26-year-old missing — his SON saw him in a newspaper photo and discovered he lived three streets away, P2
At 16, Bernard had started as an apprentice with an electrician on Dzing Street, a brusque and competent man named Fernand Lacroix who taught the trade to him with severe and poorly paid tasks, but with undeniable efficiency. In the hands of Lacroix, one learned by osmosis, by imitation, by the fear of doing wrong more than by theoretical understanding. Bernard was talented. Bernard was a quick learner. Beneath his quiet demeanor, like a northern kid used to not talking much, Bernard had something a little elusive that one couldn’t immediately name. A tendency to look away when asked a direct question. A way of dodging without really dodging. It’s like a door that’s left ajar but never fully pushed open.
It was at the Mayard textile factory where his sister Claudine had been working as a factory worker since she was 15 in the dull and continuous noise of the looms that he met Joëlle Garnier in the spring of 1969. Joëlle was 18 years old. Light grey eyes that seemed to change shade depending on the light and a way of laughing slightly backwards with her whole face that disarmed people and made them smile back without knowing why. His father, Albert Garnier, was an accountant for the railway. A meticulous man with always ironed shirts and a habit of double-checking figures before admitting they were correct. His mother sold vegetables at the Saturday market and returned home with the smell of earth on her hands even after washing them. A modest but respectable family, as they used to say back then. Which actually meant several things at once: no one had had any trouble with the law, we went to mass at least at Easter and Christmas, debts were paid on time and children were not loitering in the street after 9 p.m.
They dated for 18 months with the discretion that propriety required in that milieu and at that time. Bernard spent Sunday afternoons at the Garniers’ house in the living room which smelled of wax and his father’s stale tobacco. He played cards with Albert Garnier without ever winning or without ever giving the impression that he was winning intentionally, helped the mother move the furniture to clean behind it, accepted the coffee and dry cakes with studied politeness. He had this helpful, attentive side to little things that appealed to families even when he didn’t necessarily appeal to the girls.
But she really loved Joëlle. She loved him for something that others didn’t quite see: a gentleness buried beneath reserve, a way he had of truly listening to her, not just waiting for his turn to speak. An attentive presence that seemed rare to him in a world where men were generally used to being heard more than hearing. They were married in June 1971 at Saint Nicholas Church. A simple ceremony with white flowers and the same organist as for all the weddings in the neighborhood for the past 15 years. The reception lasted until 2 a.m. in the town hall annex’s function room with a three-piece band playing accordion, keyboard and drums, who knew enough songs to last the evening without rehearsal. Marcel Aumont, Bernard’s father, had drunk a little too much local gin and was crying for reasons that no one quite understood. Perhaps pride, perhaps nostalgia for Lens, perhaps something harder to name which is keen to see his son build a life that resembles his own and to know what it costs. Bernard danced with Joëlle until his feet hurt and they both laughed at these clumsy attempts by waltz. It was, she would say years later to someone who was not her husband, the most beautiful evening of her life, the formula of which was both exact and despairing.
They settled into a two-room apartment on the first floor of a building on rue des Potiers in old Valenciennes with a window overlooking the roofs and a temperamental oil boiler that Bernard repaired himself the first winter. Bernard was now working independently, having left Lacroix after 3 years to set up his small electrical business with a partner, Thierry Breton, a jovial and slightly disorganized man. In his notebooks, in the way he kept accounts, in his appointments which he sometimes forgot by half an hour, he compensated for his methodological shortcomings with a natural business sense, a warm and direct way with clients which meant that work was ordered from him, even when there had been some hiccups. The business was not going brilliantly, not with the ease of the good years, but it was working. We paid the rent. We put a little money aside in a savings account at the local bank. We bought the furniture gradually, one piece at a time, choosing what would last rather than what was pretty. Their son was born in November 1972. They named him Éric.
