And do I really know what he’s giving up by choosing me? He says he wants no other woman but me. It’s enough that I’m leading two lives; he didn’t want to do the same. Each time he makes things easy for me I could weep with gratitude. Never a reproach, barely a tricky question; he makes me feel that I’m a gift, not simply a bad person who makes too many demands on life.
If I confided in someone back home, he or she would be forced to lie with me and keep it secret and silent. I need to make it difficult for myself, not for others: those are the rules for the fallen.
Not once have I mentioned Jean’s name. I’m worried that the way I say it could allow Maman, Papa or Luc to see straight through me.
Maybe each of them in their own way would show understanding. Maman, because she knows a woman’s longings. They are there in all of us, even as small girls when we can hardly see over the table in the corner of the kitchen, and spend our time chatting to our long-suffering soft toys and wise ponies.
Papa, because he knows the animal lust that lurks inside us, would understand the wild, nourishing side to my behaviour; perhaps he would even recognise the biological instinct – like a potato’s urge to germinate. (I’ll ask him for help if I don’t know what to do. Or Mamapapa, as Sanary wrote in a book that Jean read aloud to me.)
Luc would understand because he knows me, because it was his decision to stay with me even knowing I needed more. He always stands by his decisions: what’s right is right, even if it hurts or later turns out to be wrong.
But what happens if I tell him about Jean, and thirty years from now he admits how badly I hurt him when I couldn’t keep my mouth shut?
I know my future husband – he would spend many horrible hours and nights. He would look at me and see the other man over my shoulder. He would sleep with me and think: Is she thinking of him? Is it good, is it better with him? Whenever I talked to a man at the village fete or the Bastille Day procession, would he wonder: Is he the next one? When will she finally be satisfied? He would come to terms with it all on his own and wouldn’t breathe a word of reproach to me. What was it he said? ‘This is the only life we have. I want to spend mine with you, but without impeding yours.’
For Luc’s sake too I must keep my mouth shut.
And for my sake – I want Jean all to myself.
I hate wanting all of this – it’s more than I bargained for …
Oh, merciless freedom, you continue to overwhelm me! You demand that I challenge myself and feel ashamed, and yet continue to feel so outrageously proud to live a life full of my desires.
How I will enjoy looking back on all our experiences when I am old and can no longer touch my toes!
Those nights when we lay in the grass in the fort at Buoux, searching the stars. Those weeks when we turned wild in the Camargue. Oh, and those fabulous evenings when Jean introduced me to a life with books as we sprawled naked on the divan with Castor the cat, and Jean used my backside as a book rest. I didn’t know there was such an infinite number of thoughts and marvels, and so much knowledge to be had. The world’s rulers should be forced to take a reader’s licence. Only when they have read five thousand – no, make that ten thousand – books will they be anywhere near qualified to understand humans and how they behave. I often felt better, no longer so bad, fake and unfaithful, when Jean read me bits where good people did nasty things out of love or necessity or their hunger for life.
‘Did you think you were the only one, Manon?’ he asked – and yes, it really did feel that awful, as if I were the only one unable to rein in my appetite.
Often when we’ve finished making love and haven’t yet started again, Jean tells me about a book that he’s read, wants to read or wants me to read. He calls books freedoms. And homes too. They preserve all the good words that we so seldom use.
Leniency. Kindness. Contradiction. Forbearance.
He knows so much; he is a man who knows what it means to love selflessly. He lives when he loves. His confidence falters when he’s loved. Is that why he feels so awkward? He has no idea what is where in his body! Grief, anxiety, laughter – where does it all come from? I’d press my fist into his tummy: ‘Do your butterflies live here?’ I’d blow under his belly button: ‘Virility there?’ I’d put my fingers to his neck: ‘Tears here?’ His body can be frozen, paralysed.