Chantal Thomas - Memories of Low Tide

LENFANT VEUT UNE VAGUE SALE, LE SABLE.

THE CHILD WANTS A SALTY WAVE, THE SAND.

COLETTE

This morning I woke up to dark clouds in the sky, after two months without rain. I didnt need to go outside to find out. I could see from my bed the palm trees swaying in the wind in the eerie, leaden light, their brilliant green fronds shrouded in grey. Id slept a long time, without the usual interruptions occasioned by the light as it grew brighter, the daily miracle of a new day heralded by the gulls shrieks and the doves low cooing. Here in Nice, during the summer months, I wake up in several stages. This is not because Im anxious; on the contrary, its because Im impatient for the light, the nuances of the light, that my sleep is unsettled. Long before the sun is fully up the light is greenish white, becoming slowly tinged with pink, before it finally blooms and this is what wakes me properly into the pure gleam of clear gold.

The summer is blazing hot. Everything burns to the touch. Its exhilarating and exhausting all at once. As if we were on the brink of some extraordinary event: catastrophe or revelation. Theres urgency in the air: to explode, go wild, add the fever of alcohol to that of the world, turn up the music full blast, sit alone on a rock, laughing, legs in the water, watching the sun set. And when the foehn, the hot wind from the mountains to the south, begins to rise in repeated gusts, it feels like the Event is imminent. Waves surge, temperatures soar, and along the pavement little piles of pine needles and dried leaves blown from inland are trampled underfoot.

Todays not like that at all. The sky is overcast, wind laced with rain. I gulp down my coffee and grab a towel, flip-flops for walking on the pebbles and a canvas sun hat, in the unlikely event that the sun should return, shove it all into my multi-coloured Brazilian beach bag and hurry down towards the sea. Its dark and furious, nothing like the Mediterranean that I swam in the previous evening. A calm sea, shimmering with coppery glints, like moir silk. An enveloping sea, whose balmy embrace made me feel like I was swimming in a dream. Why would I ever stop, I asked myself, as in the dusk a buoy blinked its green light and the street lamps along the coast came on. When I got home I flicked randomly through a book by Roland Barthes and came across a paragraph on Sade: The ultimate erotic state (analogous to the sublime legato of the phrase, which in music is called phrasing) is to swim: in corporeal substances, delights, the deep feelings of lasciviousness.

Because of the sudden bad weather, I am instinctively careful not to swim against the waves but to plunge down with them and let them bring me back up, closing my eyes against the foaming crests as they smack me in the face. Its beginning to pour, huge drops scoring the water. Its pure joy to be swimming in both sea and rain at once, the rain falling in sheets, drenching my head. But its such a deluge in the lashing waves that I can no longer see, and I get out, a little dazed. My clothes and towel are soaked. My bag is full of water. Theres no point trying to find shelter so I go up to the boardwalk, where enormous masses of water are crashing with astonishing force. On the ground they create rushing rivers, out at sea immense, light-coloured, faintly ruffled areas of water. As the storm becomes more intense these zones grow bigger, as if the rain bouncing on the sea was sufficiently forceful and abundant to replace the surface of the sea with a surface of fresh water, fleetingly obliterating it. Im struck by how the power of the seas erasure and perpetual renewal is exceeded by that of the rain. The sea, streaked with rain, swept clear of the slanting lines of waves, extends all the way to the Restaurant La Rserve, reaching another buoy and stretching out towards the horizon.

My mother used sometimes to come here to swim, although her regular beach was near where she lived at the end of the Promenade des Anglais, in front of the Hotel Westminster. But she also swam opposite the Cours Saleya. She didnt really have a regular beach, in fact. Even towards the end of her life, at an age when the normal tendency is to reduce physical effort, she would often take the train to Villefranche-sur-Mer, where she liked to swim in the bay she preferred its size and claimed it was more sheltered than the Bay of Angels. She would swim anywhere, at all times of the day, with a stubbornness and tenacity that she didnt display towards any other activity.

Still in my swimming costume, standing above the waves and clutching my dripping clothes, I abandon myself to the torrential rain. Water from the sky streams down my face and into my eyes, is seasoned with the salt from my own body. Ive always thought of my mother as a woman who was entirely indifferent to any notion of transmission, and myself as someone who had appeared out of nowhere, with no anterior wisdom, yet suddenly it seems to me that she has, without knowing it, transmitted something truly essential to me: the energy of the wake as it carves through the water, imprinted in the moment; the beauty of a path that leads to forgetting; and if there was something I wanted to celebrate about her, something of her that I wanted to try to convey, it would be, paradoxically, the figure of a woman who forgets. Not who is indifferent, but who forgets. Was this her strength or her weakness? Both, surely; and as I stand in the pouring rain, soaked in the deluge, my beach things about to be carried away by the current, borne off by a swollen wave, I find myself wishing I were already home, lost in the music of writing, watching the curtain of rain, looking through it at something far beyond, my mother swimming, alone, unreachable, a minuscule speck against the blue immensity, an almost imperceptible dot, except in my own memory.

NICE, AUGUST 2015