Ladivine (13 page)

But with Ladivine she felt so intimidated, so self-conscious!

Had her daughter not had every possible reason, over the past twenty years, to find her stupid and pitiable, lost, inaccessible?

On the phone, she had no choice but to answer Ladivine’s troubled but remarkably precise, probing questions, her startled concern all too clear, as if, thought Clarisse Rivière, she was convinced her mother could only have taken up with some shady and untrustworthy man, and she had a duty to come and investigate.

How strange to think of her mother being with any man but her father!

And, although she would never have said so, how shocking: Clarisse Rivière could hear it in her incredulous voice, in the mundane questions she babbled out as if to prevent her mother from talking to her of love or carnal desire.

“Does this man have a trade, does he have money?” Ladivine had asked almost at once.

“He works here and there, when he finds something.”

“But do you give him money? Does he ask you?”

Clarisse Rivière felt sad for both of them, for Ladivine, who thought she had to interrogate her like this, and for herself, who didn’t dare tell her, however gently, that it was none of her business.

“Yes, sometimes. When he needs it. I have more money than he does, it’s no problem.”

Ladivine went quiet, less so she could think all this over than so she could come up with a new line of attack—for that was how Clarisse Rivière saw these questions, in spite of herself, knowing there was nothing but solicitude behind them, and yet for the first time in her life she didn’t feel guilty toward Ladivine or Richard Rivière, or eternally obliged to them.

But she’d trained them to treat her like a foolish woman, ever indebted, elusive, easily taken in, and so she could hardly blame Ladivine for feeling concerned, or for talking to her like she was a child.

“Papa…Richard once told me you don’t take the money he sends you,” Ladivine began, uncomfortable.

Clarisse Rivière hurried to come to her rescue:

“That used to be true, but not since a couple of weeks ago.”

“Now that this man—”

“Freddy Moliger,” she very quietly broke in.

“Now that this Moliger’s with you?”

“Yes. We’re living it up, you know,” she added with a forced little laugh.

But on the other end of the line Ladivine wasn’t laughing.

After another silence, she asked Clarisse Rivière’s permission to come see her, to come down to Langon, as she said.

Freddy Moliger greeted this as he did every piece of news involving Malinka’s family life, with that amalgam of boredom and feigned arrogance thinly plastered over his displeasure, rage very visibly thrashing and growling below it.

“You’re fond of my mother, aren’t you?” asked Malinka anxiously. “So why not my daughter?”

“Your mother’s a pitiful nobody, and that’s why I like her, and she feels the same about me,” he said gruffly.

She remembered those words when Ladivine walked through the door, and she saw her daughter’s hesitant eyes turn toward Freddy Moliger, then immediately dart in alarm toward a corner of the room, then another, and then finally come back, veiled, slightly fixed, uncordial, to Freddy Moliger’s shoulder or neck, her lips forcing themselves into a more or less polite smile.

And Clarisse Rivière thought of what he’d said and suddenly saw the truth in it. She blushed in pity and sadness.

She tried to look at Freddy Moliger through Ladivine’s eyes: she saw his skinny alcoholic legs, his bony, slightly misshapen hips, his fleshy red cheeks, his bad teeth; she saw the apathetic but untrusting and secretive expression on his averted face; she saw his strawlike hair, still wet where he’d parted it.

Ladivine could see nothing beyond that physical misery; she could see none of the ravaged kinship that bound her, Clarisse Rivière, to Freddy Moliger, could know nothing of the salutary impoverishment denuding her heart ever since she’d learned, for one thing, to suffer for Freddy Moliger, and, for another, to caress that damaged body with pleasure and tenderness, and find it soft beneath her fingers.

Ladivine could know nothing of this, very likely refused even to imagine it, and looking through her eyes Clarisse Rivière could only understand.

And she pitied her daughter for having to tolerate this, the presence of such a man in the house where her parents once lived in harmony.

But she felt a far sharper pity for Freddy Moliger, who couldn’t escape the anxious, troubled stare of Malinka’s daughter, having realized even before she laid eyes on him that he would be neither loved nor appreciated, just as he’d sensed before the servant laid eyes on him that she would be fond of him, that she would have no choice but to be fond of him, in her own misery.

Clarisse Rivière sat down on the blue couch and, though feeling an infinite sadness, brightly asked Freddy Moliger to bring them a beer.

“And maybe a little something to nibble on, honey?”

Was she trying to show Ladivine how docile Freddy Moliger was?

She then realized that she was afraid they might somehow prevent her from keeping this man by her side, on the pretext, say, that he had an unhealthy hold over her. But that was absurd, she told herself, quickly reassured. No one had the power to forbid her anything, nor try to protect her against her will.

Ladivine took her to the Galeries Lafayette in Bordeaux, and all the way there Clarisse Rivière silently refused to speak of Freddy Moliger, just as she refused to let Ladivine buy her an outfit for her birthday.

She thought it would be a betrayal to accept a gift from someone who’d taken so strong a dislike to Freddy Moliger.

