Fresh Water for Flowers

by Valérie Perrin

  Philippe felt queasy thinking about it. He leaned against the door frame. That evening, faced with this drunkard eyeballing him, Philippe grasped how much Magnan had suffered at the hands of the two bastards that had trashed her: him and Fontanel. And that suffering pierced him like an icy wind. As if Geneviève’s ghost had stabbed him with the blade of a long knife. Darkness crashed down on him.

  Seeing him reeling, Fontanel smiled nastily and turned his back on him, without closing the front door. Philippe followed him down a dark corridor. Inside, there was that musty smell, that smell of staleness, grease, and dust combined that you get in places where the air is never let in. Where no duster or mop has ever been seen. Philippe had thought of Violette, who aired the house even in winter. Violette. As he followed Fontanel, Philippe felt an intense desire to hold her in his arms. To hold her tighter than he ever had. But as the old man at the cemetery doubtless had.

  The two men sat at the dining-room table. A dining room with no dining, just dozens of empty beer bottles on a plastic tablecloth. Two or three empties of vodka and other spirits. And, as though the Devil had decided to keep them company between these wretched walls, they started silently drinking.

  It was only much later that Fontanel had spoken, when Philippe’s eyes had fallen on, and been unable to leave, the portrait of two young boys. Two framed grins on the corner of an ageless, filthy sideboard. A special school photo of siblings together, so their parents had an extra memento.

  “The kids are with Geneviève’s sister. Much better off with her than with me. Never been a good father . . . And you?”

  “ . . . ”

  “About the girls’ deaths, about your kid, Geneviève, she wasn’t to blame . . . I mean, she did nothing on purpose. Me, I only know the end of the story, when she came to wake me up. Sound asleep I was, thought I was having a nightmare. She shook me, like some madwoman. She was blubbering and hollering all at once, couldn’t understand what she was jabbering on about . . . She spoke about you, told me your daughter was there, about her supply job at the school in Malgrange, about fate, cruel as can be . . . She spoke of her mother, I thought she’d hit the bottle. She pulled me by the arm, screaming, ‘Come! Come quickly! It’s horrific . . . horrific,’ never said such things before, Geneviève hadn’t. When I got to that room downstairs, it was too late. . .”

  Fontanel downed a bottle of beer in one go, followed by a glass of vodka. He sniffed loudly, and then spat out his words, staring at a tear in the plastic tablecloth, scratching at it with his nails.

  “The boss, that Croquevieille, she paid me peanuts for doing maintenance. The electrics, plumbing, painting, the parks . . . parks, my ass. Grass and gravel. Geneviève, she did the shopping and cooking in the summer. The boss, she gave us overtime if we both slept there when the kids arrived . . . For supervising and being an extra presence. That evening, Geneviève wasn’t supposed to be working. But when the kids went to bed, Lucie Lindon asked Geneviève to replace her for a couple of hours, supervise the ground-floor rooms. Lindon wanted to go upstairs to smoke a joint in Letellier’s room. Geneviève didn’t dare refuse . . . That Lindon was always helping her out. But Geneviève didn’t stay at the château. She went off. She left the girls on their own to go to her sister’s, to see our kids, because our youngest was ill and she was worried sick. In summer, it drove her nuts having to leave them while others swanned off to the beach . . . She blamed me, ‘You’re just a good-for-nothing, can’t even fucking take us to the beach . . . ’”

  Fontanel had gone for a pee, whistling “Vie de merde.” When he was back in the dining room, he had sat on the other side of the table, in a different seat. As if his had been taken by someone in his absence.

  “Geneviève must have been gone for an hour, tops. When she got back, and opened the door of Room 1, she came over dizzy, crashed to the floor . . . Already, that afternoon, she’d almost passed out. She thought she must be sick . . . That she’d picked up our kid’s virus. She struggled to get up . . . She opened the window to gulp some fresh air . . . That’s what saved her. It was five minutes later that she said to herself something wasn’t right . . . That the girls were sleeping too soundly. Geneviève didn’t get it straight away . . . Carbon monoxide, it’s a gas you can’t smell . . . In each room, there was an individual water heater, old as time . . . Ancient things that didn’t work at all anymore, but that weren’t allowed to be touched . . . And yet someone had. Geneviève clocked it straight away because those bloody things were stuck behind a false cupboard, and that one had been opened . . . The door was just hanging open.”

