at the plain speaking he didn’t expect from someone with my education. I enjoyed shocking him. It was so easy to do. His own world was rigid, with people and things allotted watertight compartments where they were supposed to stay.
As I smoothed a soothing ointment over the afflicted area I wondered why the authors of erotic books never mentioned these minor accidents of pleasure. Their heroines have cast-iron vaginas, endlessly receptive to the intrusion of foreign bodies. Mine felt flayed. In the magnifying mirror I could scarcely recognise my neat, distinguished vulva. In its place was an inflamed apricot, swollen, rudely bursting from its usual confines, in short utterly indecent and incapable of admitting so much as a piece of spaghetti. And yet it wasn’t long before I was accepting, indeed imploring, his branding iron, begging him to penetrate me once more with that enormous thing. And, against all physical laws, the first searing pain over, it fitted perfectly, like a glove as one says. Any other time, I should have pleaded for a truce, but there was so little time now. Against expectations, having counted on filling up my tank and going off happily, I found myself wanting him more and more. Being beside him constantly, breathing his wheaten smell, stunned by perpetual desire, absorbed all my faculties. I lay awake at night, nourishing myself with his proximity while he slept. By day, I fed on his handsomeness, the caress of those hands which looked so hard and rough but had a goldsmith’s delicacy when they touched me.
Occasionally, a bit ashamed of ourselves, we tried to restrain our animal frenzy by going to see the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, the Louvre. Making the tourist rounds instead of love. As it was his first visit to Paris I took Gauvin on a bâteau mouche. But all our sight-seeing trips were cut short. Clinging together, aching with desire, we pretended to stroll around, like normal people. But he had only to let his glance linger on my breasts or brush my leg with his powerful thigh or look at me in a way that had nothing to do with the facade of the Louvre and we’d race back to the hotel room, guilty at our haste but unable to hide it.
Or we plunged into a bar. Only wine, or spirits, could loosen the knot in my throat, each drink bringing us still closer, helping us to forget we would soon part.
‘Just what do you think you’re doing here, Lozerech? Tell me.’
‘No one’s more surprised than me. Just stick with me and we’ll try to work it out.’ He was attempting to make light of something which palpably bothered him. But even as he replied, his leg pressed against mine, and we were off, done for, both of us breathing one of those involuntary sighs which punctuate the body’s impulses.
They were wonderful and terrible, those days. Wonderful because I find it shamefully easy to live in the moment. Terrible, because I sensed that Gauvin was about to offer me his life and that it wasn’t an offer he would make twice.
It was only on the last night, in one of those warm little restaurants which cradle you from the harshness of life, that we plucked up the courage to speak. There was no point in even trying in the hotel. Our hands quickly got in the way of any conversation. And the truth was too alarming: we were there in error. We had staged a break-out from our real lives, something for which we’d be punished one day.
While I fiddled with my fish, trying to hide it under the debris on my plate because I knew I couldn’t swallow it, Gauvin was devouring his food with the concentration he brought to everything he did. And, while he ate, he sketched his vision of the future, as prosaically as he would have negotiated a contract with the Concarneau Fisheries Board. He proposed, at a stroke, breaking off his engagement, changing his job, studying as much as necessary to learn about music and modern art, doing some reading – the classic authors to start with – losing his accent and, finally, marrying me.
He sat there on the other side of the little table, his knees gripping mine, his clear eyes asking if this wasn’t a noble sacrifice. They grew troubled as they read in mine that even the offer of his life was not enough.
I should have preferred not to answer at once, not to murder in two or three words so passionate a love. I wanted to say we could think it over. But his ingenuousness broke my heart. What other man would ever make me so generous and so mad a proposal? Unfortunately Gauvin only operated on a straight yes or no. He would rather tear the heart from his breast than put up with the compromise of seeing me but not possessing me.
I was silent for a moment: all I could offer him in return were those frivolous things which are no foundation for life – the crazy desire and the tenderness I felt for him. I didn’t want to give up my degree. I didn’t want to be a fisherman’s wife. I couldn’t live in Larmor among his fishermen friends. I didn’t want Yvonne for a sister-in-law, or to spend my Sundays at the Lorient stadium, watching him running around in the penalty area. Above all, I didn’t want him to sacrifice his job, his accent, any of his strengths and weaknesses. How did I know I would still love him as an office worker, or even as a shipwright, without the reflection of the sea in his eyes? And would he love himself?
My arguments were useless. His face closed sullenly. He looked dogged, but he couldn’t control a quiver at the corner of his mouth. Christ, how I loved that contradiction in him, between the vulnerability and the fierce impulsiveness of his nature. Seeing his pain made me love him even more. I deserved a beating for that.
As we left the restaurant I tried to put my arm round his waist, but he pulled away brusquely.
‘If that’s how you feel, best I be off tonight. No point in paying the hotel another night,’ he said flatly.
For me, giving up even one night was an insult to life, a rejection of the gift we had been offered. But I could not convince him of that. Lozerech was going back to his own kind, filled with bitterness against city girls who fucked up your life, then went off with a clear conscience. He was constructing a version of events which would fit his own world-view.
‘You’ll be sorry, maybe, that you turned down my offer,’ he said. ‘Maybe you’re too complicated to be happy.’
He didn’t look at me. He never looked me in the eye when he criticised me. He reckoned that in a year – well, five at most – he could catch up to my level. He thought you could catch up on anything. He had no idea of the unfair advantages you get from a prosperous upbringing and a privileged education. He thought one got places simply by hard work. And he wasn’t one to shirk hard work. What was the point of being brave and industrious if you couldn’t conquer obstacles like those? He wouldn’t have believed me if I had told him that it isn’t just books and hard work which make the difference. It would have seemed too cruel, too unjust.
So I chose lesser arguments, more petty, more acceptable, which reassured him in a way. But the one who reasons is the one who loves less. Gauvin already knew this.
The last train for Quimperlé had gone. What joy! Now he would have to come and lie beside me one more time, this brute, who was getting more hostile by the minute. Back at the hotel he asked for another room, but they were all taken. I tried not to let my satisfaction show. As soon as we got to our room he started flinging things into his suitcase, the way they do in films. Then he undressed in silence, hiding his sex to punish me. In bed, I had once more that warm wheat smell of him, but he turned his back on me, that white back of a seaman who has neither the time nor the desire to sunbathe. His brown neck looked quite different, like a game of Heads, Bodies and Legs. I brushed my lips where the brown and white met below childlike wisps of hair, but he didn’t stir. An icy force field of rejection emanated from him, paralysing me, and I lay there, sleepless, as close as I could get without touching him.
In the small hours, sensing that he had dropped his guard, I couldn’t stop myself pressing my belly to his back and laying my cheek on his shoulder. In that silent half-sleep, I felt our deepest beings embrace, refusing separation. Outside our will, or, rather, beneath it, our sexes were signalling one to the other. Gauvin tried to ignore
