Ladivine Read Online Free PDF Page B

Malinka, “I’m not going anymore.”
    And that was all. The servant nodded and went off to catch her bus.
    The next day she told Malinka she’d found her a job, babysitting for a family whose apartment she sometimes cleaned.
    And Malinka went off to look after the children, and neither liked it nor didn’t. Sometimes, coming home in the evening, she caught sight of her mother on the bus and pretended not to have seen her.
    The servant discreetly refrained from calling out.
    Her face turned resolutely to the window, Malinka felt her mother’s gentle, placid, ever-benevolent gaze on the back of her neck, and the furious pity she felt at this shook her like a first taste of strong drink, so numbed were her feelings, so dulled her thoughts.
    She looked after the children all through summer vacation, which they spent with their parents on the Bay of Arcachon.
    This was her first time away from the suburbs of Paris, but standing by the ocean she felt like she’d seen all this before.
    The following summer, back in Arcachon, she suddenly told herself nothing was forcing her to go home to her mother.
    This idea must have been inching along unbeknownst to her since the summer before, so indistinct that she never spotted it among the charmless, colorless thoughts peopling her mind, because she wasn’t surprised to find that idea blossoming inside her, nor to know precisely what she would have to do, both to protect her independence and to put herself out of reach of her mother’s love and attentions.
    Nothing said she had to go on being the servant’s daughter forever, she told herself.
    And with this a cold feeling filled her, but she knew that was more easily fought off than the desperate tenderness that coursed through her heart when she thought of her mother, even more utterly alone than she.
    A few days after the children went home to Paris she handed in her notice and caught a train for Bordeaux, where she took a room in a modest hotel near the station.
    She found work waiting tables in a café. She wrote her mother, telling her not to worry, and received no reply.
    She now went by the name of Clarisse. There had been a Clarisse in her class at school, with long hair that fell over her back like a silken drape.
    —
    “Hey, Clarisse! Come here a sec, would you?”
    “Be right there!” she answered in her happy, slightly muted voice, which she worked to make faintly breathless and interrogative, thinking people found this particularly attractive.
    She always shivered in delighted surprise on hearing her new name, and although in the beginning she sometimes forgot to answer, that was all over now, and the person she’d become, this Clarisse with the beautiful, iron-straightened chestnut hair, with the smooth, breezy, winningly confident face, couldn’t hold back a twinge of refined, pitying contempt for the woman she was just a few months before, that clod who called herself Malinka and didn’t know a thing about makeup, that clueless girl with the hunted look in her eyes, that lowly girl who called herself Malinka.
    She stopped setting tables and hurried toward the kitchen, where her boss was calling for her.
    “We’ve got a problem—your coworker just phoned to say she won’t be in for lunch, so you’ll be all on your own,” the woman said in an anxious tone, eyeing Clarisse’s slight frame as if to measure that delicate body’s endurance.
    But she knew, because Clarisse had already shown her, just how sturdy and steadfast that frail girl truly was, and Clarisse knew that she knew, and her cheeks flushed with pride and excitement.
    How she loved those days when the other waitress didn’t come in, when the lunch shift was entrusted to her alone! She had to be even more efficient, resourceful, and charming than usual, even livelier and friendlier, both to keep the customers happy, make them think they hadn’t waited as long as their watches said, and to memorize the orders and never forget anything someone