Читать книгу Fresh Water for Flowers - Valérie Perrin - Страница 11

Someone’s gently knocking on my door. I’m not expecting anyone; indeed, I stopped expecting anyone long ago.

There are two entrances to my house, one from the cemetery, the other from the road. Eliane starts yapping as she heads for the road-side door. Her mistress, Marianne Ferry (1953­–2007) is buried in the Spindles section. Eliane turned up on the day of her burial and never left. For the first few weeks, I fed her on her mistress’s tomb, and gradually she followed me to the house. Nono named her Eliane after Isabelle Adjani’s role in the film One Deadly Summer, because she has beautiful blue eyes and her mistress died in August.

In twenty years, I’ve had three dogs that arrived along with their owners and became mine by force of circumstance, but only she remains with me.

Someone knocks again. I hesitate to open. It’s only 7 A.M. I’m just sipping my tea and spreading my biscottes with salted butter and strawberry jam, given to me by Suzanne Clerc, whose husband (1933–2007) is buried in the Cedars section. I’m listening to music. Outside cemetery opening hours, I always listen to music.

I get up and switch off the radio.

“Who is it?”

A masculine voice hesitates, then replies:

“Forgive me, madam, I saw some light.”

I can hear him wiping his feet on the doormat.

“I have some questions about someone who’s buried in the cemetery.”

I could tell him to come back at 8 A.M., opening time. “Two minutes, I’m just coming!”

I go up to my bedroom and open the winter wardrobe to put on a dressing gown. I have two wardrobes. One I call “winter,” the other “summer.” It has nothing to do with the seasons, but rather the circumstances. The winter wardrobe contains only classic, somber clothes, for the eyes of others. The summer wardrobe contains only light, colorful clothes meant only for me. I wear summer under winter, and I take off winter when I’m alone.

So, I slip a gray, quilted dressing gown over my pink-silk négligée. I go back down to open the door and find a man of around forty. At first, I see only his dark eyes, staring at me.

“Good morning, forgive me for disturbing you so early.”

It’s still dark and cold. Behind him, I can see that the night has left a covering of frost. Condensation is coming out of his mouth as if he were puffing on an early-morning cigarette. He smells of tobacco, cinnamon, and vanilla.

I’m incapable of uttering a word. As though I’ve found someone long lost. I’m thinking that he’s burst in on me too late. That if he could have turned up on my doorstep twenty years ago, everything would have been different. Why do I say that to myself? Because it’s been years since anyone knocked on my road-side door, apart from sloshed kids? Because all my visitors arrive from the cemetery?

I make him come in, he thanks me, seeming embarrassed. I serve him coffee.

In Brancion-en-Chalon, I know everybody. Even the locals who don’t yet have any dead at my place. All of them have passed through my avenues at least once for the burial of a friend, a neighbor, a colleague’s mother.

But him, I’ve never seen. He has a slight accent, something Mediterranean in his way of punctuating sentences. His hair is very dark, so dark that his few white hairs stand out in the mess of the rest. He has a large nose, thick lips, bags under his eyes. He looks a bit like the singer Serge Gainsbourg. You can tell he’s at odds with his razor, but not with grace. He has fine hands, long fingers. He drinks his coffee piping hot, in small sips, blows on it, and warms his hands on the china.

I still don’t know why he’s here. I let him into my home because it isn’t really my home. This room, it belongs to everyone. It’s like a municipal waiting room that I’ve turned into a kitchen-cum-living room. It belongs to anyone passing through, and to the regulars.

He seems to be studying the walls. This twenty-five-square-meter room has a similar look to my winter wardrobe. Nothing on the walls. No colorful tablecloth or blue sofa. Just lots of plywood, and chairs to sit on. Nothing showy. A pot of coffee always at the ready, white cups, and spirits for desperate cases. It’s here that I get tears, confidences, anger, sighs, despair, and the laughter of the gravediggers.

My bedroom is upstairs. It’s my secret courtyard, my real home. My bedroom and bathroom are two pastel boudoirs. Powder pink, almond green, and sky blue, like I’d personally modified the colors of spring. At the first ray of sunshine, I open the windows wide, and, other than with a ladder, it’s impossible to see anything from outside.

No one has ever set foot in my bedroom as it looks today. Just after Philippe Toussaint’s disappearance, I completely repainted it, added curtains, lace, white furniture, and a big bed with a Swiss mattress that molds itself to the contours of your body. My body, so I’d no longer have to sleep in the imprint left by Philippe Toussaint.

The stranger is still blowing into his cup. He finally says to me: “I’ve come from Marseilles. Do you know Marseilles?”

“I go to Sormiou every year.”

“In the Calanque?”

“Yes.”

“Strange coincidence.”

“I don’t believe in coincidences.”

He seems to be looking for something in the pocket of his jeans. My men don’t wear jeans. Nono, Elvis, and Gaston are always in overalls, the Lucchini brothers and Father Cédric in Terylene trousers. He takes off his scarf, stretches his neck, places his empty cup on the table.

“I’m like you, I’m quite rational . . . And I’m a detective.”

“Like Columbo?”

He replies with a smile for the first time:

“No, he was a lieutenant. I’m a captain.”

