Fresh Water for Flowers

by Valérie Perrin

  L’Oeuvre de Dieu, la part du Diable is the book that adopted me. I don’t know why I was never adopted. Why I was left to traipse from foster family to foster family, rather than being put up for adoption. Did my biological mother inquire after me occasionally, so I never would be?

  I returned to Charleville-Mézières in 2003 to consult my file, that of a child given up at birth. As I was expecting, it was empty. Not a letter, not a trinket, not a photo, not an excuse. A file that could also be consulted by my mother, if she so wished. I slipped my adoptive novel inside it.

  28.

  There’s no solitude that isn’t shared.

  This morning, we buried Victor Benjamin (1937–2017).

  Father Cédric wasn’t there. Victor Benjamin wanted a civil burial. Jacques Lucchini set up his sound system close to the tomb and everyone gathered to listen to the song “My Old Man,” by Daniel Guichard.

  “In his scruffy old overcoat, off he’d go, winter and summer, in the chilly wee hours, my old man . . . ”

  No cross, or flowers, or wreaths, at Victor’s request. Just a few funerary plaques placed by his friends and colleagues, his wife, and his children. One of Victor’s children held their dog on a lead. He attended the burial of his master, sat when Daniel Guichard sang:

  “Us, we’d heard it all before, no one was spared, the bourgeoisie, the bosses, the left, the right, even the good Lord, with my old man.”

  The family left on foot, followed by the dog, who seemed to appeal to Eliane. She followed them a little, and then returned to curl up in her basket. Too old for love affairs.

  When I got home, I had the blues. Nono sensed it. He went off to buy a crusty baguette and farm eggs, and we made a nice omelette with some comté cheese I’d grated. We found some jazz on the radio.

  On my table, among the leaflets from purveyors of salad seeds and cypress saplings, bills for plants, catalogues from Willem & Jardins, the postman had left a letter. I looked at its stamp of the Château d’If. It had been posted in Marseilles.

  Violette Trenet-Toussaint,

  Cimetière de Brancion-en-Chalon (71)

  Saône-et-Loire.

  I waited until Nono had left to open it.

  No “Dear Violette” or “Madame.” Julien Seul began his letter without any niceties.

  The solicitor opened a letter that was addressed to me. My mother can’t have had much faith in me. She wanted things to be “official.” She wanted it to be him who read her final wishes to me, so that I couldn’t renege on them, I imagine.

  There was just one wish. To rest beside Gabriel Prudent in your cemetery. I asked the solicitor to repeat the name of this man I didn’t know. Gabriel Prudent.

  I told him that he must be mistaken. My mother was married to my father, Paul Seul, who is buried in the Saint-Pierre cemetery in Marseilles. The solicitor told me that there was no mistake. This was the final wish of Irène Fayolle, married name Seul, born April 27th, 1941, in Marseilles.

  I got into my car, and entered “Brancion-en-Chalon, cemetery road” into my GPS, because “cemetery” didn’t appear on the list of options. Three hundred and ninety-seven kilometers. I’d have to drive up France, it was a direct route. No detours or deviations, the motorway to Mâcon. Exit near Sancé, and drive ten kilometers along country roads. What had my mother been doing up there?

  For the rest of the day, I tried to work, but it was useless. I hit the road at around 9 P.M. I drove for hours. I stopped near Lyons to have a coffee, fill up, and type “Gabriel Prudent” in the browser of my mobile phone. All I found was a definition of “prudence” on Wikipedia: “Founded on an aversion to risk and danger.”

  As I was driving toward this dead and buried man, I tried to recall my mother, the times I’d spent with her in recent years. The few Sunday lunches, an occasional coffee when I was passing through her neighborhood, rue Paradis. She would comment on the news, never asked me if I was happy. I never asked her if she was, either. She asked me questions about work. She seemed disappointed by my replies; she was expecting blood and tales of crimes of passion, when all I gave her was drug trafficking, lowlife crimes, and pickpocketing. Before I left, as she kissed me goodbye in the corridor, because of my job she always said, “Do take care, all the same.”

