The Blue Distance

The light in the villa was the colour of a peeled lemon. Not the sun, not yet, but the underwater light of early morning that seemed to seep through the shutters, soaking the white linen and the terra-cotta tiles. My husband, Simon, was still asleep, his hand curled around the space where my hip had been. I’d slipped out to the kitchen to make coffee, my feet cold on the stone floor.

Vacation. The word itself felt like a foreign object in my mouth, a hard little pebble of a thing. We had driven five hours from the airport, the rental car a tin can of stale air and Simon’s low-grade frustration with the satellite navigation. Now we were here, in a house that belonged to a friend of a friend, perched on a hillside overlooking a sea that was almost unbearably blue.

Everything was too still. The air, the dust motes dancing in the slatted light, the cicadas holding their breath. It was this stillness that unnerved me.

In Montreal, there was always the hum of the city, the damp seep of the St. Lawrence, the argument of the construction cranes, the sharp scent of snow on the pavement.

Here, the silence was so loud it made my ears ring. It seemed to amplify the tiny, frantic engine of my own mind.

I took my coffee out to the terrace. The bougainvillea was a violent, screaming pink against the whitewashed wall. It was the pink of a child's birthday party, the pink of a wound.

I thought about the woman who lived here, the friend of a friend. I’d seen photos of her online, always laughing, a glass of something pale and fizzy in her hand. She had a large, open face and hair the colour of dry wheat.

Did she sit here, in this very chair, and think about the rattle of her own life? Did the bougainvillea seem to her a little too pink?

I thought of Montreal, buried under its winter coat. The grey slush on Sherbrooke Street, the breath of the Métro rising from grates, the way the cold made the skin feel tight and strange. I had left all of that behind. And yet, here I was, in this lemon-coloured light, feeling just as sealed in.

Simon joined me an hour later, his hair wet from the shower. He was a handsome man, even in his disgruntlement. He wore a pair of linen shorts that were a little too short and a linen shirt that was a little too crumpled. He looked like a man trying very hard to be on vacation.

“Sleep well?” he asked, not really asking. He was looking at his phone, scrolling through the news. Bad news. It was always bad news. He read it out to me, a grim litany of politics and disaster, as if he were delivering a weather report. I nodded, sipping my coffee.

“We should go to the beach,” he said, finally putting the phone down. “The one they recommended.”

The beach was a crescent of white sand, fringed with pale, salt-bitten pines. The sea was a different blue here, a solid, metallic blue, like a coin. We set up our towels, two neat, identical rectangles on the sand. Simon immediately pulled a book from his bag, a dense-looking history of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

He was a man who craved facts, who believed that the world could be understood through its footnotes.

I walked to the water’s edge. The Mediterranean was tepid, a little disappointing, like bathwater gone cold. It lapped at my ankles, and I felt a sudden, surprising surge of sadness.

It was the sadness of the solitary swimmer, the loneliness of the open water. I waded in up to my knees, my skirt ballooning around me.

A boy, maybe seven years old, was building a sandcastle a few feet away. He was deeply absorbed, his tongue poking from the corner of his mouth. His father lay on a towel nearby, a paperback splayed over his face.

The mother was in the water, a sleek, dark shape moving with a steady, practiced crawl.

She was a woman who knew where she was going. I watched her turn, her arms slicing the water, her face impassive. She didn’t look at her son, or her husband. She was in her own world, her own blue distance.

That night, Simon and I went to a taverna. The tables were set with paper cloths and plastic candleholders shaped like seashells. A trio of old men played a mournful tune on a battered accordion and a violin. Simon ordered grilled octopus and a bottle of cold, dry white wine.

He was trying. He was really trying. He told me about the Austro-Hungarian Empire, about its fractious, complex history, its eventual, inevitable collapse. His voice was a low, steady hum, like the cicadas.

I listened, or rather, I watched his mouth move. The wine was making me feel loose and strange. My gaze drifted to a couple at the next table. She was young and beautiful, wearing a shimmering yellow dress. He was older, his hand resting possessively on her bare shoulder. She was laughing, her head thrown back, her throat a pale column in the candlelight. She reminded me of someone. Not a person I knew, but a person I might have been. A person who laughed like that.

“Are you listening, Brigitte?” Simon asked.

“Of course,” I said. “The Emperor Franz Joseph. He was very old.”

Simon looked at me, a flicker of annoyance in his eyes. “He was a symbol,” he said, patiently. “A symbol of a dying world.”

He was right. He was always right. I was just a woman in a taverna, drinking wine, watching a girl in a yellow dress. I was a symbol of something too. A wife on vacation. The paper cloth was soggy from my wine glass, a map of dark stains.

On our last day, we drove to a ruined city in the hills. The stones were the colour of honey, the colour of the earth. We walked among the fallen columns, the silent amphitheatres. Simon was in his element, pointing out the architecture, the remnants of the ancient plumbing. He was a tour guide to his own contentedness.

I left him by the forum and wandered away, down a narrow path that led to the edge of the cliff. A single wind-bent olive tree grew there, its roots clawing the dry soil. Beyond it, the world fell away into an endless expanse of white and blue. The sky and the sea were a single, blinding thing.

I sat on a warm stone, the sun pressing down on my head. I thought about the woman in the villa, with her laughing face and her pink bougainvillea. I thought about the swimmer in the sea, her steady, solitary arms. I thought about the girl in the yellow dress, her head thrown back in mock surrender. They were all on vacation, and they were all somewhere else entirely.

Simon’s voice called out from the ruins, a small, distant sound. He was looking for me.

I should get up, walk back, tell him about the olive tree, the view. I should play the part of the wife on vacation, smiling, nodding, agreeing that it was all very beautiful. And it was.

But I didn’t move. I just sat there, a small, still point in the vast, honey-coloured heat, and listened to the ancient, persistent ticking of the sun. I was on vacation, and I was a long, long way from home. Not Montreal, that cramped, damp place of my life. I was a long way from myself. And that, perhaps, was the point.