Authors: Marie Ndiaye
Malinka’s mother was a naturally, inexplicably cheerful woman, Clarisse Rivière remembered.
She used to come home weighed down with shopping bags, bedraggled by rain and exhaustion, then turn on the gas under a nice piece of meat, with a side dish of vegetables she’d peeled and diced before work that morning, and her cooking always filled the air with a gentle, healthy, delicious aroma, as cheery as she, Malinka’s mother, who hummed, did a few little steps of a sliding dance on the tile floor, never complained, never grumbled.
And so Malinka, unable to compare her life with other children’s, never having been invited to anyone’s house, long believed that her mother held no grudge against life or any living soul, not even the man whose face she looked for in crowds, whose figure or walk she relentlessly sought to discover in every man she saw, but that irrational hope lay hidden behind words of lucidity and patience and so never appeared as what it was.
“Your father’s got to be somewhere,” Malinka’s mother would say in her calm, melodious voice. “We’ll run into him someday.”
And this seemed so indisputable that Malinka never waited for her mother to come home without thinking she might appear on the arm of the man who’d been waiting close by, calm and patient as she, waiting for her to find him at last, and that man, with a melodious voice and no trace of an accent, that man who couldn’t show himself until his face had been spotted in the street, would be her father, her glorious father.
He was the only person Malinka’s mother ever spoke of, and she did so profusely, worshipfully, even if, Malinka came to realize, her descriptions were never particularly precise, and she seemed to know little of this eminent man’s life, past or present.
And so Malinka never felt his goodwill watching over them.
Unlike the naïve servant, she knew that man’s thoughts never turned to the two of them, that he might well know nothing of their existence, for they were only two lowly flowers.
“Your father’s a fine man,” Malinka’s mother often told her. “You know, he’s really, really nice. He has beautiful chestnut hair, and always wears it neatly combed back. He has a car. He might have a new one by now. I’ll bet he’s found a terrific job, too.”
Malinka felt no contempt for those hopes.
She felt no contempt for the servant, her peculiar mother.
But she couldn’t help believing that her mother might indeed one day come home with her grocery bags, her rain-soaked overcoat, and the lush-haired man who had jubilantly allowed her to see his face in the street.
And were that man ever to come pick her up at school, she knew, she wouldn’t be afraid to call him her father.
No disbelief or disgust would curl the other girls’ lips on hearing that truth or that lie, she wasn’t sure which, but maybe if it was a lie her own lips would stay pressed tight in a bitter crease.
Her face would be like her father’s, that man who until now had let his love rain down on heads other than hers, leaving her and her mother in their vulnerable aloneness.
But, she understood, her face would be like her father’s.
And another realization hit her at the same time, with the violence of a thing long known but never quite grasped, now abruptly revealed in all its simplicity: being that woman’s daughter filled her with a horrible shame and fear.
Oh, she was also ashamed of her shame and her fear, particularly because she was painfully aware of her mother’s fragility, she who had no protector to rely on and was nonetheless wary of no one.
But stronger still was her repugnance at the thought of letting it be seen, even simply in the street, on the bus, before strangers, that she was the daughter of a woman of no consequence.
From her earliest childhood, Clarisse Rivière would realize, she’d done nothing but spurn her mother, and her mother had pretended not to notice, and perhaps hadn’t noticed, in a way, having found another explanation for her daughter’s coldness than the simple scandal of her own appearance, her own face.
Because that was a truth Malinka’s mother would never be able to bear.
And Malinka knew it, in her despairing, furious love, because she could read the servant’s emotions better than the servant herself.
She pulled away from her mother, renounced her before the world, seeing no other way.
She always took care to walk at some distance from her, and she was delighted to see that the people around them never included them both in the same knowing glance, the impenetrable woman and the beautiful teenager with the thick, wavy hair, inherited, the marveling servant assured her, from her many-splendored father.
At fifteen Malinka heightened the natural pallor of her face with wan makeup.
