Ladivine (7 page)

A dim memory briefly came back to her, a night spent with a coworker at Le Rainbow who took her to his place while his wife was away, with whom she’d made love for the first time, quietly aware that she wanted only to cast off her virginity, which she then saw, she no longer quite understood why, as a burden, and she’d set her sights on that friendly man on the theory that he’d know what to do. And it was fast, cold, and conscientious, like an expertly performed operation. And now, before this boy she loved, she was happy to have it behind her.

She saw his high forehead, tan beneath the luxuriance of his thick, straight hair, his brown eyes slightly veiled by uncertainty (maybe he’s a virgin, she told herself in a flood of protective tenderness), she saw his dusky, just barely pink skin, his full lips, the vigorous health of a very young man in the springtime of his life, and she silently mused that she would never love another like him, and silently thought of her existence to come and imagined it wholly devoted to two commandments that were two aspects of a single charge, to renounce Malinka’s mother and adore Richard Rivière, but never to fail in even her tiniest duty toward either.

Because, in all that time, she would never once skip her monthly visit to the servant, just as, she thought, she would never break her promise of absolute, passionate love for Richard Rivière.

They married three months later in Langon’s city hall, on a Thursday, so it wouldn’t seem like a special occasion.

The elder Rivières came from Toulouse for the day, and Clarisse, who hadn’t yet met them, thought she could feel the mother’s particularly dubious gaze studying her head to toe and doing nothing to hide it.

When their eyes met, Clarisse had to look away. The mother paid Clarisse a dishonest compliment on her interesting hair. Asking her maiden name, and hearing Clarisse stammer out the name of the servant as flatly and neutrally as she could, she inquired where it came from.

“From the north,” Clarisse mumbled.

And she knew Madame Rivière didn’t believe her, and also that, in a spirit of something like tact, Madame Rivière would never speak of it to Richard.

Clarisse found a job as a salesgirl in a clothes shop, then quit it to sign on as a waitress in a newly opened pizzeria.

The work was harder, but she loved taking the stage amid that unvarying spectacle, hearing the furious little music of her heels tapping the tile floor, feeling her arm muscles tense and harden when she brought out the plates, her response perfectly calibrated to the demands of the task, just as she loved the feeling, at the end of a shift, as she sat with a cigarette in the now-clean, empty room, of having once again successfully transmuted potential disarray, with the customers pouring in and all demanding quick service, into a smooth and efficient mechanism, so discreet as to seem effortless, of which, with her clacking heels, her youthful muscles, her quick thinking, she was at once the inventor and one of the gears.

She never told herself this in so many words, but she understood her new status made her love her work all the more.

Because she was now Clarisse Rivière, and that Clarisse Rivière had a husband who sometimes came to pick her up at the pizzeria, and everyone could see them together, affable and charming and wonderfully normal, and when they talked about her they would say: “Clarisse Rivière, you know?” never guessing that she might bear any other name or be anything other than she appeared, a simple and ordinary person.

And that awareness never left her as she strode briskly between the tables, the awareness that she was a married woman who would be named Clarisse Rivière until the end of her days, and never again, because now that was all over forever, a very young girl with no link to the world save the painful sense that she didn’t legitimately belong to it.

How she loved her husband’s gravity, his quiet but stubborn ambition, his uninquisitiveness! The few questions he’d asked about her childhood in the suburbs of Paris she’d answered cheerfully and laconically, inventing an existence so peaceful and happy that there was nothing more to say of it. And was that not, in fact, the truth? she thought. Her father was dead by that time, and then her mother died when Clarisse was…sixteen? Seventeen? She couldn’t quite recall.

Once, and the incident soon came to seem as unreal as a dream, she spoke the name Malinka in front of her husband. She might have said something like: “Malinka’s mother once cleaned some famous people’s apartment, and you can’t imagine how filthy they were!” But it might have been another sentence entirely, because, as after a dream, she couldn’t recapture it after she’d spoken it, or rather after Richard Rivière told her she had.

