Ladivine (37 page)

Would Clarisse Rivière then come looking for him?

To take him where, into what frightful back ways?

In truth, he felt no fear, only burning desire and impatience.

Trevor grunted again, his forehead wrinkled, more somber still. His left leg had started to twitch.

During their noon hour that Monday, eating lunch in the kitchen with Clarisse, he got a call from the bank.

His banker informed him that to his deep regret the check he’d deposited five days before had been refused as a forgery, and the credit to his account canceled.

“There must be some mistake,” said Richard Rivière. “I never deposited a check.”

He smiled reassuringly at Clarisse as her brow furrowed in concern, but that smile was more for himself than for her, a dazzling forced smile that left his lips aching.

“A check for forty-seven thousand euros, deposited on the fourteenth of this month,” the man replied, somewhat sharply. “It had your signature on the back, your account number.”

“I don’t understand.”

He broke off and took a deep breath, all trace of his smile gone.

Suddenly he found his own breath foul and repellent.

He turned his back to Clarisse and looked up at the mountain that had given up torturing him.

The midday sun was shining on the still-green slopes, suddenly reminding him of the landscape that came with an electric train he’d been given as a child, a little mountain covered in dark-green felt overlooking a tiny chalet with doors and windows that opened.

How he’d wished he could make himself small enough to get into that chalet and live there alone, undisturbed, far from his scolding parents, sheltered by that gentle springtime mountain!

“I sold a car privately, and the buyer paid by wire transfer, just as we’d arranged. I never deposited a check for that sale.”

“You’re absolutely certain it was a transfer?”

“I’m not, actually,” Richard Rivière mumbled, trapped, now so worried that he could feel his strength draining away. “I saw the credit to my account, and since we’d agreed he’d be paying by transfer, I thought, obviously…And what about my signature, how could he have…”

“I assume you signed a contract. He must have copied it, it’s not hard. I’ve heard of this happening before, you’re not the first and you won’t be the last,” said the banker, as if to console Richard Rivière.

“What do I do now?”

He fleetingly remembered the desperation in Berger’s last words on the telephone, his unspoken plea for Richard Rivière not to hang up just yet, hoping in vain for support or a few comforting words he could draw on when the phone call was over.

Now it was his turn to speak in that tone—Oh God, oh God, he dully repeated to himself, and he saw the raspberry socks, the rippling overcoat, the lustrous, carefully styled brown hair.

The man had driven away in the SUV, gunning the engine, and Richard Rivière, standing on the sidewalk, had started to lift his hand in farewell, but his dishonored, burning hand rose no higher than his shoulder.

And when the car turned the corner, the distant, indefinable memory of a similar scene flashed through his mind, disappearing before he could catch hold of it.

“…file a complaint,” the banker was saying, concluding a sentence that Richard Rivière hadn’t listened to. “Goodbye, Monsieur Rivière.”

Call me Richard, he wordlessly implored him, still pressing the phone to his ear after the other man had hung up.

He took the afternoon off to go to the police station, and when he walked into the apartment, hours later, so exhausted he thought he might faint in the hallway, Trevor emerged from his room and announced that he had diabetes.

He’d just got the results of his blood tests via the Internet, and that’s what was wrong with him, he blurted out, seeming at once anxious and strangely excited: type 2 diabetes.

FUCK YOU, YOU FUCKING FUCK,
Richard Rivière read blankly on Trevor’s green-and-black T-shirt.

Against a black background, the big green letters undulated like tall meadow grass on the boy’s shifting flesh.

“Type two diabetes,” Trevor repeated in a grave, pedantic voice.

Fuck you, you fucking fuck.

Trevor bought these T-shirts with the money Clarisse earned.

Why did he seem so proud of himself for being sick? As if, forever failing tests, even the
baccalauréat,
twice, he could now tell himself he’d passed this one with flying colors?

Well aware of his cowardice, Richard Rivière realized this meant he could put off telling Trevor he’d lost the SUV money, thinking the lab results surely outweighed the swindle.

More than his own financial troubles, was it not the fear of letting Trevor down that had tied his stomach in knots as he waited in the police station?

