You made me come in and offered me coffee. It felt good in your house, and it smelled good and you smelled good. You were wearing a gray dressing gown, an old lady’s thing, whereas you radiated something like youth. I can’t find the words. A certain energy, something that time hadn’t spoiled. It was as if you were disguised in your dressing gown. That’s it, you were like a child who has borrowed an adult’s clothing.
Your hair was gathered into a bun. I don’t know if it was the shock I’d had at the solicitor’s, the night driving, or tiredness that disturbed my vision, but I found you incredibly unreal. A bit like a ghost, an apparition.
In finding you, I felt for the first time like my mother was sharing her bizarre parallel life with me, that she’d brought me to where she really was.
And then you pulled out your burial registers. That was the moment I realized you were different. That women do exist who resemble no other women. You weren’t a copy of someone, you were someone.
While you were getting ready, I returned to my car, ran the engine, and closed my eyes. I couldn’t sleep. I saw you again, behind that door. You had opened it to me for an hour. Like part of a film I kept replaying to hear again the music of the scene I’d just lived through.
When I got out of my car and saw you in your long navy-blue coat, waiting for me behind the gate, I thought: I have to know where she comes from and what she’s doing here.
Next, you took me over to the tomb of Gabriel Prudent. You held yourself straight and your profile was lovely. At each of your steps, I glimpsed the red under your coat. As if you were hiding secrets under your shoes. And I thought again: I have to know where she comes from and what she’s doing here. I should have felt sad that October morning in your gloomy, chilly cemetery, but I felt quite the opposite.
It struck me, in front of Gabriel Prudent’s tomb, that I was like a man who falls in love with a guest at his own wedding.
During my second visit, I watched you for a long time. You were cleaning the portraits of the dead, on their tombs, while talking to them. And I thought, for the third time: I have to know where she comes from and what she’s doing here.
I didn’t need to question Madame Bréant, the bed-and-breakfast owner, who told me that you lived alone, that your husband had “disappeared.” I thought that “disappeared” meant “died.” And I’ll admit to you that, at that, I felt joy. A strange joy at thinking: She’s alone. When Madame Bréant specified that your husband had just vanished, from one day to the next, twenty years ago, I felt that he could come back. That the unreal state I had found you in behind your door, the first time, was perhaps due to that. To all those hours in limbo that this disappearance had imposed on you, between one life and another. A waiting room you’d been sitting in for years without anyone ever coming to call you or saying your name. As if Toussaint and Trenet were knocking the ball back and forth. It must have been that, that impression of disguise, your youth under a gray dressing gown.
I wanted to know for you. I wanted to rescue the princess. Play the comic-strip hero. Take off that navy-blue coat to see you in your red dress. Did I seek to know through you what I didn’t know about my own mother, and thus my own life? Probably. I broke into your private life to soothe my own. And for that I am sorry.
Sorry.
Within twenty-four hours, I knew what you seemed not to have known for twenty years. It wasn’t hard for me to get hold of a copy of the statement you gave at the police station. I read in the notes of the sergeant you spoke to, in 1998, that your husband regularly deserted you. That it wasn’t unusual for him to go off for several days, several weeks even, without telling you where he was staying during these periods of absence. No inquiry had been carried out. His disappearance hadn’t been considered concerning. His psychological and moral profile, and state of health seemed to indicate that he had left of his own accord. I discovered that this disappearance was just a legend. Yours, and that of the inhabitants of Brancion.
An adult is free to stop contact with his or her family, and if their address is discovered, it will only be passed on with their consent. I don’t have the right to give you Philippe Toussaint’s details, but I’m taking it. It’s you yourself who said to me, “If we had to do only what was part of our job, life would be sad.”
Do what you want with this address. I’ve written it down and slipped it into the enclosed envelope. Open it if you wish to.
Yours ever,
Julien Seul
It’s the first love letter I’ve received in my whole life. A strange love letter, but a love letter all the same. He only wrote a few lines to pay homage to his mother. Words he seems to have struggled like hell to get out. And he sends me pages. It’s decidedly easier to pour one’s heart out to a perfect stranger than at a family reunion.
I look at the enclosed sealed envelope that contains Philippe Toussaint’s address. I slip it between the pages of a copy of Roses Magazine. I don’t know yet what I’m going to do with it. Keep it in the sealed envelope, throw it away, or open it. Philippe Toussaint lives a hundred kilometers from my cemetery,
