As I sit tonight at Nice on the rooftop of a building overlooking the boulevard and the seashore beyond, the sun’s echoes still warm the sky around me and the stone beneath me. My dress is casual and social, a sari and a shapeless loose top of soft cotton. All of the same midnight blue. My hair has gotten long over the summer, and is tied behind with an old piece of leather thong from the last pair of sandals I destroyed. The new ones on my feet pinch.

The American Express office lights are still on inside, five or six stories below me, casting a slight illumination on the ground below in the twilight of the still glowing sky. A scent on the breeze catches my attention at the west end of the boulevard. Some poor soul lost her traveler’s checks perhaps. I see her walk down Quai Des États-Unis and into the office right below my feet. The street is pretty quiet at that time of night. The cafes filled, and everyone is in the midst of things. The first calm after the rush of the day, I could only guess at; never having seen a city of Provence, in the daylight. But the rhythms of calm and bustle that permeate this night of Nice must reflect the diurnal patterns of its inhabitants.

Some of us sense joy in our sexual social and spiritual life. Opportunities and desires. But for others something in the brain isn't right. And life is not heaven. It is hell. And many leave. I know. I can smell them a kilometer away. I could smell her tonight as she walked out of the AMEX office onto Promenade des Anglais.

The energy of the night had intensified in the past hour as the sun finally left the night sky alone. On the evening breeze came, not the smell of the seas, but the breeze of the people and their cars, and strolling feet. As the crowds were drawn out in theatric slow motion, the boulevard filled up like some human gas, the exhalations of the city buildings. Oblivious to it all, she stood like a dream outside the office almost directly below my feet. Oblivious not to just my presence, I’m used to that, but to everything beyond her. Not unlike some statue, she stood back lit.

As the lights in the office behind her went out one by one, and she was left, a sack of discarded cloth. This pile of rags somnambulated through the living and the machines, crossing the wide boulevard, through the beach-side cafes and down onto the narrow rocky public beach nestled up against the storm sewers at the foot of Rue du Congress. There she dropped, a pile of tired clothes.

And I’m sitting here, pale and languid, or liquid, with the still warm stone under me; my legs dangling into space. Soaking up the leftover heat, standard early evening lizard pose for Sarah. Just about every night this summer that I could get free of the villains in the villa, I'm roaming the rooftops, alleys, forests and fields of southeastern Provence. In a 20km semi circle around Nice. Just looking. Snooping. Peeking. Sometimes drinking. Dressed pretty much the same, always on the edge looking in. Watching, waiting for someone to happen by.

I watched her while the heals of my sandals bang on the stonework, and my eyes fix on her, trying to see into her through the dark a couple hundred yards away.

As soon as I was sure she had stopped, sitting before her backpack on the beach, I move, scurrying from my perch back along the rooftops to the door I had forced open earlier in the month to access my now favourite vantage. As I loped down the open stairway to the street, I could see the whole night world that lives only in the back alleys of Nice. After a quick check on my little Fiat Spider, what else, making sure it was where I'd parked it, I head for the beach.

She was, as I had left her, quietly hunched before a big pack with her small daypack on her lap, as she seemed to gaze out to sea. Both packs were covered with patches of a dozen places I’d never been to, and some I’d never heard of. A big Canadian flag across the back. But that meant nothing about her, as I’d learned that everyone used a Canadian flag to hide their identity. Well, it showed that she was either Canadian or hiding the fact she was American. Hmmm… I wonder if I could get a Canadian passport someday. I pat the forged EEC driver’s license tucked into the small pouch in my sports bra along with my car key and a few Franc notes. Sarah travels light and fast. My flight suit, sports bra and exercise shorts, allowing me to dump the sari and cotton top, when things get intense, and make a quick get away.

