Authors: Marie Ndiaye
“It’s no use. No one will know.”
He immediately regretted his blunt words and, though impatient to hang up, added, “Oh, maybe they will. We mustn’t lose hope. Goodbye, Monsieur Berger.”
“Call me Marko.”
“Goodbye, Marko.”
“Don’t you want to talk to Daniel?” Berger almost shouted, desperate to keep him on the line. “He’s not like Annika, he’s willing to speak French.”
But Richard Rivière was petrified at the thought of conversing with an unknown little boy.
“Goodbye, Marko,” he said again, softly, and, as if to show Berger that the last thing he wanted was to be rude, he pressed the
OFF
button with a gentle, unaggressive finger.
Clarisse came home a few minutes later, with her slightly forced cheerfulness, her festive, overplayed, self-perpetuating enthusiasm, the work of her good-hearted spirit, thought Richard Rivière, grateful even if he couldn’t join in.
Because he could well imagine how hard it must be, after a long day at the dealership, to dig deep into oneself and draw out some semblance of joie de vivre just to keep everyone happy.
Clarisse had a special hatred of sullenness, of brooding silences heavy with vague resentments.
When the three of them were together she took care never to leave Trevor and Richard in the same room alone, fearing the emanations of spite and aversion she would feel spreading through the apartment, like toxic gas.
Sometimes Richard Rivière caught a helpless grimace on her still lips when she turned away to open the refrigerator and, thinking no one was watching, allowed her face to surrender to her real feelings, weariness, a longing to be alone, concern for Trevor and the two others, the twins she never heard from, who for all she knew might be dead or injured in a serious accident, no one knowing who to call.
Richard Rivière knew all that, felt indebted to Clarisse, because nothing could keep her down, because she was never ashamed, because she always tried to do what was best.
He also knew he would never have dreamed of embarking on a love affair with this woman, his colleague since he first arrived in Annecy, were her name not Clarisse.
But that evening, in light of what Berger had told him, his irrational, enduring hope that Clarisse Rivière’s marvelous face might one day show itself seemed pointless and sad.
Something much bigger had come to pass.
Since he hadn’t been granted the power to do so himself, it was his daughter Ladivine who would find her way through certain realms and return with a revelation that would finally bring peace to her tortured father.
How he loved her at that moment! How he wished those two could once again be together, Ladivine and Clarisse Rivière with her real face, and talk of him with the same love he felt for them!
He was a long way from Annecy, a long way from Clarisse and Trevor, at long last free of the mountain’s baleful grip.
Through the window he looked at it, dark against the night sky, and his unburdened thoughts flew off far beyond it, his old foe frightened him no longer.
His one reunion with Clarisse Rivière, the day of his father’s funeral, very nearly led him to abandon his life in Annecy, and the apartment he was outfitting with such anxious care, and Clarisse and the young Trevor, who’d moved in just the year before, and his work, where he could do no wrong.
He’d come close to giving all that up, and he trembled in retrospective terror all the way home.
Because the Clarisse Rivière he’d found waiting was in every way the one he’d realized he couldn’t go on living with.
In her liquid gaze he saw only her usual abstraction, slightly heartless despite its show of deep kindliness, the same strange, ghostly presence that had troubled him more with each passing year.
She seemed to be there, with her delicate, sinuous body, her beautiful face, unlined, as if polished, satin smooth, but her being was somewhere else, bound to something he couldn’t understand, beyond his reach.
Clarisse Rivière was often awkward, shy beyond reason, unsure of herself—but that very diffidence had no depth to it.
Richard Rivière sometimes thought her a mere illusion of a human being, not wanting to be, perhaps not knowing she was: that he couldn’t say.
But her actions that day were those of a love without rancor, entire and intact.
She threw herself into his arms, pressed against him with all her might.
He recognized the feel of the firm, serpentine body he once so loved.
And as he also recognized, unnerved, almost frightened, the emptiness in her vague and impersonal gaze, and something he could only call coldness, which made him stiffen in incomprehension and discomfort, he felt for the first time an overpowering desire to see the real Clarisse Rivière.
