Salt on my Skin. Benoite Groult

Yvonne. She was my age, and I often asked her to play at our house. We, of course, could tum up at the farm whenever we felt like it. To Frédérique and me, from our pristine house where we had to tidy our toys and whiten our canvas sandals every day, the farm seemed the height of freedom. There was always something going on, the mess of eight children’s clothes all over the place, and rows of muddy clogs by the back door. The farmyard was over-run with cats and dogs and chickens, and cluttered with rickety rabbit hutches and implements of indeterminate use which looked decrepit but would nevertheless, once a year, be indispensable for some task or other. These visits were always one way, as in those nineteenth-century tales where the lady of the manor and her daughters called on the sick and the deserving poor – grateful tenants who would never dream of visiting the big house. Sometimes, after lifting potatoes with Yvonne – an unattractive job if ever there was one, but one which I did in the hope that it would make me look less of a feeble townee – I stayed to eat with the Lozerechs. There, the bacon soup I would have detested at home seemed delicious, and I was prouder of being able to milk a cow than I was of my high grades at school. I liked to think that in another life I might have made a good farm girl.

      It was harvest time when Gauvin and I first saw each other as human beings rather than representatives of hostile social groups. At threshing time everyone lent a hand, and families would try to assemble as many people as possible before starting. Three of the Lozerech sons, including Gauvin, were at home at the same time, and the family made the most of the opportunity to fix the date for the big job ahead. Naturally, as immediate neighbours, Frédérique and I helped every year, and we were proud of sharing the work, the exhaustion at the end of the day, and the excitement of the most important event of the year, one which determined the annual income of the whole household.

      The last day had been stifling. On the two preceding days we had gathered in the barley and oats, and now it was time for the wheat. The air shimmered with the heat and a fine choking dust which got into our eyes and throats, and throbbed with the noise of the threshing machine. The dust powdered the hair and head-dresses of the women and turned their dark skirts grey, while streams of dark sweat trickled down the faces and necks of the men. Only Gauvin worked bare-chested. Standing on top of the cart, he slashed the twine which bound the sheaves with one stroke of his sickle, then straddled the sheaves and swung them on to the conveyor belt in a gesture I thought magnificent. The sheaves bounced their way down the belt. He gleamed with fine young sweat in the sunlight, the golden wheat flying all around him, while his muscles played ceaselessly under his skin, like the shining muscled quarters of the great horses which periodically brought fresh loads of sheaves.

      I had never seen a man so manly except in Hollywood movies, and I was proud to be a participant at this annual ritual. To be, for once, part of his world. I loved everything about those sultry days: the intensity, the smoking bags of wheat with their acrid smell – symbols of abundance filled under the eagle eye of Gauvin’s father who made sure that not a grain of his treasure was lost – and the three o’clock tea: a banquet of fat bacon, pate and deep yellow butter spread thickly on chunks of bread, which made our Parisian tea times seem bloodless affairs. I even loved the men swearing every time the belt slipped and had to be levered back on to the pulleys, while everyone else seized the chance to slake their parched throats with a pull of cider. And how marvellous it was when all the sacks were heaped in the barn ready for the mill, and the fest noz, for which they always slaughtered and roasted a pig, could begin.

      That evening everyone sprawled around, drunk with exhaustion. United by work well done, a harvest safely in, we basked in a late July dusk which seemed reluctant to yield to darkness. At that time of year in Brittany the long twilights linger on, giving the illusory hope that, just this once, day will conquer night. I was sitting next to Gauvin, weak with pleasure at being so near him but utterly tongue-tied. At least I knew better than to go into raptures about nature with country people, but having grown out of the games and battles of childhood, we had nothing to put in their place and were silent, constrained by our age. The Lozerech boys and Gallois girls were retreating into their respective social classes after the no-man’s-land of childhood. Soon, when we met, we would be reduced to nods and smiles, having nothing to say, not even the old taunts. Oh, we’d still be ‘friends’ of course, still ask after each other’s lives – ‘How’s the catch these days?’ ‘Exams going OK then?’ – but the answers would be treated absent-mindedly, like shells you don’t bother to gather on a winter beach.