  Alain Fontanel opened another bottle, using a lighter lying on the table, while still talking.

  “We all knew the fixtures in the château were rotten . . . A ticking time bomb. There was nothing I could do. It was too late. Asphyxiated . . . Poisoned by carbon monoxide. The four of them.”

  Fontanel went silent. His voice had betrayed emotion for the first time. He lit a cigarette, closing his eyes.

  “I immediately switched off the water heater. I even found the match used to get it going. Geneviève, she’s never been able to lie . . . When you were having it off with her, I knew it. She went all gooey-eyed. Totally daft. Stank like a perfume factory, wore stuff on her face, shoes that crippled her . . . That evening, I saw in her eyes she hadn’t done it, she wasn’t to blame. I saw her terror. She stank of death . . . And anyway, you have to know what you’re doing to start an old thing like that. She wouldn’t have been up to it . . . It was strictly forbidden to touch the château’s old water heaters. And the staff all knew that. It was drummed into us often enough. It wasn’t written in the rules, or the boss would’ve gone straight to jail, but us, we knew . . . She should’ve had them removed . . . Croquevieille, when it came time to get parents to cough up, she was right there, but when it came to paying for new gear, she was gone. The only new hot water tanks were the ones in the communal showers.”

  Someone knocked on the door. Fontanel didn’t open. He just grumbled, “Bloody neighbors,” and refilled his glass. While Fontanel was telling the story, Philippe didn’t move. He drank long glasses of vodka, at regular intervals, to burn away the pain, drown the sorrow.

  “Geneviève panicked. Said she didn’t want to go to prison. That if anyone knew she’d gone off to see her kids, she’d get the blame for everyone. Begged me to help her. At first, I said no. ‘And how d’you think I can help you?’ I said. ‘We’ll tell the truth, that it was an accident . . . We’ll find the idiot who did that.’ She went berserk, face all twisted . . . She swore at me, threatened me. Said she’d tell the whole band of cops that I spied on the supervisors . . . that she’d seen me stealing their panties from the dirty laundry . . . that she had proof. I gave her a big slap to shut her up . . . And then I remembered that, when I was in the army, one night a squaddie had burnt down part of the barracks by forgetting a saucepan of food on a badly switched off gas cooker . . . That’s how I had the idea . . . With fire, everything disappears. When everything burns, no one goes to jail . . . Especially if it’s little kids making the mistake of forgetting a pan of milk on the stove.”

  Right then, Philippe would have liked to ask Fontanel to shut up. But he was incapable of opening his mouth, of uttering a single word. He would have liked to get up, leave quickly, run away, cover his ears. But he remained frozen to the spot, paralyzed, powerless. As if two icy hands were pinning him to his chair.

  “It’s me who set fire to the kitchen . . . Geneviève who put the mugs in the girls’ room . . . I waited at the end of the corridor, left their door ajar. Geneviève went up to our room . . . Since that night, she’d never stopped blubbing . . . She was scared, too . . . Said you or your wife, you’d end up coming to skin her alive . . . ”

  Shudders coursed through Philippe. Like shocks from invisible electrodes.

  “When the flames reached the room, I ran upstairs to give a good kicking to Let
ellier’s door . . . I hid away with Geneviève in our room. Lindon woke up, went down to the ground floor, screamed when she saw the fire, I acted like I’d just got out of bed, didn’t understand what was going on . . . Letellier wanted to go into the room, but it was too late . . . Flames too high. We got everyone evacuated . . . By the time the fire brigade arrived, there were nothing left . . . Looked like Hell, but much worse . . . Lindon never dared ask Geneviève where she was that evening, why and how the girls had got up to go into the kitchen without anyone realizing, because all that was basically her fault. Never found out who’d lit that water heater . . . Or why . . . Or at what point . . . You can imagine, I checked in the other rooms, no one had touched ’em . . . And I never said a word.”

