‘What are you doing here?’
Rather than answer her, Jean walked towards her, went down on his knees and embraced her. He laid his head on her shoulder, as though he longed to crawl inside her.
Manon ruffled his hair. She hadn’t aged, not a single day. She was as young and radiant as the Manon he had last seen one August evening twenty-one years earlier. She smelled warm and alive.
‘I’m sorry I abandoned you. I was very stupid.’
‘Of course you were, Jean,’ she whispered gently.
Something changed. It was as though he could see himself through Manon’s eyes. As though he were hovering above his body and could look back through time at every episode of his strange life. He counted two, three, five versions of himself – each at a different age.
There – how embarrassing! One Perdu, bending over the map jigsaw and destroying it as soon as it was finished, then piecing it back together again.
The next Perdu, alone in his spartan kitchen, staring at the bleak wall, a naked bulb hanging above his head; chewing on shrink-wrapped cheese and sliced bread from a plastic bag. He denied himself the food he liked to avoid triggering any emotions.
And the next Perdu, turning his back on women. Their smiles. Their questions. ‘What are your plans for this evening?’ or ‘Will you give me a call?’ Their sympathy when they sensed with the antenna only women possess for such things that he had a great, sad hole inside. But their touchiness too, their lack of understanding for the fact that he was incapable of separating sex from love.
And another change came over him.
Now Jean thought that he could feel himself pushing up into the sky like a tree. He was simultaneously tumbling like a butterfly and diving like a buzzard from a mountaintop. He felt the wind streaming through his chest feathers – he was flying! Powerful strokes drove him down towards the seabed: he could breathe underwater.
A mysterious, overwhelming upsurge of energy swept through him. He finally understood what was going on inside him …
When he awoke, the waves had almost carried him back to the shore.
That morning, for some unfathomable reason, he wasn’t sad after his swim and his daydream. He was angry. Furious!
Yes, he had seen her. Yes, she had shown him what a hideous life he had chosen, how painful was the loneliness he endured because he didn’t have the courage to trust someone again. To trust someone entirely because in love there is no other way.
He was more furious than he had been in Bonnieux when Manon’s face had stared out at him from the label on the bottle of local wine. Angrier than he had ever been before.
‘Merde!’ he roared at the surf. ‘You stupid, stupid, stupid cow – why did you have to go and die in the prime of life!’
Two women joggers were gawking at him from the tarmac beach path. He was embarrassed, but only for a second.
‘What are you looking at?’ he barked. He was brimming with a blazing, roaring fury.
‘Why didn’t you simply ring me like any normal person would have? What was the point of not telling me you were sick? How could you, Manon? How could you sleep next to me all those nights and say nothing? Merde, you stupid … you … God!’
He didn’t know where to direct his rage. He wanted to punch something. He kneeled down and pummelled the sand and shovelled it behind him with both hands. He shovelled. And raged. And shovelled some more. But it wasn’t enough. He stood up and ran into the water; he thrashed at the waves with his fists and hands, both together, one after the other. The salt water splashed into his eyes. It stung. He punched and punched.
‘Why did you do it? Why?’ It didn’t matter whom he was asking – himself, Manon, death; it made no difference. He was raging. ‘I thought we knew each other, I thought you were on my side, I thought …’
His fury hardened. It sank into the sea between two waves; it became flotsam and would be washed up elsewhere to make someone else furious – furious that death could break in at any moment and ruin a life.
Jean sensed the stones under his bare feet and noticed that he was shivering.
‘I wish you’d told me, Manon,’ he said, calmer now, breathless and deflated. Disappointed.
The sea rolled in, imperturbably.
The weeping stopped. He still thought of particular moments with Manon; he continued to perform his aquatic prayers. Afterwards, however, he simply sat, let his skin dry in the morning sun and enjoyed the shivering. Yes, he enjoyed walking back along the fringe of the water in bare feet, and enjoyed buying his first espresso of the day and drinking it, his hair still wet, while he observed the sea and its colours.