Ladivine by Marie NDiaye Page B

for that lie the accusing face of the servant, who knew just how faithless Clarisse Rivière was, how much she already had to make up for, would never have left her in peace.
    And then what more could she do, she who was already giving all she could of herself?
    She was doing everything she could.
    But it tortured her that she couldn’t hold back the numbness gradually overtaking her household, the cold torpor exuded in spite of her by her artificial, oblique self, until in the end she grew used to it, and came to believe this was how things were supposed to be in happy families.
    —
    She stared at her thin, mild face in the mirror, only faintly lined with delicate wrinkles at the corners of her eyelids. She couldn’t believe nothing showed in the still water of her gray-green eyes or the even crease of her slightly upturned lips.
    Her light-red dyed hair was pulled into a loose chignon, her brow was pale and smooth, and two pearls gleamed opaquely on her ears. Who would ever suspect she was a woman in despair?
    Like the rest of the house, the bedroom was neat and impeccably clean, not one piece of clothing in sight, everything in its place in the big blond-wood drawers, the polished armoires, their doors set with hard, efficient mirrors.
    Clarisse Rivière still scrupulously neatened and cleaned this house they’d bought some years before, in the center of Langon, once they’d sold their little house on the outskirts, but now she hated the house as she’d never hated anyone in her life.
    Because long before she did, that house had heard and understood what Richard Rivière said, and its old brick and stone walls would forever preserve the memory of those terrible words, unaffected, never once sighing in sympathy with her sadness.
    She wanted the house to grieve and suffer as she did, she wished it would collapse and swallow them both, her who didn’t want to go on living, and him, Richard Rivière, who had spoken those strange, dangerous words she’d long before managed to stop hearing but which he’d so often repeated that in the end she had to give in and understand them.
    Did he say “I’m leaving this house, I’m going to live somewhere else” or “I can’t go on living here, I’m leaving”?
    That pretty house never reacted, as if indifferent to the insult or aware that none of this really concerned it, and neither did Clarisse Rivière, she only smiled vaguely, retied her blue dress’s belt on her hip, started out of the room, but that was when Richard Rivière put his hand on her arm and, realizing she’d once again succeeded in not hearing or understanding him, once again found a way to close her ears, like turning off a hearing aid, or, who knows, to make an unintelligible hash of the very clear words he’d just spoken in his patient, firm, friendly voice, he held her back with one hand as she fled, she who had sensed the threat in the air, her skin already prickling and shivering, and again he spoke those words that the house had already heard, that it had already absorbed in its thick walls, that had left it unmoved: “I’m going away, I’m leaving this house.”
    No more than the walls, Clarisse Rivière did not collapse.
    But the words and their cruel meaning had pierced her defenseless skin, the delicate, creamy, lilylike flesh that Richard Rivière once never wearied of caressing and clutching, just as she loved his body of firm, dry leather, and she felt her skin closing over those words, and those words calmly, meticulously, beginning to wreak their damage.
    She’d looked toward the window, she’d seen the big chestnut tree on the square, and suddenly her hand began to itch, because, almost distracted by the memory, she could picture herself rubbing its ribbed trunk with that hand, and even now, it seemed, Richard Rivière taking that hand in his own and raising it to his lips.
    Dimly, that gesture reminded her of another. Had she not, one long-ago day, pressed the servant’s hand to