Ladivine by Marie NDiaye Page A

completely to Richard and Ladivine.
    Every moment of her life was infused with the certainty that it could be sacrificed to those two, that it belonged above all to them, that Clarisse Rivière was to make use of it only so long as they didn’t need it. Before that man and that child who suspected nothing and enjoyed her generosity in naïve good faith, she pictured herself as a slashed wineskin pouring out the very essence of joyful abnegation, of eager, almost greedy selflessness.
    But that notion of her own success was undermined by the ever-more-troublesome thought that her voluntary, permanent self-effacement had constructed a thin wall of ice all around her, that sometimes her daughter and husband couldn’t understand, though they said nothing of it, perhaps knew nothing of it, why they couldn’t get at her in the heart of her emotions.
    And yet she must surely feel emotions, said their confused, anxious gazes, and emotions more varied than what she allowed them to see, that unending, inexorable deference, which they might well have suspected was not pure but the product of very laudable hard work.
    And might they not be tired of this, might they not be put off, perhaps, by the thought that they had to be grateful for it?
    Might they not be tired and put off by such relentless generosity, the patient, unforthcoming man and the increasingly mysterious and obliging child, neither of whom, perhaps, wanted so much goodness and wished she would let them know her in some other way, too?
    Clarisse Rivière felt the cold settling in, furtively filling the house, seeming to grip Richard Rivière and Ladivine, gradually encasing them, too, in the very delicate rime of a slightly stiff demeanor. But she didn’t know what to do so that this wouldn’t be.
    She often laughed, often joked with them merrily, and her laugh was like crystal, it was brief and noncontagious. The more she devoted herself to her husband and daughter, the more she could feel them taking their distance, without defiance or resentment, as people turn away in discomfort from an incomprehensible passion.
    But how frigid was the breath she exhaled.
    Sometimes this left her discouraged, defeated, knowing the invisible presence of Malinka’s mother in her dark street kept her from giving her gestures and words the guilelessness that would warm them.
    And she felt equally incapable of raising her daughter Ladivine by a common morality’s well-defined precepts.
    No sooner was she called on to offer an opinion of some deed, to judge the appropriateness of some attitude, or simply to say what she thought, good or bad, of some situation than the servant’s silhouette appeared before her daunted eyes, seeming to defy her to judge anyone, she who had long since found herself guilty.
    She fell into the habit of shrugging her shoulders, mute and distant, lips slightly pursed, when Ladivine told her of some clique that had offended another, and before the child’s upturned, questioning eyes, before the child striving to understand what to make of all this, she smiled curtly, saying nothing, and thus seeming to express her disgust at the story itself. And so Ladivine finally stopped telling her what went on at school, and Clarisse forgot that things she should know about ever happened at school.
    She would realize this far too late.
    Even before silence invaded their house, a polite, cozy, placid silence, she had already closed her ears to the things Richard Rivière and Ladivine said, though she pretended to listen, though her face and her gestures were the picture of careful attention—but only the commonplace words by which they ordered their day-to-day lives were allowed into her consciousness. The rest she was not to hear.
    Because if she did she wouldn’t be able to speak without lying, and while she wasn’t lying when she was giving the man and the child all she could give of herself, she would be lying if she talked about this or that like a free woman. And