The blazing mid-summer afternoon sun hits the massive stone walls of what was once the richest house in the village but dies with a whimper, killed by rooms of soot that soak up light and reflect nothing. It could be winter inside, in the dark, with the old wood stove throbbing out heat. It could be Europe a century ago. And in this room sits a ghost of a man: shaky on his feet, missing his glasses that cut into him when he hit the cold stone floor a few weeks ago, back from his dialysis that just about keeps him alive, and still, for some reason, known as Titi, a name he probably got as a baby.
He is one of the last four residents of a village that had people when he was born in There are no births in this village. All that remains of its past glory are its stones: massive slabs cut at sharp angles that sets it apart from the other buildings in the village.
But stone is the only thing left of the house, so it is only a shell, hollowed out inside. Stone is the only thing that could have survived. Stone and the hollowed out remains of Titi. There is only one usable room left, the dining room, in which the last remaining possessions have been accumulated.
Soot covers the rest of the empty space. Titi has a single table with a couple of chairs on one side and a thin bench on the other. An old fridge, an old TV, an old wood stove towards the middle of the room, its metal chimney snaking its way towards the ceiling. A massive old sink. A large bottle of cheap wine in the fridge, a chipped plate of leftover tomato and onion salad on the next shelf.
Old baguettes lie strewn across rooms, cut haphazardly with old, thin knives. A couple of packages of La Baleine salt, with a big white baleen whale on deep blue. Wood spilling out onto the floor from an adjoining room. A handful of flies lying dead on a little saucer filled with yellow granules of something that attracts and then poisons them, or what was once something. Titi sits where he always does, on the chair next to the fridge, so he can see out through the open doorway, past his year-old tractor he calls Marguis, after its last owner, across to his crumbling barn filled with nothing, over the one road through Courdemanges that no one is on.
