years"-as if he'd been waiting all along for me to ask.

 

After that he did a lot of talking. He would have been very surprised if anyone

had told him he would end up caretaker at the Marengo home. He was sixty-four

and came from Paris. At that point I interrupted him. "Oh, you're not from

around here?" Then I remembered that before taking me to the director's office,

he had talked to me about Maman. He'd told me that they had to bury her quickly,

because it gets hot in the plains, espe­ cially in this part of the country.

That was when he told me he had lived in Paris and that he had found it hard to

forget it. In Paris they keep vigil over the body forthree, sometimes four days.

But here you barely have time to get used to the idea before you have to start

running after the hearse. Then his wife had said to him, "Hush now, that's not

the sort of thing to be telling the gentleman." The old man had blushed and

apologized. I'd stepped in and said, "No, not at all." I thought what he'd been

saying was interesting and made sense.

 

In the little mortuary he told me that he'd come to the horne because he was

destitute. He was in good health, so he'd offered to take on the job of

caretaker. I pointed out that even so he was still a resident. He said no, he

wasn't. I'd already been struck by the way he had of saying "they" or "the

others" and, less often, "the old people," talking about the patients, when some

of them weren't any older than he was. But of course it wasn't the same. He was

the caretaker, and to a certain extent he had authority over them.

 

Just then the nurse carne in. Night had fallen sud­ denly. Darkness had