Until then, I knew the words of the songs printed inside the covers of my LPs. I listened to them and attempted to read them at the same time, but I didn’t understand them.
It was while thinking about buying my dictionary that I felt Léonine move for the first time. The words I’d read out loud must have woken her. I took her slow movements as encouragement.
The following day, we moved to Malgrange-sur-Nancy to become level-crossing keepers. But before that, I went down to buy a dictionary, to find the word “avide” inside it, “A person who desires something voraciously.”
20.
If life is nothing but a passage,
our memory will preserve your image.
I’m dusting the plastic boxes containing my Portuguese dolls. I lay them down as often as possible to avoid seeing their tiny, black pinhead eyes.
I heard that garden gnomes have been disappearing from properties . . . What if I convinced Madame Pinto that all my dolls had been stolen?
Nono and Father Cédric are deep in conversation behind me. Especially Nono. Elvis is leaning at the kitchen window, watching the visitors go by and singing “Tutti Frutti” very softly. Nono’s voice is drowning his out.
“I was a painter. A house painter, not a painter like Picasso. And then my wife left me all alone with three young kids . . . and I found myself without a job. I was laid off. And then, in 1982, I was employed by the town as a gravedigger.”
“How old were your children?” Father Cédric asks.
“Not very old. The older ones seven and five, the little’un six months. I raised ’em on my own. Later, I had another daughter . . . I was born nearby, behind the first block of houses next to your church. In the old days, the midwife would come to the home. And you, Father, where were you born?”
“In Brittany.”
“Rains all the time over there.”
“That may be so, but it doesn’t stop children from being born. I didn’t remain long in Brittany, my father was a soldier. He was always being transferred.”
“A soldier producing a priest. Well, that ain’t too common.”
Father Cédric’s laughter echoes around my walls. Elvis carries on humming. I’ve never know him to have a sweetheart, even though he spends his days singing love songs.
Nono calls me, “Violette! Stop playing with your dolls, someone’s knocking on the door.”
I throw my cloth on the stairs and go to open to this visitor, who’s probably looking for a grave.
I open the cemetery-side door, it’s the detective. It’s the first time he’s arrived at this door. He doesn’t have the urn. His hair’s still a mess. He still smells of cinnamon and vanilla. His eyes are glistening as if he’d been crying; probably tiredness. He smiles shyly at me. Elvis closes the window, and the noise he makes drowns my hello.
The detective notices Nono and Father Cédric sitting at the table. He says to me, “Am I disturbing you? Would you like me to come by later?” I reply no. That in two hours there’s a burial, I’ll no longer have time.
He comes in. He greets Nono, Elvis, and Father Cédric with a firm handshake.
“Let me introduce you to Norbert and Elvis, my colleagues, and our priest, Cédric Duras.”
The detective introduces himself, too; it’s the first time I hear him saying his name: Julien Seul. My three acolytes all leave at once, as if the detective’s name had scared them. Nono calls out, “See you later, Violette!”
I introduce myself for the first time, “And me, I’m called Violette. Violette Toussaint.” The detective replies:
“I know.”
“Oh really, you know?”
“At first I thought it was a nickname, a kind of joke.”
“A joke?”
“Admit it, for a cemetery keeper, it’s unusual to be called Toussaint.”
“In fact, I’m called Trenet. Violette Trenet.”
“Trenet, that suits you better than Toussaint.”
“Toussaint was my husband’s name.”
“Why ‘was’?”
“He disappeared. He vanished into thin air from one day to the next. Well, not really from one day to the next . . . Let’s say he prolonged one of his absences.”
With embarrassment, he says to me:
“That I also know.”
“You know?”
“Madame Bréant has red shutters and a ready tongue.”
I go to wash my hands, I let some liquid soap run into my palms, a sweet rose-scented soap. At my place, everything smells of powdery rose: my candles, perfume, linen, tea, even the little cakes I dip in my coffee. I smooth rose cream over my hands. I spend hours with my fingers in the earth, gardening, I have to protect them. I like to have lovely hands. It’s been years now since I stopped biting my nails.
Meanwhile, Julien Seul is again studying my white walls. He seems preoccupied. Eliane rubs her muzzle against him, he pets her, smiling.
As I serve him a cup of coffee, I wonder what exactly Madame Bréant might have told him.
“I’ve written the speech for my mother.”
He takes an envelope out of his inside pocket and leans it against the ladybird moneybox.
“You’ve just done four hundred kilometers to bring me the speech for your mother? Why not send it to me by mail?”
“No, that’s not really what I’ve come for.”
“You have her ashes?”
“No again.”
He pauses awhile. He seems increasingly uncomfortable.
“Could I smoke by the window?”
“Yes.”
He takes a squashed packet from his pocket and pulls out a cigarette, a light one. Before striking a match, he says to me:
“There’s something else.”
He goes over to the window and half-opens it. He turns his back on me. Takes a drag and blows the smoke outside.
I think I hear him say, through a curl of
