Marie NDiaye - Ladivine

What did his magnificent turquoise faience-tiled bathroom look like now?

He knew all too well, and he bridled in advance at what would be waiting for him when, in a few moments, he finished his coffee and went off to brush his teeth, comb his hair: towels tossed haphazardly over the heated rails, wadded against the wall behind them, draped any which way in front, Trevor’s toothbrush abandoned on the glass shelf, worn, dishevelled, ill-rinsed, and Trevor’s clothes, which he never dropped into the Grand Hôtel laundry basket but always to one side of it, and the glass shower door that Trevor never wiped down, white with water stains.

It was beneath him to care so deeply about such trifles, Richard Rivière told himself. And yet. .

Though he accepted the meticulous, unstoppable demolition of his life because he’d baulked at the strange labour of knowing Clarisse Rivière and because, in his cowardice, he’d let that woman he once so loved race unhindered towards her perdition, he could not bear the thought of Trevor, and to a lesser degree Clarisse, carelessly or wilfully befouling that existence’s setting, for it could be painful and dark, but absolutely not dirty and disordered.

“Kind of weird that Mum’s also named Clarisse, though, isn’t it?”

Trevor’s eyes were glued to his plate, his tone hurried and gruff.

“It’s a common enough name, you know,” Richard stammered.

Flustered, he gave up on making himself a cup of coffee. He left the kitchen with the disagreeable feeling that he was running away, and the suspicion that Trevor knew it.

No sooner was he outside than the mountain pounced on his back. He forbade himself to look at it. Nonetheless, the image of that

mountain sternly poised against the bright, blinding sky seemed to

have fixed itself on his retina, because he could still see it now, even

without raising his eyes, and he could feel its fearsome weight on his

spine, its cold claws on the back of his neck, like a corpse latching

onto him before he could shake free, before he could even think. An aching homesickness for his native Gironde, a clement place

without snowy slopes or skiers, put a lump in his throat, so fleetingly

that he only had time to realise where it had come from. His back hurt.

Stooping, he started out to the car park. He’d sold the four-wheel

drive that morning — wasn’t that good news?

He decided to pay off one of his loans, the one he’d used to

replace the bedroom’s squares of white carpet with Burmese hemp. The carpet was only two years old at the time, but the traffic lanes had gone grey, and that daily reminder of his foolishness in choosing white for the floor so gnawed at Richard Rivière that, awakened one night by the mountain’s insidious growl, he sat down at the com

puter and ordered twenty square metres of Burmese hemp. He was much happier with it now, except that the hemp was so

rough and the weave so coarse that he and Clarisse had to forgo the

pleasure of going barefoot. He tried it at first, and his soles stung

for two days.

“Monsieur Rivière, I want a word with you.”

She had the fierce, despotic air of the pampered women who

seemed to abound in this neighbourhood and this city, a thin, suntanned face beneath pale, fluffy hair.

She knows my name, he told himself, surprised. He had no idea

of hers, though for the nine years he’d lived in that building they’d

been neighbours.

He stopped by his car, eyebrows raised in an expression of interest, automatically switching on his businessman’s smile. But she

didn’t even repay him with a tight smile of her own. Her lavishly

ringed hand lashed the air before her face, telling him don’t bother,

the time for feigned conviviality was over. He couldn’t recall the

slightest disagreement with this woman.

The mountain was pressing on his spinal column with all its

weight. Stifling a grimace, he leaned on the bonnet of his car. “I’ve been wanting to see you for at least a week, Monsieur

Rivière, but I never managed to run into you, and you’re not here

during the day, there’s only that boy, not very friendly, may I say,

not particularly well raised, if you understand me. In any case, this

isn’t about that.”

She inhaled mightily, with a sort of refined disgust.

Through the yellowish fluff of her hair, like a very young child’s, he could see the dull white skin of her scalp. Her face, her skeletal

hands, everything else looked as if it had been seared.

“It’s that four-wheel drive of yours, Monsieur Rivière. I believe

you’re allotted one single parking space, like the rest of us. Your

vehicle’s so wide that I can’t get into my place when there’s a car

parked on the other side. It takes me four or five tries, and all that

because you’re encroaching. And then how am I supposed to get

out without rubbing up against the car next door? I literally have to

extricate myself. I want it out of there, Monsieur Rivière, right now.” To his astonishment, he saw tears in the eyes of this flinty, authoritarian woman.

But she went on staring at him, bristling and unyielding. It was

he who turned away a little, rattled.

Could this be, that a tiny, unthinking act on his part had brought

someone to the brink of tears?

Suddenly he was ashamed to have forced that woman to let him

see her like this. He mumbled a few words of apology, then assured

her the annoyance was temporary, since he’d sold the four-wheel

drive.

“But you have to move it now, Monsieur Rivière, right now!” “As a matter of fact, I was just on my way to work,” he said, to

put an end to this.

The dealership was located outside the city, on the Val d’Isère road, so heavily travelled by cars laden with luges and skis that a sort of bad taste lingered in Richard Rivière’s mouth every evening.

It made him feel more exiled than ever, and different from his colleagues, not to mention from Clarisse, who’d been skiing since her earliest childhood, in a way that made him seem not just an outsider but a slightly lesser man.

He himself didn’t care, but sometimes he thought it must be annoying and embarrassing for Clarisse, as if he were forcing her to put up with an infirmity he’d kept secret, something no-one could seriously consider a grave failing, perhaps even legitimate grounds for regular teasing, but nonetheless, admit it or not, one that might well end up undercutting the fragile foundations of a couple come together late in their lives.

“I so wish I could ski with you,” Clarisse would sigh, melodramatically, to show she was joking.

And yet she did say it, he understood, because she couldn’t hold in that regret, and if there was one realm in which he could never begin to rival her children’s father, a real estate agent who in every other way wasn’t much of a husband, whom Clarisse had left almost as soon as Trevor was born, it was knowing how to ski.

Sometimes, when she couldn’t find anyone else, Clarisse invited her ex to go skiing with her. At this Richard Rivière felt only indifference.

He was simply unhappy for her, because he thought she must feel vaguely humiliated before her friends, before her ex, obliged to confess that she lived with a man who’d never strapped on a pair of skis in his life.

But she would say it without shame, he was sure, with that sweet, steadfast pride he so loved in her.

She was in the showroom, amid the cars, when he came in.

She was a saleswoman. She had a passion for her work, a way of ordering cars or dealing with sales contracts as if it were her calling, in return for which she asked neither salary nor thanks, but only the joy of knowing the customer was just as delighted as she was, and the other salespeople as well, for whom she was a staunch and sensitive colleague, never seeming to expect the same devotion from them, only wanting them to feel at home in her company, graciously making it clear that they could leave the heavy lifting to her, as well as the slightly exhausting late-afternoon displays of good cheer.