It’s on that day that I understood that anything could be done and said to me, that my skin and my soul as Violette had become impervious, at my daughter’s birth, to any form of annihilation. On the other hand, everything that would touch my daughter would permeate me. I would absorb everything that would concern her, a porous mother.
While cradling my child, Mother Toussaint spoke to her, calling her Catherine. I corrected her, “She’s called Léonine.” Mother Toussaint replied, “Catherine is much prettier.” At that, Father Toussaint spoke to his wife, “Chantal, you’re going too far.” And that’s how I learnt that Mother Toussaint had a first name . . .
Léo started to cry, probably due to the smell of the old woman, her voice, her tense fingers, her rough skin. I asked Mother Toussaint to give her back to me. Which she didn’t do. She placed the screaming Léo in her bed, not in my arms.
And then we went home to the “train house,” as she later named it. I held her tight, in our bed, in our bedroom. Philippe Toussaint slept on the right side, I on the left side, and Léo even further to the left. For the first two months of our lives together, I left her only to raise and lower the barrier. I changed her under the covers. I overheated our bathroom to bathe her every day.
Then there was winter, hats, scarves, her muffled up in her pram. Teething, fits of giggles, the first ear infection. Me taking her for walks between two trains. The people who leant over to look at her. Who said, “She looks like you,” and me replying, “No, she looks like her father.”
Then there was her first spring, a blanket laid on the grass, between the house and the tracks, shaded from the sun. Her toys, her starting to sit up well, and putting everything in her mouth between smiles, the barrier to raise and lower, Philippe Toussaint going off on his motorbike, but always returning in time to put his feet under the table. And then going off on his motorbike again. Léo greatly amused him, but for no more than ten minutes.
I think I succeeded in looking after my daughter, despite my young age. I managed to find the gestures, the voice, the touch, the attention. As the years went by, the fear of losing her went quiet. I finally understood that there would be no reason for us to abandon each other.
26.
Nothing opposes the night, nothing justifies it.
Since darkness is winning
Since there’s no mountain
Beyond the winds higher than the marches of oblivion
Since we must learn
For want of understanding it
To dream our desires and live with “so be it”
And since you think
It’s entirely obvious
That sometimes even giving everything isn’t necessarily enough
Since it’s elsewhere
That your heart will beat better
And since we love you too much to keep you
Since you’re leaving . . .
This is the song that is most played at funerals. In church and at the cemetery.
In twenty years, I’ve heard it all. From Ave Maria to “The Desire to Desire” by Johnny Hallyday. For a burial, a family once requested Pierre Perret’s song, “The Willy,” because it was the deceased’s favorite. Pierre Lucchini and our previous priest refused. Pierre explained that not all final wishes could be fulfilled, either in the house of God or in the “garden of souls”—that’s what he calls my cemetery. The family found funerary etiquette’s lack of humor baffling.
Regularly, a visitor will place a CD player on a tomb. The volume is never very high, as though to avoid disturbing the neighbors.
I’ve also seen a lady placing her little radio on her husband’s tomb, “so he can hear the news.” A very young girl putting speakers on either side of the cross on the tomb of a schoolboy, to make him listen to the latest Coldplay album.
There are also the birthdays that people come to celebrate, by laying flowers on the tomb or playing music from a mobile phone.
Every June 25th, a woman named Olivia comes to sing for a man whose ashes were scattered in the garden of remembrance. She arrives when the gates open. She drinks a tea without sugar in my kitchen without saying a word, apart from maybe a remark about the weather. At around 9:10, she makes her way to the garden of remembrance. I never accompany her, she knows the way only too well. If it’s fine and my windows are open, I can hear her voice right inside the house. She always sings the same song, “Blue Room” by Chet Baker: We’ll have a blue room, a new room for two room, where ev’ry day’s a holiday because you’re married to me . . .
