by Michel Bussi
Jacques’s voice chills me:
“You remember Albert Rosalba? Yes, of course you do. The three of us were always together when we were kids. You gave us nicknames, the names of your favorite Impressionists. He was Paul and I was Vincent.”
Jacques’s hand grips the sheet. My eyes are hypnotized by the painting knives.
“It was an accident. He wanted to take your painting to the teacher, your Water Lilies, Fanette, the painting in the attic, the one you never wanted to throw away. Do you remember? But that isn’t the important thing—Paul, or rather Albert, slipped. We did have a fight first, admittedly, but it was an accident, he slipped near the washhouse, and his head bumped against a beam. I wouldn’t have killed him, Fanette, I wouldn’t have killed Paul, even if he had a bad influence on you, even if he didn’t really love you. He slipped… It’s all the painting’s fault. You said that yourself afterward.”
My fingers close around the handle of one of the knives. It has a wide blade, for scraping a palette. I’ve never touched a brush again, not once since 1937. That’s one of the vanished memories that seem to be tumbling into the huge crevasse that is opening up in my head.
“And… and James…?”
My voice is as weak as that of an eleven-year-old girl.
“That old lunatic? The American painter? Is he the one you’re talking about, Fanette?”
If I say a word, it’s inaudible.
“James,” Jacques goes on. “James, yes, that’s it. For years I tried to remember his name, but it escaped me. I even thought of asking you.”
Jacques is shaken by a guffaw. His back slides slightly down the pillows.
“I’m joking, Fanette. I knew I needed to leave you out of all that. That you mustn’t know anything about it. Guardian angels have to be discreet, don’t they? Right to the end. It’s the first principle… Don’t feel sorry for James. Remember, he used to tell you that you had to be selfish, that you had to leave your family. Everyone. He drove you mad at the time, you were so easily influenced, you weren’t even eleven, and he would have had his way. At first, I just threatened him. I carved a message in his paint box while he was asleep—he used to spend almost the entire day asleep, like a big caterpillar. But he didn’t pay any attention. He went on torturing you. Tokyo, London, New York. I had no choice, Fanette, you would have gone away, you wouldn’t listen to anyone, not even your mother. I had to save you.”
My fingers open. My memories won’t stop tumbling into that monstrous crevasse. That knife. That knife on the bed. That red knife. It’s James’s knife.
Jacques plunged it into James’s heart. He was only eleven years old.
“I hadn’t predicted that Neptune would find the body of that bloody painter in the wheat field, but I managed to move the corpse before you came back with your mother. Only by a few yards, I think, it’s all so long ago. You know, I thought I would never be able to do it; I would never have thought that such a skeletal old man could be so heavy. You won’t believe me, but you and your mother passed very close to me. You only needed to turn your head. But you didn’t. I think you didn’t really want to know. You didn’t see me, and nor did your mother. It was a miracle, you understand. A sign! From that day onward I understood that nothing else could happen to me. That my mission had to be accomplished. The next night, I buried the corpse in the middle of the meadow. It was a hell of a task for a kid, take it from me. Then I burned all the rest, one bit at a time, the easels, the canvases. I only kept his paint box as proof, proof of what I was capable of doing for you. You realize, Fanette, that I was just eleven years old. He looked after you, your guardian angel, do you see now?”
Jacques tries desperately to pull himself back up the pillows, but he goes on sliding, ever so slowly.
“I’m joking, Fanette. In fact, it wasn’t too difficult, even for a child. Your James was a powerless old man. A foreigner. An American who had missed Monet by ten years. A tramp no one cared about. In 1937 people had other things to worry about. Also, a few days before, a Spanish workman had been found murdered on a barge just outside Giverny. The local police were all working on the case, and they only caught the killer, a sailor from Conflans, a few weeks later.”
Jacques’s wrinkled hand searches for mine. It closes on air.
“It does me good to talk about all this, Fanette. Then we were peaceful together. For years… You remember? We grew up together, we were only separated when you took that course in Évreux, then you came back to Giverny as a teacher. Our school! We got married at the church of Sainte-Radegonde in Giverny in 1953. Everything was perfect and your guardian angel had only to twiddle his thumbs.”
