At first, I thought he was just lingering in another woman’s bed. One who spoke to him.
After a month, I thought he’d had an accident. After two months, I reported him missing to the police. How could I have known that Philippe Toussaint had emptied his bank accounts, I had no access to them. Only his mother had power of attorney over all of it.
After six months, I was scared he’d come back. Once I’d got used to his absence, I got my breath back. As if I’d been underwater for a long time, at the bottom of a swimming pool. His departure allowed me to push off and rise back up to the surface to breathe.
After a year, I said to myself: If he comes back, I’ll kill him.
After two years, I said to myself: If he comes back, I won’t let him in.
After three years: If he comes back, I’ll call the police.
After four years: If he comes back, I’ll call Nono.
After five years: If he comes back, I’ll call the Lucchini brothers. More specifically, Paul, the one who’s an embalmer.
After six years: If he comes back, I’ll ask him a few questions before killing him.
After seven years: If he comes back, it’s me who’s leaving.
After eight years: He won’t come back.
* * *
I’ve just visited Mr. Rouault, Brancion’s solicitor, for him to send a letter to Philippe Toussaint. He told me that he couldn’t do anything. That I must contact a solicitor specializing in family law, that was the procedure.
Since I know Mr. Rouault very well, I dared to ask him to do that on my behalf. To call a solicitor of his choosing and write the letter for me, without me having to explain, justify, beg for, or order anything. Simply to inform Philippe Toussaint that I wished to return to using my maiden name, Trenet. I told Mr. Rouault that there was no question of claiming alimony or anything like that, it would just be a formality. Mr. Rouault spoke to me about “compensatory allowance for desertion,” and I replied, “No. Nothing.”
I want nothing.
Mr. Rouault told me that, in my old age, it could make things easier for me, more comfortable. My old age, I’ll spend it in my cemetery. I won’t need more comfort than I already have. He persisted, saying:
“You know, dear Violette, maybe one day you won’t be able to work anymore, and you’ll have to retire, take it easy.”
“No, nothing.”
“O.K., Violette, I’ll take care of everything.”
He wrote down Philippe Toussaint’s address, the one Julien Seul had scribbled inside the sealed envelope that I’d ended up opening.
Mr. Philippe Toussaint, c/o Mme Françoise Pelletier
13, avenue Franklin-Roosevelt
69500 Bron
“I hope you don’t mind me asking how you found him again. I thought your husband had disappeared. After all this time, he must have had to work, must have had a social security number!”
It was true. The town hall had stopped paying him as a cemetery keeper a few months after his disappearance. That, too, I only discovered much later. The Toussaint parents received his paychecks and completed his tax returns. As level-crossing keepers and cemetery keepers, we’d never paid rent or utilities. I did the daily shopping with my salary. Philippe Toussaint used to say, “I give you a roof, I keep you warm, I give you light, and in exchange, you feed me.”
Apart from paying for the upkeep of his motorbike, he’d not touched his pay for all the years we’d lived together. It was always me who bought his and Léonine’s clothes.
“Are you sure this is really him? Toussaint is a common name. It could be his namesake. Or someone who looks like him.”
I explained to Mr. Rouault that anyone could make a mistake, but not when you actually see the man you spent so many years married to. That even if he had lost his hair and put on weight, I could never confuse Philippe Toussaint with another man.
I told Mr. Rouault about the detective, Julien Seul, that he really was called Julien Seul, how he turned up at my cemetery, his mother’s ashes, Gabriel Prudent, the research he’d done into Philippe Toussaint without asking my permission because of a red dress peeping under my coat, and the revival of Philippe Toussaint, who was living just a hundred and ten kilometers from my cemetery. That I’d borrowed Nono’s car—“Norbert Jolivet, the gravedigger,” I specified—that I’d driven to Bron, that I’d parked beside 13, avenue Franklin-Roosevelt, that No. 13 was a house not unlike the one I’d lived in previously, in Malgrange-sur-Nancy, when I was a level-crossing keeper in the east of France, except that it had nice curtains at the windows, an extra floor, and double-paned windows with oak frames. That opposite No. 13 there was the Carnot brasserie. That I drank three coffees there while waiting. Waiting for what, I had no idea. And then I saw him crossing the avenue.
He was with another man. They were smiling. They were walking in my direction. They came into the brasserie. I’d put my head down.
I’d had to grip the bar counter when Philippe Toussaint passed behind me. I’d recognized his smell, his particular scent, a mix of Caron’s “Pour un Homme” and that of other women. He always wore their smell like a loathed garment. Must be the smell of his former mistresses that had clung like bad memories, and that I alone noticed. Even after all those years.
The two men had ordered two daily specials. I’d watched him eating his lunch, in the mirror opposite me. I’d said to myself that anything was possible, that he was smiling and that anyone could start a new life, that neither Léonine nor I had heard a word from him for a long time, and that no one knew that in his present life. That anyone could appear in one life and disappear in another. Here or elsewhere, anyone was capable of completely
