7 A.M. to 8 P.M. on November 1st.
I took on my husband’s work after his departure—or, more accurately, his disappearance. Philippe Toussaint comes under the heading “disappearance of concern” in the police’s national file.
I still have several men around me. The three gravediggers, Nono, Gaston, and Elvis. The three undertakers, the Lucchini brothers, named Pierre, Paul, and Jacques. And Father Cédric Duras. All these men stop at my place several times a day. They come for a drink or a snack. They also help me in the vegetable garden, if I have sacks of compost to carry or leaks to fix. I regard them as friends, not colleagues. Even if I’m not in, they can come into my kitchen, pour themselves a coffee, rinse their cup, and set off again.
Gravediggers do a job that prompts repulsion, disgust. And yet those in my cemetery are the gentlest, most agreeable men I know.
Nono is the person I trust the most. He’s an upstanding man who has joie de vivre in his blood. Everything amuses him and he never says no. Apart from when there’s a child’s burial to attend to. He leaves “that” to the others. “To those who can bear it,” as he says. Nono looks like the singer Georges Brassens, and it makes him laugh because I’m the only person in the world who tells him he looks like Georges Brassens.
As for Gaston, he invented clumsiness. His movements are uncoordinated. He always seems drunk, despite only ever drinking water. During funerals, he positions himself between Nono and Elvis just in case he loses his balance. Beneath Gaston’s feet there’s a permanent earthquake. He drops, he falls, he knocks over, he crushes. When he comes into my place, I’m always afraid he’ll break something or injure himself. And since fear doesn’t avert danger, he invariably does break a glass or injure himself.
Elvis is known as Elvis because of Elvis Presley. He can’t read or write, but he knows all his idol’s songs by heart. His pronunciation of the lyrics is terrible—you can’t tell whether he’s singing in English or French—but his heart is in it. “Love mi tendeur, love mi trou . . . ”
There’s barely a year between each of the Lucchini brothers: thirty-eight, thirty-nine, and forty. They’ve been in undertaking for generations, from father to son. They’re also the fortunate owners of the Brancion morgue, which adjoins their funeral parlor. Nono told me that only a partition separates the parlor from the morgue. It’s Pierre, the eldest, who receives the grieving families. Paul is an embalmer. He works in the basement. And Jacques drives the hearses. The final journey, that’s him. Nono calls them “the apostles.”
And then there’s our priest, Cédric Duras. God has taste, even if he’s not always just. Since Father Cédric’s arrival, many women around here seem to have been struck by a divine revelation. There are ever more female believers in the pews on Sunday morning.
As for me, I never go to church. It would be like sleeping with a colleague. And yet, I think I’m more confided in by those who pass through than Father Cédric is in his confessional. It’s in my modest home and along my cemetery’s avenues that families let their words pour out. As they arrive, as they leave, sometimes both. A bit like the dead. With them, it’s the silences, the gravestone inscriptions, the visits, the flowers, the photographs, the way visitors behave beside their graves, that tell me about their former lives. About when they were living. Moving.
My job consists of being discreet, liking human contact, not feeling compassion. For a woman like me, not feeling compassion would be like being an astronaut, a surgeon, a volcanologist, or a geneticist. Not part of my planet, or my skill set. But I never cry in front of a visitor. That can happen to me before or after a burial, never during. My cemetery is three centuries old. The first dead person it received was a woman. Diane de Vigneron (1756–1773), who died in childbirth at the age of seventeen. If you stroke the plaque on her tomb with your fingertips, you can still make out her name carved into the dove-colored stone. She hasn’t been exhumed, even though my cemetery is short of space. None of the successive mayors dared to make the decision to disturb the first to be interred. Particularly since there’s an old legend surrounding Diane. According to the inhabitants of Brancion, she’s supposed to have appeared in her “raiment of light” on several occasions, in front of shopwindows in the town center and in the cemetery. When I do the garage sales around here, I sometimes find Diane depicted as a ghost on antique engravings dating from the eighteenth century, or on postcards. A false, staged Diane, disguised as a common phantom.
There are many legends surrounding tombs. The living frequently reinvent the lives of the dead.
Brancion has a second legend, much younger than Diane de Vigneron. She’s called Reine Ducha (1961–1982), and she’s buried in my cemetery, avenue 15, in the Cedars section. A pretty young woman, dark-haired and smiling in the photo that hangs on her headstone. She was killed in a car accident at the edge of town. Some youngsters apparently saw her, dressed all in white, at the side of the road where the accident took place.
The myth of the “white ladies” spread far and wide. These specters of women who died accidentally are supposed to haunt the world of the living, dragging their troubled souls through castles and cemeteries.
And just to reinforce Reine’s legend, her tomb shifted. According to Nono and the Lucchini brothers, it was due to a landslide. That often happens when too much water accumulates in a vault.
Over twenty years, I reckon I’ve seen plenty in my cemetery. On some nights, I’ve even caught shadows making love on or between tombs, but those weren’t ghosts.
Legends aside, nothing is eternal, not even burial plots held in perpetuity. You can purchase a concession for
