Fresh Water for Flowers

by Valérie Perrin

  I have life ahead of me, but not the love of a man. Once you’ve got used to living alone, you can’t live as part of a couple anymore. Of that I am certain.

  We’re twenty kilometers from Brancion-en-Chalon, just near Cluny, at the Hôtel Armance. I’m not going to walk home. I’m going to take a taxi. Go down to reception and call a taxi.

  This thought spurs me on. I slip out of bed as gently as possible. Like when I slept with Philippe Toussaint and didn’t want to wake him.

  I put on my dress, grab my bag, and leave the room, shoes in hand. I know he’s watching me leave. He has the good grace to say nothing, and I the bad grace not to turn around.

  Irreverent, that’s what I think of myself.

  In the taxi, I try to read random pages of Irène Fayolle’s journal, but can’t. It’s too dark. As we drive past a block of houses, the streetlamps light up one word in ten.

  “Gabriel . . . hands . . . light . . . cigarette . . . roses . . . ”

  55.

  His life is a lovely memory.

  His absence a silent agony.

  When I left Sasha’s cemetery, it was 6 P.M. I drove toward Mâcon, in the Fiat Panda, to catch the motorway. The white tiger, dangling from the rear-view mirror, was watching me out of the corner of its eye while nonchalantly swinging.

  I thought again of Sasha, of his garden, of his smile, of his words. I thought of how a strike had sent me Célia, and the death of my daughter this straw-hatted gardener. My own, personal Wilbur Larch. A man between life and the dead, his earth and his cemetery. L’Oeuvre de Dieu, la part du Diable.

  I thought again of the holiday-camp staff. Decent people, too, no doubt. I saw again the faces of the director, Edith Croquevieille; the cook, Swan Letellier; the dinner lady, Geneviève Magnan; the two young supervisors, Eloïse Petit and Lucie Lindon; the maintenance man, Alain Fontanel. Their faces all lined up.

  What was I going to do with their addresses? Was I going to go and see them, one after the other?

  As I drove, I recalled that the cook, Swan Letellier, worked at the Terroir des Souches in Mâcon. I had seen on a map that the restaurant was in the town center, on rue de L’Héritan.

  I didn’t take the motorway, I went into Mâcon, parked in a car park about two hundred meters from the restaurant, close to the town hall. A waitress welcomed me nicely. Two couples were already seated.

  The last time I had set foot in a restaurant was at Gino’s, the day I’d had lunch with Anaïs’s parents, the day Léonine had burst the eggs with a burst of laughter. I’ve relived that day thousands of times, the meal, the dress she was wearing, her braids, her smile, the magic, what the bill came to, the moment she got in the Caussin’s car and waved me goodbye, her doudou hidden under her knees—a gray rabbit whose right eye risked falling off, and that I’d put in the wash so often, it had lost an ear. There are hours that should be swiftly forgotten. But events decide otherwise.

  I couldn’t see Swan Letellier. He must have been in the kitchen. There were just girls busy serving. Four girls, like in the tomb, I thought.

  I drank a half-bottle of wine, and ate almost nothing. The waitress asked me if I didn’t like it. I said that I did, but I wasn’t very hungry. She smiled at me, condescendingly. I watched people arriving and leaving. I hadn’t drunk for several months, but I felt too alone at this table to drink water.

  At around nine, the restaurant was full. After I’d left, unsteadily, I sat on a bench a bit further down and, staring into the dark, waited for Swan Letellier.

  Nearby, I could hear the Saône flowing. I felt like throwing myself into it. To be back with Léo. Would I find her again? Wouldn’t it be better to throw myself into the sea? Was she still there? In what form? And me, was I still there? What was the point of my life? What use had it been? And to whom? Why had I been put on a radiator on the day I was born? That radiator had stopped working on July 14th, 1993.

  What was I going to say to poor old Swan Letellier? What did I want to know, exactly? The room had burned down, what was the point of questioning the present. Stirring shit up.

  I couldn’t face getting back into Stéphanie’s Panda, returning to the barrier, driving through the night.

