Marie-France went out to FNAC and bought all his books.
“I don’t read much usually. And certainly not this sort of thing. I like historical fiction. But I feel that we owe it to him. They said that Le Seuil are bringing out a new compact edition with all his political essays. I think I’ll just read the novels.”
The police interviewed me for hours. I kept breaking down like a child. They poured bottles of Evian down my throat. The gendarme at the typewriter corrected my French. He had to look up how to spell schizophrenia in the dictionary.
Early on the morning of the second day I had a phone call. A very careful English accent puzzled me at first.
“Hello? Is that you? This is Dr Jacques Martel. Your London friends rang me in Paris. The police rang the hospital too. So I’ve come from Sainte-Anne and on behalf of Paul Michel’s father. He’s too ill and senile to understand that his son is dead … I’m at the airport … Don’t worry, I’ll take a taxi. I’m here to help you with the paperwork … Yes … you won’t believe the bureaucracy. And we have to move fairly fast. They’ll release the body at the end of next week.”
“Do you have the necessary authorization?” I gulped helplessly. “They told me I didn’t.”
“I should think I do. I’m Paul Michel’s legal representative. I’ll be with you in an hour or so.”
I sat down beside the phone, my body tingling with shock. There were too many pieces of this story that I had not seen, too many connections that had never been revealed. The man with the wolf’s smile and the sharpened teeth had been the hermit in the cave, warning me of the dangers ahead. I had been watched and guided, every step of the way. I was their Red Cross Knight, sent out to find the soul that was lost. I had never understood the nature and meaning of my task, and now I had been defeated. I was still sitting on the floor beside the phone when I heard Baloo howling at the iron gates. Jacques Martel, in a light suit, his jacket over his arm, his briefcase and traveling bag in the other hand, stood, erect and unflinching as a mountain pine, on the other side of the white bars.
I thrust my face against the cold gate.
“Why didn’t you tell me when we first met?” I was almost shouting.
“I told you all you needed to know.” His manner was cool, utterly assured.
I thought of my Germanist, her mass of curly hair and intense, owl-like gaze. I felt imprisoned by conspiracy.
“Did she know too? Was she in on it? Are you all a part of this?”
Baloo howled at the blue sky.
“Ask her.” Jacques Martel stepped calmly through the gate and the dog began to circle his legs, sniffing.
“Don’t be afraid.” He gave me his traveling bag and took my arm with professional firmness. “I’m here now. I’m here to take care of you.”
I gazed up at him. What happened to the people who were consigned to his care? But it was so easy to silence me, to deflect my hysteria. Marie-France kept saying, you’re ill, you’ve had a terrible shock, you’ve lost your friend. I was taken to the doctor. They gave me tranquilizers and I began to see the bright, cooling world through a blur. I hardly ate. I slept for ten hours a day. Jacques Martel took charge of everything. I remember his hands, white, smooth, untouched by work, taking the fountain pen out of his inside breast pocket, signing all the necessary papers, lifting the phone, filling in the forms. I fought against numbness.
“You must eat. Here’s some vegetable soup. Do try. It’s very nourishing.” Marie-France smothered me with motherly concern. Her husband retired to his newly built furnace and spent the evenings devising ever more elaborate and sinister pizzas with exotic fillings.
The funeral was fixed for the twelfth of October. Jacques Martel decided to bury him with his mother in the village churchyard above the vines near Gaillac, outside Toulouse. We were then confronted by extraordinary administrative questions, Gothic and bizarre. Were we to hire a hearse and drive to Toulouse? Was cremation in Nice a preferable option? So that we could drive him back ourselves, carrying only an urn in the boot of the car? Should we have the body flown in and engage to have the local undertakers meet us at the airport? Jacques Martel studied all the options.
Articles, reviews, retrospectives on his work began to appear in the press. Marie-France defended me against the journalists. Baloo guarded the gates. In any case I had nothing to say. In the evening, six days after his death, I phoned the Germanist at her flat in Maid’s Causeway. I was at a loss and utterly defeated. I couldn’t ask my parents to come. I felt that I had no one left.
