Читать книгу Fresh Water for Flowers - Valérie Perrin - Страница 31

Since darkness is winning Since there’s no mountain Beyond the winds higher than the marches of oblivion Since we must learn For want of understanding it To dream our desires and live with “so be it” And since you think It’s entirely obvious That sometimes even giving everything isn’t necessarily enough Since it’s elsewhere That your heart will beat better And since we love you too much to keep you Since you’re leaving . . .

This is the song that is most played at funerals. In church and at the cemetery.

In twenty years, I’ve heard it all. From Ave Maria to “The Desire to Desire” by Johnny Hallyday. For a burial, a family once requested Pierre Perret’s song, “The Willy,” because it was the deceased’s favorite. Pierre Lucchini and our previous priest refused. Pierre explained that not all final wishes could be fulfilled, either in the house of God or in the “garden of souls”—that’s what he calls my cemetery. The family found funerary etiquette’s lack of humor baffling.

Regularly, a visitor will place a CD player on a tomb. The volume is never very high, as though to avoid disturbing the neighbors.

I’ve also seen a lady placing her little radio on her husband’s tomb, “so he can hear the news.” A very young girl putting speakers on either side of the cross on the tomb of a schoolboy, to make him listen to the latest Coldplay album.

There are also the birthdays that people come to celebrate, by laying flowers on the tomb or playing music from a mobile phone.

Every June 25th, a woman named Olivia comes to sing for a man whose ashes were scattered in the garden of remembrance. She arrives when the gates open. She drinks a tea without sugar in my kitchen without saying a word, apart from maybe a remark about the weather. At around 9:10, she makes her way to the garden of remembrance. I never accompany her, she knows the way only too well. If it’s fine and my windows are open, I can hear her voice right inside the house. She always sings the same song, “Blue Room” by Chet Baker: We’ll have a blue room, a new room for two room, where ev’ry day’s a holiday because you’re married to me . . .

She takes her time singing it. She sings it loudly but slowly, to make it last. There are long silences between each verse, as though someone were replying to her, echoing her. Then she sits down for a few moments on the ground.

Last June, I had to lend her an umbrella because it was pouring rain. When she came over to the house to return it to me, I asked her if she was a singer, because her voice was so beautiful. She took off her coat and sat down close to me. She started talking to me as if I had asked her lots of questions, even though in twenty years, I had asked her just the one.

She spoke to me of the man, François, she came to sing for every year. She was a schoolgirl in Mâcon when she had met him, he was her French teacher. She had fallen in love with him, immediately, at the first lesson. She had lost her appetite over it. She lived only for when she would see him next. The school holidays were bottomless pits. Of course, she always made sure she was at the front, in the first row. She now focused only on French, in which she excelled. She was rediscovering her mother tongue. During that year, she had got 19/20 for some creative writing. She had chosen as her subject, “Is love a trap?” She had written ten brilliant pages on the love a man, a teacher, felt for one of his pupils. A love he dismissed out of hand. Olivia had written her piece in the form of a detective novel, in which the guilty party was none other than her. She had changed the names of all her characters (the pupils in her class) and the setting of the story. She had made it all happen at an English school. Cheekily, she had asked François:

“Sir, why 19? Why not 20?”

He had replied:

“Because perfection doesn’t exist, mademoiselle.”

“But then,” she insisted, “why was the 20 score invented, if perfection doesn’t exist?”

“For mathematics, for resolving problems. In French, as a subject, there are very few infallible solutions.”

As a comment beside the 19/20, he had scribbled in red pen, “Excellent direct speech. You have applied your fertile imagination to serve an implacable literary construct. The subject is fascinating and handled with flair, lightness, humor, and seriousness. Bravo, your writing shows great maturity.”

Countless times she had caught him watching her when she had her nose in her notebooks. And she’d chewed many a pen cap that year while watching him offer explanations for Emma Bovary’s feelings.

She was sure this love was reciprocal. And, weirdly, they both had the same surname. This had troubled her, although their name, Leroy, was a common one.