Jacques bursts out laughing again. The laugh that I hear echoing around our house almost every day, in front of a television program or behind a newspaper. That loud guffaw. How could I have failed to notice that it was the laugh of a monster?
“But the devil keeps his eyes open, eh, Stéphanie? Jérôme Morval had to come back and start sniffing around you. You remember? Jérôme Morval, our classmate at primary school, the one you used to call Camille, Fat Camille. Top of the class! The pretentious one. At school you didn’t like him, Fanette, but he had changed. In the end, he even managed to drag that little sneak Patricia into his bed. The one you nicknamed Mary, after Mary Cassatt. But it wasn’t long before Patricia wasn’t enough for Camille. Money changes a man. He bought the most beautiful house in Giverny, and he had become arrogant, charming, even, in the eyes of certain girls… He didn’t even bother to hide his deceptions from his wife. Everyone in Giverny knew, including Patricia, who even went to the lengths of hiring a private detective to spy on him. Poor Patricia! And Morval could deliver a well-polished speech about painting, and his collection of fashionable artists. But most importantly, Stéphanie, listen to me, Jérôme Morval, the best ophthalmological surgeon in Paris, from what people said, had come back to Giverny for one thing—just one. Not for Monet or the Water Lilies, no. He had come back for the lovely Fanette, the girl who had never so much as glanced at him during all their years together in primary school. Now that the wheel had turned, Fat Camille wanted his revenge.”
“You… you…” The words stick in my throat.
“I know, Stéphanie, that you weren’t attracted to Jérôme Morval… at least not at that point. But I had to get my hand in first. Jérôme Morval lived in the village, he had all the time in the world, he was sly, he knew how to attract you, with his Water Lilies, his knowledge of Monet, the landscapes…”
Once again, the monster tries to find my hand. His hand slithers like a bedbug over the sheets. I resist the idea of grabbing the painting knife and piercing it like a harmful insect.
“I bear you no ill will, Stéphanie, I know nothing happened between you and Morval. You just agreed to go for a walk with him, have a conversation. But he would have seduced you, Stéphanie; over time, he would have got there. I’m not a wicked man, Stéphanie. I didn’t want to kill Jérôme Morval. I was patient, more than patient. I tried to explain to him, as clearly as possible, what I was capable of, what risks he was taking if he went on hanging around you. The first thing I did was send him that postcard, the one with the Water Lilies. Morval wasn’t stupid. He remembered very well that it was the card he had entrusted me with years before, in 1937, in Monet’s gardens, on your birthday, just after Albert’s death. I glued that phrase of Aragon’s to the card, from that poem you used to make the children in the class recite. ‘The crime of dreaming.’ Morval was no fool. The message was crystal clear: anyone who tried to approach you, to hurt you, was putting themselves in danger…”
Jacques’s fingers reach for the collection of poems by Aragon that is resting on the bed. They brush the book but lack the strength to pick it up. I don’t move. Jacques coughs to clear his throat and continues.
“Can you guess, Stéphanie, what Jérôme Morval’s reply to me was? He laughed in my face! I could have killed him then if I’d wanted to. But in the end I quite liked him, Fat Cam
ille, so I gave him another chance. I sent that paint box to his office in Paris, James’s paint box, still carved with the threat: She’s mine, here, now and for ever, followed by a cross. If Morval hadn’t got the message by then… Anyway, he agreed to meet me that morning in front of the washhouse, near the Moulin des Chennevières. I thought he was going to tell me that he was giving you up. In fact, it was quite the opposite. Right in front of me, he threw the paint box into the middle of the stream. He despised you, Stéphanie, he didn’t love you, you were just another trophy for him. He would have made you suffer, Stéphanie, he would have led you to your ruin. So what could I do? I had to protect you. He didn’t take me seriously, he told me that I wasn’t up to it, in my hunting boots, that I wasn’t capable of making you happy, that you had never loved me. Always that same refrain…”
His hand goes crawling again and clutches the knife.