What no one knew then, nor for a very long time, was that Bernard Aumont had a debt. A debt incurred before his marriage during a period of his life that he had never discussed with Joëlle, nor with his mother, nor with anyone else. A period he had tried to mentally compress into a few insignificant weeks, to make small and inconsequential, to classify as a youthful mistake that is not repeated and not spoken of again. In the summer of 1970, he had participated in a delivery of merchandise for a man whom everyone in a certain circle called Dédé the Sour, an occasional fence who operated between Valenciennes and the Belgian border with the quiet pragmatism of someone who never really thought about the consequences of what he did. Nothing serious on the surface: a few cartons of contraband cigarettes from Belgium, one hour of transport in a truck, 200 francs in the pocket of an apprentice who was then earning 900 francs a month. An insignificant arrangement, except that Dédé the Sour worked for people more serious than him, and these people had long memories and an implacable arithmetic that bore no resemblance to the arithmetic of honest people.
The problem began to materialize in 1973 when a man Bernard did not know rang the doorbell on rue des Potiers one Tuesday evening at 8 p.m. The time when honest people don’t ring the doorbell of honest people without having called first. Joëlle was at his mother’s house with Éric, who had just celebrated his first birthday and was just beginning to stand up by holding onto the furniture. The man was tall, with a beige wool coat of visible quality and shoes too clean for someone who had actually just walked the damp November streets. He spoke little, with an economy of words that had something deliberately threatening about it. People who have the power to do harm don’t need to raise their voices. He explained that Bernard had, during this famous delivery, used a van that was used to transport something other than cigarettes and that the owners of this van now wanted his collaboration for other services without further details for the moment. Bernard refused. That was the first mistake, not the only one, but the first.
He refused a second time, then a third time over several months of repeated visits that always followed the same protocol. The man in the beige coat, alone or with another man who stayed back and did not speak, at one o’clock in the evening or on Saturday morning, always when Joëlle was absent as if we knew precisely her movements. Still with that same cold politeness which terrified more than direct threats could have done, he began to sleep poorly at night, where he could hear the normal noises of the building: the pipes, the footsteps of the upstairs neighbor, the cats in the yard, and every noise took on a disturbing significance in the early hours of the morning. He began to look over his shoulder in the street with a regularity that seemed paranoid to himself, but which he could not control. He didn’t talk to Joëlle about it because he didn’t know how to explain something he himself couldn’t clearly name. Something that should have started at the beginning, the 1970 delivery, and whose beginning presupposed confessions that he was not capable of making.
In March 1974, the man in the beige coat returned. This time, he was not alone. This time, it was no longer a question of future service, but of something more concrete and more immediate. A specific sum of money, a sum that represented more than 2 years of revenue from the electricity business, presented not as a debt to be repaid for services rendered, but as a guarantee to be provided against the possibility that certain information concerning the 1970 delivery, and not only the delivery of cigarettes but those which were in the crates below under the cigarettes, would reach the local gendarmerie brigade. He had Joëlle, he had Éric who was about to turn 18 months old and who had just learned to stand up against the living room sofa, laughing at his own performance. He had his business, his clients, the trust of Thierry Breton, but he had his aging mother and his disabled father who depended on him for small things that no one else did: taking him to the doctor, fixing the windows of his apartment, being there.
Bernard Aumont disappeared on April 14, 1974. That Sunday morning began like every Sunday that spring in Valenciennes with the siren of a nearby factory that operated on weekends with a reduced team, with the bells of the Saint-Nicolas church at a quarter to 9, with the pale light of a northern April that had not yet decided if it would really be spring. Joëlle was still asleep. Éric slept in his crib, breathing with the peaceful regularity of very young children who have not yet learned that the world can be frightening. Bernard got up at the precise time and dressed without making a sound in the dim light of the room: grey trousers, navy pullover, the brown jacket with a straight collar that he had been wearing for 3 years and which had taken the shape of his shoulders like a second skin. He went down the creaking steps, passed the empty mailbox and went out into the still deserted potters’ street to get bread from the corner bakery, as he had done every Sunday since their wedding. He took his jacket, he took his wallet with 42 francs in it. He took his keys, and it was this detail that Joëlle later noted, the keys, because you don’t take your keys if you don’t plan to come back. He did not take the bread.
