Adieux
Christmas Eve, 2016
A bus steering through frost-glued villages still sleeping: folded shutters like closed eyelids. Cows in the fog, hotels without guests, a statue at the train station gagged by fairy lights. And just like our place, made up of gray stone and emptiness, I suddenly find this haunted topography strangely poetic. And I remember: How it smells in our house when you open the door, the tools and the odor of glue in Pépé’s workshop, the shuffling of slippers and the slurping afterwards, when they noisily suck in the soup through their pointed lips. The shuffling has stopped now, forever.
During the ceremony I acted as expected, actually, I’d been worried beforehand that I would be taken for a cold-hearted stranger again because I cannot cry in front of others and because I have failed so often already at being human; but the church proved to be my coup de grâce. The stone walls, the priest, the Ave Maria. The coffin. Papa’s voice over the speakers. I was crying and it felt so easy to cry about it. Even if I didn’t cry so much for the person under the wooden lid, which sounds harsh; I wept for everything this life is and all that it’s not, and above all I wept for Pépé, for whom my heart broke over and over. For Pépé, who silently and patiently let the whole day pass by him with his hands in his coat pockets, his fine white hair neatly combed. For the person they are all talking and worrying about, he who is now alone with his garden and the potatoes, who in the world will be able to eat all those potatoes, but who they simply ignore at the table, like a child. And I’m ignoring with because I don’t know what else to say. In this family you can only do that afterwards. When it’s too late.
If you scream, you still care.
In the cemetery, up on the hill with a view of all the roofs and the mountains behind, we were baptized in the quiet sun. When you turned your face to the light, away from the pit from which they had already dug the earth, it felt unusually warm for the end of December, and for a funeral. An almost unsuitable temperature for an eternal winter. We were unsure where to step, suddenly the whole thing was no longer choreographed, the petals, the roses in plastic. No directed exit while black shadows with shovels went on to fill up the hole; Mama turned away. I walked off and studied the inscriptions on the other graves. And thought of all the corpses in my biography, things like that don’t just stop because they have to.
Once, in church, I thought of you and our lonely bodies searching for each other in the dark. I thought of shame without sin. Of laced skin waiting, and others left cold. I thought of all the coming and going in this world that goes unnoticed.
When, a few days later, the train arrives in Paris, I am purified.
Photo credits: Lomig (unsplash) with Unsplash license
