Ladivine (12 page)

He was thirty-four years old, he told her, and he knew he looked fifty but didn’t care. He had a slight limp, the result of a fierce thrashing by his father twenty-five years before, and that didn’t bother him either, it never got in his way or stopped him from doing what he had to.

Here he snickered, as if he’d cracked a good joke. And all at once Malinka realized that he had to struggle constantly against howling rage, and that, if she herself had always refrained from judging others’ acts because she was guilty of a perpetual, ongoing crime against the servant, what kept Freddy Moliger from accusing anyone was rooted less in personal, spontaneous stoicism than in the fear of seeing his anger’s terrible face come to life.

She took him to meet the servant just two days after they met.

“Do you want to come with me to my mother’s?” she’d asked him, holding her breath.

“Of course,” he said, surprised, happy.

She hadn’t yet taken Freddy Moliger’s face in her hands, and she was shaken to see a stranger’s face when she looked at him. She was no less surprised by the importance that face had taken on in her life, that stranger’s face she had to work to remember when he wasn’t around.

And yet she wanted him to see the servant, and she wanted her to be introduced to someone by Malinka for the first time before she touched and caressed his skin.

In her eagerness to give her mother the gift that was Freddy Moliger, and to hear him call her Malinka in front of the servant as if no Clarisse Rivière had ever existed, she ignored the Tuesday rule, just this once, and took the train to Bordeaux on a Sunday, with Freddy Moliger at her side.

Malinka’s mother opened the door suspiciously. Tufts of hair stuck straight out of her tight chignon, the zipper of her jeans was only half up.

When she was expecting her daughter, she always came to the door impeccably dressed, not a hair out of place, thought Malinka in a sudden wave of sadness.

The servant gave Freddy Moliger a silent, unblinking stare.

“This is Freddy,” said Malinka.

He embraced the servant as naturally as could be.

“Your daughter looks just like you, madame,” he said, in a voice even more strident than usual.

The servant’s face didn’t trouble him at all, and Malinka was so grateful that she impulsively caressed his cheek. Freddy Moliger gave her a pleased smile.

He stepped into the room and exclaimed over the curios decorating her shelves, a thousand porcelain trinkets, mostly animals, cherubs, or shepherdesses, which Malinka’s mother spent hours arranging and rearranging, their placement governed by secret affinities.

The servant stepped toward him cautiously, as she would a slightly dangerous dog. But her eyes shone with pleasure when she began telling Freddy Moliger the source of each object, and why she preferred this one to that, and he urged her on with lively questions.

Freddy Moliger was dressed in a pale-green short-sleeved shirt and beige twill pants. He’d plastered back his dead-grass hair, and when he wasn’t speaking his washed-out eyes looked just as dead, so dead that the effort he seemed to expend to come back to life when he next spoke gave his most ordinary sentences a heroic, unhoped-for, even final quality, which, Malinka observed, commanded attention and a slightly anxious respect.

Everything about him expressed an artless, loyal goodwill toward the servant, and a sincere interest in the story behind every trinket, in all its special features.

Next he admired the decor and the furniture of the servant’s apartment, the unlikely jumble that somehow created a strange and sophisticated whole, not that she was trying for any such effect.

Then he suggested they go out to lunch, if they’d be so kind as to invite him.

He was exceptionally cheerful. He wasn’t charming, thought Malinka, not the least bit appealing, with his high voice, his large pores, his strawlike hair, but so boisterous were his high spirits, between two bouts of sepulchral blankness, when he simply stood listening, motionless, all taste for life seeming to drain unimpeded from his thin, tortured body, so abundant was his good cheer and so stirring its repeated, miraculous return that Malinka found herself irresistibly driven to look into that plain face and study it, disoriented and moved, her hands jittering restlessly.

The servant gave a girlish cry:

“Oh yes, let’s go out to eat!”

She glanced anxiously at Malinka, as if dreading her veto.

“Good idea,” said Malinka, not far from tears.

How would she ever make of the servant’s life less bitter a bread?

