Salt on my Skin. Benoite Groult

that night… two years ago…

      ‘You felt it as well, then?’ Gauvin was speaking in his darkness voice. ‘I thought…’

      ‘It’s you who never let on!’

      ‘It was better not… for both of us, I reckoned. Tonight I never meant… I just couldn’t resist it. And now I could kick myself. I’m a right bastard.’

      ‘Why? Because you’re engaged?’

      He shrugged. ‘It was because of you I got engaged. I mean, to stop myself getting ideas. It couldn’t work for us from the start. I never thought it could. I shouldn’t have asked you tonight. It was bloody stupid of me. I’m sorry.’

      He rested his head with its tight ram’s curls on my shoulder, breathing hard. I longed to tell him that he would have been more stupid if he hadn’t. I knew already that you don’t get many chances like that. But he wouldn’t have understood. He didn’t function along those lines. And anyway the rain came down harder, my duffie-coat smelt like a wet dog, the mud was seeping into our shoes and we were shivering with cold and sadness. In his case, with anger too at having surrendered to his feelings. This wasn’t at all how he’d planned his life. I could feel him flexing, impatient to get back to the certainties of his ordered life.

      ‘I’ll forgive you,’ I said. ‘On condition that we meet just once again before you start at Concarneau this winter. Only once. But a proper bed, and no tide coming in. I’d like to know you better before I forget you.’ Gauvin’s arms tightened round me. He wouldn’t forget me now. He couldn’t.

      ‘Va Karedig,’ he breathed. ‘I wouldn’t dare call you that in French. Lucky it’s dark… I can’t promise. I don’t know. But I want you to know that…’

      He stopped. I knew what he wanted me to know. Here he was, a trawlerman, engaged to be married, full of scruples and complexes, wanting to do the right thing. Meanwhile, I wanted to stay unforgettable, even if it meant wrecking his marriage. That is the lucid cruelty that girls have. Not for a second did I feel it might be better for him to be at peace in another woman’s arms. I needed the subtle joy of instilling in him an incurable nostalgia.

      ‘Kenavo… A Wechall,’ he added, even more softly, drawing away. Then in the rough Breton accent I loved so much, which swallowed the ends of his words, ‘I’ll do what I can about meeting again.’ He raised his right hand, as if on oath, and held it there until I shut our front door behind me.

      -

      3 Paris

      -

      The great experiences of life, birth, illness, death, so often reduce one to utter banality. It’s the platitudes, born of accepted wisdom which work for gut feelings, rather than any scholarly language. When Gauvin kept his promise and joined me in Paris I found myself unable to sleep or eat. I was weak at the knees, had a lump in my throat, a knot in my stomach and a weight in my heart. It was as if every function had been subsumed in sexuality. And those weren’t the only parts of me aflame: a fire raged at my core for three days, a brand from Gauvin’s red-hot iron. Like that vaginal ring in The Story of O.

      ‘You’ll never imagine where, but I’m on fire,’ I told him, not quite daring to be explicit. We didn’t know each other very well after all.

      ‘I can imagine where, never stop imagining it,’ he answered with a village boy look, torn between being pleased at this homage to his virility and shocked at the plain speaking he didn’t expect from someone with my education. I enjoyed shocking him. It was so easy to do. His own world was rigid, with people and things allotted watertight compartments where they were supposed to stay.

      As I smoothed a soothing ointment over the afflicted area I wondered why the authors of erotic books never mentioned these minor accidents of pleasure. Their heroines have cast-iron vaginas, endlessly receptive to the intrusion of foreign bodies. Mine felt flayed. In the magnifying mirror I could scarcely recognise my neat, distinguished vulva. In its place was an inflamed apricot, swollen, rudely bursting from its usual confines, in short utterly indecent and incapable of admitting so much as a piece of spaghetti. And yet it wasn’t long before I was accepting, indeed imploring, his branding iron, begging him to penetrate me once more with that enormous thing. And, against all physical laws, the first searing pain over, it fitted perfectly, like a glove as one says. Any other time, I should have pleaded for a truce, but there was so little time now. Against expectations, having counted on filling up my tank and going off happily, I found myself wanting him more and more. Being beside him constantly, breathing his wheaten smell, stunned by perpetual desire, absorbed all my faculties. I lay awake at night, nourishing myself with his proximity while he slept. By day, I fed on his handsomeness, the caress of those hands which looked so hard and rough but had a goldsmith’s delicacy when they touched me.

      Occasionally, a bit ashamed of ourselves, we tried to restrain our animal frenzy by going to see the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, the Louvre. Making the tourist rounds instead of love. As it was his first visit to Paris I took Gauvin on a bâteau mouche. But all our sight-seeing trips were cut short. Clinging together, aching with desire, we pretended to stroll around, like normal people. But he had only to let his glance linger on my breasts or brush my leg with his powerful thigh or look at me in a way that had nothing to do with the facade of the Louvre and we’d race back to the hotel room, guilty at our haste but unable to hide it.

      Or we plunged into a bar. Only wine, or spirits, could loosen the knot in my throat, each drink bringing us still closer, helping us to forget we would soon part.

      ‘Just what do you think you’re doing here, Lozerech? Tell me.’

      ‘No one’s more surprised than me. Just stick with me and we’ll try to work it out.’ He was attempting to make light of something which palpably bothered him. But even as he replied, his leg pressed against mine, and we were off, done for, both of us breathing one of those involuntary sighs which punctuate the body’s impulses.

      They were wonderful and terrible, those days. Wonderful because I find it shamefully easy to live in the moment. Terrible, because I sensed that Gauvin was about to offer me his life and that it wasn’t an offer he would make twice.

      It was only on the last night, in one of those warm little restaurants which cradle you from the harshness of life, that we plucked up the courage to speak. There was no point in even trying in the hotel. Our hands quickly got in the way of any conversation. And the truth was too alarming: we were there in error. We had staged a break-out from our real lives, something for which we’d be punished one day.

      While I fiddled with my fish, trying to hide it under the debris on my plate because I knew I couldn’t swallow it, Gauvin was devouring his food with the concentration he brought to everything he did. And, while he ate, he sketched his vision of the future, as prosaically as he would have negotiated a contract with the Concarneau Fisheries Board. He proposed, at a stroke, breaking off his engagement, changing his job, studying as much as necessary to learn about music and modern art, doing some reading – the classic authors to start with – losing his accent and, finally, marrying me.

      He sat there on the other side of the little table, his knees gripping mine, his clear eyes asking if this wasn’t a noble sacrifice. They grew troubled as they read in mine that even the offer of his life was not enough.

      I should have preferred not to answer at once, not to murder in two or three words so passionate a love. I wanted to say we could think it over. But his ingenuousness broke my heart. What other man would ever make me so generous and so mad a proposal? Unfortunately Gauvin only operated on a straight yes or no. He would rather tear the heart from his breast than put up with the compromise of seeing me but not possessing me.

      I was silent for a moment: all I could offer him in return were those frivolous things which are no foundation for life – the crazy desire and the tenderness I felt for him. I didn’t want to give up my degree. I didn’t want to be a fisherman’s wife. I couldn’t live in Larmor among his fishermen friends. I didn’t want Yvonne for a sister-in-law, or to spend my Sundays at the Lorient stadium, watching him running around