Ernest Blot
My ashes. I don’t know what should become of them. Should they be shut up somewhere, or scattered? I ask myself this question while sitting in the kitchen in my bathrobe, my eyes fixed on the laptop computer. Jeannette comes and goes, like a woman glad to spread herself out on a holiday. She opens cupboards, turns on machines, rattles the cutlery. I’m trying to read the electronic version of a newspaper. I say, Jeannette, please! My wife replies, nobody forces you to occupy the kitchen the moment I start to make breakfast. A rumble of bad weather comes to us through the window. I feel worn out and stooped, I’m squinting in spite of my glasses. I gaze at my hand as it wanders the tabletop, clutching the tool called a mouse, part of my body’s struggle with a world to which it no longer belongs. The other day my grandson Simon said, old folks are people from the past stuck in the future. That kid’s a genius. The rain starts to beat against the windows and images come to me, images of the sea, of the shore, of ashes. My father was cremated and the remains placed in an ugly, square metal box. It was painted a shade of brown, the same color as the classroom walls in the Lycée Henri-Avril in Lamballe. My sister Marguerite, our two cousins, and I scattered the ashes from a bridge in Guernonzé. He wanted to be in the Braive. A hundred meters from the house where he was born. At six in the evening. In the middle of the town. I was sixty-four years old, a few months after my quintuple bypass. There’s no spot that bears my father’s name. Marguerite can’t get used to the idea that he’s not localized. When I go there — once a year, it’s far away — sometimes I snatch a flower from somewhere nearby or sometimes I buy one, and in any case I toss it furtively. The flower floats away on the water. And I feel, for ten minutes, a sense of fulfillment. My father was afraid of being shut up like his brother. A brother who was the opposite of himself. A big-time gambler. A kind of Great Gatsby. When he went into a restaurant, the staff would grovel before him. He was cremated too. His last wife wanted to put him with her family, in the pharaonic tomb they have. An underling from the funeral home cracked open the engraved bronze door, set the urn on the first of the twelve marble shelves, and then closed the door again. As we were driving back from the cemetery, my father said, all your life you brag about your free access to high places, and then in the end they slip you inside through a crack in the door and plop you down at random. Me too, I’d like to merge with a flowing stream. But ever since I sold Plou-Gouzan L’Ic, I no longer have a river. And as for the river of my childhood, it’s not very pleasant anymore. It used to be wild and unspoiled, grass grew between its rocks, a wall of honeysuckle ran its whole length. Now its banks have been paved over, and next to it there’s a parking lot. In the sea, then. But it’s too vast (and I’m afraid of sharks). I say to Jeannette, I’d like you to throw my ashes into a stream or a river, but I haven’t chosen one yet. Jeannette stops the toaster. She wipes her hands on the dishcloth that’s lying within reach and sits down in front of me. — Your ashes? Ernest, you want to be cremated? Too much consternation in her face. Too much pathos. I laugh, baring all my mean teeth, and say yes. — And you say it just like that, like you’re talking about the weather? — It’s not a significant topic of conversation. She remains silent. She smoothes the tablecloth and says, you know I’m against it. — I know, but I don’t want to be stacked up in a vault, Jeannette. — You aren’t bound to do everything just like your father, you’re seventy-three. — That’s the right age to act like one’s father. I put my glasses back on. I say, would you be so kind as to let me read? You stick a dagger in me and then you go back to your newspaper, she answers. I’d be happy to see a newspaper appear on my screen, but I’m missing a password or some kind of identifier or something, how should I know? Our daughter Odile’s taken it into her head to retrain me. She’s afraid my brain will crumble away and I’ll become isolated. When I was in business, nobody suggested I fall into step with modernity. Sinuous bodies flutter across the screen. They remind me of the flies that used to float before my eyes when I was a child. I talked about them to a little girl I knew. I asked her if they were angels. Yes, she said, they were. I felt a certain pride in them. I don’t believe in anything. Certainly not in any kind of religious nonsense. But in angels, just a little. In the constellations. In my role, however minute, in the book of causes and effects. It’s not forbidden to imagine that you’re part of a whole. I don’t know what Jeannette’s doing, fooling around with that dishcloth instead of finishing the toast. She’s twisting the corners of the cloth and wrapping them around her index finger. This distracts my attention completely. I can’t have a serious discussion with my wife. Making myself understood is impossible. Particularly within the marital framework, where everything turns into a criminal case. Jeannette abruptly snaps the cloth off her finger and says lugubriously, you don’t want to be with me. With you where? I ask. — With me in general. — But I do, Jeannette, I want to be with you. — No you don’t. — Everyone’s