I stayed a little too long in front of the house. I was facing the fences that demarcated a construction site, a vast new beginning erasing what, for so many years, had contained something like childhoods, our childhoods. On the way to her, I had already crossed the Villeneuve primary school with the stories of my mother lying around in the yard, the church where my parents were married, the butcher, the baker, where I went with my grandmother who, over the years, always clung a little more to my arm.
“She’s my granddaughter, she lives in Quebec!” »
This is how she put up with it all: clinging to my arm, being proud in front of others, but always a little hard on us and swallowing back her tears on the train platforms at the end of the summer. .
I had fancied ringing the bell once I arrived at the house on rue Rabelais, to go in a bit, to pretend to push my big suitcase to the bottom of the large spiral staircase, to smell the smell from the side of the studio of my grandfather, maybe even dare to ogle to the garden, to see if the lettuces still grow there as well, to hear it in me: “It’s good, huh, my lettuce, you can’t grow that in autumn home, huh? »
Yes, I told myself that I was going to dare to disturb the new owners, just to say goodbye, as it should be, because in truth, I had not had time to say goodbye to anything, nor to my grandparents or at home.
“Thank you, I’m sorry, I won’t be staying long, it’s the memories, you understand, thank you, take care of her, it’s a house with a whole explosion of love in it.” »
But no, nobody lived there. Someone invisible, however, was working there to demolish: facade, windows, garden. There will be no salad this year. In the truck parked further away, I hadn’t seen him, while he was eating his ham and butter during his lunch break. ” Mrs ? “Oh, excuse me, that was my grandparents’ house.” Big smile: “Oh, you’re not from here!” »
And yet, if you knew, sir, how much, at this precise moment, yes, I am so from here. Obviously, I don’t blame him, he doesn’t know that I can reconstruct in myself, with fine precision, the totality of the environment he has just destroyed.
The summers spent in Rennes, then in the village of Pipriac and on the sea at Pornic, deposited sediments in me which, on returning to the scene, stir, reveal themselves. It’s my madeleine de Proust, my choir, my novel-river and my opera which are sung in front of a garage door open on a gap. The characters are dead, but everything about me keeps them so alive.
I had sworn to myself not to cry. The station platforms with no one waiting for us, the houses that are no longer ours, I had come to terms with the idea. The dike held, following my hasty steps towards the apartment. Then, just in front of the church, there was this chance which is perhaps not quite one. The bells rang, the hearse moved forward, a crowd came out to accompany a deceased to his final rest.
A typical Breton sun came out of the clouds, this kind of sun which, especially in December, has this unique ability to bring you back to life so much it warms you up. Sitting on the bench, in front of this borrowed funeral, I interpreted the whole thing as a delicate wink from those who had marked me so much, loved me so much, brought me up so much: my two maternal grandparents.
Like the jasmine escaping from Satrapi’s grandmother’s bodice in Persepolisthe subtle scent mixed with rose and my grandmother’s Mustela took me home one last time.
Sometimes you have to dare to do useless things, like a trip to Rennes, for the sole pretext of seeing a house that is no longer ours and of attending the funerals of people you don’t know in order to turn precious pages of our stories.
Grandparents have a capital importance, more and more recognized in the psychoanalytical literature, on the future of a child. The psychiatrist Olivier Chouchena said: “everyone agrees that it takes three generations to produce a normal child”. Without really knowing what a “normal” child is, I fully agree with him in recognizing this unique possibility that grandparents have of providing the child with a narrative structuring both the origins, the foundations cultures, traditions and the transmission of filiation.
Freer than with their own children, it even happens that grandparents deploy “parenting skills” that seem to have “jumped a generation”, as if the “right distance” sometimes took years, even a first batch of children on whom one exercises to be parents, before revealing oneself in this refined and balanced range of a countenance and a protection more released from the narcissistic stakes which characterize the first stage of adult life.
Grandparents, for many artists, are this beacon in the middle of a life that can be marked by this feeling of being misunderstood by his family. I spontaneously think of Marie Uguay and her unique bond with her grandfather, or, closer to home, of Gabrielle Boulianne-Tremblay and her dear grandmother, adorable, who had always known how to speak to the granddaughter. girl in the guise of another gender.
Grandmothers and grandfathers sometimes understand everything about this something new in us, which speaks both of where we come from, of what breaks us and what also pushes us to embrace a form of becoming of which we sometimes feel only the fragmentary impulse.