I don’t belong here.
Perdu thought of Eric Lanson, the therapist from Paris’s administrative district who loved reading fantasy novels and had tried to amuse Perdu with a spot of literary psychoanalysis. He could have talked to Lanson about his grief and his fear! The therapist had sent Jean a postcard from Bali once. There, death was the culmination of life; it was celebrated with dancing, gamelan concerts and seafood feasts. Jean found himself wondering what Max would have to say about that kind of festival. Something mildly disrespectful, without doubt; something humorous.
Max had said two things to Jean during their good-byes. First, that one had to gaze upon the dead, cremate them and bury their ashes – and then begin to tell their story.
‘Remain silent about the dead, and they’ll never leave you in peace.’
Second, that he thought the area around Bonnieux was extremely beautiful and he was going to stay in the dovecote and write. Jean Perdu guessed that a certain red tractor had played a part in this decision.
But what did it mean – that one had to tell the story of the dead?
Perdu cleared his throat and announced to the empty car: ‘Her words were so natural. Manon showed her feelings, always. She loved the tango. She drank from life as if it were champagne and faced it in the same spirit: she knew that life is special.’
He felt a deep sorrow welling up inside him.
He had wept more in the last two weeks than in the previous twenty years. But the tears were all for Manon, every last one, and he was no longer ashamed of them.
Perdu had raced up the steep streets of Cassis. He left Cap Canaille and its spectacular red cliffs behind to his left, and drove on through small hills and pine forests along the old, windy coastal road from Marseilles to Cannes. Villages merged into one another, rows of houses blurred across town boundaries, palms alternated with pines, flowers and rocks. La Ciotat. Le Liouquet. And then Les Lecques.
Spotting a car park beside a path down to the beach, Jean swung spontaneously out of the smooth stream of vehicles. He was hungry.
The little town’s sweeping waterfront, comprising weather-beaten old villas and pragmatic new hotel complexes, was bustling with families. They were strolling on the beach and the promenade, and eating in restaurants and bistros that had opened their sliding windows wide onto the sea view. A few well-tanned boys were playing Frisbee in the surf, and a flotilla of white one-man training dinghies bobbed up and down beyond the line of yellow marker buoys and the lighthouse.
Jean found a seat at the counter of the L’équateur beach bar, which was two yards back from the sand and ten yards from the gentle breakers. Large blue parasols fluttered in the wind over shiny tables, which were tightly clustered, as was the case all over Provence in the high season, when restaurants packed diners in like sardines. Perdu enjoyed an unrivalled view from the bar.
He kept his eyes on the sea as he ate mussels in a rich herb and cream sauce from a deep black pot, and washed them down with some mineral water and a glass of dry white Bandol wine. The water was light blue in the late sunshine.
At sunset it elected to turn dark turquoise. The sand went from light blonde to dark flax and then slate grey. The women walking past became more excitable, their skirts shorter, their laughter more expectant. An open-air disco had been set up on the breakwater, and it was there that mixed groups of three or four girls, dressed in skimpy dresses or jean shorts, and guys wearing shirts that rippled on their shiny, tanned shoulders, were heading.
Perdu gazed after the young women and men. In their impatient, hurrying gait he recognised the young’s unbridled lust for new experience, their striving towards places with the whiff of adventure about them. Erotic adventures! Laughter, freedom, dancing into the early hours, barefoot in the cool sand, heat in their loins. And kisses, forever engraved on the memory.
At sunset Saint-Cyr and Les Lecques were transformed into one big party area. Summer life in the south. These were the hours carried over from the hot afternoon, when the blood stood weary and thick in the veins.
The steep tongue of land dotted with houses and pines to Jean’s left gleamed a rusty gold colour; the horizon was delineated in orange-blue, and the sea swelled sweet and salty.
For a few minutes, as he reached the bottom of his pot of mussels, and sifted idly through the remnants of briny cream sauce and blue-black shimmering shards of mussel shell, sea, sky and land took on the same shade of blue: a cool grey-blue that tinted the air, his wine glass, the white walls and the promenade, and briefly turned people into chattering stone sculptures.