Читать книгу Fresh Water for Flowers - Valérie Perrin - Страница 9

When teenagers haven’t stuck chewing gum in the keyhole, I’m the one who opens and shuts the heavy gates of the cemetery.

The hours vary according to the seasons.

8 A.M. to 7 P.M. from March 1st to October 31st.

9 A.M. to 5 P.M. from November 2nd to February 28th.

The jury’s still out on February 29th.

7 A.M. to 8 P.M. on November 1st.

I took on my husband’s work after his departure—or, more accurately, his disappearance. Philippe Toussaint comes under the heading “disappearance of concern” in the police’s national file.

I still have several men around me. The three gravediggers, Nono, Gaston, and Elvis. The three undertakers, the Lucchini brothers, named Pierre, Paul, and Jacques. And Father Cédric Duras. All these men stop at my place several times a day. They come for a drink or a snack. They also help me in the vegetable garden, if I have sacks of compost to carry or leaks to fix. I regard them as friends, not colleagues. Even if I’m not in, they can come into my kitchen, pour themselves a coffee, rinse their cup, and set off again.

Gravediggers do a job that prompts repulsion, disgust. And yet those in my cemetery are the gentlest, most agreeable men I know.

Nono is the person I trust the most. He’s an upstanding man who has joie de vivre in his blood. Everything amuses him and he never says no. Apart from when there’s a child’s burial to attend to. He leaves “that” to the others. “To those who can bear it,” as he says. Nono looks like the singer Georges Brassens, and it makes him laugh because I’m the only person in the world who tells him he looks like Georges Brassens.

As for Gaston, he invented clumsiness. His movements are uncoordinated. He always seems drunk, despite only ever drinking water. During funerals, he positions himself between Nono and Elvis just in case he loses his balance. Beneath Gaston’s feet there’s a permanent earthquake. He drops, he falls, he knocks over, he crushes. When he comes into my place, I’m always afraid he’ll break something or injure himself. And since fear doesn’t avert danger, he invariably does break a glass or injure himself.

Elvis is known as Elvis because of Elvis Presley. He can’t read or write, but he knows all his idol’s songs by heart. His pronunciation of the lyrics is terrible—you can’t tell whether he’s singing in English or French—but his heart is in it. “Love mi tendeur, love mi trou . . . ”

There’s barely a year between each of the Lucchini brothers: thirty-eight, thirty-nine, and forty. They’ve been in undertaking for generations, from father to son. They’re also the fortunate owners of the Brancion morgue, which adjoins their funeral parlor. Nono told me that only a partition separates the parlor from the morgue. It’s Pierre, the eldest, who receives the grieving families. Paul is an embalmer. He works in the basement. And Jacques drives the hearses. The final journey, that’s him. Nono calls them “the apostles.”

And then there’s our priest, Cédric Duras. God has taste, even if he’s not always just. Since Father Cédric’s arrival, many women around here seem to have been struck by a divine revelation. There are ever more female believers in the pews on Sunday morning.

As for me, I never go to church. It would be like sleeping with a colleague. And yet, I think I’m more confided in by those who pass through than Father Cédric is in his confessional. It’s in my modest home and along my cemetery’s avenues that families let their words pour out. As they arrive, as they leave, sometimes both. A bit like the dead. With them, it’s the silences, the gravestone inscriptions, the visits, the flowers, the photographs, the way visitors behave beside their graves, that tell me about their former lives. About when they were living. Moving.

My job consists of being discreet, liking human contact, not feeling compassion. For a woman like me, not feeling compassion would be like being an astronaut, a surgeon, a volcanologist, or a geneticist. Not part of my planet, or my skill set. But I never cry in front of a visitor. That can happen to me before or after a burial, never during. My cemetery is three centuries old. The first dead person it received was a woman. Diane de Vigneron (1756–1773), who died in childbirth at the age of seventeen. If you stroke the plaque on her tomb with your fingertips, you can still make out her name carved into the dove-colored stone. She hasn’t been exhumed, even though my cemetery is short of space. None of the successive mayors dared to make the decision to disturb the first to be interred. Particularly since there’s an old legend surrounding Diane. According to the inhabitants of Brancion, she’s supposed to have appeared in her “raiment of light” on several occasions, in front of shopwindows in the town center and in the cemetery. When I do the garage sales around here, I sometimes find Diane depicted as a ghost on antique engravings dating from the eighteenth century, or on postcards. A false, staged Diane, disguised as a common phantom.

