We had been living here for five months, and I hadn’t returned to Geneviève Magnan’s to question Fontanel, or to the restaurant where Swan Letellier worked. I hadn’t tried to find out where the two supervisors lived so as to speak to them. The director must have come out of prison—she had only got a year without remission. I had never passed in front of the château again. I no longer heard Léonine’s voice asking me why everything had burned down that night. Sasha hadn’t been wrong: this place was restoring me.
I had immediately found my bearings in this cemetery, in the house, in the garden. I liked the company of the gravediggers, the Lucchini brothers, and the cats, who came increasingly often for a coffee on the one hand, a saucer of milk on the other, in my kitchen, when my husband wasn’t there. When Philippe Toussaint’s motorbike was parked outside the road-side door, they never came in. There was no friendliness between them, just hello and goodbye. The men from the cemetery and Philippe Toussaint had no interest in each other. As for the cats, they avoided him like the plague.
Only the mayor, who visited us once a month, didn’t care whether Philippe Toussaint was there or not; it was always me that he addressed. He seemed to be satisfied with “our” work. On November 1st, 1997, having seen the pine trees I had planted, when he was paying his respects at his family tomb, he had asked me to grow and sell a few potted plants in the cemetery, as a sideline, and I had accepted.
The first funeral I had attended as cemetery keeper had been in September of 1997. From that day on, I started recording what was said, describing those present, the flowers, the color of the coffin, the tributes inscribed on the funerary plaques, the weather, the poems or songs chosen, whether a cat or a bird had approached the tomb. I had immediately felt the necessity to leave some trace of those last moments, so that nothing got forgotten. For all those who weren’t able to attend the ceremony due to pain, grief, distance, rejection, or exclusion, someone would be there to say, to testify, to tell, to report. As I wished had been done for the funeral of my daughter. My daughter. My great love. Had I abandoned you?
Sitting on the edge of the bath, with the scrap of paper tablecloth in my hands, their names fading before my eyes, I felt an irrepressible urge to do like Philippe Toussaint, to leave for a few hours. Get out of here. Walk somewhere else. See other streets, other faces, window displays of clothes and books. Return to life, to a river. Apart from the shopping I did in the small town center, I hadn’t left the cemetery for five months.
I went out and along the avenues of the cemetery, looking for Nono so that he could drop me off in Mâcon and pick me up in the late afternoon. He asked me if I had a driving license.
“Yes.”
He handed me the keys of the council’s utility vehicle.
“I’m allowed to drive it?”
“You’re a council employee. I filled her up this morning. Have a good day.”
I drove toward Mâcon. Since Stéphanie’s Fiat, I hadn’t touched a steering wheel, felt that kind of freedom. I sang as I drove: “Douce France, cher pays de mon enfance, bercée de tant d’insouciance, je t’ai gardée dans mon coeur.” Why did I sing that? The songs of Charles Trenet, my imaginary uncle, have always been a part of me, like nonexistent memories.
I parked in the center of town. It must have been around 10 A.M., the shops were open. First, I had a coffee in a bistro, watched the living arriving and leaving, walking on the sidewalks, their cars stopping at the red lights. Living people who weren’t bereaved.
I crossed the Saint-Laurent bridge, walked along the Saône, and then wandered through the streets. It’s on that day that my winter wardrobe and summer wardrobe first started. I bought myself a gray dress and a pink polo-neck on sale.
At lunchtime, I wanted to get closer to the restaurant quarter to buy a sandwich. It was cold, but the sky was blue. I felt like having lunch beside the water, throwing my crusts to the ducks. As I thought back to the Siamese cat that had saved my life the evening I’d waited for Swan Letellier, I got lost. I found myself in streets I didn’t recognize. At a crossroads, I thought I knew where I was, but instead of going in the right direction, I moved further away from the town center. The streets were lined with houses and apartment buildings. I looked at the fences, the empty swings, the garden furniture shrouded in plastic because it was January.
It’s at that moment that I saw it, propped on its stand, one of its wheels attached to a lock. Philippe Toussaint’s motorbike was parked about a hundred meters away from me. My heart started beating as if I were a little girl who didn’t have her parents’ permission to be out of the house. I felt like turning around and running, but something held me back: I wanted to know what he was doing there. When he would leave at about 11 A.M. and return at about 4 P.M., I imagined that he went very far. Sometimes, when he got back, he told me what he had seen. It wasn’t unusual for him to cover more than four hundred kilometers in a day. Looking at his Honda, it struck me that I had only ever seen it parked outside our house. Philippe Toussaint had never suggested taking me somewhere. There had never been two helmets at the house, just his one. And when he changed it, he sold the old one.
A dog barked behind a fence, I jumped. At the same moment, I glimpsed him through the window of
