Now there’s only her and me in the house.
“You know who I am?”
“Yes. Françoise Pelletier.”
“You know why I’m here?”
“No.”
She takes a deep breath to hold back her tears.
“You saw Philippe, on that day?”
“Yes.”
She reels from the blow.
“What did he come here for?”
“To return a letter to me.”
She feels unwell, she changes color, her forehead is beaded with sweat. She doesn’t move an inch, and yet, in her midnight-blue eyes, I see cyclones passing. Her hands are clenched. Her nails digging into the skin.
“Have a seat.”
She musters a faint smile of gratitude and pulls over a chair. I serve her a large glass of water.
“What letter?”
“I’d sent him a request for a divorce, to your place, in Bron.”
My reply seems to come as a relief to her.
“He wanted to hear nothing more of you.”
“Me neither.”
“He said he’d gone crazy because of you. He hated this place, this cemetery.”
“ . . . ”
“Why did you stay here once he’d left? Why didn’t you move? Make a new life for yourself?”
“ . . . ”
“You’re a pretty woman.”
“ . . . ”
Françoise Pelletier downs her glass of water in one go. She’s shaking a lot. The death of the other slows down the movement of the one left behind. Her every movement seemed held back by that slowness. I serve her more water. She gives me a pained smile.
“The first time I saw Philippe, it was in Charleville-Mézières in 1970, the day of his First Communion. He was twelve and I was nineteen. He was wearing a white surplice, and a wooden cross hung from his neck. I’ve never seen anyone look so wrong in an outfit. I remember saying to myself: ‘Doesn’t ring true, this kid dressed up as a choirboy.’ The sort that drinks the Communion wine and smokes cigarettes in secret. I’d just got engaged to Luc Pelletier, the brother of Chantal Toussaint, Philippe’s mother. Luc had insisted that we go to Mass in the morning and have lunch with them. He didn’t get on at all with his sister and brother-in-law, he called them ‘the stuck-ups,’ but he adored his nephew. We had a pretty tedious day. We waited for Philippe to open his presents, and by 3 P.M. we’d already left. Philippe’s mother gave me dirty looks all day; we could tell that it infuriated her that her brother had got himself a young girl. I was thirty years younger than Luc.
“That same year, we got married in Lyons, Luc and I; Philippe and his parents came to our wedding, oozing resentment. Philippe got drunk by downing all the dregs in the adults’ glasses. He was so drunk that, at the start of the dancing, he kissed me on the lips and hollered, ‘I love you, auntie.’ He made all the guests laugh. He spent the rest of the evening vomiting in the bathroom, while his mother guarded the door, saying, ‘Poor boy, he’s had indigestion on and off all week.’ She stuck up for him, no matter what. Philippe greatly amused me, I adored his lovely little face.
“After our wedding, Luc and I opened a garage in Bron. At first, we did basic repairs, oil changing, maintenance, bodywork, and then we became dealers. The business was always profitable. We worked hard but never struggled. Never. Two years went by and Luc invited ‘little Philippe,’ as he called him, to come and stay with us during the summer holidays. We lived in a house in the country, about twenty minutes from our garage. Philippe celebrated his fourteenth birthday with us, and as a present, Luc gave him a motorbike, a 50cc. Philippe cried tears of joy. That’s when Luc and his sister had a falling out. Chantal insulted her brother over the phone, calling him every name under the sun, asking him what made him think he could give a motorbike to her son, it was too dangerous, he wanted Philippe to kill himself; him, the good-for-nothing who’d never managed to have children. Which was true. He’d never had any. Neither with his first wife nor with me.
“That day, Chantal had touched a nerve. Luc never spoke to his sister again. But despite his parents’ disapproval, Philippe returned to our house every summer. And he never wanted to leave. He said he wanted to live with us all year round. He begged us to keep him, but Luc explained that it wasn’t possible, that if he did so, it would be his death warrant, his sister would kill him. He was a nice kid, chaotic but nice. Seeing him gave Luc pleasure, he’d transferred his affection to his nephew. Philippe was his surrogate son for a long time. I got on well with him. I spoke to him like I would to a child—he often reproached me for that, saying, ‘I’m not a kid.’
“For the summer of his seventeenth birthday, he came on holiday with us to Biot, near Cannes. We’d rented a villa with a sea view. And we went to the beach every day. We set off in the morning, had lunch in a straw-hut café, and went home in the evening. Philippe went out with girls, a different one every day. Sometimes, one of them would join us on the beach during the day. He would kiss them on his towel, and I found him disturbingly mature and disconcertingly laid-back. He always appeared not to give a damn about anything. He went dancing every evening, came back in the middle of the night. Before setting off, he monopolized the bathroom, and left the caps of his aftershaves lying around. He stole his uncle’s razors, always left shaving foam around the edge of the basin, and never closed the toothpaste tube, left bath towels on the floor. That all succeeded in annoying Luc. It annoyed him, but it amused him, too. As for me, I picked up and washed the clothes of the kid that Luc and I would never have together. We liked having Philippe, he brought
