Ladivine (27 page)

On various plausible pretexts, Richard Rivière had never bothered to come and meet either the children or Marko, thereby, in her husband’s eyes, heightening his prestige, which, troublingly, grew more powerful still with the murder of Clarisse Rivière.

But instead of keeping quiet, shouldn’t Ladivine then have convinced Marko that Clarisse Rivière would still be alive had Richard Rivière stayed and looked after her, had he not so completely and so coldly abandoned her, like a wife he’d come to despise years before?

And that couldn’t be, could it?

One thing often irritated Ladivine: that Marko never seemed to appreciate the full splendor of Clarisse Rivière’s innocence.

To be sure, he treated her with the same kindness and thoughtfulness he offered everyone, but that was just it; he never showed, through a special, exceptional attitude, that he was aware of that ragged, dismantled woman’s unique grandeur, never showed that he had every reason to respect her far more than he did Richard Rivière, whom he admired childishly, without knowing him.

Oh yes, that had often infuriated Ladivine.

But, she thought in the SUV, wasn’t that her fault? How to know?

Had she, too, not treated Clarisse Rivière with condescension, had she not hidden her tortured love under a mask of offhandedness and even, sometimes, effrontery?

How could Marko have suspected her burning desire to see Clarisse Rivière rescued and loved when she expressed it so badly, so obliquely?

He was just as casual, just as amiably distant, polite, and unforthcoming, with Clarisse Rivière as she was, and what could he be accused of, thought Ladivine Rivière in the SUV, except refusing to understand that he was much like Clarisse Rivière, in the special sort of drab saintliness that they shared?

But now Marko was dazzling, now he radiated a magnificent, wicked flame.

Unusually, the children hadn’t yet drifted off to sleep.

Even Daniel was squirming, his eyes wide open and slightly bulging.

Ladivine thought him rapt in an unfocused pleasure that the mere presence of Marko’s body, of his flesh as if on fire beneath his pink tunic, was pretending to offer him, then suddenly snatching it away, refusing any possibility of fulfillment.

Now and then Daniel snickered, understanding nothing but putting on a forced cynicism, thought Ladivine, like a teenager who suspects some hidden meaning and doesn’t want to seem clueless. He snickered with a horrible knowing smirk, thought Ladivine, frightened.

The GPS’s silken commands landed in that electric silence like sly insinuations.

Marko was driving a little too fast on the now-deserted road, freshly asphalted, past fields of banana trees.

An amused little smile floated on his lips, ready to burst into full bloom at the slightest provocation.

How handsome he was, how appealing, how, clearly, he wished Ladivine would come over to his side and delight with him in this new untrammeled, superior, brutal way of being!

She remembered that Marko always needed her approval, express or implicit, in everything he did.

Never, she was sure, had he tried to exclude her from something in which he found happiness or satisfaction, as she had with that big brown dog, and she even wondered if he was capable of any pleasure at all, of any kind, except insofar as Ladivine consented.

Those days were gone. With all her being, with all her flesh, she could feel Marko breaking free of everything that bound his gratification to her approval.

No less clearly, she saw the desire he still nonetheless felt, not desperate or cunning but simply companionable, to include her in his new enchantment.

A wave of regretful, anguished nausea swept over her.

She looked at him, that bewitching man, she remembered the deep tenderness she once felt for him, she recalled that he was the father of her children and could be hers again if she liked. She wanted to whisper, Marko, my love. She reached out to touch his shoulder.

But just then he turned toward her, and in his eyes she thought she saw a gleam she’d never seen before, something she didn’t want to get close to for anything in the world, not even with love’s help—a joyous, arrogant rejection of decency and rectitude, of fear and compunction.

The smile on Marko’s lips came to life, and it was his usual handsome smile, loving and slightly tremulous, put on to tempt her.

But in his eyes was there anything other than cold calculation?

Ladivine sensed a distance between that smile and himself, as if his malign spirit had remembered that smile and realized its power to placate her, the deployment of his new omnipotence having failed to sway her.

Soon, she wondered, would he have even that smile to draw on?

