Next to the hotel was a small café, where the neighbors who hadn’t gone on holiday greeted each other, drank pastis, ordered a café crème and read the newspaper. By the second morning, they had begun to say hello to Marianne as she ate her breakfast.
She had explored the city, first on foot and then by getting out of the Métro at random, until she had discovered one of the bicycle rental stations, which worked out cheaper than buying a day pass for the underground. Thus Marianne had ridden through Paris on a silver bike, through a Paris that was breathing again now that so many parking spaces were free. Saint-Germain, the Latin Quarter, past the Sorbonne and into the Marais, then westward to the Eiffel Tower and down the Champs-élysées, tinkling her bell. Students were sunbathing in the parks and on the artificial beaches along the Seine, anglers were fishing in the canals, painters were dozing over sketches on their houseboats, and tourists were kissing against the setting sun on the Pont des Arts with its view of the Eiffel Tower.
Marianne was searching. Searching for the place that was meant for her; and if it were not to be found here, then she would have to travel farther afield. First, though, she wanted to be sure that that place wasn’t Paris, the city that had given her an ending and a beginning. She was certain that it would send her a sign.
Again and again she had made her way to the park at the tip of the ?le de la Cité in the hope that she might catch sight of the tramp who had fished her out of the Seine.
She brushed the crumbs from her fingers and stood up. The Arletty was gone, and the sound of a Vespa’s engine echoed in one of the fjord-like nearby streets, covering the strains of Libertango. The melody suddenly brought everything crashing back, all the memories she had so successfully blocked from her mind, fleeing through the city streets with the sole aim of preventing her thoughts from flying out over the land, westward-bound to a port on a river and into a room in which a cat sniffed her pillow and mewed plaintively. Her heart was no longer prepared to ignore Kerdruc.
As the Vespa noise faded, an unstoppable tide of images rolled toward her. The sea. Yann above her. Jean-Rémy’s feet dancing. Geneviève’s eyes scanning Rozbras. White roses in a black vase. A horde of cats lapping at china plates, and the vertical needle of the Jaguar’s speedometer. Sidonie’s hand clutching the pebble. The flowering garden behind Emile’s house in the woods. Geneviève’s red dress.
Something stirred inside Marianne. Tomorrow was 1 September.
Nobody would disturb his plans. Jean-Rémy had declared at short notice on the last day of August that the kitchen would be closed, and indeed today, 1 September, no one had come. Not a single one of his regular guests: not Paul, not Simon, neither Marie-Claude nor Colette. Even Geneviève was away. It was their business what they did—he didn’t give a damn! He was going to resolve the other half of his life.
He picked up something beside him, pulled one of his letters to Laurine from its envelope and read it.
My beloved, mon coeur, my sun, my light. Did you know that you are my very first love? That’s the way it feels—exactly that way. I’m clueless—it’s as if I were meeting myself for the first time. The longing that burns holes in my soul when you are not near me, the relief when you look at me and the desire to give you all of myself: my heart, my hopes, I would even give you my hands and my eyes. I want to entrust my future and my past to you, as if they only became valuable in your hands. Laurine, when I speak your name it means the same for me as love.
He folded the letter into the shape of a ship and placed it next to the paper boats he had already formed from other letters. Then he picked up the next one.
My flower, how exciting and elegant, how pure and how great you are. Simply having known you means I can die more serenely. Loving you means that my life will not have been meaningless and for naught, regardless of whether you love me or not. Yes, it is for you to decide whether to accept or reject my love, but it will not affect the fact that I will then smile in the face of death and say, So what? I knew Laurine. I saw her walk, I saw her laugh, I saw her dance and I heard her voice.
He folded this one with particular care. It was the last of his seventy-three love letters to Laurine. Seventy-three white boats and seventy-three flowers now lay beside him, and he tossed the very first of them—a white rose, which was on the verge of crumbling like parchment—into the river Aven.
As he let the first of the many love letters sail off after the rose, a flying shoe caught him square on the head.
“That’s robbery!” cried Laurine. She was standing only a few yards from the breakwater with Padrig at her side. Jean-Rémy felt infinitely jealous. “Those are letters to me, aren’t they? Padrig showed them to me, but you never handed them over!”
Now Laurine removed her other shoe and hurled it at Jean-Rémy. He ducked, and the shoe hit Max on the tip of his tail. The cat leaped into the air, spitting, and trotted a little way to one side, where it sat down indignantly and began to groom itself.
“They belong to me! Letters belong to their addressees!”
“Only when they’ve been sent,” cried Jean-Rémy, “and I’m only sending them now.”
“Ohhh, you…dweeb!” Laurine furiously stamped the ground.
But why were they shouting at each other, and why had Laurine taken her shoes off? Now she was also pulling her T-shirt over her head! Jean-Rémy felt short of breath: she was so unbelievably beautiful. Her skin. The curve of her waist. Her soft stomach. Her hips, as she peeled off her jeans.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m fetching my letter! I don’t want to lose a single one of your words!” She discarded her bra and, lastly, tossed away her white knickers. The hair between her legs glowed golden, and she had a dancer’s figure. She is the most beautiful girl in the world, thought Jean-Rémy, the bravest, the finest, the very best.
Laurine walked onto the quayside to rescue the first of the love letters. She had forgotten that she had decided to take a step toward Jean-Rémy, just the one. She was ready to take a giant leap. But Jean-Rémy got to his feet and ran toward her.
“No!” he shouted. “I know it by heart!”
By now the little paper boat had reached the middle of the river, spinning with increasing speed before it was swept away by the current.
There were tears in Laurine’s eyes as she said, “But it was the first, Jean-Rémy. The first is always the most important one.”
I’ll write you as many as you want, he thought. Hundreds, thousands, year after year. You’ll have a whole library of my words, and I’ll ban salt from the kitchen, because I’ll always be in love with you, even when we’re already man and wife, and father and mother, and grandfather and grandmother. He didn’t say this, though.