“Are you buying those to enhance potency?” she asked. There was a mixture of awe, timidity and hope in her expression.
Shopping that day was like running the gauntlet, and Marianne had no idea why. Madame Camus at the cheese counter, Mademoiselle Bruno at the till and even the Moroccan cleaning lady Amélie hurled questions at her. “Will I find love this weekend? Is he the right one? Should I do everything my husband requests in the bedroom?”
Marianne decided to employ some of the often perplexing phrases she had picked up from Pascale. “A handful of love is better than an oven full of bread. If you squeeze your nose, milk comes out. You don’t have to drink the sea dry.” Every one of her responses was met with a nod and a grateful smile.
She chuckled as she told Pascale everything later, while the goulash was marinating in paprika, but Pascale didn’t find it funny.
“I thought this would happen sooner or later, but not so soon. The people saw you on television, and something must have gone ‘bang’ in their heads.”
“Bang? What do you mean, bang?”
“Laurent offered you hearts? That’s so typical. Next thing you know he’d have asked you to bless his new car in return, or give his children a magic spell for school, or brew him a potion capable of bringing his wife to commit affronts against demure conventions.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Nor do I, but it seems as if people here are hoping you’re a white witch.” Marianne noticed a new, more familiar tone in Pascale’s voice. “They’re going to start gazing after you at the market or trying to touch you quickly.”
“What? But I haven’t done anything!”
“Oh yes you have! You’re from another country. You live alone. You were on television. Television is overpowering magic. To them you’re a woman who has devoted her life to the goddesses of the sea and of love.”
“Oh my word. And why do they think that?”
“Because we’re friends. They think I’m teaching you to be like me, and I have specialized in love. But we both know that your powers lie elsewhere, right?”
“Wrong.”
“Your hands, Marianne. Didn’t you know you’re a healer? Why do you think you bear that birthmark? It means you’re special.”
Marianne studied her fingers, which were kneading pasta dough to make macaroni with fried onions and cheese. “I don’t really know very much about myself,” she explained sheepishly.
“Sometimes other people recognize us before we do.” Pascale laid her fingers gently on Marianne’s cheek. “Yann recognized you, as I did. Did you know that he can taste and hear colors? He’s a synaesthete. He senses things that none of us can see or feel, and then he paints them. You saw that on his tile. You understood what he saw without knowing that you did. You both feel in the same way.”
“I hurt him.”
“I know, Marianne, I know. When will you go to him?”
When the details no longer make me so nervous, Marianne felt like saying, but she would then have had to explain everything else to Pascale. For example, why she couldn’t say, Yann, I love you. It was not because it wasn’t true. There was a simple answer to the question of whether she loved him: yes!
In love there was only yes or no. No I-don’t-knows, no maybes; those were merely nos in disguise. But Marianne was incapable of saying “I love you.” It sounded like a phrase associated with inevitable decisions: Where do we go from here? Shall we move into yours or mine? Shall we buy a house? Let’s go to Rome this winter. And where shall I put the saucers?
It sounded like a variation on what Marianne had left behind when she had decided not to speak to Lothar in Concarneau. She liked the woman she thought she was on her way to becoming, the one who was emerging from her shell, who slept in her own room and decided when she wanted to do what; someone who didn’t immediately hang up Yann’s wet towels or pick up his shirts while he was absorbed in his art, who didn’t even put a teacup in the sink for once; someone who didn’t start thinking three days in advance about what she was going to cook for dinner on Wednesday.
As long as neither of them said “I love you,” neither had any duties or a routine. You and me forever: now let’s get down to the details. Love-begotten obligations were the last thing Marianne wanted. In every respect.
All those damn details! She knew them all too well, and she suspected that she wouldn’t be sufficiently careful and would thus turn into such-and-such’s wife, becoming part of a “we” in which only the man decided. She couldn’t stand that part of herself.
But Yann isn’t Lothar. No, Yann wasn’t Lothar, but she was still too much Marianne. She was afraid that she wouldn’t last for long when free.
—
When she got back to the guesthouse three hours later, she found a familiar and beloved face waiting for her: Grete K?ster. She was holding a glass of champagne, and was fanning warm air toward herself with the postcard Marianne had sent on the day of her planned suicide.
“It would have been a shame if it had ended with death and a drink in the afterlife,” said Marianne’s old neighbor, and the two women gave each other a warm hug.
Grete K?ster held Marianne at arm’s length. “Damn, you look good. What’s his name?”
She resumed her early outings, but this time on the Vespa. Every morning she rode out to Tahiti Beach to practice the accordion by the light of the rising sun. Yet she still felt a lingering sense of unease and wariness. She looked up at every unexpected engine noise, fearing that Lothar might appear at any moment and force her to go back to Celle with him.
The sun came up and set the sea sparkling. Marianne stood there clutching her accordion, and gazed out over the sea and its glittering reflections.
Never again. Never again will I go without this, she thought.
The sea’s voice whispered inside her: You’re finally awakening.
The waves seemed hazy to her, as if some of Avalon’s mists had advanced over the swell. On their way back to the land, they would tell the stories they had gleaned on their travels.
Do I love Yann in the same way as he seems to love me?
The sea answered her, but this time Marianne didn’t understand its language. It was too mighty, and she felt small and irrelevant.
Marianne loved Yann’s hands and his boyish manner when he painted. She loved his eyes, in which, had she been a seafarer, she could have read the briny depths, the eddies and currents, the swirls and tides. She loved the fact that he never clammed up when they didn’t agree (a rare occurrence), and she loved him for the unwavering attention he paid her. As for the things they got up to when they were alone…He had a gift for making her feel beautiful, erotic and desirable with his gaze. His touch swept away all the comical aspects of age, the worries about not having perfectly smooth skin and having folds in which lurked the shadows of the years.