She knew Richard Rivière and Ladivine probably thought her an extremely simple woman.
Didn’t she sometimes embarrass them, in their sparse social life, with her anxious, smiling silence, her frozen face, lips always slightly parted, her pleasant, wary, stubborn way of never saying anything even the slightest bit personal?
Oh yes, surely, they had resigned themselves to thinking her slightly witless.
Was she? She didn’t know.
She only knew that her mind was now forever pondering thoughts that filled her with a calm, comforting passion, and that she owed this to Freddy Moliger, to the way he’d come to her that evening in the pizzeria, with his dead, desolate face, his limping form, and that, painfully, in a devastating glimpse of the inevitable, she’d abruptly realised they might rescue each other.
Now he lived in her house, and his company never disturbed her.
He moved through the house quietly, like a wild animal, she sometimes thought, whose way was to leave only the most discreet trail.
He cooked and cleaned energetically and efficiently, telling her over and over of everything that had happened in his life, the brutal parents, the brother killed by the train, the daughter he never saw, his impassive, reedy voice wanting nothing, accusing no-one.
And, though she’d heard these same stories before, never varying, their details always precise and identical, as if, almost bored, he were recounting the story of the same old movie over and over, she went on listening with an understanding and a friendship that drove her whole being towards him, and she suffered for him, since he showed no sign of suffering, and in this way hoped to displace the rage she now realised was trying to burrow into Freddy Moliger’s heart.
Every new telling of those stories was as painful to hear as the first, perhaps more. Each time she felt Freddy Moliger’s irremediable solitude all the more poignantly.
If, she thought, she could relieve him of the anger pointlessly besieging him, which he wore himself out trying to hold back, if she could do that by enduring his tales of woe, by trying to picture his woes so completely that they could only leave her weeping and wailing inside, then maybe they wouldn’t weigh so heavily in Freddy Moliger’s mind, and he would find peace and solace.
Give it all to me, let me shoulder the burden of your miseries, she silently begged him, because I know how to deal with them. And so she listened, never flinching at even the most harrowing moments, and she filled herself with his sorrow till she choked, so he would be free of it, he who after his brother’s death had spent his life struggling on alone.
At night, in the bed she’d shared with Richard Rivière for more than twenty-five years, she took this other man in her arms, and then it was she who found peace and solace, who felt freed and delivered of all obligation.
She was simply herself, Malinka, in all the innocence of her ephemeral, precarious presence on this earth. She was never humble with him. She could be authoritarian, firm, though never hard, and her voice was always gentle.
Freddy Moliger’s habits and ways did not irritate or surprise her, except when he weakened before the onslaughts of his anger and sullenly let it submerge him, becoming a different man, at once exultant and despairing and almost greedily eager to get some good out of it, to vanish into it until he was absolved of all responsibility.
She glimpsed this most painfully in the course of a visit her daughter Ladivine would soon pay her.
“If it’s all the same to you, please don’t call me by my first name in front of my daughter,” she said to Freddy Moliger in an uneasy voice.
He puffed out his cheeks and let out a little sigh of indifference. It wasn’t seeming to hide things from her daughter that embarrassed her, it was the thought that she wasn’t yet ready to reveal to Ladivine that her name was Malinka.
I’ll do that, she vowed, the day I introduce the servant to her. Because, she felt certain, that day would come.
Already she brought Freddy Moliger along whenever she visited her mother, and he thought of those visits as a perfectly natural thing and obviously enjoyed them, and very often Malinka sat silent and attentive in her velvet armchair as the servant and Freddy cooked the meal in the little kitchen, and she heard the quiet hum of their voices sometimes interrupted by Freddy Moliger’s piercing laugh or the servant’s playfully outraged protests when he tried to take on more than she wanted.
But with Ladivine she felt so intimidated, so self-conscious!
Had her daughter not had every possible reason, over the past twenty years, to find her stupid and pitiable, lost, inaccessible?
On the phone, she had no choice but to answer Ladivine’s troubled but remarkably precise, probing questions, her startled concern all too clear, as if, thought Clarisse Rivière, she was convinced her mother could only have taken up with some shady and untrustworthy man, and she had a duty to come and investigate.
How surprising it was that her mother was with a man other than her father!
She would never have said so, but it was shocking as well, Clarisse Rivière could hear it in her incredulous voice and her flood of mundane questions, as if to prevent her mother from talking to her of love or carnal desire.
“Does this man have a trade, does he have money?” Ladivine had asked almost at once.
“He works here and there, when he finds something.”
“But do you give him money? Does he ask you?”
Clarisse Rivière felt sad for the both of them, for Ladivine who thought she had to interrogate her like this, and for herself who didn’t dare tell her, however gently, that it was none of her business.
“Yes, sometimes. When he needs it. I have more money than he does, it’s no problem.”
Ladivine went quiet, less so she could think all this over than so she could come up with a new line of attack — for that was how Clarisse Rivière saw these questions, in spite of herself, knowing there was nothing but solicitude behind them, and yet for the first time in her life she did not feel guilty towards Ladivine or Richard Rivière, or eternally obliged to them.
But she’d trained them to treat her like a foolish woman, ever indebted, elusive, easily taken in, and so she could hardly blame Ladivine for feeling concerned, or for talking to her like a child.
“Papa. . Richard once told me you don’t cash the cheques he sends you,” Ladivine began, uncomfortable.
Clarisse Rivière hurried to come to her rescue:
“That used to be true, but not since a couple of weeks ago.”
“Now that this man. .”
“Freddy Moliger,” she very quietly broke in.
“Now that this Moliger’s with you?”
“Yes. We’re living it up, you know,” she added with a forced little laugh.
But on the other end of the line Ladivine wasn’t laughing.
After another silence, she asked Clarisse Rivière’s permission to come and see her, to come down to Langon, as she said.
Freddy Moliger greeted this as he did every piece of news involving Malinka’s family life, with that amalgam of boredom and feigned arrogance thinly plastered over his displeasure, rage very visibly thrashing and growling below it.