Authors: Anna Gavalda
Yes.
Precisely.
He was suffering from all of those things.
But in no one place.
He’d scrunched it up into a ball, given some slices of cold roast to his flatmate, lowered the lamp and raised the table. His was a Cartesian mind that needed proof in order to keep going. And this proof convinced him. And calmed him.
Why should things have changed, twenty years on?
It was that phantom that he loved, and you know what? Phantoms never die.
So he went through the events enumerated above, but without suffering any worse than that. He lost weight? Actually rather a good thing. He was working harder? No one would notice the difference. He’d started smoking again? He’d stop, all in due course. He bumped into passers-by? He was excused. Laurence was losing it? Her turn now. Mathilde would rather watch a brainless soap? Too bad for her.
Nothing serious. Just a bad blow to the stump. It would pass.
Perhaps it would, indeed.
Perhaps he would have gone on living like that, but taking things more lightly. Perhaps he would have done away with the commas, and taken the trouble to start a new paragraph more often.
Yes, perhaps he would have started up again with his rubbish about breathing and fresh air . . .
But he’d eventually given in.
To her entreaties, to her gentle blackmail, to her voice, made to sound quavering as she twisted the phone line.
All right, he sighed, all right.
And he went once again to dine with his elderly parents.
He paid no attention to the cluttered console and mirror in the entrance, he hung up his raincoat with his back turned, then joined them in the kitchen.
They were models of propriety, all three of them, chewing slowly on each bite, and they were careful to avoid the subject that had
brought
them together. During the coffee, however, and with an air of oh-I-know-it’s-really-foolish-but-I-was-about-to-forget, Mado gave in and turned to her son, looking somewhere well beyond his shoulder:
‘Oh, by the way, I heard that Anouk Le Men is buried near Drancy.’
He managed to strike the right note: ‘Oh, really? I thought she was in Finistère . . . How did you find out?’
‘Through the daughter of her former landlady.’
Then he gave up.
‘Well, then, you finally got round to chopping down the old cherry tree?’
‘Yes, we were obliged to . . . Because of the neighbours, you know . . . Guess how much it cost us?’
Saved.
Or at least that is what he thought, but just as he was getting to his feet, she put her hand on his knee and said, ‘Wait.’
She leaned over the coffee table and handed him a large brown envelope.
‘I was tidying up the other day, and I came across some photos which might amuse you . . .’
Charles stiffened.
‘It all went by so quickly,’ she murmured, ‘look at this one. How sweet you look, the pair of you . . .’
They were holding each other by the shoulder, Alexis and him. Two beaming Popeyes, smoking a pipe and inflating their tiny biceps.
‘Do you remember? There was that odd chap who used to dress you up all the time . . .’
No. He wasn’t in the mood for remembering.
‘Right,’ he interrupted, ‘I’ve got to get going now.’
‘You should keep these.’
‘No, thanks. What am I supposed to do with them?’
He was looking for his keys when Henri came up to him.
‘Have mercy,’ he joked, ‘don’t tell me she’s wrapped up the apple pie!’
Charles looked at the envelope trembling beneath his father’s thumb, let his gaze wander over the ribbing on his waistcoat, the worn buttons, his white shirt, the impeccable tie he had knotted
every
God-given morning for over sixty years, his stiff collar, his transparent skin, the furrows of white hairs that the blade had missed, and finally, his gaze.
The gaze of a discreet man who had spent his entire life with a bossy woman, but who hadn’t given in to her on everything.
No. Not everything.
‘Take them.’
He obeyed.
As long as his father went on standing there motionless he couldn’t open the car door.
‘Papa, please . . .’
His father said nothing.
‘Hey! You need to move, now.’
They stared at one another.
‘Are you all right?’
The old gentleman, who hadn’t heard him, stepped to one side with a confession: ‘For me, it wasn’t as –’
A lorry went by.
As long as the road allowed it, Charles watched his father’s figure growing smaller as the horizon receded.
What was it that he had muttered?
We shall never know. As for his son, he had a hunch, but he lost it at the following traffic light in the pages of his guide to the suburbs.
