Fresh Water for Flowers

by Valérie Perrin

  “What wife?”

  “Yours.”

  “You must be confusing her with someone else.”

  “Don’t think so. She said to me, ‘I’m the mother of Léonine Toussaint.’”

  “What did she look like?”

  “It was dark, I don’t really remember anymore. She was waiting for me outside the restaurant, on a bench. You didn’t know?”

  “When was this?”

  “About two years ago.”

  Philippe had heard enough. Or said enough. He was there to ask questions, not be asked any. He had got up, grunting goodbye, and Letellier had watched him leave without understanding. As he had turned, Philippe had thought he had seen Violette on the sidewalk, behind the window. I’m going nuts. He had driven straight home to Brancion.

  For the first time, he had found the cemetery house empty. For the first time, he had gone all round the avenues to find her, but in vain.

  Who was Violette, really? What did she do when he went off for entire days? Whom did she see? What was she after?

  Violette had come home two hours after him. She was very pale as she came through the door. She had stared at him for a few seconds, as though surprised to discover a stranger in her kitchen. And then she had handed him a piece of paper: “Léonine was asphyxiated?”

  On the washed-out paper he had recognized his handwriting, the names scribbled on the back of a tablecloth had almost disappeared. The ink had run so much, they were virtually illegible.

  Violette’s question had hit him like an electric shock. He had tried to think of a lie but couldn’t, had spluttered, as if Violette had just caught him in the arms of one of his mistresses:

  “I don’t know, perhaps, I’m looking . . . I’m not sure I know . . . I want . . . I’m a bit lost.”

  She had gone up to him and stroked his face with infinite tenderness. And then she had gone up to bed without a word. Hadn’t laid the table or prepared supper. When he had stretched out beside her, she had taken his hand and asked the same question, “Léonine was asphyxiated?” If he said nothing, she would just keep asking the same question.

  So, Philippe had told her everything. Everything, apart from his relationship with Geneviève Magnan. He had told her of his conversations with Alain Fontanel, that first time when he had beaten him up in the cafeteria of the hospital he worked at; with Lucie Lindon in the doctors’ waiting room; with Edith Croquevieille in Epinal, in the underground of a supermarket; and with Swan Letellier that very day, in a bistro in Mâcon.

  Violette had listened to him in silence, his hand in hers. He had spoken for hours in the darkness of their room, without seeing her face. He had sensed her attentiveness, her hanging on his every word. She hadn’t moved. Hadn’t asked any other question. Philippe had finally asked her the one he was dying to ask:

  “Is it true that you went to see Letellier?”

  She had replied without thinking:

  “Yes. Before, I needed to know.”

  “And now?”

  “Now I have my garden.”

  “Who else did you see?”

  “Geneviève Magnan, once. But you already know that.”

  “Who else?”

  “No one. Just Geneviève Magnan and Swan Letellier.”

  “Do you swear to me?”

  “Yes.”

  87.

  No remorse. No regrets.

  A life fully lived.

  Even today, when I watch Fanny, Marius, or César on the television, I get tears in my eyes as soon as I hear the first lines, even though I know them by heart. They are tears of childhood, joy, and admiration combined. I love the faces of the actors, Raimu, Pierre Fresnay, and Orane Demazis, in black-and-white. I love their every gesture, their looks. The father, the son, the young woman, and the love. I would have liked to have a father who looked at me how César looks at his son, Marius. I would have liked a youthful romance like that of Fanny and Marius.

  The first time I watched Marius, the first part of the trilogy, I must have been about ten years old. I was alone at my foster family’s. If memory serves, the other children had gone off on holiday, or to visit relatives. It was summer, there was no school the following day. My family had friends around, they had set up a barbecue in the garden. They gave me permission to leave the table. When I went into the dining room, I was confronted by the big television, which was on. And that’s when I discovered this story with no colors. The film had started about half an hour before. Fanny was weeping over the checked tablecloth in the kitchen, opposite her mother, who was slicing the bread. The first line I heard was: “Come, now, you ninny, have your soup, and don’t go crying into it, it’s already too salty.”

