Some months later he is walking along the road that leads to his house. His footfalls are muted by pine needles, sand, and piles of grass. As he often does, Adam is scanning the forest edge on the lookout for a pinecone. He does not know why but for as long as he can remember he has always kept a sharp lookout for the perfect pinecone. If anyone had asked him to describe it he would not have been able to do so, he simply knows that in its color, its shape, the angle of the scales, the weight of it in the hand, the combination of rough and smooth to the touch, he would find in it what for him was the incarnation of perfection. He inhales deeply the smell he loves so much, a mixture of mown grass, salt spray, sweet sap, and freshly turned earth. Adam is home. He is joining his wife, whom he married two hours earlier at the town hall, his father, a few friends. He reaches the end of the path and the house is exactly as he had dreamed it. He has succeeded. Are not his hands more callused? Is not his back still aching? Is not his skin more deeply furrowed, like that of the people from these parts, like that of his father, who had also long ago built his house with his own hands? Adam remembers how, as a child, he loved to spend time on the construction site for their house while it was being built, playing amid all the tools, the freshly dug earth, the noise of the machinery, the masculine talk of the workmen. André, his father, never made a big song and dance about that house, he spoke about it as if it were something very simple to do: to be able to fit together logs, planks, rafters, beams, and tiles and shape them into something that holds together, that lasts and endures.
Adam hears music, laughter, he hears Anita calling him. He has pins and needles in his legs, and a bounding heart, he wants to run up to her, to take her in his arms, to fly with her, to swallow her whole, her and the child, don’t they say that to love is to consume? But here she comes now, his wife (my wife! my wife! he says over and over again in his head, as if he had won the lottery, as if something extraordinary had happened to him). Wearing a pearl-gray silk dress, tight bodice, flowing skirt, round belly. She has let down her curly hair, which reaches to her waist. She had said she did not want flowers but had changed her mind at the last minute and had stopped on the way to gather wildflowers, which she has pinned here and there into her hair. She smiles at him, and holds out her hands. They are a happy couple who firmly believe that all their dreams have come true.
“It’s the wedding cake moment,” she says with a laugh.
“Now it’s up to us.”
Anita takes his hands and looks at him solemnly.
“Yes, it’s up to us now.”
The studio apartment with its vivid yellow walls is just a memory. The city is far away. The island is far away. Childhood is over. We are in spring, on the Atlantic shore, where the pine forests come to a halt at the foot of the sand dunes. In a little while Adam and Anita will take a walk along the vast, broad beach that looks as if it were made from the gold of the sunset. In a few weeks’ time their daughter, Laura, will be born. Yes, now, more than ever, it is up to them.
A stay-at-home mother
ANITA IS THIRTY-TWO. She is as light as a feather, with all the delicacy and competence of a perfect homemaker. She has set up a big table in the garden and covered it with what is known as a “Basque” tablecloth—white with red stripes. Since living in the country she has learned the names of these unfamiliar—and even strange—things. Basque tablecloth, Gien porcelain, Louis XV armchair, land left fallow, smoothing timber, national forest versus locally owned forest, cyclamen flowers, stone pines, reeds, sedges, cépage grapes, frog ponds, land breezes, “saints de glace” (Saints Mamert, Gervase, and Pancras, on whose saints’ days, May 11, 12, and 13, late frosts often occur). When she identifies these things, or, better still, when she succeeds in incorporating them into the decor of her daily life, or mentioning them in a sentence, she feels proud.
Nothing escapes her, so strong is her desire to be of the here and now. It is not that she has forgotten her own country, her culture, and her traditions, but she dreads being frowned on as uncultured, ignorant, foreign. She reads, she absorbs, she observes. She would like to be able to answer any question her daughter, Laura, might ask her, to be able to give her