“Hello,” she said crisply.
“It’s me.”
She paused. Then she said, “I’ve told your supervisor you’ll be late back and I’ve left a note in College.”
“Oh, thanks.”
She guessed at once what I was unable to ask.
“Do you want me to come?”
I started crying into the mouthpiece of the telephone.
“Don’t cry,” she said, and I could hear the snap of her cigarette lighter close to the phone.
She agreed to abandon Schiller for a week or so and sent a telegram with no information other than her flight number.
BA 604. Arrives Nice 18:30 tomorrow.
I was waiting in the great domed concourse among the dogs and the security guards, still dressed in the same stained T-shirt, jeans and gym shoes I had been wearing when he told me the story of the boy on the beach. I stared at her curls and glasses as she appeared from behind the barrier, as if I was seeing her for the first time.
She arrived, fresh, brisk, knowing, bearing all the chill of England. She kissed me. Then she made a more careful second inspection.
“You look awful,” she said.
“I know.”
“Well, you’ve been through it, I see.” But she didn’t specify what it was that I had so unsuccessfully traversed. She carried her own bag. I was swept out onto the pavement and into the early autumn heat. The light was changing. Now the air was vast, huge, expanding all around us. She summoned a taxi.
“We could go by bus,” I suggested.
“Don’t be ridiculous. You couldn’t stand the journey.”
She was right. I leaned against her all the way back into the city. Jacques Martel was delighted to see her. From then on they took all the decisions together.
It proved to be prohibitively expensive to fly the body back to Toulouse. For some reason a corpse’s ticket costs a good deal more than that of a living person. So we decided to drive in convoy back to Gaillac. His aunt, now eighty, still clear-headed, was his inheritor. She was busy arranging the funeral and had decided that the returning sinner should receive a decent Catholic burial, but with the minimum of expense. She put one announcement in the local papers. But it was in all the national press. The curé had been primed and given strict orders to be exceedingly discreet. Journalists and cameras were banned. She told Jacques Martel that she was very relieved that it had been a road accident and not AIDS. He was righteously furious, but kept his temper on the phone. Madame Legras said that it was no use quarreling with people like his aunt who might be incredibly wealthy, but were still peasants, and who had almost certainly never read any of his books. I didn’t remind her that, until the previous week, she hadn’t either.
It was decided, without any discussion, that I should not be present at the “levée du corps.” The Germanist took me to an exhibition of Picasso’s engravings instead. For the rest of my life I shall remember those elongated satyrs playing Pan pipes, and the evil expressions of the Minotaurs. We didn’t know what to do with the few belongings he had left in the room. I packed up all his things with mine, and took them with me on my journey home.
I hadn’t quite bargained for the fact that we were taking the motorway. In Britain the hearse usually proceeds at a walking pace. But we hurtled through the bright, autumn light down the fast lane. The great jagged red mountains of the Midi rushed past, the pink folds of Mont Ste-Victoire dropped behind us. We sat in a traffic jam ou
tside Aries and I stared at the back of the van in which his coffin was securely wedged. It could have been a police van taking someone to jail, or a bullion haul in disguise. We even paused for lunch at a service station and left Paul Michel quietly parked under the fragrant umbrella pines. We were all very sober, very quiet. The Germanist never let go of my hand. And I was grateful for that.
The journey took us all day. We got to Gaillac just as the light was fading on the hills behind Toulouse. The van disappeared, leaving me with a sinking sensation of panic and loss. As long as I knew he was traveling with us, I was obscurely comforted. Jacques Martel bundled us into the Hôtel des Voyagers, just off the square in Gaillac.
“Where will they put him?” I demanded.
“In the church.”
“With no one there? In the dark?”
Jacques Martel stared at me.
“There are always candles,” he said.
