by Michel Bussi
After my gaze has rested on each drawing exhibited, according to the ritual of a mad old woman, which is what I have been for over fifty years, I always stop in front of The Kiss. I’m not talking about the sequined embrace by Klimt, of course, that poster for some heady perfume or other. No. I’m talking about Steinlen’s Kiss.
It’s a simple charcoal sketch: a man, seen from behind, wearing tight clothes, his muscles protruding, pressing against a woman in a state of abandon. She is standing on tiptoe, her face resting against the man’s shoulder, her shy arm not daring to wrap itself around his waist.
He wants her. She is reeling, unable to resist him.
The lovers are indifferent to the deep shadows that threaten in the background.
It’s Steinlen’s finest drawing. Believe me. It’s the real masterpiece of Vernon Museum.
65
In Rue Claude Monet, school is out and the Tiger Triumph is creating a sensation among the pupils. Children slow down as they see the motorcycle and turn their heads, impressed. They are all aged between five and twelve. That’s what Laurenç Sérénac would say. He can’t help thinking of Sylvio Bénavides’s hypothesis, the idea that a child is in danger. The faces pass before him. About ten, maybe twenty. Laughing. Carefree. Which one should he question? Which of the boys, which of the girls? To ask them what? To uncover a well-kept family secret? To try to find a resemblance, something in common with Jérôme Morval? Where to begin?
Inspector Sérénac parks his Tiger Triumph T100 under the shadiest lime tree. Neptune is sleeping at the foot of the tree, as if guarding it. He gets up lazily to demand some stroking, which the inspector does not withhold.
When Laurenç Sérénac walks into the classroom, Stéphanie has her back to him. She is busy putting away some sheets of paper in wooden boxes. Sérénac doesn’t say anything. He hesitates. His breathing quickens. Has she heard him? Is she pretending to be indifferent? He walks forward a little more and rests his hands on the teacher’s hips.
Stéphanie shivers. She says nothing. She doesn’t turn around. She doesn’t need to, she has recognized him.
The sound of the engine?
Or his scent?
She rests her hands flat on the wooden desk in front of her. The inspector’s hands grip the teacher’s thin waist. His body comes closer still, until he can hear the young woman’s breathing. He can’t take his eyes off the fine drops of sweat pearling between her ear and her neck.
His hands rise, one slides along her curved back, while the other ventures onto Stéphanie’s belly as her breathing quickens. His hands rise still farther, almost meeting as they come to rest on the young woman’s breasts. Fingers tease the plunging shapes for several moments, as if trying to memorize the swell of them, before holding them firmly.
Laurenç presses his face against the teacher’s damp profile. A dewy ear, the moist nape of her neck. Now they are one. The inspector’s jeans press against Stéphanie’s linen dress. Tense desire. She can’t breathe.
They stay like that for a long time. Only the hands are alive; without even bothering to slip between fabric and skin, they knead the breasts.
Stéphanie tilts her head back, just a little, just enough for Laurenç to slide forward to her mouth. She murmurs, breathing more than speaking.
“I’m free, Laurenç. I’m free. Take me away.”
The inspector’s hands slowly come back down, open and spread, so as not to miss a single inch of skin. They reach her waist but don’t stop there, continuing in their descent.
For a moment, just a moment, Laurenç’s body pulls away from Stéphanie’s. Just long enough for his two greedy hands to grip the hem of her dress and pull it up to her waist, before his pelvis crushes the teacher’s loins again, trapping the crumpled fabric and leaving Laurenç’s hands free to stroke her bare thighs, to part them gently.
“Take me away, Laurenç,” Stéphanie’s voice murmurs again. “I’m free. Take me away.”
“Well?” Paul asks Fanette. “What did she say to you?”
Fanette closes the classroom door behind her. Her face is pale. Paul suspects that this doesn’t bode well.
“Hang on, that didn’t take long. What did Miss say to you? Did she believe you about James? She didn’t argue with you, at least?”
