Free Ladivine by Marie NDiaye

could feel only a hard knot beneath her loose-fitting sweater, such that she once thought she was simply waking from a dream in which she’d been pregnant.
    She told the servant they’d have to go two and a half months without seeing each other.
    “Fine,” said the servant, her voice cold and indifferent.
    Then for the first time she burst into tears, and Clarisse sat stunned and still, rubbing her chair’s velvet arms with both hands and thinking that her own narrow, sharp shoulder could at least have accommodated her mother’s moist cheek, could have covered her eyes.
    —
    When the child was born, she named her Ladivine. That was the servant’s first name.
    —
    Clarisse Rivière would remember the months after Ladivine’s birth as a time when she went badly astray, when she lost sight of the point of her promise.
    She would blame this confusion on her deep happiness, which grew from intense to excessive, finally becoming unrecognizable and sometimes indistinguishable from grief. She even let herself imagine taking the baby to Bordeaux, presenting her to the servant, saying, Here! and then leaving her there, going home, having nothing more to do with the child or Malinka’s mother, whose sadness at no longer seeing Clarisse would be eased by the presence of that marvelous baby.
    Once she got hold of herself, the memory of that madness tormented her. Wherever she was, she dropped everything and ran to the baby, to make sure she was there and hold her close, knowing a torrent of love would then sweep over her, painful, impenetrable, and separate from herself, as if coming from some mysterious outside and not from her own being.
    Sometimes she thought this vast love for the child a burden, and she longed to be rid of it, even if it meant ridding herself of the child as well. But she didn’t know how to find pleasure in that love, nor even what exactly to do with it; she felt as though, yearning to deploy itself unconfined, it was trying to shove her consuming love for Richard Rivière to one side, along with her imperishable, wrenching love for Malinka’s mother.
    Whence, no doubt, the devotion, almost the euphoria, with which she saw to the little chores that came with the baby.
    Washing the tiny clothes and hanging them on the line in the garden, mashing the vegetables for the baby’s puree, the routine and utilitarian nature of those tasks held back the waves of invasive, boundless love, and although every move she made was for the sake of the child, she could in a way put the child out of her mind.
    It was when she inhaled the warm, musty smell of the child’s head, when she felt that compact little body’s warmth through her clothes, that she knew she was in danger. That overpowering love unsettled her, leaving her first wary of its demands, then rebellious.
    I don’t need this, she thought, feeling heavier than when she was pregnant, as if that immense love for the baby were overstuffing her already full heart.
    Richard Rivière, for his part, had conceived a very simple passion for the child, and never tried to get out of caring for her.
    No swollen, oversize love was trying to push him beyond his limits, or take anything away from him, or split open his chest.
    —
    The Rivière parents took a day to come see the child, and the moment she opened the door Clarisse felt the strange attractive force radiating from the father’s big, solid body, a force to be struggled against, she immediately thought, because there was something unpleasant about it, but also, on first meeting, something intriguing.
    He had a broad, full face with delicate features and mocking eyes that let it be known, with an aggressiveness scarcely veiled by false benevolence, that he was a man who put up with no nonsense. He had enormous hands, deformed by arthritis, though he was not an old man. He stood with his forearms well away from his thighs, not so much to spare his ailing hands any painful contact, it seemed, as to show that he