Marie NDiaye - Ladivine

One morning, as she was leaving for work later than usual and Malinka was still lying in bed, she observed in her calm, unsurprised voice:

“You’re not getting ready for school.”

“No,” said Malinka, “I’m not going anymore.”

And that was all. The servant nodded and went off to catch her bus.

The next day she told Malinka she had found her a job, babysitting for a family whose apartment she sometimes cleaned.

And Malinka went off to look after the children, and neither liked it nor didn’t. Sometimes, coming home in the evening, she caught sight of her mother on the bus, and pretended not to have seen her.

The servant discreetly refrained from calling out.

Her face turned resolutely to the window, Malinka felt her mother’s gentle, placid, ever-benevolent gaze on the back of her neck, and the furious pity she felt at this shook her like a first taste of strong drink, so numbed were her feelings, so dulled her thoughts.

She looked after the children all through the summer holidays, which they spent with their parents on the Bay of Arcachon.

This was her first time away from the suburbs of Paris, but standing by the ocean she felt as if she had seen all this before.

The following summer, back in Arcachon, she suddenly told herself that nothing was forcing her to go home to her mother.

This idea must have been inching along unbeknownst to her since the summer before, so indistinct that she never spotted it among the charmless, colourless thoughts peopling her mind, because she was not surprised to find that idea blossoming inside her, nor to know precisely what she would have to do, both to protect her independence and to put herself out of reach of her mother’s love and attentions.

Nothing said she had to go on being the servant’s daughter forever, she told herself.

A cold feeling filled her with this, but she knew that was more easily fought off than the desperate tenderness that coursed through her heart when she thought of her mother, even more utterly alone than she.

A few days after the children went home to Paris she handed in her notice and caught a train for Bordeaux, where she took a room in a modest hotel near the station.

She found work waitressing in a café. She wrote to her mother, telling her not to worry, and received no reply.

She now went by the name of Clarisse. There had been a Clarisse in her class at school, with long hair that fell down her back like a silky curtain.

“Hey Clarisse! Come here a sec, would you?”

“Be right there!” she answered in her happy, slightly muted voice,

which she worked to make faintly breathless and interrogative, thinking people found this particularly attractive.

She always shivered in delighted surprise on hearing her new

name, and although in the beginning she sometimes forgot to answer,

that was all over now, and the person she had become, this Clarisse

with the beautiful, iron-straightened chestnut hair, with the smooth,

breezy, winningly confident face, could not hold back a twinge of

refined, pitying contempt for the person she was just a few months

before, that clod who called herself Malinka and did not know a

thing about make-up, that clueless girl with the hunted look in her

eyes, that lowly girl who called herself Malinka.

She stopped laying tables and hurried towards the kitchen, where

her boss was calling for her.

“So annoying — your co-worker just phoned to say she won’t

be in for lunch, so you’ll be all on your own,” the woman said in

an anxious tone, eyeing Clarisse’s slight frame as if to measure that

delicate body’s endurance.

But she knew, because Clarisse had already shown her, just how

sturdy and steadfast that frail girl truly was, and Clarisse knew that

she knew, and her cheeks flushed with pride and excitement. How she loved those days when the other waitress didn’t come

in, when the lunch shift was entrusted to her alone! She had to be

even more efficient, resourceful and charming than usual, even livelier and friendlier, both to keep the customers happy, make them

think they had not waited as long as their watches said, and to

memorise the orders and never forget anything someone might ask

for out of the blue.

Striding lithe and quick through the dining room, she felt triumphant, exceptional: not many waitresses could handle thirty-five

customers without a single complaint, and never get the wrong

order or table, nor come across as anything but visibly and sweetly

unruffled.

Apart from the cook and her boss, no-one knew what a challenge

that was, for the challenge was precisely never to let a customer see

anything was amiss, and this made Clarisse, that clever girl, all the

prouder — that clever girl that she had become! That important,

irreplaceable girl!

The platefuls of grilled black sausage with mashed potatoes or

roast chicken with chips she balanced on her forearms made her

vaguely and constantly nauseous, and sometimes, as she strode

over the tiled floor in her crêpe-soled slip-ons, her disgust brought

gushes of burning acid up from her stomach, but she smiled and

talked, greeted and thanked in her quavering, muffled voice, with her

exquisite manners, making this Saint-Jean neighbourhood brasserie

feel like an upscale restaurant, and everyone found her so delightful,

so charming.

And the regulars knew her by name and casually called her

Clarisse, as if there were nothing odd about a girl such as her bearing

that marvellous name.

No-one ever guessed she had once been a lowly Malinka; no-one. The customers loved Clarisse, so pretty, so good-humoured, so good at her job, they loved her youth, which was never arrogant but innocent and fresh, and Clarisse felt it, and strove to seem even more perfectly unaware of the privilege of being so young, so pretty,

so perfectly healthy and trim.

And it was true, being young and beautiful meant nothing to her,

in the end. She wanted only to be an irrefutable Clarisse, with her

straightened hair, her pale eyes, her breathy voice rising at the end

of each sentence.

When evening came, in the room down the street that she rented

from her boss, she thought back over her day, pictured the moves

she had made, the way she had stood, tried to find things that could

still be improved on.

And whereas in school her fanatical urge for perfection had

nothing to focus on but the protocols of existence and the parameters of her homework, here she could finally use her intelligence

and acuity to the full, aiming to do her job in the most exemplary

way, leaving, in her conduct as in her sensibilities, nothing to find

fault with.

She paid vigilant attention to the tiniest details. Every morning

she studied her face and hands, checked and rechecked her black

skirt and beige blouse for spots, pulled her hair into a tight plait and

coiled it around her head.

Then she powdered her face to give it an impersonal air, to ensure

that it showed no sign of fatigue, and no emotion other than those

— joy, pleasure, enthusiasm — she so wanted to display. How she loved her face in the morning, powdered, serious and

inanimate!

That was how Clarisse was meant to be in the eyes of the world,

a wonderful girl whose good points were all you ever saw, because

there were no bad ones. And how that Clarisse was loved! *

That day, then, she handled the lunch shift alone, and as usual she never slipped up. And her name rang out from one end of the room to the other: Clarisse, when you get a moment! Hey, Clarisse, more bread! Bill, please, Clarisse!