I’d always been at one with life, I’d always seen the fine side of things, rarely their darker side. Like those waterfront houses, facades gleaming in the sun. From the boat, you can see the bright color of the walls, the picket fences white as mirrors, and the verdant gardens. I rarely saw the back of these buildings, the side along the road, the shadowy side where trash cans and septic tanks are hidden.
Before Philippe Toussaint, despite the foster families and my bitten nails, I saw the sunlight on the facades, rarely the shadows. With him, I came to understand what disillusion means. That it wasn’t enough to derive pleasure from a man to love him. The gorgeous guy’s picture on glossy paper had become dog-eared. His laziness, his lack of courage when facing his parents, his latent violence, and the smell of other girls on his fingertips, had stolen something from me.
He’s the one who wanted a child from me. He’s the one who said, “We’re going to make babies.” The same man, ten years my senior, who whispered to his mother that he’d “picked me up,” that I was a “lost cause,” and that he was “so sorry.” And when his mother had turned her back after writing him the umpteenth check, had kissed me on the neck, explaining that he always told his “old folks” anything to get rid of them. But the words were cast, loaded.
I, too, pretended that day. I smiled, I said, “Fine, of course, I understand.” This disillusion produced something else inside of me. Something strong. As I saw my belly gradually expanding, I yearned to learn again. To know what “mouthwatering” really meant. Not through somebody, but through words. The ones that are in books, and that I’d run away from because they scared me.
I waited until Philippe Toussaint had left, on his bike, to read the back cover of L’Oeuvre de Dieu, la part du Diable. I had to read out loud: to understand the meaning of the words, I had to hear them. As though telling myself a story. I was my double: the one who wanted to learn and the one who would learn. My present and my future bent over the same book.
Why do books attract us the way people do? Why are we drawn to covers like we are to a look, a voice that seems familiar, heard before, a voice that diverts us from our path, makes us look up, attracts our attention, and could change the course of our life?
After more than two hours, I was only on the tenth page and I’d managed to understand one word in five. I read and reread, out loud, the French translation of this sentence, “An orphan is simply more of a child than other children in that central appreciation of the things that happen daily, on schedule. For everything that promises to last, to stay the same, the orphan is a sucker.” In French, “sucker” had been translated as “avide.” What on earth could this word mean? I would buy a dictionary and learn how to use it.
Until then, I knew the words of the songs printed inside the covers of my LPs. I listened to them and attempted to read them at the same time, but I didn’t understand them.
It was while thinking about buying my dictionary that I felt Léonine move for the first time. The words I’d read out loud must have woken her. I took her slow movements as encouragement.
The following day, we moved to Malgrange-sur-Nancy to become level-crossing keepers. But before that, I went down to buy a dictionary, to find the word “avide” inside it, “A person who desires something voraciously.”
20.
If life is nothing but a passage,
our memory will preserve your image.
I’m dusting the plastic boxes containing my Portuguese dolls. I lay them down as often as possible to avoid seeing their tiny, black pinhead eyes.
I heard that garden gnomes have been disappearing from properties . . . What if I convinced Madame Pinto that all my dolls had been stolen?
Nono and Father Cédric are deep in conversation behind me. Especially Nono. Elvis is leaning at the kitchen window, watching the visitors go by and singing “Tutti Frutti” very softly. Nono’s voice is drowning his out.
“I was a painter. A house painter, not a painter like Picasso. And then my wife left me all alone with three young kids . . . and I found myself without a job. I was laid off. And then, in 1982, I was employed by the town as a gravedigger.”
“How old were your children?” Father Cédric asks.
“Not very old. The older ones seven and five, the little’un six months. I raised ’em on my own. Later, I had another daughter . . . I was born nearby, behind the first block of houses next to your church. In the old days, the midwife would come to the home. And you, Father, where were you born?”
“In Brittany.”
“Rains all the time over there.”
“That may be so, but it doesn’t stop children from being born. I didn’t remain long in Brittany, my father was a soldier. He was always being transferred.”
“A soldier producing a priest. Well, that ain’t too common.”
Father Cédric’s laughter echoes around my walls. Elvis carries on humming. I’ve never know him to have a sweetheart, even though he spends his days singing love songs.
Nono calls me, “Violette! Stop playing with your dolls, someone’s knocking on the door.”
I throw my cloth on the stairs and go to open to this visitor, who’s probably looking for a grave.
I open the cemetery-side door, it’s the detective. It’s the first time he’s arrived at this door. He doesn’t have the urn. His hair’s still a mess. He still smells of cinnamon and vanilla. His eyes are glistening as if he’d been crying; probably tiredness. He smiles shyly at me. Elvis closes the window, and the noise he makes drowns my hello.
The detective notices Nono and Father Cédric sitting at the table. He says to me, “Am I disturbing you? Would you like me to come by later?” I reply no. That in two hours there’s a burial, I’ll no longer have time.
He comes in. He greets Nono, Elvis, and Father Cédric with a firm handshake.
“Let me introduce you to Norbert and Elvis, my colleagues, and our priest, Cédric Duras.”
