Philippe had passed out. He reopened his eyes, his head heavy, his tongue thick, embers in his stomach.
Alain Fontanel was still sitting in the same place, staring into space, eyes bloodshot, glass in hand. He hadn’t smoked the cigarette he still held between his fingers; the ash had dropped onto the plastic tablecloth.
“Don’t look at me like that, I know for sure it wasn’t Geneviève who did that. Don’t look at me like that, I tell you, I’m a nasty piece of work . . . people avoid me, see me coming and they cross the street, but never have I touched a hair on a kid’s head.”
* * *
Geneviève Magnan was buried on September 3rd, 1996. Irony of fate or unhappy coincidence, it was the day Léonine would have celebrated her tenth birthday.
When she was lowered into the family vault in the small cemetery at La Biche-aux-Chailles, three-hundred-odd meters from her house, Philippe had already gone back east, to the trains.
During the winter of 1996–97, he didn’t go to L’Adresse, and he left his motorbike sleeping in the garage.
His parents came to pick him up once, in January, to go to the Brancion cemetery and pay their respects to Léonine, but he refused to get in the car. Like an obstinate child. Like when he went on holiday with Luc and Françoise, despite his mother’s disapproval.
He spent six months playing Nintendo, mindlessly playing games that required him to save a princess. He saved her hundreds of times, having failed to save his own, the real one.
One morning, between the toast ritual and lunch, Violette told Philippe that the cemetery keeper’s job at Brancion-sur-Chalon was becoming vacant, and that she wanted that job more than anything in the world. She conjured up a kind of happiness to him. She described the position to him as if it were a place in the sun, a five-star vacation.
He looked at her as if she’d lost her mind. Not because of what she was proposing, but because he realized that she was proposing that they continue to live together. At first, instinctively, he said no, because he thought she just wanted to be closer to the old cemetery keeper, but that didn’t make sense. If she’d wanted to be closer to him, she would have left Philippe and gone and moved in with him. He realized that she wanted to carry on, that he was part of her plans, of her future.
The thought of becoming a cemetery keeper horrified him. But he wouldn’t have to do any more than at Malgrange. Violette would take care of everything. And anyhow, what else could he have done? He’d had an appointment at the employment agency the previous day, had been told to update his CV. Update it to what? Apart from tinkering on motorbikes and seducing loose women, he had no skills. They had suggested training to become a mechanic, to work in a garage or at a dealer’s; he presented well, he could also move into sales. The vision of himself as a salesman, getting commissions on cars, and the maintenance contracts that followed, disgusted him. The alarm clock going off just for him was never going to happen: office hours to stick to, suit and tie, thirty-nine-hour weeks, he’d rather die. An unthinkable nightmare. He’d never felt like working, apart from at eighteen, in Luc’s and Françoise’s garage.
By accepting this undertaker’s job, a salary would keep landing every month, a salary he wouldn’t touch. Violette would do the shopping with hers, the cooking, the cleaning. He’d still have his wife warming his bed, his toast, clean sheets and china; he’d just have to take his routine with him, along with his favorite yogurt brand. And continue his life of an eternal adolescent. As Violette had said, she’d drape curtains over the windows of their house, and he wouldn’t have to attend funerals. He’d set up his Nintendo in a closed room and save princesses, one after the other, to avoid being disturbed by some gravedigger or some lost visitor looking for a tomb.
And finally, it would be the chance to find out which son of a bitch had relit the water heater, on the night of July 13th–14th, 1993, at the château of Notre-Dame-des-Prés. He’d be on the spot to ask questions, smash a few teeth in, get the silence to talk. He’d do it secretly, so no one would ever come and take back or reclaim the insurance money he’d received, the damages paid for the accidental death of Léonine.
This obsession with putting any money aside, as his mother had taught him, disgusted him, but it was stronger than him. A genetic illness. A virus, a deadly bacterium. This stinginess was like a congenital defect. A cursed legacy he couldn’t fight. Money put aside to go where? To do what? He had no idea.
They moved in August of 1997. They did the journey in a van of barely twenty cubic meters; they didn’t possess much.
The old man from the cemetery wasn’t there anymore. He’d left a note on the table. Philippe pretended not to notice that Violette already knew the house’s every nook and cranny. When they had only just arrived, she disappeared into the garden. She called him, told him to come and see, “Come! Come quickly!” Philippe hadn’t heard that smile in her voice for years. When he found her, crouching at the back of the vegetable garden, picking plump tomatoes, red as a young girl’s cheeks, when he saw her biting into one of them, it reminded him of the sparkle in her eyes at the maternity hospital, on the day of Léonine’s birth. She said to him, “Come
