Once we’d finished lunch we lost no time in loading the pétanque balls into the trunk of the 4x4, when what I at first took for a couple of particularly brazen Italian tourists pulled up and parked their Vespa right in front of the terrace, practically where we were standing. Seated on the back of the motorcycle, whose exhaust pipe continued to bang and spit out a nasty-smelling little cloud of black smoke around our legs, sat a Japanese woman dressed in a large white tank top that all but revealed the naked curve of her breasts, a Japanese woman who, not seeming at all ready to dismount, remained seated on the back of the scooter looking every bit like some hitherto unclassified mythological creature (neither siren nor seahorse: the top half a Japanese woman and the bottom half a scooter), carefully holding a bright yellow surfboard under her arm. It was only the rather uncustomary presence of this Japanese woman on the back of the motorcycle that stopped me from immediately recognizing the driver. Getting off with calm assurance he propped the Vespa on its stand and took off his sunglasses in a Hollywood-like gesture: Christian Pietrantoni. Dressed in a flowery shirt, Bermuda shorts, and long, vaguely Austrian spotted white woolen socks pulled up to his knees (attire that contrasted somewhat with the austere gray suit and small round glasses he’d been wearing the last time I’d seen him in Tokyo), he introduced us to Noriko, who’d just got off the scooter, effectively delaying our departure for the boules tournament. I served them a well-cooled glass of Orenga rosé on the terrace while Christian Pietrantoni spent the entire conversation pulling up his Tyrolean socks and leaning over to his friend to exchange a few loud words with her in Spanish, the only language they both understood, she having spent several years in Madrid (the same years I had, in fact, I learned to my surprise: ¡hombre, en el ano noventa! said the Japanese woman, ¡Yo tambien!). Christian Pietrantoni had for his part been posted to London at the time, which probably had no connection with his excellent knowledge of Castilian. Ange knew Christian Pietrantoni too of course, Ange knew everyone. I’d even heard that when Ange’s parents came to visit him in Tokyo (Ange had also lived in Japan for a bit: “Really, these Corsicans are everywhere,” the Japanese woman must have thought), Christian Pietrantoni, immediately filled-in about their arrival by some well-informed snitch or another (Ange himself probably), had swooped down on their hotel with all the swiftness of a predator and all the doting attention of a Lithuanian cousin to serve as their guide and companion, leading them through the narrow streets of Shinjuku and telling them about the country while bringing himself up to date on the latest news from the village, the most recent putachji from Centuri, Morsiglia, or the hamlet of Minerviu. I glanced discretely at the time and, not wanting to be late for the boules match, abruptly signaled our departure by impetuously clacking my pétanque balls together the way the great players do, making Noriko jump in her seat (¡santo cielo! she cried, putting a hand to her chest).
We headed off. Taking our seats in the different vehicles we drove over to Tollare in a slow, motorized procession, Christian Pietrantoni’s little Vespa leading the way through the silent and burning scrubland, while we boules players followed in Ange’s 4x4 without speaking a word, like astronauts with less than an hour before takeoff. In front of us Christian Pietrantoni swerved his Vespa along the sinuous bends in the road like a motorcycle escort, swaying back and forth with the curves. Behind him, Noriko was clutching the multicolored shirt of her knight errant in one hand and her yellow surfboard in the other, like some profane trophy she was parading from one village to the next in honor of the ocean and its enormous waves (even if the Mediterranean was calm as a lake that day, with just a few little waves perishing humbly against the rocks down below). When we got to Tollare we parked on the large gravel lot and I walked down to the beach to sign us up for the tournament. In a little shack surrounded by reeds where you could buy ice cream and a few soft drinks, a table had been set up under a parasol and two guys in shorts (the organizers) signed the players in before starting the draw. Reaching my hand deep into the pocket of my Bermuda shorts I took out a crumpled old fifty franc note displaying a wizened, grinning Voltaire, and gave our names to the organizers. They just took down our first names, Ange, Jean-Philippe, Jean-Michel (Vilmouth’s first name is not Jean-Michel, by the way, but Jean-Luc, everyone knows that; no matter, later I astutely made up for my slip by telling him I’d invented the pseudonym to help him save face once people had seen him point). When it was finally time for the draw with its unchanging ritual of little scraps of paper mixed together in a cotton sunhat sporting the Pastis 51 emblem, luck had it that my partner was a certain René. Our team was rather unbalanced, I must say, you couldn’t have imagined a more disparate, morganatic pair. René, short and stocky, densely muscled, with a thin black moustache, red shorts, and some old slippers (he could even have gone shirtless), was the infallible shooter, while I, long-limbed and aristocratic (very Prince of Savoie, I’d been told), had the fine long hands of a levelheaded pointer, legs looking rather white compared with my partner’s hairy brown stumps (though, as far as I was concerned, my legs were already ideally tanned), silhouette slightly hunched by the weight of my years and with a hint of lukewarm disdain about it, thanks to the daily exercise of irony. I was wearing a simple baggy pair of beach trunks and a loose white cotton shirt, a light-colored straw hat that fit me like a glove — an elegant yellow straw boater garnished with a fine caramel ribbon that must have belonged to my grandfather Lanskoronskis — and a pair of what are known as boat shoes, the sort worn by indolent rich amateur sailors who idle away their time on yacht-club gangways (you can imagine the sort of figure I cut: people called me Monsieur). After the first game, which of course we won without difficulty, we returned to the shack to announce our rapid victory to the organizers. The other games were still in progress, only one had already ended, apparently without much of a fight, I could see Jean-Luc (disguised as Jean-Michel, three pétanque boules scattered around his feet) leaning on a white plastic chair on the terrace, his pant legs rolled up around his calves, standing there in bare feet gazing out at the sea. And? I asked him. Thirteen to zero, he said, and lazily tossed a pebble into the water that, like him, succumbed, dropping slowly to the bottom, two arm’s lengths from where Noriko was paddling, her surfboard wedged under her arms, slowly advancing over the water, kicking her legs recklessly behind her in the blue, desperately still sea.