I wanted to spend the night in the church. Jacques Martel shrugged his shoulders and walked out of our room. The Germanist sat smoking, cross-legged on our bed.
“I wouldn’t advise it,” she said. “You’ll get too tired and upset. And we have to get our flowers first thing in the morning. Then we can take them to the church and wait if you like. But you ought to pay your respects to the aunt. And you want to be on form for that. Also, I’ve got something to show you.”
I sat disconsolate, my head in my hands. Then I asked her, “What have you got to show me?”
She had written a letter to Paul Michel which she proposed to cellotape to the coffin along with our roses.
“They usually take all the flowers off and then put them on the grave afterwards. So we’ve just got to insist that they bury the roses. That’s why you’ve got to charm the wicked aunt. She has every reason to be grateful to you after all …” She had it all planned.
The letter was already sealed.
“Here you are. Here’s a copy. It’s from you. So it’s important that you know what you’ve said.”
“But I didn’t write it.”
“Doesn’t matter. Pretend you did. It will say what you wanted to say to him.”
I read the letter.
Cher Maître,
I was your reader too. He was not your only reader. You had no right to abandon me. Now you leave me in the same chasm which you faced when you lost the reader you loved best of all. You were privileged, spoiled; not every writer knows that his reader is there. Your writing is a hand stretched out in the dark, into an unknowing void. Most writers have no more than that. And yet how can I reproach you? You still wrote for me.
You gave me what every writer gives the readers he loves—trouble and pleasure. There were always two dimensions to our friendship. We knew one another, played together, talked together, ate together. It was painfully hard to leave you. What I miss most are your hands and your voice. So often we would be watching something else and discussing what we saw. I loved that; your cold gaze upon the world. But the more intimate relationship we had was the one you constructed when you were writing for me. I followed you, across page after page after page. I wrote back in the margins of your books, on the flyleaf, on the title page. You were never alone, never forgotten, never abandoned. I was here, reading, waiting.
This is my first and last letter to you. But I will never abandon you. I will go on being your reader. I will go on remembering you. I will go on writing within the original shapes you made for me. You said that the love between a writer and a reader is never celebrated, can never be proven to exist. That’s not true. I came back to find you. And when I had found you I never gave you up. Nor will I do so now. You asked me what I feared most. I never feared losing you. Because I will never let you go. You will always have all my attention, all my love. Je te donne ma parole. I give you my word.
“Well?”
Behind her glasses she was no longer quite so confident that she had done the right thing. But she had written the truth. It was so simply told. I had loved him terribly. And now he was dead.
“He’ll never read this. He’s dead. He’s dead. He’s dead.”
She rocked me in her arms for a while. Then she said fiercely, “How do you know he’ll never read it?”
There was no answer to that.
Next morning she went out with her credit card and bought 480 francs worth of roses. The letter was wound round the stalks, fastened with string and hidden inside a huge mass of accompanying foliage. Jacques Martel drove us out to the house. Suddenly I knew that I would recognize the gates, the long lines of poplars, already turning; that I would remember the house with its narrow brickwork and symmetrical row of lozenge windows under the receding dogtooth of the corniche, beneath gutterless eaves. I would already know the long lines of vines and their changing colors. His memories had become mine. I would look up to the red walls of the cemetery on the hill, recognize the worn grey cross on the family mausoleum, occupying the highest point in the graveyard. I would know the place to which we were carrying him to lie down at last and forever alongside his mother and the man whose name he bore, the man he had called grandfather, Jean-Baptiste Michel.
His aunt was small, bent double with rheumatism, and very suspicious. She stood among the remains of the Michel family inheritance, huge old sideboards, cupboards, dressers, a cheap battered armchair with hideous nylon cushions, poised before the vast opaque screen of the television. Her face was shut and mean. She wore black. She stared up at us for longer than anyone could possibly consider polite. Then she shook my hand grudgingly and did not ask us to sit down. Instead she rummaged for her coat, her keys. Every door was carefully locked before we left the house by the back gate and took the path across the fields to the church. I followed Paul Michel back into the past. I retraced his steps.