Because Ladivine clearly loathed him, with an unreasoning, frightened, irreparable loathing that left Clarisse Rivière as uncomfortable as some vile obscenity. In the eyes of her daughter who knew her so little, he could only be a creep who’d wormed his way into her life solely to take advantage of the naïve woman that, through her own fault, she would always be for Ladivine.

She glanced sidelong at her daughter’s preoccupied face as Ladivine somewhat roughly pulled a yellow gingham dress from its hanger, held it up to her firm, opulent body, and looked at her questioningly. For a second, in the tiny contraction of her mouth, in her one raised eyebrow, Clarisse Rivière saw the little girl she’d raised and pampered, she recognized her child and lost her nerve: How could she ever confess to her daughter that she was Malinka, and that a certain servant was leading her solitary, bitter, forever-ruined life just a few streets away?

Several days after Ladivine left, she got a beige cardigan with little mother-of-pearl buttons in the mail.

Freddy Moliger was standing nearby as she opened the package, found the gift, and, an anxious intuition running through her, answered reluctantly when Freddy Moliger asked where it came from.

“It’s from my daughter, for my birthday.”

“It’s your birthday and I didn’t even know it!”

He was speaking in his high-pitched, grating voice, unsteady and heated.

“Birthdays don’t mean anything,” she said, trying to put on a smile.

“Well, they must mean something to your daughter, and to you, too, since you’re happy with your present! Isn’t that right, aren’t you happy?”

She shrugged, folded the cardigan, hid it under the tissue paper.

“So why didn’t you tell me it was your birthday? What, I’m not worthy of giving you a present? Only your daughter knows how to pick out something you’ll like?”

She turned to face him and immediately realized she’d made a mistake, because she felt the fear that had flickered on in her gaze.

But she didn’t know until that moment that she’d realized something very important about Freddy Moliger, didn’t know that she’d realized it from the start, which was that, as with a dog, you had to be careful not to let him see your fear.

But at the same time she felt what she’d felt with her daughter a few days before: in the glint of boyish anger in Freddy Moliger’s eyes, in his puffed-out cheeks, she saw, she recognized, her child—or rather the child he once was, but at that moment it felt as if he were hers.

A great tenderness flooded through her.

She took the cardigan back out of its package, quickly slipped it on over her dress, and ran off for her camera.

While Freddy Moliger was framing the picture on the machine’s little screen, his composure returning as quickly as his rage had erupted, she wondered if he could still see the fear in her eyes, if he could perhaps even see, should that fear now have vanished, the shadow of the fear that she knew would come back.

Clarisse Rivière felt herself floating back and forth on a warm, syrupy swell, whose thickness stilled any move she might try to make. She didn’t want to move anyway, because it would hurt, it would hurt terribly, she knew, if she made any attempt to change her position. She couldn’t remember if she was sitting or standing, lying or crouching, outside or at home, but it didn’t much matter. She had to place her faith in the mindless but confident perseverance of the heavy, viscous tide now carrying her off, and when she spotted the edge of the dark, overgrown forest, its treetops towering and black against the black sky, her only thought was, I’ve never been in a deep forest, but she put up no resistance, certain that there she would be just where she was meant to be.

Slow and precise, Ladivine Sylla lifted each figurine, caressed it with her chamois, gazed at it meditatively for a few seconds, then put it back or, if she’d chosen to move it to a different shelf, set it aside in a shoe box.

She liked to imagine the boldest ones’ eagerness at the prospect of changing places, and the fears of the shier ones, the very young shepherdesses, the newly weaned lambs, the dolphins and kittens, which didn’t like to be disturbed. To them she carefully explained in a half whisper that like it or not things had to be shaken up now and then so every member of her little world would know all the others.

She herself couldn’t feel at peace if she sensed a disharmony in her trinkets’ society, and certain rainy Sundays, when a gray daylight filled her ground-floor apartment, seeming to make the room even darker, she blamed her melancholy on the tension turning her figurines against one another because she hadn’t paired them up properly.

Her mind at peace, her hair carefully pulled back, she threw a cream linen jacket over her shoulders, took her shopping cart from its place by the door, and went out.

It was a sunny Saturday in May. The narrow sidewalks shone, freshly cleaned, and the cramped, dingy street had the pure, comforting smell of a springtime morning.

Ladivine Sylla began to review what she would need from the market to make the nice lunch she had planned for the following Tuesday, when Malinka and that Freddy Moliger would be coming.

She could only think of him as “that Freddy Moliger,” and even this, even this distant and circumspect way of naming him, stirred her so violently that she went weak in the knees.

She didn’t dare think of him simply as “Freddy,” though that familiarity would have more precisely expressed the affection and gratitude she felt for that man, because she feared the depth of her own emotion, she feared that, should she ever happen to murmur “Malinka and Freddy,” she’d have to sit down on the sidewalk, trembling uncontrollably.

“That Freddy Moliger” let her hold her excitement at bay.

