Every week, Célia wrote me a long letter. I could read her smile in her words. And when we didn’t have time to write to each other, we phoned each other on Saturday evening.
Philippe Toussaint would have supper with me once I had put Léo, an early sleeper, to bed. We’d chat about this and that, but never shout at each other. Our relations were at once cordial and nonexistent. Our relations were silent, but never violent. Although, couples who don’t shout, never get angry, are indifferent towards each other, are sometimes suffering the worst violence of all. No smashing of china at our place. Or closing of windows to avoid disturbing the neighbors. Just silence.
After supper, when he didn’t go off on a ride, he would switch the television on, and me, I would open L’Oeuvre de Dieu, la part du Diable. In ten years of living together, Philippe Toussaint never noticed that I was still reading the same book. When I didn’t read, we’d watch a film together, but that very rarely brought us any closer. We didn’t even share television. He often fell asleep in front of it.
As for me, I waited for the last train, the Nancy-Strasbourg at 23:04, and went to bed until the Strasbourg-Nancy at 04:50. When I raised the barrier after the 04:50, I would go to Léo’s bedroom to watch her sleep. It was my favorite thing. Some people treat themselves to a sea view, but me, I had my daughter.
During those years, I didn’t hold it against Philippe Toussaint, leaving me in solitude, because I didn’t feel it, didn’t experience it, it just slid over me. I think solitude and boredom touch the emptiness in people. But I was full to the brim. I had several lives that took up all the space: my daughter, reading, music, and my imagination. When Léo was at school, and my novel was closed, I never did the washing, cleaning, or cooking without listening to music and dreaming. I invented myself a thousand lives during that particular life, at Malgrange-sur-Nancy.
Léonine was the bonus of the everyday. The bonus of my life. Philippe Toussaint had given me the most wonderful of presents. And, cherry on the cake, he’d given her his looks. Léo is totally beautiful, like her father. With grace and joy on top. Whether she was horizontal or vertical, I gobbled her up with my eyes.
Philippe Toussaint had the same rapport with his daughter as with me. I never heard him raise his voice at her. But Léo didn’t interest him for long. She amused him for five minutes, but very quickly, he moved on to something else. When she asked him a question, it was me who answered her. I completed the sentences that her father didn’t bother to finish. He didn’t have a father’s rapport with her, but rather a friend’s. The only thing he liked to share with his child was his motorbike. He would put her behind the engine and go once around the block of houses, very slowly, to entertain her for ten minutes. And then, as soon as he accelerated a little, she was scared, she screamed.
He may have found the right buttons to press more easily with a boy. For Philippe Toussaint, a chick was a chick. Whether she was six years old or thirty. And could never be better than a guy, a real one. One who plays football and races a supersonic truck. One who doesn’t cry when he falls down, who gets his knees dirty, and can handle throttle levers and steering wheels. The complete opposite of Léonine, who was a candy-pink-with-sequins little girl.
She belonged to the Malgrange-sur-Nancy library. It was a room adjoining the town hall that was open twice a week, Wednesday afternoon included. Every Wednesday, between the 13:27 train and the 16:05 one, we would dash, hand in hand, to get Léo’s quota of books for the week, and return those borrowed the previous week. On our way back from the library, we would stop at the Casino, where Stéphanie would give Léo a lollipop as I picked up a Papy Brossard “Savane” marbled cake. I would dunk mine in my tea, and she would dunk hers in an orange-blossom infusion after I had raised the barrier for the 16:05 train.
As soon as Léo was three years old, whenever a train was due, she would go out onto the landing to greet the passengers as the train went past our house. She would wave at them. It had become her favorite game. And some passengers waited for this moment. They knew they would see “the little girl.”
Malgrange-sur-Nancy was just a level crossing, the trains went through without stopping; there were another seven kilometers to the next station, Brangy. Several times, Stéphanie took us in the car so that we could do the Brangy-Nancy round trip together. Léo wanted to ride in the train she saw going by every day, she wanted a ride on that merry-go-round.
Her cries of joy the first time we did this strange, pointless journey, I will never forget. To this day, I still sometimes dream of them. She would have been less thrilled going around an amusement park. We, of course, took the train that went past our house, where her father was waiting on the doorstep to wave at her as it went by. It’s funny how happy children can be when you reverse the roles.
The three of us celebrated
