Fresh Water for Flowers

by Valérie Perrin

  I spoke to the white tiger. I imagined what I was going to find, the plants that had grown; the seedlings to be pricked out; the color of the leaves; the state of the soil, whether loose, dry, or soggy; the bark of the fruit trees; the progress of the buds, the vegetables, the flowers; the threat of frost. I imagined what Sasha had made me for lunch, the tea we would drink, the aroma of his house, his voice. Returning to my Wilbur Larch. My personal doctor.

  Stéphanie thought I was impatient to return to my daughter, but I was impatient to return to life after my daughter. Lives other than mine. With the main one extinguished, the volcano was extinct. But I sensed branches, offshoots growing inside me. Whatever I sowed, I could feel it. I was sowing myself. And yet, the arid soil that was me was much poorer than that of the cemetery vegetable garden. A soil full of gravel. But a blade of grass can grow anywhere, and that anywhere was me. Yes, a root can take hold in tar. All that’s needed is the tiniest crack for life to penetrate the impossible. A little rain, some sun, and then shoots from who knows where, from the wind perhaps, appear.

  The day I squatted to pick the first tomatoes I had planted, six months earlier, Léonine had long been filling the garden with her presence, as if she had brought the Mediterranean to the little vegetable garden of the cemetery in which she was buried. That day, I knew that she was within each little miracle the soil produced.

  57.

  Fate followed its path but

  it never separated our hearts.

  JUNE 1996, GENEVIÈVE MAGNAN.

  I’m so sensitive that whenever I read or hear the word “sour,” my tongue hurts and my eyes sting. I burn all over. That’s what I tell myself when I see an ad for sour candies on the TV. “You’re too sensitive,” my mother would spit at me, between wallops.

  Must be a balance thing: since my soul’s had it, worth only feeding to strays, my body makes up for it.

  I change the channel. If only I could change life by flicking my remote. Since I’ve been unemployed, I’m slumped in my old armchair, not knowing what to do. Telling myself that nothing matters. That it’s over. That they can’t go back on it. That the matter’s closed. They’re dead. They’re buried.

  I was asleep when Swan Letellier phoned me. He left me a message I couldn’t understand, his words were confused, he was in a right panic, everything gets jumbled up in his bird brain. I had to listen to it several times to make any sense of his words: Léonine Toussaint’s mother was waiting for him outside the restaurant where he works as a cook, she seems crazy, she doesn’t believe that the girls went into the kitchen to make themselves hot chocolate that night.

  After the trial, I thought I’d never hear mention of Léonine ever again. Just like I’d never hear mention of Anaïs, Océane, and Nadège ever again. Thankfully, it was her, the boss, who got all the blame. Two years in the pen. About time the rich faced the shit, about time for a bit of justice, now and then. Never could stand her, that one, all holier-than-thou.

  Léonine Toussaint’s mother . . . The families weren’t from around here. It’s only middle-class types who send their brats to dip their bums in the lake of a château. I thought the parents were just ticking the cemetery-visit box when they came to our parts, and that they hurried back home once they’d left flowers and crucifixes on their kids’ tombs.

  What’s she after? What does she want? Is she going to come to my place? Is she going to ask around? Letellier’s panicking, I’m not, I stopped being afraid of anyone ages ago.

  There were six of us at the château. Letellier, Croquevieille, Lindon, Fontanel, Petit, and me.

  Thinking back on all that, it reminds me of the first time I saw him. Not the last, the first. Usually, I think of the last. And I have hatred burning in my veins, like rivers of sour candies.

  The first time, it was an end-of-year party for the local nursery schools. I had sick on my shirt, milk reflux from my youngest, who’d been suffering due to the heat. I’d opened it up a little, so people wouldn’t see the stain. He didn’t look at me, he just glanced down at my nursing bra. I trembled. The look of a randy dog. He made me want him. Bad.

  He didn’t see me, but me, “I had eyes only for him,” as the rich would say.

  The two months of school holidays were a real downer.

