“Since my mother preferred the shade to the sun . . . ”
“Would you like to read her the speech you wrote? Would you like to be alone?”
“No, I’d prefer you to read it, later. When the cemetery is closed. I’m sure you know how to do that very well.”
The urn is a forest-green color. “Irène Fayolle (1941–2016)” is engraved in gold. He gathers his thoughts for a few moments, I remain beside him.
“I’ve never known how to pray . . . I’ve forgotten the flowers. Do you still sell them?”
“Yes.”
While choosing a pot of daffodils, he tells me he wants to go into town to buy a plaque. He asks me if I could accompany him to Le Tourneurs du Val, the Lucchini brothers’ funeral parlor. I agree to, without thinking. I’ve never been to Le Tourneurs du Val. For twenty years now, I’ve been telling others how to get there, having never set foot in it myself.
I get into the detective’s car, which smells of stale smoke. He is silent. As am I. When he switches on the ignition, an already inserted CD blares out “Elsass Blues,” by Alain Bashung, at full volume. We jump. He turns it off. We start laughing. It’s the first time Alain Bashung has made anyone laugh with this magnificent, but terribly sad, song.
We park in front of Le Tourneurs du Val. The Lucchini brothers’ funeral parlor is right next to the morgue, but also to Le Phénix, the Chinese restaurant of Brancion-en-Chalon. It’s the locals’ favorite joke. But that doesn’t stop Le Phénix being full to bursting at lunchtime.
We push open the door. In the window there are funerary plaques and bouquets of artificial flowers. I loathe artificial flowers. A plastic or polyester rose is like a bedside lamp trying to imitate the sun. Inside, various woods for coffins are displayed like in a DIY store, where you can choose the color of your flooring. There are the precious woods for making very special coffins. And then the woods of inferior quality—soft, hard, tropical—and plywood. I hope the love we feel for a living person isn’t measured by the quality of wood we choose.
On nearly all of the plaques in the window are the words, “Warbler, if you fly around this tomb, sing him your most beautiful song.” After reading a few of the texts Pierre Lucchini showed him, Julien Seul chooses, “To my mother” in brass lettering on a black plaque. No poem or epitaph.
Pierre is amazed to see me in his funeral parlor. He doesn’t know what to say to me, even though he’s been visiting my place several times a week for years, and wouldn’t dream of entering my cemetery without coming to say hello.
I know almost everything about Pierre, his bags of marbles, his first love, his wife, his children’s tonsillitis, his grief at losing his father, the products he applies to his scalp for hair loss, and now, it’s like I’m a stranger in the middle of his plastic flowers and his plaques that speak only of eternity.
Julien Seul pays and we leave.
On the way back to my cemetery, Julien Seul asks me if he can invite me to dinner. He wants to tell me the story of his mother and Gabriel Prudent.
And to thank me for everything. And also in the hope of being forgiven for having researched Philippe Toussaint without asking me. I reply to him, “Fine, but I’d rather we ate at my place.”
Because we’ll have time, and won’t be disturbed by a waiter between every dish. There will be no meat for dinner, but it will still be good. He tells me that he’s going to book his room with Madame Bréant, even though it’s never taken, and that he’ll be back at my place at 8 P.M.
33.
Along with time, goes, everything goes, you forget
the passions and you forget the voices, telling you
quietly what pathetic folk say: don’t get in
too late, above all, don’t catch cold.
Irène Fayolle and Gabriel Prudent met in Aix-en-Provence in 1981. She was forty, he fifty. He was defending a prisoner who had helped another prisoner escape. Irène Fayolle had found herself in this court at the request of her employee and friend, Nadia Ramirès. She was the wife of an accomplice of the defendant. “We don’t choose who we fall in love with,” she had said to Irène, between a root-lift and a blow-dry, “that would be too easy.”
Irène Fayolle attended the trial on the day of Mr. Prudent’s speech for the defence. He spoke of the sound of keys, of freedom, of this need to extricate oneself from ageless walls, to rediscover the sky, the forgotten horizon, the smell of coffee in a bistro. He spoke of the solidarity among prisoners. He said that close confinement could prompt a true brotherhood between the men, that freedom to speak was an escape route. That to lose freedom was to lose a loved one. That it was like a grieving process. That no one could understand this if they hadn’t lived through it.
Just like in Stefan Zweig’s Twenty-four Hours in the Life of a Woman, Irène Fayolle looked only at Mr. Prudent’s hands during the speech for the defense. Large hands, which opened and closed. With pale, perfectly buffed nails. Irène Fayolle said to herself: It’s strange, this man’s hands haven’t aged. They have remained childlike, they are those of a young man. Pianist’s hands. When Gabriel Prudent was addressing the jury, his hands opened up; when addressing the counsel for the prosecution, they closed again, clenching so much that they seemed shriveled, as if resuming their true age. When he focused on the magistrate, they froze, when he turned to the public, they couldn’t keep still, like two overexcited teenagers, and when he returned to the accused, they came back
