Then there was winter, hats, scarves, her muffled up in her pram. Teething, fits of giggles, the first ear infection. Me taking her for walks between two trains. The people who leant over to look at her. Who said, “She looks like you,” and me replying, “No, she looks like her father.”
Then there was her first spring, a blanket laid on the grass, between the house and the tracks, shaded from the sun. Her toys, her starting to sit up well, and putting everything in her mouth between smiles, the barrier to raise and lower, Philippe Toussaint going off on his motorbike, but always returning in time to put his feet under the table. And then going off on his motorbike again. Léo greatly amused him, but for no more than ten minutes.
I think I succeeded in looking after my daughter, despite my young age. I managed to find the gestures, the voice, the touch, the attention. As the years went by, the fear of losing her went quiet. I finally understood that there would be no reason for us to abandon each other.
26.
Nothing opposes the night, nothing justifies it.
Since darkness is winning
Since there’s no mountain
Beyond the winds higher than the marches of oblivion
Since we must learn
For want of understanding it
To dream our desires and live with “so be it”
And since you think
It’s entirely obvious
That sometimes even giving everything isn’t necessarily enough
Since it’s elsewhere
That your heart will beat better
And since we love you too much to keep you
Since you’re leaving . . .
This is the song that is most played at funerals. In church and at the cemetery.
In twenty years, I’ve heard it all. From Ave Maria to “The Desire to Desire” by Johnny Hallyday. For a burial, a family once requested Pierre Perret’s song, “The Willy,” because it was the deceased’s favorite. Pierre Lucchini and our previous priest refused. Pierre explained that not all final wishes could be fulfilled, either in the house of God or in the “garden of souls”—that’s what he calls my cemetery. The family found funerary etiquette’s lack of humor baffling.
Regularly, a visitor will place a CD player on a tomb. The volume is never very high, as though to avoid disturbing the neighbors.
I’ve also seen a lady placing her little radio on her husband’s tomb, “so he can hear the news.” A very young girl putting speakers on either side of the cross on the tomb of a schoolboy, to make him listen to the latest Coldplay album.
There are also the birthdays that people come to celebrate, by laying flowers on the tomb or playing music from a mobile phone.
Every June 25th, a woman named Olivia comes to sing for a man whose ashes were scattered in the garden of remembrance. She arrives when the gates open. She drinks a tea without sugar in my kitchen without saying a word, apart from maybe a remark about the weather. At around 9:10, she makes her way to the garden of remembrance. I never accompany her, she knows the way only too well. If it’s fine and my windows are open, I can hear her voice right inside the house. She always sings the same song, “Blue Room” by Chet Baker: We’ll have a blue room, a new room for two room, where ev’ry day’s a holiday because you’re married to me . . .
She takes her time singing it. She sings it loudly but slowly, to make it last. There are long silences between each verse, as though someone were replying to her, echoing her. Then she sits down for a few moments on the ground.
Last June, I had to lend her an umbrella because it was pouring rain. When she came over to the house to return it to me, I asked her if she was a singer, because her voice was so beautiful. She took off her coat and sat down close to me. She started talking to me as if I had asked her lots of questions, even though in twenty years, I had asked her just the one.
She spoke to me of the man, François, she came to sing for every year. She was a schoolgirl in Mâcon when she had met him, he was her French teacher. She had fallen in love with him, immediately, at the first lesson. She had lost her appetite over it. She lived only for when she would see him next. The school holidays were bottomless pits. Of course, she always made sure she was at the front, in the first row. She now focused only on French, in which she excelled. She was rediscovering her mother tongue. During that year, she had got 19/20 for some creative writing. She had chosen as her subject, “Is love a trap?” She had written ten brilliant pages on the love a man, a teacher, felt for one of his pupils. A love he dismissed out of hand. Olivia had written her piece in the form of a detective novel, in which the guilty party was none other than her. She had changed the names of all her characters (the pupils in her class) and the setting of the story. She had made it all happen at an English school. Cheekily, she had asked François:
“Sir, why 19? Why not 20?”
He had replied:
“Because perfection doesn’t exist, mademoiselle.”
“But then,” she insisted, “why was the 20 score invented, if perfection doesn’t exist?”
“For mathematics, for resolving problems. In French, as a subject, there are very few infallible solutions.”
As a comment beside the 19/20, he had scribbled in red pen, “Excellent
