In room 19, the new resident is called Yvan Géant. He’s eighty-two years old. He bust his hip. He’s a man with kind eyes, adored by all the nursing staff. From time to time, he silently wipes away a tear with the back of his hand. He can’t bear living here. He often says to me, Justine, I never would have imagined that I’d end my life in such a place.
To take his mind off things, and mine, I get him to talk. As soon as he starts to tell stories, his face changes. It made me feel like carrying on with my writing. And yet Monsieur Géant doesn’t have a grandson with blue eyes.
I went to old Prost’s store to buy a new notebook.
I jot down what Monsieur Géant tells me in my new notebook. Sometimes, I read it back to him. It makes him laugh. He tells me that it’s as if he were listening to someone else’s story, that my words are finer than his life. Since I’m always being told that when an old person dies a library burns to the ground, I’m saving a little of the ashes.
When I’ve finished my day’s work, Monsieur Géant talks to me, and I write:
The first time I went to spend a month at my Aunt Aline’s and Uncle Gabriel’s house, I was six years old. It was wintertime. I’d broken my arm, and my parents, who worked all day at the tannery, didn’t want to leave me alone at home. Aline and Gabriel had a rather isolated farm in the Vosges mountains, above Le Thillot.
I used to sleep with my aunt, and my uncle slept above us, in another room. It was so cold at night that we’d sleep wearing balaclavas. I loved that chill all around us. I fell in love with my aunt and with the life over there. I kept returning to their house until I was fifteen, during my summer vacation, all my summer vacations, and every Sunday.
Aline was like my second mother. She’d never had children, and I don’t know why. At home, there were four of us, and my parents didn’t have time to look after us. At my aunt’s, I became an only son.
My Uncle Gabriel had a son from a first marriage called Adrien, but he was twenty years older than me. Probably the same age as my Aunt Aline, but at the time, I didn’t realize that. When you’re small, all grown-ups are old folk.
Over there, I spent my life in the mountains. I never worked for my uncle and aunt. All they asked of me was to load the hay into the loft at the end of summer. We’d take two large sheets, knot the four corners, throw the hay inside. It smelt good.
Aline, she was an angel. What remains to me of her is an aroma, that of the fir-tree branches I used to burn in the stove. All my life, I’ve thanked God for the day I broke my arm.