by Michel Bussi
He reads the words, again and again. Who could have written that?
The writing looks clumsy, hasty. The vandal must have taken advantage of him falling asleep to carve this morbid threat in his paint box. It wouldn’t have been difficult. He often falls asleep in the field, by his canvases, when Fanette isn’t around to wake him up. But what could it mean? Who could have written those words? And does he have to take them seriously?
James studies the curtain of poplars that closes off the sweep of the meadow. The letters seem to be inscribed on his brain, as if engraved on the tender flesh of his forehead: She’s mine, here, now and for ever. Another question troubles him now, an obsessive question that worries him even more than the desire to know who supplied the threat. His hands are shaking. He wouldn’t be able to hold a brush, a knife, anything at all.
She’s mine, here, now and for ever.
The seven words go round and round in his mind like some infernal merry-go-round.
Who is the threat addressed to?
He studies his surroundings as if a monster were about to emerge from the ears of wheat.
Who is in danger here?
Fanette, or him?
28
At last I pass through the gate to the mill. I feel as if my knees are about to buckle. My right arm too, from resting on the damned cane. Neptune trots by my side. For once he waits for me.
Good dog.
I take out my keys.
I think briefly of Patricia Morval. I wonder how she is taking my revelations about her husband’s murder. Has she been able to resist the temptation to call the police? Even if it’s too late, far too late to save anyone… The trap has already closed. No policeman can do anything now.
As for me, what would I do in her place?
I look up. I spot young Fanette in the distance, running through the field and passing the iron bridge. Her American is still in the middle of the wheat. He’s bound to have told her scary stories about my mill, about the pair of ogres, the nasty owners who didn’t like Monet and wanted to cut down the poplars, tidy up the haystacks, allow the water-lily pond to dry up and build a starch factory in the meadow… The usual nonsense. The idiot! At his age, frightening children with such stories…
He’s there every day, that American painter, that James whose surname no one knows. He stands there each day in the same place, facing the mill. He could have been standing there forever, you might say. As if he, too, were part of the scenery. As if an artist God had painted him in turn. Had painted all of us. Until he felt like erasing everything. A dab of the brush and pffft, we’re gone!
James will watch Fanette leaving, as he does every day, then he’ll go to sleep in the field until tomorrow.
Good night, James.
29
Fanette goes home again. She runs. What she loves is when the lights in the streets of Giverny seem to come on as she passes.
It’s magic!
But it’s still too early for that today. The sun has barely started to hide itself. Fanette lives in a little house that is beginning to fall apart on the Rue du Château d’Eau. She doesn’t care, she doesn’t complain, she is well aware that her mother does what she can. She cleans the houses of all the well-to-do people in the village, from dawn till dusk.
Just living here, in the middle of the village, a hundred yards from Monet’s garden, even in a rotten house—what more could she have hoped for?
Her mother welcomes her from behind the kitchen work surface, a simple wooden plank set on piles of bricks. She smiles wearily.
“It’s late, Fanette. You know very well that I don’t like you hanging around outside in the evening. Particularly at the moment, with that crime that happened a few days ago, and the murderer hasn’t been found…”
My mother always has that sad, tired look on her face. She always wears that ugly blue smock and she’s always peeling vegetables, cooking soups that last a whole week, saying that I don’t help her enough, that at my age I should… If I show her my painting, then perhaps…
“I’ve finished it, Mom.”
Fanette lifts her painting of the Moulin des Chennevières level with the work surface.
“Later. My hands are dirty. Put it over there.”
As usual…
“I’m going to paint another one anyway. A Water Lilies. James told me that—”
“Who’s this James?”
“The American painter, Mom, I’ve told you before.”
“No…”
The carrot peelings rain down into a stoneware bowl.
“I did!”
I did I did I did I did. I swear! You’re doing this on purpose, Mom.
“I don’t want you hanging about with strangers, Fanette! Do you hear me? Just because I’m bringing you up on my own doesn’t mean you have to spend all your time outside. And don’t sit there like a lump: pick up a knife. If I have to do the cooking all by myself I’ll be here for an hour!”
“Our teacher told us about a competition, Mom. A painting competition.”
It’s our teacher! She can’t say anything. And anyway, she isn’t saying anything, she’s just looking at her turnip.
Fanette stands up very straight and goes on:
“James told me that… well, everyone says I can win it. That I have a good chance, if I work hard.”
“What would you win?”
“Lessons at an art school, in New York…”
“What?”
The turnip has been stabbed right through the heart. It isn’t going to recover…
“Tell me again, Fanette, what is this competition?”
“Or maybe Tokyo. Saint Petersburg. Canberra.”
I’m sure she doesn’t even know where that is, but it frightens her anyway…
“You also win dollars… Lots of them!”
Mom sighs. She decapitates a second turnip.
“If your teacher keeps on filling your head with such ideas, I’m going to have a word with her.”
I don’t care, I’ll enter the competition anyway…
“And I’d also like to have a word with this James of yours.”
Fanette’s mother energetically slides vegetables from the work bench to the sink. The carrots and turnips plunge into the water, splashing her blue smock. She bends down to lift a bag of potatoes onto the plank.
