I still love the simplicity, universal and complex, of their feelings. I love the words they say, so poetic, so apt. That music in their voices.
I think I loved Marseilles and the Marseillais before even encountering them, like an intuition, an anticipatory dream. That raw beauty, it gets to me every time I return to Sormiou, as I descend the steep little road that leads to the big blue sea. I understand Marcel Pagnol, I understand how the characters in his trilogy would come from there. From those sheer rocks, bleached by the sun, that searing heat, that clear, turquoise water playing hide-and-seek with a spotless sky, those umbrella pines just where nature intended, no fuss. This landscape puts on no airs, it is simple and majestic. It just makes sense. It’s Marius’s yearning to be a sailor. It’s Monsieur Panisse, who “makes sails so the wind carries off other people’s children,” as César says.
When I open up the red shutters of the chalet with Célia, and I find once again the old cupboard in the kitchen, the bare-wood table with its yellow chairs and the draining board above the sink, the little bunches of dried lavender, the patchwork of tiles, and the sky-blue paneling, I think of César, who stops Marius and Fanny from kissing because she is married to another man: “Children, no, don’t do that, Panisse is a decent man, don’t seek to make him look ridiculous in front of his family’s furniture.”
It was Célia’s maternal grandfather who built this chalet in 1919. Before he died, he made her promise never to part with it. Because that roof, it was worth all the palaces in the world.
It’s been twenty-four years now that I’ve been coming here. And every summer, Célia spends the day before my arrival filling up the fridge and putting clean sheets on the beds. She buys coffee and filters, lemons, tomatoes and peaches, ewe’s milk cheese, washing powder, and Cassis wine. I can implore her all I like, assure her that I can do the shopping myself, at least reimburse her, but she won’t hear of it, and repeats to me every time: “You welcomed me into your home when you didn’t even know me.” I tried leaving an envelope of money in a drawer. A week later, Célia returned it to me in the mail.
Once the shutters are open and my clothes put away, I go to visit the few native fishermen, who live down below, in the Calanque, all year round. They speak to me of the sea, which is increasingly losing fish, just as the locals are their accent. They give me sea urchins, small squid, and sugary desserts made by their wives or mothers.
Earlier on, Célia had been waiting at the end of the platform. The train arrived an hour late, she smelled of the coffee she had drunk while waiting for me. A year since I’d last seen her. We hugged each other tight.
She said to me:
“So, my dear Violette, what’s new?”
“Philippe Toussaint is dead. And after that, Françoise Pelletier came to see me.”
“Who?”
88.
From where I am, I smile, because my life
was good and, above all, I loved.
Philippe Toussaint never returned, and Sasha remained at Madame Bréant’s.
Before I knew, on the day I opened the blue suitcase full of presents, I told Sasha that the man I shared my life with, without ever having really shared it, was probably better than he’d given the impression of being.
Before I knew, I told Sasha that the man I thought was just selfish, whom I no longer listened to or looked at, the man who’d given up on me, drowning in the depths of solitude, had appeared to me in a new light when I’d seen him in a Mâcon bistro with Swan Letellier.
Before I knew, I told Sasha that, on the evening Philippe Toussaint had returned from Mâcon, he’d told me that he was searching for the truth about the sequence of events. That he’d questioned, sometimes persecuted, the château staff. At the trial he’d believed no one. Apart from Eloïse Petit—he hadn’t yet tracked her down.
My husband had told me all about Alain Fontanel and the others. I had taken hold of his hand for fear of falling, when we were lying side by side in our bed. I had imagined the words and the faces of those who had seen my daughter alive for the last time. Those who hadn’t managed to take care of her, of her smile. Those who had proved to be negligent.
The little girls left on their own while the supervisor and the cook were upstairs, fornicating and smoking joints. Geneviève Magnan gone, leaving the children unsupervised. The director, the sort that sweeps things under the carpet, fit only for collecting the parents’ checks.
So as not to be overcome when he’d told me what Fontanel had said, the story about the defective water heater, the asphyxiation, I’d focused on the fragrance of the new washing powder I’d used to wash our sheets the previous day, “tropical breeze.” So as not to howl in our bed, I’d kept thinking of the illustrations on that drum of washing powder, pink and white Tahitian flowers. Those flowers had led me to think of the patterns on Léonine’s dresses. Her dresses were like imaginary flying carpets that I rode when the present became too unbearable. All night, I breathed in the smell of my clean sheets while listening to Philippe Toussaint talking to me for almost the first time.
Before I knew, I’d stroked his face once again, and we’d made love like when we were young, when his parents would fall on us without warning. Before I knew. Before I knew that he’d slept with Geneviève Magnan when we lived in Malgrange-sur-Nancy, I’d believed
