Which is why, though resigned to being just barely pretty, to being a very ordinary woman whose careful attention to her clothes, to the cut and colour of her hair, shoulder-length, warm-brown and wavy, compensated respectably for her homeliness, she was still moved and surprised when, like that man, someone caressed her face with a gaze full of a longing to know her, to touch her.
But she accepted that there was nothing special about her, she accepted it now, without heartache.
When, long ago, she stripped off her clothes before the men who were paying her, she always took care to conceal the parts of her body she found unlovely — her ankles, her knees, even her stomach, which she thought bulged more than it should.
At the time she saw those physical flaws as something like moral failings, and thought she could only be despised for not being magnificent.
She felt no shame today at those imperfections.
She even learned to show them off, when summer came, like inventive, slightly quirky accessories she’d chosen precisely for their novelty, and if her knees, which she’d always found pudgy, showed beneath the hem of the dress she was wearing that afternoon, a dark pink cotton swing dress with two big buttons fastening the straps, it was to suggest that she was as happy with those knees as she was with her curving, golden shoulders, that her shoulders complemented her knees in a harmony both subtle and bold, that this was just how it was supposed to be, that she wasn’t, for instance, supposed to be graced with the shapely, light, dimpled knees of Clarisse Rivière.
And so she made her way through the streets, not particularly tall but standing very straight, poised on her stout legs, mutely proclaiming: Am I not, all in all, a fine-looking woman?
She pushed open Karstadt’s glass door and headed straight for the timepiece department.
She immediately spotted Marko’s tall silhouette. With nothing to do at this hour, he’d risen from the uncomfortable chair where he spent most of his day, repairing watches or, more often, changing their batteries, and now, on his feet behind the counter, he was staring into space, hands in his pockets, with his usual gentle and serious air, which made him seem lost in profound meditation when he was only daydreaming, not a thought in his head.
She kept her eyes on him as she walked forward, surprised to feel how much she loved him.
Sometimes she feared she was emotionally cold or numbed, and excessively hardened.
But she had only to glimpse Marko or the children in their own distinctive pose, or even simply remember that pose, to feel her love for them throbbing inside her, though she now knew such emotions were not without danger, too easily leading her into similarly fond memories of Clarisse Rivière (that way she had of sticking her lower lip out so far that it almost completely covered the other when she had to read something complicated!).
And thinking of Clarisse Rivière was a very hard thing for her.
She could, fleetingly, imagine the scene of the murder and Clarisse Rivière’s blood, or perhaps the lawyers and the upcoming trial, but remembering the eloquent details of Clarisse Rivière’s personality drowned her in sorrow.
Now that she’d lost him, the memory of Richard Rivière was scarcely less painful.
Would he, she wondered, say that of his daughter Ladivine, that he’d lost her?
She had no answer. She only knew that she’d forever distanced herself from Richard Rivière not because he’d gone off to embark on a mysterious new life but because, left to her own devices and the hostile world through both of their faults, Clarisse Rivière had been bled dry in her own living room, her throat slashed like a poor quivering rabbit.
And Ladivine knew she and her father were guilty, but Richard Rivière had shown by his behaviour that he did not see it the same way.
Because he could speak of the events and the trial with no hitch in his voice and no faltering in his gaze, because he could complain of the slow workings of justice and curse the accused, he could think of that man, speak his name, if only with horror and loathing.
Healthily, he could feel horror and loathing, he could say “that monster”, as thousands of readers all across the country must surely have done when Clarisse Rivière’s story, and photographs of her face, her smiling, gullible face, open, modest and charming, had appeared in the papers, with Richard Rivière’s aid, for, raging, distraught, he’d handed over those photos of the wife he’d abandoned, the woman he’d offered up to be preyed on.
He could, in those same papers, proclaim his desire for vengeance.
His desire to see the monster spend the rest of his life behind bars.
He could be effusive and sincere, sometimes he could even feel the tears coming afresh to his eyes when a reporter asked what he’d felt on hearing the awful news.
This was what convinced Ladivine that Richard Rivière thought himself blameless, that no other possibility ever entered his mind, since he was clearly neither pretending nor lying nor exaggerating when he did these things.
He was himself, sensitive and open, a touch calculating, but never cynically.
Whereas Ladivine couldn’t bring herself to speak Clarisse Rivière’s name, or the man’s, or the month and the day it all happened.
Whenever she thought of the months of the year, the days of the week, a blur blotted out the month and day she could no longer speak of.
And if her eye lit on the name Clarisse in a book or an article, her breath came quicker, and she moaned silently to herself.
As for the man, he inspired in her a sacred terror.
She’d once dreamt she was kneeling before him, or before a vague form that was unmistakably him, offering her throat to be slashed.
She could not vent her rage at that man, could not picture him or imagine any real life he might lead, could call down no curse on him.
She could only tremble in terror and incomprehension.
By that act, by the murder of Clarisse Rivière, that man had entered Ladivine’s life and emotions, he’d taken root, and she could only submit to it, like, she sometimes told herself, an unwanted pregnancy discovered too late to abort.
Sometimes she felt that man’s violent spirit kicking inside her, leaving her nauseous and faint.
Whereas, she sensed, Richard Rivière could think of it all like some horrible news story that curiously just happened to involve him.
And when he was not thinking about it, it did not upset him. His life went on.
How she resented that, how easily he’d got off!
She waved to snap Marko out of his daydream before she reached his counter.
She didn’t like to surprise him at work. Caught idling, even without a customer in sight, he couldn’t hold back an expression of childish shame, as if fearing he’d misbehaved, and that pained her, and made her vaguely indignant.
The fact that this wasn’t Marko’s place, that he was talented and hardworking and perhaps brilliant enough to get through the veterinary studies he once wanted to pursue was, for as long as she’d known him, so obvious that it tormented her to see him trapped behind a counter in a department store, with his gentle, penetrating gaze and too few occasions to make use of his intelligence.