“No.”
“Do you have a gun?”
“Sometimes I do. But now, this morning, no.”
“Did you come with your mother’s ashes?”
“No. For now, they’re at the crematorium . . . I’m not going to place her ashes on the tomb of a stranger.”
“To you he’s a stranger, not to her.”
He gets up. “Can I see this man’s grave?”
“Yes. Could you come back in about half an hour ? I never go into my cemetery in a dressing gown.”
He smiles for the second time, and leaves the kitchen-cum-living room. Instinctively, I switch on the ceiling light. I never switch it on when someone enters my place, but when they leave. To replace their presence with light. An old habit of a child given up at birth.
Half an hour later, he was waiting for me in his car, parked outside the gates. I saw the registration on the number plate: 13, for Bouches-du-Rhône. He must have dozed off against his scarf; his cheek was marked, as though creased.
I had put on a navy-blue coat over a crimson dress. I’d buttoned my coat up to my neck. I looked like the night, and yet, underneath, I was wearing the day. I would have only had to open my coat for him to start blinking again.
We walked along the avenues. I told him that my cemetery had four sections—Bays, Spindles, Cedars, and Yews—two columbaria, and two gardens of remembrance. He asked me if I’d been doing “this” for a long time; I replied: “Twenty years.” That before, I’d been a level-crossing keeper. He asked how it felt to go from trains to hearses. I didn’t know how to reply. Too much had happened between those two lives. I just thought what strange questions he asked, for a rational detective.
When we reached Gabriel Prudent’s tomb, he went pale. As if he were coming to pay his respects at the grave of a man he’d never heard of, but who could very well be a father, an uncle, a brother. We remained still for a long while. I ended up blowing into my hands, it was that cold.
Normally, I never remain with visitors. I accompany them and then withdraw. But then, I don’t know why, I just couldn’t have left him on his own. After a while, which seemed like an eternity to me, he said he was going to get back on the road. Return to Marseilles. I asked him when he thought he’d be back to place his mother’s ashes on Mr. Prudent’s headstone. He didn’t reply.
7.
There’ll always be someone missing
to make my life smile: you.
I’m repotting some plants on the tomb of Jacqueline Victor, married name Dancoisne (1928–2008), and Maurice René Dancoisne (1911–1997). Two beautiful white heathers, like two pieces of coastal cliff in pots. One of the rare plants that can withstand winter, along with chrysanthemums and succulents. Madame Dancoisne loved white flowers. She came every week to visit her husband’s tomb. We’d have a chat. Well, in the end, once she’d got a little more used to the loss of her Maurice. For the first few years, she was devastated. Being unhappy, it leaves you speechless. Or it makes you talk nonsense. Then, little by little, she found her way back to forming simple sentences, to asking for news of others, news of the living.
I don’t know why one says “on the tomb.” One should really say “beside the tomb,” or “against the tomb.” Apart from ivy, lizards, cats, or dogs, nothing goes on top of a tomb. Madame Dancoisne rejoined her husband without warning. On the Monday she was cleaning her beloved’s headstone; the following Thursday, I was arranging flowers around hers. Since her burial, her children visit once a year, and ask me to look after things the rest of the time.
I like putting my hands into the heathers’ soil, even if it is midday and this pale October sun is struggling to warm things up. And although my fingers are frozen, they love it. Just like when I plunge them into the soil of my garden.
A few meters away from me, Gaston and Nono are digging a grave with shovels while telling each other how their evening went. From where I am, I hear snatches of their conversation, depending on the direction of the wind. “My wife says to me . . . on the TV . . . itching . . . mustn’t . . . the boss is coming . . . an omelette at Violette’s . . . I knew him . . . he was a good guy . . . curly hair, right? . . . Yeah, must’ve been about our age . . . that was nice, that was . . . his wife . . . stuck-up . . . Brel song . . . ‘mustn’t play it rich if one hasn’t a bean’ . . . just dying to piss . . . scared stiff . . . prostate . . . get the shopping before it closes . . . eggs for Violette . . . it just ain’t right . . . ”
Tomorrow, there’s a burial at 4 P.M. A new resident for my cemetery. A man of fifty-five, died from smoking too much. Well, that’s what the doctors said. They never say that a man of fifty-five can die from not having been loved, not having been heard, getting too many bills, buying too much on credit, seeing his children grow up and leave home without really saying goodbye. A life of reproach, a life of grimacing. So, his little cigarette and his little drink to drown that knot in his stomach, he was fond of them.
No one ever says that you can die from having been too fed up, too often.
A bit further along, two little ladies, Madame Pinto and Madame Degrange, are cleaning the graves of their men. And since they come every day, they invent what needs cleaning. Around their tombs, it’s as clean as a flooring display in a DIY store.
These folks who visit graves daily, they’re the ones who look like ghosts. Who are between life and death.
Madame Pinto and Madame Degrange are as slight as sparrows at winter’s end. As if it were their husbands who fed them when they were