  Just when I wanted to get up, step over the wall behind me, jump into the black water, a Siamese cat came and rubbed itself against my legs, purring. It stared at me with its beautiful blue eyes. I leaned forward to touch it. Its fur was soft, warm, wonderful. It jumped onto my lap, startling me. I didn’t dare move. It stretched right out on me. Like a dead weight on my thighs, a safeguard. I was going to lean into the void, and it stopped me from doing so. I think that evening, that cat saved my life. At least, what little was left of it.

  Once the last clients had gone and the lights in the restaurant gone out, Swan Letellier was the first to appear.

  I didn’t move from the bench I was sitting on.

  He was wearing a black bomber jacket, its fabric shining under the streetlights, jeans, and sneakers, and walked with a rolling gait.

  I called out to him. I didn’t recognize my own voice. As though another woman were shouting at him. A stranger I was harboring. Probably the effect of the alcohol. Everything seemed abstract to me.

  “Swan Letellier!”

  The cat jumped to the ground and sat at my feet. Swan Letellier turned his head and looked at me for a few seconds, before responding, warily:

  “Yes?”

  “I’m the mother of Léonine Toussaint.”

  He froze. He had the same look as those youngsters I terrified that evening I turned myself into the white lady. I felt his frightened eyes searching mine. While I was in total darkness, I could see his features clearly where he was standing.

  One of the four waitresses came out of the Terroir des Souches. She went up to him and snuggled against his back. He said to her, quite drily:

  “Go on ahead, I’ll join you.”

  She immediately saw that he was looking in my direction. She recognized me and whispered something in his ear. No doubt that I’d just knocked back a half-bottle of wine all on my own. The girl gave me a dirty look and then left, almost shouting at Swan:

  “I’ll be waiting for you at Titi’s!”

  Swan Letellier moved closer to me. When he reached me, he waited for me to speak:

  “Do you know why I’m here?”

  He shook his head.

  “Do you know who I am?”

  He replied, coldly:

  “You said: the mother of Léonine Toussaint.”

  “Do you know who Léonine Toussaint is?”

  He hesitated before replying:

  “You never came to the funeral, or the trial.”

  I hadn’t expected him to say that to me at all. It’s as if he’d slapped me in the face. I clenched my fists until my nails dug into my skin. The Siamese cat was still close to me. Sitting at my feet, staring at me.

  “I never believed that the children had gone into the kitchen that night.”

  He replied, defensively:

  “Why?”

  “Intuition. And you, what did you see?”

  His voice became choked:

  “We tried to get into the room, but anyway, it was too late.”

  “Did you get on well with the rest of the staff?”

  He seemed to be struggling to breathe. He took a tube of Ventolin from his pocket and inhaled from it, hard, through his mouth.

  “Gotta go, someone’s waiting for me.”

  I detected his fear. People who are afraid can sniff out others’ fear more easily. That evening, sitting on that bench, facing that young man who was both worried and worrying, I was afraid. I sensed that the fire that was consuming my child would consume her forever if I didn’t discover the truth.

  “Don’t want to think about all that. You should do the same. It’s sad, but that’
s life. Sometimes, it can be shit. I’m sorry.”

  He turned his back on me and started walking very fast. Almost running. His reaction merely confirmed my feeling that nothing was true in the report addressed to the public prosecutor.

  I looked down. The Siamese cat had gone without my noticing.

  56.

  Sweet are the memories that never fade.

  When Jean-Louis and Armelle Caussin come to visit Anaïs’s tomb, they don’t know who I am. They don’t make the connection between the young, shy, scruffy young woman they had lunch with on July 13th, 1993 in Malgrange, and the smart municipal employee who strides purposefully up and down the avenues of Brancion cemetery. They have even bought my flowers without recognizing me.

  After my daughter’s death, I lost fifteen kilos, my face became both gaunt and puffy. I aged by a hundred years. I had the face and body of a child in crumpled packaging.

  An old little girl.

  I was seven-and-a-bit.

  Sasha said of me, “An old fledgling that’s fallen from the nest and got soaked in the rain.”