Not to mention feeling like a pitiful failure, incapable of responding to Trevor’s progress with anything but false promises, undone by his own idiocy.

Because this was all his fault, he never should have trusted that jittery, pushy, overdressed buyer.

And, sitting on a hard metal chair, head in his hands, he could think only of how to help Trevor make a new start all the same, relegating the money problems hanging over him to a future too uncertain to worry about.

He couldn’t imagine how he might do it.

He owed the bank tens of thousands of euros as it was.

Well, he told himself, he’d just have to take out another loan.

So he’d be mired in debt—what did he care?

He laid an awkward hand on the boy’s shoulder.

“We’re going to get you the best possible care,” he said stupidly.

A hint of a derisive smile grazed Trevor’s lips, replaced at once by a thoughtful, diligent look.

“I’ve been reading up about it on the Internet. As a matter of fact I’ve got to get back to it now.” And he lumbered quick as he could toward his room.

It seemed to Richard Rivière, who’d almost never seen Trevor in the company of another person, that nothing had ever interested the boy like this diabetes business.

Clarisse burst into tears when Trevor told her the news.

He came running as soon as he heard the key in the lock, and, at once frightened and pleased with himself, beaming like a child who knows he has something big to divulge, he threw that word “diabetes” in her face, then took a demure half step back, hands behind him.

Richard Rivière found them this way, Clarisse wiping her damp cheeks with one hand, Trevor shifting his weight from one leg to the other, basking, and what struck and saddened him was not only the helpless solitude, the ordinary, trivial sorrow of these two people of no particular note, but also that they seemed to expect nothing more from him, that, though not yet aware of it, they realized he no longer lived there, with them, if he ever had.

He wasn’t worried that he hadn’t yet heard from Ladivine.

A presage would have been nice, of course, even a simple hint that something was coming, and all day long, and at night in his dreams, he stood ready to open the way to any visit his daughter might pay him.

When he thought of her, he no longer pictured the young woman’s face, now almost forgotten, but the guileless, quietly introspective face of the little girl. With numbing clarity, he remembered her hand in his as they went walking on the hill, even the feel of her skin, the mosquito bite on her thumb, his rough fingers absentmindedly stroking it, which she liked.

Somewhere his beloved daughter, the child he once cherished, as he now remembered, was taking steps to flush out Clarisse Rivière—how grateful he was, and how aware that he had to welcome any form her reappearance might take!

He confessed to himself that he’d rather Ladivine come back after the trial, the following month. The mere thought of it filled him with dread.

He couldn’t help remembering that he’d found a sort of escape from his grief, from the feeling of horror and then unreality that had filled him on learning of Clarisse Rivière’s murder, in the many interviews he gave at the time, bewildered, faintly desperate, little understanding why anyone should ask his opinion of the murderer’s personality, of that Freddy Moliger he knew nothing of, but offering it gladly, taking a strange pleasure in it, delighting in his role, his importance.

He’d read some of those interviews, and they made him ashamed.

Who on earth was that Richard Rivière, he’d wondered, so assured, so informed, speaking unguardedly of the depth of his pain?

Now he got up every morning with the trial on his mind, and he was horrified to think of his daughter Ladivine being there in person, and so he silently begged her to stay away, in whatever place it was she was hearing him from.

He’d hired a lawyer to represent them both, a certain Noroit, from Bordeaux, someone he felt comfortable with, finding nothing to intimidate him in that middle-aged man’s dull, awkward appearance and plain polyester suits.

But if Ladivine were there with him, and if once again her presence gave him the painful impression that he could only have known her in his dreams, that her face meant nothing to him in real life, and that, no matter what he might think, he was therefore now dreaming, if that happened, as it always did, telling him he would soon be waking up in his Annecy room, disoriented, desperately sad, how would he ever hold up till the end of the trial?

Wouldn’t it be hard enough just to see Moliger, with that loser look he remembered from the photos, imagining that to this man, perhaps, Clarisse Rivière had shown her real face?

Because otherwise, he wondered, why would Clarisse Rivière have taken up with that creep?

It couldn’t have been sex, he thought. He had the face of a drunkard, there was something repellent about him, something ignoble that he thought a sure cure for any sort of love.

