Marie NDiaye - Ladivine

All of which left her slightly dazed and, for the first time, wearily apprehensive at the thought that in just a few hours her evening shift would begin, that she would have to smile and be cheerful, and hear her name rebounding off the walls like a wild bouncing ball, the beguiling name that was now hers but which, when she was tired, she sometimes feared she might not recognise.

Now and then she was awoken by that nightmare: the restaurant was packed, the customers all calling at once for Clarisse, and she standing there dully, aware they meant her but unable to move her limbs because she wasn’t hearing the magic word, and when finally someone began shouting “Malinka!” she went back to work, smiling and light-hearted, but by then the room had emptied, oh, how she dreaded that stupid dream.

But she could easily fight off exhaustion, bleariness, the weird feeling, disagreeable but short-lived, that she could half see the silver letters of her new name shooting through the room.

What she found infinitely harder, that day, as the lunch rush was winding down, was seeing her mother come in, the servant, just as she remembered her, her slim hips sheathed in a checked woollen skirt, her putty-coloured raincoat, the thick, woolly mass of her short hair, and her small-featured face, her distant, placid demeanour, the servant herself coming into the brasserie with the same steady, unhesitant gait as if she were entering her own flat, in the house at the far end of the courtyard.

Although she must surely have seen Clarisse just as Clarisse had seen her, their eyes did not meet.

Motionless behind the bar where she had just made a cup of coffee, Clarisse watched as her mother looked around and finally chose a table near the window, indifferent or oblivious to the suddenly closed, dull, frowning face of the boss, who gave Malinka’s mother an almost outraged stare, then lowered her eyes and carefully studied her watch, as if, looked at long enough, it would end up consenting to help her turn out that unwelcome customer, that lowly woman.

Lunch was nearly over, and yet, Clarisse noted, a torrent of re- assuring thoughts rushing into her mind as she turned towards the big clock on the opposite wall and stared at it vacantly, it was only 1.30. Often they had customers coming in until two.

She felt her boss’s gaze on her burning cheek.

“That coffee’s getting cold.”

The voice itself was cold, metallic, indignant. Slowly Clarisse turned to look at her, and her boss’s wary, surprised eyes locked with hers, and what she saw in them, something Clarisse knew nothing of, made the woman strangely calm, though her mood was still as ugly as ever.

“You’ll have to make another cup. And then you can deal with her over there,” she said, nodding towards Malinka’s mother.

Venomously, making sure Clarisse was still looking into her aggressive, suspicious eyes, she added:

“I hope she’s not going to make a habit of coming here. That wouldn’t be good for business.”

Clarisse brought the customer his coffee. Then she ambled to the table where her mother sat quietly waiting, her hands lying flat in front of her, her face turned to the window and the grimy, sunlit avenue, which rumbled with every passing truck.

Clarisse was moved to recognise her mother’s tiny, delicate ear, decorated with the little gilt ring she was never without.

She staggered under her anguish and sympathy.

She had written to the servant several times, less out of duty or compassion or in hopes of reassuring her than to safeguard her own freedom, fearing her worried mother might try to have her tracked down, although asking anyone for anything would not have been like the servant at all. She always signed her letters “Your daughter, M”.

And now her mother was looking up at her with her stoical face, her lower lip quivering all the same, her two hands no longer flat on the table but turned palm up in an instinctual gesture of supplication, a plea for mercy.

We do not know what earned us this treatment, we don’t understand it, those two calloused, tapering hands eloquently said, but what does that matter if it’s enough to ask for forgiveness, we can do that and more, whatever it takes, nothing would be beyond us. .

And Clarisse waited, deeply aware of her dead-eyed gaze, a stranger’s gaze, strictly professional, but feeling her own lip tremble no matter how hard she tried to keep her mouth tightly, severely shut.

“I’d like, maybe, a sandwich?” the servant murmured questioningly.

“Yes?” Clarisse answered in the same tone, because she had adopted that style of seeming never quite convinced of what she was saying, viscerally grasping all the mystery and charm this created, especially combined with her hushed, artificially muffled voice.

But it was not right to be charming the servant, or seeming mysterious before her pleading eyes. Fleetingly, Clarisse was ashamed of her enticing voice, that display of something slightly seedy in the life she now lived.

“I’ll bring you a ham sandwich,” she whispered, and her mother nodded, lost, smiling her mirthless smile, wanting to add something to mark the occasion and then giving up, as if warned off by some internal adviser more reasonable than herself, as if cautioned that this Clarisse was not exactly her daughter Malinka, that what was happening here was less a reunion than a first meeting.

She looked away, docile and adrift, seeming suddenly intimidated.

Clarisse pivoted on her heels, finding a reflexive and habitual pleasure in the feel of her nylon-clad thighs rubbing together.

Her boss was watching, with her sharp, slightly sardonic, experienced gaze.

Realising the other customers had all gone on their way, Clarisse felt her face turn red, though she knew her mother had not spoken her old name, Malinka. It was almost two o’clock, the café was often deserted at this hour.

But her boss knew, she knew everything, and she looked at Clarisse without hostility, with a sort of hard sadness, as if Clarisse had betrayed her, but she understood why and accepted it, then her eyes once again swept over Clarisse’s long legs, narrow hips and thin face, now probably not to measure that slender body’s resilience but to gauge its likeness to that other body, the body of the black woman sitting up very straight in her chair near the window. Once her mother had eaten her sandwich and paid her bill, Clarisse took her down the street to the little room where she lived.

She usually devoted these idle hours before the dinner shift to a nap, and she found herself longing to slip into her bed as usual, knowing her mother would think nothing of it, would simply settle into the room’s only chair and wait in unbroken silence. But she felt too much on edge even to think of sleep. And the thought that she might nonetheless have managed to drift off, forgetting the servant’s presence, and then waking with nothing resolved, to the revelation that her mother was there, patient, immovable, that thought humiliated and irritated her at the same time.

How she wished her mother could be happy far away, without her, how she wished that, wrapped up in her own happiness, she might lose all interest in her daughter Malinka, how she wished, even, that her mother’s love were monopolised by other children! How the weight of that unused love exhausted her, that vast but humble, mute love, irreproachable! How her own sympathy weighed on her!

“You can take off your raincoat,” she said, with some sharpness in her voice, seeing the servant meekly keeping it on out of politeness.

Her mother carefully folded the raincoat and laid it on the bed.

She stood there, her discreetly approving gaze surveying the neatly made bed, the clean linoleum, the white sheer curtains at the window, and although she said nothing her silence was neither heavy nor eloquent, it was the peaceful, homey silence that once reigned in their house, the foundation of their entente.