No answer.
Paul has never seen such distress on Fanette’s face. Suddenly, without even saying a word, Fanette runs away. Neptune gets up abruptly from under his lime tree and gallops along beside her.
Paul wonders whether he should do the same. He calls out to Fanette before she disappears.
“Did you talk to her?”
“Nooooo…”
The only word uttered by the girl, in a torrent of tears that would be enough to flood the slope of Rue Blanche Hoschedé-Monet.
66
The local bus drops Chief Inspector Laurentin in the main square of Lyons-la-Forêt. During the journey, the vehicle’s windshield allowed him a panoramic view of the spellbinding beech grove that surrounds the town, then the row of half-timbered Norman houses that lends it a nostalgic air of the last century, as if the village has been preserved in that state solely as a setting for adaptations of Maupassant’s short stories or the novels of Flaubert.
Chief Inspector Laurentin’s eye settles for a moment on the square’s fountain, which is just beside the imposing market halls. The pretty stone fountain doesn’t look its age, and with good reason: it was only built some twenty years ago, for Chabrol’s film about Emma Bovary.
Fakery! A trick.
But the chief inspector can’t help making the connection between the tragic fate of Emma Bovary, that feeling of ordinary boredom, that impression of another possible life that you have been refused, and all the information he has been collecting on Stéphanie Dupain over the past few days. Leaving the central square of the village, Chief Inspector Laurentin muses to himself that such a comparison is ludicrous, he’s too old to be muddling up romantic story lines. Chief Inspector Laurentin strides along. The nursing home, Les Jardins, is situated slightly above Lyons, up a steep slope, on the edge of a forest.
The pastel-blue linoleum of the foyer shines as if it’s cleaned every hour. Most of the pensioners spend the late afternoon, and probably the rest of their time, in a large room to the left of it. A huge plasma screen seems to be permanently switched on in front of around thirty motionless residents. Sleeping. Lost in thought. The most active limply chew the biscuits they were served as a snack an hour ago, as they await their evening meal. In praise of slow.
A stout nurse crosses the room toward him with the supple step of a manager in a shop full of china.
“May I help you?”
“Chief Inspector Laurentin. I called this morning. I would like to meet Louise Rosalba.”
The nurse smiles. A little gold badge indicates her first name: Sophie.
“Yes, I remember. Louise Rosalba has been informed. She’s waiting for you. Louise has had a lot of trouble expressing herself over the past few years, but don’t worry, she still has all her wits about her, and understands perfectly what she’s being asked. Room 117. Be gentle with her, Chief Inspector. Louise is a hundred and two, and she hasn’t had any visitors in a long while.”
Laurentin pushes open the door of Room 117. Louise Rosalba is sitting in profile, observing the parking lot just beneath her window. An Audi 80 parks, and a couple gets out. The woman is carrying a bouquet of flowers and two young children kick up a rumpus as she closes the door. The chief inspector has a sense that the flow of visits to the other residents gives a rhythm to the daily life of this hundred-year-old woman.
“Louise Rosalba?”
The old woman turns her wrinkled face toward him. Laurentin smiles.
“I’m Chief Inspector Laurentin. Sophie, the nurse, told you I was coming this morning? I’m sorry, but I’ve come to ask you about your memories. Some very old memories that probably aren’t particularly pleasant. I want to talk to you about the death of your son,
Albert. In 1937…”
Lacy hands tremble amid the folds of the blanket on her knees. Her bright eyes well up. Louise opens her mouth, but no sound emerges.
There is no crucifix on the walls, no photographs of children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren in christening gowns or First Communion dresses; no wedding pictures. The bare walls are simply decorated with a pretty reproduction of a painting by Monet, Woman with a Parasol: an elegant mother walking with her child in a field that blazes with the red of a sea of poppies, somewhere near Argenteuil.
“I have some specific questions to ask you,” Chief Inspector Laurentin goes on. “You don’t need to move. I’ll try to help you remember.”