Because, he understood only then, this wasn’t her.
He’d never seen or tried to see the real Clarisse Rivière, never realized or wanted to realize that he lived with her semblance alone.
And now it hit him, now he was ready to come back and live in Langon.
Might he also have heard, his ear now more acute, a muted appeal, a desperate plea from the very thing he didn’t know?
But then they went to his mother’s little apartment in Toulouse, and that hateful old woman told them the repugnant story of the dog that supposedly devoured the elder Rivière, insinuating that it was all Richard’s fault, like everything else that had gone wrong in the world since his birth.
It was always Richard’s fault.
He felt wearied, sour, impatient, emotions he’d forgotten in Annecy.
Then, vaguely but with an aversion clear enough to keep him from going back to Clarisse Rivière, he remembered another dog, long, long before, when Ladivine was just a baby; he recalled Clarisse Rivière and his father very oddly coming together, against him in a way, he who lacked at that moment something his father seemed to possess, he didn’t know what.
Twenty-four hours after he’d shown the Cherokee to the man with the raspberry socks, Richard Rivière found the agreed-upon sum credited to his account.
He immediately called the buyer, invited him to come by that evening and pick up the car.
He paced lazily back and forth on the sidewalk as he waited, carefully studying his surroundings.
He felt watchful but calm, ready for anything.
No matter how Ladivine chose to reveal herself, he’d be prepared to accept her, and there was, he thought, nothing he could not now understand and say yes to.
The mountain was finally leaving him in peace.
He didn’t tell himself that he’d beaten it, only that it had decided not to bother with him any longer, for there was a mightier force reigning over him now.
He was watching for his daughter’s return, wherever she might be coming from.
In one way or another, she would be bringing Clarisse Rivière back to him.
He was surprised to feel so serene, so sure things would go his way.
He laughed to himself, thinking that should Ladivine send him some sign from the mountain, if it was there that she wanted to announce her presence, then he would go, he would climb, he would embrace those hated slopes. He would do even that.
A taxi stopped, and the man got out, still more resplendent than two days before, though Richard Rivière noted something furtive in his gaze, then thought no more of it.
He did on the other hand look long and hard at the dark-gray wool suit with pink pinstripes, the very pale pink shirt, the light-gray tie, and the long, belted black coat, unbuttoned, hanging loose.
He gave Richard Rivière a brief, slightly clammy handshake, then quickly circled the car. Suddenly he stopped in the street, groaning in dismay.
“What’s this? It’s scratched!”
“Scratched?”
Richard Rivière came running to his side. The man pointed to a long scrape on the rear door.
“That wasn’t there this morning,” Richard stammered, reflexively looking around for someone who might be able to explain.
To his deep surprise, he felt tears welling up. He took off his glasses, looked around again, quickly wiped his eyes on his sleeve.
“Listen,” he began, staring at an invisible point far beyond the man’s face and speaking in a professional tone that rang false to his own ears, “I can take it right now to the dealership where I work. It should be fixed by tomorrow.”
“I can’t stay in Annecy till tomorrow, there’s no way! How much have you got on you?”
“On me?”
“Give me whatever you can, I’ll get it fixed myself.”
Richard Rivière hurried, almost ran, back to his apartment and frantically rummaged under the bedroom closet’s false bottom, where he kept a store of ready cash. He grabbed the bills, counted them quickly, clipped them together, and rushed out to the street.
“Will this do?…I have eight hundred and fifty euros.”
The man gave him a taut, indignant smile.
Richard Rivière felt dishonored; he didn’t know what to do with the slightly trembling hand holding out the bills.
Finally the other man snatched them away and stuffed them into his overcoat pocket, grumbling.
He was as surprised as Clarisse to see Trevor so readily agree to be taken to the doctor, not that the boy hadn’t met the proposal with his usual contempt, but Richard Rivière sensed that he no longer quite believed in the pertinence and the usefulness of his sarcasm and fell back on it now only out of habit.