  Then I was employed as a domestic assistant for the nursery schools. On the first day, I waited for him, like a mutt. When I saw him entering the schoolyard to pick up his offspring, my skin went as hard as the leather of his biker jacket. I’d have liked to be the creature they’d cut into pieces to keep him warm.

  He rarely came. It was always the mother who dropped off and picked up the child.

  It took him months to say a word to me. He probably had nothing better to do that day. No other girls to do. He was a skirt chaser and, hell, was he dishy. You could tell he was a good screw from a hundred meters, with those T-shirts and tight jeans. With his icy blue eyes, he undressed anything in a skirt, like the mothers who came and went along the corridors that reeked of ammonia.

  The windows I cleaned with Ajax after class . . . The brats I took to the toilets . . .

  One day, I stopped him, just to say any old thing to him. Some story about glasses I’d supposedly found in a child’s locker. Did they belong to him? He was as cold as the freezer in the school shed. He said, “No, they’re not mine.” He was used to females approaching him, you could see it, you could breathe it. He had the look of a devilish prince, a traitor, a swine, the handsome types, the ones in the old films.

  At the end of the school year, after seeing me hanging around the corridors in the hope of bumping into him, cornering him, he finally gave me a date. Not a date to whisper sweet nothings in my ear; no, by giving me the time and place, he’d already undressed me.

  He just came out with it, “One evening, and a quickie.” Because he was married, like I was. He didn’t want any hassle, or a hotel bed. He screwed in nightclub johns, against trees, or on the back seats of cars.

  I took hours to get myself ready. Removing the hair from my legs, covering myself in Nivea cream, slapping a clay mask on my face, on my big conk, spraying perfume under my arms, dropping the kids off to a friend who’d keep mum. One who slept around, and whom I’d already covered for. One whose adultery would stop her from talking.

  We were supposed to meet near the “little rock,” as the locals called a big stone placed at the edge of town, a kind of broken boulder, a dark corner where kids had smashed the streetlights long ago.

  He arrived on his motorbike. He placed his helmet on the seat. Like someone not staying long. He didn’t say hello, good evening, how are you, to me. I think I barely smiled at him. My heart was pounding. Enough to make my chest burst. My new shoes were sinking in the mud, they’d given me blisters.

  He turned me around. Without looking at me. He pulled down my underpants and tights, separated my thighs. No caresses, no gentle words, or rough ones. No words at all. He made me come so strong, I almost died. Started shaking like a dead leaf the tree’s in a hurry to get rid of.

  After, when he’d gone, my blisters and my eyes started weeping at the same time. Love, my mother had always told me that it was stuff for the rich. “Not for a good-for-nothing.”

  Every time I met him at the little rock, he screwed me from behind without looking at me. He came and went inside me, making me squeal like a sow having its throat slit. He never knew that my cries, they were heaven and hell, good and evil, pleasure and pain, the beginning of the end.

  I felt his breath on the back of my neck, and I loved it. I wanted more. While he was doing up his fly, I’d say to him, “Meet again next week? Same time?” He’d reply, “OK.”

  The following week, I was there. I was always there. And him, not always, not every time. Sometimes he didn’t come. He screwed elsewhere. Me, I waited, leaning against the freezing little rock. I waited for the lights of his motorbike. It went
on like that for months.

  The last time I saw him, he came by car. He wasn’t alone. There was a man in the passenger seat. I panicked, I wanted to leave, but he grabbed me by the arm, gripped me roughly, and hissed between his teeth, “You stay there, you don’t move, you’re mine.” He turned me round, defiled me in his usual way, and I let it be done, squealing. I could hear myself shouting. I heard the car door slam. I could hear my mother saying to me, “Love, that’s for the rich.” I heard him saying to the car passenger, who was right beside us, “She’s yours, help yourself.” I said no. But I let it be done.

  They both left. I was still turned around, underpants around my ankles. A collapsed puppet. My mouth was pressed against the little rock. The taste of the stone in my mouth, a bit of moss, I thought it was blood.

  After that, I moved house, the two kids in tow. Never saw him again.

  Someone’s knocking on my door, must be her. She didn’t go to the funeral. Didn’t go to the trial. She was bound to end up going somewhere.

  58.

