This year there are some ten adults, with just the same quantity of children, shouts of greeting, hugs, and exclamations of delight as in previous years. Like well-brought-up guests and good friends, they comment on small changes: Anita has a new hairstyle and has gone back into pretty outfits, Adam has grown a fine beard, the kitchen garden has been enlarged, the child’s cabin in the garden has been repainted. On the way, before they got there they saw bulldozers, what’s going on? It’s a housing development, says Adam, and they all adopt a horrified air, what a scandal that people should want to live here!
Adam enjoys these evenings less and less. Having now lost his father, despite his sadness, he has a greater sense of freedom. He is no longer the little boy whose shyness must be excused, he is no longer the clumsy youth whom people coerce into playing rugby or tennis, he is no longer the boy who likes painting. That morning he had asked Anita: “Do you enjoy seeing them again?”
“Yes, of course. What about you?”
“I don’t know. Do you think they’re friends, real friends?!”
Anita had thought about Julie, Barbara, Nicolas. Those evenings so long ago, sitting on the floor, the arguments at corner cafés, the love affairs, the tears, and all that energy expended, wasted, for what, if the truth be told? Just because they were young, because they thought they were irresistible?
“We’ve all changed, Adam.”
“Okay. But it gets on my nerves.”
When they arrive and the women gather in the kitchen, the men in the garden, Anita feels she should make some effort to retrieve the thread of this friendship, and draw it right out into the open, at the center of things, and she talks nonstop. She keeps asking questions and suddenly she realizes that, for their part, Julie, Barbara, Anne, and the others are replying offhandedly, as if Anita were being indiscreet. She leans over the sink to wash the salad (young shoots of beetroot, spinach, and watercress) and falls silent. An unpleasant feeling of déjà vu overcomes her, she knows exactly how the evening is going to go, who will talk more than the others, what topics will provoke heated debates. She will not mention her novel, Adam will say nothing about his painting. Not to them. What was it Adam had asked that morning? Are they real friends?
Then Anita sees Adèle at the bottom of the garden and it warms her heart. She thinks about the time they spent by the lake the previous day, a magical day, warm and bright. During the summer, when there is throbbing heat from the morning onward, when the cars form lines of gleaming metal all along the road that leads to the beach, when the smell of fritters, sandwiches, and crepes overlays those of salt and wind, Anita, Adam, and Laura go to the lake, barely two miles from their house. They could go on foot but in the summer they take their bicycles and a picnic and thread their way along sandy lanes and footpaths strewn with pine needles, past the delicate, lacy fronds of ferns. Again yesterday the lake was waiting for them, so bright and still. The gray jetty, the flat stones, already a little cracked by the heat. There, stretched out on the stones, as if they were the only women in the world, they had talked without fear. Adèle had continued telling her story, the story that so sets Anita’s heart beating. The little girl was playing in the shadow of the pine trees, Adam was swimming across the lake, and the noise of his strokes reached them, marking a rhythm to their conversation. That same evening, replete with Adèle’s words, Anita had reopened her notebook. She had the feeling of an urgent need to absorb this story and tell it in a new form.
Suddenly Barbara asks her a question.
“So how about you, Anita? What are you up to? Are you still writing articles about Basque pelota matches?”
For his part, Adam cannot help silently studying the men in his garden, with their fine shoes, their excessively tight jeans, their mauve or pink shirts, their mouthfuls of clichés about the grass, the fruits, the harsh winters here, the mentality of the local people, and then their questions about work, while Adam has no desire to talk about work, about plans, projects, inviting bids. Then he, too, catches sight of Adèle and thinks about their time beside the lake on the previous day. After their return he had shut himself away in his studio to begin the third painting in his new series. This woman fascinates him. In her presence his fingers tingle, his vision blurs, he rediscovers the impulse to paint as in the old days, before technique, before knowledge, before fashion. A while ago now he had laid a bare stretched canvas on the floor in the middle of his studio. He had poured black paint onto it until this formed an irregular circle on the picture. Then he spent a long time looking at this black circle that shone like a mirror and thinking about Adèle. The following
