Watering must be done at nightfall with a watering can—use water from the well or collected rainwater. The can is gentler than the hose; use the hose and you flatten the soil and it can’t breathe anymore. The soil must breathe. That’s why, occasionally, you should scratch carefully with a hook around the base of plants, to aerate it.
Pick ripe vegetables.
Tomatoes can wait a few days.
Eggplants every three days, otherwise they fatten and harden.
Beans every day. And to be eaten at once. Either preserve them, or freeze them after removing stalks, or distribute them to people around you.
Ditto for everything else: never forget that one grows to share, otherwise it’s pointless.
Father Cédric won’t be alone in tending the vegetable garden. Since the dismantling of the “Jungle” in Calais, some Sudanese families have been lodged at the château in Chardonnay. He goes there three times a week to help the volunteers. A young couple, Kamal and Anita, both nineteen, are due to have a baby. Father Cédric got permission from the authorities to have them stay with him. He will try to protect them for as long as possible, once the child is born. Long enough for them to return to studying, get a diploma, and, crucially, a permanent right to remain. It’s a precarious situation—Father Cédric says he’s living on a powder keg, but it’s a vulnerability he welcomes. And as long as it lasts, he will embrace the joy of sharing his daily life with an adopted family. Whether it lasts a month or ten years, he will have lived it.
“Everything is ephemeral, Violette, we’re merely passing through. Only God’s love remains steadfast in all things.”
Since they have been living at the presbytery, Kamal and Anita come to my kitchen every day, and unlike the others, stay longer. Anita is madly in love with Eliane, and Kamal with my vegetable garden. He spends hours deciphering Sasha’s index cards and my Willem & Jardins catalogues, when he isn’t giving me a hand. He’s really good at it. The first time I told him he had a green thumb, he didn’t understand and responded, with bafflement, “But Violette, I’m black.”
I gave my Boscher reading-method book, The Little Ones’ Day Out, to Anita. She reads it aloud to me, and when she makes a mistake, stumbles over a word, I correct her without even looking at the pages, since I know it by heart.
When Anita opened the book for the first time, she asked me if it belonged to my child; I replied with a question, “May I touch your tummy?” She replied: “Yes, do.” I laid my hands flat on the cotton of her dress. Anita started laughing because I was tickling her. The baby gave me a few kicks. Anita told me that he was also laughing. And so, we laughed, all three of us, in my kitchen.
If someone dies and there’s a funeral to organize, it’s Jacques Lucchini who will stand in for me. Since I had to give Gaston something to do during my absence, I asked him to collect my mail and put it on the shelf beside the phone. I’m almost certain that he won’t be able to break one of my letters.
From my bed, I contemplate my still-open suitcase, sitting on top of my chest of drawers. I’ll finish packing it tomorrow. I always take too much stuff to Marseilles. I wear almost nothing at the chalet. There’s too much “just in case” in my luggage.
The first time I saw that suitcase was in 1998. Philippe Toussaint had gone for good, but I still didn’t realize it. Four days earlier, he had kissed me goodbye, mumbling, “See you later.” He was due to question Eloïse Petit, the second supervisor. The only one left he hadn’t spoken to. He had said to me, “After that, I’m done. After that, we change our life. I can’t stand any more of all this, these tombs. We’ll go and live in the Midi.”
He changed life on his own.
On Eloïse Petit day, he changed direction. Instead of going to see her, he headed to Bron, to see Françoise Pelletier again.
For four days, I was on my own. I was kneeling at the back of the vegetable garden, my nose in the leaves of the nasturtiums I’d attached to bamboo stakes. Like every time Philippe Toussaint was away, the cats had gravitated to the house, and were playing hide-and-seek around me, all darting about, and one of them ended up knocking over a basin of water, they all jumped, and, in their panic, landed in the water. I couldn’t stop laughing. I heard a familiar voice, coming from the door of the house, saying, “It’s good to hear you laughing all on your own.”
I thought I was hallucinating. That the wind in the trees was playing a mean trick on me. I looked up and saw the suitcase on the table under the arbor. It was as blue as the Mediterranean on really sunny days. Sasha was standing in front of the door. I went over to him and stroked his face because I couldn’t believe it was really him. I thought he had forgotten me. I said to him, “I thought you had abandoned me.”
“Never, do you hear me, Violette? Never will I abandon you.”
He gave me a rough outline of his first months of retirement. He had visited Sany, his almost-brother, in the south of India. In Chartres, Besançon, Sicily, and Toulouse, he had visited palaces, churches, monasteries, streets, other cemeteries. He had swum in lakes, rivers, and seas. Had soothed aching backs, sore ankles, and superficial burns. He had just come from Marseilles, where he had done some window boxes of aromatic plants for Célia. He wanted to give me a hug before going to Valence to pay his respects at the tombs of Verena, Emile, and Ninon, his wife and children who were buried there. Then he would return to India to be with Sany.
He had just
