What was I going to say to poor old Swan Letellier? What did I want to know, exactly? The room had burned down, what was the point of questioning the present. Stirring shit up.
I couldn’t face getting back into Stéphanie’s Panda, returning to the barrier, driving through the night.
Just when I wanted to get up, step over the wall behind me, jump into the black water, a Siamese cat came and rubbed itself against my legs, purring. It stared at me with its beautiful blue eyes. I leaned forward to touch it. Its fur was soft, warm, wonderful. It jumped onto my lap, startling me. I didn’t dare move. It stretched right out on me. Like a dead weight on my thighs, a safeguard. I was going to lean into the void, and it stopped me from doing so. I think that evening, that cat saved my life. At least, what little was left of it.
Once the last clients had gone and the lights in the restaurant gone out, Swan Letellier was the first to appear.
I didn’t move from the bench I was sitting on.
He was wearing a black bomber jacket, its fabric shining under the streetlights, jeans, and sneakers, and walked with a rolling gait.
I called out to him. I didn’t recognize my own voice. As though another woman were shouting at him. A stranger I was harboring. Probably the effect of the alcohol. Everything seemed abstract to me.
“Swan Letellier!”
The cat jumped to the ground and sat at my feet. Swan Letellier turned his head and looked at me for a few seconds, before responding, warily:
“Yes?”
“I’m the mother of Léonine Toussaint.”
He froze. He had the same look as those youngsters I terrified that evening I turned myself into the white lady. I felt his frightened eyes searching mine. While I was in total darkness, I could see his features clearly where he was standing.
One of the four waitresses came out of the Terroir des Souches. She went up to him and snuggled against his back. He said to her, quite drily:
“Go on ahead, I’ll join you.”
She immediately saw that he was looking in my direction. She recognized me and whispered something in his ear. No doubt that I’d just knocked back a half-bottle of wine all on my own. The girl gave me a dirty look and then left, almost shouting at Swan:
“I’ll be waiting for you at Titi’s!”
Swan Letellier moved closer to me. When he reached me, he waited for me to speak:
“Do you know why I’m here?”
He shook his head.
“Do you know who I am?”
He replied, coldly:
“You said: the mother of Léonine Toussaint.”
“Do you know who Léonine Toussaint is?”
He hesitated before replying:
“You never came to the funeral, or the trial.”
I hadn’t expected him to say that to me at all. It’s as if he’d slapped me in the face. I clenched my fists until my nails dug into my skin. The Siamese cat was still close to me. Sitting at my feet, staring at me.
“I never believed that the children had gone into the kitchen that night.”
He replied, defensively:
“Why?”
“Intuition. And you, what did you see?”
His voice became choked:
“We tried to get into the room, but anyway, it was too late.”
“Did you get on well with the rest of the staff?”
He seemed to be struggling to breathe. He took a tube of Ventolin from his pocket and inhaled from it, hard, through his mouth.
“Gotta go, someone’s waiting for me.”
I detected his fear. People who are afraid can sniff out others’ fear more easily. That evening, sitting on that bench, facing that young man who was both worried and worrying, I was afraid. I sensed that the fire that was consuming my child would consume her forever if I didn’t discover the truth.
“Don’t want to think about all that. You should do the same. It’s sad, but that’s life. Sometimes, it can be shit. I’m sorry.”
He turned his back on me and started walking very fast. Almost running. His reaction merely confirmed my feeling that nothing was true in the report addressed to the public prosecutor.
I looked down. The Siamese cat had gone without my noticing.
56.
Sweet are the memories that never fade.
When Jean-Louis and Armelle Caussin come to visit Anaïs’s tomb, they don’t know who I am. They don’t make the connection between the young, shy, scruffy young woman they had lunch with on July 13th, 1993 in Malgrange, and the smart municipal employee who strides purposefully up and down the avenues of Brancion cemetery. They have even bought my flowers without recognizing me.
After my daughter’s death, I lost fifteen kilos, my face became both gaunt and puffy. I aged by a hundred years. I had the face and body of a child in crumpled packaging.
An old little girl.
I was seven-and-a-bit.
Sasha said of me, “An old fledgling that’s fallen from the nest and got soaked in the rain.”
After meeting Sasha, I changed. I grew my hair and wore different clothes. I went off jeans and sweatshirts.
When I rediscovered my body, when I saw it reflected in a shopwindow, it was that of a woman. I put it into dresses, skirts, and blouses. My facial features changed. If I’d been a painting, my face would have gone from an angular Bernard Buffet to an almost ethereal Auguste Renoir.
Sasha made me change century, going backward to keep going forward.
The last time I saw Paulo and his Emmaüs van, I gave him Léonine’s remaining possessions, my doll Caroline, my trousers, and my clodhoppers. I filed my nails, drew a fine line along my eyelids, and bought some elegant shoes.
Stéphanie, who had always known me in jeans and no makeup, looked at me suspiciously when I
