Finally, he reached for the little bell that hung between the brass bars of his bed and rang it. A little while later the waiter came in, carrying a breakfast tray. He opened the shutters and the sun flooded into the room.

‘It’s a very beautiful day,’ Yves said out loud, just as he had when he was a schoolboy and all his concerns and pleasures depended entirely on the weather. He jumped out of bed and ran barefoot to the window. At first he was disappointed: he had known Hendaye when it was a tiny hamlet of fishermen and smugglers with only two villas, one owned by the writer Pierre Loti, a bit further off to the left, near the Bidassoa river, and the other owned by his parents, to the right, at the very spot where now stood twenty-odd houses in mock Basque style. He saw that a sea wall planted with sparse trees had been laid out behind the beach, where cars could park. He looked away, sulking. Why had they spoiled this sacred corner of the world that he so loved for its very simplicity, its peaceful charm? He stood next to the open window and little by little, just as you begin to recognise a face that has changed over the years by its smile and the expression in its eyes and so gradually recall the features you once loved, in the same way Yves rediscovered with a deep sense of pleasure the lines, the colours, the contour of the mountains, the glistening water of the bay, the light, swaying fronds of the tamarisks. And when he sensed once more the scent of cinnamon and orange blossom carried in by the winds from Andalusia, he made peace with the passing of time; he smiled, and the lightness of spirit he had felt in the past returned to fill his heart.

Reluctantly, he turned away from the window and went over to the bathroom; painted in high-gloss lacquer with white tiles, it gleamed in the dazzling sunlight. Yves drew the curtains; they were made of lace, decorated with intricate designs, so immediately the same patterns swept across the floor, in a light, shimmering, delicate layer that flickered each time the sea breeze rustled the curtains. Yves watched with delight the play between light and shadow; he remembered that this used to be his favourite pastime as a little boy. And every time he recognised one of his childhood traits in the man he had become, he experienced the kind of emotion you feel when looking at old photographs, along with a vague sense of anguish.

He raised his eyes and saw himself in the mirror. That day he felt his spirits so akin to the way he used to feel as a child on those beautiful mornings that his reflection caused him painful surprise. It was a face in its thirties, so weary, so lacklustre, with its muddy complexion and that slight bitter grimace at the corner of his mouth, blue eyes that seemed to have faded, dark eyelids that had lost their silky lashes … The face of a young man, true, but already altered, sculpted by the hand of time that gently, pitilessly, etched a delicate maze of lines in the fresh smooth surface of his youthful skin, the first mocking sign of the wrinkles to come. Yves passed a hand over his forehead where his hair was already thinning at the temples; then in an unconscious gesture, he rubbed the place where his hair had grown back coarser, the scar from his last wound – a shell that had exploded and almost killed him in Belgium, near that grim section of charred wall standing among dead trees …

But the waiter who came to remove the breakfast tray tore him away from thoughts that were insidiously depressing him, like the effect on certain summer days when a sky that looks too blue grows imperceptibly darker until it takes on the grey-black colour of a storm. Yves slipped on his espadrilles and swimming trunks, threw a bathrobe over his shoulder and went down to the beach.

2

YVES LAY DOWN in the warm sand that crunched between his bare feet, closed his eyes, stretched out and remained perfectly still, relishing the feel of the burning sun on every inch of his body, on his face that he turned up towards the intense light of the August sky, white with heat, a singular sensation of silent, perfect, almost primeval joy.

All around him men and women, young and beautiful for the most part, scantily clad and unbelievably suntanned, moved lithely past. Others lay about in groups, drying their wet bodies in the sun, as he was; there were teenagers, stripped to the waist, playing with beach balls at the water’s edge; they ran along the bright sand, like shadow puppets. Tired from having stayed in the water too long, Yves closed his eyes; the brutal midday light pierced his closed eyelids, plunging him into burning darkness where enormous suns floated past, opaque and fiery. The air was filled with the resounding noise of the waves as they beat against the sand with a sound of powerful wings. A child’s shrill laughter interrupted Yves’s reverie; frantic little feet ran right up to him and he was hit by a handful of sand.

He sat up and heard a woman’s voice: ‘Francette, for goodness sake,’ she cried, outraged, ‘Francette, will you please behave yourself and come over here right this minute!’

Yves, now completely awake, sat up cross-legged and opened his eyes wide; he saw the pretty silhouette of a shapely woman in a black swimsuit who was being pulled away by a very little girl. The child couldn’t have been more than two or three years old; she was a sturdy, funny little thing with a mass of blonde hair that the sun had bleached to the colour of straw and a small round body that was almost as dark as an African’s.

Yves saw them walk off towards the sea. He watched them for a long time, with a vague sense of pleasure due equally to the child as to her pretty mother. He hadn’t seen the woman’s face, but her body had the shape of a ravishing little statue. He couldn’t help but smile as he thought of the many circumstances that would have had to coincide in Paris to allow him such a vision, one that seemed so natural here at the seaside. Seeing her there, all suntanned and rosy, with the curves and lines of her body that he could make out under her swimsuit, made him feel as if this woman belonged to him somehow, unbeknownst to her, because to him she was as naked as if she were standing in front of her lover. That was perhaps why he felt a very slight, very fleeting sense of anguish as soon as he lost sight of her among the crowd of bathers: it was one of those strange moments of regret: when set against intense despair, though, it is no more than a pinprick compared to a knife wound.

He stretched out on his side with a sudden vague sense of uneasiness; he began to play absent-mindedly with a handful of golden sand, which he let flow through his fingers like a strand of fine hair, silky and irritating. Then he looked out at the sea once more in the hope of seeing the woman, as yet only half-glimpsed, coming out of the water. Female shapes, deeply tanned and rosy, passed in front of him; he was getting more and more agitated, and still he couldn’t find the woman he had seen earlier. Finally he spotted her, thanks to the child who caught his attention because she was crying and stamping her feet: the poor little girl had swallowed some bitter, salty water which had surely caused her noisy protest. Her mother laughed a little, called her a ‘silly little thing’ and then consoled her; suddenly she reached down, picked her up, sat her on her shoulders and started to run.