  I tried to think of any glimpse she might have given me of her private life—nothing. I found not the slightest trace of that man in my memories, not even a shadow.

  I arrived at Brancion-en-Chalon at two in the morning. I parked in front of the cemetery, where the gates were locked, and fell asleep. I had nightmares. I was cold. I restarted the engine to warm up. I fell asleep again. I opened my eyes at around 7 A.M.

  I saw some light inside your house. I knocked on your door. I wasn’t remotely expecting you. When I knocked on a cemetery keeper’s door, I expected to find a ruddy-faced, potbellied old man. I know, preconceptions are stupid. But who could have expected you? With your piercing, fearful, gentle, and wary eyes?

  You made me come in and offered me coffee. It felt good in your house, and it smelled good and you smelled good. You were wearing a gray dressing gown, an old lady’s thing, whereas you radiated something like youth. I can’t find the words. A certain energy, something that time hadn’t spoiled. It was as if you were disguised in your dressing gown. That’s it, you were like a child who has borrowed an adult’s clothing.

  Your hair was gathered into a bun. I don’t know if it was the shock I’d had at the solicitor’s, the night driving, or tiredness that disturbed my vision, but I found you incredibly unreal. A bit like a ghost, an apparition.

  In finding you, I felt for the first time like my mother was sharing her bizarre parallel life with me, that she’d brought me to where she really was.

  And then you pulled out your burial registers. That was the moment I realized you were different. That women do exist who resemble no other women. You weren’t a copy of someone, you were someone.

  While you were getting ready, I returned to my car, ran the engine, and closed my eyes. I couldn’t sleep. I saw you again, behind that door. You had opened it to me for an hour. Like part of a film I kept replaying to hear again the music of the scene I’d just lived through.

  When I got out of my car and saw you in your long navy-blue coat, waiting for me behind the gate, I thought: I have to know where she comes from and what she’s doing here.

  Next, you took me over to the tomb of Gabriel Prudent. You held yourself straight and your profile was lovely. At each of your steps, I glimpsed the red under your coat. As if you were hiding secrets under your shoes. And I thought again: I have to know where she comes from and what she’s doing here. I should have felt sad that October morning in your gloomy, chilly cemetery, but I felt quite the opposite.

  It struck me, in front of Gabriel Prudent’s tomb, that I was like a man who falls in love with a guest at his own wedding.

  During my second visit, I watched you for a long time. You were cleaning the portraits of the dead, on their tombs, while talking to them. And I thought, for the third time: I have to know where she comes from and what she’s doing here.

  I didn’t need to question Madame Bréant, the bed-and-breakfast owner, who told me that you lived alone, that your husband had “disappeared.” I thought that “disappeared” meant “died.” And I’ll admit to you that, at that, I felt joy. A strange joy at thinking: She’s alone. When Madame Bréant specified that your husband had just vanished, from one day to the next, twenty years ago, I felt that he could come back. That the unreal state I had found you in behind your door, the first time, was perhaps due to that. To all those hours in limbo that this disappearance had imposed on you, between one life and another. A waiting room you’d been sitting in for years without anyone ever coming to call you or saying your name. As if Toussaint and Trenet were knocking the ball back and forth. It must have been that, that impression of disguise, your youth under
a gray dressing gown.

  I wanted to know for you. I wanted to rescue the princess. Play the comic-strip hero. Take off that navy-blue coat to see you in your red dress. Did I seek to know through you what I didn’t know about my own mother, and thus my own life? Probably. I broke into your private life to soothe my own. And for that I am sorry.

  Sorry.

  Within twenty-four hours, I knew what you seemed not to have known for twenty years. It wasn’t hard for me to get hold of a copy of the statement you gave at the police station. I read in the notes of the sergeant you spoke to, in 1998, that your husband regularly deserted you. That it wasn’t unusual for him to go off for several days, several weeks even, without telling you where he was staying during these periods of absence. No inquiry had been carried out. His disappearance hadn’t been considered concerning. His psychological and moral profile, and state of health seemed to indicate that he had left of his own accord. I discovered that this disappearance was just a legend. Yours, and that of the inhabitants of Brancion.