  It’s the words they didn’t say

  that make the dead so heavy in their coffins.

  June 1996—I’d been visiting Sasha every other Sunday for six months. I’d just left him, still had soil under my fingernails. I put their address on my dashboard. A place known as La Biche aux Chailles, just past Mâcon. I drove for about half an hour, got lost in the small roads, kept going forward, kept reversing, cried with rage. I finally found it. A small house covered in roughcast that was shabby and grubby, stuck between two others that were bigger and more imposing. It looked like a poor little girl between her two parents dressed in their finest.

  Both of their names were on the letterbox that hung on the door: “G. Magnan. A. Fontanel.”

  My heart started racing. I felt nauseous.

  It was already late. I thought about how I’d have to drive at night to get back to Malgrange, and how I hated doing that. With my stomach churning, I knocked several times. I must have knocked hard. I hurt my fingers. I saw the soil under my fingernails. My skin was dry.

  It was she who opened the door. I didn’t instantly make the link between the woman standing before me and the one posing in a ridiculous hat at a wedding, in the photo Sasha had slipped in the envelope. She had seriously aged and put on weight since that photo had been taken. In the picture, she was badly made-up, but she was made-up. In this late-afternoon light, her skin was marked by the years. She had purplish shadows under her eyes and red blotches down her cheeks.

  “Hello, I’m Violette Toussaint. I’m the mother of Léonine. Léonine Toussaint.”

  Saying the first name and surname of my daughter in front of this woman chilled my blood. I thought: She probably served Léo her last meal. I thought, for the thousandth time: How could I have let my seven-year-old daughter go to that place?

  Geneviève Magnan didn’t respond. She remained stony-faced and let me go on without opening her mouth. Everything about her was double-locked. No smile, no expression, just her sticky, bloodshot eyes staring at me.

  “I would like to know what you saw on that night, the night of the fire.”

  “What for?”

  Her question astounded me. And without thinking, I replied:

  “I don’t believe that, at seven years old, my daughter went into a kitchen to heat herself some milk.”

  “Should have said that at the trial, then.”

  I felt my legs shaking.

  “And you, Madame Magnan, what did you say at the trial?”

  “I had nothing to say.”

  She whispered goodbye to me and slammed the door in my face. I believe I remained like that for a long while, breath taken away, in front of her door, looking at the flaking paint and their names written on some plastic tape: “G. Magnan. A. Fontanel.”

  I got back into Stéphanie’s Fiat Panda. My hands were still shaking. I had sensed, when speaking to Swan Letellier, that something wasn’t clear about the sequence of events on that night, and my “meeting” with Geneviève Magnan had merely confirmed it. Why did these people all seem so elusive? Was it me who was imagining things? Was I going crazy? Even more crazy?

  During the return journey, I went from lightness to darkness. I thought of Sasha, and of the staff at the château of Notre-Dame-des-Prés. I decided that, next time, the Sunday after next, I would go to the château. I had never felt strong enough to go past it. And yet it was only five kilometers from the Brancion cemetery. And I would return to the home of Magnan and Fontanel, and I would kick their door until they finally spoke.

  I arrived outside my house at 22:37. I just had enough time to park before lowering the barrier for the 22:40 train. When I opened the door, I saw Philippe Toussaint, who had dropped off on the sofa. I looked at him without waking him, thinking that I had loved him, a long time ago. That if I’d been eighteen with short hair, I would have thrown myself on him, saying: “Shall we make love?” But I was eleven years older and my hair had grown longer.

  I went to lie down on my bed. I closed my eyes without finding sleep. Philippe Toussaint came and slid into the bed in the middle of the night. He grumbled, “So, you’re back.” I thought: Lucky I am, or who would have lowered the barrier for the 22:40? I pretended to sleep, not to hear him. I sensed that he was sniffing me, that he was seeking the smell of someone else in my hair. The only smell he must have found was the air freshener from the Fiat Panda. He was soon snoring.