She takes her time singing it. She sings it loudly but slowly, to make it last. There are long silences between each verse, as though someone were replying to her, echoing her. Then she sits down for a few moments on the ground.
Last June, I had to lend her an umbrella because it was pouring rain. When she came over to the house to return it to me, I asked her if she was a singer, because her voice was so beautiful. She took off her coat and sat down close to me. She started talking to me as if I had asked her lots of questions, even though in twenty years, I had asked her just the one.
She spoke to me of the man, François, she came to sing for every year. She was a schoolgirl in Mâcon when she had met him, he was her French teacher. She had fallen in love with him, immediately, at the first lesson. She had lost her appetite over it. She lived only for when she would see him next. The school holidays were bottomless pits. Of course, she always made sure she was at the front, in the first row. She now focused only on French, in which she excelled. She was rediscovering her mother tongue. During that year, she had got 19/20 for some creative writing. She had chosen as her subject, “Is love a trap?” She had written ten brilliant pages on the love a man, a teacher, felt for one of his pupils. A love he dismissed out of hand. Olivia had written her piece in the form of a detective novel, in which the guilty party was none other than her. She had changed the names of all her characters (the pupils in her class) and the setting of the story. She had made it all happen at an English school. Cheekily, she had asked François:
“Sir, why 19? Why not 20?”
He had replied:
“Because perfection doesn’t exist, mademoiselle.”
“But then,” she insisted, “why was the 20 score invented, if perfection doesn’t exist?”
“For mathematics, for resolving problems. In French, as a subject, there are very few infallible solutions.”
As a comment beside the 19/20, he had scribbled in red pen, “Excellent direct speech. You have applied your fertile imagination to serve an implacable literary construct. The subject is fascinating and handled with flair, lightness, humor, and seriousness. Bravo, your writing shows great maturity.”
Countless times she had caught him watching her when she had her nose in her notebooks. And she’d chewed many a pen cap that year while watching him offer explanations for Emma Bovary’s feelings.
She was sure this love was reciprocal. And, weirdly, they both had the same surname. This had troubled her, although their name, Leroy, was a common one.
A few days before sitting the French exam for the baccalauréat, Olivia, one of a small group of pupils revising with François, had dared to say to him:
“Monsieur Leroy, if we married each other, nothing would change. We’d have no admin to go through, neither for our ID papers nor for the bills.”
The whole group burst out laughing, and François blushed.
Olivia passed her French bac, getting 19 for the oral, and 19 for the written part. She sent a note to François, “Monsieur, I didn’t get 20 because you haven’t yet found a solution to our problem.”
He had waited until after the bac to ask to see her for a one-on-one meeting. After a long silence, which she took as a symptom of love, he had said to her:
“Olivia, a brother and a sister don’t marry each other.”
Initially, she had laughed. She had laughed
because he’d said her first name, when before he’d always called her mademoiselle. And then she had stopped laughing while he stared at her, intensely. She had remained speechless when François had informed her that they both had the same father. François had been born of a previous union, near Nice, twenty years before Olivia. Their father and François’s mother had lived together for two years, and then separated, painfully. The years had passed by.
François had done some research much later and learnt that his father had remarried and was the father of a little girl called Olivia.
The father had concealed François’s existence from his second family. They had seen each other again. François got himself transferred to Mâcon to be closer to him.
He had been shocked to discover that his sister was a pupil in his class. When her name was called, on the first day of term, he’d thought it an unfortunate coincidence when she had stopped whispering in her neighbor’s ear to raise her hand at her name and whisper, “Present,” while looking him straight in the eye. He had recognized her because they looked alike. He had noticed her because he knew; she hadn’t noticed him because she knew nothing.
At first, Olivia hadn’t wanted to believe it. To believe that her father could have concealed François’s existence. She had thought that he was inventing this story to put an end to the seduction games of a capricious child. And then, when she understood that the story was true, she had said, with feigned light-heartedness, to François:
“We don’t come from the same stomach, it doesn’t count. I really love you.”
