Philippe Toussaint aged me. To be loved is to stay young.
It’s the first time I make love with a man who’s sensitive. Before Philippe Toussaint, a few guys at the hostel and from Charleville. Just clumsiness, beaten-up lives banging together. Making a noise, jerks who don’t know how to caress. Who botched learning French from textbooks, botched learning love.
Julien Seul knows how to love.
He’s sleeping. I hear his breathing, it’s a new breath. I listen to his skin, I breathe in his gestures, his hands on me, one on my left shoulder, the other around my right hip. He is all over me. Outside of me. But not within me.
He’s sleeping. How many lives would I need to fall asleep against someone? To trust enough to close my eyes and let go of the souls that haunt me? I’m naked between the sheets. My body hasn’t been naked between sheets since the dawn of time.
I adored this moment of love, this surge of life.
Now I would like to go home. I want to be back with Eliane, the solitude of my bed. I would like to leave this hotel room without waking him, run away, in fact.
Saying goodbye tomorrow morning seems impossible to me. A dialogue almost as unbearable as meeting Stéphanie’s eyes when I lost Léonine.
What would I say to him?
We’d downed a bottle of champagne to brace ourselves, finally, to touch each other. We were terrified of each other. Like people truly attracted to each other are. Like Irène Fayolle and Gabriel Prudent.
I’m not after a love story. I’m too old for that. I’ve missed the boat. My meager love life is an old pair of socks shoved to the back of a closet. That I never got rid of, but that I won’t ever wear again. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters apart from the death of a child.
I have life ahead of me, but not the love of a man. Once you’ve got used to living alone, you can’t live as part of a couple anymore. Of that I am certain.
We’re twenty kilometers from Brancion-en-Chalon, just near Cluny, at the Hôtel Armance. I’m not going to walk home. I’m going to take a taxi. Go down to reception and call a taxi.
This thought spurs me on. I slip out of bed as gently as possible. Like when I slept with Philippe Toussaint and didn’t want to wake him.
I put on my dress, grab my bag, and leave the room, shoes in hand. I know he’s watching me leave. He has the good grace to say nothing, and I the bad grace not to turn around.
Irreverent, that’s what I think of myself.
In the taxi, I try to read random pages of Irène Fayolle’s journal, but can’t. It’s too dark. As we drive past a block of houses, the streetlamps light up one word in ten.
“Gabriel . . . hands . . . light . . . cigarette . . . roses . . . ”
55.
His life is a lovely memory.
His absence a silent agony.
When I left Sasha’s cemetery, it was 6 P.M. I drove toward Mâcon, in the Fiat Panda, to catch the motorway. The white tiger, dangling from the rear-view mirror, was watching me out of the corner of its eye while nonchalantly swinging.
I thought again of Sasha, of his garden, of his smile, of his words. I thought of how a strike had sent me Célia, and the death of my daughter this straw-hatted gardener. My own, personal Wilbur Larch. A man between life and the dead, his earth and his cemetery. L’Oeuvre de Dieu, la part du Diable.
I thought again of the holiday-camp staff. Decent people, too, no doubt. I saw again the faces of the director, Edith Croquevieille; the cook, Swan Letellier; the dinner lady, Geneviève Magnan; the two young supervisors, Eloïse Petit and Lucie Lindon; the maintenance man, Alain Fontanel. Their faces all lined up.
What was I going to do with their addresses? Was I going to go and see them, one after the other?
As I drove, I recalled that the cook, Swan Letellier, worked at the Terroir des Souches in Mâcon. I had seen on a map that the restaurant was in the town center, on rue de L’Héritan.
I didn’t take the motorway, I went into Mâcon, parked in a car park about two hundred meters from the restaurant, close to the town hall. A waitress welcomed me nicely. Two couples were already seated.
The last time I had set foot in a restaurant was at Gino’s, the day I’d had lunch with Anaïs’s parents, the day Léonine had burst the eggs with a burst of laughter. I’ve relived that day thousands of times, the meal, the dress she was wearing, her braids, her smile, the magic, what the bill came to, the moment she got in the Caussin’s car and waved me goodbye, her doudou hidden under her knees—a gray rabbit whose right eye risked falling off, and that I’d put in the wash so often, it had lost an ear. There are hours that should be swiftly forgotten. But events decide otherwise.
I couldn’t see Swan Letellier. He must have been in the kitchen. There were just girls busy serving. Four girls, like in the tomb, I thought.
I drank a half-bottle of wine, and ate almost nothing. The waitress asked me if I didn’t like it. I said that I did, but I wasn’t very hungry. She smiled at me, condescendingly. I watched people arriving and leaving. I hadn’t drunk for several months, but I felt too alone at this table to drink water.
At around nine, the restaurant was full. After I’d left, unsteadily, I sat on a bench a bit further down and, staring into the dark, waited for Swan Letellier.
Nearby, I could hear the Saône flowing. I felt like throwing myself into it. To be back with Léo. Would I find her again? Wouldn’t it be better to throw
