Читать книгу Fresh Water for Flowers - Valérie Perrin - Страница 12

I’m repotting some plants on the tomb of Jacqueline Victor, married name Dancoisne (1928–2008), and Maurice René Dancoisne (1911–1997). Two beautiful white heathers, like two pieces of coastal cliff in pots. One of the rare plants that can withstand winter, along with chrysanthemums and succulents. Madame Dancoisne loved white flowers. She came every week to visit her husband’s tomb. We’d have a chat. Well, in the end, once she’d got a little more used to the loss of her Maurice. For the first few years, she was devastated. Being unhappy, it leaves you speechless. Or it makes you talk nonsense. Then, little by little, she found her way back to forming simple sentences, to asking for news of others, news of the living.

I don’t know why one says “on the tomb.” One should really say “beside the tomb,” or “against the tomb.” Apart from ivy, lizards, cats, or dogs, nothing goes on top of a tomb. Madame Dancoisne rejoined her husband without warning. On the Monday she was cleaning her beloved’s headstone; the following Thursday, I was arranging flowers around hers. Since her burial, her children visit once a year, and ask me to look after things the rest of the time.

I like putting my hands into the heathers’ soil, even if it is midday and this pale October sun is struggling to warm things up. And although my fingers are frozen, they love it. Just like when I plunge them into the soil of my garden.

A few meters away from me, Gaston and Nono are digging a grave with shovels while telling each other how their evening went. From where I am, I hear snatches of their conversation, depending on the direction of the wind. “My wife says to me . . . on the TV . . . itching . . . mustn’t . . . the boss is coming . . . an omelette at Violette’s . . . I knew him . . . he was a good guy . . . curly hair, right? . . . Yeah, must’ve been about our age . . . that was nice, that was . . . his wife . . . stuck-up . . . Brel song . . . ‘mustn’t play it rich if one hasn’t a bean’ . . . just dying to piss . . . scared stiff . . . prostate . . . get the shopping before it closes . . . eggs for Violette . . . it just ain’t right . . . ”

Tomorrow, there’s a burial at 4 P.M. A new resident for my cemetery. A man of fifty-five, died from smoking too much. Well, that’s what the doctors said. They never say that a man of fifty-five can die from not having been loved, not having been heard, getting too many bills, buying too much on credit, seeing his children grow up and leave home without really saying goodbye. A life of reproach, a life of grimacing. So, his little cigarette and his little drink to drown that knot in his stomach, he was fond of them.

No one ever says that you can die from having been too fed up, too often.

A bit further along, two little ladies, Madame Pinto and Madame Degrange, are cleaning the graves of their men. And since they come every day, they invent what needs cleaning. Around their tombs, it’s as clean as a flooring display in a DIY store.

These folks who visit graves daily, they’re the ones who look like ghosts. Who are between life and death.

Madame Pinto and Madame Degrange are as slight as sparrows at winter’s end. As if it were their husbands who fed them when they were still alive. I’ve known them since I’ve worked here. More than twenty years now that, on their way to the shops, every morning, they’ve made a detour, like some inescapable ritual. I don’t know whether it’s love or submissiveness. Or both. Whether it’s for appearances, or out of affection.

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?”