  An adult is free to stop contact with his or her family, and if their address is discovered, it will only be passed on with their consent. I don’t have the right to give you Philippe Toussaint’s details, but I’m taking it. It’s you yourself who said to me, “If we had to do only what was part of our job, life would be sad.”

  Do what you want with this address. I’ve written it down and slipped it into the enclosed envelope. Open it if you wish to.

  Yours ever,

  Julien Seul

  It’s the first love letter I’ve received in my whole life. A strange love letter, but a love letter all the same. He only wrote a few lines to pay homage to his mother. Words he seems to have struggled like hell to get out. And he sends me pages. It’s decidedly easier to pour one’s heart out to a perfect stranger than at a family reunion.

  I look at the enclosed sealed envelope that contains Philippe Toussaint’s address. I slip it between the pages of a copy of Roses Magazine. I don’t know yet what I’m going to do with it. Keep it in the sealed envelope, throw it away, or open it. Philippe Toussaint lives a hundred kilometers from my cemetery, I can’t believe it. I imagined him being abroad, on the other side of the world. A world that’s not been mine for a very long time.

  29.

  The leaves fall, the seasons pass,

  only memory is eternal.

  Philippe Toussaint married me on September 3rd, 1989, the day of Léonine’s third birthday. He didn’t propose to me on bended knee and all that. He just said to me one evening, between one “I’m going for a ride” and another that “It’d be good if we were married for the little one’s sake.” End of story.

  A few weeks later, he asked me if I’d called the town hall to schedule a date. He said exactly that, “schedule a date.” The word “schedule” wasn’t in his vocabulary. That’s how I realized that he was just repeating a sentence that had been said to him. Philippe Toussaint married me at the request of his mother. So I couldn’t have custody of Léonine if we separated. Or take off, from one day to the next, without a trace, as “those girls” do. Yes, in the eyes of Mother Toussaint, I would always be “the other one,” “she,” “that girl.” I’d never have a first name. Just as she would never be Chantal for me.

  For the afternoon of the wedding, we’d got ourselves replaced at the level-crossing for the first time since our arrival at Malgrange-sur-Nancy. We’d taken our time off in turns, but we’d never left our barrier together. It suited Philippe Toussaint, that way we could never go away on holiday. And during my time off, since he didn’t change his habits, I worked.

  The town hall was just three hundred meters from our level-crossing, in the Grand-Rue. We went there on foot: Philippe Toussaint, his parents, Stéphanie—the Casino checkout girl— Léonine, and me. Mother Toussaint was her son’s witness, Stéphanie mine.

  Since Léo’s birth, the Toussaint parents came to see us twice a year. When they parked their big car outside our home, our little place disappeared. Their affluence swallowed up our impoverishment as they reversed in. We weren’t poor, but we weren’t rich either. As a couple, that is. Over the years, I learnt that Philippe Toussaint had lots of money, but it was deposited in a separate account and his mother had power of attorney over it. Of course, we married with a prenuptial agreement. And we didn’t go near a church, much to his father’s dismay. But Philippe Toussaint wouldn’t compromise.

  Mother Toussaint phoned us regularly, usually at the wrong time: when the little one was in her bath, when we were about to eat, when the barrier had to be lowered outside AND Léo was in her bath. She would call several times a day to try to reach her son, who was often out, “going for a ride.” Since I answered most of the time, I would hear her annoyed sigh followed by her voice, snapping like a whip, “Hand me over to Philippe.” No time to waste. Too busy. When she did finally manage to get hold of her son, and the conversation ended by touching on me, Philippe Toussaint would leave the room. I could hear him lowering his voice as if I were an enemy, as if he had to be wary. What could he say about me? I still wonder today what on earth he could say to his mother. How did he see me? Indeed, did he see me? I was the person who fed him, did his work for him, washed things, repainted the walls, brought up his daughter. Did he reinvent Violette Trenet? Did he attribute habits to me? Obsessions? Did he conflate all his mistresses just to speak about one woman, his wife? Did he take a bit of one, a bit of another, a bit of both to piece me together?

