Marianne held his gaze. More strongly than ever, Yann had the impression that he was facing a lady of the lake, and he was ready for her to confer immortality on him with a kiss. Now that he was an old man, he fully understood the legend of Viviane and Merlin. Women loved, and their love was so much greater and so much more lasting than power or manhood would ever be. He imagined how wonderful it would be to be loved by Marianne beyond his death.
Getting to her feet and covering the short distance between them in two strides, she felt as she stretched out her hand to Yann that he was offering his entire being to her as humbly as if she were a queen.
The two shadows on the banks of the pool merged into one.
A week later, as Marianne was practicing her French vocabulary with Pascale while preparing dinner, Emile brought in his accordion. A red accordion with ninety-six buttons. No one had played it for decades, and the pleats of the bellows had become porous. Emile claimed that his Parkinson’s made it impossible for him to play, but maybe she could? When he opened the bellows, they wheezed and the keys refused to produce a single tuneful note.
Marianne lifted the accordion, passed the two leather straps over her shoulders, undid the buckles that pressed the bellows together, slid her left hand under the strap on the manual and pushed the air button, enabling her to pull the bellows apart without a sound. The instrument seemed to exhale.
She pushed the bellows together. An inhalation, a deep breath of heavy, nutritious air. Her ring finger felt for and came to rest on the only rough, raised button on the left manual—C. She flicked one of the five switches on the right keyboard manual.
Breathe in. Gently she pressed on C. Now she only had to pull the bellows to the left again and…She didn’t dare.
“So,” said Emile, “they say you only find out a woman’s true personality when she makes music. One will read music like a picture, analytically and coldly; the next imbues every sound with emotion. And some are cruel, because music is their only lover, the only thing on which they bestow truth and passion, mastery and control. No one else comes as close to them as music and the instrument they use to rule their love. How do you play the accordion, when you eventually get around to playing it?”
“I don’t. My husband finds it too loud and too obscene.”
Emile gave a sharp cough. “Sorry? Your husband? You have a husband?” The gentle ticking of the kitchen’s grandfather clock was the only sound.
“You ran away from your husband, didn’t you?” Pascale finally asked.
“From myself, more like,” said Marianne, her voice suddenly choked.
“Does Yann know that you—”
“That’s none of our business,” Emile interrupted his wife.
“Didn’t you love him anymore?” Pascale ventured.
“I was tired,” Marianne answered, unstrapping the accordion.
“Does he know you’re here?” Emile enquired.
Marianne shook her head.
“And it’s meant to stay that way, I guess,” said the Breton.
She nodded. She was ashamed; she felt like a cheat, a fraud.
Emile Goichon rubbed his face with his rough, healthy hand. “Anyway, let’s drop the subject.” He beckoned to Marianne to come to the garage. There, the light blue Vespa looked different. It had been cleaned, greased and filled up with petrol. Emile had put the scooter into working order.
“It’s a 50cc, so you just need to accelerate and brake. The accordion’s too heavy to haul all the way through the woods. I’ll lend you this thing for as long as…” He paused. “For as long as you want.”
In the kitchen, Pascale was acting as if she’d truly forgotten everything she’d just heard. Marianne agonized over how to explain herself. In one fell swoop, everything she had worked so hard to block out was back: Lothar, her bad conscience, her sense of guilt about not confessing her reasons for leaving him and their life together.
—
After the final guest had left Ar Mor, Marianne disappeared to her room without having her usual drink and daily language practice session with Jean-Rémy. She lay staring at the ceiling in the dark, observing the pools of moonlight, then swung her legs over the side of the bed. She had a rising feeling in her stomach of the kind one gets in a lift that is falling too fast.
She caressed the accordion. The bellows let out a sigh, a short off-key chord. She listened. It wasn’t possible: no accordion played itself. The moonlight shimmered on the instrument. Two thirty. Another three hours until sunrise. She pulled on her jeans over her nightdress and draped the bottle-green leather jacket around her shoulders. Then she picked up the accordion and sneaked out onto the breakwater.
The cat lay curled up on the seat of the Vespa, but at Marianne’s approach it immediately got up, its eyes glinting in the murky darkness.
Marianne swung the instrument over her shoulders. It was heavy against her back. The cat stared at her. It can’t ask you any questions. But it seemed to Marianne that this cat could.
She rode off into the night. She didn’t pass a single car, no cyclists, not even a gull. She heard only the scooter’s high-pitched buzz, tasted the dew on her lips and felt the nighttime chill creeping under her trousers and over her bare ankles. The weight of the accordion tugged her body backward, and the bellows seemed to open and close a few fractions of an inch at every bump in the road. There it was again: that sighing, the quiet chord.
When she stood on the edge of Tahiti Beach and gazed out over the blue-black waters of the Atlantic—above her only stars, beneath her only sand—she took the accordion from her shoulders, turned it around, strapped it to her chest and opened the bellows.
Breathe out. Breathe in.
She had always loved A minor. She moved her finger two buttons up from C.
Breathe out. Breathe in.
It was a lifetime since she had last played. Forty…no, a hundred years. She pressed down her ring and index fingers and eased the bellows apart. The melancholy chord rang out plaintively, nobly, majestically and boldly from inside the instrument, sending vibrations through her stomach and heart.
This was what she had loved so much—feeling the music in her stomach, her abdomen, her chest. In her heart. The sounds were transmitted to her body, and she pushed the bellows back together until the A minor chord transformed the night into music.
She released the buttons and let herself sink heavily onto the sand. It had taken the sea to wake the accordion from its stiff silence.
As with me.
Her thoughts had run away from Lothar so effortlessly, but now they swirled and roared around her all the louder.
Was he really such a bad husband? Am I not to blame in the end? Did I really try to change things? Did I perhaps not love him enough? Could we try to start over again? Hasn’t he earned another chance? And if love is about taking someone for what he is, did I truly do that?