He didn’t bother to ask who Malinka might be, and Clarisse only gave a quiet little laugh.

Eyes flooding with tears, she stared at her husband’s shoulder, reminding herself that she could press her face to it whenever she liked.

After many elaborate calculations, Richard Rivière decided they could safely take out a loan, and they bought an almost new house on the edge of Langon.

He never talked much about his work at Alfa Romeo, but Clarisse understood that his devotion, his patience, the exercises he did with a manual in the evening, striving to learn everything he needed to know about the various finance plans he might offer the customers but also to work up a smooth and persuasive pitch, all these labors, she understood, were aimed at his goal of becoming a sales manager and even, one day, the general manager of his own dealership. He obliquely admitted as much, then never brought it up again.

That reserve was just fine with Clarisse, who took to visiting Malinka’s mother the first Tuesday of each month, never saying so but never lying outright.

She simply announced that she would be going to Bordeaux the next day, and Richard Rivière never asked what she had planned, but only smiled in that way of his, which she loved more than anything else, at once tender and absent, as if nothing really interested him but what he had in his mind at that moment, something to do with his work, she imagined.

It did not escape Clarisse Rivière that she loved his sweetly inattentive smile because it proved that she lived not in the very heart of his thoughts but a little outside, in a warm place, perhaps veiled by a serene shadow.

But that was just where she wanted to be, the better to safeguard her secret, to uphold her responsibility to the servant, on whom she heaped ever-more-generous attentions.

Her love for her mother was a foul-tasting food, impossible to choke down. That food dissolved into bitter little crumbs in her mouth, then congealed, and this went on and on and had no end, the lump of fetid bread shifting from one cheek to the other, then the soft, stinking fragments that made of her mouth a deep pit of shame.

She began bringing a little gift each time she went to visit Malinka’s mother.

She noted certain changes in her mother’s personality and behavior, that woman who, when they lived in the little house, never let any sorrow or displeasure trouble her eternal good humor or shrink the enormity of her indifference, and she was so aggrieved to see the servant turning suspicious and caustic, and sometimes even belligerent, that she longed to throw herself into the river, not to die but only to float, to drift toward the sea, toward the disappearance of all memory of her and the servant’s existence, toward absolution for all the wrongs she’d done her mother.

It was only her great debt to her mother that kept her from abandoning her anew in this way. But nothing shocked her more than to hear sarcastic asides and impotent little barbs flowing from her mother’s lips, that vile vermin being vomited up. She thought fate had mixed up her face with her mother’s, that it was she who, her voice ever gentle and calm, was befouling the honor of precious stones, of diamonds, and the still-greater dignity of self-mastery.

For even the servant didn’t recognize herself.

She would snicker sardonically as Clarisse entered the apartment, then fall silent, sorry and bewildered, and clap her hand to her mouth. She would mumble an excuse, and Clarisse realized she was afraid her daughter might stop coming to visit if she was mean to her (because that, oh, that was how the servant put it).

So this, Clarisse told herself, horrified, is what she’d done to her mother.

Sinking beneath even the wildest waves would never erase such a crime.

What bitterness, now, on the servant’s perennially pinched lips, what hard mockery in her eyes!

She began to complain of fatigue and back pain. Vacuuming an office at dawn, she tripped on a chair and broke her two front teeth. She refused to have a bridge put in on the grounds that she couldn’t afford it, even though Clarisse offered to help pay. But did she not find a sour pleasure in revealing, through the thin smile that was now hers, her gaping sorrow?

She did, thought Clarisse, seeing the hole in her mother’s mouth and feeling the dough of contemptibility swelling inside hers. Her mouth was the putrid abyss, not the servant’s.

Her love for her mother was poisoning her. On leaving the servant’s, she wanted now to shriek, now to sink into the river’s clement waters.

She did no such thing, though, no such thing.

But as for the edifice of her goodness to Richard Rivière and, beyond him, to everyone she met or worked with, she built it up bit by bit, never forgetting, never wearying, in a constant, tranquil labor that was nonetheless not untouched by doubt, concerning not the need for that endeavor but its sincerity.

