Fresh Water for Flowers

by Valérie Perrin

The following morning, after having his breakfast, he had set off again on his bike, but only for a few hours. Later, he had admitted to me that, during those four days away, he had gone to Epinal to speak to Edith Croquevieille.

  We had been living here for five months, and I hadn’t returned to Geneviève Magnan’s to question Fontanel, or to the restaurant where Swan Letellier worked. I hadn’t tried to find out where the two supervisors lived so as to speak to them. The director must have come out of prison—she had only got a year without remission. I had never passed in front of the château again. I no longer heard Léonine’s voice asking me why everything had burned down that night. Sasha hadn’t been wrong: this place was restoring me.

  I had immediately found my bearings in this cemetery, in the house, in the garden. I liked the company of the gravediggers, the Lucchini brothers, and the cats, who came increasingly often for a coffee on the one hand, a saucer of milk on the other, in my kitchen, when my husband wasn’t there. When Philippe Toussaint’s motorbike was parked outside the road-side door, they never came in. There was no friendliness between them, just hello and goodbye. The men from the cemetery and Philippe Toussaint had no interest in each other. As for the cats, they avoided him like the plague.

  Only the mayor, who visited us once a month, didn’t care whether Philippe Toussaint was there or not; it was always me that he addressed. He seemed to be satisfied with “our” work. On November 1st, 1997, having seen the pine trees I had planted, when he was paying his respects at his family tomb, he had asked me to grow and sell a few potted plants in the cemetery, as a sideline, and I had accepted.

  The first funeral I had attended as cemetery keeper had been in September of 1997. From that day on, I started recording what was said, describing those present, the flowers, the color of the coffin, the tributes inscribed on the funerary plaques, the weather, the poems or songs chosen, whether a cat or a bird had approached the tomb. I had immediately felt the necessity to leave some trace of those last moments, so that nothing got forgotten. For all those who weren’t able to attend the ceremony due to pain, grief, distance, rejection, or exclusion, someone would be there to say, to testify, to tell, to report. As I wished had been done for the funeral of my daughter. My daughter. My great love. Had I abandoned you?

  Sitting on the edge of the bath, with the scrap of paper tablecloth in my hands, their names fading before my eyes, I felt an irrepressible urge to do like Philippe Toussaint, to leave for a few hours. Get out of here. Walk somewhere else. See other streets, other faces, window displays of clothes and books. Return to life, to a river. Apart from the shopping I did in the small town center, I hadn’t left the cemetery for five months.

  I went out and along the avenues of the cemetery, looking for Nono so that he could drop me off in Mâcon and pick me up in the late afternoon. He asked me if I had a driving license.

  “Yes.”

  He handed me the keys of the council’s utility vehicle.

  “I’m allowed to drive it?”

  “You’re a council employee. I filled her up this morning. Have a good day.”

  I drove toward Mâcon. Since Stéphanie’s Fiat, I hadn’t touched a steering wheel, felt that kind of freedom. I sang as I drove: “Douce France, cher pays de mon enfance, bercée de tant d’insouciance, je t’ai gardée dans mon coeur.” Why did I sing that? The songs of Charles Trenet, my imaginary uncle, have always been a part of me, like nonexistent memories.

  I parked in the center of town. It must have been around 10 A.M., the shops were open. First, I had a coffee in a bistro, watched the living arriving and leaving, walking on the sidewalks, their cars stopping at the red lights. Living people who weren’t bereaved.

  I crossed the Saint-Laurent bridge, walked along the Saône, and then wandered through the streets. It’s on that day that my winter wardrobe and summer wardrobe first started. I bought myself a gray dress and a pink polo-neck on sale.

  At lunchtime, I wanted to get closer to the restaurant quarter to buy a sandwich. It was cold, but the sky was blue. I felt like having lunch beside the water, throwing my crusts to the ducks. As I thought back to the Siamese cat that had saved my life the evening I’d waited for Swan Letellier, I got lost. I found myself in streets I didn’t recognize. At a crossroads, I thought I knew where I was, but instead of going in the right direction, I moved further away from the town center. The streets were lined with houses and apartment buildings. I looked at the fences, the empty swings, the garden furniture shrouded in plastic because it was January.

