That’s the name I gave him. He simply couldn’t have been called anything else.
Every morning, around ten o’clock, he strolls down Boulevard Carnot towards the sea. Not to the Palais—he’s not a tourist—but past the station, along rue des Belges, skirting the Majestic, and out onto the Croisette, straight to the ocean.
If someone asked me for a picture to illustrate bon vivant, I’d choose him. Always the same, impeccably elegant. A sky-blue blazer, sleeves shoved up to the elbow—unapologetically Eighties—white trousers, brown shoes. Deeply tanned. A striking shock of white hair. The blazer is worn with no shirt underneath. You see a firm, bronzed chest, salt-and-peppered, crowned with three—or more—gold chains; on his wrist, a bracelet no less golden and just as substantial.
He takes the promenade at a purposeful clip. No time to waste. He walks straight into the rising sun. Opposite the Carlton he pulls up a blue chair, turns a second one to face him, props one leg on it, then spills into the first and goes still for an hour, sometimes two. Runners, tourists and dogs stream past; out at sea, boats pootle to and fro; people pause to exchange a word with him. He hardly shifts. His main conversation is with the sun. And it shines just for him.
So there we sit, he and I, in a neat little triangle—Cartier, Carlton, and the sea—on opposite sides of the Croisette. He where there is sunlight and surf; I where there is work and money.
By noon, he’s already climbing back up Carnot with a plastic carrier bag in hand. A baguette sticks out of it. Homewards, somewhere up past the police station, to a little flat tucked into one of those tightly packed houses. But tomorrow morning…
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