“Twenty-five kilometers away. Otherwise, just behind the church you’ll see a little house with red shutters. That’s Madame Bréant’s place, and she does bed and breakfast. Just one bedroom, but it’s never taken.”
He’s not listening to me anymore. He’s looking elsewhere. He’s gone, lost in thought. He comes back to me.
“Brancion-en-Chalon . . . Wasn’t there some tragedy here?”
“There are tragedies all around you. Every death is someone’s tragedy.”
He seems to search his memory, without finding what he’s after. He blows into his hands and murmurs: “See you later” and “Thank you very much.” He goes back along the main avenue to the gates. His steps are still silent.
Madame Pinto goes past me again to fill up her watering can. Behind her, Claire, the woman from Mâcon’s oncology unit, makes for Thierry Teissier’s grave, clutching a potted rosebush. I go over to her.
“Good morning, madame, I would like to plant this rosebush at Thierry Teissier’s grave.”
I call out to Nono, who is in his hut. The gravediggers have a hut where they get changed, take a shower at midday and in the evening, and wash their work clothes. Nono says that the smell of death cannot cling to his clothes, but no detergent exists to stop it sullying the inside of his noggin.
While Nono digs where Claire wants to plant the rosebush, Elvis sings: Always on my mind, always on my mind . . . Nono puts in a little peat and a stake so the rosebush grows straight. He tells Claire that he knew Thierry, and that he was a good guy.
Claire wanted to give me money for watering Thierry’s rosebush from time to time. I told her that I would water it, but that I never accepted money. That she could slip some change into the ladybird-shaped moneybox in my kitchen, on top of the fridge, and that such cash donations went toward buying food for the cemetery’s animals.
She said, “Fine.” And that, normally, she never did this, attend the funerals of patients from her unit. That it was the first time. That Thierry Teissier, he was too nice to be buried under the ground, like that, with nothing around him. That she’d chosen a red rosebush for what it symbolized, and she wanted Thierry to live on through it. She added that the flowers would keep him company.
I took her to see one of the loveliest tombs in the cemetery, that of Juliette Montrachet (1898–1962), around which various plants and shrubs have grown, combining colors and foliage harmoniously, while never being maintained. A garden tomb. As though chance and nature had come to an amicable agreement.
Claire said: “These flowers, they’re a bit like ladders up to heaven.” She thanked me, too. She drank a glass of water at my place, slipped a few notes into the ladybird moneybox, and off she went.
10.
Talking about you is making you exist,
saying nothing would be forgetting you.
I met Philippe Toussaint on July 28th, 1985, the day that Michel Audiard, the great screenwriter, died. Perhaps that’s why Philippe Toussaint and I never had much to say to each other. Why our dialogues were as flat as Tutankhamun’s brain scan. When he said to me, “That drink, shall we have it at my place?” I immediately said, “Yes.”
Before leaving the Tibourin club, I felt the looks of the other girls. The ones kicking their heels in the endless line behind him, since he had turned his back on them to look at me. I felt their eyes, covered in shadow and mascara, killing me, cursing me, condemning me to death when the music stopped.
No sooner had I said yes than we were on his motorbike, a too-big helmet on my head and his hand on my left knee. I closed my eyes. It began to rain on us. I felt raindrops on my face.
His parents rented a studio for him in the center of Charleville-Mézières. As we went up in the lift, I was still hiding my bitten nails under my sleeves.
As soon as we were inside his place, he threw himself on me without saying a word. I also stayed silent. Philippe Toussaint was so handsome that he took my breath away. Like when my primary-school teacher had done a lesson on Picasso and his Blue Period. The paintings she’d shown us, using her ruler on a book, had taken my breath away, and I’d decided that the rest of my life would be blue.
I slept at his place, dazed with the pleasure he’d given my body. For the first time, I’d enjoyed making love; I hadn’t done it in exchange for something. I began to hope that it would start again. And we did start again. I didn’t leave, I continued to sleep at his place. One day, two days, then three. After that, everything merged together. Days became fused, one to the next. Like a train whose carriages my memory can’t distinguish anymore. All that’s left is the memory of the journey.
Philippe Toussaint turned me into a dreamy sort. An entranced little girl who, looking at the photo of a blond, blue-eyed boy in a magazine, thinks: This picture belongs to me, I can put it in my pocket. I spent hours caressing him, one of my hands forever lingering on some part of him. There’s a saying that beauty can’t be eaten as a salad, but me, well, I dined on his beauty like a three-course meal. And if there were any leftovers, I helped myself again. He went along with it. I seemed to appeal to him, as did my caresses. He possessed me, and that’s all that mattered.
I fell in love. Thank goodness I’d never had a family, I would’ve abandoned it myself. Philippe Toussaint became my sole focus. I directed all that I was and all that I had at him. My entire being for just one person. If I could have lived in him, inside of him, I wouldn’t have hesitated.
One morning, he said to me, “Come and live here.”