She felt a boundless, remorseful, stifling tenderness for the servant.
She secretly watched her in the evening, studying her face, looking for any flaw in her good cheer, any decline in her confidence that she would one day bring about the appearance of the man who, the servant was sure, had once loved her, and loved her still, but didn’t know where to find her.
It was up to her, Malinka’s mother, not only to recognize him in the street, but also, in some mysterious way, to make him appear, and for that small miracle the force of her own assurance might be enough.
Her good cheer never faltered, but over time it turned slightly abstract, as if her habitual happiness and optimism were making her forget she had fewer reasons for those emotions than when, as a very young woman, newly arrived here with the child in her belly, she founded her hope and her joy on the enchanted sense that every single day this land worked miracles more unlikely than a longed-for face’s sudden appearance in the midst of a crowd.
Her good cheer was waning and weakening, but not her will to be cheerful, and the servant’s gaze turned a little unfocused, very quietly unhinged.
She still asked Malinka the same questions as when she was in grade school.
“Did you work hard today? Is your teacher happy with you?”
And she broke into a smile, as if already sure of the answer, not even listening to whatever Malinka might say, not even noticing that sometimes Malinka said nothing at all, and Malinka never took this amiss, understanding that in order to keep a light heart her mother had to maintain a cautious contact with reality, buffered by distraction and a faint, unwavering rapture.
The women who employed Malinka’s mother seemed to think highly of her.
She often brought home little presents, and once one of her employers came for coffee. Malinka and her mother made pound cake and fruit salad for the occasion.
The woman ate happily, casting inquisitive but kindly glances at Malinka. She complimented her on her hair, her fresh complexion.
“She has her father’s hair,” said Malinka’s mother, mechanically, ardently, then drifted back into the self-satisfied, benevolent, misty, slightly dim look that left her ever more rarely.
The woman suggested that she and Malinka move into an apartment she owned, three rooms on the ground floor of her building.
“You’ll find it so much more comfortable,” she said, glancing in dismay around the little room that served as both the kitchen and the servant’s quarters, “and, you know, I won’t ask much.”
Almost apologetically, she added:
“It would make me so happy to help you.”
An odd agitation suddenly came over Malinka’s mother.
She stood up a little too fast, bumped the corner of the stove.
Upset and very subtly furious, she seemed stunned that this woman had failed to see who she was, her, Malinka’s mother, whose goals were plain, who had only one ambition.
“I can’t move,” she finally mumbled. “I mean, really now, I can’t move.”
She let out a scandalized, mystified little laugh, eyebrows raised, staring almost wild eyed at the woman, who smiled uneasily and put on a waiting face.
The servant composed herself and sat down.
And she settled once more into a quiet beatitude, like easing back into a warm bath of delusion, thought Malinka, and this frightened and troubled her even more than the absurd indignation that had brought the servant to her feet.
“You understand,” said the servant in an exaggeratedly reasonable tone, undermined by her suddenly stronger accent, “we’re waiting for someone, and this address is his only way of finding us, so, you know, what’s he supposed to do if we leave? It’s simply out of the question.”
For the first time a harsh, hostile anger rushed to Malinka’s head. After the woman had gone, she cried out, astonished to find herself daring to talk to the servant this way, daring to bring up what she spoke of only by allusions:
“Well, what do you know! News to me! So now he has our address? He’s known our address these past fifteen years, and you always said he had no way to know where we lived, and he’s supposed to come looking for us when all this time he never bothered? And that’s why we can’t go live in that woman’s apartment? That’s why we’re staying in these two miserable rooms?”
Still sitting, the servant looked utterly defeated, and Malinka wished she’d kept her mouth shut.
Her anger drained away, she tried to put on a smile, horrified to think that her smile probably looked like her mother’s, similarly impersonal, misplaced, and infuriating.
Malinka’s mother was gently wringing her hands.
