The Narrator Asks Léa About Jade in Avignon

The Narrator’s meeting with Léa in Avignon is both a reunion between old friends and an attempt to reconstruct Jade’s past. Set against a holiday from the daily demands of caring for Erik, the conversation begins in the relief of a summer evening and turns, at Léa’s prompting, toward the childhood friendship, ambitions, and disappearance that left Jade’s history full of gaps. Léa offers memories, but also admits how much of what she once believed about Jade may have been invented.

Leaving the holiday routine

The meeting follows a family holiday that had proved more constraining than restorative. Erik was too young to be left with the hotel’s two orange-shirted monitors, who worked from nine in the morning until nine at night, so The Narrator and her family went out each day and did not return until dinner. The intended beach holiday quickly became impractical: Erik disliked the sand, feared the sea, would not stay beneath the parasol, and repeatedly lost his sun hat. Reaching the quieter coves also required carrying toys, a cooler, sun creams, flasks, and other supplies. The family switched to cultural sightseeing, visiting Cadaqués, Figueres, and Girona while searching for shade. At night, the air conditioner cooled the room but made so much noise that sleep remained difficult.

On the fourth day, after feeding Erik thoroughly and giving him quick affection, The Narrator set off alone by car. She remembers the drive toward the sign for Perpignan, Peralada, and La Jonquera as an unusually powerful experience of freedom. That departure creates the conditions for the Avignon meeting: for once, she is away from the immediate routines of nursing and childcare, though not free of their physical demands.

A friendship resumed

The Narrator and Léa see each other only every two or three years, about five times since the year they spent together. They have made weekend trips and longer visits to one another’s hometowns, but the infrequency has not, in The Narrator’s account, lengthened the emotional distance between them. Each meeting resumes as if the previous one had been the day before. Their shared past is limited in duration but intense, and the friendship has acquired an idealized quality partly because they see so little of one another. The Narrator believes they could forgive each other almost anything.

Although Léa and her family have recently moved to a village outside Avignon, the two women meet at eight in the evening in the square in front of the papal palace. Léa arrives almost twenty minutes late in the lingering heat. The Narrator orders a second beer after finishing the first. Since Erik is not with her, she can drink without worrying about breastfeeding for the first time in longer than she can remember. The summer evening seems to restore their younger selves: they wear floral clothes and sandals, their tattoos are visible, and the talk ranges across memories, future plans, gossip, and small acts of mischief.

For a while, Jade is absent from their conversation. The Narrator is glad to inhabit the temporary simplicity of being herself with Léa, rather than a mother watching the clock or preparing to nurse. But her body interrupts that escape. Pressure builds in her breasts, and she goes to the bathroom to express milk into the sink. When she returns, the subject of children can no longer be avoided.

Jade returns to the conversation

The Narrator initially considers discussion of Jade out of place amid summer, wine, oysters, and friendship. She does not want to think about a woman who killed her twins, or about the possibility that such an event could happen at all. Léa, however, recalls why they met. While they eat oysters, she remembers that Jade once taught her to put her fingers down her throat, then condenses their two childhoods and adolescence into roughly fifteen minutes.

According to Léa, she and Jade had been close since they met at six. Jade was mischievous, reckless, capable of malice, and brave; she could also perform the part of a good girl when circumstances called for it. Léa sometimes bore the consequences of Jade’s actions. Jade was not a committed student and had no particular talent for numbers or interest in reading. She lived with her mother and a younger half-brother. Although Jade often visited Léa’s home, Léa scarcely ever went to Jade’s. Jade’s mother did not work, was partly deaf, and received enough assistance to subsist because she had two children. Léa remembered her as extremely thin and constantly smoking, with a bottle of mouthwash by the sink that she gargled and spat out over the dirty dishes.

Jade’s account of her absent father was no firmer. She said he was a Polish handball player who had left Poland for the capitalist dream and left again before she was born. Her mother had met him at the hotel where she worked, serving him breakfast before he got her pregnant. Léa cannot say how much of this story was true, and suspects Jade herself may not have known. The details establish not a reliable family history but the uncertainty surrounding the stories Jade told about her origins.

Ambition, estrangement, and disappearance

As the two friends grew older, their lives diverged. Jade was said to be moving from place to place with a man, living at different times in Toulouse, Marseille, or Barcelona. She no longer lived with her mother and returned to the city only sporadically. Léa worried that something might happen to her, but Jade sometimes called and said that everything was going wonderfully: she was working as a model, travelling, and earning good money. Léa would feel reassured, then compare Jade’s apparently adventurous life with her own studies and life at home with her parents. Painting no longer appealed to her; she thought she was better at social life.

When Léa had the chance to spend a year in England, she invited Jade to join her for the first week. Léa would pay for the plane ticket, and the two could share her room. For Léa, the invitation was a final chance to recover the intimacy they had lost, as well as a way to show Jade that she too could be adventurous. The visit instead exposed how differently they experienced the world. Léa remembers Jade as a woman of the world until they reached the campus; there, Jade seemed out of place, hid behind Léa, and feared being addressed because she barely spoke English. Léa thinks the contrast hurt Jade, whether because Jade recognized it herself or because Léa did.

After returning to France, Jade never resumed contact. Léa called and sent emails, but soon received notice that Jade’s email address was no longer active. She feared the worst, then came to think Jade might have been trying to escape her lies by taking on a new one. Léa also begins to question specific stories she had once accepted. She doubts that Jade was admitted to the prestigious Paris art school she had described: Léa had never seen an official letter or document, and suspects Jade may have used her money for a short trip before claiming that the scholarship would not cover the costs. These are Léa’s retrospective doubts, not established facts.

The question of motherhood

The Narrator is about to ask Léa about Jade’s change of name when she instead asks whether Jade ever spoke about wanting to become a mother. Léa says she never did. In fact, when Léa herself said she wanted to have children young, Jade called her crazy. Léa now judges her own younger self harshly, calling that wish foolish and unconscious. The exchange gives the conversation a second point of focus: not only the uncertain account of Jade’s past, but the distance between youthful ideas about motherhood and the burdens that later become concrete. The Narrator’s attempt to recover Jade through Léa’s memories therefore yields no definitive explanation. It brings into view a friendship sustained by affection, a history shadowed by unverifiable stories, and a question about motherhood that neither woman can approach as an abstraction.