by Anna Gavalda
After the ceremony all these lovely people went to have a picnic in the gardens of Buttes-Chaumont. They had the huge La Durbellière wicker basket as their caterer, and they were especially crafty so that the park wardens wouldn’t see them picnicking.
Philibert moved 1/100,000 of his books into his spouse’s tiny two-bedroom apartment; Suzy could not dream even for a second of leaving her beloved neighborhood for a first-class burial on the other side of the Seine.
That just goes to show how disinterested she was, and how truly in love he was . . .
But he kept his room in the old apartment all the same, and they slept there whenever they came for dinner. Philibert used the opportunity to bring some books back and take others home with him, and Camille used the opportunity to continue Suzy’s portrait.
She couldn’t quite get her: yet another subject who evaded capture. But so it goes; these were the risks of the trade.
Philibert no longer stuttered, but he stopped breathing the moment Suzy was out of eyeshot.
And whenever Camille seemed surprised by how quickly they had gotten engaged and married, they gave her a funny look. Why should they wait? Why waste time, where happiness was at stake? What an idiotic thing to say, Camille. She shook her head, doubting and suddenly moved, while Franck gave her a furtive glance.
Just drop it, it’s not something you could ever understand. You just don’t get it. You’re all in a knot. Only your drawings are beautiful. You’re all shriveled up inside. When I think that I believed that you were alive . . . Shit, I must really have been really under your spell that night to have believed such a thing. I thought you’d come to make love to me, but in fact you were just starving. What an idiot I was, I swear.
Y’know what you need? You need to have your head cleaned out the way you clean out a chicken, scrape all the crap out once and for all. He’ll have to be a fucking saint, the guy manages to sort you out. I’m not sure that he even exists. Philou says that it’s because you’re like this that you draw so well—well, shit, at what a cost . . .
“Say, Franck, old boy?” Philibert was shaking him. “You seem all out of sorts just now.”
“Tired.”
“Come on. Vacation time soon.”
“Yeah, really. The whole month of July to get through still. Anyway, I’m going to bed because I have to get up early: I’m taking the ladies out into the countryside for a break.”
To spend the summer in the country. It was Camille’s idea and Paulette didn’t see anything wrong with it. She wasn’t any more enthusiastic than that, though, his old grandma. But game. Game for anything as long as she was never forced into it.
When Camille announced her plan, Franck finally began to accept the idea.
She could live apart from him. She wasn’t in love and never would be. And hadn’t she warned him, anyway: “Thanks, Franck. Me neither.” After that it was his problem if he thought he was stronger than her, stronger than the whole world. Well, guess what, you’re not that strong. And it’s not as if people hadn’t tried to make you understand, that is it. But you’re so stubborn, so full of yourself . . .
You weren’t even born yet and already your life was halfway up shit creek so why should it change now? What were you thinking? That because you were fucking her with your whole heart in it, and you were nice to her, that happiness would land fully baked onto your plate . . . Poof! What a shame. Just take a look, have you seen the hand you’ve been dealt? Where did you think you were going with it, tell me? Where were you headed? Honestly?
Camille left her bag and Paulette’s suitcase by the entrance and went back to join Franck in the kitchen.
“I’m thirsty.”
He didn’t respond.
“Are you mad? Does it bother you that we’re leaving?”
“Not at all! I’ll be able to have some fun!”
She got up and took him by the hand: “Come on.”
“Where?”
“Come to bed.”
“With you?”
“Who else?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“I don’t feel like it. You turn soft when you’ve had one drink too many. All you ever do is fuck with me, I’m sick of it.”
“Right.”
“You blow hot and cold. That’s an awful way to behave.”
Silence.
“Disgusting.”
“But I like being with you.”
“ ‘But I like being with you,’ ” he echoed in a whiny voice. “I don’t give a fuck if you like being with me. I wanted you to be with me, period. All the rest, who cares. Your little ways, your artsy-fartsy attitude, the little deals you make with your cunt and your conscience: keep them for some other sucker. This one is all used up. You’ll get nothing more from me for the time being so give it up, princess . . .”
“You’ve fallen in love, is that it?”
“God, you piss me off, Camille! Go on, then. Speak to me as if I were some terminal patient now! Fuck, you’ve got no modesty! Not a bit of human decency! I don’t deserve this, do I? Go on. You’re gonna split and it’ll be good for me. What the fuck am I doing, anyway, getting myself tangled up with some girl who gets off on the idea of spending two months in the middle of nowhere all alone with an old woman? You’re not normal, and if you had one ounce of honesty, you’d get yourself looked at before glomming on to the first mother- fucker who comes your way.”
“Paulette was right. It’s incredible how vulgar you can be.”
The trip, the following morning, seemed, shall we say, rather long.
