Ladivine by Marie NDiaye Read Free Book Online Page B

brasserie and her little room near the station for a job in a downtown café and a one-bedroom apartment in Floirac. She couldn’t imagine staying on, now that her boss had seen who her mother was, though she never mentioned it again. But above all it was vital that the servant not know where she worked, not know the address where she slept, just as she had no idea that Malinka was now Clarisse, and that that magnificent girl, that lissome Clarisse in the clinging black skirt and tight white blouse she wore for her job, that dazzling, expertly made-up girl, always a little breathless, as if she’d been running, stuck close to the walls in the street and looked over her shoulder, again and again, to make absolutely sure that her mother wasn’t walking behind her.
    —
    She couldn’t believe it didn’t show.
    She moved her face still closer to the mirror and a smile came to her lips. So this was what he saw when she leaned in to pick up the menu or put down the silverware, these features, slightly stiff beneath the makeup, these red lips reshaped with the pencil, and nothing more, surely, since she herself could see nothing. And she knew this was the face of a girl in love, and he didn’t.
    How could he?
    She smiled, beside herself with pride.
    Or maybe he did, maybe he’d guessed?
    Maybe at this very moment he was pressing his face to a similar mirror, in the mysterious place where he lived, studying his features, the features of a boy in love, smiling as she was smiling, overjoyed, wondering if she’d seen?
    Maybe at this very moment he was imagining her smiling at her reflection, at once amazed and flush with pride at what she’d become, a girl in love, as if up to now, loving no one, never thinking of love, she’d been living with an illness, from which she’d recovered by the sheer force of her wondrous vitality?
    Because that’s just what it was, it was a sickness to love only her mother, with an angry, exhausting, guilty love, so unlike her love for the boy, ardent but happy, bubbly, and light.
    She could almost feel her heart, heavy with the wrong she’d done, throwing off that weight even now. So was being a girl in love also a good deed? Could she somehow make up for her cruelty to the servant by her scintillating love for a boy with sincere eyes, with a high, tremulous brow?
    That boy was a proud horse, a gentle horse. His slightly damp cheeks twitched ever so slightly, she’d seen it, when he called her over to take his order.
    Oh no (she smiled in spite of herself), being in love gave her too much pleasure to be a good deed.
    In the mirror she saw her eyes darken and her forehead crease, just as they always did when she thought of the servant’s sorrow, but her lips went on smiling, her beautiful lips painted the violent red of an almost happy girl.
    She went out into the warm street, tottering a little on the high heels she now wore, which made her legs so long, slender, and shapely, and found to her delight that the sight of her reflection in a shopwindow took her breath away.
    That perfectly beautiful girl bore the perfect name of Clarisse, and by a wonderful stroke of luck she was that girl, that Clarisse, whose previous life and old name no one could guess, for, so smooth and so beautiful, she offered the world the very image of harmony and unity. How lucky to be that girl!
    She took the bus, walked a little farther on to the café, in the city’s stony, proud center, where the façades were less sooty and the cobblestoned sidewalks not so narrow, not so cluttered with trash cans.
    Le Rainbow had broad, glinting windows through which the men in the street could see Clarisse striding across the restaurant on her high heels, a little unsteady but tall and straight, and often she turned toward the window and smiled at those stares, which to her unending amazement confirmed that the perfect girl people couldn’t help admiring as they walked by was her.
    Maybe, she mused, the boy she loved first