“You’re going to give your green fingers to the Indians?”
“To anyone who’ll have them, yes.”
One evening, we were having supper together and talking about John Irving, and L’Oeuvre de Dieu, la part du Diable. I told Sasha that he had been my personal Dr. Larch, my surrogate father. And he replied that one day soon, he was going to let go of my hand, that he sensed I was ready. That even surrogate fathers had to let their children go. That one morning, he wouldn’t come to the house bringing me fresh bread and the Journal de Saône-et-Loire.
“But surely you wouldn’t leave without saying goodbye to me?!”
“If I said goodbye to you, Violette, I would never leave. Can you imagine us hugging each other on a station platform? Why put ourselves through the unbearable? Don’t you think we’ve given enough to sorrow already? My place is no longer here. You are young and the sun is shining, I want you to make a new life for yourself. Starting tomorrow, I’ll be saying goodbye to you every day.”
He kept his promise. From the next day forward, every evening before leaving for Madame Bréant’s, he would hug me, saying, “Goodbye, Violette, look after yourself, I love you,” as if it were the last time. And the following day he would be back. He would put the baguette and newspaper down on my table, between the tea caddies and the flower, tree, and garden magazines. Then he would chat with the Lucchini brothers, Nono, and the others. He would go around the avenues with Elvis to see the cats. Help the visitors who were looking for a particular avenue or name. Give a hand to Gaston with the weeding. And in the evening, after the supper we shared, he would hug me again, saying, “Goodbye, Violette, look after yourself, I love you,” as if it were the last time.
His goodbyes lasted all winter. And on the morning of March 19th, 1999, he didn’t come. I went knocking on Madame Bréant’s door, Sasha had left. He had packed his suitcase several days before, and, when he had returned the previous evening, he had finally decided to fulfill his old dream, the one that was longest in the tooth.
89.
We lived together in bliss.
We rest together in peace.
IRÈNE FAYOLLE’S JOURNAL
February 13th, 2009
My old sales assistant just phoned me, “Madame Fayolle, on the TV, they’ve just said that your lawyer friend had a heart attack, in court, this morning . . . He died on the spot.”
On the spot. Gabriel died on the spot.
I often told him that I would die before him. What I didn’t know was that I would die at the same time as him. If Gabriel dies, I die.
February 14th, 2009
Today is Saint Valentine’s Day. Gabriel hated Saint Valentine’s Day.
When I write his name, Gabriel, Gabriel, Gabriel, in this journal, I feel that he’s close to me. Maybe it’s because he hasn’t been buried. Until the dead have been buried, they remain close by. That distance they put between us and heaven isn’t yet there.
The last time we saw each other, we argued. I asked him to leave my apartment. Furious, Gabriel went down the stairs without a backward glance. I waited for the sound of his steps, I waited for him to come back up, but he never did. He usually called me every evening, but since our argument, my telephone has remained silent. I’ll never be able to change those things now.
February 15th, 2009
What I still have of Gabriel is the freedom I relish every day, thanks to him. It’s the clothes bought in Cap d’Antibes at the bottom of a drawer; an open bottle of Suze in the bar; a few train tickets, round-trip; three novels, L’Oeuvre de Dieu, la part du Diable and Jack London’s Martin Eden. And Une femme, by Anne Delbée, which he gave me in a very rare edition. Gabriel was fascinated by Camille Claudel.
A few years ago, I joined him to spend three days in Paris. As soon as I arrived, he took me to the Musée Rodin. He wanted to see Camille Claudel’s works with me. In the garden, he kissed me in front of Les Bourgeois de Calais.
“It’s Camille Claudel who sculpted their hands and feet. Look how beautiful they are.”
“You also have beautiful hands. The first time I saw you pleading in court, in Aix-en-Provence, I looked only at them.”
That’s what Gabriel was like: where you didn’t expect him to be. Gabriel was a rock, he was solid and powerful. A macho man, who would never have accepted a woman paying a bill, or pouring herself a glass of wine in front of him. Gabriel was masculinity incarnate. When I presumed he would worship Rodin rather than Claudel, that he would prostrate himself before his Balzac, or his Penseur, I saw him bowing down to La Valse, by Camille Claudel.
Inside the museum, he didn’t let go of my hand. Like a child. He had all of Rodin’s most majestic sculptures in front of him, but he wasn’t interested.
When he spotted Les Causeuses, the little sculpture by Camille Claudel, on its pedestal, he squeezed my fingers very hard. Gabriel leaned toward them, stayed like that for a long while, as time stood still. He seemed to be breathing them in. His eyes shone in front of these four little women, in green onyx, born more than a century ago. I heard him murmur, “Their hair’s messy.”
As we left, he lit a cigarette and admitted to me that he had waited for me to be with him before visiting this museum, that he knew, before even entering, that he would need my hand to hold to avoid stealing Les Causeuses. As a student, he had fallen in love with them from a photograph. He had always desired them, so much so that he wanted to possess them. He knew