The detective introduces himself, too; it’s the first time I hear him saying his name: Julien Seul. My three acolytes all leave at once, as if the detective’s name had scared them. Nono calls out, “See you later, Violette!”
I introduce myself for the first time, “And me, I’m called Violette. Violette Toussaint.” The detective replies:
“I know.”
“Oh really, you know?”
“At first I thought it was a nickname, a kind of joke.”
“A joke?”
“Admit it, for a cemetery keeper, it’s unusual to be called Toussaint.”
“In fact, I’m called Trenet. Violette Trenet.”
“Trenet, that suits you better than Toussaint.”
“Toussaint was my husband’s name.”
“Why ‘was’?”
“He disappeared. He vanished into thin air from one day to the next. Well, not really from one day to the next . . . Let’s say he prolonged one of his absences.”
With embarrassment, he says to me:
“That I also know.”
“You know?”
“Madame Bréant has red shutters and a ready tongue.”
I go to wash my hands, I let some liquid soap run into my palms, a sweet rose-scented soap. At my place, everything smells of powdery rose: my candles, perfume, linen, tea, even the little cakes I dip in my coffee. I smooth rose cream over my hands. I spend hours with my fingers in the earth, gardening, I have to protect them. I like to have lovely hands. It’s been years now since I stopped biting my nails.
Meanwhile, Julien Seul is again studying my white walls. He seems preoccupied. Eliane rubs her muzzle against him, he pets her, smiling.
As I serve him a cup of coffee, I wonder what exactly Madame Bréant might have told him.
“I’ve written the speech for my mother.”
He takes an envelope out of his inside pocket and leans it against
the ladybird moneybox.
“You’ve just done four hundred kilometers to bring me the speech for your mother? Why not send it to me by mail?”
“No, that’s not really what I’ve come for.”
“You have her ashes?”
“No again.”
He pauses awhile. He seems increasingly uncomfortable.
“Could I smoke by the window?”
“Yes.”
He takes a squashed packet from his pocket and pulls out a cigarette, a light one. Before striking a match, he says to me:
“There’s something else.”
He goes over to the window and half-opens it. He turns his back on me. Takes a drag and blows the smoke outside.
I think I hear him say, through a curl of smoke:
“I know where your husband is.”
“Sorry?”
He stubs his cigarette out on the low outside wall and puts the butt in his pocket. He turns to face me and repeats:
“I know where your husband is.”
“What husband?”
I feel sick. I really don’t want to understand what he’s saying. It’s as if he’d just gone up to my bedroom without my permission and opened all my drawers to rummage through them and pull out what’s inside without my being able to stop him. He looks down and, in a barely audible voice, whispers:
“Philippe Toussaint . . . I know where he is.”
21.
The darkness is never total; at the end of
the path, there’s always an open window.
The only ghosts I believe in are memories. Whether real or imagined. For me, entities, specters, spirits, all such supernatural things only exist in the mind of the living.
Some people communicate with the dead, and I believe they are sincere, but when a person is dead, they’re dead. If they return, it’s a living person making them return through thought. If they speak, it’s a living person lending them their voice; if they appear, it’s a living person projecting them with their mind, like a hologram, a 3-D printer.
Loss, pain, the unbearable can make a person experience and feel things that are beyond the imagination. When someone has gone, they’ve gone. Except in the minds of those who remain. And the mind of just one man is much bigger than the universe.
At first, I told myself that the hardest thing would be learning to ride a unicycle. But I was wrong. The hardest thing was the fear. Controlling it, on the night I did it. Slowing my heartbeat. Not shaking. Not chickening out. Closing my eyes and going for it. I had to get rid of the problem. Otherwise, there’d be no end to it.
I’d tried everything. Kindness, intimidation, other people. I wasn’t sleeping anymore. That’s all I thought about: getting rid of the problem. But how?
On a bike, whether there’s one wheel or two, it’s almost the same, it’s a question of balance. On the other hand, to practice cycling on the gravel of the cemetery, it was best for me to do it at night. No one should see the keeper unicycling along the graves. So, I practiced once night had fallen, and the gates were closed, several days in a row. I had to work on the slowing down and the accelerating. It was unthinkable that, when the time came, I should fall.
What took longest, and was most fiddly, was sewing the shroud, that piece of material used to wrap around corpses. I collected meters and meters of white fabric: muslin, silk, cotton sheets, tulle. I spent a lot of time stitching it all, to make the ensemble both realistic and surreal. On the nights I was making the “thing,” I thought, with amusement, that it was the wedding dress I hadn’t worn on the day of my union with Philippe Toussaint. I’m sure we end up laughing at everything. Smiling, at any rate. We end up smiling at everything.
Next, I put the shroud through the washing machine, on cold, along with five hundred grams of sodium bicarbonate, so it would be fluorescent. Before sewing the lining, I stuck on photoluminescent strips that recharge when exposed to light. I had nicked several meters from the van of the highway maintenance men. Normally, they use them for outdoor signposting. They are highly luminescent. You only have to put them in the light just before using them. In sunshine, or, for longer, under a lamp.
