Black Water Lilies

by Michel Bussi

  It matters so little, now.

  So, I must get going!

  I throw Dr. Berger’s envelope in the bin with disgust, then look up toward the tower of the mill.

  I waver.

  My legs can barely carry me. That last walk to Nettles Island has exhausted me. I am in two minds about whether I should go back to the village one last time or go on home. I thought about it all for a long while just now, on the banks of the Epte. About how I should finish things, now that everything is in order.

  And I’ve made up my mind. I’ve decided not to use Jacques’s rifle—I imagine you can understand why, especially now. Nor am I going to swallow any pills, to spend hours, days in my death throes, at Vernon Hospital, like Jacques did, but without anyone to turn off my drip. No, the most effective way to end it all will be to finish this day peacefully, to go back to the mill, climb up to my bedroom at the top of the keep, to spend some time putting my affairs in order, then open the window and jump.

  I decide to go into the village one last time. After all, my legs will hold me up for one more mile, one last mile.

  “Come on, Neptune!”

  If someone, anyone, a passerby or a tourist, bothered to look at me, they might think I was smiling. They wouldn’t be completely wrong. Spending these ten last days in the company of Paul, in the company of Laurenç, has finally appeased my rage.

  I walk along the Chemin du Roy once more. A few moments later, I find myself by the water-lily pond.

  On the death of Claude Monet, in 1926, the gardens were almost allowed to fall into a state of neglect. Michel Monet, his son, lived in the pink house until his marriage, in 1931, to the model Gabrielle Bonaventure, with whom he had a daughter, Henriette. When I was ten years old, in 1937, the other children and I used to slip into the gardens through a hole in the fence on the side of the meadow. I used to paint and the boys would play hide-and-seek around the pond. The only other people there were a gardener who maintained the estate, Monsieur Blin, and Blanche, Claude Monet’s daughter, but they tended to leave us alone as we weren’t doing any harm. Monsieur Blin wouldn’t have refused little Fanette anything—she was so pretty with her mauve eyes and her silver ribbons in her hair, and such a talented painter!

  Blanche Monet died in 1947. The last heir, Michel Monet, continued to open the gardens and the house on special occasions for foreign heads of state, artists, and special anniversaries… and for the children of Giverny School! I managed to convince him. It wasn’t difficult. How could anyone resist little Fanette, who had become the lovely Stéphanie, the teacher with the water-lily eyes, so knowledgeable when it came to anything to do with art, and who tried, year after year, to enthuse the children of the village about Impressionism, encouraging them to take part in the Robinson Foundation competition, with such energy, such sincerity, as if her own life depended on the emotion that she communicated to her pupils? Michel Monet opened the gardens for my class, once a year, in May, when the park is at its most beautiful.

  I turn around. For a moment I study the crowd gathered beneath the cathedral of roses, the dozens of faces pressed to the windows of the painter’s house. To think that we were alone in that house, in June 1963, Laurenç and me. In the drawing room, on the stairs, in the bedroom. It is my loveliest memory, without a doubt. My one and only attempt at escape…

  Michel Monet died in a car accident, three years later, in Vernon. After the reading of his will in early February 1966, an incredible stream of people converged on the house in Giverny. Gendarmes, notaries, journalists, artists… I was there too, like the other Givernois. Inside the house and the studios, the bailiffs were startled to discover more than a hundred and twenty paintings, eighty of them by Claude Monet himself, including some undiscovered Water Lilies, and forty paintings by his friends, Sisley, Manet, Renoir, Boudin… Can you imagine? It was an incredible treasure trove, an inestimable fortune that had been almost forgotten since Claude Monet’s death. Well, I say forgotten… Many of the villagers knew, before 1966, the value of the masterpieces stored in the pink house, abandoned there for forty years by Michel Monet. Everyone who had been allowed to step inside the house had seen them. I had too, of course. Since 1966, those hundred and twenty paintings have been housed in the Musée Marmottan, in Paris. It’s the biggest collection of Monets on display anywhere in the world.

