His inexplicable dejection faded, and for a few minutes, as he stood in the car park of his building, he congratulated himself on selling the four-wheel drive.
In the distance, the mountaintops were shrouded in clouds.
Now he could see only the pink and brown roofs of the old town below him, only the gentle, green slopes halfway up the mountains, like the hills between Langon and Malagar, where, some Sunday mornings, he used to go walking with his daughter Ladivine.
How much better he felt with the snow out of sight!
But that relief led his memory, suddenly roused and enlivened, to bring back old images of long drives with Clarisse Rivière, early in their marriage, leisurely jaunts through the vine-covered hills in their old Citroën 304, the top down, both smoking and talking, he thought at the time, in his happiness, in the bliss of a young man deeply in love, with a sweet, innocent frivolity — or his walks on those same roads with his serious, attentive, very young daughter, starting from just behind their house, and so exquisite sometimes was the feeling of the child’s hand in his, of the forthright, benevolent sun, of the child’s limpid, upturned gaze, that he would have wept with gratitude and trembled in terror had he not held himself back, lest he frighten the girl.
Such memories did him no good.
Colleagues his age, even his wife, however luckless with her children, seemed to love reminiscing about their days as young parents, when their joys were stronger and deeper than now, they said fatalistically, now that their job was essentially to resist as best they could those charmless children’s demands for money or favours, and to fight off their own disappointment.
Richard Rivière was not at all disappointed at the young woman his little girl had become. In his eyes, she was an entirely successful adult.
And the two children she’d brought into the world, whose pictures she often sent him, those two little Germans he’d never seen, seemed two perfect little human beings themselves.
He had nothing to regret but his own agonising unease. Because he could no longer bear to see his daughter Ladivine, nor even to think about her for long.
He himself found this scandalous. What kind of father was he?
He wasn’t much good in that way. He was no good at all, now, in that way.
But how could it be helped?
Every meeting with his daughter, every phone call, every daydream about his child brought him back to the awful feeling that the three of them had lived a life deformed by something huge and unnameable, hovering over them but never taking shape or fading away, making of their life a hollow travesty of life.
It began four or five years after their wedding, and he was convinced it had nothing to do with the child or with him, but with Clarisse Rivière.
Sometimes those Langon years seemed so artificial that he wondered if that life was real, and not merely a dream he’d had, despite all the evidence to the contrary.
He’d been happy enough in those days, he knew, but he couldn’t feel it, because the memory of that happiness was tainted by a sense of unreality, almost perversion, that blotted out all the rest when he thought about the life he once led.
Perhaps there was no ill intent behind that perversion. But if he believed that he’d unwittingly loved, lived with, procreated with a simulacrum, dimly sensing it and finding it deeply repellent, what did it change that that imaginary woman wasn’t responsible for her state?
For so he thought. Still today, he held Clarisse Rivière blameless.
Whereas he, Richard Rivière, had let himself drift through that counterfeit life because he felt weak and helpless, and then in a way he’d woken up, and revulsion, a sort of horror, of fear, drove him far away, far from Clarisse Rivière.
He was ashamed that he had not gone to Ladivine’s wedding, that he had never met his son-in-law or his grandchildren.
Less because he feared a face-to-face meeting with Clarisse Rivière, as Ladivine thought, than because at the time he was terrified of seeing his daughter. What was she made of, he couldn’t help asking himself, this child born to Clarisse Rivière? Even more than her mother, Ladivine reminded him of the life they’d once led, and those memories left him deeply confused, unsure if he himself had actually lived or had only passed through an interminable dream, an insincere, fabricated dream.
He could bear only the memory of his child’s first years, and the first years of his marriage with Clarisse Rivière. Nonetheless, such memories did him no good.
He tiptoed into the apartment, trying to determine which room Trevor was in — his bedroom, most likely, since he could hear computer noises through the door.
Relieved, he made for the kitchen, only to collide with the young man, who was lurking in the corridor. He started and cried out in angry surprise.
“What are you doing here?”
“Nothing. Meditating.”
And Trevor let out a little laugh, but Richard Rivière scarcely noticed, so often did the boy snicker and cackle for no reason.
Putting on a thick south-western accent, Trevor asked, “So, you sell that heap?”
“Could be,” Richard Rivière answered coldly, brushing Trevor aside with one hand.
Unintentionally, his fingers sank into the young man’s limp, bulging belly through the T-shirt, and he gave him a taut, uncomfortable smile.
Trevor had gained so much weight since moving back that Richard Rivière couldn’t help feeling embarrassed and sad for him, which he did his best to conceal, when his fingers inadvertently grazed the boy’s flabby flesh, behind an awkward display of sympathy.
He felt no trace of affection for Trevor, only those waves of pained, morose pity at the sight of that young man of twenty-two imprisoned in his bloated body, he who, Richard Rivière remembered, was once a slim, agile teenager.
However dour and forced, that pity made him more patient with Trevor’s crass ways.
He walked into the kitchen, and through the half-open window saw his four-by-four in the car park, and the spot where just a moment before he himself had been standing, contemplating the mountains half-hidden by clouds.
Now those clouds had cleared, and he saw the mountains’ glistening peaks, the triumphant, seemingly indestructible sharpness of their snow-covered flanks.
He saw himself too, standing there in his expensive clothes, a fine-looking figure in every way and yet studying the dress and the manner of the man in the raspberry socks with an insecure, already defeated eye, and despite the relaxed, distant air he tried to put on at such times, that man must have known he was being looked at and envied, or worse yet, secretly idolised.
Disgusted with himself, Richard Rivière slammed the window shut. And since Trevor had followed him into the kitchen and he realised he wouldn’t be having the quiet, solitary lunch he was hoping for, he lost his temper, and shouted:
“A hundred times your mother’s asked you not to leave this window open! We’ve already had one burglary, she did tell you that, didn’t she?”