Drancy.
They were hooting their horns at him. He stalled.
10
HIS PLANE FOR
Canada was at seven in the evening, and she was a few kilometres from the airport. He left the agency at lunchtime.
‘With his heart slung over his shoulder’: a lovely expression from a French pop song.
So he left with his heart slung over his shoulder.
Nothing in his stomach, filled with emotion, as nervous as if he were on a first date.
Ridiculous.
And not quite exact. He wasn’t on his way to a dance, but to a cemetery, and it wasn’t so much slung over his shoulder as wrapped up in a sling, that crippled little muscle of his.
It was beating, true, but any old way. It was pounding as if she were alive, as if she were looking out for him among the yew trees, and would tick him off, to start with. Ah, at last! You certainly took your time! And what are these horrible flowers you’ve brought me? Here, put them over there and let’s get out of here. And what were you thinking, telling me to meet you in a boneyard? Did you fall on your head, or what?
Yet again, she was exaggerating . . . He glanced quickly at the bouquet. They were fine, those flowers . . .
His heart in a straitjacket – that, yes.
Hey, Charles . . .
I know, I know. But leave me alone.
A few more kilometres, my last cigarette, Mr Executioner . . .
*
It was in the outskirts, a little provincial cemetery. No yew trees, but wrought iron gates, the Holy Ghost on the windows of the tombs, and ivy on the walls. A cemetery with a verger, a rusty tap,
and
zinc watering cans. It didn’t take long to walk around it. The newest arrivals, that is, the ones with the ugliest tombs, dated from the 1980s.
He shared his puzzlement with a little woman who was polishing up her dearly departed.
‘You must be confusing it with the cemetery in Les Mévreuses . . . It’s over there that they bury people nowadays. We’ve got a family plot here . . . And even so, we had to fight, you know, because the –’
‘But . . . Is it far?’
‘Do you have a car?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then the best thing is to take the national road as far as the big DIY and . . . Do you know where it is?’
‘No,’ said Charles hesitantly; he was beginning to find his bouquet rather awkward. ‘But, uh, go on, I’ll find it . . .’ ‘
Otherwise you can get there from Leclerc shopping centre . . .’
‘Oh?’
‘Yes, you pass that, then under the railway lines, and after the waste dump, it’s on the right.’
What sort of cock-up was this?
He thanked her, and went off lost in thought.
No sooner had he unbuckled his seatbelt than he fell to pieces.
It was exactly as she had described it: after the DIY and the Leclerc shopping centre, there it was: a dog pound for stiffs, right up next to the Regional Motorway Maintenance offices. With the RER suburban train directly overhead, and the cargo jumbos playing softly in the background.
Recycling bins in the car park, plastic bags clinging to the bushes, and walls made of concrete slabs that served as pissoirs for all the local taggers.
No. He shook his head. No.
And yet he wasn’t the squeamish sort. It was his job to notice when developers fucked up, but this, no.
His mother must have made a mistake. Or that other woman mixed things up. The landlady’s daughter – what were they talking about? And that landlady had fucked about with Anouk’s mind too, she was a right one. It wasn’t hard to make an impression on a young woman who was raising her son on her own, who came
home
knackered just when the bitch was taking her ratters for a shit on the square . . . Yes, that was it, it was all coming back to him. Madame Fourdel. Anouk’s heart was in her boots whenever she saw her, one of the few people on the planet who could make her feel that way . . . The rent. The rent for old Mrs Fourdel.
The absurdity of this car park must be the last dirty trick on the part of that usurer. A mean trick, a gossipy mistake, an address remembered the wrong way round. Anouk had nothing to do with this place.
Charles kept his hand squeezed tight round the keys, and the keys were in the ignition.
Right. One quick look round.
He left the flowers behind.
Poor dead people . . .
The sheer weight of so much bad taste . . .
Marble lids which shone like kitchen Formica; plastic flowers; open books made of craftily cracked porcelain; hideous photos in yellowed Plexiglas; footballs; three aces; sculptures of lively looking pike; pathetic epitaphs; words dripping with lame regret. All of it carved there, for all eternity.
