Sometimes she forgot she was writing sheer nonsense and abandoned herself to the pure pleasure of the presentation, she spent ages scripting the date, or marking off the margins, or crafting elaborate capital letters, all curlicues and meanders.
That lowly, solitary Malinka made what she called friends at school, but, looking back, Clarisse Rivière would understand that in truth it was only a little clan of two or three teenaged girls that Malinka had somehow slipped into, almost unnoticed, less in the hope of remedying her loneliness than in obedience to the rules of school life as, with her keenly observant instinct, she understood them.
She knew absolutely nothing about those girls, who never spoke of personal matters in her presence and seemed to tolerate her only out of curiosity, perhaps wondering at their own tolerance, their own curiosity.
Malinka wished she could learn everything about them, as if she might thereby understand her own existence.
But, although she was so discreet that gazes slid over her with nothing holding them back, those girls perhaps unconsciously limited their talk to everyday things whenever she came near, and it felt to Malinka as if a sudden pall had been cast by the vague mass of her body, like a grey cloud blotting out the sun.
But she grew used to that, since it was her place.
She must also have known that by abandoning all hope of closeness with these girls she could consider herself excused from having to invite them home, into the house of the servant.
Because that was out of the question.
The thought of her friends meeting her mother sent her into spasms of almost amused revolt, so laughable was the idea.
She was nothing short of speechless when a teacher one day asked to meet Malinka’s mother, looking faintly uncomfortable, as if, she told herself, all the more perplexed in that he could easily have let the matter drop there, he already knew it would never happen, because it was absurd, absurd.
But she said nothing, only nodded with her usual gravity.
He brought it up once more, she nodded once more, and then never again did she look up at him with a face hungry for approval.
And she avenged herself for that teacher’s blundering indelicacy by handing in work untouched by her ardent desire for majesty, assignments without ornament, no curlicues, no coloured underlining. She turned sixteen during the summer holidays, and never went back to school.
Clarisse Rivière would always remember the time that followed with a mix of incomprehension and terror, for it seemed that chance alone, or obedience to the whims of circumstance, guided the life of that girl Malinka, that empty-headed girl, as she often heard people say at the time: she’s a sweet girl, hardworking, but empty-headed.
The only fantasy she would gradually assemble involved the quarantining of her mother, the dismissal of the servant.
And since she could only subscribe to the judgement that she had nothing in her head, feeling that head fill with the one single preoccupation of expelling her mother would fill her with the idea that she, Malinka, was a despicable person, her mind closed to everything but disloyalty.
The servant accepted Malinka’s decision to leave school without a word, perhaps because it seemed not a decision but a natural passage from one state to another, like a change of season.
One morning, as she was leaving for work later than usual and Malinka was still lying in bed, she observed in her calm, unsurprised voice:
“You’re not getting ready for school.”
“No,” said Malinka, “I’m not going anymore.”
And that was all. The servant nodded and went off to catch her bus.
The next day she told Malinka she had found her a job, babysitting for a family whose apartment she sometimes cleaned.
And Malinka went off to look after the children, and neither liked it nor didn’t. Sometimes, coming home in the evening, she caught sight of her mother on the bus, and pretended not to have seen her.
The servant discreetly refrained from calling out.
Her face turned resolutely to the window, Malinka felt her mother’s gentle, placid, ever-benevolent gaze on the back of her neck, and the furious pity she felt at this shook her like a first taste of strong drink, so numbed were her feelings, so dulled her thoughts.
She looked after the children all through the summer holidays, which they spent with their parents on the Bay of Arcachon.
This was her first time away from the suburbs of Paris, but standing by the ocean she felt as if she had seen all this before.
The following summer, back in Arcachon, she suddenly told herself that nothing was forcing her to go home to her mother.
This idea must have been inching along unbeknownst to her since the summer before, so indistinct that she never spotted it among the charmless, colourless thoughts peopling her mind, because she was not surprised to find that idea blossoming inside her, nor to know precisely what she would have to do, both to protect her independence and to put herself out of reach of her mother’s love and attentions.
Nothing said she had to go on being the servant’s daughter forever, she told herself.
A cold feeling filled her with this, but she knew that was more easily fought off than the desperate tenderness that coursed through her heart when she thought of her mother, even more utterly alone than she.
A few days after the children went home to Paris she handed in her notice and caught a train for Bordeaux, where she took a room in a modest hotel near the station.
She found work waitressing in a café. She wrote to her mother, telling her not to worry, and received no reply.
She now went by the name of Clarisse. There had been a Clarisse in her class at school, with long hair that fell down her back like a silky curtain.
“Hey Clarisse! Come here a sec, would you?”
“Be right there!” she answered in her happy, slightly muted voice,
which she worked to make faintly breathless and interrogative, thinking people found this particularly attractive.
She always shivered in delighted surprise on hearing her new
name, and although in the beginning she sometimes forgot to answer,
that was all over now, and the person she had become, this Clarisse
with the beautiful, iron-straightened chestnut hair, with the smooth,
breezy, winningly confident face, could not hold back a twinge of
refined, pitying contempt for the person she was just a few months
before, that clod who called herself Malinka and did not know a
thing about make-up, that clueless girl with the hunted look in her
eyes, that lowly girl who called herself Malinka.
She stopped laying tables and hurried towards the kitchen, where
her boss was calling for her.
“So annoying — your co-worker just phoned to say she won’t
be in for lunch, so you’ll be all on your own,” the woman said in
an anxious tone, eyeing Clarisse’s slight frame as if to measure that
delicate body’s endurance.