For weeks I’d been leading an impossible life, gadding about bookstores and putting on my act from Limoges to Caen, Calais to Montélimar, and worse still. Wherever I went, I preened and took questions, smiled till it hurt, inscribing the title page “For Bénédicte,” “For Jeanne,” “For Clarisse—Ambre—Natacha”; the guys rarely wanted their copies signed. And wherever I went I stayed up too late after boozy dinners, trashed in my hotel room and raiding the minibar while I scrolled to hypnosis or flicked through the cable channels. And so the days passed, speedily, in migraines and trains, with no clue where I was or when I was heading home. And something vague, something worse than weariness, had begun filling the holds. By the time I got back to my place, it was clear to me. I was out of juice, out of strength, even love was out. The terrible season was starting; my goose was cooked.
Without going into details, the writer who quits drinking, drops twenty pounds, stops reading, smokes at breakfast, walks through the streets like Dante’s Virgil, and even cries a little bit into his pillow—shrinks have a name for it. Let’s just say I wasn’t doing so hot. Luckily some friends of mine came to the rescue. One Sunday I called H., who said: “Why don’t you come down here? We’ve got the sea, antisocial behavior, and bottarga.” Sounded pretty good to me, and I hurtled down the Hexagon to Marseille.
Now, as luck would have it, H. had access to the Swimmers’ Circle Club, which she used as an office. That was where she met friends, read, laid out, took dips in the sea—in short, it was where she spent a lot, or rather the best part, of her time. And that’s where I found her, in braided mules and an oversized shirt; things were looking up already.
Because, behind her, all the blue of the Mediterranean had just come rushing in over the railing, and the only thing left in the world was this color, stretching as far out to the horizon as it towered overhead, blue everywhere, in full spate, at full tilt, yet dappled with a thousand details and too many shades to name, a whole galaxy of azure caught in the jaw formed by the coastal road and the right arm of the Circle.
In a book whose title escapes me, Lawrence Durrell writes: “Somewhere between Calabria and Corfu the blue really begins.”
But that was where the blue really began, in Marseille, at its feet, uncontainable and all-consuming, bristling with crisp little sparkling crests that were the mark of the sea, the sea of the Greeks, Hannibal, and COMEX, and the pale blue of the cloudless sky, mellowed and mild once you raised your eyes above the brighter, almost pale line of the horizon. Offshore lurked an island. Later I’d learn the Château d’If was out there. Even before that, though, I saw the Circle as the means of my escape. At the time I didn’t realize that escape required two referrals and a two-thousand-buck membership ticket on top of the annual subscription, which wasn’t cheap either. But then traffickers have never been all that magnanimous when it comes to monetizing the means of survival.
H., who’d been palpating me like a clinician while I basked in the beauty of the landscape, observed that I was as bony as a sardine. And she set about doing what she could, as they’ll do around here, to fatten me up. She succeeded well beyond her expectations.
And so I took up residence in a private club, Mediterranean to the core, like an island among the teeming streets and crowded beaches, I who hailed from the north, from forests and mists, and was extremely sensitive on the subject of equality. Later, as a matter of fact, a lady got pretty keyed up about this disparity, messaging me via social media that she was surprised I claimed to be against pension reform since she’d seen me enjoying the privileges of the Circle the previous summer. A serious paradox, which I resolved by blocking her immediately.
Because it must be said I found the place pretty seductive from the start, with its damp changing rooms and ocean-liner decks, its passageways and its guests who sometimes came as a family, three generations all together, with their linen and fancy watches, their imponderable dresses and women so beautiful I felt almost cured, not to mention those phenomenally strong-shouldered swimmers who plodded along, like big quiet animals, in the cafeteria lunch line, happy as clams, calm, and breathing deeply, superb machines for doing laps and winning medals. I liked the architectural complexities of the old ship, the high, salt-stained windows, the concrete blocks in the faintly dilapidated walls, the bodies lying out down below, and the turquoise cut-out of the pool with its water green at the edges and almost black where the swimmers romped. I liked the old, gray-haired gentlemen whose wrinkles reflected seventy seasons of pure blazing sun and who sat there, bent-backed and happy, their eyes smarting in the daylight that was, still, their whole life. I liked the card players and the boys who guarded the entrances, especially one of them, who talked to me like a friend, letting me imagine I’d been refit for youth. I even liked the long-haired weird guy strutting his stuff in moccasins, his shirt open over his flat, muscled belly, who, with time, became familiar, sympathetic, almost necessary.
