From where he was, Diamantis had an exceptional view over the whole harbor. From the Cap de l’Aigle, far to the south of La Ciotat, to Pointe Grenier, west of Les Lecques.
He was leaning on the balustrade of the villa’s terrace, intoxicated by the smells coming up from the garden. A mixture of mint and lavender. The insistent chirping of crickets filled his ears. The more his senses were aroused, the more his body relaxed. He felt a happiness, a peace he hadn’t known for a long time.
He told himself he could die here, that it would be good to lie under the olive trees, over there at the far end of the garden. But he had already told himself the same thing, twenty years earlier, at home in Agios Nikòlaos, on the island of Psara. And he knew that was where he wanted to rest. Beside his father. It was what he’d told Melina that evening. After the funeral. Before they made love.
They had climbed up through the fig trees, the prickly bushes, and the ruined mills with their motionless sails, to the top of the cliff. The sea and the harbor lay below them. They were bathed in sweat. They stood silently catching their breath, and looked down at the waves dying on the sand.
“You know,” Melina had said, “this is where I can be completely myself. You see me as I am.”
“This is where I want to die, Melina. I’ve learned to live here, on this arid ground. And to stop thinking about the future.”
Melina had turned toward him slowly, with a grave look on her face, and kissed him. A furtive kiss at first, which had sent a quiver through him. Then it had become more passionate. Her lips tasted of salt. Like her body.
They had gone back down at sunset. The only hour of the day when the harbor really comes to life. The hour for ouzo. The hour when men walk arm in arm with their girlfriends. He had slipped his arm through Melina’s, and they had walked along the waterfront, watched by the fishermen and goat sellers sitting at the café tables. They had announced that they were going to get married, and his mother, still tearful with grief, had cried with happiness.
Diamantis heard voices. He turned to see Mariette walking to the gate with the preppy young couple who had been viewing the villa. There was a slamming of car doors, and then she was there. Mariette.
“Deal done!” she cried, happily. “They’re doing the right thing. Beautiful, isn’t it?”
“Fantastic.”
He couldn’t take his eyes off Mariette. She was radiant.
“Don’t you ever want to buy the houses you sell? Like this one, I mean.”
“Yes,” she said, leaning on the balustrade beside Diamantis. “Yes, of course. But . . . First, I don’t really have the money. Second, a house doesn’t mean anything if you don’t have a man to put in it.”
She laughed, as if she had cracked a good joke. She was like a teenager.
“And you don’t have a man, is that it?” he said, smiling.
“I have a little girl, nine years old. Laure. But no daddy to go with her. How about you?”
“I have a son. But I don’t have his mommy anymore.”
She laughed again, an infectiously happy laugh. “So we’re quits?”
“Quits?” He thought it over for a second. “No. Mikis is too old to need a mommy. And I’ve given up on the idea of finding a wife. Or even looking for one.”
They looked at each other. Diamantis was knocked for six by the desire in Mariette’s sparkling eyes. She took his hand and almost ran with him off the terrace.
“How about a swim?”
“A swim?”
“Didn’t you see the pool?”
“You mean there’s a pool, too?”
“Oh, yes, real luxury here. We have to take advantage, right? At least once in our lives.”
They descended a few steps and walked around the house. When they got to the pool, she let go of his hand. She lowered the shoulder straps of the loose-fitting white cotton dress she was wearing. Underneath, she had on a swimsuit, also white. He didn’t have time to get a good look at her body. She dived in, arms outstretched. He watched her moving under the transparent blue water. Her head reappeared at the other end.
“Come on in!” she called, catching her breath.
“I don’t have any trunks. You should have warned me.”
“I’ll close my eyes. Come on, it’s great in here!”
He kept his underpants on. Diamantis was a modest man.
They dried themselves half in the shade, half in the sun. Quite far from each other. Without speaking. Lost in their thoughts, their desires. He and Amina had loved going swimming. They always went out to sea. To the islands of the Frioul. Full of dozens of little creeks where they could be alone.
