Until now. Now he knew.
‘To carry them within us – that is our task. We carry them all inside us, all our dead and shattered loves. Only they make us whole. If we begin to forget or cast aside those we’ve lost, then … then we are no longer present either.’
Jean looked at the Allier River, glittering in the moonlight.
‘All the love, all the dead, all the people we’ve known. They are the rivers that feed our sea of souls. If we refuse to remember them, that sea will dry up too.’
He felt an overwhelming inner thirst to seize life with both hands before time sped past even faster. He didn’t want to die of thirst; he wanted to be as wide and free as the sea – full and deep. He longed for friends. He wanted to love. He wanted to feel the marks that Manon had left inside him. He still wanted to feel her coursing through him, mingling with him. Manon had changed him forever – why deny it? That was how he had become the man whom Catherine had allowed to approach her.
Jean Perdu suddenly realised that Catherine could never take Manon’s place. She took her own place. No worse, no better: simply different.
He longed to show Catherine the full expanse of his sea!
The men watched Max and Elaia kiss.
Jean knew they wouldn’t mention their lies and illusions again. The essential had been said.
29
A week had passed. Hesitantly, cautiously, they had confided the major events of their lives to each other: Salvatore was the ‘imposition’ of an ‘accident’ between his cleaning lady mother and a married teacher during a free period; Jean was the child of a quarrelsome relationship between an occasional craftsman and an aristocratic academic; Max, a final attempt by a chronic people pleaser and a pedant, worn down by expectation and disappointment, to save their sclerotic marriage.
They had sold books, read to children and had the piano tuned in exchange for a few novels. They had sung and laughed. From a public telephone Jean had rung his parents – and number 27 too.
No one had picked up, even though he had let it ring twenty-six times.
He had asked his father what it had felt like to go all of a sudden from being a lover to a father.
Joaquin Perdu had said nothing for an unusually long time, then Jean heard him sniff. ‘Well, Jeanno … having a child is like casting off your own childhood forever. It’s as if it’s only then that you really grasp what it means to be a man. You’re scared too that all your weaknesses will be laid bare, because fatherhood demands more than you can give … I always felt I had to earn your love, because I loved you so, so much.’
At that they had both sniffed.
‘Why are you asking, Jeanno? Do you mean to say you—’
‘No.’
Unfortunately. A Max and a daughter, a little Lady Defiance, would have been nice. Would, could, should.
Jean felt as though the tears he had shed by the Allier had created some space inside him. He could fill those initial gaps with fragrances, caresses, his father’s love … and Catherine. He could also squeeze in his affection for Max and Cuneo as well as the beauty of the landscape; he had found beneath the sorrow a place where emotion and happiness could live alongside tenderness and the realisation that he was lovable after all.
They reached the Sa?ne via the Canal du Centre, and there they sailed into the eye of a storm. Between Dijon and Lyons, the Burgundy sky came crowding down, growling and black, repeatedly split by lightning.
Tchaikovsky’s piano concertos illuminated the murky darkness in Lulu’s belly like a spark in the belly of Jonah’s whale. Max braced his feet resolutely against the frame of the piano, and conjured ballads, waltzes and scherzi from the keyboard while the boat careened along on the cresting waves of the Sa?ne.
Perdu had never heard Tchaikovsky like this: accompanied by the trumpets and violins of the storm and underpinned by the groaning and pumping of the engine, and the creaking of the timbers as the wind buffeted the boat’s vulnerable waist and tried to drive her against the bank. Books rained down from the bookcases, Lindgren lay under a screwed-down sofa, and through a tear in the armchair’s upholstery Kafka, ears flattened, observed the volumes slip-sliding around.
As Jean Perdu navigated up the Seille, a tributary of the Sa?ne, the view ahead was reminiscent of a giant steamed-up laundry. He could smell the air – it was electric; he could smell the foaming, green water; he could feel the wheel twisting in his calloused hands – and he was delighted to be alive. To be alive now, right now!
He was even enjoying the storm, force 5 on the Beaufort scale.