When, at afternoon’s end, they said goodbye to the servant and started back to the station, she thanked Freddy Moliger for his thoughtfulness toward her mother. He seemed taken aback to be thanked for—he shrugged—doing just what he always did.

He stiffened a little. Malinka half felt the wing of an indistinct fear graze her cheek.

Then he shook his head, and his face went back to its usual expression, harmless and stagnant, like an animal bled dry in the gentle darkness of its sleep.

“It was no work at all,” he said amiably. “Your mother’s so nice.”

She stopped, breathless. To her own surprise, she had to clutch Freddy Moliger’s arm to keep from sinking to her knees on the pavement.

“If you only knew the pain I’ve caused her,” she murmured. “Do you think that can ever be made up for? Do you think so?”

But he hadn’t heard, unless he was pretending. As they passed by a bench where two neighborhood women sat chatting, women Malinka knew by sight, having crossed paths with them many times, she gave them a nod, and he snorted.

“You say hello to that dirt?” he asked, loud enough to be heard. “Don’t you think we’ve got too many of those people around here? I’ll tell you what I think: they make me sick.”

He stalked onward, caught up in a rage that covered his cheeks with red blotches.

Stunned, Malinka scurried insensibly after him. When she caught up he gave her a smile, his serenity and cheerfulness suddenly restored, and she could feel herself burying the memory of that moment in a place where she wouldn’t easily find it again, because the whole thing was simply incomprehensible.

She wanted to remember only Freddy Moliger’s kindness to the servant, who’d greeted him just as Malinka had hoped: as the emissary of an ardent wish to repent.

Soon she suggested that Freddy Moliger move in with her, and he appeared the next day carrying everything he owned in a bag.

That evening they made love for the first time.

She was nervous, she’d grown unused to pleasure and the search for it, she was thinking too much, but when she took stock of herself she found she was at ease, found that Freddy Moliger’s body caused her no aversion or sadness, and that at the same time she had no fear of disappointing him, or of being disappointed, whereas, she remembered, her immense, undiminishable love for Richard Rivière never slipped free of her self-imposed duty to live up to his expectations, her furious, consuming desire for self-sacrifice, without which she felt guilty and wicked.

She sensed that Freddy Moliger expected nothing he couldn’t readily give.

When he first saw her trim, long-limbed body, its slender bones invisible beneath her solid flesh, he let out a polite and admiring little cry, but his eyes were indifferent, and Malinka understood that he’d neither hoped nor feared she would have a beautiful body.

Nothing was a problem, nothing wasn’t good enough, and it never occurred to him to think of his body as attractive or not. He was what he was, without bluff or boast, like a plant, like a stone, and beautiful or ugly his body didn’t belong to him and wasn’t his responsibility.

He was neither an attentive nor a selfish lover, but full of a strangely neutral, almost austere gentleness, and Malinka felt free and at peace. She was still thinking too much, but she was also serene, because Freddy Moliger’s presence never challenged her to prove anything at all, no more the goodness of her soul than the perfection of her body, and because she wasn’t lying to him.

Not that Richard Rivière had ever asked anything of her. But her entanglement in the snare of an endless striving to please did nothing to dispel the muted fear, which she felt even in their happiest days, that the most necessary discipline might be beyond her, and that only that discipline could make the thought of the servant, the bitter bread of her life, tolerable to her.

Nor did Freddy Moliger ask her to tell him about herself.

For the first few days after he moved in she could see his gaze drifting over the photos that ornamented the walls and the shelves, of Ladivine, of Marko Berger, of the children, or of Richard Rivière, and no interest or curiosity ever shone in his eyes.

She tried, in an offhanded, affectionate voice, to bring up her daughter Ladivine. He turned and walked out of the room, with a rudeness that wasn’t like him. Whatever was closest to her, like all talk of emotion, seemed to plunge him into an impatience he objectively recognized, as though it were someone else feeling it, and he walked off as if to get hold of himself, such that Malinka came to see in those abrupt, maddening disappearances a sign of diplomacy rather than boorishness.

She stopped trying to tell him about her daughter and grandchildren, and about her emotions generally.