He left them the car and headed off again on his old motorbike.
“Will you come again next Saturday?”
“To do what?”
“Uh . . . to have a break.”
“We’ll see.”
“I was just wondering . . .”
“We’ll see.”
“You’re not gonna kiss me?”
“Nah. I’ll come fuck you next Saturday if I have nothing better to do, but I’m not kissing you.”
“Right.”
Franck went to say good-bye to his grandmother, then disappeared down the end of the lane.
Camille went back to her big cans of paint. She was having a go at interior decoration at the moment.
She started thinking, then went: no. Took her brushes out of the white spirit and wiped them for a long time. He was right. They would see.
And their little life resumed its course. Like in Paris, yet even slower. And in the sun.
Camille met an English couple who were fixing up the house next door. They swapped things, clever ideas, tools, and glasses of gin and tonic just as night fell and the swifts swirled in the sky.
They went to the fine-arts museum in Tours. Paulette waited under an immense cedar tree (too many stairs) while Camille discovered the garden, the lovely wife, and the grandson of the painter Edouard Debat-Ponsan. He wasn’t in the encyclopedia, that one. As Emmanuel Lansyer wasn’t, whose museum they had visited in Loches a few days earlier. Camille really loved these painters who were not in the encyclopedia. These minor masters, as they were known. Regional painters of stopping-off points, whose only glory was to be found in the town which they had made their home. Debat-Ponsan would forever be the grandfather of Olivier Debré, and Lansyer had been Corot’s student. What the hell. Unburdened by genius or posterity, their paintings lent themselves more easily to a quiet love. And, perhaps, a more sincere one.
Camille was forever asking Paulette whether she didn’t need to go to the toilet. It was idiotic, having to cling to this idée fixe about incontinence just to keep her from slipping away. The old lady had let herself go once or twice, and Camille had scolded her profusely: “Oh, no, my dear Paulette, whatever you want, but not this! I’m here just for you, so just tell me when you have to go, all right? Stay with me, Paulette! What are you doing, shitting yourself like that? You’re not locked up in some cage.”
Paulette didn’t reply.
“Hey! Yoo-hoo, Paulette! Answer me! Are you going deaf as well?”
“I didn’t want to disturb you.”
“Liar! You didn’t want to disturb yourself !”
The rest of the time Camille gardened, puttered around fixing things, worked, thought about Franck, and read, at last, The Alexandria Quartet. Out loud sometimes. For Paulette. And then it was her turn to tell the stories of operas . . .
“Listen here, it’s really beautiful. Don Rodrigo suggests to his friend that he go and die in the war so that he’ll forget he’s in love with Elisabeth.
“Wait, I’ll turn up the volume. Listen to this duet, Paulette. ‘God, you sowed in our souls . . .’ ” she hummed, wiggling her wrists, “na ninana ninana . . .
“Beautiful, isn’t it?”
Paulette had nodded off.
Franck did not come the following weekend but they had a visit from the inseparable Monsieur and Madame Marquet.
Suzy had placed her yoga cushion in the wild grass, and Philibert sat reading in a deck chair—guides to Spain, where they would be headed the following week for their honeymoon.
“To Juan Carlos’s domain: my cousin by marriage.”
“I might have guessed.” Camille smiled.
“Wait a minute, where’s Franck? He’s not here?”
“No.”
“Off on the motorbike?”
“I don’t know.”
“You mean he stayed in Paris?”
“I suppose so.”
“Oh, Camille,” he said sorrowfully.
“What, Camille?” she replied, annoyed. “What? You’re the one who told me when you first talked about him that he was impossible. That he never read a thing except Motorjerk Magazine, that . . . that . . .”
“Shh. Calm down. I’m not criticizing you.”
“No, what you’re doing is worse.”
“You seemed so happy.”
“Yes. Precisely. Enough, let’s stop right there. Let’s not spoil everything.”
“You think they’re like your pencils? That they get worn down if you use them?”
“What?”
“Feelings.”
“When did you last do your self-portrait?”
“Why do you ask?”
“When?”
“A long time ago.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“That’s got nothing to do with it.”
“No, of course not.”
“Camille?”
“Hmm?”
“October 1, 2004, at eight in the morning . . .”
“Yes?”
He handed her the letter from Maître Buzot, notary in Paris.
Camille read it, handed it back and stretched out in the grass by his feet.
“I beg your pardon?”
“It was too good to last.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Stop.”
“Suzy is looking at ads for places in our neighborhood . . . It’s a good one too, you know. It’s . . . quaint, as my father would say.”
“Stop it. And does Franck know?”
“Not yet.”
He informed them he’d be coming the following weekend.
“Are you missing me too much?” purred Camille on the phone.
“No. I’ve got stuff to do on my motorbike. Did Philibert show you the letter?”
