongue against his palate. A table had been laid in the vast marble-tiled dining room, and two servants were standing against the wall waiting to serve lunch, two boys dressed in white short-sleeved shirts and black slacks, hands clasped over their belts.

They’d brought out a special wine for the aperitif, yellow and strong, shipped in by the Cagnacs from the Haute-Savoie. Unbidden, the Cagnac woman poured a little into each glass, Daniel’s excepted.

Ladivine snatched up Annika’s glass, spilling a few drops on the table.

“She’s not old enough to be drinking wine,” she said, not looking at the Cagnac woman.

She was so angry she could have smashed the glass on the ground.

Even more swiftly, Annika took back the glass and swallowed the wine in one gulp.

She banged it down on the table, wiped her lips with one hand, and gave a little laugh, pretending she’d played a prank on her mother.

But there was no laughter in her eyes, only a coldness and a despair that wrenched Ladivine’s heart.

Marko broke into a half-amused, half-irritated grimace, as he often did when the children wouldn’t go to bed and insisted on acting up.

“Really, Annika,” he said, ruffling her hair.

“A little good wine never killed anyone,” Cagnac said jovially.

The servants next brought out an array of dishes, all of them, Ladivine noted, exceptionally heavy: pork cutlets covered with melted cheese, potatoes sautéed in goose fat, salad drenched in walnut oil, and for dessert thick crêpes stuffed with chocolate cream.

The children ate greedily, and far more than Ladivine would have thought possible, they who usually ate like birds, as she liked to say.

She herself was struggling to fend off revulsion. She ate a little piece of meat, a potato, then pushed away her almost untouched plate.

The Cagnacs ate energetically, saying nothing, the better to concentrate on their pleasure. Now and then they let out satisfied little grunts.

Ladivine saw them eyeing Marko and the children, as if to be sure they too were enjoying the food, clearly willing, she thought, to do whatever it took, perhaps have still other dishes brought out from the kitchen, so vital did they seem to find it that Marko be like them in every way.

She looked at them, lowly and sorrowful, impotent, unhappy, and she felt the awful bond between the Cagnacs and her children and husband growing ever stronger thanks to the repellent meal they were sharing.

How can you like such food? she wondered.

Although she wasn’t eating, she was the only one sweating. Her hair stuck to her forehead, lay clammily against her neck.

Marko was serenely stuffing himself.

We know what you did to Wellington — and what about the Cagnacs, what’s their crime?

What vile act is illuminating their faces with that hard, white, triumphant light, so intense that they don’t want to be alone in it?

Which is why, seeing Marko and the children giving off that same radiant glow, perhaps still a bit dim and flickering, they’re drawing them close to expose them to the full light of wickedness.

Oh, it must wear them down, having to endure that incandescence day after day with no company but each other.

And she thought: Well, not me, I won’t be a part of it, my darkness keeps me. . Not me, I won’t. .

She wasn’t far from feeling a genuine hatred for Richard Rivière.

Because were it not for his advice they would not now be at the Cagnacs’, ensnared in their vile web, they wouldn’t even be in this country.

No, not the country, she wasn’t sorry to be in this country, and she never would be — not for anything, come what may.

She’d made a very dear friend in the big brown dog. She’d never had such a friend.

Where they shouldn’t have come was the heart of this forest, it was the Cagnacs’, it was into this forest that Richard Rivière never should have sent them.

What was he after?

Above all, what did he want to come of his daughter Ladivine’s meeting these immoral people, and what was he trying to tell her?

That here she was seeing everything he loved, everything he most prized?

That this world, so utterly alien to Clarisse Rivière’s, hostile to that world on principle, was now his world, in his new Annecy existence, filled with a joy unknown in Langon?

Was he trying to show Ladivine, his one, precious daughter, just what sort of man he’d become?

Did he want his daughter Ladivine to be so charmed by the Cagnacs that she would finally allow herself to choose Annecy over Langon, that her allegiance would finally desert Clarisse Rivière?

She’d remained ever faithful to Clarisse Rivière’s spirit, which he might have seen as a condemnation of his running away from it, from Clarisse Rivière’s intolerable innocence.

Well, thought Ladivine, snorting to herself, if the Cagnacs had been sent to this outpost for the purpose of enchanting her, if their mission was to deliver her into Annecy’s loving, treacherous arms, then clearly Richard Rivière did not know his dear daughter so well.

Because nothing could possibly disgust her more than these old faces aglow with their crimes, these fatty foods, this sweet yellow wine.

And they were no more taken with her. It was Marko they wanted on their side, flanked by his children, ripe for the plucking.