Spanish flu

The Spanish flu is remembered in Touladi not as a distant historical abstraction but through deaths that remain embedded in family grief and the village cemetery. It appears in Loïc’s childhood account of a child buried too soon, in a dream that summons the dead, and in La Grébiche’s history of love and loss.

Deaths in the Village Memory

During the epidemic’s ravages among Touladi’s children, one child was buried before death had actually occurred. The child was later found turned over in the grave, with the jaw clamped around an arm, when the cemetery was moved after the 1944 landslide. The account reaches Loïc indirectly: he has overheard adults discussing it. What he remembers is not only the discovery but the horror of imagining a person waking in the sealed darkness of a coffin, unable to cry out for lack of air.

The Spanish flu also belongs to the village’s larger catalogue of premature deaths. In a dream, La Grébiche calls the dead of Touladi by their varied fates, including young people taken by tuberculosis or the Spanish flu, alongside the drowned, accident victims, and children who died at birth or soon afterward. The disease is thus one strand in a collective history of loss, distinguished by its toll on the young.

Loïc’s Encounter with the Cemetery

After the plane passes over the village and circles above the cemetery overlooking Lake Squatec, Loïc imagines the people underground as if sealed inside small boxes. The graves prompt the remembered story of the child buried alive, and he struggles to drive away the image. The fear makes the epidemic’s past immediate: a story learned from adults becomes an imagined bodily experience of confinement and helplessness.

In a separate dream procession, the cemetery becomes a forest of tombstone trunks and human-like branches. La Grébiche strikes a gravestone and summons Touladi’s dead; the stones break open and the deceased return. Among them are victims of the Spanish flu, included in a vision that mingles communal history with Loïc’s own encounters with people who have died. The dream does not undo those deaths; it gives them a dramatic form in which the lost can appear again, even as the scene ends in grief.

La Grébiche’s Personal Loss

The Spanish flu also marks La Grébiche’s private history. After losing a child at birth and becoming a widow at twenty, she later loses two fiancés: one in an accident and another to the Spanish flu. The illness is one cause among several of the repeated bereavements that define her experience of love; the narrative presents her loves as repeatedly cut short, rather than treating the epidemic as an isolated misfortune.

Across these distinct recollections, the Spanish flu links individual bereavement to the village’s accumulated dead. It survives in an overheard story, in Loïc’s fear before the graves, in the dream roll call, and in La Grébiche’s account of lost love. The disease’s narrative presence rests on those returns: its victims belong both to a shared past and to memories that continue to disturb the living.