  I thought of a story about seeds that Sasha had told me. He had tried to plant melons in his vegetable garden, they had never grown. He had tried two years in a row, nothing doing, the melons refused to grow. The following year, he had thrown the rest of the melon seeds to the birds. Further away, at the back of the vegetable garden, where there were piles of pots, rakes, watering cans, and planters. One of those birds, carelessly or mischievously, must have carried one of the seeds in its beak and dropped it in the middle of a path in the garden. A few months later, a fine plant had grown, and Sasha hadn’t pulled it up, just walked around it. It had produced two beautiful melons. Nice and plump, nice and sweet. And every year, it had again produced one, two, three, four, five. Sasha had said to me, “You see, they’re melons from heaven, that’s what nature is all about, it’s she who decides.”

  I fell asleep on those words.

  I dreamt of a memory. I was taking Léonine to school. It was the first day of term at primary school. We were walking along the corridors. Her hand in mine. Then she had let mine go because she was “a big girl now.”

  I woke up screaming:

  “I know her! I’ve seen her before!”

  Philippe Toussaint switched the bedside lamp on.

  “What? What’s up?”

  He rubbed his eyes, looked at me as if I were possessed.

  “I know her! She worked at the school. Not in Léonine’s class, in the one next door.”

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “I saw her. After the cemetery, I stopped by at Geneviève Magnan’s.”

  Philippe Toussaint looked horrified.

  “What?”

  I looked down.

  “I need to understand. To meet the people who were at the château of Notre-Dame-des-Prés that night.”

  He got up, walked around the bed, grabbed me by the collar, and, choking me, yanked me right up and started screaming:

  “You’re beginning to seriously piss me off! Carry on, and I’ll get you locked up. Do you hear me? And I warn you, you’re not going back there! Do you hear me? NEVER set foot over there, ever again!”

  Over the years, he had let me sink into a bottomless solitude, a black pit. I could just as well have been someone else, got myself replaced, employed a temp to lower and raise the barrier, do the shopping, make lunch and supper, wash his clothes, and sleep on the left side of the bed, he wouldn’t have cared, wouldn’t have noticed.r />
  Never had he knocked me about or threatened me. By doing that, he brought me to my senses. I became myself again.

  * * *

  The following morning, I went to Stephanie’s to return the keys to the Panda. On Mondays, the Casino was closed. She lived alone on Grand-Rue, on the first floor of a house. She made me come in and poured me some coffee in a ceramic goblet. She was wearing a long T-shirt with Claudia Schiffer on it, and said, “Monday, at home, it’s cleaning day.” It seemed odd to me, seeing her head above that supermodel’s, but it’s her head that moved me to tears, her friendly round face, her lovely rosy cheeks, her tow-colored hair.

  “I filled her up for you.”

  “Oh, well, thanks a lot.”

  “Looks like it’s going to be nice today.”

  “Oh, well, yes.”

  “It’s good, your coffee . . . My husband doesn’t want me to go to Brancion cemetery anymore.”

  “Oh, right, well, hold on, hey. It’s for going to see your kid, after all, isn’t it.”

  “Yes, I know. In any case, thanks for everything.”

  “Oh, well, it’s nothing, hey.”

  “Yes, Stéphanie, it’s everything.”

  I clasped her in my arms. She didn’t dare move. As if no one had ever shown her the slightest sign of affection. Her eyes and mouth became even rounder than normal. Three flying saucers. Stéphanie would remain forever an enigma, the Martian of the Casino. I abandoned her there, arms dangling, in the middle of her sitting room.

  Next, I went back along Grand-Rue, heading for the primary school. Like in Dave’s song, “Swann’s Way,” I took the same route backwards. The one I took every morning with Léo. In her satchel, the Tupperware box took up more space than her textbooks and exercise books. I was obsessive about making her lavish packed snacks, so she never went without. Because I still had that emptiness the foster families had left me with. When we’d go on a school trip, and the others would have chips, bars of chocolate, sandwiches made with farmhouse bread, sweets, and fizzy drinks in their knapsacks. Me, it’s not that I went without, but there were no treats in my plastic bag. “Girls in care are happy with very little.” It wasn’t the fact of having less that upset me, it was not being able to share my frugal lunch. Having just enough. I wanted to give Léonine the chance to share with the others.