Philippe Toussaint had got fatter, but he smiled openly. I’d never seen him smiling like that, back when we’d lived together. His eyes still showed no curiosity. He lived on avenue Franklin-Roosevelt and I knew that, even in this present life, the one in which he smiled more than before, he didn’t know who Roosevelt was, that even if he’d changed his life, if, in that one, someone had asked him who Franklin Roosevelt was, he would have answered, “The name of my street.”
Gripping on to my bar, I’d realized that I’d been very lucky that he’d gone and never returned. I hadn’t moved. I hadn’t turned around. I had my back to him. All I could see of him was his smiling reflection in the mirror.
The waiter had called him “Monsieur Pelletier,” but the guy I took to be his friend had called him “boss” twice, and the waiter had said, “Everything on the account as usual, Monsieur Pelletier?” And Philippe Toussaint had replied, “Yup.”
I’d followed him in the street. The two men were walking side by side. They had entered a garage that was about two hundred meters from the brasserie, the Pelletier Garage.
I’d hidden behind a car that looked as much of a wreck as I did when Philippe Toussaint had disappeared. Broken down, dented, scratched, left to one side until someone decided what to do with it. There must surely be a few motor parts to salvage. A bit of gasoline left in the tank. Enough to set off again. Finish the trip.
Philippe Toussaint went into an office shielded by glass partitions. He made a phone call. He seemed like the boss. But when Françoise Pelletier arrived ten minutes later, he seemed like the husband of the boss. He looked at her with a smile. He looked at her lovingly. He looked at her.
I left.
I returned to Nono’s car. A parking ticket was wedged between the windscreen and the wiper, a fine of a hundred-and-thirty-five euros, because I was parked in the wrong place.
“The story of my life,” I said, smiling at the solicitor.
Mr. Rouault remained speechless for a few seconds.
“My dear Violette, I’ve seen it all, in my time as a solicitor. Uncles who pretend to be sons, sisters who disown each other, false widows, false widowers, false children, false parents, false affidavits, false wills, but I have never been told a story such as that.”
And then he showed me out.
Before I left his office, he promised to take care of everything. The solicitor, the letter, the formalities of the divorce.
Mr. Rouault is fond of me because whenever frost is likely, I take care of covering the plants, native to Africa, that he planted for his wife. Marie Dardenne, married name Rouault (1949-1999).
32.
My dear friends, when I die, plant
a willow in the cemetery. I love its weeping foliage.
Its paleness is sweet and dear to me, and its shadow
will fall lightly upon the earth in which I sleep.
In April, I put ladybird larvae on my rosebushes, and on those of the deceased, to combat greenfly. I’m the one who places the ladybirds, one by one, with a little paintbrush, on the plants. It’s as though I repainted my garden in the spring. As if I planted stairways between earth and sky. I don’t believe in phantoms or ghosts, but I do believe in ladybirds.
I am convinced that when a ladybird settles on me, it’s a soul getting in touch with me. As a child, I imagined that it was my father coming to see me. That my mother had abandoned me because my father was dead. And since we tell ourselves the stories we feel like telling ourselves, I always imagined that my father looked like Robert Conrad, the hero in The Wild Wild West. That he was handsome, powerful, tender, and that he adored me from up in heaven. That he protected me from where he was.
I invented my guardian angel for myself. The one who arrived late on the day of my birth. And then I grew up. And I understood that my guardian angel would never have a permanent contract. That he would often have to sign on at the employment agency, and, as Brel sings, would get drunk “every night, on bad wine.” My Robert Conrad aged badly.
Placing my ladybirds, one by one, keeps me busy for ten days, if I do only that. If there’s no funeral in the meantime. Putting them on the rosebushes feels like opening the doors to the sun, letting it in over my cemetery. It’s like giving it permission. A permit. That doesn’t stop anyone from dying during the month of April, or from visiting me.
Once again, I didn’t hear him arriving. He is behind me. Julien Seul is behind me. He watches me without moving. How long has he been there? He hugs the urn containing his mother’s ashes. His eyes shine like black marble covered in frost, when the winter sun glints on it. I’m speechless.
Seeing him has the same effect on me as my closets: a black wool dress over a pink silk slip. I don’t smile at him, but my heart is pounding like that of a child arriving late at the door of a favorite pâtisserie.
“I’ve come back to tell you why my mother wanted to be laid to rest at the tomb of Gabriel Prudent.”
“I’m used to men who disappear.”
That’s all I’m capable of saying to him.
“Would you mind accompanying me to his tomb?”
I put my paintbrush down carefully on the Monfort family vault, and head for Gabriel Prudent.
Julien Seul follows me, and then says:
“I have no sense of direction, so in a cemetery . . . ”
We walk side by side, in silence, toward avenue 19. When we arrive at Gabriel Prudent’s tomb, Julien Seul puts the urn down and then moves it several times, as if he can’t
