‘That’s in the section marked “Survival in the Provinces for City Dwellers”.’
‘And where’s the cleaning bucket? In a book as well?’ Max gave a little grunt of laughter and pushed his earmuffs back over his ears.
Perdu saw a group of canoeists ahead and gave a warning blast of the ship’s horn. The sound was deep and loud, and it coursed through his chest and stomach – directly under his belly button, and from there deeper still.
‘Oh,’ whispered Monsieur Perdu.
He tugged on the horn lever again.
Only a man could invent that.
The blast and its vibrations brought back the feeling of Catherine’s skin beneath his fingers. How her skin had enveloped the deltoid muscles on top of the shoulder. Soft, warm and smooth. And round. For a moment the memory of Catherine made Jean feel dizzy.
Caressing women, steering ships, running away.
Billions of cells seemed to wake up inside him, blink sleepily, stretch and say: ‘Hey! We’ve missed this. More, please. And step on it!’
Starboard to the right, port to the left, channel marked by coloured buoys: his hands still knew, and navigated between them. And women are the smart ones, because they didn’t oppose feeling and thinking, and loved without limits – yes, he knew that in his gut.
And watch out for the eddies coming up to a lock.
Watch out for women who always want to be weak. They won’t let a man get away with any weakness.
But the skipper has the last word.
Or his wife.
Finding new moorings? Parking this thing was about as easy as silencing your night-time thoughts. Nah! This evening he would simply head towards a particularly long and indulgent quay, manoeuvre the rudder gently, if he could find it, and then? Maybe he should aim for an embankment instead.
Or just keep on going until the end of my life.
A group of women peered at him from a carefully tended garden on the bank. One of them waved. Very occasionally a working barge or a Flemish cargo vessel, one of Lulu’s ancient forebears, would come towards them, its phlegmatic captain relaxing with his feet up and steering the large, smooth-turning wheel with one thumb.
Then all of a sudden civilization ceased. After Melun they plunged into the green of summer.
How good it smelled! So pure, so fresh and so clean.
Yet there was something else that was completely unlike Paris. Something very specific was missing, something Perdu had grown so accustomed to that its absence gave him slight dizziness and caused a humming in his ears.
Immense relief swept through him when he realised what it was. There was no rush of cars, no roar of the metro, no buzz of air conditioners. None of the whirr and grumble of millions of machines and transmissions and lifts and escalators. There were no sounds of reversing lorries, trains braking or heels on gravel and stone. None of the bass-driven music from the yobs two houses down, the crackle of skateboards, the chatter of scooters.
It was a Sunday quietness of the kind Perdu had first experienced this ripely and fully when his father and mother had taken him to see relatives in Brittany. There, somewhere between Pont-Aven and Kerdruc, the silence had struck him as the essence of life, hiding itself away from city dwellers at the end of the world in Finistère. Paris had seemed to him like a giant machine that droned and boomed away to produce a world of illusion. It put people to sleep with laboratory-made scents that imitated nature, and lulled them with sounds, artificial light and fake oxygen – as in E. M. Forster’s books, which he had loved as a boy. When Forster’s literary ‘machine’ breaks down one day, people who have so far only communicated via their screens die from the sudden silence, the pure sunlight and the intensity of their own, unfiltered sensations. They die from an overload of life.
That was exactly how Jean Perdu felt now, overrun by hyperintensive perceptions he had never experienced in the city. How his lungs hurt when he took a deep breath! How his ears popped in the unfamiliar liberty of peace. How his eyes were restored by the sight of living shapes. The fragrance of the river, the silken air, the vaulted open space above his head.
He had last experienced such tranquillity and freedom when Manon and he had ridden through the Camargue late one pastel-blue summer. Even so, the days had been as glowing and hot as a stove plate. Already by night, though, the stalks in the meadows and the woods by the swampy lakes sipped dew. The air was steeped in the aromas of autumn and the salt from the salt pans. It smelled of the campfires of the Roma and the Sinti, who lived in summer sites tucked away among bull pastures, flamingo colonies and old forgotten orchards.
Jean and Manon rode on two lean, sure-footed white horses to the deserted beaches among isolated lakes and along small, winding roads that petered out in the woods. Only these horses, native to the Camargue and able to eat with their muzzles underwater, could find their way in the endless, waterlogged emptiness.