Ladivine by Marie NDiaye Read Free Book Online Page A

words left no room for any specific inquiry.
    Clarisse never pretended she hadn’t heard or understood. Her self-respect recoiled at the thought of deliberate, shameful playacting. She stared at an invisible point slightly behind her mother and sat in silence with a pleasant, patient, vaguely apologetic look, letting a bubble of discomfort swell between them until the servant finally popped it with a forced chuckle or a remark on the color of the sky, and the mounting disbelief and stinging affliction in that little laugh was not lost on Clarisse, who noted it with some sadness, the calm, immovable, self-satisfied sadness of an absolutist.
    Because once her decision was made there was no going back.
    Only within the four walls of this little apartment did she consent to be the servant’s daughter, that girl named Malinka.
    And eventually her mother realized this and gloomily accepted it, even if it sometimes mystified her at first, as if she couldn’t quite believe such a thing could be happening, that her daughter, whom she’d rejoined and reconquered, and who seemed so cordial, so present, was in fact turning away from her completely, or rejecting her even more violently than if she’d pressed both hands to her chest and shoved her beneath the wheels of a passing car.
    Sadness and incomprehension put a new, embittered crease on the servant’s lips.
    Sometimes, when they ran out of banalities and both sat in silence, she burst into a laugh, sarcastic or self-mocking. And Clarisse realized her mother could no longer take refuge in fantasy, in the vague and the impalpable.
    She herself so suffered from the pain she inflicted on the servant, who’d done nothing to merit this punishment, that a weight settled into her chest and never went away, an alloy of grief and guilt whose volume and mass she felt every minute of the day, crushing her, smothering her.
    But once her decision was made, there was no going back.
    —
    Very soon Malinka’s mother took a job with a cleaning service. Her hapless, dreamy mother’s long-standing gift for finding work wherever she wanted inspired a certain admiration in Clarisse Rivière, although she suspected that her mother’s vacant, infinitely mild air worked against her even as it eased her way, giving the impression, which was in fact true, that she would make few demands as an employee. Her work now was cleaning city-owned buildings, late at night and early in the morning.
    “For the first time in my life, I have coworkers,” she said, with that voice that gave no clue if she thought this a good thing or not.
    Nevertheless, Clarisse had the feeling she wasn’t unhappy about it.
    “That’s good,” she was foolish enough to say. “This way you won’t be so alone.”
    “I wouldn’t feel alone at all if I had my daughter beside me,” said the servant, the bitter crease on her lips.
    And it was so clear to Clarisse that she meant “on my side,” or “if my daughter weren’t my enemy,” that in a rare rush of emotion she clasped her mother’s hands and pressed them to her face.
    But such surges of tenderness and contrition, even the heavy burden of her guilty conscience weighing on her rib cage and forbidding her, wherever she was, to feel fully carefree, none of that could shake her faith in the necessity of her choice, which, when she offered it up to her own judgment in the starkest terms, was to have nothing to do, ever again, with Malinka’s mother.
    These visits were no more than a tactic for keeping her quiet.
    But how she loved that woman, even more so now that she was seeing her suffer! How vile, how convoluted, she felt next to the servant, who was so light, so clear, so valiant in her attachment!
    Clarisse knew she’d doomed herself, knew she would one day be punished for abandoning the servant. She didn’t like that idea, but she wasn’t afraid.
    Because once her decision was made there was no disobeying it, even in her thoughts.
    She gave up her job at the