He presses his index finger on a few sugar grains scattered on the table.

“My mother wishes to be buried in this cemetery, and I don’t know why.”

“She lives around here?”

“No, in Marseilles. She died two months ago. Being buried here is one of her final wishes.”

“I’m so sorry. Would you like a drop of something stronger in your coffee?”

“Do you often get people drunk so early in the morning?”

“Sometimes. What is your mother’s name?”

“Irène Fayolle. She wished to be cremated . . . and her ashes to be placed at the tomb of a certain Gabriel Prudent.”

“Gabriel Prudent? Gabriel Prudent, 1931–2009. He’s buried on avenue 19, in the Cedars section.”

“You know all the dead by heart?”

“Almost.”

“The date of their death, their location, and everything?”

“Almost.”

“Who was Gabriel Prudent?”

“A woman comes by from time to time . . . His daughter, I believe. He was a lawyer. There’s no epitaph on his black-marble tomb, or photo. I can no longer remember the date of the burial. But I can look in my registers, if you’d like me to.”

“Your registers?”

“I record all burials and exhumations.”

“I didn’t know that was part of your job.”

“It isn’t. But if we had to do only what was part of our job, life would be sad.”

“It’s funny to hear that from the mouth of a . . . what’s the name of your job? ‘Cemetery keeper’?”

“Why? You think I weep from dawn to dusk? That I’m all tears and grief?”

I serve him more coffee while he asks me, twice: “You live alone?”

I eventually answer yes.

I open my register drawers and consult the 2009 volume. I look through the surnames and immediately find that of Prudent, Gabriel. I start reading:

February 18th, 2009, burial of Gabriel Prudent, torrential rain.

There were a hundred and twenty-eight people for the interment. His ex-wife was present, as were his two daughters, Marthe Dubreuil and Cloé Prudent.

At the deceased’s request, no flowers or wreaths.

The family had a plaque engraved that reads: “In homage to Gabriel Prudent, a courageous lawyer. ‘Courage, for a lawyer, is essential; without it, the rest doesn’t count: talent, culture, knowledge of the law, everything is useful to the lawyer. But without courage, at the decisive moment, there are but words, sentences that follow each other, that dazzle and then die.’ (Robert Badinter).”

No priest. No cross. The cortege only stayed for half an hour. When the two undertakers had finished taking the coffin down into the vault, everyone left. Still raining heavily.

*

I close the register. The detective looks dazed, lost in thought. He runs a hand through his hair.

“I wonder why my mother wants to be laid to rest beside this man.”

For a time, he returns to studying my white walls, on which there’s absolutely nothing to study. Then he returns to me, as if he didn’t believe me. He indicates the 2009 register with his eyes.

“Can I read it?”

Normally, I only entrust my notes to the families concerned. I hesitate for a few seconds, and end up handing it to him. He starts leafing through it. Between each page, he stares at me as if the words of 2009 were written on my forehead. As if the volume he held in his hands were an excuse to look at me.

“And you do that for every funeral?”

“Not every, but almost. That way, when those who were unable to attend come to see me, I can tell them about it from my notes . . . Have you ever killed anyone? I mean, in connection with your job . . . ”

“No.”

“Do you have a gun?”

“Sometimes I do. But now, this morning, no.”

“Did you come with your mother’s ashes?”

“No. For now, they’re at the crematorium . . . I’m not going to place her ashes on the tomb of a stranger.”

“To you he’s a stranger, not to her.”

He gets up. “Can I see this man’s grave?”

“Yes. Could you come back in about half an hour ? I never go into my cemetery in a dressing gown.”

He smiles for the second time, and leaves the kitchen-cum-living room. Instinctively, I switch on the ceiling light. I never switch it on when someone enters my place, but when they leave. To replace their presence with light. An old habit of a child given up at birth.

Half an hour later, he was waiting for me in his car, parked outside the gates. I saw the registration on the number plate: 13, for Bouches-du-Rhône. He must have dozed off against his scarf; his cheek was marked, as though creased.

I had put on a navy-blue coat over a crimson dress. I’d buttoned my coat up to my neck. I looked like the night, and yet, underneath, I was wearing the day. I would have only had to open my coat for him to start blinking again.

We walked along the avenues. I told him that my cemetery had four sections—Bays, Spindles, Cedars, and Yews—two columbaria, and two gardens of remembrance. He asked me if I’d been doing “this” for a long time; I replied: “Twenty years.” That before, I’d been a level-crossing keeper. He asked how it felt to go from trains to hearses. I didn’t know how to reply. Too much had happened between those two lives. I just thought what strange questions he asked, for a rational detective.

When we reached Gabriel Prudent’s tomb, he went pale. As if he were coming to pay his respects at the grave of a man he’d never heard of, but who could very well be a father, an uncle, a brother. We remained still for a long while. I ended up blowing into my hands, it was that cold.

Normally, I never remain with visitors. I accompany them and then withdraw. But then, I don’t know why, I just couldn’t have left him on his own. After a while, which seemed like an eternity to me, he said he was going to get back on the road. Return to Marseilles. I asked him when he thought he’d be back to place his mother’s ashes on Mr. Prudent’s headstone. He didn’t reply.