People are strange. They can’t bear to look in the eye a mother who has lost her child, but they’re even more shocked to see her picking herself up, dressing herself up, dolling herself up.
I learned about day cream, night cream, powdery roses, the way others learn how to cook.
The woman who looks after the cemetery looks sad, but she always smiles at passersby. I suppose looking sad goes with the job. She looks like an actress I can’t remember the name of. She’s pretty, but ageless. I noticed she’s always smartly dressed. Yesterday I bought some flowers from her for Gabriel. I didn’t feel like giving him my roses. The woman who looks after the cemetery sold me a lovely purple heather. We chatted about flowers together, she seems passionate about gardens. When I told her I owned a rose nursery, she lit up. She became a different person.
That’s what Irène Fayolle wrote about me in her journal from 2009. One month after the funeral of Gabriel Prudent. Years after the disappearance of Philippe Toussaint.
If Irène Fayolle had known that, one day, the “woman who looks after the cemetery” would spend a night of love with her son.
I’ve had no news from Julien Seul. I imagine he’ll turn up one morning, silently, like he usually does. Like me when I left the Hôtel Armance.
I think of our night of love as I stand in front of the coffin of Marie Gaillard (1924–2017), which is being interred. It seems that Marie Gaillard was a nasty piece of work. Her housekeeper has just whispered in my ear that she’d come to the funeral of the “old woman” to make sure that she really was dead. I pinched the palm of my hand hard so as not to laugh. There’s not a soul around the tomb, not even the cemetery’s cats. Not a flower, not a plaque. Marie Gaillard is buried in the family vault. I hope she won’t be too vile to those she’s joining.
It’s not uncommon to see visitors spitting on tombs. I’ve even seen it more often than I would have believed. When I first started, I thought hostilities died with the hated person. But tombstones don’t put the lid on hatred. I’ve attended funerals with no tears. I’ve even attended happy funerals. There are some deaths that are convenient for everyone.
After Marie Gaillard’s interment, the housekeeper muttered that “nastiness is like manure, its stink hangs in the wind for ages, even once it’s been removed.”
* * *
Starting in January of 1996, I returned to see Sasha every other Sunday. Like the parent without custody who sees their child every other weekend. I always borrowed Stéphanie’s red Fiat Panda, which she lent me willingly. I set off in the morning, at 6 A.M., and returned in the evening. I sensed that it couldn’t last. That very soon, Philippe Toussaint would ask me questions, stop me from going. He was very suspicious.
As my visits to Brancion cemetery continued, I changed, physically. Like a woman who has a lover. My only lover was the compost that Sasha taught me to make with horse dung. He taught me to turn it over in October, and then again in spring, depending on the weather. To watch out for earthworms, not to crush them, so they could “do their job.”
He taught me to look at the sky and decide whether planting should be done in January or later, if I wanted to harvest in September.
He explained to me that nature took its time, that eggplants planted in January wouldn’t emerge before September, and that, on industrial farms, they sprayed vegetables with vast quantities of chemical fertilizer so they would grow fast. A yield not required in the vegetable garden at Brancion cemetery. No one was waiting for these vegetables apart from him, the keeper, and me, his “old fledgling fallen from the nest.” He taught me to use only nature to nurture nature. Never fertilizer, unless it was untreated. And to make a nettle slurry and sage infusion for treating the vegetables and flowers. Never pesticides. He said to me, “Violette, the natural way is much more work, but time, as long as one is alive, one finds it. It grows like the mushrooms in the morning dew.”
He soon used the informal “tu” with me; I never did likewise.
When he saw me, he began by telling me off:
“Have you seen your getup! Can’t you dress like the beautiful woman you are? In fact, why is your hair so short? Do you have lice?”
He said this to me as if talking to one of his cats, cats that he adored.
I would arrive on Sunday morning at around 10 A.M. I’d go into the cemetery and straight to Léonine’s tomb. I knew that she was no longer there. That beneath that marble, there was just emptiness. Like a wasteland, a no-man’s-land. I went there to read her first name and her surname. And to kiss them. I didn’t leave flowers; Léonine couldn’t care less about flowers. At seven years old, a girl prefers toys and magic wands.
When I pushed open the door to Sasha’s house, there was always that aroma, that combination of simple cooking, of onions being softened in a pan, of tea, and of “Rêve d’Ossian,” which he sprayed on handkerchiefs scattered here and there around the room. And me, as soon as I entered, I breathed more easily. I was on holiday.
We would have lunch, sitting opposite each other, and it was always good, colorful, spicy, aromatic, tasty, and without meat. He knew I couldn’t stand it.
He would ask me questions about my fortnight, my daily existence, life in Malgrange-sur-Nancy, my work, what I was reading, the music I was listening to, the trains that went by. He never spoke to me of Philippe Toussaint, or, when