Joëlle became worried around 11 o’clock when Éric woke up demanding his bottle and the Sunday table was still empty. Reading the newspaper without the croissants, without the still-warm baguette that Bernard always cut with the same wooden-handled knife. She called the bakery at the end of the street. Mr. Dubois picked up the phone himself and confirmed that Bernard had not come by that morning, that he had not seen anyone matching his description. She called Thierry Breton, the partner whose wife answered and then put her husband on the phone after a moment. He had no news and at first seemed slightly surprised by the question, before taking on a more concerned tone when he understood that Joëlle was really worried. She called her in-laws Marcel and Yvonne who had not seen Bernard since the previous Wednesday and who reacted to her way of asking the question with the slowness of elderly people who have not yet decided whether it is serious or not. At 2 p.m., she had called everyone she knew. Éric had eaten his lunch alone in his high chair, then he fell asleep in his bed in the middle of the afternoon while his mother was on the phone.
At 4 p.m., Joëlle took his coat, put Éric in the pram that had been received as a wedding gift and walked to the gendarmerie brigade in Valenciennes, whose grey and functional building overlooked a street parallel to the town hall. The chief brigadier who received her in a small room with beige walls and a table covered in paper was a square and methodical man with a brush mustache, whom he listened to with the professional patience of someone who regularly hears people worried about reasons that usually turn out to be benign. He explained to her with an administrative kindness tinged with slight weariness that the disappearances of adults could not be registered as worrying disappearances until 48 hours had passed, except in the presence of obvious signs of violence, acts contrary to the will of the person or particular vulnerability. The question concerning Bernard was that he was a healthy adult with no known psychiatric history, and the absence of a Sunday morning without signs of violence could have dozens of explanations. The police would take note of the approach. He handed her a form. She returned home with Éric asleep in the pram, the form in her bag, and the feeling that she had knocked on a stone door. She did what all the women of her generation had learned to do in impossible moments when the world stops and you don’t know what to do with your hands: she prepared the evening meal, she gave Éric a bath, she put him to bed while singing him his favorite nursery rhyme. She sat in the silence of the empty apartment and waited. Bernard did not return that evening. He did not return the next day. He didn’t come back at all.
The following days triggered the usual procedure, carried out with the methodology of the time and the resources of a local brigade in 1974. The gendarmerie opened an investigation for a worrying disappearance after Joëlle, during a second, more formal hearing, reported visits from the man in the beige coat. Information that she had initially retained by instinct. She did because the aforementioned implied explaining why this man was coming, and explaining why this man was coming implied things about her husband that she didn’t quite understand yet. But the warrant officer he received this time, a man in his forties with a calm and direct way of asking questions, made him understand that withholding information would not help anyone, and she spoke. Minutes were taken. Thierry Breton was questioned and confirmed that Bernard had seemed preoccupied in the weeks preceding his disappearance, less talkative than usual, sometimes absent in his answers, even when he was physically present, but had said nothing explicit, nothing that could be grasped and examined. The parents, the neighbors on the landing, and the regular customers of the electricity company were questioned.
Ah, we found a trace of the 1970 delivery, a van registered in Ardennes, owned by a man named Fernand Caperon who had since died in a car accident in 1972. Case closed. No direct link has been established between Caperon and any criminal network at this stage of the investigation. The man in the beige coat was never identified. The investigating judge assigned to the case was a conscientious and methodical magistrate named De la Vigne with 20 years of experience at the Valenciennes High Court and a reputation for strict fairness. He worked on the case for 8 months, summoned 12 witnesses, ordered searches in the files of the national police and the gendarmerie, which had the civil status registers consulted within a 50 km radius to see if Bernard Aumont had resurfaced somewhere under his real name. Nothing.
