It’s up on a hill above the harbour, behind the Notre-Dame-de-la-Pitié chapel, but overlooking Portissol, the tiny bathing beach where the holidaymakers lie towel to towel. Some old Parisian flats are bigger than this house – but not as nice.
Its colour varies from flamingo red to curry-powder yellow. From one of the bedrooms all you can see is a palm, a pine tree, a lot of flowers and the back of the little chapel, and further along, beyond the hibiscus, the sea. Gauguin would have adored the colour combination: pink and petrol, rose and wet turquoise. I’m starting to learn to stand on my own two feet here, Catherine.
In lieu of rent I’ve been renovating the flamingo-curry house since I moved; it too belongs to André and his wife, Pauline. They don’t have the time to work on it themselves or any children of their own they could cajole into doing it. Their nine-room guesthouse, the Beau Séjour, is booked all summer.
I miss the blue room, number three on the first floor, and André’s raucous voice, his breakfasts and his quiet garden with its roof of green leaves. There’s a touch of my father about André. He cooks for his half-board guests, Pauline plays solitaire, or tarot if the occasional old lady requests her to, and she makes sure that there’s always a good atmosphere. I generally see her smoking and tutting as she lays down the cards on the plastic table. She has offered to tell my fortune. Should I take her up on it?
Their cleaning ladies – Aimée, blond, fat, very loud and very funny, and Sülüm, tiny, thin, hard, a shrivelled olive, discordant laughter pouring from her toothless mouth – carry their buckets of washing water with the handles slung over their arms, as Parisian women do their Vuitton and Chanel bags. I often see Aimée in church, the one by the harbour. She sings and she has tears in her eyes as she does so. The services here are very human. The altar boys are young, wear those white nightshirts and have winning smiles. Sanary shows few signs of the general phoniness of many tourist destinations in the south.
Everyone should sing like Aimée: weeping with happiness. I’ve started to belt out some tunes in the shower again while pretending to hop about to the rhythm of the faulty showerhead’s jets. Yet sometimes it still feels as if I’m sewed up in my own skin, as if I’m living in an invisible box that keeps me in and everyone else out. In such moments even my own voice strikes me as superfluous.
I’m building a shade roof over the terrace, for however reliable the sun is here, it is like an aristocrat’s drawing room: warm and safe, cosseting and luxurious; and yet when the heat continues for too long, it can become oppressive, threatening and suffocating. Between two and five in the afternoon, sometimes until seven, nobody in Sanary ventures outdoors. They prefer to retreat to the coolest part of the house, lie naked on the cellar tiles and wait for the beauty and the furnace outside finally to take pity on them. I put damp towels around my head and on my back.
From the kitchen terrace that I am building, you can see the bright house fronts between the ship’s masts in the harbour, but the main features are the gleaming white yachts and the lighthouse at the end of the breakwater, from where the fire service shoot their thundering pyrotechnics into the sky on Bastille Day. You can see the sweeping hills and mountains opposite, with Toulon and Hyères beyond. Lots of little white houses scattered along the rocky outcrops.
Only if you stand on tiptoes can you see old Saint-Nazaire’s square watchtower. The H?tel de la Tour is built around it, a plain cube in which several exiled German writers survived the terrors of the war years. The Manns, the Feuchtwangers, Brecht. The Bondys, Toller. One Zweig, and the other too. Wolff, Seghers and Massary. Fritzi – what a wonderful name for a woman.
(I’m sorry, Catherine, this has turned into a bit of a lecture! Paper is patient; authors never are.)
At the end of July, when my pétanque game had finally progressed beyond that of an unwelcome novice, a small, rotund Neapolitan appeared around the corner of Quai Wilson near the old harbour, panama on his head, whiskers quivering like the cat that got the cream, and a woman on his arm, the warmth of whose heart shone in her expression. Cuneo and Samy! They stayed for a week, having left the barge in the custody of the Cuisery council. Book-crazed Lulu in her rightful place – among her own kind.
Where from, why, how come? Effusive greetings.
‘Why do you never turn your mobile on, you paper ass?’ roared Samy. Well, they had found me, even without it. Via Max, and then Madame Rosalette, of course, as unselfish as ever with the results of her espionage. She had analysed the postmarks on the letters that I sent you and located me in Sanary long ago. How would friends and lovers get by without the concierges of this world? Who knows, maybe each of us has a specific role in the great book of life. Some of us love particularly well; others look after lovers particularly well.