Ladivine (9 page)

And yet she must surely feel emotions, said their confused, anxious gazes, and emotions more varied than what she allowed them to see, that unending, inexorable deference, which they might well have suspected was not pure but the product of very laudable hard work.

And might they not be tired of this, might they not be put off, perhaps, by the thought that they had to be grateful for it?

Might they not be tired and put off by such relentless generosity, the patient, unforthcoming man and the increasingly mysterious and obliging child, neither of whom, perhaps, wanted so much goodness and wished she would let them know her in some other way, too?

Clarisse Rivière felt the cold settling in, furtively filling the house, seeming to grip Richard Rivière and Ladivine, gradually encasing them, too, in the very delicate rime of a slightly stiff demeanor. But she didn’t know what to do so that this wouldn’t be.

She often laughed, often joked with them merrily, and her laugh was like crystal, it was brief and noncontagious. The more she devoted herself to her husband and daughter, the more she could feel them taking their distance, without defiance or resentment, as people turn away in discomfort from an incomprehensible passion.

But how frigid was the breath she exhaled.

Sometimes this left her discouraged, defeated, knowing the invisible presence of Malinka’s mother in her dark street kept her from giving her gestures and words the guilelessness that would warm them.

And she felt equally incapable of raising her daughter Ladivine by a common morality’s well-defined precepts.

No sooner was she called on to offer an opinion of some deed, to judge the appropriateness of some attitude, or simply to say what she thought, good or bad, of some situation than the servant’s silhouette appeared before her daunted eyes, seeming to defy her to judge anyone, she who had long since found herself guilty.

She fell into the habit of shrugging her shoulders, mute and distant, lips slightly pursed, when Ladivine told her of some clique that had offended another, and before the child’s upturned, questioning eyes, before the child striving to understand what to make of all this, she smiled curtly, saying nothing, and thus seeming to express her disgust at the story itself. And so Ladivine finally stopped telling her what went on at school, and Clarisse forgot that things she should know about ever happened at school.

She would realize this far too late.

Even before silence invaded their house, a polite, cozy, placid silence, she had already closed her ears to the things Richard Rivière and Ladivine said, though she pretended to listen, though her face and her gestures were the picture of careful attention—but only the commonplace words by which they ordered their day-to-day lives were allowed into her consciousness. The rest she was not to hear.

Because if she did she wouldn’t be able to speak without lying, and while she wasn’t lying when she was giving the man and the child all she could give of herself, she would be lying if she talked about this or that like a free woman. And for that lie the accusing face of the servant, who knew just how faithless Clarisse Rivière was, how much she already had to make up for, would never have left her in peace.

And then what more could she do, she who was already giving all she could of herself?

She was doing everything she could.

But it tortured her that she couldn’t hold back the numbness gradually overtaking her household, the cold torpor exuded in spite of her by her artificial, oblique self, until in the end she grew used to it, and came to believe this was how things were supposed to be in happy families.

She stared at her thin, mild face in the mirror, only faintly lined with delicate wrinkles at the corners of her eyelids. She couldn’t believe nothing showed in the still water of her gray-green eyes or the even crease of her slightly upturned lips.

Her light-red dyed hair was pulled into a loose chignon, her brow was pale and smooth, and two pearls gleamed opaquely on her ears. Who would ever suspect she was a woman in despair?

Like the rest of the house, the bedroom was neat and impeccably clean, not one piece of clothing in sight, everything in its place in the big blond-wood drawers, the polished armoires, their doors set with hard, efficient mirrors.

Clarisse Rivière still scrupulously neatened and cleaned this house they’d bought some years before, in the center of Langon, once they’d sold their little house on the outskirts, but now she hated the house as she’d never hated anyone in her life.

Because long before she did, that house had heard and understood what Richard Rivière said, and its old brick and stone walls would forever preserve the memory of those terrible words, unaffected, never once sighing in sympathy with her sadness.