  For my part, after 1966, I stopped taking the children to Monet’s garden. It only opened to the public again much later, in 1980. It was quite natural, though, for such a treasure to be shared with the masses, for the overwhelming beauty of the place to be offered to any soul capable of grasping it.

  Not just that of a little girl who was so dazzled by its brilliance that she burned her dreams there.

  I turn to the right and walk back up toward the village by the Rue du Château d’Eau.

  My childhood home no longer exists.

  After my mother’s death, in 1975, it became a real hovel and had to be pulled down. The neighbors, from Paris, bought the land and put up a white stone wall more than six feet high. Where my house once stood there is probably a flower bed, a swing, a pool. In truth I have no idea. You’d have to be able to look over the wall.

  At last I reach the end of the Rue du Château d’Eau. That’s the hardest part over. To think that I used to run along that street faster than Neptune when I was eleven years old! Now he’s the one who always has to wait for me, the poor thing. I turn into Rue Claude Monet. The tourist highway. I don’t even have the desire to moan about the crowds anymore. Giverny will survive me, different, eternal, when all the ghosts of other times have disappeared: Amadou Kandy, his art gallery and his deals; Patricia Morval; me…

  I walk. I don’t resist the urge to take a detour of twenty yards to pass in front of the school. The Place de la Mairie hasn’t changed in all these years, not its white stones or the shade of the lime trees, except that the school was rebuilt in the early 1980s, three years before I retired. Now it’s hideously modern—pink and white like a marshmallow. In Giverny, of all places. But I lost the will to fight against this monstrosity long ago. The nursery school they’ve opened is even worse, in a prefab just opposite. Well, in the end none of that has anything to do with me anymore. Every day now, the children run past me without a glance, and I have to scold Neptune and tell him to leave them in peace. The only people who ever ask me for directions are old American painters.

  I go back down the Rue Blanche Hoschedé-Monet. The house I used to live in when I was a teacher, just above the school, is now an antique shop. My slope-roofed bedroom, with its round skylight, along with the other dusty rooms, now furnishes city dwellers with supposedly authentic rural artifacts. Check in hand. No one will ever look through that round skylight to see the full moon at its perigee. My God, how many years, how many nights I spent by that window…

  In front of the antique shop a group of adults is talking Japanese, or Korean, or Javanese. I no longer understand anything about anything. I’m a dinosaur in a zoo.

  I carry on along the Rue Claude Monet. Only the Hôtel Baudy hasn’t changed. The Belle Époque decor, on the terrace, on the façade and inside, is meticulously maintained by successive owners. Theodore Robinson could come back to the Hôtel Baudy tomorrow; time stopped there a century ago.

  71 Rue Claude Monet.

  Jérôme and Patricia Morval.

  I quickly pass in front of the house. Four days ago, I went inside. I needed to talk to Patricia. Along with me, she’s the last surviving person from the old Giverny. I never liked Patricia much, as you will by now understand. I think that for me she will always be Mary the sniveler. Mary the sneak.

  It’s ridiculous, I admit it. She has suffered so much. At least as much as me. She finally gave in to Fat Camille by marrying him, and in a cruel twist, Fat Camille became Jérôme Morval, the brilliant medical student, and the more Jérôme tried to seduce other women, the more attached to him she became. Life stopped in that house, 71 Rue Claude Monet, one day in 1963. It wa
s once the finest house in the village. Now it’s a ruin. The town council is waiting impatiently for the widow Morval to die so that it can get rid of the eyesore.

  Patricia had to know. She had to know the name of her husband’s murderer. I owed her that. And Patricia, the little sneak, surprised me, in the end. I expected to see the police turning up at my mill the following day. She had no hesitation, back in 1963, in sending the police in Vernon anonymous photographs of her husband’s supposed mistresses. Me, among others.

  But curiously, this time it didn’t happen. Life changes us, I suppose. I’ve heard that she barely leaves her house now, especially since one of her nephews introduced her to the Internet. She, who had never turned on a computer before the age of seventy! And still, I’d like to take tea with her, one last time, to share our common hatred of a monster. Before the big jump.

