Marie NDiaye - Ladivine

There was nothing to do, thought Richard Rivière, staring down the violet shadow-shrouded mountain through the kitchen window, but accept the awkwardness.

“How was your holiday?” he finally asked, feeling as if he’d come back from far, far away.

“Ladivine didn’t come home with us.”

“What do you mean? She stayed behind?”

“Yes,” said Berger in a barely audible voice.

Richard Rivière himself didn’t know if the cry that then burst from his lips was a cry of terror or joy or excitement, disbelief or eager affirmation of what he’d just learned. He understood only that concern had no part in it at all.

His legs went weak. He turned his back to the mountain, now fading into the darkness, and dropped onto a chair.

“But why?” he choked out.

“I don’t know. She disappeared.”

“Then how do you know she’s still there?”

“I don’t know anything,” Berger slowly repeated, as if utterly drained. “That’s what I think. That damned country swallowed her whole, you understand? You never should have suggested it.”

“You met the Cagnacs?”

“Yes. That’s where Ladivine disappeared, at their house.”

“My God, oh my God!” cried Richard Rivière. “And they have no idea?”

“No. It wouldn’t mean anything to them anyway. All they care about is selling their filthy cars.”

Berger’s tone was so desolate that Richard Rivière wanted to comfort him.

But, realising he’d forgotten this young man’s name too, he dropped the idea.

The only name he could think of was Daniel, and he wasn’t sure it had any connection to Ladivine’s little family.

He fell silent again, pressing the telephone to his ear with all his strength as a hope full of terror and uncertainty rose up in him, and he found it at once exhilarating and shameful, because he couldn’t be sure Ladivine had not freely chosen to bring him, Richard Rivière, who had so long sought his way in the dark, the possibility of an understanding.

But what if she never came back?

In truth, he thought no such thing. He had faith in the instinct that had led him to settle the Cagnacs in that clearing, to work for their success, to want them to stay there forever.

But if it was true that Ladivine could get at what for him had always stayed hidden, he couldn’t be sure she was glad of that, that she hadn’t felt forced or cajoled into it by her father’s unspoken intentions.

What would she learn? What was there to learn? What was the place of Clarisse Rivière’s will in all this?

“Are you still there?” Berger asked.

“Yes, yes,” he whispered, starting, scarcely remembering who he was talking to.

“I’ve made a website, haveyouseenladivine.com. I’ve got a lot of responses, but so far nothing I can take seriously.”

“It’s no use. No-one will know.”

He immediately regretted his blunt words, and, though impatient to hang up, added:

“Oh, maybe they will. We mustn’t lose hope. Goodbye, Monsieur Berger.”

“Call me Marko.”

“Goodbye, Marko.”

“Don’t you want to talk to Daniel?” Berger almost shouted, desperate to keep him on the line. “He’s not like Annika, he’s willing to speak French.”

But Richard Rivière was petrified at the thought of conversing with an unknown little boy.

“Goodbye, Marko,” he said again, softly, and, as if to show Berger that the last thing he wanted was to be rude, he pressed the off button with a gentle, discreet finger.

Clarisse came home a few minutes later, with her slightly forced cheerfulness, her festive, overplayed, self-perpetuating enthusiasm, the work of Clarisse’s good-hearted spirit, thought Richard Rivière, grateful even if he couldn’t join in.

Because he could well imagine how hard it must be, after a long day at the dealership, to dig deep into oneself and draw out some semblance of joie de vivre just to keep everyone happy.

Clarisse had a special hatred of sullenness, of brooding silences heavy with vague resentments.

When the three of them were together she took care never to leave Trevor and Richard in the same room alone, fearing the emanations of spite and aversion she would feel spreading through the apartment, like toxic gas.

Sometimes Richard Rivière caught a helpless grimace on her still lips, when she turned away to open the refrigerator and, thinking no-one was watching, allowed her face to surrender to her real feelings, weariness, a longing to be alone, concern for Trevor and the two others, the twins she never heard from, who for all she knew might be dead or injured in a serious accident, no-one knowing whom to call.

Richard Rivière knew all that, felt indebted to Clarisse, because she was unbeatable, because she was never ashamed, because she always tried to do what was best.

He also knew he would never have dreamt of embarking on a love affair with this woman, his colleague since he first arrived in Annecy, were her name not Clarisse.

But that evening, in light of what Berger had told him, his irrational, enduring hope that Clarisse Rivière’s marvellous face might one day show itself seemed pointless and sad.

Something much bigger had come to pass.

Since he had not been granted the power to do so himself, it was his daughter Ladivine who would travel through certain domains and return with a revelation that would finally bring peace to her tortured father.

How he loved her at that moment! How he wished those two could once again be together, Ladivine and Clarisse Rivière with her real face, and talk of him with the same love he felt for them!

He was a long way from Annecy, a long way from Clarisse and Trevor, at long last free of the mountain’s baleful grip.

Through the window he looked at it, dark against the night sky, and his unburdened thoughts flew off far beyond it, his old foe frightened him no longer.

His one reunion with Clarisse Rivière, the day of his father’s funeral, very nearly led him to abandon his life in Annecy, and the apartment he was outfitting with such anxious care, and Clarisse and the very young Trevor, who’d moved in just the year before, and his work, where he could do no wrong.

He had come close to giving all that up, and he trembled in retrospective terror all the way home.

Because the Clarisse Rivière he’d found waiting was in every way the one he’d realised he could not go on living with.

In her liquid gaze he saw only her usual abstraction, slightly heartless despite its show of deep kindliness, the same strange, ghostly presence that had troubled him more with each passing year.

She seemed to be there, with her delicate, sinuous body, her beautiful face, unlined, as if polished, satin-smooth, but her being was somewhere else, bound to something he couldn’t understand, beyond his reach.

Clarisse Rivière was often awkward, shy beyond reason, unsure of herself — but that very diffidence had no depth to it.

Richard Rivière sometimes thought her a mere illusion of a human being, not wanting to be, perhaps not knowing she was — that he couldn’t say.

But her actions that day were those of a love without rancour, entire and intact.

She threw herself into his arms, pressed against him with all her might.

He recognised the feel of the firm, serpentine body he once so loved.

And as he also recognised, unnerved, almost frightened, the emptiness in her vague and impersonal gaze, and something he could only call coldness, which made him stiffen in incomprehension and discomfort, he felt for the first time an overpowering desire to see the real Clarisse Rivière.

Because, he understood only now, this wasn’t her.

He’d never seen or tried to see the real Clarisse Rivière, never realised or wanted to realise that he lived with her semblance alone.