  Philippe had passed out. He reopened his eyes, his head heavy, his tongue thick, embers in his stomach.

  Alain Fontanel was still sitting in the same place, staring into space, eyes bloodshot, glass in hand. He hadn’t smoked the cigarette he still held between his fingers; the ash had dropped onto the plastic tablecloth.

  “Don’t look at me like that, I know for sure it wasn’t Geneviève who did that. Don’t look at me like that, I tell you, I’m a nasty piece of work . . . people avoid me, see me coming and they cross the street, but never have I touched a hair on a kid’s head.”

  * * *

  Geneviève Magnan was buried on September 3rd, 1996. Irony of fate or unhappy coincidence, it was the day Léonine would have celebrated her tenth birthday.

  When she was lowered into the family vault in the small cemetery at La Biche-aux-Chailles, three-hundred-odd meters from her house, Philippe had already gone back east, to the trains.

  During the winter of 1996–97, he didn’t go to L’Adresse, and he left his motorbike sleeping in the garage.

  His parents came to pick him up once, in January, to go to the Brancion cemetery and pay their respects to Léonine, but he refused to get in the car. Like an obstinate child. Like when he went on holiday with Luc and Françoise, despite his mother’s disapproval.

  He spent six months playing Nintendo, mindlessly playing games that required him to save a princess. He saved her hundreds of times, having failed to save his own, the real one.

  One morning, between the toast ritual and lunch, Violette told Philippe that the cemetery keeper’s job at Brancion-sur-Chalon was becoming vacant, and that she wanted that job more than anything in the world. She conjured up a kind of happiness to him. She described the position to him as if it were a place in the sun, a five-star vacation.

  He looked at her as if she’d lost her mind. Not because of what she was proposing, but because he realized that she was proposing that they continue to live together. At first, instinctively, he said no, because he thought she just wanted to be closer to the old cemetery keeper, but that didn’t make sense. If she’d wanted to be closer to him, she would have left Philippe and gone and moved in with him. He realized that she wanted to carry on, that he was part of her plans, of her future.

  The thought of becoming a cemetery keeper horrified him. But he wouldn’t have to do any more than at Malgrange. Violette would take care of everything. And anyhow, what else could he have done? He’d had an appointment at the employment agency the previous day, had been told to update his CV. Update it to what? Apart from tinkering on motorbikes and seducing loose women, he had no skills. They had suggested training to become a mechanic, to work in a garage or at a dealer’s; he presented well, he could also move into sales. The vision of himself as a salesman, getting commissions on cars, and the maintenance contracts that followed, disgusted him. The alarm clock going off just for him was never going to happen: office hours to stick to, suit and tie, thirty-nine-hour weeks, he’d rather die. An unthinkable nightmare. He’d never felt like working, apart from at eighteen, in Luc’s and Françoise’s garage.

  By accepting this undertaker’s job, a salary would keep landing every month, a salary he wouldn’t touch. Violette would do the shopping with hers, the cooking, the cleaning. He’d still have his wife warming his bed, his toast, clean sheets and china; he’d just have to take his routine with him, along with his favorite yogurt brand. And continue his life of an eternal adolescent. As Violette had said, she’d drape curtains over the windows of their house, and he wouldn’t have to attend funerals. He’d set up his Nintendo in a closed room and save princesses, one after the other, to avoid being disturbed by some gravedigger or some lost visitor looking for a tomb.

  And finally, it would be the chance to find out which son of a bitch had relit the water heater, on the night of July 13th–14th, 1993, at the château of Notre-Dame-des-Prés. He’d be on the spot to ask questions, smash a few teeth in, get the silence to talk. He’d do it secretly, so no one would ever come and take back or reclaim the insurance money he’d received, the damages paid for the accidental death of Léonine.

  This obsession with putting any money aside, as his mother had taught him, disgusted him, but it was stronger than him. A genetic illness. A virus, a deadly bacterium. This stinginess was like a congenital defect. A cursed legacy he couldn’t fight. Money put aside to go where? To do what? He had no idea.

  They moved in August of 1997. They did the journey in a van of barely twenty cubic meters; they didn’t possess much.