She’d gone looking, he told himself, racked by a jealousy he’d never felt in his life, she’d gone looking for someone, anyone (preferably, perhaps, blind to what she was offering?), to reveal herself to.

Was that it? He wasn’t sure of anything anymore.

All he knew was that he didn’t want to see his daughter Ladivine in such circumstances.

He wanted to see her transformed, he thought, and enlightened about Clarisse Rivière; he wanted his heart to recognize her immediately, without doubt or regret, never wondering if that woman was once the little girl whose hand he held; he wanted to see her and hear her say: I’ve brought Mama back to you.

He would not be afraid, he thought, of either one’s new face.

Ladivine Sylla dressed and groomed herself with even more care than usual.

She oiled her hair, then pulled it back and bound it at her nape with an elastic band, tugging so vigorously that her scalp smarted, but she was long used to that and scarcely noticed the pain.

Next she put on a tweed pantsuit she’d found for forty euros in a secondhand shop. She’d chosen a dark-red turtleneck to go with it, and her best pair of shoes, high-heeled ankle boots, on which the trouser cuff broke ever so slightly, which she considered the height of elegance.

She went and said goodbye to her figurines, asking them to wish her luck. She clearly heard them answer, each in its own way, in its own distinctive voice.

“Luck with what?” asked the little gilded Buddha.

But she couldn’t say, not quite knowing herself.

Luck one day entering her life suddenly seemed to her so absurd an idea that she nearly laughed out loud at herself. Did she even really want such a thing? Not likely. A stroke of luck now would be grounds for alarm, she thought, and it would feel like a punishment. What could be crueler than good things coming too late, when the worst possible thing had happened?

She went off to catch the tram on the
quai,
a thick, silty-smelling fog in the air. She didn’t quite know what she wanted for herself, but she knew exactly what she didn’t, at any price: her words having some sort of influence.

The lawyer, that Bertin, had told her she had only to answer whatever she was asked with the utmost sincerity. She wasn’t to try to make out what they wanted from her, nor even imagine they wanted anything in particular. In a sense, that was none of her business.

Ladivine Sylla didn’t believe a word of it, though she feigned absolute confidence in Bertin.

She was convinced there were things that he wanted her to say, and he’d called her as a witness in the hope or the certainty she would say them. That was his job. From what that Freddy Moliger had told him of Ladivine Sylla, Bertin thought her worth putting on the stand, and that was fine with her, Ladivine Sylla, but she wanted her words to carry no weight in anyone’s mind, on one side or the other.

That was her only concern.

The rest, she told herself, she could handle. She’d long since stopped crying. Why should she break down there in front of all those people?

For two years she’d been buying figurines of young princes or damsels in tears, their necks bowed, their heads bent over their joined hands, and whenever she woke in the morning crushed by sadness she lined them up on the front row of her shelf, then sat down before them and stared at them for hours.

Finally she fell into the state she was seeking, between awareness and stupor, and the figurines seemed to be weeping for her, sharing in her pain, gazing on her with their suddenly living, damp, shining eyes.

In their porcelain pupils she saw her own dry, dead eyes reflected, and she felt better, and consoling words came to her lips, and she murmured those words to her poor figurines, nearly reaching out to wipe their tear-streaked cheeks.

But no one had ever come to console her, no one had ever dried her tears with a tender hand, in those early days when she wept and wept for Malinka. That’s how life was for her.

The one person she thought of when her need for solace grew so overpowering that her figurines’ good wishes were no longer enough was that Freddy Moliger. Had she dared, she would surely have paid a call on that Moliger in his prison, and she had no doubt that her sorrow would have been lightened.

She got off the tram near the courthouse, walked with some difficulty in her high heels to the foot of the stone steps.

She felt tall, slender, and very old; she imagined her face like the face of her dear little Saxony porcelain shepherdess, smooth and timeworn, thin, slightly vacant. Her scalp stung, which was good, because it made her feel alive, sharp, not dulled and lost, as she usually did since Malinka’s death.

A dog was watching her from the other side of the street.

Afraid of cats and suspicious of dogs, Ladivine Sylla deliberately looked away, not wanting to attract it.

But she did once more glance its way. It was a big brown dog, scrawny and shivering in the damp air.