Safely tucked away in this cocoon, I began to breathe easier. I spent hours reading Giono, swimming out to the yellow buoys, and sipping cold drinks in the shade of big umbrellas. My hands often shook, and though my regrets were too big and my appetite too small, I could already feel the wind and laziness doing me good. The Circle seemed like a great place to end up. But in fact it was beginning again. I’d regained my taste for pleasure. Every time I got into the water, I felt better.
And then one platitudinous day with no mistral or waves, I noticed a young man striding from the bar to the sea, from the changing rooms to the sauna, falsely cool but fundamentally frenzied, and always pursued by a girl in a ruffled swimsuit who was practically stepping on his heels and might have been his sister. I don’t really know what caught my attention. Maybe his extreme indifference to the pleas of the girl yammering behind him, or his sort of nebulous, intermediate majesty, his body simultaneously perfect and unfinished, dead set on his fixed idea. Or maybe it was the anxiety he so poorly concealed under his outward indifference. Perhaps I simply envied him because he was in no pain, because he was handsome and didn’t know it, full of promise, with his future still unwritten.
Anyway, now that his silhouette had been snipped out by my curiosity and set apart from the crowd, I seemed to see him everywhere. In the cafeteria and the water, at the bar where I ordered my Coke Zero, on my way out of the changing room. Everywhere. Naturally I started dreaming up lives and foibles for him, and wondering what his parents did, if he was a good student or slow on the uptake, if he had a girlfriend, a guy friend, skateboarded, or played PlayStation, if he had a meaningful first name or settled for something more boilerplate, if he was more into ice-cream bars or cones. But basically my conjectures didn’t go very far and I was satisfied with obvious observations. He seemed to be leading an easy, settled, rather happy-go-lucky southern life; he came to the Circle with his mother; and he always had this wonderful girl trailing after him, begging for his attention and never getting it. But then what was this constant anxiety gallivanting within him? Why was the kid so impatient? It didn’t remain a mystery for long.
Because that evening around seven we saw an air mattress floating from the Plage des Catalans toward the waters of the Circle. A young woman, steering the thing with her hands, maneuvered it in until she was about a hundred yards offshore. Then she lay down on her stomach and let herself gently drift, one foot trailing in the water and both hands clasped beneath her chin, as if she were asleep. At that distance, it was scarcely possible to form an idea of her face, or even her hair color. She was wearing a striped swimsuit, her mane was long, and she looked pretty young but maybe not that young. The faint evening light had drawn a thin golden crescent, almost as bright as the metallic glint off the water, on the small of her back. And she was still lying there like that, elemental and tossed by the calm evening surf, when the young man turned up. He’d gone down the steps that led to the beach and, in a single motion, tore off his T-shirt and flip-flops, waded into the water, and then dove in headfirst. Immediately he started swimming toward the girl with very fluid, rolling strokes that wasted none of his strength and left no doubt about his membership in the swim club. After a few minutes, he managed to latch on to the mattress. He and the girl exchanged a few words, then ignored each other while he went on floating in the water, submerged to his shoulders, wordlessly bobbing, calm, silent, and satisfied. This went on for fairly long time, which must have been wonderful, until the girl took her leave, and the young man returned to the Circle with a slow, weighty crawl. It was all over.
Fortunately the same thing happened every evening, and I made sure never to miss this ritual occasion, which now gave order to my entire day. And every time I spied on those youthful bodies with everything ahead of them, coming together and then ignoring each other like that, I couldn’t help imagining what was going on behind the scenes: his anxiety about not seeing her again, the speedy way the time passed when they were together, the depth of their silences, his mistrust of her, the step-by-step efforts and terrifying racing of his heart when finally he dove into the water after another endless day of waiting. H. and I got into the habit of drinking a Coke on the deck when the time came for this strange symposium. We observed them with almost vindictive rapture, suspecting the worst as well as the best. H. proved to be the more audacious of us.
“She’s screwing him for sure.”
“Forget it. He’s not even allowed to climb aboard.”
“You don’t get it. She wants somebody who deserves her. But every now and then she says, OK, come, meet me tonight.”
“No way.”
She sighed.
