Fresh Water for Flowers

me. He lit me up. It hurt my eyes. All I could see of them was their silhouettes. He placed the girl with her back to a tree. He was facing me. He put the flashlight down by his feet, still directed at me. It was like being caught in the headlights of a car. He said, ‘I want to see your face.’ The girl thought he was talking to her. He gave her a whole load of instructions, which she carried out before my eyes, not knowing that I was there, close by. ‘Since it’s forbidden, I at least want to kiss your face.’ He made love to the girl. I didn’t see him, I was blinded, but I sensed him staring at me. At one moment, he said, ‘Come, come, come.’ Until I got up and approached them. She still had her back to me, Philippe was pressed to her, facing her, facing me. I was so close to them that I could smell their bodies. ‘Yes, that’s it, see how much I love you.’ His eyes looking straight into mine, never will I forget it. Or his sad smile. How he held her, his thrusting, his eyes looking straight into mine, his climax, his victory over me.

“I returned to my bedroom, shaking, I fell asleep against Luc. That night, I dreamt of Philippe. And the nights that followed, too. The next day, Philippe and the girl went home. I didn’t see them leave. I used a headache as an excuse to stay in bed. When I heard his motorbike start up, and then the sound of the engine fade away, I got up, promising myself never to see him again. But I thought about him. Often. The following summer, I organized a trip to the Seychelles with Luc for a romantic holiday, telling him I felt like having a second honeymoon with him.

“I saw Philippe again the summer he was twenty-five. He turned up at the villa without warning. Luc knew, they wanted to surprise me. I pretended to be pleased, I wanted to vomit, too many emotions, loathing, attraction. That very evening, he was back making love to a girl under my windows, murmuring, ‘Come, come, come, see how much I love you.’ It went on for a month. I tried to avoid him all day long. When our paths crossed at breakfast, he’d say to me, with feigned cheeriness, ‘Good morning, auntie, sleep well?’ But he didn’t smile anymore. He seemed unhappy. Something had changed. And yet, every night, he was at it again with a different girl. I didn’t smile anymore, either. I, too, was unhappy. He had succeeded in contaminating me with an unhealthy love. I was more infected by him than in love with him.

“On the last day of the holidays, I was the one who took him to the station. I told him that I never wanted to see him again. He replied, ‘Come, we’re leaving together. I feel that with you, everything is possible, with you, I can face anything. If you refuse, I’ll become a loser, a good-for-nothing.’ He broke my heart. I made him understand, gently, that I would never leave Luc. Never. He asked me if he could kiss me one last time, I said no . . . If I’d let him kiss me, I would have left with him.

“On August 30th, 1983, once his train had disappeared, I knew that I wouldn’t see him again. I felt it. Not in that life, anyhow. You know, there are several lives within a life.

“We lost touch with Philippe. At first, he continued to phone us, and then, little by little, as the years went by, nothing anymore. Luc thought that he’d ended up doing his parents’ bidding. That he’d sided with them. We returned to our routine, our life. A peaceful, serene life. A year later, we heard that Philippe had met someone, you, that he’d had a child, that he’d got married. That he’d moved. But he never called us to tell us so. I knew it was because of me. But Luc suffered greatly from not hearing from him anymore.

“I think he would have loved to meet you, to meet your . . . Perhaps things would have been different. Easier. And then there was that tragedy. We learned about it almost by chance. The holiday camp. Horrendous. Luc wanted to contact Philippe. He phoned his sister to get your phone number, she slammed the phone down on him. He didn’t persist. He put it down to grief. Luc said to me, ‘And in any case, what could we say to them? Poor Philippe.’

“In October of 1996, Luc died in my arms, heart attack. And yet it had been a beautiful day. We’d laughed together at breakfast. By late morning, he’d stopped breathing. I screamed to make him open his eyes, I screamed to make his heart restart, but it was no use. Luc couldn’t hear me anymore. I blamed myself. For a long time, I told myself that it had happened because of Philippe. Because of that funny, hidden love. That wasn’t funny at all.

“I had him buried in the strictest privacy. I didn’t tell Philippe’s parents. What was the point? Luc couldn’t have tolerated seeing them at his funeral. He might even have come back to life for five minutes, to box their ears and tell them to beat it. I didn’t tell Philippe, either. What was the point? I decided to keep the garage, but I appointed a manager, I went away for several months, far from Bron. I needed to think, ‘time to grieve,’ as they say.

“Distancing myself didn’t help me. Quite the opposite. I, in turn, nearly died. I had a nervous breakdown. I found myself in a psychiatric hospital under medication. I couldn’t even count to ten anymore. Luc’s death almost cost me my life, too. In losing my man, I lost my bearings. I was so young when I’d met him. When I began to resurface,