She wanted the house to grieve and suffer as she did, she wished it would collapse and swallow them both, her who didn’t want to go on living, and him, Richard Rivière, who had spoken those strange, dangerous words she’d long before managed to stop hearing but which he’d so often repeated that in the end she had to give in and understand them.

Did he say “I’m leaving this house, I’m going to live somewhere else” or “I can’t go on living here, I’m leaving”?

That pretty house never reacted, as if indifferent to the insult or aware that none of this really concerned it, and neither did Clarisse Rivière, she only smiled vaguely, retied her blue dress’s belt on her hip, started out of the room, but that was when Richard Rivière put his hand on her arm and, realizing she’d once again succeeded in not hearing or understanding him, once again found a way to close her ears, like turning off a hearing aid, or, who knows, to make an unintelligible hash of the very clear words he’d just spoken in his patient, firm, friendly voice, he held her back with one hand as she fled, she who had sensed the threat in the air, her skin already prickling and shivering, and again he spoke those words that the house had already heard, that it had already absorbed in its thick walls, that had left it unmoved: “I’m going away, I’m leaving this house.”

No more than the walls, Clarisse Rivière did not collapse.

But the words and their cruel meaning had pierced her defenseless skin, the delicate, creamy, lilylike flesh that Richard Rivière once never wearied of caressing and clutching, just as she loved his body of firm, dry leather, and she felt her skin closing over those words, and those words calmly, meticulously, beginning to wreak their damage.

She’d looked toward the window, she’d seen the big chestnut tree on the square, and suddenly her hand began to itch, because, almost distracted by the memory, she could picture herself rubbing its ribbed trunk with that hand, and even now, it seemed, Richard Rivière taking that hand in his own and raising it to his lips.

Dimly, that gesture reminded her of another. Had she not, one long-ago day, pressed the servant’s hand to her mouth? Had she not tried, not to soften her mother’s sorrow, but to save herself from the pain and the knowledge of her own cruelty? And had that gesture saved her? Oh, she didn’t know anymore.

Now she was staring emptily into the chestnut’s leafy boughs, and, feeling Richard Rivière’s rough lips on her hand, she thought it was the trunk itself kissing her palm, the entire tree trying to redeem itself after for some reason inflicting on her a sadness she would never escape—but now she’d forgotten what it was, or even if there was anything to remember, and so she tentatively turned her eyes toward Richard Rivière and saw he was about to speak again, suspecting she hadn’t heard, which was true and false at the same time, because now she could feel a way being cleared inside her for a monstrous pain, but she had no idea where it was coming from, and with sluggish surprise she mused that the old chestnut tree patiently burrowing its roots under the asphalt on the square, if it really was that tree trying to redeem itself by exhaling a dry breath onto her hand, was in no position to torture her, that pitiful trash-ringed tree, and her so tall and pale in her sky-blue dress, her dainty-heeled sandals, oh, she would already have fled this room if she weren’t inexplicably being held back by one hand.

“I’m not sure you understand what I said,” Richard Rivière was telling her in his steadily patient voice, insistent but detached, as if conscientiously discharging a duty he knew would be difficult. “I’m going away, I don’t want to live here anymore, with you, which doesn’t mean I’ve stopped loving you, you’ll always be my…”

A siren began to shriek, but Richard Rivière’s lips went on moving, his hand gently squeezing Clarisse’s, and his lack of reaction surprised her until she realized the awful noise was coming from her own head.

At the same moment, a fierce wave of nausea made her moan aloud.

No doubt thinking she was about to collapse, Richard Rivière took her in his arms. She could see his anxious eyes, his moving lips, but not a sound could be heard through the wail in her ears, and she shook her head, vaguely ashamed to be making a scene.

But she felt so ill, so terribly ill, that her embarrassment ebbed, pushed back by a grief full of nausea, disgust, and unbounded horror, which now flooded through her, making her limbs twitch, vainly trying to throw open her breast so it could get out, but her firm, solid flesh had closed over that pain like the house’s walls over Richard Rivière’s irrevocable words, and nothing, she thought, would ever dislodge it.

