Free Ladivine by Marie NDiaye Page B

before and, no less quick and assured, decide that the danger was not where it seemed. This troubled her. She felt at peace, nonetheless, and very comfortably pure, as if washed clean from within by an intuition higher and wiser than hers, which had chosen her.
    “I never want to see that dog in this house again!” Richard shouted furiously.
    Clarisse noted that he was taking care not to look at the dog, still sprawled on the bed watching him, dark and serene, silent and proper.
    Something struck her, clear as day: that well-behaved dog had the same eyes as Malinka’s mother.
    Richard’s father began to stroke its flanks, speaking tenderly into its ear, not to placate it, Clarisse told herself, because he wasn’t afraid of it, but to erase any offense.
    The dog stretched its legs, yawned, deigned to get down from the bed.
    The father gently grasped its collar—once again, thought Clarisse, not to control it but as if taking the arm of a dear friend—and the two of them left the room without a glance Richard’s way. He sighed in ostentatious relief. He rocked and caressed the child, who had begun to cry.
    “That was close,” he said accusingly.
    Did he mean to include her in this censure, because she hadn’t rushed forward to snatch the baby away from the dog’s maw?
    Clarisse wasn’t sure, but she preferred not to know.
    Her certainty that the dog had come to the child’s room not to harm her but to teach her was twisting and turning inside her, and it troubled her like an unwholesome temptation of disloyalty to Richard Rivière. Shouldn’t she have told him of that certainty, wouldn’t he have understood it, found reassurance in it? Oh no, he wouldn’t have understood, and his inability would have made clear to Clarisse what she already knew, that no breath had come to him to show him the way into the dog’s mysterious soul.
    She couldn’t help seeing it as a sign of Richard’s weakness that this inspiration had steered clear of him but had entered his father’s heart.
    Madame Rivière hadn’t bothered to come into the bedroom. She’d set the table in the kitchen, and the father was sitting and waiting before his plate with the impatient, wearied look of a man who wants to put the chore of the meal behind him and be off as quickly as possible.
    Richard showed the baby to his mother, who, thought Clarisse, examined her guardedly, her eyes full of an outraged skepticism, as if this might all be a cruel joke she’d have to thwart before they could laugh at her. She clumsily took the child in her arms, then handed her back almost at once with a furious little giggle.
    Later, as the meal was nearing its end and Ladivine was back asleep in her little bed, they heard crunching gravel outside on the terrace. It was the dog, pacing back and forth in front of the house, beneath the kitchen windows.
    Seething, Richard asked them:
    “What’s with you having that dog now? Since when are you animal lovers?”
    “It’s to guard the shop,” said Madame Rivière. “You’ve got to protect yourself these days, you know.”
    “It’s got nothing to do with the shop,” the father said deliberately.
    He waved his fork toward the mother, not looking at her.
    “That’s what she’d like to think, but that’s not it at all. Why would we have brought it here if it was supposed to be guarding the shop? Why do we take it with us wherever we go?”
    “Yes, why?” asked the mother, suddenly afraid.
    “Because we can’t not, that’s how it is. It’s an order come to life. What do I care about dogs? It’s true, I don’t even like them that much. This one’s different. I had no choice.”
    Richard let out a disdainful snicker. He was trying to add scorn to his hatred, Clarisse told herself, but it was beyond him, and scorn refused to take root in so pallid a heart. His gaze was dull, at once full of hate and struggling to summon up some scorn with which to harden itself.
    The dog began to yelp. It was jumping up