But him, I’ve never seen. He has a slight accent, something Mediterranean in his way of punctuating sentences. His hair is very dark, so dark that his few white hairs stand out in the mess of the rest. He has a large nose, thick lips, bags under his eyes. He looks a bit like the singer Serge Gainsbourg. You can tell he’s at odds with his razor, but not with grace. He has fine hands, long fingers. He drinks his coffee piping hot, in small sips, blows on it, and warms his hands on the china.
I still don’t know why he’s here. I let him into my home because it isn’t really my home. This room, it belongs to everyone. It’s like a municipal waiting room that I’ve turned into a kitchen-cum-living room. It belongs to anyone passing through, and to the regulars.
He seems to be studying the walls. This twenty-five-square-meter room has a similar look to my winter wardrobe. Nothing on the walls. No colorful tablecloth or blue sofa. Just lots of plywood, and chairs to sit on. Nothing showy. A pot of coffee always at the ready, white cups, and spirits for desperate cases. It’s here that I get tears, confidences, anger, sighs, despair, and the laughter of the gravediggers.
My bedroom is upstairs. It’s my secret courtyard, my real home. My bedroom and bathroom are two pastel boudoirs. Powder pink, almond green, and sky blue, like I’d personally modified the colors of spring. At the first ray of sunshine, I open the windows wide, and, other than with a ladder, it’s impossible to see anything from outside.
No one has ever set foot in my bedroom as it looks today. Just after Philippe Toussaint’s disappearance, I completely repainted it, added curtains, lace, white furniture, and a big bed with a Swiss mattress that molds itself to the contours of your body. My body, so I’d no longer have to sleep in the imprint left by Philippe Toussaint.
The stranger is still blowing into his cup. He finally says to me: “I’ve come from Marseilles. Do you know Marseilles?”
“I go to Sormiou every year.”
“In the Calanque?”
“Yes.”
“Strange coincidence.”
“I don’t believe in coincidences.”
He seems to be looking for something in the pocket of his jeans. My men don’t wear jeans. Nono, Elvis, and Gaston are always in overalls, the Lucchini brothers and Father Cédric in Terylene trousers. He takes off his scarf, stretches his neck, places his empty cup on the table.
“I’m like you, I’m quite rational . . . And I’m a detective.”
“Like Columbo?”
He replies with a smile for the first time:
“No, he was a lieutenant. I’m a captain.”
He presses his index finger on a few sugar grains scattered on the table.
“My mother wishes to be buried in this cemetery, and I don’t know why.”
“She lives around here?”
“No, in Marseilles. She died two months ago. Being buried here is one of her final wishes.”
“I’m so sorry. Would you like a drop of something stronger in your coffee?”
“Do you often get people drunk so early in the morning?”
“Sometimes. What is your mother’s name?”
“Irène Fayolle. She wished to be cremated . . . and her ashes to be placed at the tomb of a certain Gabriel Prudent.”
“Gabriel Prudent? Gabriel Prudent, 1931–2009. He’s buried on avenue 19, in the Cedars section.”
“You know all the dead by heart?”
“Almost.”
“The date of their death, their location, and everything?”
“Almost.”
“Who was Gabriel Prudent?”
“A woman comes by from time to time . . . His daughter, I believe. He was a lawyer. There’s no epitaph on his black-marble tomb, or photo. I can no longer remember the date of the burial. But I can look in my registers, if you’d like me to.”
“Your registers?”
“I record all burials and exhumations.”
“I didn’t know that was part of your job.”
“It isn’t. But if we had to do only what was part of our job, life would be sad.”
“It’s funny to hear that from the mouth of a . . . what’s the name of your job? ‘Cemetery keeper’?”
“Why? You think I weep from dawn to dusk? That I’m all tears and grief?”
I serve him more coffee while he asks me, twice: “You live alone?”
I eventually answer yes.
I open my register drawers and consult the 2009 volume. I look through the surnames and immediately find that of Prudent, Gabriel. I start reading:
February 18th, 2009, burial of Gabriel Prudent, torrential rain.
There were a hundred and twenty-eight people for the interment. His ex-wife was present, as were his two daughters, Marthe Dubreuil and Cloé Prudent.
At the deceased’s request, no flowers or wreaths.
The family had a plaque engraved that reads: “In homage to Gabriel Prudent, a courageous lawyer. ‘Courage, for a lawyer, is essential; without it, the rest doesn’t count: talent, culture, knowledge of the law, everything is useful to the lawyer. But without courage, at the decisive moment, there are but words, sentences that follow each other, that dazzle and then die.’ (Robert Badinter).”
No priest. No cross. The cortege only stayed for half an hour. When the two undertakers had finished taking the coffin down into the vault, everyone left. Still raining heavily.
*
I close the register. The detective looks dazed, lost in thought. He runs a hand through his hair.
“I wonder why my mother wants to be laid to rest beside this man.”
For a time, he returns to studying my white walls, on which there’s absolutely nothing to study. Then he returns to me, as if he didn’t believe me. He indicates the 2009 register with his eyes.
“Can I read it?”
Normally, I only entrust my notes to the families concerned. I hesitate for a few seconds, and end up handing it to him. He starts leafing through it. Between each page, he stares at me as if the words of 2009 were written on my forehead. As if the volume he held in his hands were an excuse to look at me.
“And you do that for every funeral?”
“Not every,