“I had no choice, Stéphanie, I killed him right there, with James’s painting knife, which I had been careful enough to bring with me. He died on the edge of the stream, in the same spot where Albert had died years earlier. The act that followed, the rock smashing his skull, the head in the water, I know it was ridiculous. I even thought you might suspect something, particularly when the police pulled James’s paint box out of the water. Luckily you never saw that box. It was important for me to protect you and make sure you didn’t know anything, to take all kinds of risks for you. You trusted me, and you were right. You can admit it now, my Fanette, that you never suspected just how much I loved you, that you never guessed the lengths that I would go to for you. You remember, a few days after Morval’s death, you even went to the police, to tell them that we had been in bed together that morning… Probably, somewhere deep inside you, you knew the truth, you just didn’t want to admit it.”
I observe, petrified, Jacques’s wrinkled fingers stroking the handle of the knife, as if his old man’s body were still shivering from the pleasure of having stabbed two men. I don’t hold back; I can’t do it any longer. The words explode from my throat.
“I wanted to leave you, Jacques. That was why I gave a false statement. You were in jail and I would have felt guilty.”
The fingers twist on the knife. The fingers of a murderer, a madman. A guffaw shakes him. That crazed laugh.
“Of course, Stéphanie. You felt guilty. Obviously, everything was muddled up in your head. But not in mine. No one knows you better than I do. Once Morval was dead I thought we would live in peace. No one there to separate us anymore, Stéphanie, no one to take you from me. And then, to top it all—it’s almost comical, when I think about it—there’s Morval’s corpse luring that policeman toward you, that Laurenç Sérénac, the worst danger of all! I was stuck. How could I get rid of him? How could I kill him without being accused of it, without being arrested, without being parted from you for good? So that another Sérénac, or another Morval, could come and make you suffer because I couldn’t possibly protect you if I was locked up in a cell. From the very beginning that policeman suspected me; it was as if he could read my mind… He followed his instinct. He was a good policeman and it was a very close thing, Stéphanie. Luckily he never managed to discover the connection between me and Albert’s accident, and he never heard about the disappearance of that American painter. They came very close to the truth, back then in 1963, he and his deputy, Bénavides. But they couldn’t imagine the truth, of course. Who could have understood? Meanwhile that bastard Sérénac turned your head. It was him or me. I looked at the problem from all sides…”
Discreetly, my hand creeps along the sheet. Jacques has slid so far, he’s lying down now, he can’t sit up, and he can’t see me anymore, he’s talking to the ceiling. My hand closes on the knife again. I feel a morbid pleasure at the touch of it. As if the dried blood on the handle were insinuating itself into my veins, swelling them with a murderous impulse.
Jacques’s nervous laughter turns into a hacking cough and he struggles to catch his breath. It would be better for him if he were sitting up, that much is clear. But Jacques doesn’t ask me to help him.
“I’ve nearly finished, Stéphanie,” he says eventually, his voice faltering. “In the end, all it took were a few threats to make Sérénac run away… some effectively illustrated threats.”
He laughs again. Slowly, I bring the knife toward the folds of my black dress.
“Men are so weak, Stéphanie. All men. Sérénac preferred his little job as a police officer to his grand passion for you. But we’re not going to complain, are we, Stéphanie? It’s what we wanted, isn’t it? And Sérénac was right, in the end. Who knows what might have happened if he had decided to be stubborn. That was the last shadow between us, Stéphanie, the last cloud, the last branch to brush aside. Over forty years ago now…”
I fold my arms over my breasts, the knife pressed to my heart. I would like to speak, I would like to scream: “Jacques, tell me, tell me, my guardian angel, since that’s what you claim to be, is it so very easy to stab someone? To plunge a knife into a man’s heart?”
“What determines a life, Stéphanie? If I hadn’t been there at the right moment, if I hadn’t been able to get rid of all the obstacles, one after the other. If I hadn’t been able to protect you. If I hadn’t been born just after you, like a twin. If I hadn’t understood my mission… I’m leaving this earth a happy man, Stéphanie. I’ve succeeded, I’ve loved you so much, and now you have the proof.”