  The old man from the cemetery wasn’t there anymore. He’d left a note on the table. Philippe pretended not to notice that Violette already knew the house’s every nook and cranny. When they had only just arrived, she disappeared into the garden. She called him, told him to come and see, “Come! Come quickly!” Philippe hadn’t heard that smile in her voice for years. When he found her, crouching at the back of the vegetable garden, picking plump tomatoes, red as a young girl’s cheeks, when he saw her biting into one of them, it reminded him of the sparkle in her eyes at the maternity hospital, on the day of Léonine’s birth. She said to him, “Come and taste.” At first, he recoiled. Then he saw that the garden was too elevated for the cemetery’s waste water to run into it. And yet, with a pained smile, he had to force himself to bite into the tomato she held out to him. Juice trickled over his hands, Violette grabbed them and licked his fingers. He realized right then that he had never stopped loving her, but that it was too late. That you can’t turn back the clock.

  He got his motorbike out of the van and said to Violette, “I’m going for a ride.”

  77.

  It’s better to mourn you than not to have known you.

  October 22nd, 1996

  Most precious Violette,

  It’s already two months since your husband forbade you to return here. I miss you. ‘Say, when are you coming back?’ as Barbara sings.

  This morning I listened to some Barbara, and it’s amazing how perfectly her voice goes with autumn, the smell of wet earth, not the sort roots grow in, but that they gently sleep in to return stronger, preparing to draw on that strength in winter. Autumn is a lullaby for the life that will return. All those leaves changing color, it’s like some haute couture fashion show, just like the notes in Barbara’s voice are. Personally, Barbara amuses me. When you really listen to her, you can hear that, for her, nothing is that serious, despite its seriousness. I could have fallen madly in love with her, especially if she’d been a man. What can I say, like her, ‘I don’t have the virtue of sailors’ wives.’

  Thanks to this late season being mild, and no frost yet, I’ve actually just picked the last tomatoes, peppers, and zucchini. All Saints’ Day approaches, it’s like an invisible line: once it’s over, no more summer vegetables. My lettuces are still as fine, in a month’s time, there’ll only be my sugarloaf chicory left. The cabbages are emerging from the soil. While awaiting the first frosts, I’ve already turned over some beds, which I’ve covered in manure—where we picked the potatoes and onions together last August. My farming friend brought me five hundred kilos of shit, which I stored under the tarpaulin beside the shed. I cover it bec
ause, if it rains, the best of the manure gets washed away, leaving just the straw. It stinks a bit, but not too badly (it’s always better than those ghastly chemical fertilizers). I don’t think I’m bothering my closest neighbors. Speaking of whom, Edouard Chazel (1910–1996) was buried three days ago—died in his sleep. Sometimes I wonder what one can see at night to want to die of it.

  I heard about Geneviève Magnan, a very sad end. I think it’s best to forget, Violette. I think you need to keep going and stop trying to find out how, why, who. The past isn’t as fertile as the shit I spread on the ground. It’s more like quicklime. That poison that burns stumps. Yes, Violette, the past poisons the now. Forever turning things over means dying a little.

  Last month, I started pruning the old rosebushes. The weather has been too nice for mushrooms. Usually, at the end of summer, if there have been two or three storms with lots of rain, the chanterelles appear seven days later. Yesterday, I went into the woods, that secret spot where I usually find plenty of them, and I returned home like a Parisian, almost empty-handed. Just three chanterelles taunting me at the bottom of the basket. Like a litter of maggots, they were. I still ate them in an omelette. Serves them right! Last week, I saw the mayor, and spoke to him about you, highly recommended you. He wants to meet you and isn’t against the idea of you replacing me. I warned him that you wouldn’t be alone, that you had a husband. At first, he grimaced, because it means an extra salary, but since there used to be four gravediggers, and now there are only three, as a couple you should come within budget. So, if I were you, I wouldn’t hang around. Before some person comes begging to him—there’s always a nephew, cousin, neighbor after a municipal position. Admittedly, people aren’t exactly lining up to become cemetery keepers, but all the same, let’s not be complacent! It’s out of the question that I leave my cats and my garden to anyone other than you!