  I was immediately fascinated by the faces and the dialogues, the humor and the tenderness. Impossible to switch it off. That evening, I went to bed very late because I watched the whole trilogy.

  I still love the simplicity, universal and complex, of their feelings. I love the words they say, so poetic, so apt. That music in their voices.

  I think I loved Marseilles and the Marseillais before even encountering them, like an intuition, an anticipatory dream. That raw beauty, it gets to me every time I return to Sormiou, as I descend the steep little road that leads to the big blue sea. I understand Marcel Pagnol, I understand how the characters in his trilogy would come from there. From those sheer rocks, bleached by the sun, that searing heat, that clear, turquoise water playing hide-and-seek with a spotless sky, those umbrella pines just where nature intended, no fuss. This landscape puts on no airs, it is simple and majestic. It just makes sense. It’s Marius’s yearning to be a sailor. It’s Monsieur Panisse, who “makes sails so the wind carries off other people’s children,” as César says.

  When I open up the red shutters of the chalet with Célia, and I find once again the old cupboard in the kitchen, the bare-wood table with its yellow chairs and the draining board above the sink, the little bunches of dried lavender, the patchwork of tiles, and the sky-blue paneling, I think of César, who stops Marius and Fanny from kissing because she is married to another man: “Children, no, don’t do that, Panisse is a decent man, don’t seek to make him look ridiculous in front of his family’s furniture.”

  It was Célia’s maternal grandfather who built this chalet in 1919. Before he died, he made her promise never to part with it. Because that roof, it was worth all the palaces in the world.

  It’s been twenty-four years now that I’ve been coming here. And every summer, Célia spends the day before my arrival filling up the fridge and putting clean sheets on the beds. She buys coffee and filters, lemons, tomatoes and peaches, ewe’s milk cheese, washing powder, and Cassis wine. I can implore her all I like, assure her that I can do the shopping myself, at least reimburse her, but she won’t hear of it, and repeats to me every time: “You welcomed me into your home when you didn’t even know me.” I tried leaving an envelope of money in a drawer. A week later, Célia returned it to me in the mail.

  Once the shutters are open and my clothes put away, I go to visit the few native fishermen, who live down below, in the Calanque, all year round. They speak to me of the sea, which is increasingly losing fish, just as the locals are their accent. They give me sea urchins, small squid, and sugary desserts made by their wives or mothers.

  Earlier on, Célia had been waiting at the end of the platform. The train arrived an hour late, she smelled of the coffee she had drunk while waiting for me. A year since I’d last seen her. We hugged each other tight.

  She said to me:

  “So, my dear Violette, what’s new?”

  “Philippe Toussaint is dead. And after that, Françoise Pelletier came to see me.”

  “Who?”

  88.

  From where I am, I smile, because my life

  was good and, above all, I loved.

  Philippe Toussaint never ret
urned, and Sasha remained at Madame Bréant’s.

  Before I knew, on the day I opened the blue suitcase full of presents, I told Sasha that the man I shared my life with, without ever having really shared it, was probably better than he’d given the impression of being.

  Before I knew, I told Sasha that the man I thought was just selfish, whom I no longer listened to or looked at, the man who’d given up on me, drowning in the depths of solitude, had appeared to me in a new light when I’d seen him in a Mâcon bistro with Swan Letellier.

  Before I knew, I told Sasha that, on the evening Philippe Toussaint had returned from Mâcon, he’d told me that he was searching for the truth about the sequence of events. That he’d questioned, sometimes persecuted, the château staff. At the trial he’d believed no one. Apart from Eloïse Petit—he hadn’t yet tracked her down.

  My husband had told me all about Alain Fontanel and the others. I had taken hold of his hand for fear of falling, when we were lying side by side in our bed. I had imagined the words and the faces of those who had seen my daughter alive for the last time. Those who hadn’t managed to take care of her, of her smile. Those who had proved to be negligent.

