Ladivine Read Online Free PDF

couldn’t remember.
    She read and reread what she’d written, and it meant nothing to her, had nothing to do with anything she’d managed to hold in her mind, itself nothing more than a magma of words and numbers, misshapen ideas, incoherent hypotheses, which she ended up laboriously dredging through in search of something she could use, almost anything, to fill up a page with her shapely, magnificent handwriting.
    Sometimes she forgot she was writing sheer nonsense and abandoned herself to the pure pleasure of the presentation; she spent ages scripting the date, or marking off the margins, or crafting elaborate capital letters, all curlicues and meanders.
    That lowly, solitary Malinka made what she called friends at school, but looking back Clarisse Rivière would understand that in truth it was only a little clan of two or three teenage girls that Malinka had somehow slipped into, almost unnoticed, less in hopes of remedying her loneliness than in obedience to the rules of student life as, with her keenly observant instinct, she understood them.
    She knew absolutely nothing about those girls, who never spoke of personal matters in her presence and seemed to tolerate her only out of curiosity, perhaps wondering at their own tolerance, their own curiosity.
    Malinka wished she could learn everything about them, as if she might thereby understand her own existence.
    But, although she was so unassertive that gazes slid over her with nothing holding them back, those girls perhaps unconsciously limited their talk to everyday things whenever she came near, and it felt to Malinka like a sudden pall had been cast by the vague mass of her body, like a gray cloud blotting out the sun.
    But she grew used to that, since it was her place.
    She must also have known that by abandoning all hope of closeness with these girls she could consider herself excused from having to invite them over, into the house of the servant.
    Because that was out of the question.
    The thought of her friends meeting her mother sent her into spasms of almost amused revolt, so laughable was the idea.
    She was nothing short of speechless when a teacher one day asked to meet with Malinka’s mother, looking faintly uncomfortable, as if, she told herself, all the more perplexed in that he could easily have let the matter drop there, he already knew it would never happen, because it was absurd, absurd.
    But she said nothing, only nodded with her usual gravity.
    He brought it up once more, she nodded once more, and then never again did she look up at him with a face hungry for approval.
    And she avenged herself for that teacher’s blundering indelicacy by turning in papers untouched by her ardent desire for majesty, assignments without ornament, no curlicues, no colored underlining.
    —
    She turned sixteen during summer vacation, and never went back to school.
    Clarisse Rivière would always remember the time that followed with a mix of incomprehension and terror, for it seemed that chance alone, or obedience to the whims of circumstance, guided the life of that girl Malinka, that empty-headed girl, as she often heard people say at the time: She’s a sweet girl, hardworking, but empty-headed.
    The only fantasy she would gradually assemble involved the quarantining of her mother, the dismissal of the servant.
    And since she could only subscribe to the judgment that she had nothing in her head, feeling that head fill with the single preoccupation of expelling her mother would convince her that she, Malinka, was a despicable person, her mind closed to everything but disloyalty.
    The servant accepted Malinka’s decision to drop out of school without a word, perhaps because it seemed not a decision but a natural passage from one state to another, like a change of season.
    One morning, as she was leaving for work later than usual and Malinka was still lying in bed, she observed in her calm, unsurprised voice:
    “You’re not getting ready for school.”
    “No,” said