Читать книгу Fresh Water for Flowers - Valérie Perrin - Страница 18

I’ve just found the 2015 register slipped behind my blue window box. The detective has scribbled, “Thanks a lot. I’ll phone you,” on the back of a leaflet for a gym in Marseilles’s 8th arrondissement. There’s a photo of a smiling girl on it. Her dream body is torn at knee level.

He wrote nothing else, no comment on the speech for Marie Géant, not a word about his mother. I wonder whether he’s far from Marseilles. Whether he’s already arrived. When did he set off? Does he live close to the sea? Does he gaze at it, or no longer pay any attention to it? Like those who’ve lived together so long that it’s separated them.

Nono and Elvis arrive just as I’m opening the gates. They call out, “Hi, Violette!” and park the municipal truck on the main avenue to go into the hut and put on their work clothes. I can hear their laughter from the side avenues I’m surveying to check that all’s well. That everyone’s in their place.

The cats come and rub themselves against my legs. At the moment, there are eleven of them living in the cemetery. Five of those belonged to the deceased, at least I think they did. They appeared on the day of the burial of Charlotte Boivin (1954–2010), Olivier Feige (1965–2012), Virginie Teyssandier (1928–2004), Bertrand Witman (1947–2003), and Florence Leroux (1931–2009). Charlotte is white, Olivier black, Virginie an alley cat, Bertrand grey, and Florence (a tomcat) mottled white, black, and brown. The other six turned up over time. They come and go. Because people know that the cats at the cemetery are fed and sterilized, cats are abandoned, even thrown over the walls.

It’s Elvis who names them as he finds them. There’s Spanish Eyes, Kentucky Rain, Moody Blue, Love Me, Tutti Frutti, and My Way. My Way was left on my doormat in a shoebox for a size 43.

When Nono sees a new little one turn up at the cemetery, he tells it like it is, “I warn you, the boss’s specialty is getting balls chopped off.” But that doesn’t stop the cats from staying close to me.

Nono put a cat-flap on the door of my house for whoever wants to come in. But most of them slip inside the mortuary chapels. They have their habits and their preferences. Apart from My Way and Florence, who are always curled up in a ball somewhere in my bedroom, the others follow me as far as the landing, but don’t come in. As though Philippe Toussaint were still there, inside. Do they see his ghost? They say that cats converse with souls. Philippe Toussaint didn’t like animals. As for me, I’ve loved them since a tender age, although my childhood was only ever tough.

Generally, visitors like stumbling across the cemetery cats. Many tell themselves that their lost loved one is using these feline creatures to give them a sign. On the tomb of Micheline Clément (1957–2013) it says: “If Heaven there is, Heaven it will only be if I’m welcomed in by my dogs and cats.”

I return to the house, followed by Moody Blue and Virginie. When I push open the door, Nono is just talking to Father Cédric about Gaston. He’s speaking of his notorious clumsiness, of the permanent earthquake Gaston seems to be living through. Of the day when, during an exhumation, Gaston turned his wheelbarrow full of bones around, right in the middle of the cemetery, and a skull rolled under a bench without him noticing. And how Nono had called him back to tell him that he’d forgotten a “billiard ball” under the bench.

Unlike the priests who came before him, Cédric drops by at the house every morning. As he listens to Nono’s stories, Father Cédric keeps saying: “My God, there’s no way, my God, no way.” But every morning, he returns and questions Nono, who feeds him with stories. Between each sentence, he bursts out laughing, and we join him. Starting with me.

I love to laugh about death, to make fun of it. It’s my way of putting it down. That way, it pushes its weight around less. By making light of it, I let life have the upper hand, have the power.

Nono uses the familiar “tu” with Father Cédric, but calls him “Father.”

“Once, we took out a body that was almost in one piece. After more than seventy years, Father, in one piece! . . . Problem was, the opening for putting stiffs into the ossuary, it’s really small. Elvis ran off to find me, Elvis with his constantly dripping nose, who says to me, ‘Nono, come quick, come quick!’ And I says, ‘But what is it?’ And Elvis screams, ‘It’s Gaston who’s got a feller stuck in the thingamajig!’ And I says, ‘But what thingamajig?’ I arrives at the ossuary at a run, and I sees Gaston shoving the body to get it into the ossuary! I says to them, ‘God’s sake, guys, we’re not with the Germans in the war here . . . ’ The best one, yes, the very best, I’m always telling it to the mayor, and the mayor, hell, does it crack him up . . . the town hall gave us a cylinder of gas on a little four-wheeled trolley with a blowtorch on the end for burning away weeds. So, of course, that Elvis, he puts the blowtorch on and Gaston turns on the gas . . . just to clarify, Father, you have to turn the gas on very gently, except that Gaston, he turns it on hard when Elvis comes with his lighter, and it goes BOOM right across the cemetery! You’d have thought there was a war going on in there . . . And, wait for it! They even managed to . . . ”

