Her doomsday didn’t come the next day or the day after that. For the past eleven days Marianne had woken shortly before sunrise and set off through the misty woods to die in the sea. But each day she grew stronger, shedding her world-weariness. The sun began to tan her skin, and the sea made her eyes brighter. Her knee seldom hurt her now.
Every morning she walked barefoot into the foaming waves, but the urge to surrender to them was always washed away by a defiance she couldn’t fathom. Once it was the pumpernickel she was desperate to bake for Jean-Rémy during one of their evening French lessons. Another time she had promised to go with him to the organic market in Trégunc. Then there was one of the weekly Wednesday concerts that Laurine wanted to take her to on their evening off. And if she was already there, she might as well take a look at the island off Raguenez, at the northern end of Tahiti Beach, which one could reach on foot at low tide. This was where the two lovers in Benoîte Groult’s novel Salt on our Skin had first slept with each other.
“I need a word with you,” Marianne said to Jean-Rémy on the twelfth day. He was tying up dough in linen bags, which he tossed into the simmering kig ha farz casserole, a traditional dish whose ingredients were pancakes, oxtail, flank of beef, cured pork, savoy cabbage and celeriac.
Marianne pushed the cauliflower florets to one side; the kaolenn-fleur came from a field directly by the coast. She started reading from the small order pad she used as an exercise book.
“This silliness. With you and Laurine. Stop it. Send her flowers every day. Be a man, not a…triñschin…an, umm, cabbage-head!”
“Not sorrel?!” Jean-Rémy said with irritation before spelling out Marianne’s tasks to her. “First, mix the pig’s blood with flour, sugar, raisins, salt, pepper and a little chocolate. Paul’s twins are celebrating their birthday tomorrow and they’ve ordered silzig—blood sausage.”
Marianne collected herself. “Jean-Rémy. I was talking about Laurine!”
“Second, clean the morgazen—the squid. Remove the skin, the spikes, the beak and the suckers.”
At a sign from Jean-Rémy Marianne passed him a bowl filled with bottle corks, which he poured into the pot with the washed calamari tubes. The corks were intended to neutralize the proteins that made the calamari so chewy, and render the white flesh exquisitely tender.
“How about flowers?” Marianne continued to beseech him.
“The potatoes need peeling too!”
“Write her a love letter, will you?”
Jean-Rémy fled into the cooler. “Madame, tomorrow is the first day of the summer holidays, and the next day half of Paris will have moved to Brittany. The sleepy villages suddenly become frantic beehives, with tourists swarming in and out of this place, hungry for mussels and lobster. We won’t have a day off until the end of August. When do you want me to write letters?”
“At night?” Marianne said, then more gently, “You little triñschin.”
Catching Marianne’s words, Madame Geneviève smiled to herself behind the bar. She was making an inventory of bottles, polished cutlery, glasses and cruet sets. She thanked every god in Brittany for this woman. Marianne had cleaned the guesthouse and washed and ironed mountains of bedsheets, pillowcases, tablecloths and curtains. The German woman was bringing the guesthouse to life.
Geneviève checked the buttons of her black dress and pulled her hair back until her temples hurt. Fate had done her proud: this Marianne had a heart so big that a supertanker could do a U-turn inside it. The guesthouse owner wished she had that much room in her own heart.
Yes, there had been moments. There had been that one man, that love, laying existence bare in a way that made everything else pale into insignificance, swelling her heart to bursting point and making it big enough to hold the entire world. But then fate had unleashed its fury upon her.
Geneviève sighed and walked out of the restaurant and along the quayside. Gardeners were transplanting seedlings into pots on the terrace and removing the tangled weeds from around the front door of the guesthouse.
Laurine was sweeping Ar Mor’s terrace with a broom. “Mon amour, oh, mon amour,” she whispered to the broomstick, “je t’aime, sleep with me, right here and now.” She closed her eyes and began to waltz.
“Laurine!” The startled young woman dropped the broom, which clattered onto the polished planks. Her face went dark red under her bangs. “What’s wrong with you? Are you daydreaming?”
“Yes, Madame. I was dreaming that this was my lover and we were naked and he—”
“Silence!” thundered Geneviève.
Laurine picked up the broom and pressed it to her bosom.
“Go home and dream!”
“But there’s no one there.”
“There’s no one here either.”
The girl dumbfounded Geneviève. Nature had created her to make legions of men unhappy, and what did she do? She made herself unhappy.
Just as Madame Geneviève grabbed the broom from Laurine’s hand, an old Renault came coasting down the slope toward the harbor. Geneviève turned pale and clung to the broomstick.
A man got out of the Renault. Tall and wiry, wearing jeans, the sleeves of his white shirt rolled up. He must have been handsome as a young man, and that handsomeness had matured into an expressive, virile, vigorous demeanor.
“Isn’t that…?” Laurine blurted out, eyes widening.
“It is. Go into the kitchen. Immediately,” Madame Geneviève ordered, and Laurine obeyed her.
“What do you want?” Geneviève Ecollier asked the man, who approached her as tentatively as a wild animal.
“To see where my guests will soon be heading,” he said in a voice that thrummed like a D major chord. “It looks as if you’re reopening the guesthouse soon.”
“Well, now you’ve seen it. Kenavo.”
“Genoveva…please.” His imploring gaze brought about no change in her impassive face.
Madame Geneviève pressed the broom to her chest and walked back into Ar Mor, her back ramrod-straight and her head held high.
“Genoveva,” the man called after her, tenderly, beseechingly.
Marianne retreated from the corner by the back door. She hadn’t intended to eavesdrop, and she hurried to bring the bunch of thyme from the vegetable patch to Jean-Rémy.
“Have you said something nice to Laurine today?” she asked casually. Jean-Rémy handed her a bucket of mussels and signaled to her to remove their beards.
“I told her she’s beautiful.”
“No you didn’t, triñschin.”
Jean-Rémy mumbled something unintelligible as he stirred another pan of washed mussels that were bubbling away in a mixture of white wine, butter and shallots.
“There was a man outside. Do you know him?”
“Hmm,” Jean-Rémy growled. “Alain Poitier. From the other side. Rozbras. He’s our competitor.” He tipped the mussels into a large dish, picked out the unopened ones, poured the liquid through a sieve into a smaller pot and dusted the sauce with flour. Marianne passed him the saffron, the cream and the sour cream, and he added them to the mussel stock before boiling it down.
She reflected on what she had just seen. Nothing is colder than a heart that once blazed.
Alain Poitier wasn’t merely a competitor, she thought. He was also the man who had shaped Geneviève’s experience in such a way that her face only betrayed emotion at night and never in front of anyone.
Marianne wondered what kind of expression she herself might have had, how her body language might have changed, had she succeeded in making her husband love her, respect her or give her a flower, just one flower, once.