I get up, horrified, keeping the knife invisible against my chest. Jacques looks exhausted, as if he is struggling to keep his eyes open. He tries to pull himself up and the aluminum chest falls off the bed onto the parquet floor with a deafening crash. Jacques barely blinks, but the high-pitched noise keeps ringing through my head like a dizzying echo. I feel as if the whole room is spinning around me.
I try to move forward, but my legs refuse to carry me. I unfold my arms. Jacques is still staring at me. He hasn’t seen the knife, yet. I raise it slowly.
Outside, Neptune howls, just below our window. A moment later, there’s the sound of a siren and an ambulance enters the courtyard of the mill. Tires crunch on gravel. Two silhouettes, white and blue in the rotating light, pass by the window and knock at the door.
They took Jacques away. I signed a stack of papers without even reading them, without asking anything at all. They asked me if I wanted to go with them in the ambulance; I said no, I would take the bus, or a taxi, in a few hours’ time. The orderlies didn’t comment.
The aluminum chest lies open on the floor. The painting knife is on the bedside table. The book by Aragon is lost among the bedclothes. I don’t know why, but after the ambulance leaves, the first thing that occurs to me is to go upstairs and search the attic until I find that dusty old painting, my Water Lilies, the one I painted when I was eleven.
The one I painted twice—first in incredible rainbow colors, to win the Robinson Foundation competition, and then in black, after Paul’s death.
I’ve taken Jacques’s hunting rifle down from the wall and put the painting in its place, on the same nail, in a corner where no one but me can see it.
I go outside. I need to get some fresh air. I take Neptune with me. It is just after six in the morning and, for a few hours at least, Giverny is deserted. I’m going to walk along the brook, in front of the mill.
And remember.
DAY THIRTEEN
May 25, 2010
(Chemin du Roy)
Progression
83
That was twelve days ago, on May 13. Since then I have spent my days reliving those few hours when my life was stolen from me, watching the film again to try to grasp the unimaginable, one last time and then be done with it.
As I walked alone through this village, you must have taken me for a ghost. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.
I’m all too real.
It’s the others who are ghosts; the ghosts of my memories. I have peopled those places where I have always lived with my ghosts, and as I passed i
n front of each spot I remembered: the mill, the meadow, the school, the Rue Claude Monet, the terrace of the Hôtel Baudy, the cemetery, Vernon Museum, Nettles Island…
I have also populated these places with the long conversations I had with Sylvio Bénavides between 1963 and 1964, after the investigation into the murder of Jérôme Morval was dropped. Inspector Sylvio Bénavides stubbornly pursued it, but he never found the slightest bit of evidence, the smallest new clue. We sympathized. At least Jacques wasn’t jealous of my exchanges with this other inspector. Sylvio was a faithful husband and an attentive father to little Carina, who had had so much trouble getting out of her mother’s womb. Sylvio told me all the details of the inquiry that he had led with Laurenç, at the station in Vernon, in Cocherel, in the museums in Rouen and Vernon. Then, in the mid-1970s, Sylvio was transferred to La Rochelle. A little over ten years ago, in September 1999 to be precise—you can see that my memory still works perfectly—I received a letter from Béatrice Bénavides. A short, handwritten letter. She told me that Sylvio had left them, her and Carina, one morning, after having a heart attack. Sylvio had climbed onto his bicycle, as he did every morning, to ride around the island of Oléron, where the family rented a bungalow during the off-season. He had left with a smile on his face. The weather was fine, a little windy. He collapsed by the ocean, while cycling along a deceptively steep path, between Brée-les-Bains and Saint-Denis-d’Oléron. Sylvio was seventy-one.
That’s what getting old is: seeing other people die.
A few days ago I wrote a short letter to Béatrice, explaining everything. A kind of memorial to Sylvio. The extremely wealthy Robinson Foundation had nothing to do with any of the murders, any more than Amadou Kandy, with his dubious art dealings did, or the rumored Monets or Morval’s mistresses. Laurenç Sérénac had been right from the start: it was a crime of passion. Only one unimaginable detail had prevented the discovery of the truth: the jealous criminal had not been content to eliminate his wife’s supposed lovers, he had also killed the friends of a little ten-year-old girl with whom he was already in love. I haven’t yet posted that letter. I don’t think I will, in the end.