The Little French Bistro

by Nina George

  Next to the hotel was a small café, where the neighbors who hadn’t gone on holiday greeted each other, drank pastis, ordered a café crème and read the newspaper. By the second morning, they had begun to say hello to Marianne as she ate her breakfast.

  She had explored the city, first on foot and then by getting out of the Métro at random, until she had discovered one of the bicycle rental stations, which worked out cheaper than buying a day pass for the underground. Thus Marianne had ridden through Paris on a silver bike, through a Paris that was breathing again now that so many parking spaces were free. Saint-Germain, the Latin Quarter, past the Sorbonne and into the Marais, then westward to the Eiffel Tower and down the Champs-Élysées, tinkling her bell. Students were sunbathing in the parks and on the artificial beaches along the Seine, anglers were fishing in the canals, painters were dozing over sketches on their houseboats, and tourists were kissing against the setting sun on the Pont des Arts with its view of the Eiffel Tower.

  Marianne was searching. Searching for the place that was meant for her; and if it were not to be found here, then she would have to travel farther afield. First, though, she wanted to be sure that that place wasn’t Paris, the city that had given her an ending and a beginning. She was certain that it would send her a sign.

  Again and again she had made her way to the park at the tip of the Île de la Cité in the hope that she might catch sight of the tramp who had fished her out of the Seine.

  She brushed the crumbs from her fingers and stood up. The Arletty was gone, and the sound of a Vespa’s engine echoed in one of the fjord-like nearby streets, covering the strains of Libertango. The melody suddenly brought everything crashing back, all the memories she had so successfully blocked from her mind, fleeing through the city streets with the sole aim of preventing her thoughts from flying out over the land, westward-bound to a port on a river and into a room in which a cat sniffed her pillow and mewed plaintively. Her heart was no longer prepared to ignore Kerdruc.

  As the Vespa noise faded, an unstoppable tide of images rolled toward her. The sea. Yann above her. Jean-Rémy’s feet dancing. Geneviève’s eyes scanning Rozbras. White roses in a black vase. A horde of cats lapping at china plates, and the vertical needle of the Jaguar’s speedometer. Sidonie’s hand clutching the pebble. The flowering garden behind Emile’s house in the woods. Geneviève’s red dress.

  Something stirred inside Marianne. Tomorrow was 1 September.

  Nobody would disturb his plans. Jean-Rémy had declared at short notice on the last day of August that the kitchen would be closed, and indeed today, 1 September, no one had come. Not a single one of his regular guests: not Paul, not Simon, neither Marie-Claude nor Colette. Even Geneviève was away. It was their business what they did—he didn’t give a damn! He was going to resolve the other half of his life.

  He picked up something beside him, pulled one of his letters to Laurine from its envelope and read it.

  My beloved, mon coeur, my sun, my light. Did you know that you are my very first love? That’s the way it feels—exactly that way. I’m clueless—it’s as if I were meeting myself for the first time. The longing that burns holes in my soul when you are not near me, the relief when you look at me and the desire to give you all of myself: my heart, my hopes, I would even give you my hands and my eyes. I want to entrust my future and my past to you, as if they only became valuable in your hands. Laurine, when I speak your name it means the same for me as love.

  He folded the letter into the shape of a ship and placed it next to the paper boats he had already formed from other letters. Then he picked up the next one.

  My flower, how exciting and elegant, how pure and how great you are. Simply having known you means I can die more serenely. Loving you means that my life will not have been meaningless and for naught, regardless of whether you love me or not. Yes, it is for you to decide whether to accept or reject my love, but it will not affect the fact that I will then smile in the face of death and say, So what? I knew Laurine. I saw her walk, I saw her laugh, I saw her dance and I heard her voice.

  He folded this one with particular care. It was the last of his seventy-three love letters to Laurine. Seventy-three white boats and seventy-three flowers now lay beside him, and he tossed the very first of them—a white rose, which was on the verge of crumbling like parchment—into the river Aven.

  As he let the first of the many love letters sail off after the rose, a flying shoe caught him square on the head.

  “That’s robbery!” cried Laurine. She was standing only a few yards from the breakwater with Padrig at her side. Jean-Rémy felt infinitely jealous. “Those are letters to me, aren’t they? Padrig showed them to me, but you never handed them over!”

  Now Laurine removed her other shoe and hurled it at Jean-Rémy. He ducked, and the shoe hit Max on the tip of his tail. The cat leaped into the air, spitting, and trotted a little way to one side, where it sat down indignantly and began to groom itself.

  “They belong to me! Letters belong to their addressees!”

  “Only when they’ve been sent,” cried Jean-Rémy, “and I’m only sending them now.”

