The tour guide gave a talk about oysters, but Marianne listened with only half an ear; the view out to sea over the river and its gently rocking boats was simply too enticing. She caught snatches of explanations about small larvae and underwater nurseries.
“Des plates ou des creuses?” said a voice behind her. It was the man in the biker boots. He chatted as he first opened one of the smooth, round oysters and then one of the long variety with a rough, barnacle-encrusted shell. It made a noise like a twig cracking. He held out the rounder, flatter oyster to Marianne. “Calibre numéro un, madame!”
Her hand trembled as she peered into the shell. She looked up at the young man again. Though he was attractive, he didn’t seem too sure of it. Dark-blue eyes with a glint of tenderness and longing. His gaze spoke of many unfulfilled nights.
I don’t dare. She’d never eaten an oyster in all her life. She caught the man’s eye again and noticed a smile on his sensuous lips. Go on, he encouraged her with a nod.
Marianne copied the movements she had seen him make, raising the oyster to her mouth, throwing back her head, and slurping. She caught the subtle tang of seawater; she tasted a nutty flavor and something like shell, and her nose was full of the concentrated aroma of what she imagined when she saw the sea—spray, waves, surf, jellyfish, salt, coral and teeming fish, the wide horizon and infinity.
“Sea,” she said wistfully. One could eat the sea!
“Ya. Ar Mor—the sea,” he said with a throaty laugh. He scraped out the remaining gray muscle with the oyster knife and passed her the shell again.
Ar Mor. Every oyster was like the sea, thought the young man. The same sea, wide and free, wild or gentle, delicate blue or black, that each of us carried inside us. An oyster wasn’t only a delicacy. It held the key to our deepest dreams of the sea. People with no desire to throw themselves into the sea’s embrace, those who feared the breadth of its horizon and its depths, its passion and its unpredictability, would never like oysters. They would feel only disgust, just as they were disgusted by love, passion, life, death and everything the sea represented.
“Merci,” said Marianne. Their fingertips touched as his hand took the oyster shell from hers.
You should have been my son, Marianne thought suddenly. I would have loved to have a son like you. I’d have danced to opera with you. I would have given you love, so that you too could love.
As she sat there eating one oyster after another and drinking a glass of Muscadet under the beeches overlooking the bay, with the sea in the near distance, Marianne’s thoughts turned to death. Was there really nothing absolute about it, as Clara had said? Was it like this side of the world, but with more fairies and demons?
A sparrow landed on her table and flew off with her butter.
The closer the coach got to Pont-Aven, the more Marianne wished for it to slow down. She was afraid that she wouldn’t be able to stop herself from running to the nearest phone booth and begging Lothar to come and pick her up. She wasn’t sure if she trusted herself to remain free.
When the bus pulled up outside the biscuit factory, she slipped quietly away. She walked through Pont-Aven without fully taking in how charming it was; a village of galleries, crêperies and houses that must have been built in the eighteenth century. Here, the past was the foundation of the present. She followed the meandering river through the village until she passed the H?tel Les Mimosas and came to the forest on the edge of what she knew was the artists’ haven—that world depicted on the tile.
A small sign told her that it was four miles to Kerdruc. Another seven thousand yards. Perhaps twelve thousand paces. That was nothing.
Marianne had walked a lot in her hometown of Celle. She’d felt like a bird that was constantly on the wing, gleaning something here, something there. Lothar never let her take the car. “Not enough driving practice,” he’d said laconically, “and anyway, you wouldn’t find a parking space.”
He never went shopping, and he’d be lost in the aisles now, she thought—a sergeant major wandering among the tins, tampons and tea bags. Not for the first time, she instinctively clapped her hand to her mouth. What foul thoughts she was having.
The air smelled of silt and the warm forest floor. Her nose picked up the delicate scent of mushrooms. Maybe she would make it to the sea by sundown and could then go to bed in it with the sun? The only sounds were the hum of insects, the call of a finch, a furtive cracking and a rustling of leaves. Nothing. Her footsteps were the only human noise on the winding forest path along the river Aven, which had now shrunk to the width of a man’s shoulders; it was like the lengthening hallway leading to an unknown room. Foxgloves were in bloom on all sides. Digitalis—the plant that could stop your heart.
Maybe she should simply chew some of that, thought Marianne, but then it occurred to her that local children might come here to play. No child should have to discover a dead body in the bushes.
She passed tall old trees that let only a little green-spangled misty daylight filter through onto the path. After a slight rise, she came to a narrow road that led over a straight stone bridge spanning a dry riverbed, in the middle of which stood a windowless house. A moulin à marée—a tidal mill.
It began to rain, even though the sun was still shining, and the water set the air glittering. She imagined that this golden shimmer was the veil separating the here from the beyond. In the middle of the bridge, she raised her hand and pushed it through the veil. The rain was very soft and very warm. She imagined that fairies and giants were passing her on this bridge and laughing at how she had stretched one hand into the underworld.
She hadn’t known that the world could be so bewitching and so wild. No tower blocks. No modern buildings. No motorways. Just birds building their nests in the palm trees, and wisterias, peonies and mimosas sprawling over the rocks. There was sky, stones and other worlds beyond the golden cloudbursts.
A land like this shapes people, thought Marianne, not the other way round. It must make them proud and stubborn, passionate yet restrained. It shapes them like stones and tree trunks.
She ran, and the deserted land tugged at her limbs. She seemed to hear a whispering from the depths of the wood; she thought of Clara and how she had said that this land would only tell its stories to those who were willing to listen. She pricked up her ears, but she couldn’t understand what the wind and the grass, the trees and the granite had to say to her.
—