Madame Pinto is Portuguese. And like most of the Portuguese living in Brancion, in summer she’s back off to Portugal. It means a lot of work for her, come autumn. At the beginning of September, she returns, still as thin, but with tanned skin, and knees grazed from having cleaned the graves of those who had died back home. In her absence, I’ve watered the French flowers. So, to thank me, she gives me a folk-costume doll in a plastic box. Every year, I’m entitled to my doll. And every year I say: “Thank you, Madame Pinto, thank you, you SHOULDN’T have. For me, flowers are a pleasure, not work.”
There are hundreds of folk costumes in Portugal. So, if Madame Pinto lives another thirty years, and I do, too, I’ll be entitled to thirty new creepy dolls who close their eyes when you lay down the boxes that serve as their sarcophagi, to do the dusting.
Since Madame Pinto comes to my home from time to time, I can’t hide the dolls she gives me. But I don’t want them in my bedroom, and I can’t put them where people come seeking comfort, either. They’re too ugly. So, I “display” them on the steps leading up to my bedroom. The staircase is behind a glass door. You can see it from the kitchen. When she comes to mine for a coffee, Madame Pinto looks over at them, to check that they are in their proper place. In winter, when it’s dark at 5 P.M. and I see them with their black eyes glinting and their frilly costumes, I imagine they’re going to open their boxes and trip me up so I fall down the stairs.
I’ve noticed that, unlike many others, Madame Pinto and Madame Degrange never talk to their husbands. They clean in silence. As if they’d ceased talking to them well before they were dead. That this silence, it’s a kind of continuity. They never cry, either. Their eyes have long been dry. Sometimes, they converge to chat about the fine weather, the children, the grandchildren, and even, soon, can you believe it, their great-grandchildren.
I saw them laugh once. One single time. When Madame Pinto told the other one that her granddaughter had asked her this question: “Granny, what’s All Saints? Is it like holidays?”
8.
May your rest be as sweet as your heart was kind.
November 22nd, 2016, blue sky, 10C, 4 P.M. Burial of Thierry Teissier (1960–2016). Mahogany coffin. No marble. Grave dug straight into soil. Alone.
Around thirty people present. Including Nono, Elvis, Pierre Lucchini, and me.
Around fifteen of Thierry Teissier’s colleagues from the DIM factories laid a spray of lilies: “To our dear colleague.”
An employee named Claire, from Mâcon’s oncology unit, holds a bouquet of white roses.
The wife of the deceased is present, as are their two children, a boy and a girl aged, respectively, thirty and twenty-six. On a funerary plaque they have had engraved: “To our father.”
No photograph of Thierry Teissier.
On another funerary plaque: “To my husband.” With a little warbler etched above the word “husband.”
A large cross made of olive wood has been embedded in the soil.
Three school friends take turns reading a poem for him, by Jacques Prévert.
A distraught village listens
To the song of a wounded bird
It’s the only bird in the village
And it’s the only cat in the village
Who has half-devoured it
And the bird stops singing
The cat stops purring
And licking its muzzle
And the village gives the bird
A marvelous funeral
And the cat who is invited
Walks behind the little straw coffin
In which the dead bird lies
Carried by a little girl
Who doesn’t stop crying
If I’d known it would upset you so
The cat said to her
I’d have eaten all of it
And then I’d have told you
That I’d seen it fly off
Fly off to the ends of the earth
To a place so far away
That one never returns
You’d have had less grief
Just sadness and regrets
One must never do things by halves.
Before the coffin is lowered into the ground, Father Cédric speaks:
“Let us recall the words of Jesus to the sister of Lazarus, just after her brother’s death: ‘I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.’”
Claire places the bouquet of white roses beside the cross. Everyone leaves at the same time.
I didn’t know this man. But the way some people looked at his grave makes me think he was kind.
9.
His beauty, his youth smiled upon the world
in which he would have lived. Then from his hands
fell the book of which he has read not a word.
There are more than a thousand photographs scattered across my cemetery. Photos in black-and-white, sepia, color that’s vivid or faded.
On the day all these photos were taken, none of the men, children, women who posed innocently in front of the camera could have thought that that moment would represent them for all eternity. It was the day of a birthday or a family meal. A walk in the park one Sunday, a photo at a wedding, at a promotion party, one New Year. A day when they were at their best, a day when they were all gathered together, a particular day when they were wearing their finest. Or then in their military, baptism, or First Communion attire. Such innocence in the eyes of all these people who smile from their tombs.
Often, the day before a funeral, there’s an article in the newspaper. An article that sums up the life of the deceased in a few sentences. Briefly. A life doesn’t take up much space in the local paper. A little