She sometimes thought, without resentment, that Richard Rivière and Ladivine must have longed terribly to hear what she was feeling or thinking, that toward them she’d always been tender and distant, giddy with an inexpressible love and yet hard to love, and here she was finally finding her voice, and Freddy Moliger didn’t want to hear.

She knew Richard Rivière and Ladivine probably thought her an extremely simple woman.

Didn’t she sometimes embarrass them, in their sparse social life, with her anxious, smiling silence, her frozen face, lips always slightly parted, her amiable, wary, stubborn way of never saying anything even the slightest bit personal?

Oh yes, surely they’d resigned themselves to thinking her slightly witless.

Was she? She didn’t know.

She only knew that her mind was now forever pondering thoughts that filled her with a calm, comforting passion, and that she owed this to Freddy Moliger, to the way he’d come to her that evening in the pizzeria, with his dead, desolate face, his limping form, and that, painfully, in a devastating glimpse of the inevitable, she’d abruptly realized they might rescue each other.

Now he lived in her house, and his company never disturbed her.

He moved through the house quietly, like a wild animal, she sometimes thought, whose way was to leave only the most imperceptible trail.

He cooked and cleaned energetically and efficiently, telling her again and again of everything that had happened in his life—the brutal parents, the brother killed by the train, the daughter he never saw—his impassive, reedy voice wanting nothing, accusing no one.

And though she’d heard these same stories before, never varying, their details always precise and identical, as if, almost bored, he were recounting the story of the same old movie over and over, she went on listening with an understanding and a friendship that drove her whole being toward him, and she suffered for him, since he showed no sign of suffering, and in this way hoped to displace the rage she now realized was trying to burrow into Freddy Moliger’s heart.

Every new telling of those stories was as painful to hear as the first, perhaps more. Each time she felt Freddy Moliger’s irremediable solitude all the more poignantly.

If, she thought, she could relieve him of the anger pointlessly besieging him, which he wore himself out trying to hold back, if she could do that by enduring his tales of woe, by trying to picture his woes so completely that they could only leave her weeping and wailing inside, then maybe they wouldn’t weigh so heavily in Freddy Moliger’s memory, and he would find peace and solace.

Give it all to me, let me shoulder the burden of your miseries, she silently begged him, because I know how to deal with them. And so she listened, never flinching at even the most harrowing moments, and she filled herself with his sorrow till she choked, so he would be free of it, he who after his brother’s death had spent his life struggling on alone.

At night, in the bed she’d shared with Richard Rivière for more than twenty-five years, she took this other man in her arms, and then it was she who found peace and solace, who felt freed and delivered of all obligation.

She was simply herself, Malinka, in all the innocence of her ephemeral, precarious presence on this earth.

She was never humble with him. She could be authoritarian, firm, though never hard, and her voice was always gentle.

Freddy Moliger’s habits and ways didn’t irritate or surprise her, except when he weakened before the onslaughts of his anger and sullenly let it submerge him, becoming a different man, at once exultant and despairing and almost greedily eager to get some good out of it, to vanish into it until he was absolved of all responsibility.

She glimpsed this most painfully in the course of a visit her daughter Ladivine would soon pay her.

“If it’s all the same to you, please don’t call me by my first name in front of my daughter,” she said to Freddy Moliger in an uneasy voice.

He puffed out his cheeks and let out a little sigh of indifference.

It wasn’t seeming to hide things from her daughter that embarrassed her; it was that she wasn’t yet ready to reveal to Ladivine that her name was Malinka.

I’ll do that, she vowed, the day I introduce the servant to her. Because, she felt certain, that day would come.

Already she brought Freddy Moliger along whenever she visited her mother, and he thought of those visits as a perfectly natural thing and obviously enjoyed them, and very often Malinka sat in her velvet armchair and listened as the servant and Freddy cooked the meal in the little kitchen, and she heard the quiet hum of their voices sometimes interrupted by Freddy Moliger’s piercing laugh or the servant’s playfully outraged protests when he tried to take on more than she wanted.