Marie NDiaye - Ladivine

Afraid of cats and suspicious of dogs, Ladivine Sylla deliberately looked away, not wanting to attract it.

But she did once more glance its way. It was a big brown dog, scrawny and shivering in the damp air.

A memory of Malinka surfaced in her mind, the child’s face looking up at Ladivine Sylla when she came home from work, in that tiny house at the far end of a courtyard, and herself trembling in gentle, grave astonishment when the girl’s pale eyes met her own.

Where had she come from, that child with sand-coloured eyes and straight hair but a face so like her own? And that dog, where did it come from, its dark gaze inexplicably calling Malinka to mind?

She understood that it meant her no harm, and she briefly turned back towards it, breathless.

An old image of herself came to mind, as far as could be from the little shepherdess’s cold face. She saw herself at a time when she was full of fury and hate, when her face was clenched around her pinched lips, her little quivering nose. Her anger at Malinka had become a rage at the spell that was gripping them both, and then even that had waned, replaced by a sad resignation.

But, in that angry time, she would sometimes wake in the morning and feel as if she’d been running all night. Her thigh muscles ached, her nostrils were red from breathing in drizzle or mist. Over what plains had she raced, over what meadows blew that wind whose grassy scent she thought she could still smell on the down of her arms? She longed to go back to that place where the wind had whistled in her ears, where the dry, packed ground had sustained her enchanted sprint, where the light, perfumed air had swept off her anger.

Because those mornings found her weary but freed of the impotent rage that was sapping her. Gradually it came back, but less virulent — exhausted from trying to maintain itself in those nocturnal sprints, of which Ladivine Sylla remembered nothing, except, now and then, a sensation of trickling warmth on her back, like flowing sweat on bare skin.

She turned away from the dog and started up the steps.

How old she’d become! Who would look after her when she was still frailer, who would lower her eyelids when she was dead, who would know she’d just died? Would Malinka? And that dog on the other pavement? What messenger would she have to announce her death? Who would care?

That Freddy Moliger might be sad. He alone would still sometimes think of her. *

After a two-hour wait in a little room whose dingy corners and crannies Ladivine Sylla inspected with a critical eye, to pass the time (so experienced was she in removing all manner of stains that she could see just what the cleaning lady would have needed — bleach, the right sponge, thirty minutes more — to erase the shoeprints from the tile floor, the marks left by the chair backs on the painted wall), she was finally ushered into the courtroom.

She studied the ground at her feet, suddenly troubled by a pressure in her ears, as if she’d too quickly dived to a very great depth.

She made out a hum of voices and movements around her, and the room seemed enormous and packed. A roaring filled her ears, she staggered on her high heels. Someone caught her by the elbow and asked, she thought she made out, if she was alright.

“Yes, yes,” she mumbled, embarrassed.

Nonetheless, the person kept a grip on her until she reached the stand, where Ladivine Sylla grasped the rail in relief.

Then she dared to look up, and found only friendly, attentive gazes.

She wondered if she should turn her head to look for that Freddy Moliger, then decided against it, vaguely afraid that this act might have the same force as speech, and remembering that she wanted nothing she said to have any meaning beyond what she hoped was the perfectly neutral sense of each word.

She gave them her name, as they’d asked. Then, when they asked her to verify that she was Clarisse Rivière’s mother, and although she’d tried hard to get used to the name Malinka had chosen, an old pride flickered to life, and she couldn’t help correcting:

“My daughter’s name was Malinka.”

The lawyer she’d met with, the one who introduced himself as Bertin, representing that Freddy Moliger, asked if she’d ever met his client.

“Yes,” she answered.

He asked if she enjoyed that Freddy Moliger’s company. “Yes,” she answered.

He asked if she’d even felt some affection for him.

“Yes,” she answered.

He asked if her daughter Malinka seemed happy with that Freddy Moliger.

“Yes,” she answered.

It took her a few seconds to grasp why her mind was desperately summoning up the image of her weeping figurines, and how they might help her now. Were they not called to suffer in her stead?

She swallowed, once again heard a dim, piercing plaint deep inside her ears.

Her figurines were meant to do the weeping, a frantic little voice was saying over and over in her head, so her own eyes would stay dry and no-one would know what she was going through. A thousand needles pricked her lower eyelids. She squeezed the rail with all her might, almost resigned, in her exhaustion, to let all her misery spill out.

But as it happened they had no further questions.

:

ladivine sylla remembered catching a glimpse of that man’s face as she turned on her heels to walk out of the courtroom. The anguish she’d read on his features, the dumbstruck stare he fixed on her without seeming to see her, as if, through her skin and her flesh, through her old porcelain-shepherdess face, he was probing a mystery that brought him no joy, all that made her think, curious and apprehensive, that she’d be seeing him again.

And now he’d knocked at her door, now she’d offered him the velvet armchair that was Malinka’s favourite, which she could no longer bring herself to use, now they were sitting face to face, without awkwardness, in no hurry to speak, knowing that what had to be said would be said, and perhaps, thought Ladivine Sylla, reflecting that there was no real need to say anything.

She needed only to know that he was Richard Rivière. Anything he might say to her of Malinka seemed beside the point now.

But she doubted, from his questioning, feverish air, bent forward in his chair and studying her, Ladivine Sylla, as if his searching gaze would eventually distract or wear down whatever it was in her that was refusing him, she doubted that he felt the same.

To put him at his ease, she’d sat down, their knees almost touching.

A pale winter light filtered into the cluttered little room. She offered him a cup of coffee, and he accepted reflexively, not even understanding what she was saying, she sensed, merely guessing that it was an offer of that kind.

And she could hear the water gurgling through the machine in her kitchen, she could hear it and look forward to the good coffee they’d soon be drinking, whereas Richard Rivière, absorbed in his quest or his wait, heard nothing, saw nothing, and never dropped that perfervid air, which she was almost tempted to mock, gently, so he would relax.

But no, that wouldn’t relax him at all. He might, she told herself, even see it as an answer.

And then Ladivine Sylla was taken by surprise, whether because she was paying too close and too proud an attention to her burbling coffee maker or because she was having too much fun picturing the look on Richard Rivière’s face if she began poking fun at him, and she heard the scratching at the door even as she realised it must have been going on for several seconds already.

She knew at once who it was. She jumped up, startling Richard Rivière.

“It’s the dog,” she whispered.

“The dog?”

He looked towards the door, lost. The scratching had stopped. The dog was patiently waiting, knowing it had been heard, thought Ladivine Sylla.