by Nina George
From my hideaway I can see, mirrored in the open glass door, the sky and a strip of sea in the distance. This view makes everything appear lovelier and softer, even though it’s almost inconceivable that anything here could be more beautiful than it already is. Sanary is the last place on the coast between Marseilles and Toulon, among all the towns made up of little white boxes, where life continues even when there are no more tourists. Naturally, everything is geared towards them from June to August, and it’s impossible to get a table for dinner if you haven’t reserved. When the guests have gone home, they don’t leave empty, draughty houses and deserted supermarket car parks behind them. Life always goes on here. The lanes are narrow, the houses are colourful and small. The residents stick together, and the fishermen sell gigantic fish from their boats at daybreak. This little town could be in the Luberon; it is neighbourly, peculiar and proud. But the Luberon has become the 21st arrondissement of Paris. Sanary is a nostalgic place.
I play pétanque every night, not at the boulodrome, but on Quai Wilson. They leave the floodlights on until an hour before midnight. It’s where the sedate (some would say old) men play, and there’s not a lot of conversation.
It’s the prettiest spot in Sanary. You can see the sea, the town, the lights, the boules, the boats. You’re in the thick of things, yet it’s peaceful. No applause, just the occasional low ‘Aah!’; the click of boule on boule; and when the striker, who is also my new dentist, hits, a cry of ‘Peng!’ My father would love it.
Lately I’ve often pictured myself playing with my father. And talking. Laughing. Oh, Catherine, there is so much more for us to discuss and laugh about.
Where did the last twenty years go?
The south is a vivid blue, Catherine.
Your colour is missing here. It would make everything shine all the more brightly.
Jean
38
Perdu went swimming every morning before the heat set in, and every evening shortly before sunset. He had discovered that this was the only way he could flush the sorrow out of his system and let it flow away, bit by bit.
He had tried praying in church, of course. Singing too. He had hiked through Sanary’s hilly hinterland. He had recited Manon’s story loudly, in the kitchen and on his dawn walks; he had shouted her name to the gulls and the buzzards. But only occasionally did it help.
Hurting time.
The sorrow often arrived and took hold of him as he was falling asleep. Just when he was relaxed and drifting off – it came. He lay in the dark and wept bitterly; and at that moment the world felt reduced to the size of his bedroom, lonely and devoid of all comfort. In those instants he was afraid that he would never be able to smile again and that his pain would never, ever cease. In those gloomy hours a thousand different ‘what ifs’ swirled around in his head and his heart. That his father might die while he was playing boules. That his mother would start to squabble with the television set and waste away with grief. He was afraid that Catherine was reading his letters to her girlfriends and that they were laughing at them together. He was afraid that he was destined to mourn over and over for people he loved.
How should he endure that for the rest of his life? How could anyone endure it?
He wished he could prop his fearful self up in a corner like a broom and walk away.
The sea was the first thing he had found that was large enough to absorb his sorrow.
After a serious workout, Perdu would drift on his back, his feet pointing towards the beach. There, on the waves, with the water spilling through his outspread fingers, he drew up from the depths of his memory every hour he had spent with Manon. He examined each one until he no longer felt any regret that it was past, then he let it go.
So Jean let the waves rock him, raise him up and pass him on. And slowly, infinitely slowly, he began to trust. Not the sea, far from it; no one should make that mistake! Jean Perdu trusted himself again. He wouldn’t go under; he wouldn’t drown in his emotions.
And each time he abandoned himself to the sea another small grain of fear trickled out of him. It was his way of praying.
The whole of July, the whole of August.
One morning the sea was gentle and calm. Jean swam out further than ever before. Finally, a long way from the shore, he surrendered to the delicious sensation of being able to relax after his exertions. He felt warm and serene inside.
Maybe he fell asleep. Maybe he was daydreaming. The water drew back as he sank, and the sea turned to warm air and soft grass. He caught the scent of a fresh, velvety breeze, of cherries and May weather. Sparrows hopped about on the arms of a deckchair.
She was sitting there. Manon. She smiled tenderly at Jean.
‘What are you doing here?’
Rather than answer her, Jean walked towards her, went down on his knees and embraced her. He laid his head on her shoulder, as though he longed to crawl inside her.
Manon ruffled his hair. She hadn’t aged, not a single day. She was as young and radiant as the Manon he had last seen one August evening twenty-one years earlier. She smelled warm and alive.
‘I’m sorry I abandoned you. I was very stupid.’
‘Of course you were, Jean,’ she whispered gently.
Something changed. It was as though he could see himself through Manon’s eyes. As though he were hovering above his body and could look back through time at every episode of his strange life. He counted two, three, five versions of himself – each at a different age.
