Marie NDiaye - Ladivine

Nothing in this world, he thought, quite met his desires, but what those desires were he couldn’t say.

That reticence before everything that should have made him happy, everything he seemed to want from his work, from his cogitations and calculations, dated back to the year after he’d left Langon. Oh, he saw it now, even if he had denied it at first. He saw it.

He was sick, in a way, but his illness had no name, and wasn’t easily described, even to himself. Was it nostalgia?

It was not what he once knew, what once was, that he missed; what he missed was what should have been, or could have been, had he only known how to go about it.

Because he missed not Clarisse Rivière but the woman Clarisse Rivière should or could have been, a woman he didn’t know, a woman he couldn’t so much as imagine, and that, he thought, was nobody’s fault but his own.

Through the windscreen he saw the man sign his name at the bottom of the contract, where he himself had already signed. That was that.

The buyer got out of the car, displaying a broad expanse of raspberry socks and, just above them, two slender shins, orange-tanned and hairless like his face and his soft hands, every fingernail highlighted by a white pencil line under the tip.

There was something comical about such fastidious grooming, Richard Rivière thought to himself, and yet once again he felt inadequate before that younger, taller, fitter, better-looking man, he felt horribly heavy and worn and provincial.

At such times he always feared a resurgence of the faint south-western accent he’d struggled to disguise even when he lived in that part of France, as a precaution, on the theory that losing it couldn’t possibly hurt and might one day prove useful, and because it made him secretly proud not to speak like his parents. But his accent had not gone away, he knew, he’d only tamed it, and emotion could always bring it back. He had particular difficulty saying cette rather than c’te , and so at work never referred to a car as cette voiture , sticking to the far less risky ce véhicule .

“You can pick it up as soon as the money’s in my account,” he said, casually kicking one foot towards the four-wheel drive.

“You’ll have it the day after tomorrow,” the man said.

He blew on his forelock, flashing a practised, perfect smile. How charming and slim he was in the blue mountain light! A master skier, obviously, able to cut pure, complex lines in the snow, like his signature’s long, self-assured strokes.

Richard Rivière had planned to offer him a cup of coffee in the apartment if the deal went through, but now he didn’t feel up to it. Suppose Trevor appeared in his old pyjama bottoms, hangovers from his teenage years, and possibly bare-chested, his hair unkempt, suppose he spoke to the customer with that irritating way of giving a caustic turn to the most ordinary words, having already judged you too dull-witted to notice the sarcasm, or his contempt for you

— between his exasperating stepson, whose every supercilious little manoeuvre he knew all too well, and this man who to his deep shame intimidated him, Richard Rivière had lost all confidence in his ability to stifle his accent.

What cruel joy Trevor had felt, one evening when they were celebrating his mother’s birthday and Richard had drunk a full bottle of champagne, on hearing his stepfather wisecracking with a Toulouse accent! Weeks afterwards, Trevor was still forever shouting Merci bieng! and erupting into a mirthless laugh, hard and triumphant, as if he’d finally put his finger on the most contemptible thing about Richard Rivière.

The man drove off in the strange, battered little car he’d come out in — not his, he’d immediately made clear, but on loan from the garage while his own was being serviced.

Wasn’t it odd, Richard Rivière mused, that a man so obsessed with his appearance should go putt-putting around in such a ridiculous car? Or was that merely the sign of an elegance too self-assured to care what others might think? If so, why was the man so bent on informing him that it wasn’t his car? What did he care if Richard Rivière was surprised?

His inexplicable dejection faded, and for a few minutes, as he stood in the car park of his building, he congratulated himself on selling the four-wheel drive.

In the distance, the mountaintops were shrouded in clouds.

Now he could see only the pink and brown roofs of the old town below him, only the gentle, green slopes halfway up the mountains, like the hills between Langon and Malagar, where, some Sunday mornings, he used to go walking with his daughter Ladivine.

How much better he felt with the snow out of sight!

But that relief led his memory, suddenly roused and enlivened, to bring back old images of long drives with Clarisse Rivière, early in their marriage, leisurely jaunts through the vine-covered hills in their old Citroën 304, the top down, both smoking and talking, he thought at the time, in his happiness, in the bliss of a young man deeply in love, with a sweet, innocent frivolity — or his walks on those same roads with his serious, attentive, very young daughter, starting from just behind their house, and so exquisite sometimes was the feeling of the child’s hand in his, of the forthright, benevolent sun, of the child’s limpid, upturned gaze, that he would have wept with gratitude and trembled in terror had he not held himself back, lest he frighten the girl.

Such memories did him no good.

Colleagues his age, even his wife, however luckless with her children, seemed to love reminiscing about their days as young parents, when their joys were stronger and deeper than now, they said fatalistically, now that their job was essentially to resist as best they could those charmless children’s demands for money or favours, and to fight off their own disappointment.

Richard Rivière was not at all disappointed at the young woman his little girl had become. In his eyes, she was an entirely successful adult.

And the two children she’d brought into the world, whose pictures she often sent him, those two little Germans he’d never seen, seemed two perfect little human beings themselves.

He had nothing to regret but his own agonising unease. Because he could no longer bear to see his daughter Ladivine, nor even to think about her for long.

He himself found this scandalous. What kind of father was he?

He wasn’t much good in that way. He was no good at all, now, in that way.

But how could it be helped?

Every meeting with his daughter, every phone call, every daydream about his child brought him back to the awful feeling that the three of them had lived a life deformed by something huge and unnameable, hovering over them but never taking shape or fading away, making of their life a hollow travesty of life.

It began four or five years after their wedding, and he was convinced it had nothing to do with the child or with him, but with Clarisse Rivière.

Sometimes those Langon years seemed so artificial that he wondered if that life was real, and not merely a dream he’d had, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

He’d been happy enough in those days, he knew, but he couldn’t feel it, because the memory of that happiness was tainted by a sense of unreality, almost perversion, that blotted out all the rest when he thought about the life he once led.

Perhaps there was no ill intent behind that perversion. But if he believed that he’d unwittingly loved, lived with, procreated with a simulacrum, dimly sensing it and finding it deeply repellent, what did it change that that imaginary woman wasn’t responsible for her state?

For so he thought. Still today, he held Clarisse Rivière blameless.