  It’s at that moment that I saw it, propped on its stand, one of its wheels attached to a lock. Philippe Toussaint’s motorbike was parked about a hundred meters away from me. My heart started beating as if I were a little girl who didn’t have her parents’ permission to be out of the house. I felt like turning around and running, but something held me back: I wanted to know what he was doing there. When he would leave at about 11 A.M. and return at about 4 P.M., I imagined that he went very far. Sometimes, when he got back, he told me what he had seen. It wasn’t unusual for him to cover more than four hundred kilometers in a day. Looking at his Honda, it struck me that I had only ever seen it parked outside our house. Philippe Toussaint had never suggested taking me somewhere. There had never been two helmets at the house, just his one. And when he changed it, he sold the old one.

  A dog barked behind a fence, I jumped. At the same moment, I glimpsed him through the window of a building fronted by a yellowing lawn, on the other side of the road. He crossed a room on the ground floor and I recognized his silhouette, his bearing, the bomber jacket he was hurriedly putting on, his weasel face, his scrawniness: Swan Letellier. I had pins and needles in my hands, as if I’d held the same position too long. He was inside a small, concrete apartment building with three floors, painted in faded pastels. The old balconies with worn railings were showing their age, and the few empty window boxes still hanging from them appeared to have seen many springs, but few flowers.

  Swan Letellier arrived in the hall, pushed open an aluminum door, and walked along the opposite sidewalk. I followed him until he went into the local bar. He went straight to the back of it. Where Philippe Toussaint was waiting for him. He sat at his table, opposite him. They spoke calmly, like two old acquaintances.

  Philippe Toussaint was piecing together the story, but which one? He was looking for something, someone. Hence that list, always the same one, that he wrote on the back of a bill or a tablecloth, as though to solve a puzzle.

  Through the glass, I could only see his hair. Like that first evening at the Tibourin, when he had his back to me. When, from behind the bar, I had contemplated his blond curls turning from green to red to blue under the revolving lights. The curls had gone a bit white, and the rainbow of his youth had gone out. As had the prism of light through which I admired him. I thought of how, for years now, whenever I looked at him, the weather was always overcast. The pretty girls who were whispering sweet nothings in his ear, as I studied his perfect profile, had disappeared. Must have only been flabby women now in his makeshift beds. The perfume they left on his skin had changed, the refined fragrances had become cheap scents.

  They were alone at the back of the gloomy bistro. They spoke for fifteen minutes, and then Philippe Toussaint suddenly got up to go. I only just had time to dodge into an alley at the side of the bar. He started up his bike and was off.

  Swan Letellier was still inside. He was just finishing his coffee when I approached him. I could see that he didn’t recognize me.

  “What did he want?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Why were you talking to Philippe Toussaint?”

  As soon as he placed me, Letellier’s features hardened. He replied, curtly:

  “He says the kids were asphyxiated by carbon monoxide. That someone would’ve lit a water heater, or some such thing. Your husband’s looking for a culprit who doesn’t exist. If you
want my advice, you’d both be better just moving on.”

  “You can take your advice and shove it.”

  Letellier’s eyes widened. He didn’t dare utter another word. I went out into the street and spewed bile onto the sidewalk, like a drunkard.

  83.

  People have stars that aren’t the same.

  For those who travel, stars are guides, for

  others, they are nothing but little lights.

  Sometimes, I regret having scolded Léonine when she had disobeyed me or thrown a tantrum. I regret having dragged her out of bed to go to school when she would have liked to sleep a little longer. I regret not having known that she would only be passing through . . . I never regret for long. I prefer to conjure up the lovely memories, carry on living with what happiness she left me.”

  “Why didn’t you have other children?”

  “Because I wasn’t a mother anymore, just an orphan. Because I didn’t have the father that went with my other children . . . And also, it’s tough for children to be ‘the others,’ ‘those that came after.’”