There – how embarrassing! One Perdu, bending over the map jigsaw and destroying it as soon as it was finished, then piecing it back together again.
The next Perdu, alone in his spartan kitchen, staring at the bleak wall, a naked bulb hanging above his head; chewing on shrink-wrapped cheese and sliced bread from a plastic bag. He denied himself the food he liked to avoid triggering any emotions.
And the next Perdu, turning his back on women. Their smiles. Their questions. ‘What are your plans for this evening?’ or ‘Will you give me a call?’ Their sympathy when they sensed with the antenna only women possess for such things that he had a great, sad hole inside. But their touchiness too, their lack of understanding for the fact that he was incapable of separating sex from love.
And another change came over him.
Now Jean thought that he could feel himself pushing up into the sky like a tree. He was simultaneously tumbling like a butterfly and diving like a buzzard from a mountaintop. He felt the wind streaming through his chest feathers – he was flying! Powerful strokes drove him down towards the seabed: he could breathe underwater.
A mysterious, overwhelming upsurge of energy swept through him. He finally understood what was going on inside him …
When he awoke, the waves had almost carried him back to the shore.
That morning, for some unfathomable reason, he wasn’t sad after his swim and his daydream. He was angry. Furious!
Yes, he had seen her. Yes, she had shown him what a hideous life he had chosen, how painful was the loneliness he endured because he didn’t have the courage to trust someone again. To trust someone entirely because in love there is no other way.
He was more furious than he had been in Bonnieux when Manon’s face had stared out at him from the label on the bottle of local wine. Angrier than he had ever been before.
‘Merde!’ he roared at the surf. ‘You stupid, stupid, stupid cow – why did you have to go and die in the prime of life!’
Two women joggers were gawking at him from the tarmac beach path. He was embarrassed, but only for a second.
‘What are you looking at?’ he barked. He was brimming with a blazing, roaring fury.
‘Why didn’t you simply ring me like any normal person would have? What was the point of not telling me you were sick? How could you, Manon? How could you sleep next to me all those nights and say nothing? Merde, you stupid … you … God!’
He didn’t know where to direct his rage. He wanted to punch something. He kneeled down and
pummelled the sand and shovelled it behind him with both hands. He shovelled. And raged. And shovelled some more. But it wasn’t enough. He stood up and ran into the water; he thrashed at the waves with his fists and hands, both together, one after the other. The salt water splashed into his eyes. It stung. He punched and punched.
‘Why did you do it? Why?’ It didn’t matter whom he was asking – himself, Manon, death; it made no difference. He was raging. ‘I thought we knew each other, I thought you were on my side, I thought …’
His fury hardened. It sank into the sea between two waves; it became flotsam and would be washed up elsewhere to make someone else furious – furious that death could break in at any moment and ruin a life.
Jean sensed the stones under his bare feet and noticed that he was shivering.
‘I wish you’d told me, Manon,’ he said, calmer now, breathless and deflated. Disappointed.
The sea rolled in, imperturbably.
The weeping stopped. He still thought of particular moments with Manon; he continued to perform his aquatic prayers. Afterwards, however, he simply sat, let his skin dry in the morning sun and enjoyed the shivering. Yes, he enjoyed walking back along the fringe of the water in bare feet, and enjoyed buying his first espresso of the day and drinking it, his hair still wet, while he observed the sea and its colours.
Perdu cooked, swam, drank very little, kept a regular sleep routine and met up with the other boules players every day. He continued to write letters. He worked on The Great Encyclopedia of Small Emotions, and in the evenings he worked at the bookshop, selling books to people in beach shorts.
He had altered his method of matching books to readers. He often asked, ‘How would you like to feel when you go to sleep?’ Most of his customers wanted to feel light and safe.
He asked others to tell him about their favourite things. Cooks loved their knives. Estate agents loved the jangle made by a bunch of keys. Dentists loved the flicker of fear in their patients’ eyes; Perdu had guessed as much.
Most often he asked, ‘How should the book taste? Of ice cream? Spicy, meaty? Or like a chilled rosé?’ Food and books were closely related. He discovered this in Sanary, and it earned him the nickname ‘the book epicure’.
He finished renovating the little house in the second half of August. He shared it with a morose, stripy stray tomcat, which never meowed, never purred and would only visit in the evening. It could be relied on to stretch out next to his bed and glower at the door. From this position the cat would guard the sleeping Perdu.
He tried to call it Olson, but because the animal bared its fangs at this name, he settled on Psst.
Jean Perdu didn’t wish to leave a woman guessing about his feelings again – even if he himself could only guess at what his feelings were. He was still in the in-between zone, and any new beginning lay shrouded in mist. He couldn’t say where he would be at the same time the next year. All he knew was that he must continue along this path until he found its destination. So he’d written to Catherine, as he had begun to do while on the waterways and since he had been in Sanary – every three days in fact.