  The little girls left on their own while the supervisor and the cook were upstairs, fornicating and smoking joints. Geneviève Magnan gone, leaving the children unsupervised. The director, the sort that sweeps things under the carpet, fit only for collecting the parents’ checks.

  So as not to be overcome when he’d told me what Fontanel had said, the story about the defective water heater, the asphyxiation, I’d focused on the fragrance of the new washing powder I’d used to wash our sheets the previous day, “tropical breeze.” So as not to howl in our bed, I’d kept thinking of the illustrations on that drum of washing powder, pink and white Tahitian flowers. Those flowers had led me to think of the patterns on Léonine’s dresses. Her dresses were like imaginary flying carpets that I rode when the present became too unbearable. All night, I breathed in the smell of my clean sheets while listening to Philippe Toussaint talking to me for almost the first time.

  Before I knew, I’d stroked his face once again, and we’d made love like when we were young, when his parents would fall on us without warning. Before I knew. Before I knew that he’d slept with Geneviève Magnan when we lived in Malgrange-sur-Nancy, I’d believed him for almost the first time.

  * * *

  Philippe Toussaint never returned and Sasha remained at Madame Bréant’s.

  After he’d been absent for a month, in 1998, I went to the police station to report the disappearance of my husband. I did so on the advice of the mayor. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have bothered. The sergeant who received me made a strange face. Why had I waited so long to report someone missing?

  “Because he often went off.”

  He took me into an office next to the reception to fill in a form and offered me a coffee that I didn’t dare refuse.

  I gave his particulars. The police officer asked me to come back with a photo. We hadn’t taken any since arriving at the cemetery. The most recent was the one taken in Malgrange-sur-Nancy, when he had put his arm around my waist while giving the journalist a nice smile.

  The sergeant asked me to specify the make of his motorbike, the clothes he was wearing the last time I had seen him.

  “Jeans, black leather biker boots, black biker jacket, and a red polo-neck sweater.”

  “Any distinguishing features? Tattoo? Birthmark? Visible moles?”

  “No.”

  “Did he take anything with him, important papers that might suggest a prolonged absence?”

  “His video games and the photos of our daughter are still in the house.”

  “Had his behavior or habits changed in recent weeks?”

  “No.”

  I didn’t tell the police officer that the last time I had seen Philippe Toussaint, he was about to go to Eloïse Petit’s workplace in Valence. He had tracked her down, she was an usher at a movie theater over there. He had phoned her from the house, she had said she would meet him on Thursday the following week, at 2 P.M., outside the theater.

  On that day, Eloïse Petit had called in the afternoon. She must have traced the number Philippe Toussaint had called her from. When I answered, I thought it was the town hall, the death-notice department. It was the time they regularly phoned me to inform me of something, or to ask me details about a funeral past or future, a surname, a first name, a date of birth, a vault, a cemetery location. When Eloïse Petit had introduced herself, her voice was shaky. I hadn’t immediately understood what she was saying. When I had finally grasped who she was, what her call was about, my hands had gone clammy, my throat dry.

  “Was there a problem?”

  “A problem? Mr. Toussaint isn’t here, we had an appointment at 2 P.M., I’ve been waiting for him outside the movie theater for two hours.”

  Anyone else would have imagined there had been an accident, would have called all the hospitals between Mâcon and Valence; anyone else would have said to Eloïse Petit: “Where were you the night Room 1 burnt down? Were you sleeping easy next door?” But I had replied to her that there was nothing to understand, Philippe Toussaint was, and always would be, unpredictable.

  There had been a long silence at the other end of the line, and then Eloïse Petit had hung up.