He leans forward and takes from his bag a black-and-white school photograph: Giverny School: 1936–37.
He sets the picture down on Louise’s knees. She seems to be fascinated by it.
“Is that Albert?” the policeman asks, pointing to the boy in the second row. “Is that him?”
Louise nods. A few tears drip onto the photograph, as if it had started raining on the school playground, but the children, docile and well-behaved, didn’t dare to bat an eyelash but sat patiently in front of the photographer’s lens.
“You never believed it was an accident, is that right?”
“N… no,” Louise manages to say.
She gulps for a moment.
“He wasn’t… alone. Not alone. By the… the riv… by the river.”
Laurentin tries to control his agitation. He thinks again of the nurse’s advice. Be gentle with Louise.
“Do you know who was with your son?”
Louise nods gently. The policeman’s voice becomes more hesitant. An extreme tension fills the air of the tiny room, as if opening up those ancient memories was releasing an inflammable gas that could ignite at the slightest faux pas.
“It was… was it this person, the one who was with Albert by the stream, who killed your son?”
Louise concentrates on the policeman’s words and nods. A slow and unequivocal motion of her neck.
“Why didn’t you say anything? Why didn’t you accuse them at the time?”
A shower is now falling on the playground of Giverny School. The paper begins to curl. The children of the class, still impeccably behaved, don’t move a muscle.
“No… no one… be… believed me… not even… my husband.”
It takes a huge effort for the old woman to utter those few words. The slack skin that hangs beneath her neck trembles. Chief Inspector Laurentin understands that he will have to tread carefully, to ask the questions and suggest the answers, so that Louise has only to confirm or deny the hypotheses that he proposes with a gesture or a single syllable.
“Then you moved? It wasn’t possible to stay. And your husband passed away.”
Louise slowly nods again. The policeman leans toward her, takes a handkerchief from his pocket, and delicately wipes the class photograph.
“And then?” he goes on in a voice that struggles to conceal his emotion. “This person, this person who was with your son by the riverside. This person committed another crime, is that it? Perhaps several? This person struck again? This person will strike again?”
Louise Rosalba is suddenly breathing more easily, as if the chief inspector has just lifted a weight that had been bearing down on her chest for an eternity.
She nods her head again.
My God…
Chief Inspector Laurentin’s arms turn to gooseflesh. Such abrupt cardiac accelerations aren’t recommended for him either, but for the moment he doesn’t care about the advice of his cardiologist; all that matters are these stunning revelations, hidden away in the memory of this woman for almost seventy-five years. He brings the photograph closer to Louise’s fingers.
“This person we’re talking about, they’re sitting on the school benches too, aren’t they? Can you show them to me?”
Louise’s fingers quiver even more. Laurentin gently places his palm on Louise’s wrist, being careful not to apply too much pressure, to avoid turning it in one direction or another. The woman’s wrinkled fingers move above the school photograph and then, slowly, her index finger settles on a face.
The chief inspector feels his heart racing.
My God, my God.
An enormous wave of heat engulfs him and he clutches Louise’s hand. His heart is about to burst; he needs to calm down.
“Thank you. Thank you.”
He breathes gently and the excitement subsides a little. Chief Inspector Laurentin is filled by a strange feeling: the contradiction between the size of this revelation, this testimony, this accusation, and its implacable logic. Now he knows who murdered little Albert Rosalba. Consequently he also knows who murdered Jérôme Morval. Who, and why.
His heart gradually returns to its normal rate, but he can’t ignore that ridiculous satisfaction, that pointless pride in having proof at last that he wasn’t mistaken, that he hadn’t been duped.
That he was right, before anyone else.
His gaze drifts out through the window, beyond the parking lot, toward the edge of the dark beech forest.
What should he do now?
Go back to Giverny?
Go back to Giverny and find Stéphanie Dupain? Before it’s too late?
At this one last thought, his heart starts pounding once more. His cardiologist would be furious.