It was a clear, fresh day with a bright wind. The tiny church was small and dark, filled with flowers. We were nearly an hour in advance of the funeral, but the undertakers were already there, slick as gangsters in dark glasses and black gloves. So were many cars, almost all of them with Paris registration plates. I shook hands with people I had never seen before. They were all young. I had not even taken in the coffin before we entered the church. It was a rich walnut brown, the color of his sunburn, with ornate, silver handles. The thing was covered in flowers.
The Germanist went into action. She took one careful measure of the aunt then bypassed her completely and addressed herself solely to the undertakers. I saw her whispering to the ghoul in charge. He gathered up the roses, bowed to the altar with the flowers in his arms, and then quietly rearranged the entire coffin so that the roses covered the plaque across Paul Michel’s chest. I had great difficulty imagining him inside. It was as if he had been locked up permanently indoors.
She slid back into the pew beside me and put her mouth to my ear. The church around her was filling up.
“It’s OK. I’ve fixed it. They’ll bury the roses with him. I gave them 200 francs.”
She was ingenious, but without shame.
I can’t remember much about the service. I couldn’t follow what the priest said. He talked about the family and how creative Paul Michel had been and listed his numerous services to French culture. He talked about his tragically early death and never mentioned the fact that he was homosexual or that he had been locked up in an asylum. His version of Paul Michel sounded unlikely and inconsistent. But I was too distressed to care. I did notice, however, the words of the hymn he had chosen.
Et tous ceux qui demeurent dans l’angoisse
ou déprimés, accablés par leurs fautes,
Le Seigneur les guérit, leur donne vie,
leur envoie son pardon et sa parole.
And I clutched at this because it was the last promise that the Germanist had made to him. I give you my word. When the moment came to say goodbye and each person present scattered holy water on the flowers covering his coffin, I realized that there were more people waiting outside the church than could enter in. The march past was wi
thout end. There were some couples, women and men together, but most of them were men.
We climbed the hill to the graveyard, the entire procession disorganized, colorful, chaotic. I was crying silently; a huge, formless grief wrapped its arms about me. The Germanist held me fiercely round the waist, but her eyes never left the roses, bobbing ahead on the shoulders of six gasping undertakers, who were finding the hill harder to negotiate than they had expected. We couldn’t all fit into the graveyard. I looked back. In the October morning sun, stretching back down the hill, was a long, straggling line of pilgrims, following Paul Michel.
If you come from a wealthy family you are not buried in earth. A huge granite slab had been pried off the family vault. He was to be encased forever in concrete. They rest one coffin on top of another. Eventually they rot down. I clutched her hand. Unfortunately we were at the head of the procession and could see perfectly well what was happening. The priest began the chant. His words vanished into the wind. Every so often all the people around me intoned, “Pour toi, Seigneur …” I was aware of the old aunt’s tuneless whistle. But they all seemed to know what to sing. The coffin rocked against the mossy concrete walls with a grating clank as the ropes were lowered. The men had very little space in which to move. The graves pressed against one another. I could see a dark shape, sinister, fresh, waiting at the bottom. They were there, one on top of the other, his mother, his grandfather, his whispering grandmother, and Paul Michel.
“There’s no grave, no real grave, no earth,” I hissed, desperate.
“It’s OK,” she said quietly. “He liked cities. It’s just more concrete. And the roses will last longer.”
He was right about her intensity, her sense of purpose and her complete fearlessness. I realized then why he had been so drawn to the boy on the beach. They were two of a kind, watching the world with cold eyes.
We walked back to the house through a multitude of somber, concentrated disciples. A gang of smokers cowered under the cemetery wall. Jacques Martel had the aunt on his arm and the priest marched before us. The undertakers, like Caesar’s soldiers, stood guard around the tomb. The throng parted before us. I saw nothing but a blur of faces. We were treated as family. The aunt pulled Jacques’ face down towards her.
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