  I didn’t tell the sergeant that, seven days after Philippe Toussaint’s “flight,” seven days after the appointment with Eloïse Petit he had missed, a young woman had come to pay her respects at the tomb of the children, of my child. And that, distraught, she had found herself, like many other visitors, buying flowers and having a hot drink at my place. When I had seen that young woman behind my door, I had recognized her instantly: Lucie Lindon. In the photo I had kept, she was younger, in color, and smiling. In my kitchen, she was white and had shadows under her eyes.

  I had made her some tea and added more than a drop of eau-de-vie—paradoxical, when I would have liked to pour in rat poison. I made her drink a cup and a little glass of spirits, two little glasses of spirits, then three. And as I was hoping, she had finally poured her heart out.

  I still have the marks from my nails on the palm of my left hand. The marks I made as Lucie Lindon spoke. My lifeline is covered in scars since that day. I remember the dried blood in my palm, my clenched fist so she wouldn’t see, so she would never know.

  Lucie Lindon told me that she was on the staff at the château of Notre-Dame-des-Prés.

  “You know, that holiday camp where everything burned down five years ago, the four children are buried here. Since the tragedy, I can’t sleep anymore, I can still see the flames; since the tragedy, I’m forever cold.”

  She continued to talk. And me, I continued to serve her. With my left fist clenched, my nails digging into my flesh; I was already suffering too much to feel physical pain. After soliloquizing, she finally let out that “poor Geneviève Magnan” had had a relationship with the father of little Léonine Toussaint.

  “A relationship?”

  I had a kind of iron taste in my mouth. A taste of blood. As if I had just drunk steel. But I managed to repeat, “A relationship?”

  Those are the last words I uttered in front of Lucie Lindon. After that I kept quiet. After that she got up to go. She stared at me. With the back of her arm, she wiped away the tears streaming from her eyes, nose, and mouth. She sniffed noisily and I felt like hitting her.

  “Yes, with the father of little Léonine Toussaint. It went on one or two years before the tragedy. When Geneviève worked at a school . . . Near Nancy, I think.”

  I didn’t tell the sergeant that I had screamed my hatred and my pain in Sasha’s arms when I had realized that it was Magnan who had killed four children to get her revenge on him, on us, on our daughter. I didn’t tell him that Philippe Toussaint had questioned the staff from the château where our child had met her death. And that w
as after the trial, because he no longer believed anyone. And for good reason. He must have been seeking, by whatever means, to put himself in the clear. It wasn’t a culprit he was looking for, it was proof of his own innocence.

  Finally, the sergeant asked me if Philippe Toussaint might have had a mistress.

  “Many.”

  “What do you mean, many?”

  “My husband always had many mistresses.”

  There was an awkward moment. The sergeant hesitated before writing on his form that Philippe Toussaint screwed everything that moved. He blushed a little, and poured me another cup of coffee. He would call me if there was any news. Would issue a missing-person’s description. I never saw that man again until the day he buried his mother, Josette Leduc, née Berthomier (1935–2007). He smiled sadly at me when he saw me.

  * * *

  Once I did know that Philippe Toussaint had had a relationship with Geneviève Magnan, I lost Léonine a second time. His parents had taken her from me by accident; their son had snatched her from me intentionally. The accident became murder.

  I ransacked my memory, searched a thousand times through those mornings I took my daughter to school, the late afternoons I went to fetch her, I tried everything to remember that nursery assistant at the back of the classroom, in a corridor, in front of the coatracks, in the playground, under the shelter, one word, one sentence she might have said to me. Even just a “Hello,” or a “Goodbye, see you tomorrow,” “Lovely weather,” “Wrap her up warm so she doesn’t get cold,” “She seems tired today,” “She forgot her activities book, the one with the blue cover.” At the school party, between the songs and the streamers, the exchanges Geneviève Magnan might have had with my husband. Looks, a smile, a gesture. The silent complicity of lovers.

  I searched for when they saw each other, how many times, why she had taken revenge on children, how on earth Philippe Toussaint must have treated her for her to end up doing such a thing. I searched until I was banging my head against a brick wall. But I found nothing. Like an absence of myself.