Marie NDiaye - Ladivine

But she held back, out of pity and love for her father.

:

the man was taking his time looking over the car, and Richard Rivière saw the elegant drape of his navy-blue overcoat, unbuttoned and gracefully rippling as he circled the vehicle, bent down to inspect the wheel rims, then lithely stood up again, his body visibly honed by regular exercise.

The coat must be cashmere, he thought, and the dark grey pinstripe suit a silk and wool blend. On his feet Richard Rivière had noted, with a fervid curiosity he knew well, and which always filled him with self-disgust, a pair of polished, point-toed ankle boots.

And when the man first squatted down Richard Rivière was astonished to see he was wearing raspberry-red socks.

Astonishment gave way to envious loathing, and that too was an emotion he knew well, always depressed and disappointed to be feeling it, him, Richard Rivière, who aspired to be a sensible and thoughtful man, noble in his sentiments.

Why, then, could he not help feeling jealous and frustrated when a well-dressed man had the breezy audacity to display some accessory — gaudy socks or a comical tie — that Richard Rivière would never dare buy, lest he give himself away as what he thought he was in others’ eyes, a parvenu with odd and dubious tastes?

He was not unaware that such encounters with tall, thin, chic men also inspired in him, along with envy, an immediate, baseless respect, slightly craven and limp.

How stupid, and how pitiful!

He put on an aloof and superior air, checked his watch. He glanced at the ground-floor windows of his apartment building and was relieved to see no sign of movement behind the sheer curtains. He would rather Trevor not see him trying to sell the four-wheel drive to a man of this sort, exactly the type Trevor made a great show of mocking, with their tailored suits and their gym-room physiques.

“OK, it’s a deal,” said the man, striding athletically towards him, his young, tanned face friendly and, Richard Rivière fleetingly thought, almost fawning.

“You’ll take it?” he asked, surprised.

Collecting himself, he added:

“You won’t be sorry.”

The man inside Richard Rivière who forever strove to decipher a customer’s uncertainties or unspoken misgivings thought he could make out an anxious little twinge behind the smile, a touch too unwavering, and the gaze, a touch too ostentatiously frank, in this man whose elegance was perhaps also, in the end, just a little too impeccable, he thought, every detail as if carefully weighed for its charismatic effect.

But why must those intuitions always be silenced by the Richard Rivière who was intimidated by wealth or its appearance, and anxious to sell what he had, to be rid of it, like some ill-gotten gain?

As the free, severe, impotent part of him whispered that question in his ear, he glanced again at the ground floor of his building and saw the kitchen window ajar.

That meant Trevor was up, eating his breakfast, perhaps observing his stepfather’s obsequious charade from his chair, with that awful little smirk he’d developed, full of smug, listless irony. Trevor’s implacable judgements meant nothing to Richard Rivière, but he did not like being spied on, did not like feeding the young man’s mindless censoriousness at his expense.

He turned his back to the window, irritated, and grimaced a smile at his customer, who was explaining that he was planning to give the car to his wife as a present. Yes, yes, let’s get this over with, he thought.

His eye lit on the man’s white cotton shirt, darkened by two little sweat stains on either side of the purple polka-dot tie. A few drops of sweat, too, he observed, between the upper lip and the nose, so short and straight that it must have been artificial, surgically reshaped.

Richard Rivière felt preoccupied, out of sorts, he didn’t know why.

He’d forgotten about Trevor. He’d almost forgotten that an overdressed stranger was on the verge of buying a Grand Cherokee for forty-seven thousand euros without haggling, nearly five thousand more than he’d paid for it at the Jeep dealership.

Come on, let’s get this over with, he was thinking, depressed, his mind elsewhere, but fixated in spite of himself on such trivialities as the beads of sweat glinting on the man’s suntanned skin or the way he stuck out his lower lip after every sentence to blow at the lock of hair draping his brow. The lock fluttered up, and Richard Rivière saw the pale skin, fragile and tender, at his hairline.

He would later realise that the wide-awake Richard Rivière inside him had tried to sound the alarm. Wasn’t this man clearly nervous, though a skilled enough actor to give himself away only by a sudden sweat in the chilly air of this autumn morning?

He would also realise, later, that he had refused to understand out of sadness and weariness, perhaps even that he had understood but wouldn’t accept it, because sadness had suddenly got the better of him.

He looked past the man’s shoulders at the mountain, still covered with snow, and the bright, frozen sky beyond.

Nine years he’d been living in Annecy, and he’d never got used to the mountains. They left him cold, wary, vaguely hostile, because he enjoyed none of the pleasures they seemed to offer, and he found them unfriendly, stupid and portentous in the way they loomed over the city.

He had never wanted to learn how to ski, he did not like the atmosphere of the resorts, the pointlessness of such arduous exertions.

Sometimes he woke with a start in the night, shivering as if shaken by a huge icy hand, and then he got up, went to the window, and found the mountain looking at him in the dull grey darkness.

The idea that it would always be there, when he got up and when he lay down and long after he was dead, immovably there and watching, discouraged him.

He lay down again with the disagreeable feeling that he wasn’t his own master, that at any moment the mountain could blow a cold breath down his neck.

It could feel his dislike, and it scorned him, that was what he was thinking, and he had no-one to tell of it.

“I’d like to be paid by bank transfer,” he heard himself announcing, his voice almost hostile.

“Of course,” the man answered warmly.

Richard Rivière took a contract from his briefcase and handed it to the man, who sat down behind the wheel of the car to look over it.

He stayed outside, shivering, suddenly unable to rejoice at having so effortlessly made a sale that would bring him a tidy profit. What would he do now, what desire would enliven the days to come?

For the past several months, ever since he took out a loan to buy that four-wheel drive for resale, each new day dawned with that question, which he’d managed to turn into something exciting and even ennobling: Would this be the day that he sold the car?

Much of the pleasure he felt on waking each morning, much of the good cheer he displayed both at home and at work came from the idea of earning five thousand euros for doing virtually nothing. And now it was done, and he felt only a weary gloom, and now he dreaded the prospect of an existence stripped of that motivation.

And what, for that matter, would he do with the money? Nothing tempted him that he didn’t already own, and what did he actually have? Nothing much, compared to what his colleagues or wife thought important.

Sometimes he thought he spent money only to justify his urge to make money, and he alone knew his enthusiasm was feigned, that his interest in clothes, and now even in cars, was an act, borrowed from a personality he scarcely remembered as his own, now alien to him, and unpleasant, too. Visits to the city’s most lavish restaurants, multicourse menus, pricy wines he could not appreciate, every delight he felt obliged to indulge in left him bored or withdrawn.