My face and hair had to be completely concealed. I took one of Nono’s black hats from the hut. I cut into it at eye level, and slipped a bride’s veil over it. A visiting undertaker had given me a key ring in the form of an angel. It gave out a pretty strong light when you pinched the edges. A kind of safety flashlight, but small and soft. I wedged it between my lips.
When I saw myself in the mirror, I thought I looked scary. Really scary. I looked like something out of the horror film those youngsters were watching on Diane de Vigneron’s tomb, the day they left their computer behind after my whistleblowing. In this getup—long, white, ghostly dress, face hidden under bridal veil, body shining like snow in headlights, mouth lighting up, depending on whether I closed or pinched my lips—in a particular setting, that is, a cemetery at night, where the smallest twig snapping can assume irrational proportions, I could give someone a heart attack.
I was missing sound. I had the image, but not the soundtrack. That’s what I told myself once I’d finished laughing away, all on my own. There are several sounds that would terrify anyone in a cemetery at night. Groans, moans, a creak, the sound of the wind, footsteps, slowed-down music. I opted for a little radio on the wrong frequency. I hung it on my bike. When the time came, I’d switch it on.
At around 10 A.M., I hid inside a mortuary chapel, heart pounding under my getup, clutching my bike.
I didn’t have to wait long. Their voices preceded their steps. They came over the wall on the eastern side of the cemetery. There were five of them that evening. Three boys and two girls. It varied.
I waited for them to “settle in.” For them to start opening their cans of beer and using the potted plants as ashtrays. They stretched out on the tomb of Madame Cedilleau, a nice woman I’d got to know well when she came to put flowers on her daughter’s grave. The thought of them stretching out on that mother and daughter spurred me on.
I started by getting on my bike and arranging my long dress correctly—it mustn’t get caught in the wheels. My outfit could be seen from far away, I’d exposed my strips for two hours under a halogen lamp. I pushed open the door of the mortuary chapel, making a lot of noise, a grating noise. Their voices fell silent. I was several hundred meters away from the group. I began to pedal. Gently. As if carried by the breeze.
I was about four hundred meters away from them when one of the boys spotted me. I was petrified. I could feel the clamminess of my hands, the fabric around my legs, the heat of my head. The boy was incapable of uttering a word. But his expression, his horrified stupor, made one of the girls turned toward me, cigarette in mouth, and she, well, she screamed. She screamed so loud that my mouth went dry, very dry. Her screaming made the other three jump. They who, until then, had been laughing their heads off, stopped laughing.
All five of them stared at me. It lasted one or two seconds, no longer. I stopped abruptly, two hundred meters from them. I pinched my lips and the light shone right at them. I stretched my arms into a cross and again went straight for them, but this time much faster, more threateningly.
In my memory, all that happened in slow motion, and I had time to analyze every second. If I didn’t pull it off, if I was unmasked, if they, in turn, pursued me, I was done for. But they didn’t think. Once they realized that a fluttering ghost was heading straight for them, at a good clip, arms in a cross, they bolted quicker than lightning. Never has anyone got up so fast. Three of them headed for the gates, screaming, two for the back of the cemetery.
I opted to pursue the trio. One of them fell, but got back up immediately.
I don’t know how they managed to scale the gates, despite them being three-and-a-half meters high. Proof that fear gives you wings.
I never saw them again. I know
that they told anyone who would listen that the cemetery was haunted. I collected their cigarette butts and empty beer cans. I doused Madame Cedilleau’s tomb with hot water.
I found it hard to get to sleep, I couldn’t stop laughing. As soon as I closed my eyes, I saw them again, bolting like rabbits.
The following morning, I put the bike and my ghoulish disguise up in the attic. Before hiding it in a trunk, I thanked it. I put it away like you’d put away your wedding dress, taking it out from time to time to see if you can still get into it.
22.
Little flower of life. Your scent is eternal,
even if humanity picked you too soon.
Philippe Toussaint is dead. The only difference between him and the deceased in this cemetery is that I do occasionally pay my respects at their graves.”
“Philippe Toussaint is in the phone book. Well, the name of his garage is in the phone book.”
It has been more than nineteen years since anyone has spoken his first name and surname aloud in front of me. Even in the speech of others, Philippe Toussaint had disappeared.
“His garage?”
“I thought you would want to know, that you’d looked for him.”
I’m incapable of responding to the detective. I haven’t looked for Philippe Toussaint. I waited for him for a long time, which is different.
“I noticed that there’d been some movement on Mr. Toussaint’s bank account.”
“His bank account . . . ”
“His current account was emptied in 1998. I went to check on the spot where the money had been withdrawn, to find out whether it was fraud, identity theft, or Toussaint himself who had withdrawn that money.”
I feel chilled from head to toe. Every time he says his name, I want him to shut up. I want him never to have entered my house.
“Your husband hasn’t disappeared. He lives a hundred kilometers from here.”
“A hundred kilometers . . . ”
Fresh Water for Flowers Page 7