She isn’t even asking me to help her. That’s not a good sign. She’s babbling words that I don’t understand. I’ll have to ask her to repeat them.
“Are you going to leave me, Fanette? Is that it?”
And so it begins…
I’m exploding! I’m exploding inside my head, but no one can see it. No one but me. Mom, I want to do the washing up. I want to set the table. I want to wipe it down with a sponge. I want to do the dusting. I want to go and get the broom, use it, put it away. I want to do all the things that a little girl should do, I want to do everything, without complaining, without crying. On condition that I’m allowed to paint. I just want to be allowed to paint.
Is that too much to ask?
Mom is still eyeing me suspiciously. She’s never happy when I don’t do anything and she always looks at me strangely when I do too much. I think it’s New York that she can’t get her head around, and the other cities too, especially when I added Japan, Russia, Australia, all at the same time!
“Three weeks of art school, Mom? Three weeks isn’t a long time. It’s nothing.”
She looks at me as if I am insane.
Since we finished eating she hasn’t said a word. She’s ruminating. It’s a bad sign when she ruminates. I’ve never seen her ruminate and then say something I liked.
Fanette’s mother gets up just as her daughter is putting away the tea towels, hanging flat on the rail rather than hurled in a pile as usual. She sends the temperature plunging:
“I’ve made my decision, Fanette. I don’t want to hear anything more about painting competitions, American painters, or anything else. It’s all over and done with. I w
ill go and talk to your teacher.”
I don’t say anything. I don’t even cry. I just let the rage boil up inside me. I know why Mom is saying this. She’s said it a thousand times.
The old refrain. On a loop, recited by heart.
The song of lamentation.
“Little daughter of mine, I don’t want you to waste your life as I did. When I was your age I, too, believed all those stories. I, too, had dreams. I, too, was pretty and men made promises to me.
“But look! Look at me today!
“Look at the holes in the roof, the mildewed walls, the damp, the stench; remember the cold whistling through the windows this winter; look at my hands, my poor hands, the most elegant thing I possessed, fairy hands, how many times did I hear that, Fanette, when I was your age, that I had fairy hands. Fairy hands that now spend their time washing other people’s toilets.
“Don’t be taken in as I was, Fanette. I won’t let them do it. Don’t trust anyone other than me, Fanette. Not your James, not your teacher, nor anyone else.”
OK, Mom. I will listen to you. I want to trust you.
But in that case, Mom, you’ll have to tell me everything. Everything. Even the things we never talk about. The things we’re not allowed to say!
I’ll scratch your back, you scratch mine.
Fanette takes a sponge and spends a long time cleaning the gray tile, the one on which her mother writes her list of vegetables.
She waits awhile for it to dry, then picks up the white chalk. She knows her mother is watching over her shoulder. She writes, in delicate round handwriting. The handwriting of a teacher.
Who is my father?
Then, just underneath:
Who?
She hears her mother crying behind her.
Why did he leave?
Why did we not follow him?
There is still some room at the bottom of the tile. The white chalk squeaks.
Who?
Who?
Who?
Who?
Fanette turns over her painting, her “witch’s mill.” She sets it on a chair, then without saying a word she goes to her room. She hears her mother weeping down below. As she always does.
Weeping isn’t an answer, Mom.
Fanette knows that tomorrow the whole thing will have blown over, that they won’t mention any of this again, and that her mother will have wiped the slate clean.
It’s late now.
Probably nearly midnight. Mom must have been asleep for a while—she starts cleaning other people’s houses very early in the morning. Often she has already left and come back by the time I get up.
My bedroom window looks out onto the Rue du Château d’Eau. The street is on a steep slope; even from the first floor you’re barely more than three feet from the ground. I could jump, if I wanted to. Often in the evening, from my window, I talk to Vincent. Vincent hangs about in the streets every evening. His parents don’t care. Paul is never allowed out in the evenings.
Fanette weeps.
Vincent looks at me without much of a clue about what to do. I’d rather Paul were here. Paul understands me. Paul knows how to talk to me. Vincent just listens, that’s all. It’s all he knows how to do.
I talk to him about my father. I only know that my mother fell pregnant when she was very young. Sometimes I think I’m the daughter of a painter, an American painter, that the only thing he left me with was his talent; that Mom posed naked for him outside, surrounded by nature, and she was beautiful, Mom was very, very beautiful—there are photographs of her downstairs in an album. And of me too, as a baby. But none of my father.
Vincent listens. He takes the hand that Fanette dangles down the wall and grips it tightly.
I go on talking. I tell him I think my father and mother were madly in love with each other, completely head over heels, and that they were both beautiful. Then my father left to go somewhere else and my mother couldn’t stop him. Perhaps Mom didn’t know that she was pregnant? Perhaps Mom didn’t even know my father’s name. Perhaps she simply loved him too much to hold him back; my father was someone good, someone faithful, perhaps he would have stayed and brought me up if he had known I existed, but Mom loved him too much to put him in a cage by telling him.
