Ladivine by Marie NDiaye

and down on the terrace so its head could be glimpsed through the window. It barked when its eyes met those of Clarisse or Richard’s father, then whimpered when its paws hit the ground and it was once again out of sight.
    Identical to the cries of Malinka’s mother, its laments were more than Clarisse could bear.
    She walked to the window, and the dog hurried off around the house, glancing impatiently back at Clarisse again and again.
    She suddenly realized it was headed for the child’s room, whose window looked onto the yard on the opposite side of the house. She whirled around, raced through the kitchen, ran to Ladivine’s room. She first saw the bounding dog’s huge frantic head through the glass, then the baby’s pale little face as she hiccupped and moaned in her own vomit.
    She cried out, picked up the child, patted her back until she heard regular breathing and the faint beat of that soothed, very young heart.
    “How did you know, you nice dog, how did you know?” she murmured, staring at the window, where the dog, now at peace, could no longer be seen.
    Richard Rivière’s father had just appeared in the doorway.
    For the first time Clarisse glimpsed fear in his cold eyes, but it was a respectful fear, docile, a pious fear that in no way diminished him.
    —
    She went back to visiting Malinka’s mother, leaving the child with a neighbor who would also look after her when Clarisse went back to work.
    Sitting in the velvet armchair that had slowly become hers at the servant’s, her gaze wandering over the trinkets her mother had begun to surround herself with—little porcelain elephants, handbells of various sizes, vases never filled with flowers but abundantly covered with fanciful floral motifs—she listened with one ear as the servant told her of bosses and coworkers, with the monotonous insistence, the maniacal, forced intensity Clarisse noticed she always fell into when she sensed her daughter’s thoughts straying, and rather than try to lure them back she seemed to deliberately drive them still farther away with her mind-numbing monologues.
    “What about you, how are you getting on?” she would ask at long last, her tone at once aggressive and imploring.
    And Clarisse would smile and say nothing, evasive, but smiling lovingly and sincerely all the same.
    But her heart was pounding, and, thinking about the baby, from whom she didn’t like to be separated for these few hours, she told herself how she wished she could give her mother the gift of that child. How happy the servant would be!
    And to be sure, she would be breaking her vow never to link her existence to the servant’s, but also acquitting herself of it by so great a sacrifice, and so her responsibility to those two, to her child and her mother, would, she thought, be behind her.
    Because she would then flee far from both of them, far even from Richard Rivière, not yet realizing what she owed him. And would she not suffer terribly, never again seeing those three she loved far more than life?
    But in truth she didn’t mind suffering, if it was the sorrow of love, of not having those you love close beside you.
    Far more painful for her was fidelity to her irreversible decision, which was destroying Malinka’s mother over a slow flame, and her, too, Clarisse Rivière, with a brighter flame, more violent, perhaps purifying, but she didn’t yet know—she didn’t know, and simply went on hoping in fear.
    —
    As the years went by, and Ladivine became a sweet, even-tempered girl, and Richard Rivière’s skillful salesmanship, tireless work, and quiet, indestructible ambition brought him ever-greater responsibilities at the dealership, Clarisse Rivière began to see that winning on one front could only mean losing on the other, that this was how it had to be, that it was a matter of her destiny.
    But she led her life onward with an untrembling hand.
    Apart from what they weren’t allowed to know, she believed she gave of herself