Ladivine (8 page)

Whence, no doubt, the devotion, almost the euphoria, with which she saw to the little chores that came with the baby.

Washing the tiny clothes and hanging them on the line in the garden, mashing the vegetables for the baby’s puree, the routine and utilitarian nature of those tasks held back the waves of invasive, boundless love, and although every move she made was for the sake of the child, she could in a way put the child out of her mind.

It was when she inhaled the warm, musty smell of the child’s head, when she felt that compact little body’s warmth through her clothes, that she knew she was in danger. That overpowering love unsettled her, leaving her first wary of its demands, then rebellious.

I don’t need this, she thought, feeling heavier than when she was pregnant, as if that immense love for the baby were overstuffing her already full heart.

Richard Rivière, for his part, had conceived a very simple passion for the child, and never tried to get out of caring for her.

No swollen, oversize love was trying to push him beyond his limits, or take anything away from him, or split open his chest.

The Rivière parents took a day to come see the child, and the moment she opened the door Clarisse felt the strange attractive force radiating from the father’s big, solid body, a force to be struggled against, she immediately thought, because there was something unpleasant about it, but also, on first meeting, something intriguing.

He had a broad, full face with delicate features and mocking eyes that let it be known, with an aggressiveness scarcely veiled by false benevolence, that he was a man who put up with no nonsense. He had enormous hands, deformed by arthritis, though he was not an old man. He stood with his forearms well away from his thighs, not so much to spare his ailing hands any painful contact, it seemed, as to show that he was unarmed, which might well be a lie, said his jeering eyes, because he had no fear of lies, and no sense of honor.

A wolfhound came in with the parents, a big, healthy, powerful beast. Clarisse backed away.

“Don’t be afraid,” said the father. “He’s with us, he’s very well behaved.”

Richard had gone out for bread, and he came back just then. A surprised, vaguely irritated look crossed his face, as if he’d forgotten his parents were coming, which couldn’t be true, thought Clarisse, since he’d gone out specially to buy bread for four. His suddenly unhappy face settled into a guarded expression, just this side of rude.

He murmured a greeting to his father, still keeping his distance.

Filled with a compassion she’d never before felt for her husband, an almost disinterested sympathy, Clarisse sensed that he was shielding himself from the crushing physical authority, the simultaneously attractive and repellent omnipotence that had entered the house with his father. How strange to see Richard trembling, he who ordinarily showed no fear of anyone!

She went and stood at his side, their arms touching.

She could feel him quivering in turmoil and sterile distress, like a dog, she told herself. He seemed to be trying to fight off a will stronger than his own, and that will was serenely waiting for him to give in and bow down, and Richard was still clinging to his anger and pride, and the other will saw that and laughed, requiring neither anger nor pride to maintain itself.

So Richard Rivière’s father laughed off his son, thought Clarisse, moved, because he knew Richard’s frail crutches would soon break, that his anger would tire and his pride falter, no longer at all sure of its reason for being.

Stiff but trembling, Richard didn’t say a word, as if the energy he was burning to stand up to his father and keep up his dignity forbade any further exertion.

Clarisse showed the parents into the living room, babbling, describing what they could plainly see, the simple, brightly colored furniture she and Richard had picked out, the pale-yellow wallpaper they’d hung. The parents nodded, never offering a compliment, the mother dubious and reserved, the father snide and uninterested.

Richard stood off to one side, arms crossed, and Clarisse thought he looked exhausted and drained beneath his still fiercely tensed face, as if his sense of himself couldn’t quite keep up with his real nature, which, weak and helpless before the father, was, unbeknownst to him, already showing itself in his vacillating gaze, in his mouth’s drooping corners.

“Let’s go see the baby,” said Clarisse, having heard a faint squeal.

She started down the hallway, then stopped short at the room’s open door. Her hands instinctively sprang out toward the two sides of the jamb, as if to prevent anyone entering.

The wolfhound was lying on Ladivine’s bed, a little crib whose bars were lowered on one side so the baby could be picked up more easily, and its outstretched head, lightly grazing the child’s, had a deathly stillness about it.

