So this, Clarisse told herself, horrified, is what she’d done to her mother.
Sinking beneath even the wildest waves would never erase such a crime.
What bitterness, now, on the servant’s perennially pinched lips, what hard mockery in her eyes!
She began to complain of fatigue and back pain. Vacuuming an office at dawn, she tripped on a chair and broke her two front teeth. She refused to have a bridge put in on the grounds that she could not afford it, even though Clarisse offered to help pay. But did she not find a sour pleasure in revealing, through the thin smile that was now hers, her gaping sorrow?
She did, thought Clarisse, seeing the hole in her mother’s mouth and feeling the dough of contemptibility swelling inside hers. Her mouth was the putrid abyss, not the servant’s.
Her love for her mother was poisoning her. On leaving the servant’s, she wanted now to shriek, now to sink into the river’s clement waters.
She did no such thing, though, no such thing.
But as for the edifice of her goodness to Richard Rivière and, beyond him, to everyone she met or worked with, she built it up bit by bit, never forgetting, never wearying, in a constant, tranquil labour that was nonetheless not untouched by doubt, concerning not the need for that endeavour but its sincerity.
Could what she practised, she sometimes wondered, really be called goodness, or, more simply, niceness and apparent submission?
And in any case, what sort of goodness was a goodness that was aware of itself?
She took care never to upset Richard Rivière, never to needle him, tease him, provoke him, and when, as he so rarely did, he lost his temper, to answer only with silence.
Now and then she saw a brief flash of surprise or unease on her husband’s face, when she so visibly and insistently fended off some potential conflict and stared at him with her inward-looking eyes, open wide onto her own abnegation, careful to keep a grip on herself, utterly withdrawn into her vow of kindliness.
It seemed to her at such times that her eyes never blinked, she thought she could see their pale, fixed, absent reflection in Richard Rivière’s dark, puzzled gaze.
“Come on, say something,” he sometimes sighed. “You don’t have to agree.”
As if prodded into action, she tried to pull her gaze out of the pensive depths where it was contemplating Clarisse Rivière’s sacrifice and haul it back to the surface, where Richard Rivière was awaiting some word, some answer, albeit with his increasingly frequent air of having already set down his attentiveness and wandered off somewhere else, someplace more interesting.
And so, after struggling to recall the question he had asked her, or the subject on which he’d tried to draw her into some sort of dispute, after desperately casting around in slightly nauseous panic for some more or less suitable answer, she realised he’d forgotten all about it, that she was now speaking only to Richard Rivière’s frozen, mute, polite shadow as he fled into the distance, him and his beating heart, his untameable hair, his impatient muscles.
She took that shadow in her arms and pulled it to her. There was still a shoulder there to rest her forehead on, to cover her eyes.
Her love for Richard Rivière bathed her in sweetness and gentleness.
Was she perfectly, purely good to him? Probably not, since he was aware — his unease made it clear — of a strangeness about her, when he should have moved about in her goodness without even knowing it, should even have been able to attack and defy that goodness without seeing it, without Clarisse herself seeing it. Her pregnancy showed so little that she thought it safe to go on visiting the servant up to the seventh month.
She was intrigued to find her belly’s already modest bulge becoming even more discreet when she boarded the train for Bordeaux. And when she walked into her mother’s flat and her hand moved reflexively to her stomach, she could feel only a hard knot beneath her loose-fitting sweater, such that she once thought she was simply waking from a dream in which she’d been pregnant.
She told the servant they’d have to go two and a half months without seeing each other.
“Fine,” said the servant, her voice cold and indifferent.
Then for the first time she burst into tears, and Clarisse sat stunned and still, rubbing her chair’s velvet arms with both hands, and thinking that her own narrow, sharp shoulder could at least have accommodated her mother’s moist cheek, could have covered her eyes. When the child was born, she named her Ladivine. That was the servant’s first name.
Clarisse Rivière would remember the months after Ladivine’s birth as a time when she went badly astray, when she lost sight of the point of her promise.
She would blame this confusion on her deep happiness, which grew from intense to excessive, finally becoming unrecognisable and sometimes indistinguishable from grief. She even let herself imagine taking the baby to Bordeaux, presenting her to the servant, saying “Here!” and then leaving her there, going home, having nothing more to do with the child or Malinka’s mother, whose sadness at no longer seeing Clarisse would be eased by the presence of that marvellous baby.
Once she got hold of herself, the memory of that madness tormented her. Wherever she was, she dropped everything and ran to the baby, to make sure she was there and hold her close, knowing a torrent of love would then sweep over her, painful, impenetrable, and separate from herself, as if coming from some mysterious out- side and not from her own being.
Sometimes she thought this vast love for the child a burden, and she longed to be rid of it, even if it meant ridding herself of the child as well. But she didn’t know how to find pleasure in that love, nor even what exactly to do with it; she felt as though, yearning to deploy itself unconfined, it was trying to shove her consuming love for Richard Rivière to one side, along with her imperishable, wrenching love for Malinka’s mother.
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 purée, 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, oversized 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 and see the child, and the moment she opened the door Clarisse felt the strange magnetic 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.