      But now, this evening, hovering between day and night, between dream and reality… As the party was about to break up Gauvin, in spite of the tiredness softening his features, suddenly suggested driving over to Concarneau. No one was keen to begin with; they just wanted to fall into bed. But then another Lozerech boy came round to the idea and using all the persuasive tactics at my disposal, I implored Yvonne to join us, pledging my best lacy bra, my most expensive toilet water, anything so as not to be the only girl. Gauvin was one of the few people in the village who had a car, an old 4CV, and he piled in as many people as it could hold. Frédérique stayed behind: a fifteen-year-old simply doesn’t go dancing in Concarneau.

      For a girl who had only been to faculty balls, the affair at the Ty Chupenn Gwen hotel was as exotic as an Apache war dance. Luckily Yvonne took me under her wing. I was very much the outsider in this crowd of rowdy young men already the worse for drink, but at least I wouldn’t be the wallflower I was in Paris, too often reduced to hiding behind the record player. As soon as we arrived Gauvin drew me on to the dance floor without a word and, before anyone else had a chance, settled me in his arms as firmly as he would grasp a trawlerstay. I was aware of each finger of the hand on my ribs. Proper hands, I told myself. They wouldn’t let you fall, not like the pale, distinguished hands waved around by the pale, distinguished young men I knew in Paris. He danced like a man of the people, like one of Zola’s workers, with a swing of the shoulders pronounced enough to seem common to my bourgeois code of etiquette. Not once did his eyes meet mine and neither of us said a word. He wouldn’t have known what to say and I couldn’t think of a single subject of conversation. ‘Do you like Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet?’ (even I knew that wouldn’t do) or, ‘How’s the fishing going?’ (that wouldn’t do either). What does a student of classics and history say to a young man who spends most of his time on a trawler on the Irish Sea? I stayed speechless, dumb with shyness and the unexpected sensation of being in Gauvin’s arms. But it didn’t matter, since he kept his arms round me between dances, waiting for the music to begin again. He still smelled of sunshine and wheat, and I thought he handled me with the same serious concentration he had given the sheaves earlier that day. In any case, what words could have expressed the absurd, incongruous feeling of recognition between our bodies, the sense that our souls – for it certainly wasn’t our minds – were striving towards each other, regardless of worldly obstacles. Naturally Plato came into my head. At that age I channelled all my thoughts and emotions through the words of poets and philosophers. And Gauvin had recklessly surrendered to the same spell. I was sure of it somehow, sure that feelings like these are always mutual. The spell held through a waltz and two paso dobles and swung us along in a sultry tango, while reality blurred and receded. The voices of the Raguenès boys reached me as if from a distant planet. They were getting noisier and more facetious to hide their growing lust for the girls they were trying to soften up with drink and hopeful fumbling. When the lights suddenly went out Gauvin and I found ourselves outside by silent accord. Selfish with happiness, we decided that Yvonne and the others could find their own way home, and, like a pair of cowards, drove off in the 4CV.

      He took the road to the sea, of course. You head for the sea instinctively at times like this. The sea absolves any need for talk. It enfolds you like a mother, wraps you in indulgent silence. But we were checked at le Cabellou, la Dument, Trévignon and the beach at Raguenès, There was no through road along the coast then, only dead ends, emblematic of our own situation. The less we spoke, the more the silence swelled. Gauvin kept his arm round my shoulders, brushing my cheek with his temple now and again.

      At Raguenès the tide was out. The spit of sand which joined the island to the shore at low water shone in the moonlight. To the east, where there was shelter from the prevailing wind, we could just make out the line where the sea met the sand. It was smooth as glass. To the west a breath of wind ruffled the silver expanse with its frilled, phosphorescent edge. It was still, so pure,