The following weeks in Antananarivo unfolded in a kind of fog. I worked, I saw Ennemiah, sometimes alone, sometimes with her family. But everything felt distant, as if I were watching my own life through a fogged-up window. The nights in Ambatolampy kept coming back to me, especially that last one, when everything had tipped over. I found myself analysing every sensation, every emotion. Was it real? Or had my mind, exhausted by the distance, the heat, the guilt, invented this absolute transgression?
I didn’t speak of it to anyone. Not even to Ennemiah, who continued to look at me with the same possessive tenderness, as if that night had been nothing more than a natural chapter in our story. Lala kissed me on the cheeks with increased warmth, Tahina shook my hand a little more firmly. And I smiled, played the part, but inside I was struggling.
At the end of January, headquarters called me back to Paris. The subsidiary was on solid ground, recruitment well advanced, the launch scheduled for spring. Three months had flown by like a dream – or a nightmare, I no longer knew.
The return flight took off from Ivato on a grey morning. I watched Antananarivo shrink through the window: red roofs, hills, rice fields. Ennemiah had come with me to the airport. She kissed me long and deep behind a pillar, tears in her eyes.
“You’ll come back, won’t you?” she whispered.
I promised. Without knowing if I would keep my word.
Eleven hours later, I landed at Roissy under a low, cold sky. My wife was waiting behind the doors, just as she had three months earlier, but this time it was me arriving. She threw her arms around my neck, held me tight, kissed me as if I had been gone for years. Her hair smelled of the same shampoo as before, her skin of the same discreet perfume. Everything was familiar, reassuring, real.
In the car on the motorway, she talked non-stop: the children, the house, the neighbours, the unusually cold winter. I nodded, smiled, asked questions. But inside, I was elsewhere. I watched her hands on the wheel, her moving lips, and wondered if everything I had experienced in Madagascar had been nothing more than a too-vivid dream.
The following days reinforced that doubt. Jet lag, the return of routine, the Paris office, meetings in French, the crowded metro. Nothing seemed to have changed. Except me.
And then, the evening we found ourselves alone in our bedroom.
She had prepared a simple dinner, worn a dress she knew I loved, lit candles. We drank wine, laughed over old memories. When we went upstairs, she took me in her arms with infinite tenderness.
“I missed you so much,” she murmured, kissing me.
I kissed her back, harder, longer than usual. My hands rediscovered her body like one rediscovers a familiar path, but with a new, almost violent urgency. I undressed her slowly, rediscovering her paler, softer skin than Ennemiah’s, her rounder, more mature curves. She moaned when I touched her, surprised by my ardour.
I took her as never before.
Not with the usual tenderness of an old couple, but with raw, animal passion. I pinned her against the wall first, then on the bed, penetrated her deeply, without waiting, as if I wanted to erase everything else. She panted, clung to me, surprised and aroused at once.
“What’s gotten into you?” she breathed between moans.
I didn’t answer. I fucked her harder, faster, hands everywhere on her, mouth on her breasts, her neck, her lips. I turned her over, took her from behind – something we rarely did. She almost cried out, nails digging into my back. When she came, hard, long, her body shaking beneath mine, I kept going, insatiable.
And when my turn came, it was violent, liberating. I emptied myself inside her with a groan I couldn’t hold back, as if I were exorcising demons.
Afterwards, we lay entwined, sweaty, breathless. She stroked my face, an amazed smile on her lips.
“Wow… if missions to Madagascar do that to you, you can go back whenever you want.”
I laughed, a slightly forced laugh. She fell asleep against me, peaceful.
Me, I stayed awake for a long time.
I stared at the ceiling of our bedroom, so different from the one in Ambatolampy or the residence in Tana.
I still didn’t know if I had dreamed it all.
Or if I had simply become someone else.