He shrugged, let out a resigned “Why not?”
And although, refusing to make any further concessions, he’d dressed in the least flattering clothes his wardrobe had to offer, thereby expressing his disdain for the opinion of a doctor he’d never asked to see, Richard Rivière couldn’t help feeling that Trevor had let down his guard, that he had in a sense tired of being who he was.
And so, taking note of that modest change, he refrained from commenting on the young man’s grotesque getup.
But it pained his heart.
He looked away when Trevor emerged from his room in a T-shirt that bulged over his belly and breasts, ornamented in large silvery letters with the English words
I NEED A GIRL—CALL 0678986,
and Hawaiian swim trunks, and a sleeveless jean jacket with a dirty fleece collar.
The thin black socks and beige tassel loafers made his feet seem tiny beneath his gargantuan calves.
He looked like a lunatic. Richard Rivière told himself, suddenly embarrassed by his own sympathy.
He couldn’t help feeling sorry for Clarisse, who’d done nothing, he thought, to deserve a son who looked like a pathetic mental case.
But why did he suddenly find it so urgent to acquit himself of all his responsibilities, and more, to Clarisse and Trevor?
Who and what were awaiting him if he left Annecy?
His certainty that Ladivine had gone off to demand explanations and wouldn’t fail to tell him what she’d found had little by little convinced him that Clarisse Rivière herself would be coming back to him, with her sinuous body, her face unchanged but the veil lifted from her gaze, her voice lively and musical—how flat was her old voice, how cautious, how droning!
And why should that be?
Why believe such a thing?
Clarisse Rivière would rise and return—but from among what dead, amid what miracles?
To his dismay, he realized he could now conceive of no other solution, that his own wish to go on living was at stake.
If nothing happened, if Ladivine came back empty-handed, her heart cold, then nothing would ever matter to him again.
The mountain could pounce on his back, Trevor could grab him and have his way with him, he would put up no defense, he would lie back, close his eyes.
Had he not been awaiting just that for nine years, since he left the house in Langon?
And would he not be waiting still, in his empty Annecy existence, had Clarisse Rivière not been killed?
Because what explanation could he hope for, what real Clarisse could he hope to meet, if she were still living, withdrawn, hermetic, obscure, with that human wreck Moliger?
Trevor climbed into Clarisse’s little car beside him, filling the closed, cramped space with his slightly musky odor, his loud breathing, his boredom.
And Richard Rivière realized he’d feel guilty about Trevor if he went away, if he deserted Annecy without helping him somehow, unpleasant as Trevor was, and in spite of everything he’d put him through.
He remembered that Trevor had dropped the southwestern accent after he brought up Moliger’s trial, three days before.
“I have an idea for you,” he said as he drove, staring straight ahead.
“Oh yeah?” Trevor said warily.
“After all, I did sell that SUV. I could help you get something going, a little software business. You could go back and study for a few months, get up to speed, and then the money from the car would be yours, to help you get started.”
“You talk to Mom about this?”
“Not yet. But she’ll be on board, and you know it.”
Trevor acknowledged this with a grunt.
Glancing toward him, Richard Rivière found the young man serious, almost somber, which he took to mean that he’d struck a nerve.
“Why would you do that?” Trevor asked in a hurried, clipped, gruff voice, as if he disapproved of the question but felt he had to ask so that everything would be clear.
Because I’m going away, and I want to leave you with a good memory of me, because I’ve never done anything more than the minimum for you, knowing you didn’t like me, and so not much liking you either.
But he said no such thing.
Horrified to find himself blushing, he answered:
“After all this time, you’re sort of my son, aren’t you?”
Oh no, he wasn’t, and he never would be.
How was it that even now he couldn’t forget Trevor’s many offenses, nor his own lack of love?
He felt only compassion and a need to do his duty, to put his affairs in order and settle his debt, even if no one but he thought he owed them anything, before he took off.
The vision of an abandoned Clarisse and Trevor tormented him.
He would simply say he was going back to Langon, back to the house, which was still up for sale.