alone in death. And stop with that dishcloth, what are you doing? — I’ve always thought it was sad that your parents aren’t buried together. Your sister thinks so too. Papa’s very happy in the Braive, I say. And your mother is sad, says Jeannette. — My mother’s sad! Once again I show my mean teeth. All she had to do was follow his example instead of having her parents’ bones put into ossuaries to make room for her in the family tomb. Who made her do that? — You’re monstrous, Ernest. — That’s nothing new, I say. Jeannette would like us to be buried together so that passersby could see our two names. Jeannette Blot and her devoted husband, securely stashed away in stone. She’d like to erase forever the humiliations of our married life. In the past, when I’d stayed out all night, she’d rumple my pajamas before the housemaid arrived. My wife is counting on the grave to outfox spiteful gossips, she wants to remain a petit bourgeois even in death. The rain drums on the tiles. When I’d return from Bréhau-Monge to Lamballe, where my boarding school was, the evening breeze would be blowing. If raindrops streaked a windowpane, I’d press my nose against it. Renan says somewhere, “When the bell rings at five in the afternoon …” What book is that in? I’d like to read it again. Jeannette has stopped manipulating the dishcloth. She’s gazing vacantly into space, into the gray weather. When she was young, she had a kind of impudent look about her. She resembled the actress Suzy Delair. Time changes everything, including the soul of a face. I say, don’t I even get a cup of coffee? She shrugs her shoulders. In the old days, I never paid any attention to this dizzying loop of day and night, I wouldn’t even know whether it was morning or afternoon or anything else. I’d go to the ministry, I’d go to the bank, I’d chase after women, I’d never worry about eventual consequences. I’ve still got enough joy left in me to do a little chasing, but after a certain age, the preliminaries are wearying. Jeannette says, you can also choose to be cremated without having your ashes scattered. I don’t even react. I turn back to my false cybernetic activity. I’m not opposed to learning something new, but to what end? To stimulate my brain cells, my daughter says. Is that likely to change my worldview? There’s already enough pollen and crap in the air without adding corpse dust, it’s not worth the trouble, Jeannette says. I say, I’ll ask someone else to do it — Odile, or Robert. Or Jean, but I’m afraid he’s going to pass on before I do, that idiot. He wasn’t looking very good last Tuesday. Throw me in the Braive. I’ll rejoin my father. Just take care not to inflict any kind of ceremony on me, no funeral service or other foolishness, no tiresome blessed words. For all you know, I’ll die before you, Jeannette says. — No you won’t, you’re robust. — If I die before you, Ernest, I want there to be a service with a blessing, and I want you to tell the story of how you proposed to me in Roquebrune. Poor Jeannette. In a distant time that’s nothing more than a subject of confusion now, I asked her for her hand through the judas window of a medieval dungeon I’d shut her up in. If she only knew how utterly Roquebrune has lost all meaning for me. How that past has dissolved and turned into vapor. Two people living side by side, and every day their imaginations separate them more and more conclusively. Deep down inside themselves, women build enchanted palaces. You’re mummified somewhere in there, but you don’t know it. No licentiousness, no lack of scruples, no act of cruelty is considered real. The moment of eternal farewell arrives, and a story about two youngsters must be told. Everything is misunderstanding, and torpor. — Don’t count on it, Jeannette. Happily, I’ll disappear before you do. And you’ll attend my cremation. And don’t worry, that sort of thing doesn’t smell like roasting pork the way it used to in bygone days. Jeannette pushes back her chair and stands up. She throws the dishcloth on the table. She turns off the gas stove — the water for my eggs has almost boiled off anyway — and unplugs the toaster. As she leaves the room, firing a parting shot, she says, good thing your father didn’t choose to have himself chopped up in pieces, otherwise you’d want to be chopped up in pieces too. I think she turns off the ceiling light while she’s speaking. There’s hardly any light coming in from outside, and so I remain in darkness, good riddance to me. I take the pack of Gauloises out of my pocket. I promised Doctor Ayoun I’d stop smoking. Just as I promised him I’d eat salads and broiled steaks. A nice guy, that Ayoun. A single cigarette won’t kill me. My eyes fall on the shrimp net with the wooden frame that’s been hanging on the wall for decades. Fifty years ago, somebody used to plunge it under layers of seaweed and thrust it into rifts. In the old days, Jeannette would put bouquets of thyme, laurel, all sorts of herbs in that net. Objects pile up, items no longer of any use. And neither are we. I listen to the rain, which has dropped down a tone. The wind too. I lower the lid and close the laptop. All that our eyes can see is already in the past. I’m not sad. Things are made to disappear. I’ll vanish without a fuss. There will be no coffin and no bones. Everything will go on as it has always done. Everything will float blithely away on the water.