I’d closed L’Oeuvre de Dieu, la part du Diable at page 25. I’d hidden it in a drawer, like a promise. A postponed holiday. I reopened it the year Léonine was two. I’ve never closed it since. And still today, I reread it several times a year. I return to the characters as though returning to an adoptive family. Dr. Wilbur Larch is my dream father. I’ve made the Saint Cloud’s Orphanage, in Maine, my childhood home. The orphan Homer Wells is my big brother, and Nurse Edna and Nurse Angela are my two imaginary aunts. That’s the prerogative of orphans. They can do what they want. They, too, can decide who their parents will be.
L’Oeuvre de Dieu, la part du Diable is the book that adopted me. I don’t know why I was never adopted. Why I was left to traipse from foster family to foster family, rather than being put up for adoption. Did my biological mother inquire after me occasionally, so I never would be?
I returned to Charleville-Mézières in 2003 to consult my file, that of a child given up at birth. As I was expecting, it was empty. Not a letter, not a trinket, not a photo, not an excuse. A file that could also be consulted by my mother, if she so wished. I slipped my adoptive novel inside it.
28.
There’s no solitude that isn’t shared.
This morning, we buried Victor Benjamin (1937–2017).
Father Cédric wasn’t there. Victor Benjamin wanted a civil burial. Jacques Lucchini set up his sound system close to the tomb and everyone gathered to listen to the song “My Old Man,” by Daniel Guichard.
“In his scruffy old overcoat, off he’d go, winter and summer, in the chilly wee hours, my old man . . . ”
No cross, or flowers, or wreaths, at Victor’s request. Just a few funerary plaques placed by his friends and colleagues, his wife, and his children. One of Victor’s children held their dog on a lead. He attended the burial of his master, sat when Daniel Guichard sang:
“Us, we’d heard it all before, no one was spared, the bourgeoisie, the bosses, the left, the right, even the good Lord, with my old man.”
The family left on foot, followed by the dog, who seemed to appeal to Eliane. She followed them a little, and then returned to curl up in her basket. Too old for love affairs.
When I got home, I had the blues. Nono sensed it. He went off to buy a crusty baguette and farm eggs, and we made a nice omelette with some comté cheese I’d grated. We found some jazz on the radio.
On my table, among the leaflets from purveyors of salad seeds and cypress saplings, bills for plants, catalogues from Willem & Jardins, the postman had left a letter. I looked at its stamp of the Château d’If. It had been posted in Marseilles.
Violette Trenet-Toussaint,
Cimetière de Brancion-en-Chalon (71)
Saône-et-Loire.
I waited until Nono had left to open it.
No “Dear Violette” or “Madame.” Julien Seul began his letter without any niceties.
The solicitor opened a letter that was addressed to me. My mother can’t have had much faith in me. She wanted things to be “official.” She wanted it to be him who read her final wishes to me, so that I couldn’t renege on them, I imagine.
There was just one wish. To rest beside Gabriel Prudent in your cemetery. I asked the solicitor to repeat the name of this man I didn’t know. Gabriel Prudent.
I told him that he must be mistaken. My mother was married to my father, Paul Seul, who is buried in the Saint-Pierre cemetery in Marseilles. The solicitor told me that there was no mistake. This was the final wish of Irène Fayolle, married name Seul, born April 27th, 1941, in Marseilles.
I got into my car, and entered “Brancion-en-Chalon, cemetery road” into my GPS, because “cemetery” didn’t appear on the list of options. Three hundred and ninety-seven kilometers. I’d have to drive up France, it was a direct route. No detours or deviations, the motorway to Mâcon. Exit near Sancé, and drive ten kilometers along country roads. What had my mother been doing up there?
For the rest of the day, I tried to work, but it was useless. I hit the road at around 9 P.M. I drove for hours. I stopped near Lyons to have a coffee, fill up, and type “Gabriel Prudent” in the browser of my mobile phone. All I found was a definition of “prudence” on Wikipedia: “Founded on an aversion to risk and danger.”
As I was driving toward this dead and buried man, I tried to recall my mother, the times I’d spent with her in recent years. The few Sunday lunches, an occasional coffee when I was passing through her neighborhood, rue Paradis. She would comment on the news, never asked me if I was happy. I never asked her if she was, either. She asked me questions about work. She seemed disappointed by my replies; she was expecting blood and tales of crimes of passion, when all I gave her was drug trafficking, lowlife crimes, and pickpocketing. Before I left, as she kissed me goodbye in the corridor, because of my job she always said, “Do take care, all the same.”
I tried to think of any glimpse she might have given me of her private life—nothing. I found not the slightest trace of that man in my memories, not even a shadow.
I arrived at Brancion-en-Chalon at two in the morning. I parked in front of the cemetery, where the gates were locked, and fell asleep. I had nightmares. I was cold. I restarted the engine to warm up. I fell asleep again. I opened my eyes at around 7 A.M.
I saw some light inside your house. I knocked on your door. I wasn’t remotely expecting you. When I knocked on a cemetery keeper’s door, I expected to