Because his smile was hovering at the very edges of his lips, a faraway, uncertain memory of what even now was no more, while his gaze, turned inward, was fixed on another goal, a secret goal—oh no, not even secret, Marko’s new desires radiated from his whole body, the car thrummed with those waves, forbidding the children to take refuge in sleep.

Surprised by the sound of her own voice, Ladivine shouted:

“Wellington!”

Then she huddled on the edge of her seat, as far from Marko as possible.

He sourly pretended to focus on the road ahead, roaring recklessly past overloaded old trucks and rusting, outmoded little cars whose drivers sometimes sent a vigorous gesture of hostility Marko’s way.

“I want to see him again,” Daniel whined.

“We’ll never see Wellington again,” said Annika, in a grave, superior voice.

“Why not?”

“Because Papa says so.”

Never, in the old days, would that little girl have announced that something involving the entire family wouldn’t come to pass simply on Marko’s orders, Ladivine thought.

“From now on, it’s forbidden to speak Wellington’s name,” said Marko calmly.

Annika burst into a painful, sharp, prolonged laugh, which seemed to brighten Marko’s gloomy heart.

To keep her company and express his approval, he began to laugh, too, his fists pounding little blows on the steering wheel.

After two monotonous hours on the perfectly straight highway, flanked by endless banana and sweet potato plantations, Marko turned onto a yellow dirt road that soon entered the forest.

Ladivine had stopped looking back to see if Daniel and Annika were finally asleep—the atmosphere individually embracing each child was arousing enough that she could feel them holding themselves at the ready, unsure what they were waiting for but maniacally attentive to their father’s every move, his every word or sigh, anything that might give them a lead to follow, give them a place in the wake of his dazzling vigor.

Were they afraid they might fall from Marko’s favor if they slept, and so find themselves back in Ladivine’s camp, where a tedious remorse about Wellington was accompanied by an utter inability to bring him back?

Wellington!

Why shouldn’t the children have concluded that their father could produce the boy whenever he pleased, and that if he didn’t want to he must have had very good reasons, whereas, manifestly, Ladivine could only cry Wellington’s name in subdued, pointless sorrow, unable even to speak of him, to summon up his image with amusing words and anecdotes?

Wellington!

Why, for that matter, shouldn’t the children rather be forbidden to speak that name than hear it heartlessly cried into their mystified ears by their frightened, opaque, uncommunicative mother?

The poor little things must have feared that Ladivine would take over their minds if they slept, then drag them away from Marko’s wondrous influence, spirit them away from that radiant force.

She turned around in her seat and caressed Daniel’s bare thigh, squeezed Annika’s calf, trying to smile reassuringly.

The children’s flesh felt hard, clenched. They refused to meet her gaze, and she realized she was being a nuisance, but what did she care, if she didn’t want to lose them?

Because, she thought, could she still see in them her beloved children if they turned into depraved little monsters?

Wellington!

She longed to tell them the boy was dead, and she and Marko, for all their pretensions to excellent parenting, were, with this refusal to speak of what they’d done to Wellington, lying to them.

But it was too late, she couldn’t talk to her children now, and her children didn’t want to hear, she could tell by their averted eyes, the way their limbs tensed beneath her fingers.

Suddenly a broad clearing appeared down the road, opening up in the forest.

“We’re here,” said Marko.

Ladivine felt a shared astonishment briefly reuniting her with Marko, for what they now saw was nothing like even the vaguest image they’d conjured up of Richard Rivière’s friends, whom Ladivine, not quite knowing why, had pictured as a couple of grizzled drifters temporarily stranded by a lack of funds or a need for rest, but the dozens of clearly brand-new SUVs, white, black, and gray, parked in the clearing beneath sheet-metal roofs, and the big pink stucco house, which reminded Ladivine of certain villas in Langon, revealed the presence, deep in this forest, of prosperous car dealers, and why not, thought Ladivine with a stab of ill will, since that’s what Richard Rivière had become once he left Clarisse Rivière (as if Clarisse Rivière had somehow been keeping him down), having gone from assistant manager in Langon, at the Alfa Romeo dealership he’d been hired by just out of the
lycée,
to the head of a Jeep dealership in the Haute-Savoie, and Ladivine always wondered how he’d settled on that area, having, to the best of her knowledge (which is to say from what Clarisse Rivière told her), never spent any time there before going off to make it, perhaps forever, his home.

