Marie NDiaye - Ladivine

Less driven, Richard Rivière felt cynical next to her, slightly fraudulent, burned out.

He wasn’t, he knew. He was methodical, prone to anxiousness, particularly since his move to Annecy, where he couldn’t quite resign himself to the certainty that he’d never feel at home, where the fear of a mistake in figuring a customer’s loan sometimes knotted his stomach, because what would then be questioned and judged, he thought, was not his competence but his very essence.

Clarisse came towards him with her broad, hearty smile, her warm, encouraging gaze, a reassuring sight for customers worried they might have blundered into a stupid misadventure when they walked through the dealership’s door.

She was so helpful, so cordial, so naturally likeable that some of them hesitated to disappoint her by declining to commit to a purchase on the spot.

And sometimes, she’d noticed, not quite knowing why, they did their best to avoid her when they next came, to escape the barrage of an attentiveness so generous that it could be wearing, Richard Rivière had more than once thought, affectionately amused.

The showroom was empty so soon after lunch, only two salesmen chatting in one corner, hands in their pockets, swaying to and fro on their heels, their slacks’ dark grey nylon stretched tight over their slightly ponderous rear ends.

Clarisse brushed his cheek with her lips. She wore high heels for work, making her face more or less level with his, small though she was.

As usual, he stared intently at her face, longer than he should in such everyday circumstances, a face he’d known for six or seven years.

And as always he hid his disappointment by murmuring whatever came to mind, always intended to please her in one way or another, for she must never know how let down he was, since it was in no way her fault.

“I sold the Cherokee, the guy didn’t even bargain.”

She raised one thumb in a victory sign.

She was plump, vital, her body an assemblage of firm curves. Her face was open and simple, unmysterious, but Richard Rivière was forever hoping another face might show behind it, a face he wouldn’t know but would immediately recognise as the real face of Clarisse Rivière, not the one he’d been wed to for twenty-five years but the one he’d never managed to seek out and find, he thought, behind the impersonal, irreproachable, innocent woman he’d ended up leaving, too bored and frustrated to go on.

He knew what he was waiting for, that apparition on Clarisse’s face, and he silently berated himself for his credulity and duplicity.

Because the face that she offered him, suspecting none of this, was nakedly trusting.

But he could not help himself, and he searched those features for some revelation: at long last, he desperately hoped, he would know who Clarisse Rivière had been.

The two women had nothing in common apart from their name, but the fact that this was the face of a Clarisse, that it was stamped and suffused with those very syllables, authorised him, quite logically, he thought, by the rules of his own irrationality, not to lose hope that he might one day see Clarisse Rivière’s real face showing through.

What that face would be he had no idea.

He knew only this: the sight of that face would instantly fill the great emptiness he had in him, amid a tangle of insipid material longings, petty terrors, annoyances.

He would feel less guilty, he would almost feel redeemed, if Clarisse Rivière’s soul did him the mercy of showing him the face that he couldn’t find before.

She would still be alive had he tried to reach her back then — but why had she striven so to stop him?

Why had she set out to make herself impossible to love, transformed herself into a figure without qualities, the image of a fleshless, evanescent, unbearable perfection?

From her intent, faintly questioning air, he sensed that Clarisse was saying something about Trevor.

He pretended to listen, nodded as a thought came to his mind and transfixed him with sorrow.

That Moliger, her killer, had he seen Clarisse Rivière’s real face? Did he see it as he watched her die? Or before, when he lived with her?

“He’d be more likely to go if you took him,” Clarisse was saying. “I think he’s embarrassed to go to the doctor with his mother. That’s the only reason he doesn’t want to, I’m sure of it. And one of us has to be with him, you know how he is, he’ll never tell us everything the doctor says if it makes him uncomfortable.”

“A doctor?” he echoed.

“He’s not in good health at all, not at all.”

“He eats too much,” he murmured, distant, bored.

“Oh, not that much, for his size and his age. Young people have to eat a lot, everybody knows that.”

“He eats too much,” he said again, now aware that he was annoying her but unwilling to promise to take Trevor anywhere. “Incidentally, I sold the Cherokee.”

“I know, you just told me.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure!”

Being an unaggressive, fundamentally generous woman, she chose to let the matter drop.

She gave a little laugh and patted his cheek, like a mother.

Her brown-dyed hair fell in waves around her full, opaque face, which was only itself, innocent and trustworthy.

And Richard Rivière was torn between the respect he owed that face and his yearning to see it fade away to reveal the other.

He spent the afternoon at his computer, studying the supply of available cars.

He regularly left his desk, when people came in and the salesmen were all busy, to keep the waiting customers company.

He offered them coffee, asked a few questions, affable, assiduous, informed, but his mind was not there, and without even knowing it he summoned up memories of the hundreds of times he had done this before, smile, ask questions, point the customer towards a salesman, because he was thinking about none of that.

His thoughts jumped from subject to subject, freed of his control.

And, perhaps because he remembered resolving to call his daughter Ladivine, he thought of the Cagnacs, and an unpleasant feeling started to nag at him, something dark and jealous that he was not used to, that took him by surprise.

The Cagnacs were the only friends he’d made in Annecy.

They’d met at the dealership, five years before, and their Périgord roots had had far more to do with their pull on him than their quick, fuss-free decision to buy the most expensive car of the line.

The Cagnacs were in the restaurant business at the time, bored and wanting a change.

And Richard Rivière took them to that country he’d already visited alone several times.

He’d chosen it purely by chance, he told them sincerely, because at the time that’s what he thought, as he was searching the Internet for a sunny holiday spot one night, and everything he found there enchanted him, and not a year had passed since that he didn’t go back, and Clarisse never came with him, and never asked to.

And it occurred to him, since his friends the Cagnacs were looking for a new direction in life, to suggest that they open a dealership there.

He’d seen to getting them settled, doing far more than a new friendship demanded, with a zeal and a generosity that even left the Cagnacs a little wary.

But they soon realised he’d take no cut from their profits.

Richard Rivière knew he was too scrupulous, too honest, he had too much confidence in his own integrity, for their suspicions to last.

Saint-like, never seeking to defend or justify himself, his devotion never flagging, he held fast to the strange joy of setting the Cagnacs up in their business.

He visited them regularly, rejoicing in their success as if it were his own.

And yet, once he’d left them, once he was back on the plane to Annecy, he could not hold off a sense that the Cagnacs were not exactly letting him down, but neglecting some vital duty, which he couldn’t define for sure, but which they should have grasped all the same, that they weren’t repaying him for everything he’d done for them, and, in their disappointing insensitivity, did not know it.