She walked toward the market at her unhurried pace, pulling her squeaking cart, and with mingled pleasure and astonishment remembered Freddy Moliger’s thin face, his off-blue eyes, like stagnant water, so empty and dull when words weren’t enlivening them, and the fact that her present happiness, her fondest wish, had taken the desolate form of that stranger intrigued her endlessly. That was simply how it was; there was nothing more to understand.

That man was rescuing them both from their curse, her, Ladivine Sylla, and her daughter Malinka, the only real creature she loved in this world—how hard it was to have only her daughter to love!

Malinka had brought her that Freddy Moliger, and he’d settled into Ladivine Sylla’s life and thoughts with miraculous ease and inevitability, and she immediately realized he would free them from the spell.

What matter that he seemed such a sad case! Was that not the very sign of an envoy’s power, the perfect humility of his appearance?

She wanted to make a leg of lamb with Soissons beans and haricot vert bundles bound up with strips of bacon. She’d forgotten to ask when he last came if he liked his meat rare or well done, but she could get around that, she thought, by putting the lamb in the oven only when they got there, even if it meant waiting awhile with a glass of wine and some finger foods. She was already, delightedly, imagining whipping up puff pastry canapés with Roquefort or anchovies and mini-tartlets with onion jam.

That Freddy Moliger was always hungry, she’d noticed, almost gluttonous; he ate quickly, preoccupied and contemptuous, as if scorning his own appetite, but, thought Ladivine Sylla indulgently, isn’t that how those who weren’t well fed as children always wanted to seem, people used to having badly cooked, meager helpings slammed down before them, with even less love than for a dog?

She entered the Marché des Capucins and made for the butcher’s stand she considered the best, even if, because its meat was expensive, she almost never shopped there. But for that Freddy Moliger she wanted only the finest and tenderest.

As for her daughter Malinka, she ate everything in the same way, without to-do, without interest or awareness, and she was happy with everything because food meant nothing to her.

Oh, her daughter Malinka! How heartbreaking, yes, that Ladivine Sylla had never found anyone else to love!

She’d long been convinced that Malinka kept her out of her life because she was ashamed of her, Ladivine Sylla, who couldn’t be other than what she was. Then, as the years went by, she came to believe that they were both entangled in the coils of a shared spell, bonds that Malinka could no more loosen than she could, that they were both being punished with the same cruelty, the same injustice, and this helped her bear her bitter existence and cast off all ill will toward Malinka, whom she loved ever since with a purified heart, a comforted heart.

And Malinka had brought her that Freddy Moliger, and now displayed a new face, shimmering with hopefulness, and her clear, quiet gaze, now unafraid to meet her mother’s, told her she’d accepted, with joy in her heart, this new order: the introduction of Ladivine Sylla.

Suddenly it was all nearly too much for her.

She’d often tried to picture the life Malinka was leading. Once, she thought she saw faint brown patches on her daughter’s cheeks, as if she were pregnant, and then she didn’t come back for weeks.

How she dreamed of meeting that child, and how she feared it as well! He or she would be over thirty by now, and Ladivine Sylla was an insignificant woman whose appearance, whose status, whose uninspired conversation, might very well, she had no doubt, come as a disappointment.

At the activities center where she went several times a week to play checkers or knit in the company of other neighborhood women, she generally sat silent, imprisoned in the shameful emptiness of her life, listening distantly as her neighbors talked of their children and grandchildren, of their husbands, living or dead, asking no questions so none would be asked of her.

Who could claim to know Ladivine Sylla? There was nothing to discover in her; there was too little to her.

She bought a four-pound leg of lamb, a pound of haricots verts, some apricots for a tart. The shopkeepers knew her and greeted her amiably, despite her reserve, her habit of answering their banter with nothing more than a nod, and their observations on the fine weather with a thin smile. But that Saturday she was open, almost cordial. Little by little, her daughter Malinka was acknowledging her!

Leaving the market, she decided to make a detour down a street parallel to her own, where she could enjoy the sunshine.

She was passing by a newsstand when the front page of
Sud-Ouest
caught her attention after a few seconds’ delay, making her retrace her steps, still pulling her cart, and then, her legs suddenly weak, her arms limp, as if her limbs had understood before her head, she stared hard at a photograph of a beautiful, serious Malinka, her face slightly sad and uneasy, narrow and delicate like her own and framed by locks that fell in light waves over her slender shoulders, looking into the lens, at the photographer, anxious to please.

That attractive fifty-four-year-old woman was her daughter Malinka. No question about it; that was her.

Ladivine Sylla tried feebly to reach for the newspaper, but her arm refused to move. She clutched the handle of her cart with both hands and bent down to read the headline:
LANGON WOMAN STABBED IN HER HOME
.

She stood up with a little cry and, still clasping the handle, scurried off down the sunlit sidewalk, in the perfumed air, rich with anticipations and promises. She realized she was crying out as she lurched along, but her voice was muffled, hoarse, low, and no one paid her any mind.