She herself couldn’t feel at peace if she sensed a disharmony in her trinkets’ society, and certain rainy Sundays, when a grey daylight filled her ground-floor flat, seeming to make the room even darker, she blamed her melancholy on the tension turning her figurines against one another because she hadn’t paired them up properly.
Her mind at peace, her hair carefully pulled back, she threw a cream linen jacket over her shoulders, took her shopping trolley from its place by the door, and went out.
It was a sunny Saturday in May. The narrow pavements shone, freshly cleaned, and the cramped, dingy street had the pure, comforting smell of a springtime morning.
Ladivine Sylla began to review what she would need from the market to make the nice lunch she had planned for the following Tuesday, when Malinka and that Freddy Moliger would be coming.
She could only think of him as “that Freddy Moliger”, and even this, even this distant and circumspect way of naming him stirred her so violently that she went weak at the knees.
She didn’t dare think of him simply as “Freddy”, though that familiarity would have more precisely expressed the affection and gratitude she felt for that man, because she feared the depth of her own emotion, she feared that, should she ever happen to murmur “Malinka and Freddy”, she’d have to sit down on the pavement, trembling uncontrollably.
“That Freddy Moliger” let her hold her excitement at bay.
She walked towards the market at her unhurried pace, pulling her squeaking trolley along, and with mingled pleasure and astonishment remembered Freddy Moliger’s thin face, his off-blue eyes, like stagnant water, so empty and dull when words weren’t enlivening them, and the fact that her present happiness, her fondest wish, had taken the desolate form of that stranger intrigued her endlessly. That was simply how it was, there was nothing more to understand.
That man was rescuing them both from their curse, her, Ladivine Sylla, and her daughter Malinka, the only real creature she loved in this world — how hard it was to have only her daughter to love!
Malinka had brought her that Freddy Moliger, and he’d settled into Ladivine Sylla’s life and thoughts with miraculous ease and inevitability, and she immediately realised he would free them from the spell.
What matter that he seemed such a sad case! Was that not the very sign of an envoy’s power, the perfect humility of his appearance?
She wanted to cook a leg of lamb with Soissons beans, and haricotvert bundles bound up with strips of bacon. She’d forgotten to ask when he last came if he liked his meat rare or well done, but she could get around that, she thought, by putting the lamb in the oven only when they got there, even if it meant waiting a while with a glass of wine and some finger foods. She was already, delightedly, imagining whipping up puff-pastry canapés with Roquefort or anchovies and mini-tartlets with onion jam.
That Freddy Moliger was always hungry, she’d noticed, almost gluttonous, he ate quickly, preoccupied and contemptuous, as if scorning his own appetite, but, thought Ladivine Sylla indulgently, isn’t that how those who weren’t well fed as children always wanted to seem, people used to having badly cooked, meagre helpings slammed down before them, with even less love than for a dog?
She entered the Marché des Capucins and made for the butcher’s stand she considered the best, even if, because its meat was expensive, she almost never shopped there. But for that Freddy Moliger she wanted only the finest and tenderest.
As for her daughter Malinka, she ate everything in the same way, without to-do, without interest or awareness, and she was happy with everything because food meant nothing to her.
Oh, her daughter Malinka! How heartbreaking, yes, that Ladivine Sylla had never found anyone else to love!
She’d long been convinced that Malinka kept her out of her life because she was ashamed of her, Ladivine Sylla, who couldn’t be other than what she was. Then, as the years went by, she came to believe that they were both entangled in the coils of a shared spell, bonds that Malinka could no more loosen than she could, that they were both being punished with the same cruelty, the same injustice, and this helped her bear her bitter existence and cast off all ill will towards Malinka, whom she loved since then with a purified heart, a comforted heart.
And Malinka had brought her that Freddy Moliger, and now displayed a new face, shimmering with hopefulness, and her clear, quiet gaze, now unafraid to meet her mother’s, told her she had accepted, with joy in her heart, this new order: the introduction of Ladivine Sylla.
Suddenly it was all nearly too much for her.
She’d often tried to picture the life Malinka was leading. Once she thought she saw faint brown patches on her daughter’s cheeks, as if she were pregnant, and then she disappeared for several weeks.
How she used to dream of meeting that child, and how she feared it as well! He or she would be over thirty by now, and Ladivine Sylla was an insignificant woman whose appearance, whose status, whose uninspired conversation might very well, she had no doubt, come as a disappointment.
At the activities centre where she went several times a week to play draughts or knit in the company of other women of the neighbourhood, she generally sat silent, imprisoned in the shameful emptiness of her life, listening distantly as her neighbours talked of their children and grandchildren, of their husbands, living or dead, asking no questions so none would be asked of her.
Who could claim to know Ladivine Sylla? There was nothing to discover in her, there was too little to her.
She bought a two-kilo leg of lamb, a pound of haricots verts, some apricots for a tart. The shopkeepers knew her and greeted her amiably, despite her reserve, her habit of answering their banter with nothing more than a nod, and their observations on the fine weather with a thin smile. But that Saturday she was open, almost cordial. Little by little, her daughter Malinka was acknowledging her!
Leaving the market, she decided to make a detour down a street parallel to her own, where she could enjoy the sunshine.
She was passing by a newsstand when the front page of SudOuest caught her attention after a few seconds’ delay, making her retrace her steps, still pulling her trolley, and then, her legs suddenly weak, her arms limp, as if her limbs had understood before her head, she stared hard at a photograph of a beautiful, serious Malinka, her face slightly sad and uneasy, narrow and delicate like her own and framed by locks that fell in light waves over her slender shoulders, looking into the lens, at the photographer, anxious to please.
That attractive fifty-four-year-old woman was her daughter Malinka. No question about it, that was her.
Ladivine Sylla tried feebly to reach for the newspaper, but her arm refused to move. She clutched the handle of her trolley with both hands and bent down to read the headline: Woman stabbed in her home in Langon.
She stood up with a little cry and, still clasping the handle, scurried off down the sunlit pavement, in the perfumed air rich with anticipations and promises. She realised she was crying out as she lurched along, but her voice was muffled, hoarse, low, and no-one paid her any attention.