Marianne loved the feeling of being wanted. As Marianne. As a woman.
In my search for death I found life. How many deviations, side roads and senseless detours a woman can take before she finds her own path, and all because she falls into line too early, takes too early the paths of custom and convention, defended by doddering old men and their henchwomen—the mothers who only want the most dutiful outcome for their daughters. And then she wastes an immense amount of time ensuring that she fits the mold! How little time then remains to correct her fate.
Marianne was suddenly scared that she would lose the courage to continue to search for her own path.
And yet, life as an autonomous woman is not a song. It’s a scream, a war; it’s a daily struggle against the easy option of obeying. I could have obeyed, could have lived less dangerously, ventured nothing, failed at nothing.
As she took in the wide expanse of the Atlantic, she remembered how she had felt on that bridge in Paris when life seen from the Pont Neuf had resembled a trickle, its opportunities dried up, its possibilities blocked with silt.
That was wrong. It no longer held true. The longer a woman lived, the more she began to discover. If she could first set aside the conventional dreams of marriage, children, lifelong love and professional success, then a life would begin in which everything else was there to be conquered. There could only be meaning when every person found his or her proper place in the course of events. Life wasn’t too short: it was too long to waste unduly on non-love, non-laughter and non-decisions. And it began when you first took a risk, failed and realized that you’d survived the failure. With that knowledge, you could risk anything.
Marianne unstrapped the accordion. She would ride to Yann’s to face him and his love, even if, in his aggrieved state, he were to turn her away. For lying to him when he had asked about her past. For leaving him without answering whether she planned to go back to her husband. “Yann,” she whispered to the sea, and turned to go. A single white rose was poking from the sand.
He must have left it there while Marianne was playing a song for the sea. He must have listened and watched as she played, wept and laughed, as she screamed at the sea and sought and found the right notes and words.
She pulled the rose from the sand and held it to her nose. He was sitting on a rock, very close by. The golden gleam of the sea dappled his face, and the waves were breaking in his eyes. He looked at her as Marianne felt no man had ever looked at her before. His eyes rested on her with great intensity, as if she were an island.
He was composed yet confused, as if he had known her the whole time he had searched for her. Marianne no longer found this strange. She too had found something, here at the end of the earth. In the mirror of the sea she had seen herself, and what she had once been intended for.
Never again. Never again will I go without this.
As she took a step across the heavy sand, he stood up and walked toward her. She let the accordion slide to the ground and flew into his arms.
“Yann!” she cried, then a second time, “Yann!”
“Salut, Marianne,” he whispered, and he embraced her with all his might and his love.
—
As he had sat there watching his lover, Yann had renewed a long-forgotten promise to himself: nothing insignificant ever again. Everything was to be experienced at the highest pitch of passion and life. To expect something greater after life was to forget that life was the greatest thing of all. He had forgotten that, and now he wanted to live with all his strength and with no further dread. Love, paint, love: nothing that would tire his heart or offend his soul.
He wanted to tell Marianne that he understood. For a while her unexplained departure had almost killed him, but then he had understood. A few nights of love and caresses from him could not dissolve forty-one years of marriage. This woman had cast off her former life, but it still clung to her and would not yet let go of her. How could it?
She possessed greater courage than anyone he had ever met, for she had set out into a foreign world, armed with nothing but her determination. Yet beneath all that strength there was still the other Marianne, the vulnerable one. The warrior carried serious wounds, which could prove fatal if they were reopened, and that man—her husband—had cut her to the quick with his TV appearance, reminding her of all the scars she bore.
Yann had understood. Feeling her now, resting in his arms, was a second shock to his system. He stressed every word he whispered into her ear in a voice that brooked no contradiction and asked for no agreement: “Tonight I will not be without you, nor in any of the nights to come.”
She looked up at him. “Why wait for the night?”
They drove to Raguenez, and made their way across to the island off the northern end of Tahiti Beach. There, they made love before the tide came in. They were on an island that no one else knew. When they looked out later over the rolling waves that hurled themselves against the cliffs, Yann asked, “Are you going to tell your husband at some point that you’re alive? And that you’re not coming back? That you want to be free, whether for me or for you?”
Marianne said nothing for a minute. “At some point, yes. Of course.”
Colette had moved in with Sidonie to love her and be loved in return. In view of the certain transience of her love, she felt whole for the first time in her life. It was all there. It had always been there, but she hadn’t noticed: a love of women.
The second week after she had moved in, Sidonie asked her to take her to the stones she had always longed to touch. Stonehenge, the wandering stones of Death Valley, the magical palaces of Malta and the altar stones of Palestine. Her doctor forbade her to travel. Colette flew into a rage and implored him, but he stood firm, warning of a premature death from exhaustion, and she fell silent.
Everything had been in a state of flux recently, as if the steady maelstrom of the passing days had intensified its fateful blows in an attempt to catch up on something that could no longer be reeled in—the past.