Marie NDiaye - Ladivine

Oh, maybe the servant’s heart was not as unassuming as it seemed.

Her pale, smooth-skinned daughter Malinka hoped so. She fervently wanted arrogance, pride and self-indulgence to play some part in her mother’s ridiculous optimism; she hoped she was just a little blinded by her vanity.

Because, while the servant was well thought-of and evidently even liked by the women who employed her, Malinka realised there were others who did not know her, who did not always treat her so well.

Malinka had never seen her mother insulted to her face, but couldn’t help fearing, every day, that she might be.

Everything about her, her hopes, her fears, her embarrassments, was a betrayal of the servant.

And so she ardently hoped that a sheath of outrageous selfimportance and even inflated, unwholesome pride shielded her mother’s heart with its crystalline hardness, but she doubted it, so humble did the servant continually prove, and, when she wasn’t talking about Malinka’s father, so serene and so sensible.

She doubted it.

Rather, she assumed that her mother patiently endured every affront, and that only her placidity, her slight withdrawal from the world, her inexpressive smile, helped her dismiss such things as of no great importance.

When Malinka began to slip, in senior school, she effortlessly hid it from her mother, not fearing her anger but wanting to spare the servant any needless anxiety, because there was little her mother could do for her, and less in that realm than in any other.

She took to signing her school reports herself, never showing them to the servant, who seemed to forget there were such things as marks and school reports.

Clarisse Rivière would later recall that Malinka had struggled to keep up, that she had hung on as best she could, but her downhill slide, starting when she was eleven or twelve, and at first gradual, uncertain, soon took on the sudden brutality of a verdict handed down at last after a long wait.

She would remember that as a very young girl Malinka had ambitions, that she’d sensed doing well in school would bring her nearer her goals than her mother’s ignorant, vague solicitude, that she’d conscientiously striven to be worthy and, in a sense, perfect.

But she attained only perfection’s outer form, as if the great efforts she made had hidden from her the real reason for those labours.

And so she became a model of application and assiduity, a pupil so polite that her presence was often overlooked.

She turned in her homework on time, written in an elegant and readable hand, always a little longer than required so no-one would suspect her of slacking off, although before so serious, so painfully intent a young face not even the sternest teacher would ever think such a thing, and those scrupulous pages, reeking of labour and terror, always drew a regretful, understanding comment and a below-average mark, inflated a little all the same, out of indulgence, in recognition of everything that was sad and unfair in all this.

Malinka never quite seemed to grasp what was asked of her. She understood only the express or unspoken laws governing the relations between pupils and teachers, which she obeyed in a mix of keen pleasure and arduous rigour, and so literally that she could have vanished without anyone noticing, so absolute was her submission to the image of a pupil who was nothing more than a pure receptive mind.

But what they were trying to teach her never found its way into her head, or lingered only a moment, then quickly faded.

At home, she sat for long hours at her desk, slightly befogged, trying in vain to connect her memories of the class with the sentences written down in her impeccable notebook.

She vibrantly remembered every detail of the teacher’s face, expression or dress, and she could picture herself, too, as clearly as if she were studying a photograph, and she deeply admired that girl looking up at the blackboard with her perfectly attentive face.

But what had been said in that classroom, what that exemplary girl had heard and thought she understood, she could not remember.

She read and reread what she had written, and it meant nothing to her, had nothing to do with anything she had managed to hold in her mind, itself nothing more than a magma of words and numbers, misshapen ideas, incoherent hypotheses, which she ended up laboriously dredging through in search of something she could use, almost anything, to fill up a page with her beautiful roundhand.

Sometimes she forgot she was writing sheer nonsense and abandoned herself to the pure pleasure of the presentation, she spent ages scripting the date, or marking off the margins, or crafting elaborate capital letters, all curlicues and meanders.

That lowly, solitary Malinka made what she called friends at school, but, looking back, Clarisse Rivière would understand that in truth it was only a little clan of two or three teenaged girls that Malinka had somehow slipped into, almost unnoticed, less in the hope of remedying her loneliness than in obedience to the rules of school life as, with her keenly observant instinct, she understood them.

She knew absolutely nothing about those girls, who never spoke of personal matters in her presence and seemed to tolerate her only out of curiosity, perhaps wondering at their own tolerance, their own curiosity.

Malinka wished she could learn everything about them, as if she might thereby understand her own existence.

But, although she was so discreet that gazes slid over her with nothing holding them back, those girls perhaps unconsciously limited their talk to everyday things whenever she came near, and it felt to Malinka as if a sudden pall had been cast by the vague mass of her body, like a grey cloud blotting out the sun.

But she grew used to that, since it was her place.

She must also have known that by abandoning all hope of closeness with these girls she could consider herself excused from having to invite them home, into the house of the servant.

Because that was out of the question.

The thought of her friends meeting her mother sent her into spasms of almost amused revolt, so laughable was the idea.

She was nothing short of speechless when a teacher one day asked to meet Malinka’s mother, looking faintly uncomfortable, as if, she told herself, all the more perplexed in that he could easily have let the matter drop there, he already knew it would never happen, because it was absurd, absurd.

But she said nothing, only nodded with her usual gravity.

He brought it up once more, she nodded once more, and then never again did she look up at him with a face hungry for approval.

And she avenged herself for that teacher’s blundering indelicacy by handing in work untouched by her ardent desire for majesty, assignments without ornament, no curlicues, no coloured underlining. She turned sixteen during the summer holidays, and never went back to school.

Clarisse Rivière would always remember the time that followed with a mix of incomprehension and terror, for it seemed that chance alone, or obedience to the whims of circumstance, guided the life of that girl Malinka, that empty-headed girl, as she often heard people say at the time: she’s a sweet girl, hardworking, but empty-headed.

The only fantasy she would gradually assemble involved the quarantining of her mother, the dismissal of the servant.

And since she could only subscribe to the judgement that she had nothing in her head, feeling that head fill with the one single preoccupation of expelling her mother would fill her with the idea that she, Malinka, was a despicable person, her mind closed to everything but disloyalty.

The servant accepted Malinka’s decision to leave school without a word, perhaps because it seemed not a decision but a natural passage from one state to another, like a change of season.