  The ceremony was led by the deputy mayor’s deputy, who read three sentences from the Civil Code. When he said the words “that you do promise fidelity and support ’til death you do part,” the 14:07 train drowned out his voice and Léonine cried out, “Mommy, the train!” She couldn’t understand why I wasn’t going out to lower the barrier. Philippe Toussaint replied yes. I replied yes. He leaned toward me to kiss me. The deputy, while slipping his jacket on because he was due elsewhere, said, “I declare you joined together by the bonds of marriage.” Deputies of deputies doubtless do the bare minimum when the bride is not in white. As can be seen in the only photo taken by Stéphanie, and that I have left, of this union, Philippe Toussaint and I looked pretty good.

  We all went for lunch at Gino’s, a pizzeria run by Alsatians who have never set foot in Italy. Léonine blew out her three candles between two fits of giggles. The light shining in her eyes. Her amazed expression when she saw the big birthday cake I’d had made for her. I can still feel, and feel again, that moment, relive it on demand. Léo, and the same curls as her father.

  Léo made me a loving mother. I always had her in my arms. Philippe Toussaint often said to me, “Can’t you let go of that kid a bit?”

  My daughter and I mixed up our wedding and birthday presents, and we opened them at random. It was joyful. Well, I, at any rate, was joyful. I wasn’t in white on my wedding day, but, thanks to Léo’s smile, I wore the most beautiful gown of all, that of my daughter’s childhood.

  Inside our gift-wrapped packages there was a doll, kitchen utensils, modeling clay, a recipe book, crayons, a year’s subscription to France Loisirs, a princess outfit, and a magic wand.

  I borrowed the magic wand from Léo and, with one wave, just one, I said to the little gathering as they tucked into the daily special, “May the fairy Léonine bless this marriage.” No one heard me, except Léo, who burst out laughing and, reaching out for her magic wand, said, “My turn, my turn, my turn!”

  30.

  Along this river where you loved to dream,

  the silvery fish slipped by so lightly,

  keep our memories, which can never die.

  There’s quite a crowd at my place this morning. Nono is telling his stories to Father Cédric and the three apostles. It’s very rare for the Lucchini brothers to be together. One of them is always busy at the funeral parlor, but for the past ten days, no one’s been dying.

  My Way is sleeping c
urled up on Elvis’s lap, and he, as usual, is looking out of the window and singing to himself.

  Nono is making everyone laugh:

  “And when pumping the water, sometimes we’d open graves or a vault, and they’d be full of water, and I mean to the brim. We’d put a hose inside to drain them, and I mean a hose like that!”

  Nono gesticulates to demonstrate the diameter of the hose.

  “When you switched the pump on, you had to hold on to it, that hose! Well, that Gaston, he’d left the hose on the avenue . . . just like that, down with the daisies . . . the hose swelled, and swelled, and then, BANG, water everywhere! And when that water had burst out like cannon fire, Gaston and Elvis, they’d drenched a posh lady! Straight in the chignon! Everything flying in all directions! The woman, her glasses, her chignon, and her crocodile handbag! Should have seen the state of her! First time in three years she was visiting her late husband, well, we never saw her again!”

  Elvis turns around and sings: With the rain in my shoes, rain in my shoes, searchin’ for you.

  Pierre Lucchini joins in:

  “I remember it! I was there! Good god, how I laughed! She was the wife of a foreman! The uptight sort who laughs as they burn. Stiff as a poker. While he was alive, her husband called her Mary Poppins because he dreamt she’d disappear and she never did, she was always breathing down his neck.”

  “But still, no one funeral is ever like another funeral,” Nono continues.