For my part, I was telling myself a completely different story. Every evening I rooted for a breakthrough, even a tiny breakthrough, some extra little something that would mean the day wasn’t wasted, and I began to root so hard for these two idiots to have their first kiss that their summer love became mine, a little bit. I’d found my escape.
On August 15, I arrived at the club fairly early as usual and found the sea, always crisscrossed with swimmers, utterly deserted. I rushed over to the surf to look, and standing there, peering into the clear water, I saw them—vague, round, seemingly static shapes, limpid wads of snot with purple crests trailing poisonous filaments: jellyfish. They had invaded the coast overnight, unconcerned and unseeing, easy to defeat, but rampant and legion. My thoughts went immediately to my young swimmer. And indeed I spotted him a few yards away, likewise studying this minefield where his usual agenda was going under. But he didn’t flinch, kept his frustrations to himself, and trudged wordlessly back up to the bar with the same little girl close on his heels but, by some miracle, silent.
Once the news was out, the whole Circle seemed whipped into a sort of painful frenzy. On the rocks, caramel-colored, swim-trunked fathers rehashed the same three comments, all of them experts with hands on hips. Their children were more daring and went at the scourge with nets. From time to time one of these overly adventurous hunters would spring out of the water squealing, and the sting would have to be scratched with a health-insurance card, thereby purging him of the venom of the jellyfish that had caught him off guard. Meanwhile, attendance and temperatures were approaching critical thresholds, and we glommed together as best we could, tense and dry, delirious with the heat, still courteous, but for how long?
Around three in the afternoon, we heard the loudspeaker from the Plage des Catalans—which usually confined itself to reports about pickpockets, or little Fanny who couldn’t find her mother—declaring swimming off-limits while the town blazed, hemmed in between the milling crowd, its infested shores, and the curse of living unsubmerged in hundred-degree weather.
In any case, I didn’t see the young man again all day. I imagine that he’d found a shady spot where he could ruminate on his despondency while the other Circle members were busy putting on a brave face: the bar broke attendance records that day. After a few hours, the Catalans lifeguards got fed up with lecturing vacationers and locals alike and let anybody willing to risk it go back into the water. There was, however, neither rush nor uproar, each sting giving rise to immediate, albeit secret, treatment so that no one could tell whether the threat continued unabated or had started to wane. Riding the current, the beasts went on with their mild surprise attacks, and the atmosphere was tense with the feeling of unspecific risk.
Then, around seven o’clock, the air mattress swam into view. And exactly as she had on the previous evening, and all the evenings before it, the young woman crossed the darkened surface of the sea, on which the sun convened its glinting shards and gilded squares, then let herself drift, lying prone with one foot trailing in the water, her head resting on her folded arms. Though usually this sight aroused little curiosity, this time a number of members had pressed up against the railing to peer at the fearless girl who dared to brave the waves and the beasts alike. I, for my part, was waiting for the boy. He, too, was right on schedule. But this time, I saw, he didn’t rush; he took his time, solemnly disrobed, and strapped on a pair of goggles. He hesitated for a few seconds, then rushed in. And we watched him: the long, careful strokes of the forward crawl; the head swiveling underwater, looking out for trouble; the swerves when he ran into one of the creatures; and the pauses that allowed him to catch his breath—a slow, cautious, terrifying journey that was becoming more and more interminable. Halfway there, a brief shock stopped him, and a few of us gasped or sighed. But he started up again, and when finally he reached the mattress, we saw the young woman raise herself up on one elbow and make room for him. All he had to do was clamber up beside her. He was safe. She placed one finger on the wound on his back, and cupping some water in the palm of her hand, she washed it. Right next to me, kneeling on the deck, a little girl was crying. 
Nicolas Mathieu was born in the Vosges in 1978 and now lives in Nancy. In 2014, he published his first novel, Aux animaux la guerre, which was adapted for television. In 2018, his second novel, And Their Children After Them, was awarded the Goncourt Prize. His most recent novel, Connemara, will be published by Other Press in 2024.
Alex Andriesse is a writer whose work has appeared in Granta, Conjunctions, and the Review of Contemporary Fiction. He has translated, among other books, Cristina Campo’s The Unforgivable and François-René de Chateaubriand’s Memoirs from Beyond the Grave. He is an associate editor at NYRB Classics.
Illustration: Jerome Masi.
