And again her eyes filled with tears.
She’d had the very same thought about Clarisse Rivière when she last came to visit in Berlin, when Ladivine, walking behind, spotted her callused heels, incongruously revealed by elegant sandals with multiple gilded straps.
She was unsettled and moved by that sight, like the unveiling of something slightly sad in her mother’s private existence, but it also irritated her a little, the contrast between those delicate shoes and those yellowed, cracked heels seeming to show once again that Clarisse Rivière could never do anything right.
She hadn’t exactly thought: “If you’re going to parade around in such flashy, probably expensive sandals, you should learn to take care of your feet.”
She didn’t have it in her to express such a thought, so sharply phrased, not even to herself.
Sympathy and shamefaced devotion often tamped down her bursts of annoyance with Clarisse Rivière.
But she couldn’t help seeing her mother’s rough heels, and now, as she pulled up her own sandal strap, she recalled the many times she’d been infuriated by some display of Clarisse Rivière’s careless or absurdly trusting nature, when, confident of her judgement, her reason, she’d taken cover behind disapproval, forbidding herself to see that no fault could be found with Clarisse Rivière, that she could only be watched over, because, like a cat, like a bird, Clarisse Rivière lacked all discernment.
Had she been willing to see that, Clarisse Rivière would no doubt still be alive, she told herself. Had she only been willing.
She went on past the park, started down the pavement overlooked by the tracks of the S-Bahn.
Stuttgarter Platz’s pick-up bars were still closed at this slow, vacant afternoon hour, but a woman was heading into the Panky, a woman Ladivine knew, having regularly crossed paths with her for years, and she gave her a wave, and that woman was more or less Clarisse Rivière’s age when she died, and her body was similarly long-limbed, taut, compact, but her hard, jaded, impassive face, the set of her lips, not bitter but tired and scornful, were nothing like Clarisse Rivière’s, who’d kept her full, gentle features, almost untouched by time, well into middle age.
The woman’s only reply was a quick twitch of the lips, making a rudimentary “hello”, while an almost irritated and untrusting look crossed her face, as if, though long used to seeing Ladivine around the neighbourhood, she suspected her of unspoken judgements and didn’t think her greeting sincere.
Does she think I’m only saying hello because I know she works in that bar and don’t want her to get the idea I look down on her? Ladivine asked herself.
But I say hello to everyone I run into around here. Although, oh. .
She also knew that by raising one hand in the sunshine and waving it at that ageing woman’s coldly disenchanted face, that woman who, Ladivine had learned, got the evening off to a start at the Panky by dancing on a table (in gold sandals, her cracked, grey heels showing beneath the thin straps?), she knew she was greeting an image of herself, Ladivine Rivière as she could easily have become.
For her upbringing by Richard and Clarisse Rivière had done nothing to protect her from a life of that kind.
They had raised their only child Ladivine in accordance with a neutral morality, or unstable, or infinitely relative.
That was their outlook on life, so utterly unjudgemental that Ladivine learned as a child to find it deeply indecent to express a firm opinion on anything at all, or simply to think it, even if you would never speak it aloud, to consider the only honourable attitude an unwavering tolerance for every aspect of the private life and public behaviour of all those around us.
Never could Ladivine, caught up in girlish ardour and sometimes forgetting the house rules, rage against some act perpetrated on the playground without Richard Rivière or Clarisse Rivière, so alike in this way that she could rarely remember which had spoken, asking benignly, almost smilingly reproachfuclass="underline" “But, little girl, who are you to judge?”
Very unkind things were sometimes done in that crowd of children, words were sometimes spoken with the clear intention of causing damage or hurting feelings, and sometimes those acts or words were Ladivine’s, and she told her parents of them without hiding their source, and although she knew how they saw things she was always a little surprised, confused, at the way they shrugged their shoulders and vaguely ascribed these things she found so appalling to the unchanging nature of the human race, to the necessarily legitimate reasons (necessarily because all of them were) motivating this or that person or even their own daughter, Ladivine, who shouldn’t try to be perfect.
Richard Rivière and Clarisse Rivière never forgave: they never saw any wrong.
Especially Clarisse Rivière, blind to all misdeed, committing none herself.
Once in her teens, Ladivine stopped telling them what went on at school, knowing it would bring her no guidance, no lessons in right and wrong, and instinctively fearing, as she laboured to establish the precepts of her personal morality, that in her parents’ infinite indulgence she might lose her way forever.
Then, when she started secondary school, with her sexual awakening and her wonderment at the purity of her fresh, young body, with the fascinated discovery that a pretty girl’s fresh, young body is a most precious currency, she gradually forgot the unbending principles of propriety and frugality that her ardent, virtuous pre-pubescence had convinced her were necessary.
She soon made a name for herself, in the little world of Langon’s middle class, as a sort of well-bred call-girl, driven on Saturday evenings to a restaurant and a hotel in Bordeaux by divorced shopkeepers or unmarried bank clerks, who dropped her off at her door Sunday morning in their white or gunmetal-grey people carriers, sometimes one or two child seats in the back.
They honked goodbye as they drove off, and, her key in the lock, she turned around to blow them a kiss.
She did not lie to her parents. She did not tell them she was babysitting or spending the night at a friend’s.
She said: “I’m going out with a guy I know.”
She showed them the money she got, and while she sometimes saw Richard Rivière’s alert, cheerful eye briefly dimmed by a faint veil of discomfort and hesitation, Clarisse Rivière never showed that she found anything untoward about someone paying her daughter to go to bed with him.
And her daughter Ladivine was convinced that Clarisse Rivière sincerely saw no harm in it, that she was incapable of judging such a thing, because that was how it was, and whatever was had to be accepted.
Clarisse Rivière’s eyes widened in admiring surprise at the fiftyfranc notes Ladivine casually pulled from her little purse, as if Ladivine had won them in the lottery or found them on the pavement, not that she pretended to believe this, but because to her mind it was much the same — if her daughter Ladivine was earning some pocket money and seemed to enjoy her work, little matter that it was by prostituting her fresh, young body, the body of a beautiful, vigorous girl.
And Ladivine did enjoy her work, on the whole.
But she could not shake off a dark unease when she caught sight of a loving young couple, boys and girls her age pressed close together, as if seeking to erase the tiniest gap between their two bodies, and, surprised and unsettled, reflected that they were doing all this for free, and her disquiet expressed itself at home in sudden bursts of unfocused hostility stoically endured by Richard and Clarisse Rivière, who were unused to conflict, who neither enjoyed it nor knew how to quell it.