Salt on my Skin. Benoite Groult

even the best writers display an appallingly meagre vocabulary.

      One just has to forget everything and start afresh – forget press pornography, hard or soft, mucous membrane journalism with its relentless accounts of sexual acrobatics churned out by cynical hacks on subsistence wages. Forget more especially fashionable post-modern erotica which cloaks its nastiness in high-flown jargon.

      All the same, there’s no way I can tell my story without describing the sin of firkytoodling, as sexual play was known in the sixteenth century. It was by abandoning themselves to firkytoodling that my hero and heroine became enslaved to each other. It was in quest of firkytoodling that they pursued each other to the ends of the world. It was because of firkytoodling that they were never able to part, though in every other aspect of their lives they were as apart as they could be. It would be nice to say that this love came from the marriage of true minds, or a childhood bond, an extraordinary gift or a heart-rending disability of our hero or heroine. But facts had better be faced and the bare fact is, these two weren’t meant to know each other, were even meant to despise each other, and it was only the speechless language of love which made them able to communicate. It was the magic of his thing in her whatsit – and perhaps a touch of the destiny one always likes to invoke in these matters, or mysterious forces or the play of hormones or whatever – which bound them so inextricably that they overcame all obstacles to their love.

      What I’ve got to do is make the commonest act of all seem dazzling. Why write at all if you can’t dazzle? So how can I describe that hope of heaven which gleams between the legs of men and women, making a miracle of an act which takes place everywhere and has done since forever, between sexes – opposite or the same – pathetically or gloriously? I’m not endowed with any special knowledge or with words which haven’t been used or abused a thousand times before. This is no voyage to an undiscovered country: love has no terra incognita. In the end, there’s nothing more commonplace than a cunt unless it’s two cunts. When it comes to it, a phallus of the finest quality ejaculates just like any common or garden cock. Prudence would dictate giving up now. Between the pitfalls of pornography on the one hand and insipidity on the other, very few writers have scoffed at the dangers and achieved literary masterpieces that shine with an insolent brightness. But it’s only after the event, once one’s failed, that prudence seems such a desirable quality. Isn’t all literature imprudent anyway?

      But, in spite of all this, what a beautiful risk it was to write the opening lines of this impossible story: ‘I was eighteen when Gauvin entered my heart for life, or what I took to be my heart, though at the time it was still only my skin…’

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      1 Gauvin

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      I was eighteen when, without either of us realising it, Gauvin entered my heart for life. Yes, it began with my heart, or what I took to be my heart though, at that time, it was still only my skin. He was six or seven years older and, as a deep-sea fisherman earning his own living, he was a match for me, a middle-class student, but still dependent on my parents. My Paris friends were greenhorns and wimps beside this young man, already marked by a calling which turns a sinewy adolescent into a force of nature and, all too soon, a man old before his time. Yet boyhood still lurked in his eyes, which he dropped whenever you looked at him, and youth in the arrogant curl of his mouth. But there was a man’s strength in his great hands, toughened by salt water, and his deliberate gait, each step set firmly, as if on a rolling deck.

      Until we reached adolescence we eyed each other with the wariness of incompatible species – he the Breton, I the Parisienne – knowing that our paths were bound in different directions. To aggravate things, he was the son of a poor farmer and I the daughter of summer visitors. He seemed to think that being summer visitors constituted our chief occupation, a way of life for which he felt nothing but contempt. The little spare time he had was spent in violent games of football with his brothers, an activity which left me cold. Or he would shoot birds with his catapult or raid their nests, all of which revolted me. The rest of the time he would be scuffling with his mates or, if he met my sister and me, swearing like a trooper for our benefit. I decided that this was typical male behaviour, by definition hateful. It was he who punctured the tyres of my first little-rich-girl’s bicycle. To be fair, that bicycle was a real kick in the teeth. All he and his brothers possessed was a clapped-out old box on wheels in which they would clatter down the one street in Raguenès, rejoicing in the racket. As soon as his legs were long enough, he flung them across his father’s decrepit old nag of a pushbike and sneaked off every time the old man lay senseless in a ditch after a Saturday-night bender. My sister and I responded by using clothes-pegs to fix postcards to the wheels of our shiny chrome bicycles, with their bells and mudguards and their little baskets. This made a whirring engine-like noise which was meant to impress the Lozerech boys. They took no notice whatsoever.

      There was a sort of tacit agreement that we play with the one girl of the Lozerech family, the youngest of what my father dismissively described as ‘that brood of rabbits’. She was a charmless little blonde, with a name, Yvonne, which we thought lamentable. As I said, we had nothing in common.

      When he was fourteen or fifteen Gauvin disappeared from my horizon. He was already at sea during the summer as ship’s boy on his brother’s trawler, the Valliant Couturier. I was charmed by the name: for a long time I believed it was for a real valiant couturier, renowned for some unexpected act of bravery at sea. Gauvin’s mother used to say that he wasn’t one to shirk and it wouldn’t be long before his apprenticeship was over. But for the moment he was just ship’s boy, the scapegoat on board. That was the custom and a skipper had less right to be soft with a relative than others.

      For my sister and me this simply meant one enemy fewer in the village. But the five remaining Lozerech boys continued to consider us as useless because we were girls and stuck-up because we came from Paris. This was made even worse by the fact that my name was George. ‘George without an s, as in George Sand,’ my mother would proclaim, having sacrificed me on the altar of her youthful passion for Indiana. My younger sister, who had been less controversially christened Frédérique, scolded me for being ashamed. I retaliated by calling her ‘Frederic with a q-u-e’, I would have given much not to suffer the teasing and questions at the start of each school year, before the new ones got used to it. Children are merciless to anyone who doesn’t conform, and I was well into adulthood before I forgave my mother. It wasn’t such a problem at my college, Sainte-Marie, as in the country. At least people there recognised the name, even if it was devoid of the odour of sanctity. But in any case, by the end of her life, George Sand had redeemed herself with a couple of pious novels, and by becoming the good Lady of Nohant. But at Raguenès my name furnished an inexhaustible source of mockery. They never tired of it; the target was irresistible.

      It did not help that, instead of being among all the other holiday homes, our house was in the middle of a working village, inhabited only by fishermen and farmers. We stuck out like the proverbial sore thumb. The ‘beachwear’ sported by my mother and the vast berets and tweed plus-fours which my father affected caused constant hilarity. The village boys kept quiet if our parents were around, but if they caught us alone they were transformed into a pack of male animals, flaunting the superiority supposedly endowed by their willies, and taking every opportunity, the minute they spotted us in the distance, to scoff at my sister and me. Gauvin in the lead, they would bray stupid doggerel. The sillier they got the more furious we became.

      Parisiennes,

      Silly hens!

      From the town,

      Silly clowns!

      When you’re a child, the silliest jokes are often the best ones. We got our revenge when we encountered our tormentors singly or in pairs. In a group they were Man. Isolated they were just one kid against another; or worse, a farm boy faced with a city girl.

      Gauvin had never been to our house. He didn’t think it was a house anyway, but a pretentious villa with a ridiculous thatched roof. For the villagers real roofs were made of slate. Our meticulously authentic thatch of hand-beaten rye-straw, hard to find and costing the earth from the last thatcher in the district, seemed to be flying in the face of common sense. So to say something as ordinary as ‘Come round to our place