The judge De la Vigne put forward two main hypotheses which were mutually exclusive and yet both were defensible with the available evidence: either Bernard had fled of his own accord to escape criminal pressure of which he had not informed his wife, or he had been a victim of this same criminal pressure in a way that made a return impossible. In both cases, the absence of a body, direct witnesses, traceable financial transactions and identifiers of the man in the beige coat left the investigation without any means of advancing further. In November 1974, a partial dismissal of the case was pronounced. The case remained nominally open, like all unsolved missing persons cases, but no one was actively working on it anymore. It joined the archive shelves among other files awaiting an event that might or might not come.
Joëlle Aumont, she had kept her husband’s name, not knowing if she was the wife of a missing person or the wife of a fugitive and not wanting her son to grow up with a family name different from his own. He resumed his work at the Mayard textile factory 6 weeks after the disappearance. During factory hours, his mother looked after him in the Garniers’ house, which smelled of cooking and cat, and which became a second home for the child for several years. Joëlle repaid the debts of the electricity business which had to close due to lack of resources and possible management, selling the tools and equipment stored in the shed on rue du Quesnoy piece by piece, making sure to get a fair price for each thing because money was tight. She did it with an efficiency that made people in the neighborhood say she was courageous. She didn’t feel brave. She felt empty in a particular, specific way that had no name in ordinary language, not grief. Because grief presupposes a confirmed death, but something so heavy without the permission to truly settle down.
She didn’t have to wait long for Bernard to return. She understood with a cold certainty that gradually settled in during the summer of 1974, like understanding something you already knew but hadn’t wanted to face. She didn’t know if he was dead or alive, that he wouldn’t come back. She did not know if he had chosen to leave or if he had been forced to disappear by external forces. What she knew, what she knew with a clarity that the years never denied, that the most difficult nights could not erase, was that he and she and Éric had not been enough for him to stay.
Éric grew up without a father and without a satisfactory explanation. Joëlle told him when he was old enough to ask direct questions and refuse vague answers that his father had had to leave because of a complicated story that even the adults themselves had never been able to fully unravel. It wasn’t a lie. It was an incomplete truth, the only form of truth that Joëlle could offer her without simultaneously imposing on her the weight of guilt or anger that a child was not equipped to bear. Éric accepted this answer with the quiet resignation of children who instinctively understand, without being explicitly told, that some questions are too painful to be asked to the end. He was a good student, diligent in scientific subjects, and more economical with words than his classmates in subjects that required oral expression. He had a way of looking at people slightly sideways, not frankly, not directly, which could pass for shyness but was perhaps something more complicated: a learned vigilance, a habit of not exposing oneself entirely before knowing what one risks. Where did this way of being come from? From his father, of whom he had no conscious memory? From his mother, who had learned to watch faces since that Sunday in April 1974? He wouldn’t have known how to respond.
He obtained his baccalaureate in June 1990 at the technical high school of Valenciennes with a good grade in mathematics which allowed him to directly enter the BTS computer science program at the higher education institution in the city. Information technology was then a sufficiently new field and the need for technicians sufficiently pressing that employers agreed to train their recruits themselves on their specific systems. At the end of his training, he found a position in an IT services company in Maubeuge, 30 km from Valenciennes, whose technical director saw in his BTS an honest working basis and in his seriousness an asset that experience would refine. He was 21 years old in 1993, living in a shared apartment with two friends in the center of Maubeuge. A life that was being built at a reasonable pace in a region that was itself trying to rebuild after the closure of the last mines and the restructuring of the steelworks. There was a particular melancholy in the north during those years, an industrial sadness that coexisted with a resistance and solidarity that the people of the north simply called normality because they had never known anything else, and Éric was the product of it without knowing it quite clearly.
The question about his father bothered him intermittently, like a poorly tuned radio that you can neither turn off completely nor pick up clearly enough to really listen to. Sometimes for months, he hardly thought about it. There was work, friends, a young woman he had been seeing since the fall of 1992 and with whom things were still fragile but promising. Then something, an old photo found by chance among his grandmother Yvonne’s belongings during a move, an administrative form that asked for the father’s name and address, an evening conversation that revolved around families and origins, and it all came back at once: that precise feeling of an empty space, where there should be something. An absent presence that was not mourning because there was no confirmed death, no grave, no definite date, but just a Sunday morning in April 1974. And after that, silence. He didn’t really look. During those years, he thought about it without actively seeking it out. These are two different things.