This pile of laundry in front of me was another story. Socks, shoes, and t-shirts attached to the packs with string and clips. As if I was looking into someone else’s life, rooting through dirty laundry. I drew back from where I sat, hunched, less than 2 metres away in the shadow of the sidewalk where the beach met the city. The smell that first drew me to her, that scent of death, was overwhelming in this drying laundry of her soul. There was no way I could just sit here and watch her, without doing something insane. I had to engage her somehow.

The shadows kept me as I moved far down the beach, so that I could come upon her directly amid the rising moonlight. I did not try to hide or silence the crunch of my sandals, slipping from time to time on the shingle as I made my way close down by the surf, along the beach in her direction.

She looked up at me, I guess. I could feel her eyes on me, I was in mid-stumble while looking down for somewhere to place my feet for a more stable purchase. As I looked back up, I found her fixed upon me, and I stopped dead. Sarah always stops dead. And I met her stare with my own, and slowly walked up the beach toward her. I halted my progress a few steps away, standing there looking at almost eye level with her seated form, as the slope of the beach leveled the difference between us. Trying to smile from under her knot of sun-bleached dreadlocks, she mumbled a greeting in something that almost resembled French.

"Hallo," I smiled back, in as neutral an accent as I could come up with. I didn’t know what to do. She literally oozed the pheromone of death, the way others glowed with charisma or sexuality. She was ripe like no one I had met in Nice. Part of me groaned and howled in frustration. Oh the humanity! Her scent was driving me wild, but my tummy was just not growling. I wasn't hungry! I don’t eat when I’m not hungry. Never did before, still don’t. But still, I was salivating.

"Do you speak English?" I asked, just so I could stand there and let her scent overwhelm me, without her wondering what I was doing there, my knees shaking, drool making my lips glisten. What the fuck am I doing here? Am I curious? Nose to nose with succulent pheromones. I am just plain curious. Blood sucking ethnologist, exploring the culture of the prey? She was free from the clutches of me for now.

She had answered, "Yes." and I crawled up the last bit of beach that separated us and eased myself down beside her, wiggling my butt around until I could see both her face and the sea, I smiled again, to hide the twitching. I was overwhelmed by the scent which hung like her aura around her, hypnotizing me. I hoped she thought I was smiling, and not leering.

But she smiled back in a way that disarmed me even more. It was an open and friendly smile, unbeguiling. Nothing like the despairing scent that assaulted me. Not at all. She was looking at me curiously. The calm curiosity of the happy tourist, just wondering who this young woman was and what she might be up to. I didn’t know quite what to say, and I was the one bewildered now.

"You look lost." she started and reached out to hold my hand.

"Uh? I am." I returned. "When I saw you, I thought you looked lonely or sad. And that drew me towards you. But here you look so content and relaxed sitting next to the sewers on a stony beach all alone."

Smiling, her hands dropped into her lap, and looking out to the sea> "Well," she began, "it has been such a wonderful day. I can’t get it out of my thoughts. Today, I hiked up a mountain just north and west of here. I took a bus from the train station, #129 I think. Up to some small village. Then I walked long through the early afternoon up a road in the dust and heat to the summit of some hill to get a look at Mount Ventoux hazy in the distance. All I could smell was the lavender and the dust under my feet. The wind was dry and warming, and I could feel the sweat on my body. And the water was cool on my face and in my mouth. And the sound from the half empty bottle comforted me."

She looked away from the waves towards me in my shadows, and licked her lips. Looking, I guess, for some response. And I can imagine that she saw me, slack jawed and waiting. She continued, "When I got to the top, to the end of this road, it was only to a park. A small park at the top. You couldn’t tell where the park started, and the scrub and houses ended. At the centre of the park there was a lookout from where I could see all the sites in all directions. But I was looking for only one thing, one site. For off in the distance there was this mountain. The mountain I had come for. Petrarch’s mountain, Mount Ventoux. The place where he had lived for a decade, pining and writing poetry to his beloved Laura, hundreds of years ago."

