That blue suitcase was for me. It was full of presents. Teas, incense, scarves, fabrics, jewelry, honeys, olive oils, Marseilles soap, candles, amulets, books, Bach LPs, sunflower seeds. Everywhere Sasha had been, he’d bought me a souvenir.
“I’ve brought you back an impression for each trip.”
“The suitcase, too?”
“Of course, one day you, too, will set off.”
He walked around the garden with tears in his eyes. He said, “The pupil has surpassed the teacher . . . I knew you’d do it.”
We had lunch together. Every time I heard an engine in the distance, I thought it might be Philippe Toussaint returning. But no.
* * *
Nineteen years later, it’s a different man I find myself waiting for. In the morning, when I open the gates, I look for his car in the car park. Sometimes, along the avenues, when I hear steps behind me, I turn around, thinking: He’s here, he’s come back.
Yesterday evening, I thought someone was knocking on my road-side door. I went down but there was no one there.
And yet, the last time Julien slammed his car door and said to me, “Be seeing you,” just as if bidding me farewell, I did nothing to keep him. I smiled and replied, confidently, “Yes, safe journey,” just as if I were saying to him, “It’s for the best.” When Nathan and Valentin waved at me from the back of the car, I knew I wouldn’t be seeing them again.
Since that morning, Julien has given me just one sign of life. A postcard from Barcelona to tell me that Nathan and he would be spending the two months of summer over there. And that Nathan’s mother would be joining them from time to time.
The meeting of Irène and Gabriel will have helped Julien and Nathan’s mother. I was a bridge, a crossing between them. Julien had needed to know me to realize that he couldn’t lose the mother of his child. And thanks to Julien, I know that I can still make love. That I can be desired. Which is at least something.
86.
We have come here in search, in search of something or someone. In search of that love that is stronger than death.
January 1998
On the day Violette had seen him talking with Swan Letellier in Mâcon, Philippe had felt someone’s eyes on the back of his neck. A familiar presence behind him. He had paid it no attention. Not really. Not enough to turn around. Swan Letellier was now facing him. The face of a rat. This thought had already crossed his mind at the trial. Small, deep-set eyes, craggy cheeks, thin mouth.
On the phone, Letellier had said to him, “Meet me at the local bar, around midday, it’s quiet then.”
Like the others, Philippe had coldly asked him the same questions, his tone and look menacing, “Don’t lie, I have nothing to lose.” He always stressed the final one: who could have turned on a rickety old water heater?
Letellier didn’t seem to know what had gone on that night. He had turned white as a sheet when Philippe had told him, in one breath, what Alain Fontanel had admitted: Geneviève Magnan going off to hug their sick son, then returning to the château and panicking at finding the four bodies, asphyxiated by carbon monoxide, the idea of starting the fire to make it look like a domestic accident, Fontanel kicking Letellier’s door to wake him up, wake all the staff up.
But Letellier hadn’t believed this story. Fontanel was an alky, he must have said any old thing to a father searching for an explanation for the inexplicable.
He did remember the muffled banging on the door. Their difficulty waking up because they had been smoking joints with the supervisor. The smell, the smoke, the fire. How inaccessible Room 1 was, the flames already too high, that impenetrable barrier. That sudden hell. That moment you tell yourself that it’s a nightmare, that none of it’s real. He could still see the girls outside in their nighties, barefoot in their slippers or badly laced shoes, and all the staff going crazy. Mother Croquevieille choking. And the others, shocked, shaking, and praying. The wait for the fire brigade. Counting, and counting again, how many children were safe and sound. Their sleepy eyes, when they, the adults, would never sleep soundly again. The little girls, terrified by the flames and the grown-ups’ wan faces, asking for their parents. Whom they had had to call, inform, one after the other. Whom they had had to lie to, also, not admitting that inside, four of the girls had perished.
Swan Letellier had added that he still felt guilty to that day. None of it might have happened had the supervisor remained on the ground floor.
Lucie Lindon and he had said nothing to the authorities about Geneviève Magnan because they had felt at fault. Lucie Lindon shouldn’t have asked Geneviève Magnan to stand in for her. But Swan had really insisted on it. They had all failed in their duty.
Croquevieille, who would do anything not to spend a centime—the ill-fitting lino in the rooms, the asbestos under the eaves, the fiberglass that no longer insulated anything, the peeling paintwork, the lead pipes, the fire that had spread too fast, the toxic fumes given off by ancient kitchen units. No, no one was in the clear, not Magnan, or Lindon, or Fonatanel, or himself. They were all up to their necks in it, and it was too much to bear . . . The only thing he was sure about was that no one would have intentionally turned on one of the water heaters on the ground floor. All the staff knew that they mustn’t be touched. Indeed, those old things were hidden behind plasterboard units, out of the children’s reach. He well remembered Edith Croquevieille’s words the day before the first guests, of those due