Equally still, Clarisse saw in a single sweeping glance, were the baby’s body, her colorless face, her wide eyes looking deep into the dog’s staring gaze, as if she’d plunged into an abyss of sibylline knowledge and perhaps become lost.

Yet Clarisse had the strong sense of a bond not to be rashly broken, a secret union with no immediate danger for the child. Not for a moment did she doubt the dog’s good intentions.

She heard a horrified cry behind her and felt herself being violently shoved forward. Richard burst into the room, snatched up the baby, and clasped her to him, turning his back to the dog as a shield for the child.

“Get that thing out of here!” he screamed toward the hallway, where his parents were standing.

He backed toward the wall, scarlet with fear and indignation.

The father calmly stepped in. Clarisse saw his eyes study the scene just as hers had a moment before and, no less quick and assured, decide that the danger was not where it seemed. This troubled her. She felt at peace, nonetheless, and very comfortably pure, as if washed clean from within by an intuition higher and wiser than hers, which had chosen her.

“I never want to see that dog in this house again!” Richard shouted furiously.

Clarisse noted that he was taking care not to look at the dog, still sprawled on the bed watching him, dark and serene, silent and proper.

Something struck her, clear as day: that well-behaved dog had the same eyes as Malinka’s mother.

Richard’s father began to stroke its flanks, speaking tenderly into its ear, not to placate it, Clarisse told herself, because he wasn’t afraid of it, but to erase any offense.

The dog stretched its legs, yawned, deigned to get down from the bed.

The father gently grasped its collar—once again, thought Clarisse, not to control it but as if taking the arm of a dear friend—and the two of them left the room without a glance Richard’s way. He sighed in ostentatious relief. He rocked and caressed the child, who had begun to cry.

“That was close,” he said accusingly.

Did he mean to include her in this censure, because she hadn’t rushed forward to snatch the baby away from the dog’s maw?

Clarisse wasn’t sure, but she preferred not to know.

Her certainty that the dog had come to the child’s room not to harm her but to teach her was twisting and turning inside her, and it troubled her like an unwholesome temptation of disloyalty to Richard Rivière. Shouldn’t she have told him of that certainty, wouldn’t he have understood it, found reassurance in it? Oh no, he wouldn’t have understood, and his inability would have made clear to Clarisse what she already knew, that no breath had come to him to show him the way into the dog’s mysterious soul.

She couldn’t help seeing it as a sign of Richard’s weakness that this inspiration had steered clear of him but had entered his father’s heart.

Madame Rivière hadn’t bothered to come into the bedroom. She’d set the table in the kitchen, and the father was sitting and waiting before his plate with the impatient, wearied look of a man who wants to put the chore of the meal behind him and be off as quickly as possible.

Richard showed the baby to his mother, who, thought Clarisse, examined her guardedly, her eyes full of an outraged skepticism, as if this might all be a cruel joke she’d have to thwart before they could laugh at her. She clumsily took the child in her arms, then handed her back almost at once with a furious little giggle.

Later, as the meal was nearing its end and Ladivine was back asleep in her little bed, they heard crunching gravel outside on the terrace. It was the dog, pacing back and forth in front of the house, beneath the kitchen windows.

Seething, Richard asked them:

“What’s with you having that dog now? Since when are you animal lovers?”

“It’s to guard the shop,” said Madame Rivière. “You’ve got to protect yourself these days, you know.”

“It’s got nothing to do with the shop,” the father said deliberately.

He waved his fork toward the mother, not looking at her.

“That’s what she’d like to think, but that’s not it at all. Why would we have brought it here if it was supposed to be guarding the shop? Why do we take it with us wherever we go?”

“Yes, why?” asked the mother, suddenly afraid.

“Because we can’t not, that’s how it is. It’s an order come to life. What do I care about dogs? It’s true, I don’t even like them that much. This one’s different. I had no choice.”

Richard let out a disdainful snicker. He was trying to add scorn to his hatred, Clarisse told herself, but it was beyond him, and scorn refused to take root in so pallid a heart. His gaze was dull, at once full of hate and struggling to summon up some scorn with which to harden itself.

