Marianne woke before sunrise. She couldn’t recall ever having enjoyed such a deep and replenishing night’s sleep. She had felt so safe and secure. Looking out of the window, she could smell the sea.

As she pattered past the deserted reception desk, she impulsively took one of the yellowed postcards of the guesthouse from a stand. They were all postage paid.

She wrote the address of Grete, her friend and neighbor in Celle, on the fine lines, then paused. She wanted to thank Grete for having been there for her, for her laughter and feathery slippers and for having sent her postcards from all over the world when she’d traveled to forget her love for the hairdresser. Marianne had loved being let in on her adventures.

The hairdresser was married and had returned home to his wife every night of the twenty years he had slept with Grete. When his wife died, he followed her two weeks later, leaving Grete seriously put out. “He had such a guilty conscience that he even snuck off into the grave after her!”

“Thank you for everything. And for being who you are,” wrote Marianne, then slipped the card into her coat pocket.

She found the sign for the coastal path on the left a hundred yards along the village’s main street. Next to the sign was a postbox into which she dropped the card. She was certain that this would be her last sign of life to her hometown.

Four miles to Port Manec’h, where the Belon and the Aven flowed together into the Atlantic; twelve thousand paces and it would all be over.

Marianne passed an old thatched granite cottage with stooping eaves, a house as old as hope, before the narrow footpath peeled away from Kerdruc and led off into the dim woods. Trees like cathedral buttresses and walls overgrown with grass and ivy arched over the slender path. The fragrance of the woods blended with the peculiar aroma of seaweed, salt and spray.

A wood that smells of the sea.

The path narrowed, and lichen and muddy puddles grappled with the tight bends. On the far side of a hollow, Marianne came upon the first branch of the Aven. A trickle divided the loamy riverbed in two, and the footpath wiggled its way up a rise past towering, lichen-covered rocks. It was like being in the rain forest, with only sky, trees, water, earth and the blaze of the rising sun above her head.

She breathed in, breathed out. She screamed. She seemed to have no control over how long her scream lasted. She screamed breathing out and breathing in. The cry pulverized her entire life into fragments, and she screamed and spat them all out. Her soul spewed up pain.

Walking on, she felt as if something had jumped off her back, something that had dug its sharp claws into her skin. It was fear. Fear had jumped off, an ugly, red-eyed beast that was now scuttling through the undergrowth to look for someone else’s back to possess. She heard a rustling and a cracking in the depths behind the green wall.

I never even noticed that I am alive, she thought.

High tide was driving new, salty water into the side channels of the river, and the scent of the wood was changing.

Her movements split the passing time, and Marianne no longer felt like a stranger in this place: it was as if she had merged with it and dissolved the unruly borders between man and matter. Moisture had gathered in the small of her back. She could sense her body more than ever before, could feel her muscles twitching with the unfamiliar exertion and wanted more, wanted to move, to walk, to work. And then the fragrance hit her—that singular fragrance!

Far below, under the primeval white cliffs, the sea washed against the shore. Marianne could smell it and hear it. She tasted salt on her lips, and she fell helplessly in love with the sight of the sea with the light dancing on its surface.

She followed the ancient customs path north along the top of the cliffs. She hoped against hope that it would soon lead her down to the water’s edge so that she might at last dip her hands into this endless, scented expanse.

—

Marianne sang to the beat of the waves slapping against the shore behind her—a narrow, terraced white beach under cliffs hemmed with sedge grass, bilberries, wildflowers and broom. She walked toward the sea, singing “Hijo de la Luna” as she went, one of the most beautiful songs she knew, full of longing and pain. In it a young gypsy woman begs the moon for a husband, but the moon demands her firstborn in return. The woman finds her beloved and the child is born. Its skin is light and its eyes gray. The gypsy man believes it to be another man’s and stabs his wife to death, then abandons the child on a mountaintop. As it wails, the moon wanes to a slim crescent that could serve the child as a cradle. People criticize the mother and the moon: a woman who gives up her unborn child to get a husband doesn’t merit a child’s love, and the moon has no right to be a mother, for what can it do with a creature of flesh and blood? What did you want with the child, moon? Yet no one criticizes the man who kills his wife out of vanity, fear and foolish pride.

And it’s always the same story, thought Marianne, lifting the hem of her dress a little higher. No one accuses men of anything; it is the woman who bears the blame if he doesn’t love her, if she’s too weak to leave or if she has a child but no wedding ring. We are the sex that blames itself. Lothar killed love and life, and I never managed to accuse him of anything! What did you want with my love? Tell me! What did you want with it?

She was awash with feelings and thoughts that kept rising to her lips but no further. Why had she never been bold enough to be candid with her husband, to demand of him, “Know my body! Respect my heart!?”

She railed at her own cowardice then fell silent. She could hear nothing but the roar of the sea. She ventured another two steps into the water, which was now up to her thighs. She walked farther into the painful, cold waves until they washed about her stomach and splashed her face with brine. The sea was a living organism, its surf like boiling milk. Watery claws snatched at her.

“It’s all over for me,” she whispered.

Another step. The claws clutched harder. She felt her blood pounding, her breathing, the wind snagging in her hair and the sun warming her skin. She thought of the Shell Room, and of the cat between her calves; she thought of Jean-Rémy.

So today was to be the last day on which she would see and feel the sea, just as the sight of the endless horizon was inspiring an unfamiliar feeling of boundlessness within her. This was the last time she would hear her own voice, but it had to be done.

Who said so? Salty spray spattered her face. Yes, who said so? Was she not free to do or not do whatever she pleased? She could do it right now! She had the power to decide at any moment that it was over.

She spun around to take in the rugged beauty of the coastline.

Tomorrow.

She turned and waded back to the shore.

Tomorrow.