First, he must go back to see Magnan. “I’d never have done any harm to kids.” Why had she said that? He must go back there to make her spit it out; she’d almost spoken earlier on, but he hadn’t let her. Wasn’t ready.
He looked at Léonine’s tomb one last time, failed, once and for all, to open his mouth, like when she was alive and he already didn’t say much to her. Never answered her questions. “Daddy, why is the moon switched on?”
When he left Léonine’s tomb and was walking briskly to the gate, he saw them. Violette and the old man, on the avenue. Violette was holding his arm. Philippe had seen the deception. He’d heard his mother saying to him: “Trust no one, think only of yourself, of you.”
He thought she was in Marseilles, at Célia’s chalet. He thought she was on a kind of pilgrimage. And there she was, with another man. She was smiling. Philippe hadn’t seen Violette smile once since Léonine’s death.
For six months, Violette had come, every other Sunday, to this cemetery. So that was it. She’d borrowed the red car from the twit at the Casino to make Philippe think she was visiting Léonine’s tomb. She’d hidden her game very well. She had a lover? This old man? How had she met him? Where? A lover, Violette, impossible.
He hid behind a large stone cross and watched them for a while. They walked arm in arm to the house at the entrance to the cemetery. The old man came back out, at around 7 P.M., to close the gates. So that was it, he was the keeper of this wretched place. His wife was sleeping with the keeper of the cemetery in which their daughter was buried. Philippe heard himself laugh, an evil laugh. An intense desire to kill, to strike, to slaughter.
Violette remained inside. He saw her, through a window, laying the table for two, like she did at their home, with a tea cloth tied around her waist. It hurt him so much, he gnawed his fingers until they bled. Like in the Westerns he watched as a child, when the cowboy bites into a piece of wood while the bullet in his stomach is extracted. Violette had a double life and he hadn’t been aware of a thing.
Night fell. The old man and Violette switched off the lights. Closed the shutters. And she had remained inside. She had slept there. No longer any question about it.
Two months previously, he’d forbidden Violette from returning to Burgundy. When she’d spoken to him about that Magnan, told him she’d been to see her, he’d been scared. Scared of being found out. Scared of Violette knowing that she had been her husband’s mistress, the very woman who did the cooking at the château.
But the story was very different, she had a lover. That’s why she seemed more lighthearted the day before going there. Every other Sunday. She had dared to announce to him, “I will go to the cemetery every other Sunday.” And he’d seen nothing; now he understood why his wife seemed to improve from week to week.
He climbed a wall to get out; it was late. He gave a big kick to the road-side door, got on his bike, and sped off like a madman.
It must have been about 10 P.M. when he found himself back on the road of the house Magnan lived in. There were cops inside, their van was parked outside. Neighbors in dressing gowns were talking under the streetlights. He told himself that Fontanel must have hit her too hard.
Philippe turned straight around and headed back east without stopping. Once there, he went directly to L’Adresse, where bodies were on the house.
71.
Through the open window, together we looked
at life, love, joy. We listened to the wind.
IRÈNE FAYOLLE’S JOURNAL
October 22nd, 1992
Yesterday evening, I heard Gabriel’s voice on the television news. I heard him talking about “defending a woman who left me.” Of course, he didn’t say that, my mind distorted his words.
Paul was helping me prepare supper in the kitchen, the television was on in the room next door. I was so surprised to hear the sound of his voice again, the sound of my most wonderful memories, that I dropped the saucepan of boiling water I was carrying. It clattered onto the tiles and my ankles got splashed. It made an almighty racket, Paul panicked. He thought I was shaking because of my burns.
He ushered me into the sitting room and made me sit on the sofa, facing the television, facing Gabriel. There he was, inside that rectangle I never watch. While Paul flapped around, applying wet gauze to my smarting skin, I saw images of Gabriel in court. A journalist said he had been defending in Marseilles that week. That he had got three men acquitted out of five accused of conspiring to escape. The trial had concluded the previous day.
Gabriel was in Marseilles, so close to my life, and I didn’t know it. But anyhow, what would I have done? Would I have gone to see him? To say what to him? “Five years ago, I ran away in the street because I didn’t want to abandon my family. Five years ago, I was afraid of you, afraid of myself. But you should know that I have never stopped thinking of you”?
Julien emerged from his bedroom, said to his father that I should be taken to hospital. I refused. While my husband and son were debating it, and before I finally found a tube of Biafine cream in the medicine cabinet, I watched Gabriel waving his beautiful hands around in front of the journalists. I saw the passion he put into defending others in his long black robe. I wanted him to pop out from the screen, to be Mia Farrow in that
