The weather was beautiful.
Sitting beneath a parasol, a woman gazed out at the horizon. She wore a broad-brimmed hat with a red ribbon, dark glasses and a white swimsuit that clung to her tanned body like a second skin.
And there would be no more to tell had it not been for a gust of wind.
Had I known that a gust of wind can change the course of a life, I might have been more wary, but at the age of seventeen, we all believe we are invulnerable . . .
The midday breeze had come up and the fateful gust of wind, waiting in ambush, raced along the beach stirring up eddies of sand, whipping the parasol into the air as the lady clutched her hat to stop it from flying away. The parasol pirouetted through the air, sailed along the sand, turned somersaults. Jean-Christophe tried but failed to catch it. If he had, my life would have gone on as before, but fate decreed otherwise. The parasol landed at my feet. I simply reached out and picked it up.
Smiling, the lady watched me as I made my way towards her with the parasol tucked under one arm. She got to her feet.
‘Thank you,’ she said.
‘Don’t mention it, madame.’
I knelt down beside her and began scooping out sand, making the hole where the parasol had been deeper and wider. Then I replanted the parasol, and trampled the sand to make sure it did not fly off again.
‘You are very kind, Monsieur Jonas,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry . . .’ she added quickly. ‘I heard your friends call you that.’
She took off her dark glasses.
‘Are you from Terga?’
‘From Río Salado, madame.’
Her piercing eyes unsettled me. In the distance I could see my friends giggling and laughing at me. I quickly took my leave of the woman and went back to join them.
‘You’re red as a beetroot,’ Jean-Christophe teased me.
‘Leave me alone,’ I said.
Simon, who had just come back from a swim, was rubbing himself vigorously with a towel, a mischievous smile on his lips. He dropped into my chair and said:
‘So what did Madame Cazenave want with you?’
‘You know her?’
‘Of course I know her. Her husband was governor of a penal colony in Guyana. They say he disappeared in the jungle tracking a couple of escaped prisoners. When he didn’t show up, she decided to come home. She’s a good friend of my aunt. My aunt says she thinks Madame Cazenave’s husband succumbed to the charms of some big-bottomed Amazonian beauty and ran off with her.’
‘I’m glad your aunt’s no friend of mine!’
Simon burst out laughing and threw the towel at my face, beat his chest like a gorilla and, with a shrill war cry, raced back down to the sea.
‘Completely mad,’ sighed Fabrice, propping himself up on one elbow to watch Simon perform some ridiculous dive.
The girls André had been waiting for arrived on the stroke of ten. The youngest was at least four or five years older than André and José. The girls kissed the Sosa cousins on both cheeks and settled themselves in canvas chairs. André’s manservant, Jelloul, busied himself at the barbecue, fanning the coals and sending clouds of white smoke across the surrounding dunes. José pulled a hamper from under the piles of bags around the centre pole of the tent, took out a couple of strings of spicy merguez sausages and laid them on the grill. The smell of burning fat began to drift along the beach.
I don’t remember why I decided to head over to André’s tent. Perhaps I was deliberately trying to attract the attention of Madame Cazenave so that I could get another glimpse of her magnificent eyes. If so, she was reading my mind, because as I passed her, she took off her sunglasses, and as she did, I suddenly felt as though I was wading through quicksand.
I saw her again some days later on the main street in Río Salado. She was coming out of a shop, a white hat perched like a crown over her perfect face. People turned to look at her but she did not even notice. She had an aristocratic bearing and did not walk but strode along the avenue to the rhythm of time itself. She reminded me of the enigmatic heroines of the silver screen, who seemed so real that next to them our reality paled into insignificance.
She glided past as I sat with Simon Benyamin on the terrace of a café on the square. She did not even see me. My only consolation was the cloud of perfume that trailed in her wake.
‘Easy does it,’ whispered Simon.
‘What?’
‘Take a look in the mirror! You’re red as a beetroot! Don’t tell me you’re in love with a respectable housewife and mother?’
‘What are you saying?’
‘I’m saying you look like you’re about to have a heart attack.’
Simon was joking. What I felt for Madame Cazenave wasn’t love but a profound admiration. My feelings towards her were entirely honourable.
At the end of the week, she came into the pharmacy. I was behind the counter helping Germaine fill a pile of prescriptions that had come in as the result of an epidemic of gastritis. When I looked up and saw her, I almost fainted.
I expected her to take off her sunglasses, but she kept them perched on her pretty nose, and I could not tell if she was staring at me or ignoring me.
She handed Germaine a prescription, proffering her hand as though to be kissed.
‘It might take a little while . . .’ Germaine said, struggling to decipher the doctor’s scrawl. ‘I’m a little busy at the moment.’ She nodded to the packages on the counter.
‘When do you think it might be ready?’
‘This afternoon, hopefully, but it won’t be before three.’
‘That’s all right . . . but I won’t be able to come back to pick it up. I’ve been out of town for a while and my house needs some serious spring cleaning. Would you mind having a messenger bring it round? I’ll happily pay.’
‘It’s not a question of money, Madame . . . ?’
‘Cazenave, Madame Cazenave.’
‘Pleased to meet you. Do you live far?’
‘Just behind the Jewish cemetery. The house is set back from the marabout road.’
‘Oh, I know where you mean . . . It’s no problem, Madame Cazenave, I’ll have the prescription delivered to you this afternoon sometime between three and four.’
‘Perfect!’
As she left, she gave me an almost imperceptible nod.
I could barely sit still as I watched Germaine struggle to fill the orders in the back office. The hands of the clock hardly seemed to move; it felt as though night would come before the delivery was ready. At last came my hour of deliverance, like a great lungful of air after too long underwater. At exactly three p.m., Germaine emerged from the back office with a vial wrapped in brown paper. I did not even wait for her to give me directions, but tore it from her hands and leapt on my bicycle.
Gripping the handlebars, my shirt billowing in the wind, I was not pedalling, I was flying. I cycled around the Jewish cemetery, took a short cut through the fields and, weaving between the potholes, raced along the marabout road.
The Cazenaves lived in an imposing mansion perched on a hill some distance outside the village. It was a large whitewashed house that faced southward, overlooking the plains. There were stables, now derelict, but the house was still magnificent. A steep, narrow driveway lined with dwarf palms led up from the road. Wrought-iron gates leading to a courtyard hung from a low wall of finely chiselled stone on which a climbing vine vainly tried to get purchase. The pediment, supported by two marble columns, had the letter ‘C’ carved into the stone, and underneath, as though supporting the initial, was the date 1912, the year in which the house had been built.
I ditched my bicycle by the gates, which creaked loudly as I pushed them open, and stepped into the small courtyard with its fountain; there was no one there. The gardens had fallen into decline.
‘Madame Cazenave?’ I called out.