You are lying there now like a dancer doing a pirouette. One leg stretched out, the other pulled up. One arm above your head, the other almost braced against your side.
You always looked at me as though I were unique. In five years, not once did you look at me with anger or indifference. How did you manage it?
Castor is staring at me. We two-legged creatures must seem very strange to cats.
I feel crushed by the eternity that awaits me.
Sometimes – but it is a truly evil thought – just sometimes I wished there were someone I love who would go before me. To show me that I can make it too.
Sometimes I thought that you had to go before me so I could do it too, certain that you are waiting for me …
Adieu, Jean Perdu.
I envy you for all the years you still have left to live.
I shall go into my last room and from there into the garden. Yes, that is how it will be. I shall stride through tall, inviting French windows and straight into the sunset. And then … then I shall become light, and then I can be everywhere.
That would be my nature; I would be there always, every evening.
Jean Perdu poured himself another glass of wine.
The sun was slowly sinking. Its pinkish light settled over the land, painting the houses gold, and making his wine glass and the windows of the farms down below glitter like diamonds.
Then it happened: the air began to glow.
Like billions of dissipating droplets, sparkling and dancing, a veil of light descended on the valley, the mountains and him; the light seemed to be laughing. Never in his whole life, never before, had Jean Perdu seen such a sunset.
He took another sip as the clouds revealed themselves in a multitude of colours, from cherry and raspberry to peach and honeydew. Then, at last, Jean Perdu understood.
She is here.
There!
Manon’s soul, Manon’s energy, Manon’s whole disembodied essence filled the land and the wind; yes, she was everywhere and in everything; she sparkled and manifested herself to him in every form she had taken on …
… because everything is within us. And nothing dies away.
Jean Perdu laughed, but his heart ached so much that he fell silent and turned his attention inwards, where his laughter danced on.
You’re right, Manon.
It is all still there. The times we spent together are immortal, imperishable, and life never stops.
The death of our loved ones is merely a threshold between an ending and a new beginning.
Jean breathed deeply in and slowly out again.
He would invite Catherine to explore this next stage, this next life, with him – the new, bright days after a long, dark night that had commenced twenty-one years earlier.
‘Good-bye, Manon Morello, good-bye,’ whispered Jean Perdu. ‘It was wonderful to have known you.’
The sun sank behind the hills of the Vaucluse, and the sky glowed with molten fire.
Only when the colours had paled and the world had turned to shadow did Perdu drain his glass of Manon to the last drop.
Epilogue
It was the second time they had eaten the thirteen desserts together on Christmas Eve, laying three extra places for the dead, for the living and for good fortune in the year to come. Three seats were always left empty at the long table in Luc Basset’s house.
They had listened to the ‘Ritual of the Ashes’, the Occitan prayer of the dead, which Victoria read to them beside the open fire in the kitchen. She had asked to read it on this anniversary, for her mother’s sake and for hers: it was a message from the dead woman to her beloved.
‘Am the bark that carries you to me,’ Vic began in her clear voice. ‘Am salt on your numbed lips, am the aroma and the essence of every food … Am startled dawn and garrulous sundown. Am a dauntless island, fleeing the sea. Am what you find and what slowly releases me. Am the positive boundary of your solitude.’
At these final words Vic started to cry. So did Jean and Catherine, who were holding hands; and Joaquin Albert Perdu and Lirabelle Bernier, occasionally known as Perdu, who were testing out a truce as lovers and companions in Bonnieux. Austere northerners, whom little moved to tears otherwise – certainly not words.
They had grown very fond of Max, their so-called adopted grandson, and of the Basset family, to whom their lives were bound by love, death and grief. For a few days around Christmas, this unusual mix of emotions brought Perdu’s parents together – in bed, at the table and for a shared car journey. Throughout the rest of the year Jean continued to be treated over the telephone to his mother’s moaning about her ex-husband – ‘that social dyslexic’ – and to his father’s jocular complaints about the professor.