It’s complicated in my head, but that’s the only way it could be, Vincent, don’t you think? Otherwise, where would I have got this mad desire to paint? This desire to fly away? Who else would have given me these things, these dreams that fill my head?
Vincent grips Fanette’s hand. He grips it too hard. The horrible bracelet he always wears around his wrist digs into the little girl’s flesh, as if to imprint there the first name engraved on the bracelet.
On other evenings, I sometimes study the clouds hiding the moon and tell myself that my father must be one of those rich bastards my mom cleans for. That I bump into him on the Rue Claude Monet, and I don’t know he’s my father, but he knows. He’s just a big fat pig who slept with my mother, who forced her to do disgusting things. Perhaps he even slips Mom some cash from time to time. Sometimes, when I see men in the street giving me sidelong glances it drives me mad, it makes me want to vomit. It’s horrible. But I don’t tell Vincent any of that.
Tonight, the clouds are leaving the moon in peace.
“My father was someone who was just passing through,” says Fanette.
“Don’t worry, Fanette,” says Vincent. “I’m here.”
“Someone passing through. I’m like him. I have to leave, I have to fly away.”
Vincent grips her hand even more tightly than before.
“I’m here, Fanette. I’m here…”
Not far away, in the Rue du Château d’Eau, Neptune is chasing moths.
DAY EIGHT
May 20, 2010
(Vernon Police Station)
Acrimony
30
Inspector Laurenç Sérénac is helpless with laughter. From time to time, through the window, he glances discreetly at the largest office in Vernon police station, Room 101, the one used most often for interrogations. Jacques Dupain is sitting with his back to him, tapping impatiently on the arm of his chair. Sérénac tiptoes into the corridor and whispers conspiratorially to Sylvio Bénavides:
“We’ll let him stew awhile longer…”
He tugs his deputy by the sleeve.
“What I’m most proud of,” he says, “is the way I’ve set the scene. Come and have a look, Sylvio.”
They walk down the corridor, heading for the interrogation room.
“How many are there, Sylvio?”
Bénavides can’t help smiling.
“A hundred and seventy-one pairs! Maury brought in three more a quarter of an hour ago.”
In the room where Jacques Dupain is waiting, the policemen have stored all the pairs of boots collected in the village of Giverny since the previous day. They have been placed in every corner of the room, on the shelves and on the tables, on the windowsills, on the chairs, piled on the ground or balancing on top of each other. They come in all colors, from fluorescent yellow to fire-station red, although the classic khaki green predominates. The boots are sorted according to wear, size, and make, and each pair bears a small cardboard tag detailing the name of its owner.
Sérénac doesn’t conceal his jubilation.
“You’ve taken a photograph, Sylvio, I hope. I love this kind of madness! There’s nothing better to put a client in the right mood. It looks like a work of contemporary art. With those seventeen barbecues in your garden, you should appreciate a collection like this.”
“Yes,” says Inspector Bénavides, not bothering to look up. “It’s amazing, from an aesthetic point of view. A first. You could produce an exhibition. On the other hand—”
“You’re too serious, Sylvio,” Sérénac interrupts him.
“I know.”
Bénavides studies some sheets of paper and puts them in order.
“I’m sorry, I must be too much of a policeman. Are you interested in the inq
uiry, boss?”
“You have no sense of humor this morning.”
“To tell you the truth, I barely slept last night. Apparently I was taking up too much room in the bed, according to Béatrice. I should add that she’s had to sleep on her back for the last three months. As it was, I ended up on the sofa.”
Sérénac pats him on the shoulder.
“Come on, it’ll all be over in a week and you’ll be a dad. And then neither of you will be able to sleep. Do you want a coffee? We can have a catch-up in the common room.”
“A tea.”
“Of course, I’m an idiot. No sugar. You still haven’t decided to go for first names?”
“I’ll think about it. I can assure you, Chief, I’m really working on it.”
Sérénac laughs uproariously.
“I like you, Sylvio. And what’s more, you—just you—hunt down more information than a whole station of investigators in the Tarn!”
“You don’t know how right you are. I worked all night again.”
“On your sofa? While your wife was snoring away on her back?”
“Yes.”
Bénavides grins. The two policemen go up three steps and then enter a large box room, the hundred square feet of which are cluttered with an assortment of furniture: two tired sofas covered in orange fabric with a long fringe, a lilac armchair, and a Formica table laid with a cafetière, mismatched cups, and some rusty spoons. A feeble lightbulb hangs from the ceiling, surrounded by a scorched cylindrical red cardboard shade. Sylvio slumps into the lilac armchair while Laurenç makes the hot drinks.
“Right, Chief,” Sylvio begins, “shall we start with the exhibition, since you seem to be so fond of it?”
Bénavides consults his notes.
“We have a hundred and seventy-one pairs of boots, ranging from three and a half to size thirteen. We didn’t keep any that were smaller than three and a half. From the ones brought in, we have identified fifteen fishermen and twenty-one huntsmen, with permits. Including Jacques Dupain. We also have around thirty licensed hikers. However, as you already know, Chief, none of the hundred and seventy-one pairs has a sole that matches the plaster cast Maury made of the print near Jérôme Morval’s body.”