30.
Along this river where you loved to dream,
the silvery fish slipped by so lightly,
keep our memories, which can never die.
There’s quite a crowd at my place this morning. Nono is telling his stories to Father Cédric and the three apostles. It’s very rare for the Lucchini brothers to be together. One of them is always busy at the funeral parlor, but for the past ten days, no one’s been dying.
My Way is sleeping curled up on Elvis’s lap, and he, as usual, is looking out of the window and singing to himself.
Nono is making everyone laugh:
“And when pumping the water, sometimes we’d open graves or a vault, and they’d be full of water, and I mean to the brim. We’d put a hose inside to drain them, and I mean a hose like that!”
Nono gesticulates to demonstrate the diameter of the hose.
“When you switched the pump on, you had to hold on to it, that hose! Well, that Gaston, he’d left the hose on the avenue . . . just like that, down with the daisies . . . the hose swelled, and swelled, and then, BANG, water everywhere! And when that water had burst out like cannon fire, Gaston and Elvis, they’d drenched a posh lady! Straight in the chignon! Everything flying in all directions! The woman, her glasses, her chignon, and her crocodile handbag! Should have seen the state of her! First time in three years she was visiting her late husband, well, we never saw her again!”
Elvis turns around and sings: With the rain in my shoes, rain in my shoes, searchin’ for you.
Pierre Lucchini joins in:
“I remember it! I was there! Good god, how I laughed! She was the wife of a foreman! The uptight sort who laughs as they burn. Stiff as a poker. While he was alive, her husband called her Mary Poppins because he dreamt she’d disappear and she never did, she was always breathing down his neck.”
“But still, no one funeral is ever like another funeral,” Nono continues.
“Just like the sunsets beside the sea,” Elvis sings.
“And you’ve seen the sea, have you?” Nono asks him.
Elvis turns back to the window, without replying.
“Me,” Jacques Lucchini picks up, “I’ve seen burials with masses of people, and others with five or six. But anyhow, as I say, they get buried all the same . . . But it’s true that at funerals, there have been slanging matches over an inheritance, rowing in front of the coffin . . . The worst I saw was two biddies who had to be separated because they were tearing each other’s hair out . . . Two hysterical lunatics . . . And my father, God rest his soul, took a few knocks that day . . . they were screaming, ‘You’re a thief, why did you take that, why do you want that,’ they were hurling insults . . . how sad is that.”
“Right in the middle of a funeral . . . nice . . . ” Nono sighs.
“That was before you, Violette,” Jacques Lucchini tells me. “It was still the old cemetery keeper, Sasha.”
Hearing the name Sasha makes me have to sit down. Nobody had said it out loud in front of me for years.
“What’s become of Sasha, anyway?” Paul Lucchini asks. “Anyone heard any news?”
Quick as a flash, Nono changes the subject:
“About ten years ago, a really old tomb was sold off . . . Everything on it had to be thrown away. We cleaned it all up, put everything into a skip, although we do return things to people if they want them. But that one, it was really ancient, a wreck, you know. I found an old plaque with the words, ‘To my dear departed ones.’ So, I chuck it into the skip. And then I see a lady, well dressed, I won’t say her name out of respect because she’s a nice one, a brave one . . . She pulls that plaque, ‘To my dear departed ones,’ out of the skip and stuffs it in a plastic bag. I say to her, ‘What on earth are you going to do with that?’ And, like a shot, she answers, totally seriously, ‘My husband’s got no balls, I’m going to give it to him as a present!’
The men make such a noise laughing that My Way takes fright and goes up to my bedroom.
“And God in all that?” Father Cédric asks. “Do all these people believe in God?”
Nono hesitates before replying.
“There’s those who believe in God the day he rids them of jerks. Me, I’ve seen joyful widows and happy widowers, and I can tell you that, in such cases, your God is mightily thanked, Father . . . Ah, come on, I’m just kidding, don’t make that face. Your God, he does relieve plenty of suffering. It’s simple, if he didn’t exist, he’d have to be invented.”
Father Cédric smiles at Nono.
“You see it all, in our line of work,” Paul Lucchini steps in. “Sadness, happiness, believers, time passing, the unbearable, the unjust, the intolerable . . . in other words, life. Basically, us undertakers, we deal with life. Maybe even more so than in other lines of work. Because those who come to see us, it’s them that remain, them that remain alive . . . Our father, God rest his soul, always said to us, ‘Sons, we’re the midwives of death. We deliver death, so make the most of living, and earn a good one.’”
31.
We were two loving each other,
Only I remain to grieve for you.
Philippe Toussaint’s motorbike didn’t take him very far from Brancion. He lives exactly one hundred and ten kilometers from my cemetery. He just switched regions.
I often asked myself a whole load of questions: What made him stop in another life and stay there? Did he fall off his bike, or in love? Why didn’t he warn me? Why didn’t he send me a letter of dismissal, of resignation, of desertion? What happened on the day he left? Did he know he wouldn’t come back? Did I say something I shouldn’t have, or was it that I didn’t say anything? Toward the end, I no longer said a thing. I got meals ready.
He hadn’t packed a bag. He’d taken