Controlling his anger, he had replied to her:
“No, forget it, forget that right now.”
Then there had been the final year. Their paths would cross in the school corridors. Every time she caught sight of him, she wanted to throw herself into his arms. But not like a sister into the arms of her brother.
He avoided her, bowed his head. Annoyed, she would do a detour to confront him and virtually shout at him:
“Hello, Monsieur Leroy!”
And he would reply, shyly:
“Hello, Mademoiselle Leroy.”
She hadn’t dared to ask her father anything. She hadn’t needed to. She had seen how he had looked at François on the day the diplomas were handed out at the end of the year.
Olivia had caught a smile between François and their father. She’d felt like grabbing one to kill the other. Her tears and her anger welled up. She could see no way out, other than to forget.
After the diploma ceremony, there had been a celebration. Pupils and teachers took turns performing onstage. After some covers of songs by the groups Trust and Téléphone, François had sung “Blue Room” a cappella, with the same intensity as Chet Baker: We’ll have a blue room, a new room for two room, where ev’ry day’s a holiday because you’re married to me . . .
He had sung it for her, gazing into her eyes. She had understood that she would never love any man but him. And that this impossible love was reciprocal.
And then off she had gone. Had been around the world more than once, and had qualified to become a teacher of literature herself. She had married elsewhere, to someone else. She had changed her name.
Seven years later, at the age of twenty-five, she returned to live with François. She knocked on his door one morning, and said to him, “Now we can live together, I don’t have the same name as you. We won’t get married, we won’t have a child, but at least we will live together.” François replied, “O.K.”
They had continued to use the formal “vous” with each other, always. As though to keep a distance between them. To remain at the beginning, like a first date. Life had given them twenty years together. The same number as the years that separated them.
While drinking some port, Olivia said to me, “Our family rejected us, but we didn’t suffer from it that much, our family was us. When François died, as if to punish us, his mother had him cremated here, in Brancion-en-Chalon, the town she was born in. To make her son disappear completely, she had his ashes scattered in the garden of remembrance. But he will never disappear, I will carry him forever within me. He was my soul brother.”
27.
A weak dawn spills across the fields
the melancholy of setting suns.
As soon as Léonine was born, I ordered a textbook to relearn to read: The Little Ones’ Day Out—Boscher Method, by M. Boscher, V. Boscher, J. Chapron (primary-school teachers), and M. J. Carré. Toward the end of my pregnancy, I heard a primary-school teacher talking about it on the radio. She talked about how one of her pupils had had to redo his first year in primary school twice due to his illiteracy. How he didn’t try to read, but rather to guess. He might say any old thing, or use his memory to pretend to read when he was actually reciting by heart. That is exactly what I had always done. So, the teacher had made him follow this reading method, and in six months, her pupil was reading almost as well as the rest of the class. This old method of reading was entirely syllabic. It didn’t allow word recognition: it was impossible to cheat, to attempt to recognize or guess words or sentences.
For hours, while Léonine was still an infant in her pram, I read words out loud to her, “The street at midday, i ee i i ee ee i ee, feet, pin, beetroot, bin. Christmas holidays. ee o a i o ee a o, olives, hand, dominoes, apples, bottle. Toto tidied the table. To. Ti. Ta. Eric. The peel. The potato. The pram. The pig. Eric was polite at school. Cool. Pool. Stool. Tool. Fool. Wool. Mood i er. Poo dle. Coo ler. Noo dles. Soo ner. The doo dl er. The boo k shop. Sm oo th. Foot step. Ella hears a cuckoo, I look for you, my mother will loop the wool and knit a hood.”
Léonine opened her big eyes and listened to me without passing judgment on the slowness of my reading, the repetition, the pronunciation mistakes, the words I got stuck on, or what they meant. Every day I repeated the same syllables to her, until they just slipped out on their own.
