A woman with a head of dark curls pushing open a compartment door, first gazing outside for a long time, then turning to him with tears in her eyes. Striding through Provence, Paris and Rue Montagnard, before finally stepping into his flat. Taking a shower, then walking around the room naked. A mouth drawing close to his own in the half darkness.
Wet, water-wet skin, water-wet lips taking his breath away, drinking his mouth.
Drinking and drinking.
The moon on her small, soft tummy. Two shadows in the middle of a red window frame, dancing.
How she then covers herself with his body.
—is sleeping on the divan in the Lavender Room, as she called the forbidden room, rolled up in her Proven?al patchwork quilt, which she had sewed during her engagement.
Before—had married her vigneron, and before …
She left me.
And then left me a second time.
— had given a name to every room they had met in during those five short years: the Sun Room, the Honey Room, the Garden Room. They were rooms that meant the world to him, her secret lover, her second husband. She had named the room in his flat the Lavender Room; it was her home away from home.
The last time she’d slept there was a hot August night in 1992.
They had showered together; they were wet and naked.
She had caressed Perdu with her hand, cooled by the water, then slid on top of him and, raising his two hands in her own, pushed them down onto the sheet-covered divan. She had fixed him with a wild look and whispered, ‘I’d like you to die before me. Will you promise me that?’
Her body had taken his, more unbridled than ever before, while she moaned, ‘Promise. Promise me!’
He promised her.
Later that night, when he could no longer see the whites of her eyes in the darkness, he had asked her why.
‘I don’t want you to have to walk from the car park to my grave on your own. I don’t want you to have to mourn. I’d rather miss you for the rest of my life.’
‘Why did I never tell you I loved you?’ whispered the bookseller to himself. ‘Why didn’t I, Manon? Manon!’ He had never confessed his feelings. So as not to embarrass her. So as not to feel her fingers on his lips as she whispered, ‘Shush’.
He could be a stone in the mosaic of her life, he thought at the time. A beautiful, sparkling one, but a stone all the same, not the whole picture. He wanted to do that for her.
Manon. The vibrant, never-dainty, never-perfect girl from Provence, who spoke with words that he felt he could grasp with his hands. She never planned; she was always entirely present. She didn’t talk about dessert during the main course, about the coming morning as she was falling asleep, about meeting again when saying good-bye. She was always in the now.
That August night 7,216 nights ago was the last time Perdu slept well; and when he woke up, Manon was gone.
He hadn’t seen it coming. He had thought it over again and again, had sifted through Manon’s gestures and looks and words – but had found no possible clue that could have told him she was already leaving.
And wouldn’t come back.
Instead, a few weeks later, her letter.
This letter.
He had left the envelope on the table for two nights. He had gazed at it as he ate alone, drank alone, smoked alone. And as he wept.
Tear after tear had run down his cheeks and dripped onto the table and the paper.
He hadn’t opened the letter.
He had been so tired back then, from crying and because he could no longer sleep in the bed that was so big and empty without her, so cold. He was tired from missing her.
He had thrown the letter into the drawer of the kitchen table, angrily, despairingly and above all unopened. To join the corkscrew that she had ‘borrowed’ from a brasserie in Ménerbes and spirited away to Paris. They had come from the Camargue, their eyes bright and almost glazed from the southern light, and had stopped off in the Luberon, in a guesthouse that clung to a craggy slope with a bathroom halfway down the stairs and lavender honey for breakfast. Manon wanted to show him everything about herself: where she came from, the kind of country that was in her blood; yes, she’d even wanted to introduce him to Luc, her husband, from afar, on his tall tractor moving along the grapevines in the valley below Bonnieux. Luc Basset, the vigneron, the winemaker.
As if she wanted the three of them to be friends, and each to grant the other their desire and their love.
Perdu had refused. They had stayed in the Honey Room.
It seemed as though the strength was bleeding out of his arms, as though he could do nothing but stand there in the darkness behind the door.