Ladivine by Marie NDiaye Page A

for one thing, and…yes, yes, I want to stay there with you, oh I do, oh yes.”
    He found the courage to raise his unbelieving eyes to hers, and now, from the serious, stunned, stupefied look on his face, it might just as well have been her who’d given him some dire piece of news.
    This is how we’ll be at our wedding, this is how the mayor will see us when he marries us, so in love that we’ll seem like absolute idiots, totally lost, she thought, in time with the familiar radiant carillon sounding noon from the church next door, her lips, finally unbound, stretching into a perfectly fulfilled smile.
    Was it then, Clarisse Rivière would later wonder, that she’d first vowed to forever be good to Richard Rivière, a vow that would shape the whole of her life with him?
    Because she must have realized, then or just a little later, that there was no other escape from what she’d deliberately done to the servant, Malinka’s mother, who was never to know of Clarisse Rivière, never to delight in anything good that happened to her daughter, never to broaden her narrow circle to include those her daughter loved most, on whom she herself might lavish her vast, unused love—no, no other escape from that violence, that shame, than the deepest, most indisputable goodness in every other way.
    Claiming not to be feeling well, Clarisse punched out and went to join the boy who’d hurried off to get his car from down the street, now waiting for her before the café, engine running.
    He took her to her apartment in Floirac to pack a few things. Then, on the way to Langon, they spoke of this and that with a spontaneity and an animation that delighted them both and sometimes made them look at each other, amused and proud and observing themselves from a shared distance, like parents moved by their children’s behavior.
    She stole a glance at him, that boy with the thick black hair, the dusky complexion, the sharp features; and that face, that body, at once slender and solid, seemed in no way removed from her own, seemed in no way to live and move in a space and a manner not yet known to her.
    And so she found nothing intimidating in the boy’s dense physical presence at her side. Impulsively running her fingers through his hair, she felt nothing new, as though she’d done just the same thing many times before. There was nothing foreign to her, she marveled serenely, in the young man’s physical being. She thought she knew the scent of his skin, the shape of his fingernails, the way his muscles flexed beneath the fabric of his trousers when he braked or accelerated, and she loved it all, she told herself, she loved every fragment of his carnal reality as surely as she knew and loved her own body.
    He sold cars for a living, he told her, he worked at the new Alfa Romeo dealership in Langon, and they’d sent him to Bordeaux for a four-day training seminar.
    “I love cars,” he said with a bashfulness she found adorable.
    Clarisse was enchanted to find him already wanting to confess his weaknesses and hoping not to displease her too terribly should she happen to harbor some special contempt for car buffs.
    He continued in the same vein, as if eager to make a clean breast of all his least charming features: his parents ran a stationery shop in Toulouse, he rarely saw them, they “didn’t think the same way,” his father was exceptionally prone to anger, it had become too much to take.
    He glanced her way, and although trembling inside she gave him an encouraging smile—her turn was coming, and she’d have to lie, the lie to come was already parching her mouth, and what would become of her vow to be good and her promise of irreproachable love if she started out telling lies to the boy she was in love with, so deeply in love?
    “You don’t have to love your parents, right, if they don’t deserve it?” he blurted out, with an emotion so ill-contained that she realized he was revealing a sentiment as difficult to feel as it was