The servant looked at Clarisse, and now there was no trace of a smile or sign of delight on her face, only an air of sad understanding and, just beneath it, a sort of passionate resolve, a broader stubbornness that, for a moment, was not even about Malinka, or love, or the miseries of absence. Caught off guard, Clarisse felt her agitation fade a little.
Painfully aware of her weakness and unworthiness, she nonetheless stammered:
“You always said you’d never leave, because he. . because my father might come looking for you.”
Her mother winced as if lashed by a blow mysteriously landing in a place she thought she could no longer feel. Distant and ethereal, her old smile came to her rescue.
“I’d rather be close to you,” she said simply, with no great ardour, merely acknowledging a fact.
Digging into her bag, she took out a piece of paper with her address written on it and laid it on a corner of the bed.
When the time came for Clarisse to go back to work, the servant walked her to the brasserie’s door, then gave her a quick kiss and strode off with her sprightly step, the step, thought Clarisse, sour and annoyed, of a person who would never want to intrude on anyone’s life.
The decision that showed Clarisse she could be just as fanatically obstinate as her mother first took the form of a discreet coldness, little different from the coldness that filled the air when they lived together, two lowly flowers.
Then, with that decision carefully weighed and resolved, it struck Clarisse that there was no need for coldness, any more than distance or feigned dislike, that what was needed was in fact devotion and tenderness, as if to make up for the heartlessness of the decision.
This was a liberation for her, and a sincere relief, because she had no wish to be cruel.
Here, then, began a happy time for the servant.
Every two or three days Clarisse came for dinner in the little flat her mother had rented in an alley not far from the port, and she was cheerful and chatty as she’d never been before.
She talked about the brasserie — which she would soon leave, without telling the servant — and inflated the customers’ fussiness to enliven her anecdotes. And the fact that she never spoke of herself, never told of her existence away from the brasserie, never mentioned a name, an address, her mother most probably didn’t notice right away.
Only when a dubious feeling drove her to ask a few unobtrusive questions did she realise she would never get an answer, and that, in any case, Clarisse’s vague, trivial words left no room for any specific enquiry.
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 colour 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 flat did she consent to be the servant’s daughter, that girl named Malinka.
And eventually her mother realised 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 had 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 realised 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 had 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 longstanding 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 public buildings, late at night and early in the morning.
“For the first time in my life, I have co-workers,” 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 ribcage 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 judgement 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 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 did not like that idea, but she was not afraid.
Because once her decision was made there was no disobeying it, even in her thoughts.
She gave up her job at the brasserie and her little room near the station for a job in a downtown café and a one-bedroom flat 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 should 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 glorious girl, that lissom 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 was not walking behind her. She could not 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, stiff beneath the make-up, 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 did not.