The dog began to yelp. It was jumping up and down on the terrace so its head could be glimpsed through the window. It barked when its eyes met those of Clarisse or Richard’s father, then whimpered when its paws hit the ground and it was once again out of sight.

Identical to the cries of Malinka’s mother, its laments were more than Clarisse could bear.

She walked to the window, and the dog hurried off around the house, glancing impatiently back at Clarisse again and again.

She suddenly realized it was headed for the child’s room, whose window looked onto the yard on the opposite side of the house. She whirled around, raced through the kitchen, ran to Ladivine’s room. She first saw the bounding dog’s huge frantic head through the glass, then the baby’s pale little face as she hiccupped and moaned in her own vomit.

She cried out, picked up the child, patted her back until she heard regular breathing and the faint beat of that soothed, very young heart.

“How did you know, you nice dog, how did you know?” she murmured, staring at the window, where the dog, now at peace, could no longer be seen.

Richard Rivière’s father had just appeared in the doorway.

For the first time Clarisse glimpsed fear in his cold eyes, but it was a respectful fear, docile, a pious fear that in no way diminished him.

She went back to visiting Malinka’s mother, leaving the child with a neighbor who would also look after her when Clarisse went back to work.

Sitting in the velvet armchair that had slowly become hers at the servant’s, her gaze wandering over the trinkets her mother had begun to surround herself with—little porcelain elephants, handbells of various sizes, vases never filled with flowers but abundantly covered with fanciful floral motifs—she listened with one ear as the servant told her of bosses and coworkers, with the monotonous insistence, the maniacal, forced intensity Clarisse noticed she always fell into when she sensed her daughter’s thoughts straying, and rather than try to lure them back she seemed to deliberately drive them still farther away with her mind-numbing monologues.

“What about you, how are you getting on?” she would ask at long last, her tone at once aggressive and imploring.

And Clarisse would smile and say nothing, evasive, but smiling lovingly and sincerely all the same.

But her heart was pounding, and, thinking about the baby, from whom she didn’t like to be separated for these few hours, she told herself how she wished she could give her mother the gift of that child. How happy the servant would be!

And to be sure, she would be breaking her vow never to link her existence to the servant’s, but also acquitting herself of it by so great a sacrifice, and so her responsibility to those two, to her child and her mother, would, she thought, be behind her.

Because she would then flee far from both of them, far even from Richard Rivière, not yet realizing what she owed him. And would she not suffer terribly, never again seeing those three she loved far more than life?

But in truth she didn’t mind suffering, if it was the sorrow of love, of not having those you love close beside you.

Far more painful for her was fidelity to her irreversible decision, which was destroying Malinka’s mother over a slow flame, and her, too, Clarisse Rivière, with a brighter flame, more violent, perhaps purifying, but she didn’t yet know—she didn’t know, and simply went on hoping in fear.

As the years went by, and Ladivine became a sweet, even-tempered girl, and Richard Rivière’s skillful salesmanship, tireless work, and quiet, indestructible ambition brought him ever-greater responsibilities at the dealership, Clarisse Rivière began to see that winning on one front could only mean losing on the other, that this was how it had to be, that it was a matter of her destiny.

But she led her life onward with an untrembling hand.

Apart from what they weren’t allowed to know, she believed she gave of herself completely to Richard and Ladivine.

Every moment of her life was infused with the certainty that it could be sacrificed to those two, that it belonged above all to them, that Clarisse Rivière was to make use of it only so long as they didn’t need it. Before that man and that child who suspected nothing and enjoyed her generosity in naïve good faith, she pictured herself as a slashed wineskin pouring out the very essence of joyful abnegation, of eager, almost greedy selflessness.

But that notion of her own success was undermined by the ever-more-troublesome thought that her voluntary, permanent self-effacement had constructed a thin wall of ice all around her, that sometimes her daughter and husband couldn’t understand, though they said nothing of it, perhaps knew nothing of it, why they couldn’t get at her in the heart of her emotions.