A gilt German shepherd.
Sleep, Master, I lie watching by your side
.
It was probably not as bad as all that, or at least there might have been a touch more tenderness, but our Charles had decided to despise them all.
On Earth as it is in Heaven.
A typically French cemetery, laid out in a grid like an American town. Numbered rows, graves all lined up tight together, sign-posting for the soul in B23 and eternal rest for H175, aligned chronologically, the really cold ones towards the front, the more lukewarm ones towards the rear, the gravel neatly raked, a sign warning about recycling rubbish and another one about some crap manufactured in China and endlessly, ceaselessly, the infernal racket overhead, those bloody trains thundering right through their sleep.
This time it was the architect who was protesting. Surely there were terms and conditions to be respected where the dead were concerned, too? At least a bare minimum? Just a little bit of peace, excuse me – you mean it isn’t included?
Why should it be . . . They’d been taken for a ride when they were alive, crammed into those wretched prefabs that had cost them three times what they were worth and left them in debt for twenty years – so why should anything change now that they’d snuffed it? And how much had they paid to have a view of the waste dump, until kingdom come?
Oh . . . that’s their problem after all. But what about his belle dame? If he found her in this tip, he –
Go on. Finish your sentence. What would you do, you wanker? Start scratching at her grave to get her out of there? Dust off her skirt, take her in your arms?
What’s the use. He can’t hear us anyway. There’s a freight train going by, lifting the carrier bags, depositing them a little farther along.
*
It wasn’t the Fiat any more, nor was it Han Solo’s Millennium Falcon, not yet, so it must have been during the glorious years of her little red Peugeot, her first
brand new
car, and the action takes place about the time they were ten years old. Or maybe eleven. Were they already in secondary school? He can’t remember. Anouk didn’t look her usual self. She was all dressed up, and she wasn’t laughing. She was chain-smoking, and she forgot to turn off the windscreen wipers, she didn’t get their silly Toto jokes at all, and she told them every five minutes that they had to be a credit to her.
The boys replied yes, yes, but they didn’t really understand what she meant by that, being a credit to her, and since Toto had drunk all the beer, he went wee wee in his dad’s glass, and . . .
She was taking them to see her family, to her parents’ place, and she hadn’t seen them for years; Charles was along for the ride. And for Alexis’s sake, probably. To protect him from whatever was already making her so nervous, and because she felt stronger when she could hear them snorting with laughter about Willies, Sausages and Co. in the rear.
‘When we get to Granny’s you leave off all the Toto business, all right?’
‘Yeah, yeah . . .’
It was in the cheap housing district on the outskirts of Rennes.
That
much Charles recalled quite clearly. She was trying to find the way, driving slowly, cursing, complaining that she didn’t recognize a thing, and Charles, as in Russia thirty-five years later, could not take his eyes off the row upon row of brand new blocks of flats that were already so unspeakably dreary . . .
There were no trees, no shops, no sky, the windows were tiny and the balconies full of junk. He didn’t dare say anything but he was somewhat disappointed that part of her came from here. He had always thought she’d arrived on their street from the sea . . . on a scallop shell . . . Like in the painting of Spring that Edith was so fond of.
She’d brought heaps of presents, and she’d forced them to tuck their shirt-tails into their trousers. She’d even combed their hair, out in the car park, and it was at that point that they understood that being a credit to her meant not behaving the way they normally did. So they didn’t squabble to see who would get to press the button on the lift and they watched her growing paler and paler as they rose towards the top floor.
Even her voice had changed . . . And when she handed her the presents, her mother put them away in the next room.
Alexis asked about it on the way home: ‘Why didn’t they open the presents?’
She took a while to answer.
‘I don’t know. Perhaps they’re keeping them for Christmas.’
The rest is vague. Charles recalls that there was far too much to eat and that he had a stomach ache. There was an odd smell. They talked too loudly. The television was on all the time. Anouk gave some money to her younger sister, who was pregnant, and to her brothers, and some medicine to her father. And no one had thanked her.