They would swim for a long time, out to sea and back again, Amina clinging to his back, then climb, breathless, onto a rock, where they would kiss, Amina’s body wrapped around his, then they would sway and fall and let themselves sink to the bottom, Amina’s body intertwined with his, and come back up, rolling with the waves, still clinging to each other like limpets, exhausted now, until they reached the narrow strip of burning sand . . .
Diamantis felt Mariette’s hot breath on his shoulder. She had moved silently toward him. He opened his eyes. She was looking at him. Her big, round breasts strained at the material of her swimsuit. They made Diamantis think of fruit, many different kinds of fruit. Pineapples, mangos, apples, pomegranates . . . He could taste them on his tongue. He rolled onto his stomach to hide his erection.
“How about having a bite to eat?” she said. “My treat.”
She knew a little pizzeria called L’Escalet in the harbor of La Ciotat. They walked along the waterfront arm in arm.
“Does it bother you if I give you my arm?” she had asked him.
No, it didn’t bother him. He liked having a woman on his arm, loved the moment when a man and a woman fall into step, as if one body.
“Look,” she said, pointing to the huge gantries, bascule bridges, and cranes on the other side of the waterfront. “That’s all finished. One day, people will forget there were shipyards here. Everyone’s trying to turn the page. The men who used to work in the shipyards. Their wives and children, too. And the people who are moving into the area and don’t want to know.”
“They build them in Athens now. Ships as big as the France . . .”
“Uh-huh . . .” she said, sadly. “It’s a pity they don’t build them here anymore. This port is nothing without ships.” Then she corrected herself. “It isn’t true. I love it like this too.”
They had stopped. He wanted to put his arm around her shoulders, but he didn’t. So many ports he knew were sinking into oblivion. There were fewer and fewer ports, fewer and fewer ships, fewer and fewer sailors. It was the same everywhere.
He didn’t have an opinion about this. It was just an observation. There wasn’t the slightest twinge of sadness in it. He had the feeling a world was coming to an end. His world. Yes, the century was turning the page, and he was on the page that was being turned. In the new century, people would forget the very name Odysseus, he thought. He recalled how his father’s letters had been full of references to the Ancient World. We are passing the Pillars of Hercules, the headland where Antaeus died . . . Who would be able to say, tomorrow, on what island before the start of the Ocean Calypso had lived, Calypso who seduced Odysseus but couldn’t keep him?
Curiously, that was what he and Mariette talked about over lunch. The Ancient World, not the new world. As if they were both aware that they had no future. Or, more correctly, that their future was in that past that was slipping through their fingers.
They had sat down on the terrace of L’Escalet, under the old plane trees. Mariette had ordered a bottle of light, fruity rosé from the Lacoste estate, on the slopes outside Aix en Provence. And a huge pizza, half mozzarella, half fegatelli.
Mariette had interrupted her literature studies when she had become pregnant with Laure. When Laure started nursery school, she thought of taking them up again. But then her husband, Regis, died of a heart attack one morning, as he was shaving. She had found him lying stiff on the tiled floor of the bathroom when she came back from dropping Laure at the nursery. She had had to forget all that, come to terms with things, carry on with her life. She had taken over Regis’s real estate agency and had made a success of it. “She’s doing quite well,” Toinou had said, proudly.
Encouraged by the fact that Mariette was all ears, Diamantis decided to tell her about his passion for sea maps and ports.
“The origin of a port,” he said, “reveals its qualities. Depending on whether it was built where it was because of a river, because of a coast and a hinterland, or because of the sea itself.”
As he talked, they gazed longingly at each other. Under the table, Mariette’s knees pressed against his, burning hot. But neither of them wanted to make a move—even a small move—that would break the spell of their intimate conversation.
“You see, it’s the way it can be approached that determines the nature of a port. Really determines it. The Atlantic and the Pacific are seas of distance. The Mediterranean, a sea of closeness. The Adriatic, a sea of intimacy.”