  “And now?”

  “Now I’m old.”

  Julien bursts out laughing.

  “Shush!”

  I place my hand over his mouth. He grabs my fingers and kisses them. I’m afraid. Afraid of the mess in my house. Afraid of the car doors that will slam in a few hours’ time. Afraid of heading straight for disaster with this affair that isn’t one.

  Nathan and his cousin, Valentin, are sleeping on the sofa close to us. You can make out their little bodies, top to tail, under the tangled sheets and blankets. Their dark hair on the two white pillows, like a piece of the countryside sticking out, a little path smelling of hazelnut. Running your fingers through a child’s hair is like walking on the dead leaves in a forest at the start of spring.

  Julien, Nathan, and Valentin arrived from Auvergne yesterday evening. During his stay at the Pardons, Nathan had apparently pestered his father, “We’re not going back to Marseilles, we’re going to Violette’s, we’re not going back to Marseilles, we’re going to Violette’s . . . ” Until Julien gave in and drove to the cemetery. They arrived at around 8 P.M., after the gates had been closed. They knocked on the road-side door, but I didn’t hear them. I was in my garden, busy pricking out my last lettuce seedlings. The two boys crept up behind me, “We’re zombies!” Eliane barked and the cats came closer, as if they remembered Nathan.

  Yesterday evening, I wanted to be alone, I felt tired, I wanted to retire early, watch a TV series from my bed. Not speak. Above all, not speak anymore. I did my best not to show them that I didn’t feel like seeing them. I would have liked to be happy about this surprise. But I wasn’t. I thought Nathan was talking too loudly, I thought Julien was too young.

  Julien was waiting for us in the kitchen. Embarrassed, he said to me, “Sorry for turning up on a whim, but my son is in love with you . . . Can we take you out for dinner? . . . I’ve booked my room at Madame Bréant’s.”

  As soon as he opened his mouth, I felt solitude falling off me like a dead skin. His voice seemed to shine on me, as if he had switched on a lamp above my head. Like when a day seems gloomy, and then a leaden sky cracks and the sun appears from nowhere to light up certain parts of the landscape. I wanted them to stay, all three of them.

  No question of going to a restaurant, they would eat at my house. No question of sleeping at Madame Bréant’s, they would sleep here. I made them croque-monsieurs with extra cheese, pasta shells, fried eggs, and a tomato salad. Julien helped me set the table. For dessert, I had some strawberry sorbets in the freezer. Stashing sweets, ice cream, chocolate cakes in my drawers, yogurts in the fridge. The same old habit as taking Nathan’s hand in mine.

  I made Julien drink a lot of white wine so he couldn’t change his mind, so he wouldn’t go to sleep at Madame Bréant’s, but stay here, with me.

  Once I had cleared away the dirty dishes, I made up a bed for the two children on the big sofa, the one I slept on when I visited Sasha. The boys cheered and started jumping on the poor old springs, which squeaked with joy.

  Before going to bed, they begged me to take them around the avenues of the cemetery “to see the ghosts.” They asked me many questions as they read the names on the headstones. They asked me why some tombs had lots of flowers and others didn’t. They read out the dates, told me that most of the dead were really, really old.

  Frightfully disappointed not to have seen a single ghost, they asked me to tell them some “scary stories.” I told them about Diane de Vigneron and Reine Ducha, supposedly glimpsed in the vicinity of the cemetery, at the edge of the road, or in the streets of Brancion-en-Chalon. The children started to blanch, so, to reassure them, I told them that these were just legends, and that, personally, I’d never seen them.

  Julien was waiting for us on a bench in the garden. He was smoking a cigarette beside Eliane, and stroking her, lost in thought. He smiled when the children told him that we hadn’t seen a single ghost, but that some people had already encountered some inside and beside the cemetery. They urged me to show them the images of Diane as a ghost on the old postcards. I convinced them that I had lost them.