67
10:53. I’m looking at the moon.
Seen from the window of the keep of the Moulin des Chennevières, it looks enormous, almost within reach.
Don’t worry, I haven’t gone mad. It isn’t an optical illusion. They talked about it on Radio France Bleu Haute Normandie, and even on local television, explaining that tonight’s full moon will be the biggest of the year. At its perigee, as they put it, which is to say that tonight, if I have understood it correctly, the moon will be at its nearest point to the earth. Apparently the moon doesn’t orbit the earth in a circle, but in an ellipse, so there is a day when the full moon is farthest away from the earth and a day when it is closest. Once every year. The perigee.
The nocturnal brightness bathes the roofs of Giverny in a strange light. With a little motivation an artist might take out his easel and continue painting through the night, without artificial light. How many of us are looking at the same moonlight at the same time? Having listened to the radio, watched the television, and obeyed. An unmissable spectacle, they said. Thousands, tens of thousands, I’m sure.
I’m feeling very nostalgic today. After my pilgrimage to Vernon Museum, here I am spending the night by my window. I’m not going to last long, at this rate.
And in any case, I don’t intend to. Believe me, it’s a real privilege to know the date of the end and to be able to savor the last few hours, the last night, the last moon.
Tomorrow it will all be over.
It’s been decided. I just have to choose the method.
Poison? A knife? A gun? Drowning? Suffocation?
There is no shortage of options.
Or of courage. Or determination. Or motivation.
I study the sleeping village once more. The streetlights and the last windows in the village where lights still burn remind me of the yellow flowers on my black Water Lilies, like so many frail lighthouses lost in an ocean of darkness.
The police failed; they won’t have worked anything out. Too bad for them.
Tomorrow evening everything will end with one last corpse, like a parenthesis closed once and for all.
Full stop.
It’s the first time Fanette has seen such a big moon. It looks like a planet or a kind of flying saucer that is going to land just over there, among the trees, on the hill. Her teacher was right when she told her to stay up late. She explained it to them, the ellipse, the perigee; she even drew complicated diagrams on the board, with arrows and numbers.
Fanette doesn’t have a watch, but she thinks it must be at least eleven o’clock. Vincent went home about an hour ago, more
or less.
I thought he was going to spend the night below my window, listening to me, refusing to let go of my hand.
In the end he left.
Phew!
Fanette wanted to be alone, alone with that giant moon, like a big sister. A big sister who lives far away, and who is going to invite her to her house.
This evening Fanette finished her painting. Usually it isn’t like her to be conceited, she doesn’t really believe it, deep down, when everyone tells her that her drawing is brilliant, but this time… Yes, she can tell the moon, this time she’s proud of the colors she put down on the canvas, proud of that movement of the stream running through her painting, those vanishing lines going off in all directions. She’s had it all in her head for ages, but she never thought she could turn it into a painting. She has hidden the painting under the washhouse. Tomorrow she will ask Paul to go and get it, then give it to their teacher.
I can trust Paul. Only Paul. None of the others, not pretentious Camille, sneaky Mary, or Vincent… Vincent… The little dog who follows me everywhere.
And certainly not Mom. Mom has been keeping an eye on me lately; she takes me to school in the morning and drops me off at the gate before going up to the villa where the Parisians live. It’s the same at midday. As if she were spying on me! Sometimes I think it’s weird. Perhaps Mom is worried that I will tell everyone my story.
About James. Gone. Dead.
Killed, in the field.
As if she is worried that her daughter will be taken for a lunatic.
James…
Fanette stretches out her hand. She feels that if she leaned out of the window a little farther, she might be able to touch the craters of the moon, run her fingers over the crevices.
James…
Did I make him up?
Didn’t I just find some brushes left behind in the field by a painter, some drops of paint on the riverbank, and my imagination did the rest? Mom’s always telling me that I live in an imaginary world, that I invent things, I distort reality. To make it what I want it to be.