Before, Gran had the suicide sickness. She would seem fine for a month or so, and then, suddenly, she would swallow three packs of tablets, or stick her head in the oven, or throw herself from the second floor, or try to hang herself in the junk room. She would say, “Good night, my dears,” to us, and two hours later, from our room, Jules and I would hear the ambulance or fire engine come screeching up to the house.
Her suicide attempts would take place during the night, as if she waited for everyone to be asleep to end it all. Forgetting, no doubt, that Gramps loses sleep as often as he loses his glasses.
The last attempt was seven years ago. She had managed to get a prescription for two packs of tranquilizers from a replacement doctor, who hadn’t read the note, despite it being written in red felt-tip, on Gran’s medical file: “Chronic depression, prone to suicide attempts.” At all the region’s pharmacies, everyone knows not to give Gran the drugs on her prescription if Gramps isn’t with her.
Old Prost also knows not to sell her rat poison, caustic drain cleaner, or any other corrosive products. Gran cleans the entire house with white vinegar, not for ecological reasons, but because everyone’s terrified she’ll end up swallowing the liquid dish soap or the oven cleaner.
The last time, she very nearly did die. But when she saw Jules’s tears (I was too shocked to cry), she promised never to do it again. All the same, there are no bottles of surgical spirit or razor blades in our bathroom cabinet.
She did see a psychiatrist a few times. But since the nearest one’s office is fifty kilometers from Milly, and you have to wait months for an appointment, she says it’ll be easier to consult one in heaven, when she’s dead, and in the meantime, she swears, truly, she won’t do it again. “It’s a promise, my dears, I swear to you, I’ll die a natural death, if such a thing exists.” She never promises a thing to Gramps, but always to us, her grandchildren.
In the tenth year after my parents’ death, she jumped from a bit higher than usual and crushed her hip bone. Which left her with a slight limp and a walking stick forever hooked on her hand.
I’ve just set her hair. Jules is beside us in the kitchen, polishing off a jar of Nutella, spread on baguette. Gramps, seated at the end of the table, is flicking through Paris Match magazine. In the dining room, the TV is screaming at the empty sofa, screaming things we no longer even hear.
“Gramps, did you know Hélène Hel?” I ask.
“Who?”
“Hélène Hel. The lady who ran old Louis’s café, until 1978.”
My sad and taciturn granddad closes his magazine, clicks his tongue, and utters these few words, rolling his “r”s the way folk around here do:
“I’ve neverr frrequented bistrros.”
“You still had to go past it every day to reach the factory.”
Gramps grumbles. Whereas Gran has waited, since the twins’ death, to see her sons again in Jules’s face and mine, while occasionally trying to do herself in, Gramps has stopped waiting for anything at all since the day they died. I’ve never seen him smile, and yet, on the childhood photos of my father and Uncle Alain, he wears colorful tops and often seems to be larking around. He may not have much left now, but he had a fine head of hair when the three of them climbed Milly’s big hill, one Sunday in July. At the back of my favorite photo it says “July 1974.” My granddad is thirty-nine years old. He has thick, dark hair, and is wearing a red T-shirt and an ad-worthy smile. When my granddad was a dad, he was very handsome. All that remains of his youth is his height: 1.93 meters. He’s so tall, he looks like a diving board.
He’s turning the pages of Paris Match again. What on earth can he make of the stories inside it? And more to the point, what on earth can he care? He who’s so distant from the world, from us, from himself. Could he tell the difference between an earthquake in China and one in his kitchen?
“I rememberr her dog. Looked like a wolf.”
Louve . . . Gramps remembers Louve.
“You remember Louve! Well then, you must remember Hélène!”
He stands up and leaves the kitchen. He hates me asking him questions. He hates his memory. His memory is his children, he hurled it into their coffins the day he buried them.
I’d like to ask him if he remembers a seagull that lived in the village when he was small. But I already know he’d say to me: “A seagull? How could I rememberr a seagull . . . Ain’t none arround here.”