  After meeting Sasha, I changed. I grew my hair and wore different clothes. I went off jeans and sweatshirts.

  When I rediscovered my body, when I saw it reflected in a shopwindow, it was that of a woman. I put it into dresses, skirts, and blouses. My facial features changed. If I’d been a painting, my face would have gone from an angular Bernard Buffet to an almost ethereal Auguste Renoir.

  Sasha made me change century, going backward to keep going forward.

  The last time I saw Paulo and his Emmaüs van, I gave him Léonine’s remaining possessions, my doll Caroline, my trousers, and my clodhoppers. I filed my nails, drew a fine line along my eyelids, and bought some elegant shoes.

  Stéphanie, who had always known me in jeans and no makeup, looked at me suspiciously when I placed powder and blusher on her register’s conveyor belt. Even more so than when I was placing bottles of every kind of alcohol under her nose.

  People are strange. They can’t bear to look in the eye a mother who has lost her child, but they’re even more shocked to see her picking herself up, dressing herself up, dolling herself up.

  I learned about day cream, night cream, powdery roses, the way others learn how to cook.

  The woman who looks after the cemetery looks sad, but she always smiles at passersby. I suppose looking sad goes with the job. She looks like an actress I can’t remember the name of. She’s pretty, but ageless. I noticed she’s always smartly dressed. Yesterday I bought some flowers from her for Gabriel. I didn’t feel like giving him my roses. The woman who looks after the cemetery sold me a lovely purple heather. We chatted about flowers together, she seems passionate about gardens. When I told her I owned a rose nursery, she lit up. She became a different person.

  That’s what Irène Fayolle wrote about me in her journal from 2009. One month after the funeral of Gabriel Prudent. Years after the disappearance of Philippe Toussaint.

  If Irène Fayolle had known that, one day, the “woman who looks after the cemetery” would spend a night of love with her son.

  I’ve had no news from Julien Seul. I imagine he’ll turn up one morning, silently, like he usually does. Like me when I left the Hôtel Armance.

  I think of our night of love as I stand in front of the coffin of Marie Gaillard (1924–2017), which is being interred. It seems that Marie Gaillard was a nasty piece of work. Her housekeeper has just whispered in my ear that she’d come to the funeral of the “old woman” to make sure that she really was dead. I pinched the palm of my hand hard so as not to laugh. There’s not a soul around the tomb, not even the cemetery’s cats. Not a flower, not a plaque. Marie Gaillard is buried in the family vault. I hope she won’t be too vile to those she’s joining.

  It’s not uncommon to see visitors spitting on tombs. I’ve even seen it more often than I would have believed. When I first started, I thought hostilities died with the hated person. But tombstones don’t put the lid on hatred. I’ve attended funerals with no tears. I’ve even attended happy funerals. There are some deaths that are convenient for everyone.

  After Marie Gaillard’s interment, the housekeeper muttered that “nastiness is like manure, its stink hangs in the wind for ages, even once it’s been removed.”

  * * *

  Starting in January of 1996, I returned to see Sasha every other Sunday. Like the parent without custody who sees their child every other weekend. I always borrowed Stéphanie’s red Fiat Panda, which she lent me willingly. I set off in the morning, at 6 A.M., and returned in the evening. I sensed that it couldn’t last. That very soon, Philippe Toussaint would ask me questions, stop me from going. He was very suspicious.

  As my visits to Brancion cemetery continued, I changed, physically. Like a woman who has a lover. My only lover was the compost that Sasha taught me to make with horse dung. He taught me to turn it over in October, and then again in spring, depending on the weather. To watch out for earthworms, not to crush them, so they could “do their job.”

  He taught me to look at the sky and decide whether planting should be done in January or later, if I wanted to harvest in September.

  He explained to me that nature took its time, that eggplants planted in January wouldn’t emerge before September, and that, on industrial farms, they sprayed vegetables with vast quantities of chemical fertilizer so they would grow fast. A yield not required in the vegetable garden at Brancion cemetery. No one was waiting for these vegetables apart from him, the keeper, and me, his “old fledgling fallen from the nest.” He taught me to use only nature to nurture nature. Never fertilizer, unless it was untreated. And to make a nettle slurry and sage infusion for treating the vegetables and flowers. Never pesticides. He said to me, “Violette, the natural way is much more work, but time, as long as one is alive, one finds it. It grows like the mushrooms in the morning dew.”