  I speed up, although in my case the expression isn’t terribly apt. Neptune trots along thirty yards ahead of me. The Rue Claude Monet rises gently, like a long path toward the sky. Stairway to heaven, a guitar played, two generations ago.

  At last I reach the church. The giant portrait of Claude Monet looks down at me from fifty feet up. They’re renovating Sainte-Radegonde’s. The work and the scaffolding is covered by a huge canvas poster: a photograph of the master, in black and white, palette in hand. I don’t have the strength to drag myself all the way up to the cemetery, on the slope behind the church, but everyone I’ve crossed paths with in my life, everyone who has ever meant something to me, is buried here. Strangely, it rained at almost every funeral, as if it would have been indecent for the light of Giverny to shine on the day of an interment. It rained in 1937, the day when my Paul, my Albert Rosalba, was buried. I was distraught. It also rained in 1963, when Jérôme Morval was buried. The whole village was there, including the Bishop of Évreux, the choir, journalists, and even Laurenç. Several hundred people. How strange fate is. A week ago I was alone at the burial of Jacques.

  I peopled the cemetery with my memories. My memories of rain.

  “Come on, Neptune!”

  I’m headed for the finish line. I go back down the Rue de la Dîme, then straight on to the Chemin du Roy. It emerges right opposite the mill. I wait a long time before crossing: the flow of cars leaving Giverny by the main road is almost continuous. Neptune waits obediently beside me. A red convertible with a complicated registration number and the steering wheel on the left finally lets me pass.

  I cross the bridge. In spite of myself I stop by the brook and for the last time I examine the tiles and the pink bricks of the washhouse, the green metallic paint of the bridge, the walls surrounding the courtyard of the mill, and rising above them, the top floor of the keep and the top of the cherry tree. The washhouse was covered in graffiti a few weeks ago, grimacing black-and-white faces, but no one ever bothers to clean the bricks. Perhaps out of carelessness, perhaps not. After all, if there is one place where cleaning up the rebellious manifestations of anonymous artists could give the wrong impression, it’s Giverny. Don’t you think?

  The little stream of clear water flows on, as if mocking the activities of the people on its banks: those monks who once dug this millrace; the inspired painter who diverted the river to create a pond, and who locked himself away for thirty years to paint water lilies; the lunatic who, at this very spot, murdered every man who came anywhere near me, all the men I might have loved.

  Who would be interested in that, today? Who could I complain to? Is there such a thing as an office of lost lives?

  I walk another few yards. My eyes take in the meadow, probably for the last time. The parking lot is almost empty now.

  No, in the end, the meadow isn’t just a commercial backdrop. Of course, it isn’t. It’s a landscape, living and changing. According to the seasons, according to the time of day, according to the light. It is overwhelming too. Did I need to be so sure of the time of my death, so certain that I am seeing it for the last time, to understand this at last? To know just how much I will miss it? Claude Monet, Theodore Robinson, James, and so many others didn’t end up here by chance. The fact that it is a place full of memories doesn’t strip the landscape of its beauty.

  Quite the contrary.

  “Isn’t that right, Neptune?”

  My dog wags his tail as if he can hear my ravings. In fact, he already knows what I’ll do next. He knows it’s rare for me to enter the courtyard without taking a quick tour of the little clearing just behind it. A willow, two pines. Today the clearing is protected from the tourists by a fence. You can’t see it from the road. I step forward.

  Neptune is ahead of me once again. He waits for me, lying in the grass, as if he were aware of the significance of this spot. When I finally arrive, I place my cane in the soft earth and stand, leaning on it. In front of me I see the five little tumuli with their five little crosses.

  I remember. How could I forget? I was only twelve. I held Neptune tightly, and he died in my arms. A year after Paul drowned. Old age, my mother told me.

  “He didn’t suffer, Stéphanie. He just fell asleep, like an old dog.”

  I was inconsolable. I didn’t want to be parted from my dog.