Nono starts splitting his sides. He gets back to his story, nose in a handkerchief:

“There’s a woman who’s cleaning her tomb, she’s put her handbag on top of it, and they bloody set fire to the lady’s bag . . . I swear on the head of my grandson, Father, it’s true! Let me die on the spot if I tell a lie. Elvis started jumping with both feet on the lady’s handbag to put out the flames, with both feet on the bag!”

Propped against a window, with My Way on his knees, Elvis starts gently singing, “I feel my temperature rising, higher, higher, it’s burning through to my soul . . . ”

“Elvis, tell Father how the lady’s glasses were in the bag, and how you smashed the lenses! You should’ve seen the job he did, Father! And Elvis who was saying, ‘That Gaston bloody set fire to the bag . . . ’ And the little old lady who was screaming, ‘He’s smashed my glasses! He’s smashed my glasses!’”

Father Cédric, in fits of laughter, is weeping into his cup. “My God, there’s no way, my God, there’s no way!”

Nono spots his boss through my windows. He’s up like a shot. Elvis follows suit.

“Talk of the devil, and you always sees his tail. And that one definitely uses his tail. Sorry, Father! May God forgive me, and if he doesn’t, no matter. Well, cheerio, folks!”

Nono and Elvis leave my place and head for their boss. As the manager of technical services for the town, it’s Jean-Louis Darmonville who supervises the gravediggers. Apparently, he has as many mistresses in my cemetery as down Brancion high street. And yet he’s not much to look at. From time to time, he makes an appearance, and paces up and down my avenues. Does he remember all the women he barely held close? The ones who gave him a blow job? Does he look at their portraits? Does he remember their names? Their faces? Their voices? Their laughter? Their smell? What remains of his non-love affairs? I’ve never seen him paying his respects. Just strolling around, nose in the air. Does he come to reassure himself that none of them will ever talk about him?

As for me, I don’t have a boss. Only the mayor. The same one for twenty years. And I only see the mayor for the funerals of his people. Storekeepers, the military, municipal employees, people of influence, the “bigwigs,” as we call them here. Once, he buried a childhood friend, and his face was so contorted by grief that I didn’t recognize him.

Father Cédric also gets up to leave.

“Good day, Violette. Thank you for the coffee and the good cheer. It’s such a tonic.”

“Good day, Father.”

He places his hand on the handle of my door and reconsiders.

“Violette, do you ever doubt, sometimes?”

I weigh my words before replying to him. I always weigh my words. You never know. Particularly when I’m addressing a servant of God.

“In recent years, less so. But that’s because I feel at home here.”

He pauses awhile before continuing:

“I fear not being equal to the task. I hear confessions, I marry, I christen, I preach, I teach catechism. It’s a weighty responsibility. I often feel as if I’m betraying those who place their trust in me. Starting with God.”

At that, I quit weighing anything, and reply to him:

“Don’t you think God is the first to betray men?”

Father Cédric seems shocked by my remark.

“God is only love.”

“If God is only love, he inevitably betrays: betrayal is part of love.”

“Violette, do you really believe what you’re saying?”

“I always believe what I say, Father. God is in man’s image. That means he lies, he gives, he loves, he takes back, he betrays, just like each and every one of us.”

“God is a universal love. Across his entire creation, God evolves thanks to you, thanks to us, thanks to all the hierarchies of light, he feels and lives all that is lived and he wants to create ever more perfection, ever more beauty . . . It’s myself that I doubt, never him.”

“Why do you doubt?”

Not a sound comes from his mouth. He looks at me, distraught.

“You can speak, Father. There are two confessionals in Brancion, the one in your church, and this room. I’m told many things here.”

He smiles, sadly.

“I feel more and more the desire to be a father . . . It wakes me in the night . . . At first, I took this desire for fatherhood as pride, vanity. But . . . ”

He approaches the table, mindlessly opens and closes the sugar bowl. My Way comes to rub up against his legs. He bends to pet him.

“Have you thought about adoption?”

“I have absolutely no right to do so, Violette. All laws prohibit me from doing so. Terrestrial ones as much as divine ones.”

He turns around and automatically looks toward the window. A shadow passes.

“Forgive me, Father, but have you ever fallen in love?”

“I love only God.”