Oh yes, she’d thought on being told by her father that he now lived in Annecy, Richard Rivière had been quietly plotting his Haute-Savoie escape for some time—because how to believe that he’d rushed straight from Langon to Annecy with no plan in mind, no prospects, no idea even what the city was like?

A couple emerged from the house and stood looking in their direction, hands shading their eyes.

But why, the insidious little voice of common sense whispered in Ladivine’s ear, why should Richard Rivière have revealed to his daughter that he wanted to leave Clarisse Rivière and make a fresh start in Annecy?

So she would try to talk him out of it?

And on what grounds would she have sought to convince him to go on wasting away with Clarisse Rivière?

He did the one thing he could do, not uncaringly, and no reasonable person could blame him for not anticipating that his wife would end up drowning in her own blood because he wasn’t there beside her, because he wasn’t there to keep her from foolishness—to keep her from being herself, that is, to keep her from being the slightly dim Clarisse Rivière.

The sunlight that made the sheet-metal roofs sparkle poured down on the couple’s two identically unmoving heads, as if to designate them for veneration.

The woman’s wrists and throat glimmered, laden with gold.

She took a languid step forward, very consciously offering her adorned body to their gaze, and Ladivine felt a small shock on realizing that this diminutive figure in spike heels, capris, and a little sailor shirt was in fact an old woman, whose long hair, dyed deep black, seemed to wrap her gaunt, tanned, heavily made-up face like a scarf.

She was neither smiling nor looking at her expectantly, but only waiting, infinitely patient and docile in her certainty of being admired, and she raised her chin a little, boldly exposing her wrinkled face, slightly smoothed over by the makeup, to the stark sunlight.

“I’m Richard Rivière’s daughter,” said Ladivine, after nodding a hello.

She couldn’t help adding, so as to say something, for she was intimidated by the woman’s imperial aloofness:

“His only child, Ladivine.”

“Yes, I know, he said you’d be coming,” the woman answered, ever so slightly bored, as if she found the obligation to speak pointless when one had only to show oneself, exhibit oneself.

“Oh, he told you?”

“Yes, a few weeks ago, on the phone.”

She realized that Richard Rivière must have talked to his friends as soon as she’d hung up, and although she could have considered that diligence a sign of his eagerness to help out, it rankled her.

Because there was little chance that either she or Marko would ever have felt the urge to rent a car and drive out to these strangers’ property were it not for “that Wellington business,” as she’d privately named what had happened, and did it not seem that, from his mysterious Haute-Savoie lair, Richard Rivière had foreseen the events that would bring them to this place, and so was it not in his power, a power he’d left unused, to say or do something to forestall those events?

Shouldn’t he have put her on guard, he who claimed to know this country?

And said to her: Beware of courtly teenagers who accost you at the front door of the National Museum? Beware of the violence nestled in your heart, waiting to be roused when you meet a young man with impenetrable schemes, beware of the sympathy you might begin to feel for your own extraordinary misdeeds, your newfound longing to let go and plunge endlessly into senselessness?

Marko and the children had now joined her before the woman with the cold, serene face, not so much covered with makeup as carved from it.

Marko held out his hand, and with a weary resignation she gave him her own.

Oh, how he’d changed, how he wanted it to be seen, thought Ladivine.

Because Marko had climbed out of the car and, before that woman, smiling, his back very straight, he had made his appearance.

The old Marko would have thought it enough simply to be there.

He glowed with pride and confidence in his pink tunic, the huge purple flowers ornamenting the front like the insignia of some ignoble order.

Ladivine was beginning to loathe that outfit.

She felt Marko’s hunger to present himself to this stranger in all his new magnificence; she sensed his pleasure that this woman had never seen him before; she saw his brazen manner, the full depth of his emancipation.