Marie NDiaye - Ladivine

“Um, just to be sure.”

For once, Richard Rivière couldn’t help noticing, Trevor had neglected to mask his unease behind a sarcastic, moronic or arrogant front. His face bore an almost childlike expression of respectful, intimidated interest.

Rather than feel moved or simply indifferent, Richard found a savage rage burning inside him, because it was Clarisse Rivière’s murder that had brought about this change in the boy. That’s the one thing that excites him, he thought, feeling his own furious, savage excitement, but also suspecting that Trevor was not so much excited as shaken, and, in his dull way, frightened.

He went on breathing in noisy little gasps, rubbing the inflamed wings of his nose with his thumb and index finger, making the pain even worse. But so terrible was the gnawing hurt in his heart that this other pain was almost a relief.

He wanted to snuff out the boy, see him disappear from the kitchen, where he’d just spoiled his lunch, from the apartment, bought with a loan in his own name and no-one else’s, and finally from his life, perpetually poisoned, he thought, by Trevor’s presence.

There was nothing he wanted less than to talk about Clarisse Rivière with Trevor. The mere thought of it sickened him.

When Clarisse Rivière was murdered, three years before, Trevor was still living in Switzerland, and neither Richard Rivière nor Clarisse, Trevor’s mother, ever told him what had happened, nor Clarisse’s other two children, twin brothers in their thirties who drifted from city to city in the south of France, so rarely heard from that Richard Rivière was always stunned to remember that they existed.

Those few years together, temporarily free of Clarisse’s three wearying children, were the one happy period of Richard Rivière’s life in Annecy, and now he missed it bitterly, as if he’d been perfectly happy in those days.

He had not, but he never expected to be, never even hoped to be, and so that sedate existence with an agreeably ordinary woman seemed the best he could wish for, and he enjoyed what he thought of as his good fortune, the bland, restful, soothing pleasure of a halfhearted attachment, of a daily routine without turmoil or upheaval.

Then Trevor came back from Switzerland, where he’d failed to start up a modest computer repair business with two friends. That project had struck Richard Rivière as nebulous in the extreme from the start, and because he had serious doubts about Trevor’s skills, given his uselessness when any little thing went awry with the family computer, he saw the young man’s shamefaced, bitter return as simply one more in a logical series of very predictable defeats.

And among his own string of defeats, thought Richard Rivière, was Trevor’s return.

He wasn’t particularly surprised that he had to endure this ordeal, oh no. He might well be forced to go on living with Trevor for years to come, maybe till he died.

Sometimes he rebelled at that prospect, as now, wishing he could expunge the young man from his life. And yet secretly he had accepted it, as fitting punishment for everything he’d failed to grasp in the past, when Clarisse Rivière was alive.

Now and then he wondered if the sight of Trevor’s decline, that ruined body, that panting breath, those endless jeers, was intended to test him: what would he do this time, faced with such obvious signs of distress? What would he fail to grasp now?

But he rejected that suspicion, wearily telling himself that he’d never promised to love or protect this young man. And hadn’t he been punished enough as it is, accepting that his life had turned so unpleasant, accepting that it might never be any more serene or agreeable, accepting that he was irreparably guilty of betraying Clarisse Rivière?

That he accepted, yes, but he admitted it to no-one. He’d sensed that his daughter Ladivine blamed herself, and wanted him to do likewise. He refused. He thought he’d be taking the easy way out, seeking consolation for his shattered soul, if he gave in to the temptation of mutual despair and shared tears. He was bitterly sorry he couldn’t give Ladivine that gift, an admission of guilt, but he thought it ignoble to give up any part of that guilt. It was his fault and he knew it, so why seek to lighten the punishment?

He wanted to be alone with his remorse, with his difficult days. He did not want to suffer less. He wanted what he deserved.

What poor Ladivine thought she had to feel guilty for was nothing.

He believed he’d told her that one day on the phone, unless he’d thought it but never said it, he no longer knew.

What could you possibly have done, so far away, with your children, your own life to lead? Could you have prevented your mother from seeing that guy, from spending time with anyone she pleased?

How he hoped he’d said that! He vowed to telephone her that evening and make sure, and ask how the holiday had gone, if she’d met the Cagnacs, if she’d had a little fun in that country he’d suggested.

He felt an odd hope stirring inside him, the hope that she might have something to tell him. Because he had made several visits to that country, though in the beginning he knew nothing about it, had never been told of it, ostensibly to look into the market for imported cars, but in truth cars were the last thing on his mind.

He did not know it, but he was awaiting a revelation, and that revelation never came, and only when he found that nothing had come, that he was as empty and unquiet as when he arrived, did he realise he’d been awaiting it.

He put on his glasses and smiled vaguely at Trevor, who was making his usual dish of pasta with cream and lardons, facing the stove, not looking at him. He stood up, put his plate and cutlery in the dishwasher.

He thought the kitchen looked dowdy, messy and sad, and yet he’d put more money into this one than any of the flat’s four rooms.

He’d had it completely remodelled, with a slate floor and pale grey glass tiles on the walls. The built-in elements were finished in dark grey, the table was a glass plate with black metal legs.

In the early days, he and Clarisse found that kitchen so beautiful and so elegant that they scarcely dared use it, and frying was out of the question for months.

And yet here as usual was Trevor browning his lardons on high heat, spattering grease on the gleaming black hob and the little tiles around it.

All sorts of things that had no place in a kitchen cluttered the marble worktop and the corner bench, its pale-rose patterned chintz now dark with wear and heavily food-stained: DVD cases, flyers, a scarf, plastic bags carefully folded in four.

The fact that Clarisse or Trevor could go to the trouble of folding a plastic bag and then simply leave it on a chair or on top of the refrigerator, as if the very minimal act of folding it made it a pleasing sight, wearied Richard Rivière beyond measure.

He had an awful feeling that the irreparable loss of his kitchen’s purity was a sign of his own life’s disintegration.

He pictured the bathroom, which had also required much thought and tens of thousands of euros, and those months-long deliberations had plunged him into a state of happy beleaguerment that he didn’t regret in the least.

Spending hours on the Internet comparing total immersion tubs, sinks carved from a single slab of sequoia, mysterious, subtle taps, he felt intensely aware of his being, of his tense, quivering body, of his mind working to judge, to eliminate, to select, with a glorious self-assurance and the faint, thrilling terror that he might be spending far too much money.

But little matter, he applied for loans and inevitably got them, because he made a good living.

And that feeling of being at once outside and fully inside himself, in his self’s heady depths, now suddenly open and luminous but unburdened by care and remorse, by unease and difficult days — however ephemeral, that feeling was beyond price.