She leaned forward until her face almost touched Richard Rivière’s, so he couldn’t turn away.
“Do you have nothing to feel guilty about? Are you absolutely certain your life is in order?” she whispered, with such fury in her face that Clarisse saw him close his eyes in anguish.
“My life isn’t hurting anyone,” he murmured stoutly.
“I hope not, for your sake,” the mother hissed, “because your father ended up paying for something or someone, and he was the most virtuous man there ever was. So, yes, I dearly hope you’ll take care to live a life no-one will ever curse you for.”
Surprised, almost insulted, Clarisse Rivière caught him glancing uncomfortably in her direction, not so much suspicious as wary and fearful.
She gave him the non-answer of an opaque, amiable gaze, but her slighted heart began to bleed again, protesting. Tears stung her eyes.
Can you really not understand, she silently murmured, that I will never call down the slightest hardship on you, nor anyone’s wrath, because above all else I love you and will always see you as my husband, and you never once hurt me before the irreparable catastrophe that your leaving was for me, and even about that I’ve never felt any malice, only a grief that will never fade, which I don’t hold you responsible for, because it was me you wanted to be free of, not the house that hears everything, which means it’s my fault, can you really not see that, and believe that if anyone ever wishes sorrow on you it will never, ever be me?
“What happened to the dog?” she hurried to say.
“They put it to sleep, of course,” said the mother, whose fat face suddenly seemed to drip with exhaustion and sadness.
In a disgusted voice, but as if she thought it her duty, she added:
“But it will come back, I know it will, that one or another, exactly the same, with the same name, and it will attack anyone who deserves it.”
Only a few long-time customers and two or three neighbours came to the funeral, for the Rivière parents had never sought to make friends in their life, wholly occupied with each other and their shop.
Clarisse held Richard’s arm, her fingers lightly caressing the fine wool of his elegant overcoat, which he’d picked out without her in a city she knew nothing of.
The bell of despair was tolling in the distance, nonetheless. She could just make out its muffled ringing from a future in which Richard Rivière’s return to absence, once he’d driven her home and gone on his way, did not yet seem a certainty.
After all, it was her, Clarisse Rivière, who was standing close at his side by the grave, it was her that he suddenly looked down at with his moved, loving gaze, his tanned, full face marked with hollows and wrinkles but to her still the same as the shy young face she had first beheld in Le Rainbow, some twenty-five years before.
Did she not have every reason to ignore the grim thud of that all-too-familiar bell as she huddled against him in the biting wind and he patted her back with one hand as if to say, “Don’t worry, everything will be fine”?
Maybe that baleful bell hadn’t noticed all this, its every ring counting off the dreary, dark days of loneliness past and future — Richard Rivière’s fingers brushed her hand, he turned his face to hers, no longer intimidated, no longer young or smooth but, she thought, as overflowing with inexpressible love as the face looking up at her when she came to take his order, long ago, at Le Rainbow.
Over and over her memory would replay those moments in the cemetery, the brief hour of perfect accord and loving harmony that had let her hold the reverberations of despair at a distance, almost inaudible.
She was convinced that she’d felt and understood that moment accurately, hadn’t made too much of it. Her imagination hadn’t run away with her, she was of course happy to see Richard Rivière again on the morning of his arrival, but she hadn’t been hoping for anything.
He took her home, and their conversation in the four-wheel drive was untroubled, though she noted his refusal to talk about his father and the dog when she offered a thought on the subject and saw him grow silent, his lips suddenly grey and pressed tight.
He pulled up to the house and didn’t want to come in. He hugged her, climbed back into the car, waved a final farewell, and Clarisse Rivière had a powerful feeling, so horrible and absolute that it was almost an icy relief, that she would never see him again.
Now it had been years, after Richard Rivière went away, since Clarisse’s heels had clattered boldly and efficiently over the tiles of the pizzeria, where she oversaw a staff of four and still waited tables herself.
Not that her heels were never heard striking that hard floor, but the noise was now inadvertent, indifferent, with no resonance of contentment and innocent pride.
Sometimes, not realising it, she dragged her feet. Then, a moment later, the horrible shuffling sound snapped her out of it, reminded her of the need for some semblance of dignity, and she made what felt like a heroic effort to walk properly.
Everything meant boredom and weariness, except perhaps for her visits to the servant, when, as she sat in her bronze velvet armchair listening to her mother’s morose chatter, she forgot that she was Clarisse Rivière, or couldn’t recall who that Clarisse Rivière was, that woman whose husband had left her for Annecy, whom every- one thought humiliated but who was only ashamed of her own failure.
The pizzeria’s manager had planned a party at the restaurant, and invited Clarisse with such insistence that she felt obliged to accept, despite her deep dislike of gatherings, high spirits and pleasantries.
She bought a violet jersey dress that clung to her slender frame and hung down to her ankles, with pumps to match. She didn’t care about being pretty and nicely dressed. She only wanted to honour the sincere kindness of the man who’d invited her, who’d urged her to come, hoping it might lift her spirits.
When she got home, some three hours later, Freddy Moliger was with her.
She stopped on the square in front of her house and pressed her back to the chestnut tree, listening, with an almost violent attentiveness and concentration that surprised even her, to the detailed, meandering, alternately lyrical and chillingly raw tale of a life of grim poverty that wreck of a man was recounting.
Clarisse Rivière felt the fog parting inside her, the thick, dully buzzing cloud that kept her safely walled off from the rest of the world and filled her gaze with the gently frightened, languishing look that, she knew, made people see her as a woman untouched by guile. She felt it as a searing pain, a razor-sharp blade slicing cleanly into her mind, draining away all that now had no reason to be there, to linger there.
It happened the moment Freddy Moliger came towards her, with his doleful face, his unsteady, ravaged body, unwholesomely thin.
She felt it, that sudden feeling of exposure, a sense that no sheltering torpor now stood between her and this lost man!
Alarmed, surprised at herself, she immediately thought: He has to be told that my name is Malinka. This left her shaken and grateful, like a vision that might mean her salvation, though at a great price.
Every word Freddy Moliger spoke touched the vulnerable spot in her new sensitivity, her at long last unveiled ability to feel, and, she thought, it was as if her mother, the servant, had sent her this messenger to strip her bare, and perhaps, if she received him as she should, to free her.
His manner was open and plain, with a shy person’s bluntness and awkward, joyless humour. Sometimes he looked at her full on, his gaze a dull blue beneath his pale brown eyelids, and sometimes he looked at her sidelong, as if suspecting she might be trying to deceive him with an unjustifiable good will, watching for Clarisse’s duplicity to show. He spoke quickly and abundantly in a tangle of words, perhaps hoping this torrent would drown the grossest of the many grammatical errors he made, having of his own language only a vague notion, resentful and suspicious, because that very language looked down on him and laid traps for him, purely to expose his ineptitude.