Marcel

It's been a long time since someone close to me died. I forgot all about death, how impossibly hard it is to understand, but then our good friend and neighbor died over the weekend and I remembered how death overwhelms and suffocates and buries you in memories. It wasn't a sudden death but slow and long in coming, over a year. Its length should have made it easier to accept but because he was someone so full of life it's been hard to understand and it's a shock to everyone around him. It's always that way with people who are so present in life. Marcel was like that, omnipresent and energetic, he seemed to be everywhere at once. When we first met him he was in his late seventies and biking 40 kilometers twice a week. He had beautiful legs and he wore shorts so late in the season that you could see snow in the not so distant Alps, but he didn't get cold. And we noticed from our upstairs window that he saw everything. He watched the world go by and he studied the lake and us and our house from his bird's nest of a living room.




We've felt completely lost for the last few days. Marcel, Marcel, Marcel...he was more than a neighbor he was a parent to us. He said "you are like my kids" and we knew it. He didn't have to tell us. We had plans to go to Th*non either this week or next week to see him and say goodbye but of course it was too late because his cancer was far more advanced than he let on to anyone. We knew though because the last time we saw him he looked like an old sick dog, lifeless and barely able to move. He made us coffee but with so much effort he had to stop halfway through and ask for our help. It wasn't like him and I had to turn away and hide my tears because it was hard to watch. It hurt too much. In the last phone call to him he asked Seb to please bring the kids so he could see them one more time. We kind of knew what was coming.



I have so many Marcel stories! He was such a character. We never knocked on each other's doors, just hollered which was sometimes annoying for me running around half dressed "I'll be right there!" And we borrowed things from each other right and left,--onions, eggs, pots and pans and chairs. Whatever I'd need he'd have in his garage or usually something close to it. Barely a day went by when we didn't have coffee together and I always took over my extra cakes and cookies and later he would say "j'ai manger ton truc americain hier" but never offer a compliment because it wasn't his style. He always took our side against the snarky neighbors and since he was the Godfather of the street everybody listened because they knew they couldn't trump him.

But, what was most fun were his endless stories about the street and how it was in the old days when everyone would gather at night on their steps and talk and sing. He told us that gossip ran rampant and people would fight, actually fist fight because they'd had too much wine or something, but everyone laughed later and grudges didn't last too long. He told me stories and then he said "so you'll know and tell everyone how it was, especially this one because he's a Riveois",* pointing to Little S. And he told us how it was a child's paradise growing up on the lake, jumping in the water naked in the summer or playing leapfrog by balancing on the moored boats, and of playing hide and seek in the alleyways until past midnight with kids as young as three joining in, running free at all hours. He told us all his stories, about the war when he went to hide in the mountains and joined the Resistance and about how they found the American soldier whose plane had crashed and they helped him hide until it was safe. He told me about the German soldiers in the chateau at the end of the street and how the people on the street worked to feed the resistance with supplies from Switzerland brought across the lake and about how the provisions were hidden in a false roof in our tool room. He told how they ate stray cats because there wasn't any food and about how he finally moved to Lyon for a few years because he couldn't survive on the meager rations of his grandmother and the rest of the family. He brought it all to life for us and it was facinating.



And he was a fisherman. He made his living on the lake for most of his life. He explained to me what the treasures were in my attic, old rigs and lines and cork floaters, leftovers from a bygone era. He used to laugh at us when we said we loved lake Annecy (everybody loves lake Annecy). "It's a pond! he'd say. This is a real lake! C'est ne pas la même chose mes amis." He told us stories of working the steam boats on the lake, shoveling coal into the boiler. He'd always vie for the job of running the boiler for the yearly Rolex trip when they'd attach some watches to the bottom of the boat and drag them across the lake, testing their durability while executives toasted champagne. He'd always get the servers to bring him a bottle of the champagne to drink while he worked downstairs. I don't think there are any steamboats left on the lake anymore. They've all disappeared along with the rest of Marcel's stories.



Memories come flooding back. I can see us four ducking out from the sun on an absent neighbor's porch, listening to him and his wife tell stories about their travels to Corsica and Casablanca and telling us how they met. And my mind wanders off to his tenderly bandaging my hand when I nearly lobbed off a finger cutting carrots. I ran to his house for help. He bandaged me and said it was no big deal and told me of all his fishing knife accidents. I still have that scar. And of how they were the first ones to see Little S after he was born and how Lison would tear up when she'd see me with him and give me old world baby raising advice that seemed a bit off kilter at times but at times it worked and I would be surprised. And I have memories of us showing them 1930's artists singing on You Tube for Christmas dinner a few years ago and them falling back in time with each video, getting drunk on memories. And a funny memory of his fixing my tire when I crashed into the house (don't ask) and joking that he'd stick up for me if Seb got mad, teasing me about it for years after. He always stuck up for me, telling me with a wink that the mean lady at the end of the street who never said hi to me had cheated on her husband with ALL the men in the village in her younger days and that she was putting on false aires with me because she was jealous that I was young and she wasn't. And then there are the memories of all the dinners we had together, whew there were a lot of dinners and apéros!

Marcel and his wife on our back terrace--yet another dinner

He called my mom The Pin-up and she called him Picasso. They were fitting names for each other. He didn't just look like le Maistro he acted like him too, macho to the core, proud and an admirer of pretty women.

He told me once, "one day I won't be here Christine and you'll look at my house and say " It's Marcel's house" because for you it will always be my house but someone else will be living in it. Mais c'est la vie!" and he laughed.

*meaning born in the sector of Th*non called Rives, the French are very proud of their provenance and have a proper noun for "being from such and such town, sector or village"