  “We’ll go and get another one, Stéphanie. A little puppy. Tomorrow.”

  “The same one, I want the same one.”

  “Fine, Stéphanie. The same one. We’ll go to the farm at Autheuil. What would you like to call your new puppy?”

  “Neptune!”

  I’ve had six dogs in my life. All German shepherds. I’ve called them all Neptune, out of fidelity to the whim of a lonely, unhappy little girl, who so wanted her dog to live forever, who never wanted him to die.

  My gaze shifts from right to left. Beneath every cross, on a little plaque, the same name is engraved. Neptune.

  The only difference is the numbers beneath each name.

  1922–1938

  1938–1955

  1955–1963

  1963–1980

  1980–1999

  Neptune gets up, comes and rubs himself against me as if he has understood that for the first time I’m the one who’s leaving, and not him. Neptune will be taken in by the farm at Autheuil. They’ve been raising dogs there for generations; his mother probably still lives there. He’ll be fine. I’m going to leave a letter with precise instructions, about his food, the fact that children should be allowed to play with him; and that he should be buried here when his time comes.

  I stroke him. He’s never pressed himself so tightly against me. I want to cry, more and more. I’ll have to get a move on. If I dawdle, I won’t have the courage.

  I leave my cane there, planted in the ground by the five tumuli. I won’t be needing it anymore. I walk back to the courtyard and Neptune stays right beside me. That damned sixth sense that animals have! Usually, Neptune would have gone to lie down beneath the cherry tree. Not this time. He doesn’t leave me. He’s going to trip me up. For a moment I wish I hadn’t left my cane behind.

  “Gently now, Neptune. Gently.”

  Neptune pushes against me again. There haven’t been silver ribbons among the leaves of the cherry tree for a long time now. The birds are singing their hearts out. I stroke Neptune again, for a long time. I look up toward the keep of the Moulin des Chennevières.

  Jacques bought the mill in 1971. He kept his word. I believed him, my God, I believed him at the time. He bought it for me, the house of my dreams, that rickety house that had attracted me so much ever since I was a child. When the Parisians started coming, his estate agency finally went into profit. He had been biding his time, waiting for the right moment. The mill had been unoccupied for a long time, but then the owners finally decided to sell. He was the first on the case. He renovated the entire place over a period of several years. The wheel, the well, the keep.

  He thought it would make me happy. It was so pathetic. Like a jailer decorating the walls of a prison. When it was finished, the Moulin des Chennevières no longer resembled the ruined old house that had fa
scinated me, “the witch’s mill,” as people called it back then. Washed stones. Varnished wood. Trimmed trees. Flower-covered balconies. Raked courtyard. Oiled gate. Built fence.

  Jacques was obsessive. So obsessive.

  How could I have imagined…

  I always refused to let him cut down the cherry tree. He yielded to all my whims. Yes, yes, that’s what I really believed.

  Then the tide turned at the agency. We found it difficult to pay for things. At first we rented out part of the mill, then we sold it to a young couple in the village. We only held on to the keep. Some years ago they turned the rest of the Moulin des Chennevières into holiday homes. It’s going well, apparently. I think they’re just waiting for one thing, for me to depart, so they can build a few extra rooms. There are swings in the courtyard now, a large barbecue, parasols, and garden furniture. They’re even talking about turning the field behind the mill into a small zoo. They’ve started bringing in llamas, kangaroos, emus… I don’t know.

  Can you imagine?

  Exotic animals to amuse the children. You can’t miss them, when you arrive in Giverny, traveling from Vernon along the Chemin du Roy.

  To think that for decades this place was just the witch’s mill…

  All that’s missing is the witch.

  Me.

  I won’t be around much longer, don’t worry. The witch is going to take advantage of the full moon and disappear. She’ll be found in the early morning, lying at the foot of the cherry tree. Whoever finds her will look up and decide that she probably fell from her broom.

  I grip Neptune’s fur in my hand one last time, tightly, oh so tightly, then I close the door of the keep behind me. I climb the stairs quickly before I hear him whine.