11 April 1987
For eight months I’ve known that I’m a very different woman from the girl who came to the north last August and was so scared that I wouldn’t be capable of loving – twice.
It still comes as a huge shock to me to discover that love doesn’t need to be restricted to one person to be true.
In May I’ll marry Luc, beneath a thousand blossoms and amid the sweet scent that a new beginning and confidence bring.
I shall not break up with Jean; I shall, however, leave it up to him whether he does so with me, the voracious want-it-all.
Am I so terrified of transience that I need to experience everything immediately, just in case I’m struck down tomorrow?
Marriage. Yes? No? To question that would be to call everything into question.
I wish I were the light in Provence when the sun goes down. Then I could be everywhere, in every living thing. It would be who I am, and no one would hate me for it.
I must arrange my face before I arrive in Avignon. I hope it’s Papa picking me up, not Luc, not Maman. Whenever I spend time in Paris, my features seek to adapt to the expressions urban creatures wear as they jostle past each other in the streets, as though oblivious to the fact that they’re not alone. They are faces that say: ‘Me? I don’t want anything. I don’t need anything. Nothing impresses me, nothing shocks me, surprises or even pleases me. Pleasure is for simpletons from the suburbs and from stinking cowsheds. They can be pleased. The likes of us have more important matters to attend to.’
But it’s not my indifferent face that’s the problem; it’s my ninth face.
Maman says I’ve added it to my other ones. She has known my every gesture and facial expression since I entered this world as a wrinkly little grub. But Paris has transformed my face from my hair parting to the tip of my chin. She must have noticed the last time I came home, while I was thinking of Jean, his mouth, his laugh, his ‘you’ve got to read this, it’ll do you good’.
‘I’d be scared to have you for a rival,’ she said. She was stunned that she’d blurted it out.
We’ve always dealt with truths in that direct, clear way. I learned as a girl that the best type of relationship was ‘clear as mountain water’. I was taught that difficult thoughts lost their poison when spoken aloud.
I don’t think that’s always true.
My ‘ninth face’ unsettles Maman. I know what she means. I’ve seen it in Jean’s mirror as he rubbed my back with a warm towel. Every time we see each other he takes a part of me out and warms it up so I don’t wither like a frost-damaged lemon tree. He would be a father hen. My new face is sensual, but it hides behind a mask of self-control, which only makes it seem spookier to Maman.
Maman’s still anxious for me. Her anxiety is practically infectious, and I think that should something happen to me, I want to have lived as intensely as possible up to that point, and I don’t want to hear anyone complain.
She asks little, and I tell a lot – I give virtually a blow-by-blow account of my weeks in the capital and I hide Jean behind a beaded curtain of tinkling, brightly coloured, transparent minutiae, detail upon detail. Clear as mountain water.
‘Paris has taken you further from us and closer to yourself, hasn’t it?’ says Maman, and when she says ‘Paris’, she knows I know she’s got a man’s name in mind, but I’m not prepared to tell her.
I never will be.
I am so foreign to myself. It’s as if Jean had peeled back a shell to reveal a deeper, truer self who is reaching out to me with a mocking grin.
‘So?’ it says. ‘Did you really think you were a woman without qualities?’ (Jean says that quoting Musil’s The Man Without Qualities is not a sign of intelligence, merely of a well-trained memory.)
But what exactly is happening to us?
This damned freedom! It means I have to be as silent as a tree stump about what I am up to while my family and Luc mistakenly imagine me in a seminar at the Sorbonne or working hard in the evenings. It means I have to control myself, destroy and hide myself in Bonnieux, and not expect anyone to take my confession or listen to the truth of my secret life.
I feel as if I’m sitting on top of Mount Ventoux, exposed to the sun, the rain and the horizon. I can see further and breathe more freely than ever before; but I am stripped of my defences. To be free is to lose one’s certainty, says Jean.
But do I really know what I’m losing?