On March 9, 1994, Éric Aumont was 21 years old. He had returned to spend the weekend at his mother’s in the apartment in the Saint-Jean district where Joëlle had lived since 1982 after leaving the rue des Potiers, a smaller apartment on the second floor of a clean building with a caretaker’s lodge and metal mailboxes painted in grey which had become his mother’s in Éric’s memory as if the geography of the place mattered less than the presence that defined it. They had lunch together with Joëlle’s sister, Agnès, who had come from Douai for the weekend with her two young children. We had eaten potjevleesch, the terrine of frozen meats that the whole north considers its own and that northerners only eat when served by other northerners, with crispy fries and a dark beer for the adults and grenadine syrup diluted with water for the children. The atmosphere was that of Sunday family lunches, slightly noisy, sometimes interspersed with parallel conversations and the radio playing jazz in the background from the kitchen.
After lunch, while Joëlle and Agnès were clearing up and Agnès’s children were playing in Éric’s room with toys he had kept without knowing why, Éric had sat in the living room armchair with the Sunday newspaper La Voix du Nord, the regional daily newspaper that his mother had been buying every morning for three years and which covered life in the north with the meticulousness of a provincial columnist for whom every town has its importance. It was one of those lazy Sunday reads that you do without a specific goal, letting your eyes wander over the titles without really looking for anything, jumping from one article to another according to the whim of the moment.
The photo was on page 12. An article about the renovation of the Valenciennes covered market. One of these local business revitalization operations that the municipality financed as part of a regional program to revitalize city centers. The article showed a consultation meeting with the shopkeepers of the area concerned, but in a room that resembled a town hall function room with its plastic chairs and formica table. There were about ten people around that table. The photo was not of high quality, a little blurry as is often the case with meeting photos in regional newspapers, taken under the artificial light of a ceiling light, but clear enough to distinguish faces. The caption listed the names of each person: two municipal councilors, a representative of the regional council, representatives of a trade association, and a representative of the social housing provider. One of the names was Gérard Tessier, representative of the association of shopkeepers in the Lille street area.
It wasn’t the name that stopped Éric, it was the face. He was 22 years younger than the man in the photo. He had never known this man as an adult, never had any conscious memories of him. He had no image of his father stored in his visual memory. 18 months at the time of disappearance is before the formation of lasting memories. And yet, there was something in that photo, something in the way this man held his shoulders slightly hunched, in the particular shape of his forehead, in the position of his hands placed flat on the table like someone who is listening and maintaining a calm presence that made him look up from the newspaper and look at the photo a second time, then a third time.
He remained seated in the armchair with the newspaper in his hands for perhaps 10 minutes, without moving, without calling his mother in the nearby kitchen, without doing anything. He looked at the photo and felt something he couldn’t quite name, not certainty, not yet, but something between recognition and vertigo, like when you see a shape in the clouds and you can no longer not see it, even if you know that it may only be a projection. He went into his mother’s room and opened the second drawer of her dresser. He knew exactly where she kept the photos. He had grown up with that chest of drawers. He took the small brown cardboard album that contained the wedding photos, the only photo album that dated from before 1974 and that Joëlle had kept without ever displaying it, like keeping something you don’t want to think about but can’t throw away either. He returned to the living room. He placed the open album on the coffee table next to the newspaper next to the photo on page 12 and compared the wedding photo dated from June 1971. The man in it was 21 years old, brown hair combed back, a light-colored suit for the occasion which gave him a slightly formal and somewhat awkward look. They were 23 years apart, but the shape of the forehead was there, the way they held their shoulders was there, the position of their hands was flat.
Joëlle entered the living room 10 minutes later, still holding a dishcloth in his hands. She saw the two photos side by side on the table. She saw her son’s face. She sat down in the second armchair without anyone asking her to. The silence that followed lasted perhaps 30 seconds. At, it seemed like a whole hour passed between what Joëlle said next and she didn’t repeat it exactly