There are many legends surrounding tombs. The living frequently reinvent the lives of the dead.

Brancion has a second legend, much younger than Diane de Vigneron. She’s called Reine Ducha (1961–1982), and she’s buried in my cemetery, avenue 15, in the Cedars section. A pretty young woman, dark-haired and smiling in the photo that hangs on her headstone. She was killed in a car accident at the edge of town. Some youngsters apparently saw her, dressed all in white, at the side of the road where the accident took place.

The myth of the “white ladies” spread far and wide. These specters of women who died accidentally are supposed to haunt the world of the living, dragging their troubled souls through castles and cemeteries.

And just to reinforce Reine’s legend, her tomb shifted. According to Nono and the Lucchini brothers, it was due to a landslide. That often happens when too much water accumulates in a vault.

Over twenty years, I reckon I’ve seen plenty in my cemetery. On some nights, I’ve even caught shadows making love on or between tombs, but those weren’t ghosts.

Legends aside, nothing is eternal, not even burial plots held in perpetuity. You can purchase a concession for fifteen years, thirty years, fifty years, or eternity. Except that with eternity, you have to beware: if, after a period of thirty years, a perpetual concession has ceased to be maintained (unkempt and dilapidated appearance), and no interment has taken place for a long while, the council can reclaim it. The remains are then placed in an ossuary at the back of the cemetery.

Since I’ve been here, I’ve seen several expired plots being dismantled and cleaned, and the bones of the deceased placed in the ossuary. And no one said a thing. Because those dead people were seen as lost property with no one left to reclaim it.

It’s always like that with death. The further back it goes, the less hold it has on the living. Time does for life. Time does for death.

Me and my three gravediggers, we do our utmost never to leave a grave neglected. We can’t bear to see that municipal label: “This grave is subject to retrieval proceedings. Please contact the town hall urgently.” When the name of the deceased person resting there is still visible.

That’s doubtless why cemeteries are covered in epitaphs. To ward off the passage of time. Cling on to memories. The one I like best is: “Death begins when no one can dream of you any longer.” It’s on the grave of a young nurse, Marie Deschamps, who died in 1917. Apparently, it was a soldier who put up this plaque in 1919. Every time I go past it, I wonder whether he dreamt of her for a long time.

Jean-Jacques Goldman’s “Whatever I do, wherever you are, nothing fades you, I think of you,” and Francis Cabrel’s “Among themselves, the stars speak only of you” are the lyrics most quoted on funerary plaques.

My cemetery is very beautiful. The avenues are lined with centenarian linden trees. A good many of the tombs have flowers. In front of my little keeper’s house, I sell a few potted plants. And when they’re no longer worth selling, I give them to the abandoned graves.

I planted some pine trees, too. For the scent they produce in the summer months. It’s my favorite smell.

I planted them in 1997, the year we arrived. They’ve grown a lot and make my cemetery look splendid. Maintaining it is all about caring for the dead who lie within it. It’s about respecting them. And if they weren’t respected in life, at least they are in death.

I’m sure plenty of bastards lie here. But death doesn’t differentiate between the good and the wicked. And anyhow, who hasn’t been a bastard at least once in their life?

Unlike me, Philippe Toussaint instantly detested this cemetery, this little town, Burgundy, the countryside, the old stones, the white cows, the folk around here.

I hadn’t even finished unpacking the removal boxes and he was off on his motorbike, morning till night. And as the months went by, he sometimes left for weeks at a time. Until the day he no longer returned. The policemen couldn’t understand why I hadn’t reported him missing sooner. I never told them that he had disappeared years before, even when he was still dining at my table. And yet, after a month, when I realized he wouldn’t return, I felt just as abandoned as the tombs I regularly clean. Just as gray, drab, and dilapidated. Ready to be dismantled and my remains thrown into an ossuary.