Since I’ve been here, I’ve seen several expired plots being dismantled and cleaned, and the bones of the deceased placed in the ossuary. And no one said a thing. Because those dead people were seen as lost property with no one left to reclaim it.
It’s always like that with death. The further back it goes, the less hold it has on the living. Time does for life. Time does for death.
Me and my three gravediggers, we do our utmost never to leave a grave neglected. We can’t bear to see that municipal label: “This grave is subject to retrieval proceedings. Please contact the town hall urgently.” When the name of the deceased person resting there is still visible.
That’s doubtless why cemeteries are covered in epitaphs. To ward off the passage of time. Cling on to memories. The one I like best is: “Death begins when no one can dream of you any longer.” It’s on the grave of a young nurse, Marie Deschamps, who died in 1917. Apparently, it was a soldier who put up this plaque in 1919. Every time I go past it, I wonder whether he dreamt of her for a long time.
Jean-Jacques Goldman’s “Whatever I do, wherever you are, nothing fades you, I think of you,” and Francis Cabrel’s “Among themselves, the stars speak only of you” are the lyrics most quoted on funerary plaques.
My cemetery is very beautiful. The avenues are lined with centenarian linden trees. A good many of the tombs have flowers. In front of my little keeper’s house, I sell a few potted plants. And when they’re no longer worth selling, I give them to the abandoned graves.
I planted some pine trees, too. For the scent they produce in the summer months. It’s my favorite smell.
I planted them in 1997, the year we arrived. They’ve grown a lot and make my cemetery look splendid. Maintaining it is all about caring for the dead who lie within it. It’s about respecting them. And if they weren’t respected in life, at least they are in death.
I’m sure plenty of bastards lie here. But death doesn’t differentiate between the good and the wicked. And anyhow, who hasn’t been a bastard at least once in their life?
Unlike me, Philippe Toussaint instantly detested this cemetery, this little town, Burgundy, the countryside, the old stones, the white cows, the folk around here.
I hadn’t even finished unpacking the removal boxes and he was off on his motorbike, morning till night. And as the months went by, he sometimes left for weeks at a time. Until the day he no longer returned. The policemen couldn’t understand why I hadn’t reported him missing sooner. I never told them that he had disappeared years before, even when he was still dining at my table. And yet, after a month, when I realized he wouldn’t return, I felt just as abandoned as the tombs I regularly clean. Just as gray, drab, and dilapidated. Ready to be dismantled and my remains thrown into an ossuary.
5.
The book of life is the ultimate book, which we can
neither close nor reopen at will; when we want to return
to the page on which we love, the page on which we die
is already between our fingers.
I met Philippe Toussaint at the Tibourin, a nightclub in Charleville-Mézières, in 1985.
He was leaning on his elbows at the bar. And me, I was a bartender. I was doing several casual jobs by lying about my age. A friend at the hostel I lived in had doctored my papers to make me old enough.
I looked ageless. I could have been fourteen as easily as twenty-five. I only ever wore jeans and T-shirts, had short hair, and piercings everywhere. Even in my nose. I was slight, and I put smoky shadow around my eyes to give myself a Nina Hagen look. I’d just left school. I was no good at reading or writing. But I could count. I’d already lived several lives and my one aim was to work to pay my own rent, to leave the hostel as soon as possible. After that, I would see.
In 1985, the only thing that was straight about me was my teeth. Throughout my childhood, I’d had this obsession with having lovely white teeth like the girls in the magazines. When child-welfare workers visited my foster homes and asked me if I needed anything, I always requested an appointment with the dentist, as if my future, my whole life, would depend on the smile I had.
I didn’t have any friends who were girls—I looked too much like a boy. I’d been close with a few surrogate sisters, but the continual separations, the changes of foster home, had killed me. Never become attached. I told myself that having a shaved head would protect me, give me the heart and guts of a boy. So, girls avoided me. I’d already slept with boys, to be like everyone else, but it was no big deal, I was disappointed. It wasn’t really my thing. I did it to allay suspicion, or get clothes, a gram of dope, entrance to somewhere, a hand that would hold mine. I preferred the love in the children’s stories, the ones I’d never been told. “They got married and had many, many, many . . . ”
Leaning on his elbows at the bar, Philippe Toussaint was watching his friends bopping on the dance floor while sipping a whiskey-and-Coke with no ice. He had the face of an angel. Like the singer Michel Berger, but in color. Long blond curls, blue eyes, fair skin, aquiline nose, mouth