Samy had counselled him: ‘Try your phone for once. Amazing little device, I’m telling you.’
So one evening he picked up the mobile and dialled a number in Paris. Catherine needed to know who he was: a man caught between darkness and light. You become someone else when your loved ones die.
‘Number 27. Hello? Who’s there? Say something!’
‘Madame Rosalette … Had your hair dyed recently?’ he asked hesitantly.
‘Oh! Monsieur Perdu, how …’
‘Do you know Madame Catherine’s number?’
‘Of course I do. I know every number in the building, every single one. Now, Madame Gulliver upstairs …’
‘Could you give me it?’
‘Madame Gulliver’s? What on earth for?’
‘No, chère Madame. Catherine’s.’
‘Oh. Yes. You write to her a lot, don’t you? I know because Madame carries the letters around with her. They fell out of her bag once. I couldn’t help seeing. It was the day Monsieur Goldenberg …’
He chose not to press her to give him the number, and instead allowed Madame Rosalette’s gossip to wash over him. Gossip about Madame Gulliver, whose new coral-red mules made an awful showy clatter on the stairs. About Kofi, who had decided to study political science. About Madame Bomme, who’d had a successful eye operation and no longer needed a magnifying glass for reading. And Madame Violette’s balcony concert: wonderful! Someone had shot a – what’s it called? – a video and put it on that internet thing, and other people had clacked on it a lot or something, and now Madame Violette was famous.
‘Clicked?’
‘That’s what I said.’
And, oh yes, Madame Bernard had converted the attic and wanted to let some artist move in. And his fiancé. His fiancé! How about a sea horse while he was at it?
Perdu held the mobile away from his ear so that she wouldn’t hear his laughter. As Madame Rosalette nattered on and on, Jean could think of only one thing: Catherine kept his letters and carried them around with her. Fa-bu-lous, as the concierge would say.
After what felt like hours she finally dictated Catherine’s number to him.
‘We all miss you, Monsieur,’ Madame Rosalette said. ‘I hope you’re no longer so terribly sad?’
He clenched his fist around the phone.
‘Not any more. Thank you,’ he said.
‘Don’t mention it,’ Madame Rosalette said quietly before she hung up.
He tapped in Catherine’s number and, closing his eyes, raised the mobile phone to his ear. It rang once, twice …
‘Hello?’
‘Um … it’s me.’
It’s me? Crumbs, how was she supposed to know who ‘it’s me’ was, for goodness’ sake?
‘Jean?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh my God.’
He heard Catherine gasp and put the phone down. She blew her nose and came back on the line.
‘I didn’t expect you to ring.’
‘Should I hang up?’
‘Don’t you dare!’
He smiled. From her silence he figured that she must be smiling too.
‘How …’
‘What …’
They’d spoken at the same time. They laughed.
‘What are you reading at the moment?’ he asked softly.
‘The books you gave me. For the fifth time, I think. I haven’t washed the dress I wore on our evening together either. There’s still a hint of your aftershave on it, you know, and each sentence in the books tells me something new every time, and I put the dress under my cheek at night so I can smell you.’
Then she said nothing; nor did he, surprised by the happiness that suddenly came over him.
They listened wordlessly to each other, and he felt very close to Catherine, as though Paris were directly next to his ear. All he would have to do was open his eyes and he would be sitting by her green front door, listening for her breath.
‘Jean?’
‘Yes, Catherine.’
‘It’s getting better, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. It’s getting better.’
‘And yes, being lovesick is like being in mourning. Because you die, because your future dies and you with it … There is a hurting time. It lasts for so long.’
‘But it gets better. I know that now.’
Her silence felt good.
‘I can’t stop thinking that we didn’t kiss each other on the mouth,’ she whispered hastily.
Distraught, he said nothing.
‘Talk to you tomorrow,’ she said and hung up.
That must mean he could ring her again?
He sat there in the dark kitchen, a crooked smile on his lips.
39
By the end of August he saw that his body had become toned. He had to tighten his belt a couple of notches, and his shirt stretched tight over his biceps.
He studied himself in the mirror as he dressed and saw in the reflection a very different man from the one he had been in Paris. Tanned, fit, erect, his dark, silver-streaked hair longer and swept casually back. The pirate beard; the loosely buttoned, washed-out linen shirt. He was fifty.
Nearly fifty-one.
Jean stepped up to the mirror. There were more lines on his face from exposure to the sun; more laugh lines too. He guessed that some of the freckles weren’t freckles but age spots. But it didn’t matter – he was alive. That was all that counted.