“Yes.”
He was silent.
“Are you thinking about Paulette?”
“Yes.”
“Me too.”
“We’ve been playing yo-yo with her. We would have done better to leave her where she was.”
“Do you really believe that?” asked Camille.
“No.”
96
THE week went by.
Camille washed her hands and went back out into the garden to join Paulette, who was enjoying the sun in her chair.
She’d made a quiche. Well, a sort of pie with bits of bacon in it. Well, something to eat, let’s say.
A genuine little housewife, waiting for her man.
She was on her knees digging in the soil when her elderly companion murmured to her back: “I killed him.”
“Pardon?”
Heaven help us.
She had been talking nonsense more and more lately.
“Maurice . . . my husband . . . I killed him.”
Camille sat up straight without turning around.
“I was in the kitchen looking for my wallet to go down to the bakery and I . . . I saw him fall. He had a bad heart, you know. He was groaning and sighing and his face was . . . I—I put on my cardigan and went out.
“I took my time. I stopped outside every house. ‘And your little boy, how’s he doing? And your rheumatism, has it gotten any better? And have you seen the storm that’s brewing?’ I’m not a very chatty person but that morning I was particularly friendly. And the worst of it is that I bought a lottery ticket. Can you imagine? As if it were my lucky day. Anyway. When I finally got home he was dead.”
Silence.
“I threw out my lottery ticket because I never would’ve had the nerve to check all the winning numbers, and I called the ambulance. Or the emergency rescue people . . . I don’t remember exactly. But it was too late. And I knew it.”
Silence.
“You have nothing to say?”
“No.”
“Why aren’t you saying anything?”
“Because I think his time had come.”
“You think so?” Paulette implored.
“I’m sure of it. A heart attack is a heart attack. You told me once that he’d had fifteen years of borrowed time. Well, there you go, he’d used them up.”
And to prove her good faith, Camille went on digging as if nothing had happened.
“Camille?”
“Yes?”
“Thank you.”
When Camille stood up a good half hour later, Paulette was sleeping, a smile on her face.
Camille went to fetch her a blanket.
Then she rolled a cigarette.
Then she cleaned her nails with a matchstick.
Then she went to check on her “quiche.”
Then she chopped three little heads of lettuce and some chives.
Then she washed them.
Then she poured herself a glass of white wine.
Then she took a shower.
Then she went back out into the garden and pulled on a sweater.
She put her hand on her shoulder: “Hey, you’ll catch cold, Paulette, love.”
She shook her gently: “Paulette?”
Never had a drawing taken so much out of her.
She made only one.
And perhaps it was the finest . . .
97
IT was after one o’clock when Franck woke the entire village.
Camille was in the kitchen.
“Still keeping company with the bottle?”
He put his jacket down on a chair and reached for a glass in the cupboard above her head.
“Don’t move, I’ll get it.”
He sat down across from her.
“My grandma already in bed?”
“She’s in the garden.”
“In the gar—”
And when Camille looked up, he began to moan.
“Oh, no, fuck. Oh, no.”
98
“WHAT sort of music? Any preference?”
Franck turned to Camille.
She was crying.
“You can think of something nice, can’t you?”
She shook her head.
“And what about the urn? Have you—have you had a chance to look at their rates?”
99
CAMILLE didn’t have the strength to go back to town to look for a decent CD. Moreover, she was not sure she’d find one. And, well, she just didn’t have the strength.
She took the cassette from the car stereo and handed it to the gentleman from the crematorium.
“Nothing to do, then?”
“No.”
Because this really was Paulette’s favorite music. The proof was that he’d even sung a song just for her, so what more . . .
Camille had compiled the tape for Paulette to thank her for the horrible sweater she’d knitted that winter, and they’d listened to it again intently just the other day on their way back from the gardens at Villandry.
She’d watched Paulette smiling in the rearview mirror.
When that tall young man began to sing, Paulette was twenty years old again.
She’d seen him in 1952, back in the days when there was a music hall next to the movie house.
Ah, he was so handsome, she sighed, so handsome.
So it was to Yves Montand that they entrusted the task of delivering the funeral oration.
And the requiem . . .
Quand on partait de bon matin
Quand on partait sur les chemins
À bicyclette
Nous étions quelques bons copains
Y avait Fernand y avait Firmin
Y avait Francis et Sébastien
Et puis Paulette
On était tous amoureux d’elle
On se sentait pousser des ailes
À bicyclette
And what about Philou, who wasn’t even here.
Off somewhere in his castles in Spain . . .
Franck stood very straight, hands behind his back.
Camille wept.
La, la, la . . . Mine de rien,
La voilà qui revient,
La chansonnette
Elle avait disparu,
Le pavé de ma rue,
