Odile Toscano
In the last year of her life, your grandmother was a little out of her mind, Marguerite says. She wanted to go into the village and fetch her children. I’d say, Maman, you don’t have little children anymore. Yes I do, yes I do, she’d say, I have to get them and bring them home. We’d go looking for her children in Petit-Quevilly. It was a way for me to get her to walk. And it was funny, going to look for Ernest and me as we’d been sixty years before. We’ve just passed Rennes. Marguerite’s sitting by the window next to Robert. Since this trip began, hers has been practically the only voice anyone has heard. Since our two companions have withdrawn opaquely into themselves, my aunt addresses no one but me, in sporadic bursts, exhuming various episodes from the past lives of the dead. We’re in one of those new, modern train compartments that are open to the aisle. Maman’s sitting next to me and across from Marguerite. She’s wedged the Go Sport bag between us. She didn’t want to put it up on the rack above our heads. Robert’s been sulking ever since he found out we have to change trains at Guingamp. It’s my secretary’s mistake. She got us round-trip tickets, Paris — Guernonzé, but with a change on the way there. By the time Robert noticed, we were already in Gare Montparnasse, and he accused us of always wanting to complicate things when it would have been so much simpler to take the car. He walked ahead of us on the platform, being obnoxious and carrying the black-and-pink-striped Go Sport bag with the cinerary urn inside. I have no clue about the choice of that bag. Neither does Marguerite. She asks me on the sly, why has your mother put Ernest in that thing? They didn’t have something more elegant, like an overnight bag? Outside the window, warehouses go by, along with scattered, dreary industrial zones. Farther on we pass housing developments and then fields of turned earth. I can’t figure out how to adjust the back of my seat. It feels as though it’s projecting me forward. Robert asks me what I’m trying to do. I’m disturbing his reading, a biography of Hannibal. There’s an inscription on the cover, a line from Juvenaclass="underline" “Weigh Hannibal’s ashes: how many pounds will the great general come to?” Maman has closed her eyes. With her hands on her thighs, she lets the train’s movements rock her to sleep. Her skirt’s too high up on her blouse, which she’s tucked in all wrong. It’s been a long time since I really looked at her. A portly, weary lady to whom no one pays any attention. In Cabourg, when I was little, she’d walk along the promenade in a tight-waisted muslin dress. The pale fabric would float in the sea breeze, and she’d swing her canvas tote bag. The train passes Lamballe without stopping. We have time to see the railroad parking lot, the doctor’s red house! (Marguerite says to us almost yelling), the buildings of the train station, the fortified church. All the shapes are blurred by the treacherous fog. I think about Papa, ground up and inside a gym bag, passing though his childhood town for the last time. I feel like seeing Rémi. I feel like having some fun. What if I experimented with nipple clamps like Paola? Poor Paola. Luc drags her around here and there — I wonder if Robert knows that? If I were a generous friend, I’d introduce her to Rémi Grobe. They’d like each other. But I want to keep Rémi for myself. Rémi saves me from Robert, from time, from all kinds of melancholy. Last night Robert and I stayed awake in the dark for a long while without speaking. At one point I said, so what’s Lionel for Jacob now? I felt Robert considering the question, and I could tell he didn’t know the answer. The train stops in Saint-Brieuc. A long ribbon of white houses, all the same. A freight car from the cooperative