The illustrations were colorful, cheery, and simple. Before long she was putting her little fingers on them. My textbook was stained as soon as Léonine could grab hold of it and crumple it. Spit, chocolate, tomato sauce, felt pen. She even cut her teeth on the cover. She put it in her mouth like she wanted to swallow it whole.
For the first few years, I hid this book. I didn’t want Philippe Toussaint to fall on it by chance. If he’d discovered that I was learning to read properly, it would have been unbearable. It would have meant that I really was the poor, uneducated girl so despised by his mother.
I would take it out again as soon as he went off on his bike. When Léonine saw the reader, she squealed with joy, she knew that reading was about to begin. She would let herself be lulled by my voice, and look at the illustrations that she knew by heart. Little girls with blond hair and red dresses, hens, ducks, Christmas trees, grass, flowers, scenes of daily life aimed at very young children. Simplified, happy lives.
I told myself that I had three years to read fluently, that when she started nursery school, I would be able to do so. I managed much sooner than that. When Léonine blew out her first candle, I was on page 60.
I learned to read properly, without stumbling on words, thanks to this Boscher Method. I would have liked to tell this to the teacher on the radio, to tell her that her story had altered the course of my life. I phoned RTL, told an operator that I’d heard a teacher talking in one of Fabrice’s programmes in August 1986, but the response was that it was impossible to trace if I didn’t have the exact date, which I didn’t.
Learning to read is like learning to swim. Once you’ve learnt the arm movements, and got over the fear of drowning, crossing a swimming pool or an ocean comes to the same thing. It’s just a question of breathing and training.
Very soon, I reached the page before last, and the story told there became Léonine’s favorite. It’s taken from a Hans Christian Andersen tale, The Fir Tree:
“In the forest there was once the sweetest little fi
r tree imaginable. It grew in a good place, where the sun could warm it, with good friends all around it: fir trees and pine trees. And yet it had but one aim: to be big very soon. The children would sit close to it; looking at it, they would say, ‘How sweet this little fir tree is.’ And the little fir tree couldn’t bear that. To grow, to grow; to become tall and mature, that’s the only happiness on earth, it thought . . . At the end of the year, the woodcutters always came to fell a few trees, always the finest ones. ‘Where are they going?’ the little fir tree wondered . . . A stork told it, ‘I believe I saw them; they were standing tall, heads held high, on splendid new boats, and travelling the world.’ When Christmas came, every year some very young trees would also be felled, selected from among the finest and sturdiest. ‘Where might they be going?’ the fir tree wondered. Finally, its turn came. And off it was carried, into a large and beautiful room with lovely armchairs; on all of its branches toys gleamed and lights twinkled. What brightness! What splendor! Only joy! The following day, the fir tree was carried off to a corner where it was forgotten. It had time to think. Looking back at its happy youth in the woods, and the joyous Christmas Eve, it sighed, ‘Over, all that is over! Oh, if only I had been able to appreciate the fresh air and the warm sun when there was still time!”
I bought some children’s books, some real ones. I read them, and reread them, a hundred times to Léonine. She’s probably had more stories read to her than any other little girl. It became a daily ritual, she never fell asleep without a story. Even during the day, she would run after me clutching books and stammering, “Story, story,” until I sat her on my knees and we opened a book together. And then she wouldn’t budge, fascinated by the words.
I’d closed L’Oeuvre de Dieu, la part du Diable at page 25. I’d hidden it in a drawer, like a promise. A postponed holiday. I reopened it the year Léonine was two. I’ve never closed it since. And still today, I reread it several times a year. I return to the characters as though returning to an adoptive family. Dr. Wilbur Larch is my dream father. I’ve made the Saint Cloud’s Orphanage, in Maine, my childhood home. The orphan Homer Wells is my big brother, and Nurse Edna and Nurse Angela are my two imaginary aunts. That’s the prerogative of orphans. They can do what they want. They, too, can decide who their parents will be.
Fresh Water for Flowers Page 9