When she leaves the building she is still clinging a little to this euphoria, as one clings to the lingering haze of sleep, she does not want to go back home right away, she wants to go on being this blossoming, independent woman for a little longer. She knows that in a few hours’ time, things will become real, less romantic. With a firm but light tread she retraces her footsteps. Anita goes back into the club. She wants to listen to music, sip an elegant amber alcoholic drink (alone at 1:00 in the morning! after writing her first story as a real reporter!).
Inside there are fewer people than earlier on and the music now is disco. The musicians of the group from Réunion have left. They had another concert to go to the next day thirty miles away. Anita is aware of a sudden impulse to run after them, follow them, linger in the warm, golden wake of their music. Would she have given in to this impulse if she had been younger, with no husband, no child? Anita likes to think that at the age of thirty-five she would still have had the courage to do it, as she likes to believe that, as of tomorrow, she could abandon all her bourgeois comforts, live in a tent, start all over again.
She settles on a stool, one elbow on the bar. All the vibrant animal energy—those figures standing there with uplifted arms, that music—has vanished and it is as if she were in a totally different place now, and had dreamed it all. Nothing catches her eye, no colors, no shapes, though Anita is not impervious to such things. She is floating in some kind of aura that is soft, hazy, maybe a little sad, an aura with a stale smell of alcohol. Good and evil, light and darkness, success and failure, responsibilities and freedom, doubt and conviction, family and solitude, fervor and cowardice, equality and submissiveness, none of this exists anymore.
Suddenly.
An arm, a gleam of light on a silver bracelet, the tall figure of a woman dressed in black, a face dominated by a moving mouth. Open, shut, open.
“I’m sorry? I didn’t hear.”
“I was asking if you’d like something to drink. I’m going to close the bar soon. I still have some punch left.”
“Yes, it was very good, that punch. What’s your name, by the way?”
This question came out as softly as a breath of air, something emerging from who knows where and settling between two people.
“Adèle.”
“Adèle … that’s pretty.”
“It’s not my real name, you know.”
That, too, came out as calmly as hello, how are you today, what would you like. Adèle feels a tingling all over her body, but she does not fall to the ground, she does not flinch, nor is this, as they say in books, a moment of truth.
“No?”
“No.”
“Look. I won’t drink anything. But may I stay here for a moment?”
“Sure. We close in half an hour.”
“Are you going home after that?”
“Yes.”
“Would you like to have a stroll on the beach with me? It’s not cold at all. After that, I’ll drop you off. I have a car.”
“Okay.”
“So what’s your real name?”
“I’ll tell you another time.”
And the element of chance in all this, the ease that is established between two women who have only just met, is no small thing. Anita looks back at the room with new eyes. Now she notices the shadowy figures on the sofas, a woman dancing out in the full light, a man in the half light at the edge of the dance floor waiting for some sign, a tune, another tempo, before he goes to join her. No, it is not true that there is nothing here. Here, too, there are years, hours, and the same sentimental crowd clinging to its dreams.
Adèle and Anita sit there, the two of them, looking out to sea. The night is cool, there is this perfectly round moon, tinged with gray, with beige, with pink, there is the sound of the waves. In this moment, which is both simple and extraordinary, Adèle glimpses another way of living, another way of loving, giving, weeping, laughing, working, starting again.
Adèle decides she will not tell lies to Anita as she lies to other people. She will tell her her real name, she will tell her her life story, talk about her husband and her son. On the beach, in the utter purity and nakedness of this moment, something is released deep within her, a knot slowly unraveling itself and she breathes deeply. The night fills her.
Yet between them that night there are no revelations, no secrets shared, no solemn vows. They speak the way the waves are breaking down below, without hesitation, but with no haste either.
Long silences occur that do not trouble them. Adèle tells her what she does: three nights at the Tropical, days at the Lesparets. A hardworking and lonely life emerges in the short, simple sentences she uses.
“Do you get on well with the children?”
“Yes. But I don’t know if I’ll continue with it. I was in an accident this morning.”
“What happened?”
“A bus I was on crashed into a car. I was thrown out.”
“What? My goodness! But are you all right? You still came to work?”
“Some people were injured, but I was fine. I was just a bit bruised on my back.”
“But that’s a miracle! To be unscathed after being thrown out from a bus!”
A miracle. How many times has she heard that word today? How many times between this Saturday now and that Tuesday so long ago has she prayed for one? A miracle.
“What does ‘unscathed’ mean?”
“Hmm … It means without any injuries. But it also means that you’re a survivor.”
A “survivor.” Adèle rolls the word around in her