A memory of Malinka surfaced in her mind, the child’s face looking up at Ladivine Sylla when she came home from work, in that tiny house at the far end of a courtyard, and herself trembling in gentle, grave astonishment when the girl’s pale eyes met her own.

Where had she come from, that child with sand-gray eyes and smooth hair but a face so like her own? And that dog, where did it come from, its dark gaze inexplicably making her think of Malinka?

She understood that it meant her no harm, and she briefly turned back toward it, breathless.

An old image of herself came to mind, as far as could be from the little shepherdess’s cold face. She saw herself at a time when she was full of fury and hate, when her face was clenched around her pinched lips, her little quivering nose. Her anger at Malinka had become a rage at the spell that was gripping them both, and then even that had waned, replaced by a sad resignation.

But, in that angry time, she would sometimes wake in the morning and feel as if she’d been running all night. Her thigh muscles ached, her nostrils were red from breathing in drizzle or mist. Over what plains had she raced, over what meadows blew that wind whose grassy scent she thought she could still smell on the down of her arms? She longed to go back to that place where the wind had whistled in her ears, where the dry, packed ground had sustained her enchanted sprint, where the light, perfumed air had swept off her anger.

Because those mornings found her weary but freed of the impotent rage that was sapping her. Gradually it came back, but less virulent—exhausted from trying to sustain itself throughout those nocturnal sprints, of which Ladivine Sylla remembered nothing, except, now and then, a sensation of trickling warmth on her back, like flowing sweat on bare skin.

She turned away from the dog and started up the steps.

How old she’d become! Who would look after her when she was still frailer, who would lower her eyelids when she was dead, who would know she had died? Would Malinka? And that dog on the other sidewalk? What messenger would she have to announce her death? Who would care?

That Freddy Moliger might be sad. He alone would still think of her now and then.

After a two-hour wait in a little room whose dingy corners and crannies Ladivine Sylla inspected with a critical eye to pass the time (so experienced was she in removing all manner of stains that she could see just what the cleaning lady would have needed—bleach, the right sponge, thirty minutes more—to erase the shoe prints from the tile floor, the marks left by the chair backs on the painted wall), she was finally ushered into the courtroom.

She studied the ground at her feet, suddenly troubled by a pressure in her ears, as if she’d too quickly dived to a very great depth.

She made out a hum of voices and movements around her, and the room seemed enormous and packed. A roaring filled her ears; she staggered on her high heels. Someone caught her by the elbow and asked, she thought she made out, if she was all right.

“Yes, yes,” she mumbled, embarrassed.

Nonetheless, the person kept a grip on her until she reached the stand, where Ladivine Sylla grasped the rail in relief.

Then she dared to look up, and found only friendly, attentive gazes.

She wondered if she should turn her head to look for that Freddy Moliger, then decided against it, vaguely afraid that this act might have the same force as speech, and remembering that she wanted nothing she said to have any meaning beyond what she hoped was the perfectly neutral sense of each word.

She gave them her name, as they’d asked. Then, when they asked her to verify that she was Clarisse Rivière’s mother, and although she’d tried hard to get used to the name Malinka had chosen, an old pride flickered to life, and she couldn’t help correcting:

“My daughter’s name was Malinka.”

The lawyer she’d met with, the one who introduced himself as Bertin, representing that Freddy Moliger, asked if she’d ever met his client.

“Yes,” she answered.

He asked if she’d enjoyed that Freddy Moliger’s company.

“Yes,” she answered.

He asked if she’d even felt some affection for him.

“Yes,” she answered.

He asked if her daughter Malinka seemed happy with that Freddy Moliger.

“Yes,” she answered.

It took her a few seconds to grasp why her mind was desperately summoning up the image of her weeping figurines, and how they might help her now. Was it not their job to suffer in her stead?

She swallowed, once again heard a dim, piercing plaint deep inside her ears.

Her figurines were meant to do the weeping, a frantic little voice was saying over and over in her head, so her own eyes would stay dry and no one would know what she was going through. A thousand needles pricked her lower eyelids. She squeezed the rail with all her might, almost resigned, in her exhaustion, to let all her misery spill out.

But as it happened they had no further questions.