it).
So this, Clarisse told herself, horrified, is what she’d done to her mother.
Sinking beneath even the wildest waves would never erase such a crime.
What bitterness, now, on the servant’s perennially pinched lips, what hard mockery in her eyes!
She began to complain of fatigue and back pain. Vacuuming an office at dawn, she tripped on a chair and broke her two front teeth. She refused to have a bridge put in on the grounds that she couldn’t afford it, even though Clarisse offered to help pay. But did she not find a sour pleasure in revealing, through the thin smile that was now hers, her gaping sorrow?
She did, thought Clarisse, seeing the hole in her mother’s mouth and feeling the dough of contemptibility swelling inside hers. Her mouth was the putrid abyss, not the servant’s.
Her love for her mother was poisoning her. On leaving the servant’s, she wanted now to shriek, now to sink into the river’s clement waters.
She did no such thing, though, no such thing.
But as for the edifice of her goodness to Richard Rivière and, beyond him, to everyone she met or worked with, she built it up bit by bit, never forgetting, never wearying, in a constant, tranquil labor that was nonetheless not untouched by doubt, concerning not the need for that endeavor but its sincerity.
Could what she practiced, she sometimes wondered, really be called goodness, or, more simply, niceness and apparent submission?
And in any case, what sort of goodness was a goodness that was aware of itself?
She took care never to upset Richard Rivière, never to needle him, tease him, provoke him, and when, as he so rarely did, he lashed out at her, to answer only with silence.
Now and then she saw a brief flash of surprise or unease on her husband’s face, when she so visibly and insistently fended off some potential conflict and stared at him with her inward-looking eyes, open wide onto her own abnegation, careful to keep a grip on herself, entirely withdrawn into her vow of kindliness.
It seemed to her at such times that her eyes never blinked; she thought she could see their pale, fixed, absent reflection in Richard Rivière’s dark, puzzled gaze.
“Come on, say something,” he sometimes sighed. “You don’t have to agree.”
As if prodded into action, she tried to pull her gaze out of the pensive depths where it was contemplating Clarisse Rivière’s sacrifice and haul it back to the surface, where Richard Rivière was awaiting some word, some answer, albeit with his increasingly frequent air of having already set down his attentiveness and wandered off somewhere else, someplace more interesting.
And so, after struggling to recall the question he’d asked her, or the subject on which he’d tried to draw her into some sort of dispute, after desperately casting around in slightly nauseated panic for some more or less suitable answer, she would realize he’d forgotten all about it, that she was now speaking only to Richard Rivière’s frozen, mute, polite shadow as he fled into the distance, him and his beating heart, his untamable hair, his impatient muscles.
She took that shadow in her arms and pulled it to her. There was still a shoulder there to rest her forehead on, to cover her eyes.
Her love for Richard Rivière bathed her in sweetness and gentleness.
Was she perfectly, purely good to him? Probably not, since he was aware—his unease made it clear—of a strangeness about her, when he should have passed through her goodness without even knowing it, should even have been able to attack and defy that goodness without seeing it, no more than Clarisse herself would.
—
Her pregnancy showed so little that she thought it safe to go on visiting the servant up to the seventh month.
She was intrigued to find her belly’s already modest bulge becoming even more discreet when she boarded the train for Bordeaux. And when she walked into her mother’s apartment and her hand moved reflexively to her stomach, she
So this, Clarisse told herself, horrified, is what she’d done to her mother.
Sinking beneath even the wildest waves would never erase such a crime.
What bitterness, now, on the servant’s perennially pinched lips, what hard mockery in her eyes!
She began to complain of fatigue and back pain. Vacuuming an office at dawn, she tripped on a chair and broke her two front teeth. She refused to have a bridge put in on the grounds that she couldn’t afford it, even though Clarisse offered to help pay. But did she not find a sour pleasure in revealing, through the thin smile that was now hers, her gaping sorrow?
She did, thought Clarisse, seeing the hole in her mother’s mouth and feeling the dough of contemptibility swelling inside hers. Her mouth was the putrid abyss, not the servant’s.
Her love for her mother was poisoning her. On leaving the servant’s, she wanted now to shriek, now to sink into the river’s clement waters.
She did no such thing, though, no such thing.
But as for the edifice of her goodness to Richard Rivière and, beyond him, to everyone she met or worked with, she built it up bit by bit, never forgetting, never wearying, in a constant, tranquil labor that was nonetheless not untouched by doubt, concerning not the need for that endeavor but its sincerity.
Could what she practiced, she sometimes wondered, really be called goodness, or, more simply, niceness and apparent submission?
And in any case, what sort of goodness was a goodness that was aware of itself?
She took care never to upset Richard Rivière, never to needle him, tease him, provoke him, and when, as he so rarely did, he lashed out at her, to answer only with silence.
Now and then she saw a brief flash of surprise or unease on her husband’s face, when she so visibly and insistently fended off some potential conflict and stared at him with her inward-looking eyes, open wide onto her own abnegation, careful to keep a grip on herself, entirely withdrawn into her vow of kindliness.
It seemed to her at such times that her eyes never blinked; she thought she could see their pale, fixed, absent reflection in Richard Rivière’s dark, puzzled gaze.
“Come on, say something,” he sometimes sighed. “You don’t have to agree.”
As if prodded into action, she tried to pull her gaze out of the pensive depths where it was contemplating Clarisse Rivière’s sacrifice and haul it back to the surface, where Richard Rivière was awaiting some word, some answer, albeit with his increasingly frequent air of having already set down his attentiveness and wandered off somewhere else, someplace more interesting.
And so, after struggling to recall the question he’d asked her, or the subject on which he’d tried to draw her into some sort of dispute, after desperately casting around in slightly nauseated panic for some more or less suitable answer, she would realize he’d forgotten all about it, that she was now speaking only to Richard Rivière’s frozen, mute, polite shadow as he fled into the distance, him and his beating heart, his untamable hair, his impatient muscles.
She took that shadow in her arms and pulled it to her. There was still a shoulder there to rest her forehead on, to cover her eyes.
Her love for Richard Rivière bathed her in sweetness and gentleness.
Was she perfectly, purely good to him? Probably not, since he was aware—his unease made it clear—of a strangeness about her, when he should have passed through her goodness without even knowing it, should even have been able to attack and defy that goodness without seeing it, no more than Clarisse herself would.
—
Her pregnancy showed so little that she thought it safe to go on visiting the servant up to the seventh month.
She was intrigued to find her belly’s already modest bulge becoming even more discreet when she boarded the train for Bordeaux. And when she walked into her mother’s apartment and her hand moved reflexively to her stomach, she
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