The next morning at around ten a taxi came to pick me up at the hotel. We’d left the village and had been driving for some time along a rainy road that led uphill among the trees. My son sat beside me in the back, his legs spread on the seat and his two feet clad in little leather boots that stuck straight up in the air. One of his hands was lying on my leg, and with the other he clutched his stuffed seal against his anorak. A transparent plastic nipple in his mouth, he looked at me with a terribly serious, thoughtful air. The driver hadn’t said a word since we’d left the hotel. A corn-paper cigarette was wedged between his lips, which he couldn’t remove from his mouth moreover because he had to keep both hands on the wheel to negotiate the numerous curves, to the point where not surprisingly his face became slightly flushed and a wisp of smoke played around his ears. For my part I drowsed on the back seat, looking vaguely at the smoke that wafted hesitantly over the driver’s temples and formed an immaterial halo about his head, which it soon enshrouded in a splendid evanescent ring. I’d gotten his telephone number that morning and called him shortly before ten o’clock to take me to the little neighboring port of Santagralo, where I wanted to do some shopping.
Santagralo wasn’t very busy in the winter but fifty or so pleasure craft were anchored there permanently and, aside from a few shops specializing in marine supplies, there was a post office and a bank, a supermarket and a couple of restaurants. I was planning to stay and have lunch at noon, so when the driver left me on the main square I arranged for him to come and pick me up again thereafter. The sky was still very menacing above the village, and I headed off toward the supermarket with my son ahead of me in his stroller, very upright in his seat and looking intensely in front of him, an immobile little figurehead at the front of our convoy, who deliberately dropped his seal onto the sidewalk from time to time and watched me pick it up with a blend of total indifference and guarded curiosity. You watch it, I said. In the supermarket, as I pushed his stroller between the shelves making a quick note of what I had to buy, he took to thrusting his arm out suddenly to try to get hold of whatever he could, so that I was obliged to maneuver the stroller skillfully back and forth to keep him out of reach of everything he tried to snatch from the shelves. Somewhat put out by my stops and starts, he needed a bit of time to right himself each time I swerved, which didn’t stop him from sticking out his arm again as soon as he could and trying to grab something else that was shelved at just his height. Finally, wanting to do my shopping in peace, I asked an elderly woman waiting at the checkout if she wouldn’t mind taking care of him for a few seconds, the time it would take for me to go get one or two things. The woman was more than happy to accept and, as I crouched down at my son’s feet to explain that he had to stay with the woman for a moment and that he should give her a little kiss on the cheek, my son looked very sad in his stroller all of a sudden. But she’s a very nice woman, I said to him. What’s your name, Madam? Marie-Ange, said the woman, who’d come nearer and bent down toward my son. She’s very nice, Marie-Ange, I said to my son, you don’t want to give her a little kiss? Look, like this, I said (and I kissed the woman, who seemed somewhat taken aback, on the cheek).
Leaving the supermarket I walked back to the center of the village and sat down at a café terrace on the main street. There were just a few tables outside, round white plastic tables that had been out in the rain that morning, with a few raindrops still clinging to the seats. I’d lit a cigarette and looked out at the port on the other side of the street, where dozens of sailboats rocked softly in the wind to a continual clinking of booms and stays. Most of the masts were stripped of their sails. Naked and metallic, they rose very high in the sky, with a couple of wisps of cloth fixed here and there to the tops of the spars, little flags or white handkerchiefs, which fluttered in the wind and beat against the yardarms. A large fishing boat was being repaired in front of the port authority a little way off, heaved up onto chocks in the middle of the careenage, and two men stood there talking about the hull by the looks of it, while a third, sitting at the wheel of his car with the door open, watched them talking, intervening from time to time to shoot down any suggestions they made with a sort of resigned fatalism that his companions accepted good-naturedly, as if the man in the car was the skipper and his boat was in fact a lost cause. The rest of the village was very calm, and I drank my aperitif on the terrace while looking over at my son from time to time, who was sitting beside me in his stroller, his eyes fixed on the large horizon. Occasionally a car passed, crossing the village without stopping, and my son watched it with interest, a cookie in his hand, tilting his head forward to watch it drive off without taking his eyes off it for a second.
I’d taken the four letters I’d removed from the Biaggis’ mailbox the night before out of my pocket and I looked at them while wondering what on earth could have induced me to take them. Because even if I might have thought for a moment that I’d give them to the Biaggis in person, returning them now struck me as highly difficult without also giving them an explanation. And what explanation could I give? Then should I act as if nothing had happened and go back to their place one evening to put them back in the mailbox? I didn’t know. In any case I was thinking it wasn’t such a bad thing that the Biaggis hadn’t received the letter I’d sent them from Paris a few days before, even though all it contained was a few words saying I was thinking of spending a couple of days in Sasuelo. But if they had received it I’d no longer have the liberty to postpone the moment I went to visit them, and I wasn’t at all sure now that I wanted the Biaggis to know I was in Sasuelo. Already on the first day, after remaining undecided all afternoon in my hotel room, I’d realized it was more complicated than I’d thought it was going to be to make up my mind to go see them. To a certain extent of course that was why I’d come to Sasuelo, but ever since I’d felt this initial reticence at going to see them I could very well imagine that my trip to Sasuelo, although initially meant as an occasion to see the Biaggis, would in fact end without my having resolved to contact them — now all the more so, no doubt, since I’d taken the liberty of collecting the letters from their mailbox.
At noon I went for lunch at Chez Georges, one of the few restaurants in the port that stayed open all year round. The walls were hung with old maps in decorative frames and the red and white tablecloths matched the napkins and curtains. Perfecting the punctilious harmony of the decor in a sort of delicious search for elegance in the tiniest of details, the same wooden ringlets served both as napkin and curtain rings. I’d taken my son out of his stroller and sat him beside me on a chair, with his little feet hanging in the void and his chin at table-height. He’d managed to kick off one of his boots and his foot, clad in a light blue sock, imperceptibly beat out the measure of some mysterious tempo. I’d been served my appetizer and my son watched me eat in silence, well behaved if somewhat perplexed on his chair, playing with a few pieces of bread I’d given him to keep him busy. Among the other guests at the restaurant I recognized the man who’d been sitting at the wheel of his car that morning in front of the port authority as soon as he came in. I didn’t know if he’d managed to solve his problem but he’d just sat down at a table right in front of me together with three blonde women who must have had the same hairdresser. All three were very becoming and had clearly known each other for a while. Now they smiled and held each other’s forearms on the table to a tinkling of bracelets, getting the owner to explain the menu to them, who they also seemed to have known for ages, calling him by his first name. And in fact Georges was also what they called the man from the car, who, sitting impassively on his chair behind his tinted glasses, chimed into the conversation now and then to steadfastly refute every suggestion made to him concerning the choice of entrée. He was dressed in an elegant gray suit and matching vest that compressed his paunch somewhat and, one thumb negligently tucked under the garment to relieve the pressure, he studied the menu while chewing away on a cigar. Oddly enough, as the owner waited beside him for him to make up his mind, he put the menu back down and leaned over mischievously to drum his fingers briefly on the table in the direction of my son. Encouraged by his example and no doubt not wanting to be outdone, the owner and the three women also looked over at our table and started making cooing noises, to which, my mouth full and somewhat caught off guard, I responded with an uneasy smile while wiping my mouth with my napkin, whereas my son, unperturbed by the two Georges, started exerting his charm on the blondes with astonishing cheek, considering his age.