She rubbed her face against his shirt, inhaled the fresh, childlike smell she knew so well, thinking, So that’s what was coming to me, with an astonishment beyond measure.

No less immense was her disbelief that nothing showed in the mirror just a few hours later. A slight lostness in her eyes might tell the servant that something was troubling her daughter when she next went to see her, but what that torment might be she would never guess.

Clarisse Rivière found no comfort in this. For the first time in her life she wished she could confide in Malinka’s mother, tell her not of her joy but her sorrow, and see that sorrow’s reflection on the servant’s face, so like her own.

When she called her daughter Ladivine in Germany the next day, she would tell her of Richard Rivière’s decision in a halting but calm, steady voice, and Ladivine’s palpable sadness would come as a balm to her, but then she would realize Richard Rivière had already told her, and, suddenly embarrassed, she would say nothing of her desperate need for consolation.

“I’m fine,” she would murmur in response to Ladivine’s question. “Yes, yes, I’m fine.”

She would later admit to herself that, against all reason, she was hoping Ladivine might rush straight to Langon, try to talk her father out of going away, press her to her young, vigorous, supple breast, and then everything would be just as it was, Richard Rivière would once again climb into his SUV every morning to go off and sell cars, carefree as ever, quietly, humbly, but visibly proud of his success, while she set off on foot, her jaunty heels clacking smartly over the paving stones, for the pizzeria where she now oversaw the waitstaff, and maybe Ladivine would move home again, watch over them, open her father’s eyes to the reality of their love.

Because they were in love, weren’t they? Clarisse Rivière, at least, felt an unmingled passion for her husband, unquestioning and uncritical.

But no such thing was happening.

The memory of the way it actually was came roaring back at her whenever she let herself drift into that daydream, or in the earliest hours of the morning, and she returned to reality with tears streaming down her cheeks.

Richard Rivière was still there beside her, cordial, watchful, and distantly polite in a way that stung her cruelly. He was packing up his things, and Clarisse lent a hand, though she could see he didn’t like it, that it embarrassed him and, strangely, angered him.

She studied him when he turned his back—his tan nape, his hair, still thick and dark, the way his shoulder muscles bulged beneath his T-shirt when he lifted a box—then forgot to look away when he glanced furtively in her direction, catching her on the brink of tears, lost in thought, drained and hopeless.

He came to her reluctantly, gave her a distant embrace, as if taking care to avoid any gesture that might give Clarisse the idea his decision was anything other than irrevocable.

She felt that distance, and she clung to his neck, immediately thinking, Soon I won’t be able to do this anymore, and panic knotted her stomach. She bent double, silent, breathless with grief.

Richard Rivière’s body was as familiar as her own, and she thought she knew his face more intimately than hers, more than Clarisse Rivière’s narrow, delicate face, once a certain Malinka’s, which she always looked at askance in the mirror, uncertain and ill at ease, weary of that reflection.

She’d never stopped studying Richard Rivière’s face, in repeated but serene wonderment, no longer sure if it was handsome or not, little caring, knowing it had aged and surely changed, but seeing it in the eternal present of her love and devotion.

How, she wondered, distraught and unbelieving, how would she ever do without that face? She might have gouged out her own eyes, had she not realized that Richard Rivière’s face would be just as absent to her blind.

“Where will you live?” she asked dully.

He paused for a very brief moment.

“In Annecy. I found something there.”

“That’s a long way from here,” she murmured, shocked.

“Yes, it is,” he said simply, with a half shrug.

Then—wanting to spare her, she thought, perhaps to conceal any eagerness or anticipation in his eyes as he spoke the name Annecy—he gently turned away.

They made love one last time the night before he left, and Richard Rivière, considerate and giving as always, seemed to her almost too attentive, hurtfully so, as if trying to soothe or appease her, to ward off an anger that she thus began to feel, almost reflexively, no such thought ever having entered her mind before, rapt as she was with shame and despair.

But no righteous anger could she feel. Were Richard Rivière’s reasons for leaving the house not perfectly valid, whatever they might be? Who was she to judge? Had she not made of the servant’s life a bitter bread?