“I’m not sure anymore,” she said hesitantly. “You’re right, your father must not have our address, how could he? There was no way to tell him before I went away, I didn’t know how to get hold of him, I thought I’d have no trouble finding him here, I thought it was big but not that big. But if we move, then…”
“No, let’s not move,” Malinka murmured. “Everything’s just fine where we are, let’s not move.”
The servant genuinely seemed to believe, with that part of her reason Malinka couldn’t fathom, as elusive as it was maddening, that a change as major as moving would be a betrayal of the faith that sustained her in her nebulous, desperate, but confident quest for one particular face among so many others, and what did she have to help her go on imperturbably hoping but that faith, with its rituals and commandments, the very first of which was the prohibition against making any change to the life that had seen her certainty sprout and flourish, what did she have but that absurd faith, thought Malinka, to make her seem grander in her own eyes?
Oh, maybe the servant’s heart was not as unassuming as it seemed.
Her pale, smooth-skinned daughter Malinka hoped so. She fervently wanted arrogance, pride, and self-indulgence to play some part in her mother’s ridiculous optimism; she hoped she was just a little blinded by vanity.
Because while the servant was well thought of and evidently even liked by the women who employed her, Malinka realized there were others who didn’t know her, who didn’t always treat her so well.
Malinka had never seen her mother insulted to her face, but couldn’t help fearing, every day, that she might be.
Everything about her—her hopes, her fears, her embarrassments—was a betrayal of the servant.
And so she ardently hoped that a sheath of outrageous self-importance and even inflated, unwholesome pride shielded her mother’s heart with its crystalline hardness, but she doubted it, so humble did the servant continually prove, and, when she wasn’t talking about Malinka’s father, so serene and so sensible.
She doubted it.
Rather, she assumed that her mother patiently endured every affront, and that only her placidity, her slight withdrawal from the world, her inexpressive smile, helped her dismiss such things as of no great importance.
When Malinka’s grades began to slip, she effortlessly hid it from her mother, not fearing her anger but wanting to spare the servant any needless anxiety, because there was little her mother could do for her, and less in that realm than in any other.
She took to signing her report cards herself, never showing them to the servant, who seemed to forget there were such things as grades and report cards.
Clarisse Rivière would later recall that Malinka had struggled to keep up, that she’d hung on as best she could, but her downhill slide, starting in ninth grade and at first gradual, uncertain, soon took on the sudden brutality of a verdict handed down at last after a long wait.
She would remember that as a very young girl Malinka had ambitions, that she’d sensed doing well in school would bring her nearer her goals than her mother’s ignorant, vague solicitude, that she’d conscientiously striven to be worthy and, in a sense, perfect.
But she attained only perfection’s outward form, as if the great efforts she made had hidden from her the real reason for those labors.
And so she became a model of application and assiduity, a pupil so polite that her presence was often overlooked.
She turned in her homework on time, written in an elegant and readable hand, always a little longer than required so no one would suspect her of slacking off, although before so serious and so painfully intent a young face not even the sternest teacher would ever think such a thing, and those scrupulous pages, reeking of labor and terror, always drew a regretful, understanding comment and a below-average grade, inflated a little all the same, out of indulgence, in recognition of everything that was sad and unfair in all this.
Malinka never quite seemed to grasp what was asked of her. She understood only the express or unspoken laws governing the relations between pupils and teachers, which she obeyed in a mix of keen pleasure and arduous rigor, and so literally that she could have vanished without anyone noticing, so absolute was her submission to the image of a pupil who was nothing more than a pure receptive mind.
But what they were trying to teach her never found its way into her head, or lingered only a moment, then quickly faded.
Back at home, she sat for long hours at her desk, slightly befogged, trying in vain to connect her memories of the class with the sentences written down in her impeccable notebook.
She vibrantly remembered every detail of the teacher’s face, expression, or dress, and she could picture herself, too, as clearly as if she were studying a photograph, and she deeply admired that girl looking up at the blackboard with her perfectly attentive face.