He wanted to see her transformed, he thought, and enlightened about Clarisse Rivière, he wanted his heart to recognise her at once, without doubt or regret, never wondering if that woman was once the little girl whose hand he held, he wanted to see her and hear her say: I’ve brought Mama back to you.
He would not be afraid, he thought, of either one’s new face.
:
ladivine sylla dressed and groomed herself with even more care than usual.
She oiled her hair, then pulled it back and bound it at her nape with an elastic band, tugging so vigorously that her scalp smarted, but she was long used to that, and scarcely noticed the pain.
Next she put on a tweed trouser suit she’d found for forty euros in a second-hand shop. She had chosen a dark red turtleneck to go with it, and her best pair of shoes, high-heeled ankle boots on which the trouser cuff broke ever so slightly, which she considered the height of elegance.
She went and said goodbye to her figurines, asking them to wish her luck. She clearly heard them answer, each in its own way, in its own distinctive voice.
“Luck with what?” asked the little gilded Buddha.
But she couldn’t say, not quite knowing herself.
Luck one day entering her life suddenly seemed to her so absurd
an idea that she nearly laughed out loud at herself. Did she even really want such a thing? Not likely. A stroke of luck now would be grounds for alarm, she thought, and it would feel like a punishment. What could be crueller than good things coming too late, when the worst possible thing had happened?
She went off to catch the tram on the quay, a thick, silty-smelling fog in the air. She did not quite know what she wanted for herself, but she knew exactly what she didn’t, at any price: her words having some sort of influence.
The lawyer, that Bertin, had told her she had only to answer whatever she was asked with the utmost sincerity. She was not to try to work out what they wanted from her, nor even imagine they wanted anything in particular. In a sense, that was none of her business.
Ladivine Sylla did not believe a word of it, though she feigned absolute confidence in Bertin.
She was convinced there were things that he wanted her to say, and he’d called her as a witness in the hope or the certainty she would say them. That was his job. From what that Freddy Moliger had told him of Ladivine Sylla, Bertin thought her worth putting on the stand, and that was fine with her, Ladivine Sylla, but she wanted her words to carry no weight in anyone’s mind, on one side or the other.
That was her only concern.
The rest, she told herself, she could handle. She’d long since stopped crying. Why should she break down there in front of all those people?
For two years she’d been buying figurines of young princes or damsels in tears, their necks bowed, their heads bent over their joined hands, and whenever she woke in the morning crushed by sadness she lined them up on the front row of her shelf, then sat down before them and stared at them for hours.
Finally she fell into the state she was seeking, between awareness and stupor, and the figurines seemed to be weeping for her, sharing in her pain, gazing on her with their suddenly living, damp, shining eyes.
In their porcelain pupils she saw her own dry, dead eyes reflected, and she felt better, and consoling words came to her lips, which she murmured to her poor figurines, nearly reaching out to dry off their tear-streaked cheeks.
But no-one had ever come to console her, no-one had ever dried her tears with a tender hand, in those early days when she wept and wept for Malinka. That’s how life was for her.
The one person she thought of when her need for solace grew so overpowering that her figurines’ good wishes were no longer enough was that Freddy Moliger. Had she dared, she would surely have paid a call on that Moliger in his prison, and she had no doubt that her sorrow would have been lightened.
She got off the tram near the courthouse, walked with some difficulty in her high heels to the foot of the stone steps.
She felt tall, slender and very old, she thought her face must be like the face of her dear little Saxony porcelain shepherdess, smooth and old, thin, slightly vacant. Her scalp stung, which was good, because it made her feel alive, sharp, not dulled and lost, as she usually did since Malinka’s death.
A dog was watching her from the other side of the street.
Afraid of cats and suspicious of dogs, Ladivine Sylla deliberately looked away, not wanting to attract it.
But she did once more glance its way. It was a big brown dog, scrawny and shivering in the damp air.
A memory of Malinka surfaced in her mind, the child’s face looking up at Ladivine Sylla when she came home from work, in that tiny house at the far end of a courtyard, and herself trembling in gentle, grave astonishment when the girl’s pale eyes met her own.
Where had she come from, that child with sand-coloured eyes and straight hair but a face so like her own? And that dog, where did it come from, its dark gaze inexplicably calling Malinka to mind?
She understood that it meant her no harm, and she briefly turned back towards it, breathless.
An old image of herself came to mind, as far as could be from the little shepherdess’s cold face. She saw herself at a time when she was full of fury and hate, when her face was clenched around her pinched lips, her little quivering nose. Her anger at Malinka had become a rage at the spell that was gripping them both, and then even that had waned, replaced by a sad resignation.
But, in that angry time, she would sometimes wake in the morning and feel as if she’d been running all night. Her thigh muscles ached, her nostrils were red from breathing in drizzle or mist. Over what plains had she raced, over what meadows blew that wind whose grassy scent she thought she could still smell on the down of her arms? She longed to go back to that place where the wind had whistled in her ears, where the dry, packed ground had sustained her enchanted sprint, where the light, perfumed air had swept off her anger.
Because those mornings found her weary but freed of the impotent rage that was sapping her. Gradually it came back, but less virulent — exhausted from trying to maintain itself in those nocturnal sprints, of which Ladivine Sylla remembered nothing, except, now and then, a sensation of trickling warmth on her back, like flowing sweat on bare skin.
She turned away from the dog and started up the steps.
How old she’d become! Who would look after her when she was still frailer, who would lower her eyelids when she was dead, who would know she’d just died? Would Malinka? And that dog on the other pavement? What messenger would she have to announce her death? Who would care?
That Freddy Moliger might be sad. He alone would still sometimes think of her. *
After a two-hour wait in a little room whose dingy corners and crannies Ladivine Sylla inspected with a critical eye, to pass the time (so experienced was she in removing all manner of stains that she could see just what the cleaning lady would have needed — bleach, the right sponge, thirty minutes more — to erase the shoeprints from the tile floor, the marks left by the chair backs on the painted wall), she was finally ushered into the courtroom.
She studied the ground at her feet, suddenly troubled by a pressure in her ears, as if she’d too quickly dived to a very great depth.