“You’re fond of my mother, aren’t you?” asked Malinka, anxiously. “So why not my daughter?”
“Your mother’s a pitiful nobody, and that’s why I like her, and she feels the same about me,” he said gruffly.
She remembered those words when Ladivine walked through the door and she saw her daughter’s hesitant eyes turn towards Freddy Moliger, then immediately dart in alarm towards a corner of the room, then another, and then finally come back, veiled, slightly fixed, uncordial, to Freddy Moliger’s shoulder or neck, her lips forcing themselves into a more or less polite smile.
And Clarisse Rivière thought of what he’d said and suddenly saw the truth in it. She blushed in pity and sadness.
She tried to look at Freddy Moliger through Ladivine’s eyes, she saw his skinny alcoholic legs, his bony, slightly misshapen hips, his fleshy red face, his bad teeth, she saw the apathetic but untrusting and secretive expression on his averted face, she saw his straw-like hair, still wet where he’d parted it.
Ladivine could see nothing beyond that physical misery, she could see none of the ravaged kinship that bound her, Clarisse Rivière, to Freddy Moliger, could know nothing of the salutary impoverishment denuding her heart ever since she’d learned, for one thing, to suffer for Freddy Moliger, and, for another, to caress that damaged body with pleasure and tenderness, and find it soft beneath her fingers.
Ladivine could know nothing of this, very likely refused even to imagine it, and looking through her eyes Clarisse Rivière could only understand.
And she pitied her daughter for having to tolerate this, the presence of such a man in the house where her parents once lived in harmony.
But she felt a far sharper pity for Freddy Moliger, who couldn’t escape the anxious, troubled stare of Malinka’s daughter, having realised even before she laid eyes on him that he would be neither loved nor appreciated, just as he’d sensed before the servant laid eyes on him that she would be fond of him, that she would have no choice but to be fond of him, in her own misery.
Clarisse Rivière sat down on the blue couch, and, though feeling an infinite sadness, brightly asked Freddy Moliger to bring them a beer.
“And maybe a little something to nibble on, dear?”
Was she trying to show Ladivine how docile Freddy Moliger was?
She then realised that she was afraid they might somehow prevent her from keeping this man by her side, on the pretext, say, that he had an unhealthy hold over her. But that was absurd, she told herself, suddenly reassured. No-one had the power to forbid her anything, nor try to protect her against her will.
Ladivine took her to the Galeries Lafayette in Bordeaux, and all the way there Clarisse Rivière silently refused to speak of Freddy Moliger, just as she refused to let Ladivine buy her an outfit for her birthday.
She thought it would be a betrayal to accept a gift from someone who’d taken so strong a dislike to Freddy Moliger.
Because Ladivine clearly loathed him, with an unreasoning, frightened, irreparable loathing that left Clarisse Rivière as uncomfortable as some vile obscenity. In the eyes of her daughter who knew her so little, he could only be a creep who’d wormed his way into her life solely to take advantage of the naive woman that, for Ladivine, through her own fault, she would always be.
She glanced sidelong at her daughter’s preoccupied face as Ladivine somewhat roughly pulled a yellow gingham dress from its hanger, held it up to her firm, opulent body, and looked at her questioningly. For a second, in the tiny contraction of her mouth, in her one raised eyebrow, Clarisse Rivière saw the little girl she’d raised and pampered, she recognised her child and lost her nerve: how could she ever confess to her daughter that she was Malinka, and that a certain servant was leading her solitary, bitter, forever ruined life just a few streets away?
Several days after Ladivine left, she got a beige cardigan with little mother of pearl buttons in the post.
Freddy Moliger was standing nearby as she opened the package, found the gift, and, an anxious intuition running through her, answered reluctantly when Freddy Moliger asked where it came from.
“It’s from my daughter, for my birthday.”
“It’s your birthday and I didn’t even know it!”
He was speaking in his high-pitched, grating voice, unsteady and heated.
“Birthdays don’t mean anything,” she said, trying to put on a smile.
“Well, they must mean something to your daughter, and to you too, since you’re happy with your present! Isn’t that right, aren’t you happy?”
She shrugged, folded the cardigan, hid it under the tissue paper.
“So why didn’t you tell me it was your birthday? What, I’m not worthy of giving you a present? Only your daughter knows how to pick out something you’ll like?”
She turned to face him and immediately realised she’d made a mistake, because she felt the fear that had flickered on in her gaze.
But she didn’t know until that moment that she’d realised something very important about Freddy Moliger, didn’t know that she’d realised it from the start, which was that, as with a dog, you had to be careful not to let him see your fear.
But at the same time she felt what she’d felt with her daughter a few days before: in the glint of boyish anger in Freddy Moliger’s eyes, in his puffed-out cheeks, she saw, she recognised her child — or rather the child he once was, but at that moment it felt as if he were hers.
A great tenderness flooded through her.
She took the cardigan back out of its package, quickly slipped it on over her dress, and ran off for her camera.
While Freddy Moliger was framing the picture on the machine’s little screen, his composure returning as quickly as his rage had erupted, she wondered if he could still see the fear in her eyes, if he could perhaps even see, should that fear now have vanished, the shadow of the fear that she knew would come back.
clarisse rivière felt herself floating back and forth on a warm, thick swell, whose density stilled any move she might try to make. She didn’t want to move anyway, because it would hurt, it would hurt terribly, she knew, if she made any attempt to change her position. She couldn’t remember if she was sitting or standing, lying or crouching, outdoors or at home, but it didn’t much matter. She had to place her faith in the mindless but confident perseverance of the heavy, dense tide now carrying her off, and when she spotted the edge of the dark, overgrown forest, its treetops towering and black against the black sky, her only thought was “I’ve never been in a deep forest”, but she put up no resistance, certain that there she would be just where she was meant to be.
slow and precise, ladivine sylla lifted each figurine, caressed it with her chamois, gazed at it meditatively for a few seconds, then put it back where it was, or, if she’d chosen to move it to a different shelf, set it aside in a shoebox.
She liked to imagine the boldest ones’ eagerness at the prospect of changing places, and the fears of the shyer ones, the very young shepherdesses, the newly weaned lambs, the dolphins and kittens, which didn’t like to be disturbed. To them she carefully explained in a half-whisper that like it or not things had to be shaken up now and then so every member of her little world would know all the others.