Every year, from August 3rd to 16th, the SNCF sent people to replace us. Philippe Toussaint, who refused to follow me in my “morbid delirium,” left on his bike to meet up with Charleville friends, and I left for Sarmiou. Célia came to pick me up at Saint-Charles station, took me down to the chalet, and then left me alone with my memories. From time to time, she would visit me and we would drink Cassis wine while contemplating the sea.
For me, All Souls’ Day was in August. I immersed myself and I felt the presence of my daughter who was no longer there.
I never heard a thing from Armelle and Jean-Louis Caussin, Anaïs’s parents. Not a phone call, not a letter, not a sign. They must have held it against me, not going to the burial of our children’s ashes.
The old Toussaints returned to the cemetery several times. Each time, they brought their son with them. I never saw them again, either, after Léonine’s death. They no longer came inside my home. It was like a tacit agreement between us.
Anger, and the promise of substantial compensation, kept Philippe Toussaint going. His obsession was that those who caused the fire should pay. But he was repeatedly told that no one “caused” the fire, that it was an accident. Which made him even angrier. A silent anger. He wanted compensation. He thought our daughter’s ashes were worth their weight in gold.
He started to change physically, his features hardened, his hair whitened.
When, twice a year, he returned from the Brancion-sur-Chalon cemetery, and his parents dropped him off outside the house without ever coming in, he said nothing to me. When he got up in the morning, he said nothing to me. When he went off on a ride, he said nothing to me. When he got back, hours later, he said nothing to me. At the table, he said nothing to me. Only the video games he played with his joysticks, sitting in front of the television, made a racket. And from time to time, when the police or the lawyers or the insurers phoned, he shouted and demanded an explanation.
We still slept together, but I no longer slept. I was terrified by my nightmares. At night he stuck himself to me. And I imagined that it was my daughter, there, behind me.
Once or twice, he said to me, “We’ll have another kid,” and I replied yes, but I took a contraceptive as well as the antidepressants and tranquilizers. My stomach was done for. Carry life in the death that was now my body? Never. Léo had made that disappear, too: the possibility of another child.
I could have left, dumped Philippe Toussaint after the death of our child, but I had neither the strength nor the courage to do so. Philippe Toussaint was the only family I had left. Remaining close to this man was also staying close to Léonine. To see her father’s features every day was also to see her own features. Going past the door of her room was to be close to her world, her footprints, her passage on Earth. I would forever be a woman who would never leave, but who would be left.
In September 1995, I received a parcel with no sender’s name. It had been posted from Brancion-en-Chalon. At first, I thought it could only come from my dear Célia. That she had been over there, at the cemetery. But I didn’t recognize her writing.
When I opened the parcel, I had to sit down. I had in my hands a white funerary plaque with a lovely dolphin engraved to one side and these words: “My darling, you were born on September 3rd, died on July 13th, but to me, you will always be my August 15th.”
I could have written those few words. Who had sent me this plaque? Someone wanted me to go and place it on Léonine’s tomb, but who?
I put it back in the packaging and put it away in the cupboard in my room under a pile of towels we never used.
While folding the laundry, I found a list of names and positions slipped between two sheets:
Edith Croquevieille, director.
Swan Letellier, cook.
Geneviève Magnan, dinner lady.
Eloïse Petit and Lucie Lindon, supervisors.
Alain Fontanel, maintenance man.
The list of the staff of Notre-Dame-des-Prés, scribbled by Philippe Toussaint. He must have noted down their names during the week of the court case. The list had been written on the back of a bill, a meal for three people in the café at the law courts, the year of the lawsuit, at Mâcon. Three people: Philippe Toussaint and, presumably, his parents.
I took that as a sign coming from Léonine. On the same day, I received that plaque and I had before my eyes the list of the people who had seen her for the last time.
It’s from that day on that I started to go out of my house, to wave at passengers in the trains from my barrier. And it’s from that day on that Philippe Toussaint started to look at me as if I’d lost my mind. But he didn’t understand me: I was finding it again.
I started by ripping up my chemical life jacket. I stopped the medication, little by little. The alcohol completely. All the pains would lay into me, ruthlessly no doubt, but I would no longer die of them.
I left the house, through the glass my eyes met Stéphanie’s, behind her register, and she gave me a sad smile. I walked for a good ten minutes, reflecting that before, when I went this way, past the houses, I had my daughter’s hand in my pocket. My pockets would always be empty from now on, but Léonine’s hands would continue to guide me. I pushed open the door of Bernard’s Driving School, to sign up for the written and road tests for a license.
46.
You’re no longer