  He soon used the informal “tu” with me; I never did likewise.

  When he saw me, he began by telling me off:

  “Have you seen your getup! Can’t you dress like the beautiful woman you are? In fact, why is your hair so short? Do you have lice?”

  He said this to me as if talking to one of his cats, cats that he adored.

  I would arrive on Sunday morning at around 10 A.M. I’d go into the cemetery and straight to Léonine’s tomb. I knew that she was no longer there. That beneath that marble, there was just emptiness. Like a wasteland, a no-man’s-land. I went there to read her first name and her surname. And to kiss them. I didn’t leave flowers; Léonine couldn’t care less about flowers. At seven years old, a girl prefers toys and magic wands.

  When I pushed open the door to Sasha’s house, there was always that aroma, that combination of simple cooking, of onions being softened in a pan, of tea, and of “Rêve d’Ossian,” which he sprayed on handkerchiefs scattered here and there around the room. And me, as soon as I entered, I breathed more easily. I was on holiday.

  We would have lunch, sitting opposite each other, and it was always good, colorful, spicy, aromatic, tasty, and without meat. He knew I couldn’t stand it.

  He would ask me questions about my fortnight, my daily existence, life in Malgrange-sur-Nancy, my work, what I was reading, the music I was listening to, the trains that went by. He never spoke to me of Philippe Toussaint, or, when he did come up, just said “him.”

  Before long, we would go out into his garden to work together. Whether it was freezing or fine, there was always something to do.

  Planting, sorting seedlings, pricking out, positioning stakes, hoeing, weeding, taking cuttings, tidying the avenues, both of us leaning toward the earth, hands in the earth, all the time. On warm days, his favorite game was to target me with the hosepipe. Sasha had a child’s-eye view, and the games that went with it.

  He had been the keeper of this cemetery for years, he never spoke about his priv
ate life. The only wedding ring he wore was the one found in his first vegetable garden, around the carrot.

  Sometimes, he would pull Regain, the novel by Jean Giono, out of his pocket and read me passages from it. I would recite the bits of L’Oeuvre de Dieu, la part du Diable I knew by heart.

  Sometimes, we were interrupted by some emergency, someone who’d hurt their back or sprained an ankle. Sasha would say to me, “Carry on, I’ll be back.” He would disappear for half an hour to look after his patient, and always returned with a cup of tea, a smile on his lips, and the same question, “So, how’s it going with our bit of earth?”

  How I loved that first time. Hands in the earth, nose in the air, creating a link between the two. Learning that the one never went without the other. Returning two weeks after the first planting and seeing the transformation, approaching the seasons differently, the power of life.

  Between those Sundays, the wait felt endless to me. The Sunday I didn’t go to Brancion was a desert where only the future counted, the following Sunday on the horizon.

  I spent my time reading the notes I had taken, on what I had planted, how I had done this or that cutting, my seedlings. Sasha had entrusted me with some gardening magazines, which I devoured, just as I had devoured L’Oeuvre de Dieu, la part du Diable.

  After ten days, I felt like a prisoner counting the final hours before being released. From Thursday evening on, I was stamping my feet with impatience. On Friday and Saturday, unable to bear it any longer, I’d take myself for a walk between each train. I needed to, so as to channel my energy without Philippe Toussaint noticing. I took shortcuts that he didn’t take on his motorbike. If, by chance, he was around, I told him that I was off to do some quick shopping. On Saturday, late afternoon, I went to pick up Stéphanie’s Panda, parked outside her house.

  Never has anyone in the world loved a car like I loved Stéphanie’s Fiat Panda. No collector, no driver of a Ferrari or an Aston Martin has felt how I felt when placing my trembling hands on the steering wheel. When turning the key, going into first gear, pressing down on the accelerator.