Could what she practiced, she sometimes wondered, really be called goodness, or, more simply, niceness and apparent submission?

And in any case, what sort of goodness was a goodness that was aware of itself?

She took care never to upset Richard Rivière, never to needle him, tease him, provoke him, and when, as he so rarely did, he lashed out at her, to answer only with silence.

Now and then she saw a brief flash of surprise or unease on her husband’s face, when she so visibly and insistently fended off some potential conflict and stared at him with her inward-looking eyes, open wide onto her own abnegation, careful to keep a grip on herself, entirely withdrawn into her vow of kindliness.

It seemed to her at such times that her eyes never blinked; she thought she could see their pale, fixed, absent reflection in Richard Rivière’s dark, puzzled gaze.

“Come on, say something,” he sometimes sighed. “You don’t have to agree.”

As if prodded into action, she tried to pull her gaze out of the pensive depths where it was contemplating Clarisse Rivière’s sacrifice and haul it back to the surface, where Richard Rivière was awaiting some word, some answer, albeit with his increasingly frequent air of having already set down his attentiveness and wandered off somewhere else, someplace more interesting.

And so, after struggling to recall the question he’d asked her, or the subject on which he’d tried to draw her into some sort of dispute, after desperately casting around in slightly nauseated panic for some more or less suitable answer, she would realize he’d forgotten all about it, that she was now speaking only to Richard Rivière’s frozen, mute, polite shadow as he fled into the distance, him and his beating heart, his untamable hair, his impatient muscles.

She took that shadow in her arms and pulled it to her. There was still a shoulder there to rest her forehead on, to cover her eyes.

Her love for Richard Rivière bathed her in sweetness and gentleness.

Was she perfectly, purely good to him? Probably not, since he was aware—his unease made it clear—of a strangeness about her, when he should have passed through her goodness without even knowing it, should even have been able to attack and defy that goodness without seeing it, no more than Clarisse herself would.

Her pregnancy showed so little that she thought it safe to go on visiting the servant up to the seventh month.

She was intrigued to find her belly’s already modest bulge becoming even more discreet when she boarded the train for Bordeaux. And when she walked into her mother’s apartment and her hand moved reflexively to her stomach, she could feel only a hard knot beneath her loose-fitting sweater, such that she once thought she was simply waking from a dream in which she’d been pregnant.

She told the servant they’d have to go two and a half months without seeing each other.

“Fine,” said the servant, her voice cold and indifferent.

Then for the first time she burst into tears, and Clarisse sat stunned and still, rubbing her chair’s velvet arms with both hands and thinking that her own narrow, sharp shoulder could at least have accommodated her mother’s moist cheek, could have covered her eyes.

When the child was born, she named her Ladivine. That was the servant’s first name.

Clarisse Rivière would remember the months after Ladivine’s birth as a time when she went badly astray, when she lost sight of the point of her promise.

She would blame this confusion on her deep happiness, which grew from intense to excessive, finally becoming unrecognizable and sometimes indistinguishable from grief. She even let herself imagine taking the baby to Bordeaux, presenting her to the servant, saying, Here! and then leaving her there, going home, having nothing more to do with the child or Malinka’s mother, whose sadness at no longer seeing Clarisse would be eased by the presence of that marvelous baby.

Once she got hold of herself, the memory of that madness tormented her. Wherever she was, she dropped everything and ran to the baby, to make sure she was there and hold her close, knowing a torrent of love would then sweep over her, painful, impenetrable, and separate from herself, as if coming from some mysterious outside and not from her own being.

Sometimes she thought this vast love for the child a burden, and she longed to be rid of it, even if it meant ridding herself of the child as well. But she didn’t know how to find pleasure in that love, nor even what exactly to do with it; she felt as though, yearning to deploy itself unconfined, it was trying to shove her consuming love for Richard Rivière to one side, along with her imperishable, wrenching love for Malinka’s mother.