“And the Aegean?”
He smiled. The sea of love, he wanted to answer.
“The sea that gave birth to myths. You know, Homer was born on an island, not far from mine.”
“The island of Chios, yes, I know. You were born on Psara, then?”
He was surprised. Not many people knew Chios. Let alone Psara.
“Do you know the islands?”
She shook her head, and her hair caught the sun’s rays, turning almost red. “Only through books. I’ve never left Marseilles.”
“Didn’t you ever want to?”
“No one ever invited me to go abroad. Not even to Corsica!”
They both laughed.
Diamantis wanted to talk to her about Psara. But Psara belonged to Melina. It was her image he saw whenever he went back there. On the streets, on the cliffs, or in the Valley of the Pear Trees, in the middle of the island. Melina’s presence also filled the house. The rose bushes, the orange trees, the bougainvillea in the courtyard bore witness to their past happiness. None of that should be touched, he had said to himself one morning. He had vowed never to take another woman to Psara, and he’d kept his vow.
One evening, just before he left for La Spezia, he had found a suitcase at the bottom of a wardrobe, full of clothes forgotten by Melina. They still smelled of her. One of her dresses in particular. There was a knot in his stomach and he felt almost dizzy. He had fallen asleep, his face buried in the material, smelling her fragrance. When he woke up, he didn’t recall his dreams. All he remembered was a sentence he’d read in a book, which came back to the surface of his thoughts like the body of a drowned man: It is a curse never to love.
The waiter brought their coffees and the check. Around Diamantis and Mariette, life had suddenly reasserted itself. Cars, buses, and mopeds going back and forth. Horns hooting. Engines racing. Shouts. They were the only two people still sitting under the plane trees.
Mariette glanced discreetly at her watch.
“Do you have other appointments?” he asked.
“I ought to get back to the office. What are you doing later?”
“I have to meet Nedim. A crew member who came back to the ship. I’m doing a favor for him.”
“And after that?”
After that, he wanted to go to Le Mas. The restaurant Masetto had mentioned, where Amina hung out. He wanted to find her as quickly as possible. Maybe then he could start thinking about women in a different way, without fear or guilt. Maybe then he could even envisage a different life. Maybe, deep down, even though he truly loved the sea, he knew he only sailed to escape. If we escape too often, we die. He knew that, too. And death, he was aware, was coming closer.
Diamantis didn’t want to die. Life was full of joys. Mariette was a wonderful example of that. She just had to smile, and her dimples lit up her round, pretty face.
“I have to . . . I have to find someone. Someone I haven’t seen for . . . a long time.”
“A woman?”
Mariette’s eyes searched the innermost recesses of his being. He felt uncomfortable. He shrugged, without replying.
She smiled. “And after that?”
“Why, do you have an idea in mind?”
“Mmmm . . . Not an idea, more like a desire . . .”
Their knees were still touching.
“I don’t know, Mariette.”
“Come if you want to. Come when you want to. I put Laure to bed at nine, and I never turn the light out before midnight. Within those limits, anything can happen.”
Mariette dropped Diamantis in the Vieux-Port, not far from the Grand Bar Henri where he’d arranged to meet Nedim. They had driven without speaking, listening to an Italian singer she had discovered quite recently. Gianmaria Testa. Her favourite track was Come le onde del mare. She translated a verse of it for him.
Some evenings have a color you can’t define,
somewhere between blue and purple,
and they vibrate slowly, slowly.
And we who wait for them,
we know they are prisoners
like the waves of the sea.
Mariette knew all the words, and she sang along in a soft voice. They made a fine duo, the singer and her. Come le onde del mare. Come le onde del mare.
She kissed him on the cheek, and the spicy scent of her body filled his nostrils. Her kiss, too, was scented. He wondered how her breasts would taste tonight. Pineapple, mango, apple, or pomegranate? Or the taste of a fruit he didn’t yet know?