“I should send you the siblings who insult each other in my office, they could do wisdom internships around you.”
“Personally, I think inheritance shouldn’t exist. I think we should give everything to the people we love while we’re alive. Our time and our money. Inheritances were invented by the Devil, to make families tear themselves apart. I only believe in donations while one is alive. Not in the promises of death.”
“Did you know that your husband was rich?”
“My husband wasn’t rich. He was too lonely and too unhappy. Luckily, at the end of his life, he lived with the right person.”
“How old are you, dear Violette?”
“No idea. Since July 1993, I no longer celebrate my birthday.”
“You could make a new life for yourself.”
“My life is fine as it is.”
67.
On the quicksand into which life has slipped
grows a sweet flower my heart has picked.
In August of 1996, a year before moving to the cemetery, I left the Sormiou chalet earlier than usual. I took a train to Mâcon, and then a bus that stopped at Brancion-en-Chalon on its way to Tournus. My bus passed through La Clayette, I saw the château of Notre-Dame-des-Prés, in the distance, through the window, for the first time. My bus stopped a few minutes later, in front of the Brancion-en-Chalon town hall, and when I got off, I was shaking from head to toe. My legs struggled to carry me to the cemetery. With every step, I kept seeing the château again, the windows, the white walls. I had glimpsed the lake, just behind, glistening like a sea of sapphires. It was a very hot day.
The door to Sasha’s house, on the cemetery side, was half-open; I didn’t go in. I went straight to Léonine’s tomb, still seeing the walls of the château. Standing in front of the headstone engraved with the names of my daughter and her friends, for the first time I felt bad for not having been to the funeral, for leaving her to depart alone, for not having placed even a white pebble on her tomb. And yet, once again on that day, I knew that Léonine was far more present in the Mediterranean I’d just come from, and among the flowers in Sasha’s garden, than beneath this tombstone. I walked over to Sasha’s house with an aching heart.
He didn’t know I was there, I hadn’t told him I was coming. I hadn’t seen him for more than two months. Since Philippe Toussaint had forbidden me from doing so. The house was tidy. The door leading to his vegetable garden wide open. I didn’t call to him. I went out and saw him lying on a bench, having a nap, a straw hat shading his face. I approached him very gently, he immediately jumped up and hugged me.
“There’s nothing more beautiful than the sky seen through a straw hat. I like looking at it through the holes without the sun harming me. My little sparrow, what a lovely surprise . . . Are you staying all day?”
“A little longer.”
“That’s wonderful! Have you eaten?”
“I’m not hungry.”
“I’m going to make you some pasta.”
“But I’m not hungry.”
“With butter and grated Gruyère, come, follow me, we’ve got work to do! Have you seen how everything has grown? It’s a big year for the garden! A big year!”
At that moment, seeing him bustling about and smiling, I felt a warmth in my belly, a little like happiness. Not something put on, not one of those spurts of life that lasted but seconds, but a plenitude, a smile on the lips not instantly erased, quite simply, desire. I was no longer remote-controlled, I was inhabited.
I would have liked to keep the summer and that moment, the garden, and Sasha forever.
I stayed with him for four days. We started by picking the ripe tomatoes to make preserves. First, we sterilized the jars in a pan of water that Sasha brought to the boil over a wood fire. Next, we chopped and deseeded the tomatoes, before putting them in the jars with freshly picked basil leaves. Sasha taught me the importance of having new rubber washers to seal the jars hermetically. We heated them up for fifteen minutes.
“Now we can keep these jars for at least four years. But you see, all the people lying in this cemetery, they put things aside, and what good did it do them? Us two, we’re not going to wait for anything, and this evening we’re opening one up just for us.”
We did the same thing with the beans. We removed their stalks, put them in the jars with a glass of salted water, sealed them, and brought them to a boil.
“This year, my beans appeared over a single night, just two days ago; they must have sensed you were coming . . . Never underestimate your garden’s powers of divination.”
On the second day, there was a funeral. Sasha asked me to accompany him. I’d have nothing to do, just be with him. It was my first time attending a funeral. I saw the faces, the grief, the pallor, the smart, dark clothes. I saw hands being shaken, people arm-in-arm, heads bowed. I still remember the speech given by the son of the deceased with tears in his voice:
“Dad, as André Malraux said, the finest tombstone is our memory. You loved life, women, great wine, and Mozart. Every time I open a good bottle or come across a beautiful woman, every time I savor a great wine in the company of a beautiful woman, I’ll know that you’re not far away. Every time the vines change color, from green to red, and the sky gradually lights up with a gentle glow, I’ll know you’re not far away. When I listen to a clarinet concerto, I’ll know that you’re there. Rest, Dad, everything’s taken care of.”
When everyone had left, and we’d returned to Sasha’s, I asked him if he ever kept the eulogies he heard. If he recorded them somewhere.
“What