A few days before sitting the French exam for the baccalauréat, Olivia, one of a small group of pupils revising with François, had dared to say to him:

“Monsieur Leroy, if we married each other, nothing would change. We’d have no admin to go through, neither for our ID papers nor for the bills.”

The whole group burst out laughing, and François blushed.

Olivia passed her French bac, getting 19 for the oral, and 19 for the written part. She sent a note to François, “Monsieur, I didn’t get 20 because you haven’t yet found a solution to our problem.”

He had waited until after the bac to ask to see her for a one-on-one meeting. After a long silence, which she took as a symptom of love, he had said to her:

“Olivia, a brother and a sister don’t marry each other.”

Initially, she had laughed. She had laughed because he’d said her first name, when before he’d always called her mademoiselle. And then she had stopped laughing while he stared at her, intensely. She had remained speechless when François had informed her that they both had the same father. François had been born of a previous union, near Nice, twenty years before Olivia. Their father and François’s mother had lived together for two years, and then separated, painfully. The years had passed by.

François had done some research much later and learnt that his father had remarried and was the father of a little girl called Olivia.

The father had concealed François’s existence from his second family. They had seen each other again. François got himself transferred to Mâcon to be closer to him.

He had been shocked to discover that his sister was a pupil in his class. When her name was called, on the first day of term, he’d thought it an unfortunate coincidence when she had stopped whispering in her neighbor’s ear to raise her hand at her name and whisper, “Present,” while looking him straight in the eye. He had recognized her because they looked alike. He had noticed her because he knew; she hadn’t noticed him because she knew nothing.

At first, Olivia hadn’t wanted to believe it. To believe that her father could have concealed François’s existence. She had thought that he was inventing this story to put an end to the seduction games of a capricious child. And then, when she understood that the story was true, she had said, with feigned light-heartedness, to François:

“We don’t come from the same stomach, it doesn’t count. I really love you.”

Controlling his anger, he had replied to her:

“No, forget it, forget that right now.”

Then there had been the final year. Their paths would cross in the school corridors. Every time she caught sight of him, she wanted to throw herself into his arms. But not like a sister into the arms of her brother.

He avoided her, bowed his head. Annoyed, she would do a detour to confront him and virtually shout at him:

“Hello, Monsieur Leroy!”

And he would reply, shyly:

“Hello, Mademoiselle Leroy.”

She hadn’t dared to ask her father anything. She hadn’t needed to. She had seen how he had looked at François on the day the diplomas were handed out at the end of the year.

Olivia had caught a smile between François and their father. She’d felt like grabbing one to kill the other. Her tears and her anger welled up. She could see no way out, other than to forget.

After the diploma ceremony, there had been a celebration. Pupils and teachers took turns performing onstage. After some covers of songs by the groups Trust and Téléphone, François had sung “Blue Room” a cappella, with the same intensity as Chet Baker: We’ll have a blue room, a new room for two room, where ev’ry day’s a holiday because you’re married to me . . .

He had sung it for her, gazing into her eyes. She had understood that she would never love any man but him. And that this impossible love was reciprocal.

And then off she had gone. Had been around the world more than once, and had qualified to become a teacher of literature herself. She had married elsewhere, to someone else. She had changed her name.

Seven years later, at the age of twenty-five, she returned to live with François. She knocked on his door one morning, and said to him, “Now we can live together, I don’t have the same name as you. We won’t get married, we won’t have a child, but at least we will live together.” François replied, “O.K.”

They had continued to use the formal “vous” with each other, always. As though to keep a distance between them. To remain at the beginning, like a first date. Life had given them twenty years together. The same number as the years that separated them.

While drinking some port, Olivia said to me, “Our family rejected us, but we didn’t suffer from it that much, our family was us. When François died, as if to punish us, his mother had him cremated here, in Brancion-en-Chalon, the town she was born in. To make her son disappear completely, she had his ashes scattered in the garden of remembrance. But he will never disappear, I will carry him forever within me. He was my soul brother.”