  All four of us went inside. The boys checked three times that the doors were double-locked. I left the light on for them in the corridor leading to my room. But one look at Madame Pinto’s dolls, and they requested a night-light each.

  Julien and I went upstairs, avoiding knocking over the dolls. He followed me. At one moment, I stopped. I felt his breath in the nape of my neck, he stroked the small of my back, and whispered, “Hurry up.”

  Barely had we closed the door before the two boys were opening it to come and sleep in my bed. We lay on either side of them until they fell asleep, stroking their heads, and sometimes our hands met, found each other, linked in Nathan’s hair.

  And then we went downstairs to the sofa, to make love. At around 4 A.M., the boys lifted our sheets to curl up with us. We were packed together like sardines. I didn’t sleep a wink as I listened to their breathing, with the rapt attention I gave the Chopin sonatas that Sasha always played.

  At 6 A.M., Julien took me by the hand and we went back up to my room to make love. I never thought I would make love several times with the same man. Only with someone passing through. A stranger. A visitor. A widower. Someone desperate. Just once, to kill time.

  Now we’re whispering, noses in our mugs of coffee. My hands smell of cinnamon and tobacco. My body smells of love, roses, and perspiration. My hair is tangled, my lips chapped. I’m afraid. Later, when Julien leaves, because he will leave, solitude will be back to keep me company, faithful and undying.

  “And you, why didn’t you have other children, after Nathan?”

  “Same thing. Didn’t meet the mother that went with them.”

  “What’s Nathan’s mother like?”

  “In love with another man. She left me for him.”

  “That’s tough.”

  “Oh yes, really tough.”

  “You still love her?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  He gets up and kisses me. I hold my breath. It’s so lovely to be kissed in summertime. I feel clumsy, all fingers and thumbs. I’ve forgotten the moves. One learns how to save lives, but never how to bring one’s own skin, and that of another, back to life.

  “As soon as the children are awake, we’ll be off.”

  “ . . . ”

  “If you’d seen your face, yesterday evening, when we turned up . . . God, I felt bad . . . If Nathan hadn’t been there, I’d have bolted.”

  “It’s because I’m not used to it anymore . . . ”

  “I won’t be back, Violette.”

  “ . . . ”

  “I don’t want to come to have it off with you, once a month, at your cemetery.”

  “ . . . ”

  “You live wi
th dead people, novels, candles, and a few drops of port. You’re right, there’s no place for a man in all that. Let alone a man with a kid.”

  “ . . . ”

  “And also, I can see in your eyes that you don’t believe in our story.”

  “ . . . ”

  “Speak, please. Say something.”

  “You know the two of us can’t last.”

  “Of course, I know it. Well, no, I know nothing. It’s you who knows. Get in touch from time to time. But not too often, or I’ll keep waiting.”

  84.

  Here we are today, at the edge of the void,

  Because we’re searching everywhere

  for the face we have lost.

  IRÈNE FAYOLLE’S JOURNAL

  February 13th, 1999

  I don’t know how Gabriel knew about Paul’s death. I caught sight of him this morning at the St-Pierre cemetery. Standing back, hiding behind another tomb, like a thief.

  My husband was being buried, and me, I only had eyes for Gabriel. Who am I? What kind of monster am I?

  I lowered my eyes to say a silent prayer to Paul, and when I raised them, Gabriel had gone. My eyes searched desperately for him, scoured every corner of the cemetery, in vain.

  I started crying like a “widow.”

  When a woman loses her husband, she’s called a widow. But when a woman loses her lover, what’s she called? A song?

  November 8th, 2000

  I’m selling the rose nursery.

  March 30th, 2001

  This morning, Gabriel phoned me. He calls me about once a month. Every time I answer, he seems surprised to hear my voice. He asks me a few questions: “How are you? What are you doing? What are you wearing? Is your hair tied back? What are you reading at the moment? Been to the movies lately?” He seems to be reassuring himself that I really exist. Or that I still exist.

  April 27th, 2001

  Gabriel came to my place for lunch. He liked my new apartment, told me it was just like me.