She was looking at me again, and I don’t think I blinked or moved at all. She raised an eyebrow at me, and I realized that I hadn’t been breathing, or moving properly either. I do that when I'm concentrating. It weirds some people rather badly. I think I blushed, not that she’d know, and I looked down and breathed deeply, tasting the salt night air I loved, and trying to wash her death out of my senses. They were a chaotic mesh of the night, her daylight story, and my unrequited hunger that was still gnawing at my satiated being. "Who’s Laura?" was all I could manage, raising my eyes to see her looking again out to sea, and hearing her continue.

"Laura?" Looking back at me. "Here take this." She handed me a battered penguin out of her pocket as if she knew exactly where it was, without looking. "I’m not sure who I am any more. Laura and Petrarch have been part of my life for so long, since I was your age, perhaps. I used to want to be Laura, so distant, yet so loved. Exalted on a high pedestal. A girl whom another human being had so loved that ten years of his life was spent on that mountain. Ten years of his words you now have in your hands."

I looked down at the tattered softcover book, stained with damp, tears perhaps, and broken, almost coming to pieces in my hands.

"But that was long ago. Then, I wanted love as strongly as he did. I wanted to burn for love, to die for love, and then realize that I had to live for love. And then to go on and on and on forever in a purgatorio of desire. A purgatory because unlike heaven, purgatory was a labor and a pain that would cleanse the soul and raise it up to heaven, while in exquisite torture keeping you from the object of desire."

She took a deep breath, almost a shiver, and looked over at me. To see, perhaps, my eyes. And though I don’t think I had moved at all or drawn a breath, they were alive with curiosity. She expected nothing of me, except perhaps that I was there. I smiled, looking at her face, still feeling so close.

"But?" Keeping my stare and looking deep into my eyes. "But. Yes. But."

"But I don’t want that any more. I have loved. And burned. And loved and burned for love in some heart rending agony. And been purged. And now I'm at the bottom of all things. 'Utterly worn out. Utterly clean.' That day is done and dead, and for all this summer, I want nothing more."

Her monologue ended while she sat staring a the waves for a long while, unblinking. And I stared at her unblinking, rocking slightly to the waves. The moon had risen, her face was visible and glistening with quiet tears. I slowly edged forward and slipped my arms around this woman, and almost cheek touching cheek, I saw these bright laughing eyes through the mist of tears. "Where do your tears come from, Mme Petrarch?"

"My tears? They are tears of many places. Of accumulated joy and endings. I came to this beach from a phone call. From a sentence that speaks of endings. From an answer. I was sitting here. Here to sit and wait for the morning. Waiting for my time."

This was getting worse and worse. I was drowning in pheromones of self-destruction. Confused by these stories and hints of tears, I was an wreck of emotions. The moon was not moving across the sky. It stood, yet it danced on the wind, blowing on the waves, and jumping at us off the surf. Ever moving reflections of a motionless light. The warmth of the day gave way to the cooler night.

Seated on the sand that lightly covered the rocks, the cold of the sewer tainted the warm breeze, but the sound of the water splashing forth was hushed by the surf. My thoughts were gone. But my senses were alive. The scent, her death scent, assaulting me. But other senses, competing for space, kept everything in check. She humbled me. Her closeness numbed me. Her warmth comforted me. I had never been so close to one so close to death, for so long. So passionate. So drawing me forth. So alive. Yet not insisting or demanding. Just present, timeless, immediate. My paralyzed self wanted to shake her and cry out, "Who? What?"

Instead, she looked to me, and asked, "Who are you, my little dark one? Are you a child of sea and the night? Climbing from the surf like a shadow. Do you come from where I go?" Her question was a story in itself that I had no answer to, except the truth. And this easy truth, brought a smile to my lips. The truth that never spoken of to those who learn it from my voiceless teeth.

"I sense your longing. I can taste your drive to oblivion. Smell your pain. This is what I live on. The warm, yet already dead. I am a dead girl. An undead. A friend. My name is Sarah." And I smiled again.

To be continued March 2001 in E2K

Llyr's daughter is Branwen