Ladivine (4 page)

But what had been said in that classroom, what that exemplary girl had heard and thought she understood, she couldn’t remember.

She read and reread what she’d written, and it meant nothing to her, had nothing to do with anything she’d managed to hold in her mind, itself nothing more than a magma of words and numbers, misshapen ideas, incoherent hypotheses, which she ended up laboriously dredging through in search of something she could use, almost anything, to fill up a page with her shapely, magnificent handwriting.

Sometimes she forgot she was writing sheer nonsense and abandoned herself to the pure pleasure of the presentation; she spent ages scripting the date, or marking off the margins, or crafting elaborate capital letters, all curlicues and meanders.

That lowly, solitary Malinka made what she called friends at school, but looking back Clarisse Rivière would understand that in truth it was only a little clan of two or three teenage girls that Malinka had somehow slipped into, almost unnoticed, less in hopes of remedying her loneliness than in obedience to the rules of student life as, with her keenly observant instinct, she understood them.

She knew absolutely nothing about those girls, who never spoke of personal matters in her presence and seemed to tolerate her only out of curiosity, perhaps wondering at their own tolerance, their own curiosity.

Malinka wished she could learn everything about them, as if she might thereby understand her own existence.

But, although she was so unassertive that gazes slid over her with nothing holding them back, those girls perhaps unconsciously limited their talk to everyday things whenever she came near, and it felt to Malinka like a sudden pall had been cast by the vague mass of her body, like a gray cloud blotting out the sun.

But she grew used to that, since it was her place.

She must also have known that by abandoning all hope of closeness with these girls she could consider herself excused from having to invite them over, into the house of the servant.

Because that was out of the question.

The thought of her friends meeting her mother sent her into spasms of almost amused revolt, so laughable was the idea.

She was nothing short of speechless when a teacher one day asked to meet with Malinka’s mother, looking faintly uncomfortable, as if, she told herself, all the more perplexed in that he could easily have let the matter drop there, he already knew it would never happen, because it was absurd, absurd.

But she said nothing, only nodded with her usual gravity.

He brought it up once more, she nodded once more, and then never again did she look up at him with a face hungry for approval.

And she avenged herself for that teacher’s blundering indelicacy by turning in papers untouched by her ardent desire for majesty, assignments without ornament, no curlicues, no colored underlining.

She turned sixteen during summer vacation, and never went back to school.

Clarisse Rivière would always remember the time that followed with a mix of incomprehension and terror, for it seemed that chance alone, or obedience to the whims of circumstance, guided the life of that girl Malinka, that empty-headed girl, as she often heard people say at the time: She’s a sweet girl, hardworking, but empty-headed.

The only fantasy she would gradually assemble involved the quarantining of her mother, the dismissal of the servant.

And since she could only subscribe to the judgment that she had nothing in her head, feeling that head fill with the single preoccupation of expelling her mother would convince her that she, Malinka, was a despicable person, her mind closed to everything but disloyalty.

The servant accepted Malinka’s decision to drop out of school without a word, perhaps because it seemed not a decision but a natural passage from one state to another, like a change of season.

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’d 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 summer vacation, 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 like she’d seen all this before.

The following summer, back in Arcachon, she suddenly told herself 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, colorless thoughts peopling her mind, because she wasn’t 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.

And with this a cold feeling filled her, 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 waiting tables in a café. She wrote 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 over her back like a silken drape.

“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’d become, this Clarisse with the beautiful, iron-straightened chestnut hair, with the smooth, breezy, winningly confident face, couldn’t hold back a twinge of refined, pitying contempt for the woman she was just a few months before, that clod who called herself Malinka and didn’t know a thing about makeup, that clueless girl with the hunted look in her eyes, that lowly girl who called herself Malinka.

She stopped setting tables and hurried toward the kitchen, where her boss was calling for her.

“We’ve got a problem—your coworker 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 hadn’t waited as long as their watches said, and to memorize 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 one 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 she’d become! That important, irreplaceable girl!

The platefuls of grilled black sausage with mashed potatoes or roast chicken with french fries she balanced on her forearms made her vaguely and constantly nauseated, and sometimes, as she strode over the tile floor in her crepe-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 neighborhood 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 marvelous name.

No one ever guessed she’d once been a lowly Malinka, no one.

The customers loved Clarisse, so pretty, so good-humored, 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 guilelessly 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 up 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’d made, the way she’d 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 fullest, 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 braid 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, earnest, 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! Check, please, Clarisse!

All of which left her slightly dazed and, for the first time, wearily apprehensive at the thought that her evening shift would begin just a few hours later, that she’d have to smile and be cheerful and hear her name bouncing off the walls like a rubber ball, the beguiling name that was now hers but which, when she was tired, she sometimes feared she might someday stop recognizing.

Now and then she was awoken by that nightmare: the restaurant was packed, the customers all calling at once for Clarisse, and she stood there dully, aware they meant her but unable to move her limbs because she wasn’t hearing the magic word, and when someone finally began shouting “Malinka!” she went back to work, smiling and lighthearted, but by then the room had emptied out, 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 woolen skirt, her putty-colored raincoat, the thick, woolly mass of her short hair, and her small-featured face, her distant, placid demeanor, the servant herself coming into the brasserie with the same steady, unwondering gait as if she were entering her own apartment 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 didn’t meet.

Motionless behind the bar where she’d 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 reassuring thoughts rushing into her mind as she turned toward the big clock on the opposite wall and stared at it vacantly, it was only one thirty. 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 toward Malinka’s mother.

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