‘Yes,’ she admitted quietly, then said, more loudly: ‘Yes.’
‘Yes!’ she cried, laughing and weeping, throwing her arms up. ‘And this book was meant to bring me my man, Jeanno! Someone who loves me from the place between his chest and his belly button. I wanted him to find me because he’d been hunting for me, because he’d dreamed of me, because he enjoys everything I am and needs none of the things that I’m not. You know what, though, Jean Perdu?’
She could not stop crying and laughing.
‘You found me – but you’re not the one.’
She turned around.
‘That chap in his flowery apron, with those nice, firm bunched muscles. With his moustache, which will tickle me: he’s the one. You brought him to me. Together you and Southern Lights brought him. By pure magic.’
Her joy infected Jean. She was right, as wishable as that might sound: he had read Southern Lights, he had stopped in Cepoy, met Salvo and from there … hey presto, they had arrived here.
Samy wiped her tear-salted face. ‘I had to write my book. You had to read it. You had to endure and suffer in order to get into your boat and set off at last. Let us believe that’s how it came about. Okay?’
‘Of course, Samy. I believe it. Some books were written for a single person: Southern Lights was for me.’ He mustered his courage. ‘I only survived till now because of your book,’ he confessed. ‘I understood your every thought. It was as if you knew me before I knew myself.’
Sanary-Samy clapped her hands to her mouth.
‘That’s so uncanny, Jean. Those are the most wonderful words I’ve ever heard.’
She threw her arms around him.
She kissed him left and right and then again on the cheeks, the forehead and the nose. After each kiss she said, ‘I’m telling you: never again will I write to summon love. Do you know how long I’ve waited? More than twenty years, dammit! And now you’ll have to excuse me: I’m going to kiss my man – and I’m going to do it properly. That’s the final part of the experiment. But I probably won’t be in much of a mood this evening if it doesn’t work out.’
She hugged Jean tightly once more.
‘Crikey, I’m scared! It’s horrid! But so wonderful. I’m alive. How about you? Did you feel it, right now?’
She disappeared down into the belly of the barge.
Jean caught a ‘Yoo-hoo, Salvo …’
Jean Perdu realised with astonishment that he had – and it felt great.
MANON’S TRAVEL DIARY
Paris
August 1992
You’re asleep.
I see you, and I’m no longer so ashamed that I simply want to bury myself in salty sand because one man can never be everything to me. I’ve stopped berating myself as I have done for the last five cobalt-blue summers. And we had relatively few days together in total: adding them all up, Jean Ravenfeather, I come to half a year in which we breathed the same air – 169 days, just enough to string a double pearl necklace, one pearl for each day.
However, the days and nights away from you – as far away as a vapour trail in the sky – when I thought of you and looked forward to seeing you, they count too. Double and threefold, in elation and guilt. Seen that way, it actually felt like fifteen years, time to try out several lives. I dreamed up so many different scenarios.
I’ve often wondered, did I do wrong, make the wrong choice? Would it have been a ‘proper’ life, alone with Luc, or with someone else entirely? Or was I dealt a good hand of opportunities but played it badly?
There are no wrongs and no rights in life, though. And there’s no reason to ask myself that now anyway: why one man was never enough for me.
There were so many answers.
Such as hunger for life!
And desire, such red-hot, restless, sticky-wet desire.
Such as letting me live before I grow wrinkled and grey, a half-inhabited house at the end of the road.
Such as Paris.
Such as your running into me, like a ship colliding with an island. (Ha-ha. That was my it’s-not-my-fault-it-was-fate phase.)
Such as does Luc really love me enough to put up with this?
Such as I’m worthless, I’m bad, so it doesn’t matter what I do.
Oh, and of course I can only be with one if I’m with the other. Both of you, Luc and Jean, husband and lover, south and north, love and sex, earth and sky, body and spirit, country and city. You are the two things I need to be whole.
Breathe in, breathe out, and in between: live at last.
So three-sided spheres do exist.
But all those answers are now redundant. Now the main question is an entirely different one:
When?
When will I tell you what’s happening to me?
Never.
Never, never, never and never. Or at any moment, when I touch your shoulder, which is poking, as always, out of the covers you’ve rolled yourself in. If I touched you, you’d wake immediately and ask, ‘What’s the matter? What’s up, cat girl?’
I wish you’d wake up and save me.
Wake up!
Why should you? I’ve lied to you too well.
When will I leave you?