For years, soil and roses had obsessed her. With the money from her salon, she bought a plot of land in Marseilles’s seventh arrondissement, which she turned into a rose-nursery. She learned how to plant, grow, water, pick. She also learned how to create new varieties of rose in tones of carmine, raspberry, grenadine, and “maiden’s blush,” all while thinking of Gabriel Prudent’s hands.
She created flowers as though creating hands that open and close, depending on the weather.
A year later, Irène Fayolle accompanied Nadia Ramirès back to Aix-en-Provence for a second trial. Her husband had again got caught over some drugs business. Before leaving, Irène wondered how to dress so as not to look like a “dilettante.”
She was disappointed. Mr. Prudent wasn’t there anymore. He had left the area.
Irène discovered this in the car on the way from Marseilles to Aix when Nadia told her that she was worried because this time it wouldn’t be Mr. Prudent pleading in her Jules’s defense, but a colleague.
“But why?” Irène asked, like a child going on holiday who discovers that there won’t be any sea there.
A divorce situation, he had moved. Nadia knew nothing more.
The months passed, until the day a woman entered Irène Fayolle’s rose-nursery to order a spray of white roses to be delivered to Aix-en-Provence. As she filled in the delivery note, Irène saw that the roses were to be taken to Aix’s Saint-Pierre cemetery, for Mme Martine Robin, wife of Gabriel Prudent.
For the first time, it was Irène who did the delivery, on the morning of February 5th, 1984, to Aix-en-Provence, where frost had appeared overnight. She took special care of the spray of flowers to be delivered. It took up all the space in the back of her Peugeot van.
At the Saint-Pierre cemetery, a municipal employee allowed her to drive along the avenues to deliver the roses close to the tomb of Martine Robin, who hadn’t yet been buried. It was only 10 A.M. and the burial wasn’t until the afternoon.
Into the marble had been engraved, “Martine Robin, married name Prudent (1932–1984).” Under her name, her photo had already been soldered: a beautiful, dark-haired woman smiling straight at the camera. The photo must have been taken when she was around thirty.
Irène went off to wait. She wanted to see Gabriel Prudent again. Even from a distance. Even from a hiding place. She wanted to know if he was the widower, if it was his wife being buried. She looked through the death notices, but found no actual mention of him.
“It is with great sadness that we announce the sudden death of Martine Robin, at the age of fifty-two, in Aix-en-Provence. Martine was the daughter of the late Gaston Robin and the late Micheline Bolduc. She leaves behind, in grief, her daughter Marthe Dubreuil, her brother Richard and sister Mauricette, her aunt Claudine Bolduc-Babé, her mother-in-law Louise, numerous cousins, nephews and nieces, and her close friends, Nathalie, Stéphane, Mathias, and Ninon, along with several others.”
No mention of Gabriel Prudent. As if he had been crossed off the list of those permitted to grieve.
Irène left the cemetery and drove to the first bistro she found, about three hundred meters away. A transport café. She thought to herself: Strange, this transport café stuck between the cemetery and Aix’s municipal swimming pool. As if it lost its way.
She parked, and then almost turned back because the windows were filthy and the curtains hanging behind them beyond old. But a shadow stopped her. Inside, a hunched silhouette. She recognized him despite the dirty glass. He was there. Really there. Leaning against a closed window, smoking a cigarette, staring into space.
For a few seconds, she thought she was hallucinating, getting confused, taking her desires for reality, in a novel rather than in life, real life. The one that’s less fun than the life you promise yourself at fourteen. And also, she had only seen him once, three years ago.
He looked up when she entered. There were three men leaning on the bar and just Gabriel Prudent sitting at a table. He said to her:
“You were in Aix for the trial of Jean-Pierre Reyman and Jules Ramirès the year Mitterrand was elected . . . You’re the dilettante.”
She wasn’t surprised that he recognized her. As if it stood to reason.
“Yes, hello, I’m a friend of Nadia Ramirès.”
He shook his head, lit another cigarette with the dying embers of his butt, and replied:
“I remember.”
And without inviting her to join him at his table, as if that were obvious, he ordered two coffees and two “calvas” by pointing his index finger at the ceiling and then the waitress. Once again, Irène Fayolle, who had never drunk coffee in her life—just tea—and even less so, calvados at ten in the morning, stared at Gabriel’s large hands and sat in front of him. His hands still hadn’t aged.
He was the first to speak, a lot. He said that he’d returned to Aix to bury Martine, his wife, well, his ex-wife, and that he couldn’t stand stoups, priests, and guilt. So he wouldn’t go to the religious service, just the burial, that he’d wait here, that he’d lived with another woman in Mâcon for two years, that he’d never seen Martine, his wife, well, his ex-wife, again since he’d left, that since he’d left her because he’d met someone else, his kid—who wasn’t one anymore—wasn’t speaking to him, that he’d been devastated by the news—Martine, dead!—but that no one would understand, that he would forever be the total bastard who had abandoned a wife, his own. And as postmortem revenge, Martine, his wife, well, his ex-wife, or his daughter, he no longer really knew, had had his name engraved on the tombstone.
