Her daughter Ladivine, who telephoned often, and her coworkers at the restaurant, and Richard Rivière himself, who dutifully called once a month and wired her money she never spent, they were all doing their best, discreetly, affectionately, sometimes with openly expressed concern, to rescue her from her humiliation.
But she had never felt any such thing. Nor was she humiliated that people thought her humiliated, only vaguely surprised.
Richard Rivière’s leaving had filled her with shame, because it told her she’d failed in her attempt to offer all the love and generosity a human being might need, and more.
For, she thought, no-one could weary of such a gift if it was properly given, they’d know nothing of it, and it would filter invisibly into the tight weave of their lives.
And yet Richard Rivière had grown sick of it, and he’d run away, that was her failure, and that was what filled her with shame, but not humiliation.
She did not blame her husband, who’d done what he thought he had to, she blamed herself, and she felt ridiculous, pointless, heartless. She’d made of the servant’s life a bitter bread and in the end nothing had made up for that, though in her vanity she was convinced all this time that it had.
She paid less attention to her appearance, her dress, and the clothes she wore were not as perfectly, rigorously clean as they once were. Her feet were yellowed and dry in her sandals.
She was aware of this negligence, and sometimes it gave her a grim satisfaction, for she thought of her body as an old dog that could never be punished enough for having, say, devoured a little child.
She settled into a long wait for death, exhausted by grief and loathing for everything around her, insensitive to everything else, frozen, and even the birth of Annika and then Daniel, whom she went to see several times in Berlin, little touched her, however hard she tried, as she took them in her arms, to revive the emotion she’d felt on embracing her own baby.
She knew her indifference and desperate attempts to conceal it gave her a slightly hunted, fearful look. She didn’t know what to say, what to talk about, kept her mouth shut.
When Richard Rivière called, she could scarcely summon the strength to murmur a response to his “hello”, and tears sprang to her eyes, trickled down her face and neck as she listened to his falsely cheerful chatter, against an indecipherable background of other lively, spirited voices that made her think that he lived his life amid unending revelry.
That didn’t hurt her. She noted it without interest, but the sound of Richard Rivière’s voice brought her ever fresh torments. Her fingers convulsively clutched the receiver, she could not catch her breath, could not listen, lost in dread of the moment when he would hang up and she’d be alone again in her house, the house that knew everything and never came to her rescue.
“Please, please, come back to the house,” she would say, or think she was saying, since Richard Rivière never answered, and it was likely she had not said a word, though she couldn’t help thinking the house must have heard her and swallowed her plea in its walls.
Nor, certainly, did she say “I love you so”, but the words rolled around and resounded in her aching skull, making such a din that Richard Rivière could only have heard them, had he not striven so insistently to fill up the moment with his own harmless, lighthearted words.
He did come back to the house, though, just once.
Not, she thought dejectedly, and perhaps because for a few minutes she’d been foolish enough to think that it was, to surrender to her love and her sorrow, to rescue her from her quiet agony.
He was coming back to the house because his father had died in Toulouse, and so they drove off to the funeral together in Richard Rivière’s four-wheel drive.
Three years had gone by since his leaving. Clarisse Rivière found him more handsome than before, a little more filled out, and dressed with a very studied elegance, like a prosperous, fastidious, slightly anxious man.
She threw herself against him as soon as she opened the door, and she found a certain taste for life tentatively coming back to her, slightly dimming her grief and bewilderment. She could feel his discomfort at having her in his arms. She did not care. She held him close, so happy to be seeing him again, nestling her face against his neck, thinking he might be uncomfortable because in his mysterious Annecy existence there was another woman who held him like this, but not caring, lost in her joy at rediscovering Richard Rivière’s smell.
If he’d fled what she had given him so generously, that alone was worth thinking about. What he’d fled to didn’t interest her.
Richard Rivière’s mother looked at them with an almost hostile face. She seemed not so much stricken as infuriated by her husband’s death, or rather, Clarisse realised uneasily, by its circumstances.
Without pleasure they drank a warm, syrupy vin cuit in the little flat where Richard Rivière was raised, above the stationery shop that the parents had still been running only the month before, when they had made the decision to retire. The mother had gone off for a mineral cure in the mountains while the father took inventory.
“The shop was locked up, the blind was down, and your father had the dog with him, that horrible dog,” the mother said accusingly.
Richard Rivière swirled the sweet wine in his glass, looking around him in boredom and distaste.
“Not that same dog you brought to our house?” whispered Clarisse, with a nervous titter.
The mother almost roared in irritation. She tried to catch Richard Rivière’s eye, but he very visibly refused. She seemed bent on rebuking him, and, unable to express her outrage in a shared glance, furiously shook her head. Clarisse remembered him telling her, one day long before, that his parents habitually blamed him for their every concern and sorrow.
“No, of course not, a different dog, the first one died ten years ago at least. But it was the same breed, and they looked so much alike you forgot it wasn’t that other one. Not to mention that your father gave it the same name.”
She began to sob, dry-eyed, her broad face contorted and creased.
“I never wanted a dog, myself,” she whimpered, “and neither did your father, but he was convinced he didn’t have a choice.”
When the mother got home from her cure two weeks later, she found the father lying in the back room of the shop, his neck and part of his face ripped away. The dog was standing close by, and it growled viciously on catching sight of her.
“They told me your father probably died of a heart attack, and then the dog went after him because it was starving. But I know that’s not it. What I think is that your father, who was in perfect health, was just doing his work, minding his own business, and that dog lunged at his throat and killed him on purpose.”
Richard Rivière shrugged in a brusque gesture of scornful anger. He banged his glass of vin cuit down on the coffee table. A few drops jumped out and spattered on the varnished wood.
“Why would you think a thing like that?” he shouted. “Have you ever heard of a dog ripping its master’s throat out for no reason?”
“I never said for no reason,” the mother spat back. “You hear me, son? I never said for no reason. It wanted vengeance for something, that’s what I think.”