Shall I describe him to you? Have I talked to you about The Big Blue? Can you picture Jean-Marc Barr, the dolphin man with every shade of blue imprinted on his eyes, starry chasms, like two marbles containing the entire universe? Well, his spitting image is right in front of me. A fisherman who’s just as magnetic: baby-round head shaved with an electric razor three days ago, from skull to chin, the same poetry in his eyes. He’s the same, I’m telling you! Just as dreamy, except that he clearly doesn’t spend his days free-diving under water; he’s more likely to spend them above the waves. He works with his hands, he toils away, unknotting his wretched nets with great concentration whilst being fried by the sun.

I wait.

How old? Ten years older than me, max?

I wait like a little flirt, I wait until the sun has grilled him medium rare, I imagine his tanned arms pulling his wet T-shirt over his head, his damp muscles twisting the fabric, his hands …

‘Come on over.’

He’s spoken to me. Damn it. Caught red-handed!

‘Come here,’ he says again. ‘I need some advice. Come and take a look.’

What would you have done in my place?

Don’t try to be clever, my future reader. The same as me, obviously! So I set down my newspaper and my Walkman, I pushed my sunglasses back on to my forehead and stepped towards his boat.

‘I need your advice. Look, what do you think?’

And even if you don’t believe me, I don’t care, the dolphin-man really was a dolphin man, as if I’d read something in his face and he’d picked up on that. Like some kind of telepathy, the same way cetaceans can communicate with each other, by sonar, brain to brain. OK, so it was less than five metres from my bench to his boat, but we were just starting out. My dolphin-man and I can train ourselves, we’ll get better, and in the end we’ll be able to communicate from one ocean to another.

‘So, are you looking?’

He shows me a little blue poster painted on plywood, showing three dark outlines on a sparkling sea.

Sea Safari – swim with dolphins

Every day until the end of August.

L’Aryon

Port of Stareso

04 95 15 65 42

‘What do you think?’

‘It’s good.’

To tell you the truth, his poster is a complete rip-off of The Big Blue, he hasn’t exactly over-exerted himself. Besson could sue, I think.

Then I add:

‘Except that it’s nonsense.’

I like to provoke. The dolphin-man pauses and stares at the death’s-head sphinx on my T-shirt. He pulls the face of a wandering poet who’s walked into a glass door.

‘Is that what you thought when you read it?’

‘Yep.’