  “Ohhh, you…dweeb!” Laurine furiously stamped the ground.

  But why were they shouting at each other, and why had Laurine taken her shoes off? Now she was also pulling her T-shirt over her head! Jean-Rémy felt short of breath: she was so unbelievably beautiful. Her skin. The curve of her waist. Her soft stomach. Her hips, as she peeled off her jeans.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m fetching my letter! I don’t want to lose a single one of your words!” She discarded her bra and, lastly, tossed away her white knickers. The hair between her legs glowed golden, and she had a dancer’s figure. She is the most beautiful girl in the world, thought Jean-Rémy, the bravest, the finest, the very best.

  Laurine walked onto the quayside to rescue the first of the love letters. She had forgotten that she had decided to take a step toward Jean-Rémy, just the one. She was ready to take a giant leap. But Jean-Rémy got to his feet and ran toward her.

  “No!” he shouted. “I know it by heart!”

  By now the little paper boat had reached the middle of the river, spinning with increasing speed before it was swept away by the current.

  There were tears in Laurine’s eyes as she said, “But it was the first, Jean-Rémy. The first is always the most important one.”

  I’ll write you as many as you want, he thought. Hundreds, thousands, year after year. You’ll have a whole library of my words, and I’ll ban salt from the kitchen, because I’ll always be in love with you, even when we’re already man and wife, and father and mother, and grandfather and grandmother. He didn’t say this, though.

  She wanted that letter? She would have that letter. Jean-Rémy pulled off his shoes and his shirt and jumped. As he swam, stroke after stroke, and the currents and eddies caught and wrestled with him, his mind was flooded with every sentence he had written in that first love letter to Laurine.

  He swam, repeatedly craning his neck so as not to lose sight of the little boat. His arms burned, the water grew colder and colder, and he could hardly feel his toes, but he swam on as fast as he could, even if it meant following the boat out to sea and drowning there!

  The river fairies seemed to be amused by this swimmer chasing after his own words. They made the paper boat dance, sent small waves skimming toward him, causing him to splutter, and drove the love letter hither and thither, as if they were tossing a ball to one another. Then they pushed it into a side channel of the Aven, and Jean-Rémy, who felt his waning strength begging him to give up and simply float on his back, pursued it with furious, powerless tears in his eyes.

  Yet Nimue, the ruler of the sea, had an agreement with Jean-Rémy, and sent the letter sailing toward him. He had it! He turned to face Laurine, who was still standing on the quayside. He had swum a long way from the shore, and now he had to return against the current. When his breathing had calmed, he gripped th
e letter between his teeth and began to paddle back.

  As he clambered up the ladder on Kerdruc harbor wall, Laurine first took the letter from his mouth and then bent down to the breathless man. She took his head in her hands and pushed the wet black hair from his forehead, warming his body wherever she touched it with hers.

  “Jean-Rémy,” she whispered before kissing him, her lips lightly touching his. He was so stunned by his beloved’s kiss, her closeness, her skin, her scent, her face and her smile, that he almost toppled backward into the water.

  She stepped back and carefully unfolded the wet paper boat.

  Laurine, you are everything to me. You are my morning, my smile. You are my fear and you are my courage. You are my dreams and my daylight. You are my night and my breath, you are my most important lesson. I beg to be allowed to love you, and I beg for no less than a lifetime by your side.

  She read for a long time, savoring it, letting the lines echo in her soul. When she raised her eyes, there was great dignity in her expression.

  “Yes,” she said.

  Yes. The most beautiful word in the world.

  “Love? What do you mean, love?”

  “An artist must love if he wants to be any good.”

  “Rubbish. He’s got to be free, or he’s not an artist. Free of love, free of hatred, free of every defined emotion.”

  Arm in arm with Rozenn, Paul walked past the two men and said quietly to her, “Our first brush with Parisian art critics.”

  “That’s what it’s like at previews,” she whispered back.

  He let his hand slide down onto her backside. “Let’s go and find the cellar,” he murmured.

  No one could really recall whose idea it had been to make the trip to Yann Gamé’s exhibition in Paris after Jean-Rémy had abruptly gone on strike. Yann had wanted to cancel the show. He had wanted to burn, destroy and rip up the pictures, but Colette had stored them in a sealed container. She knew that artists sometimes got this way shortly before their work was due to be exhibited: they would become anxious that someone might take away their paintings, and with them all the emotions and ideas they had invested in them; they were scared that their souls would be stolen.

  Colette had chosen her date well. The first of September was the rentrée, when people returned to school and to work. Everyone was back in Paris and desperate to recover from being in the provinces by gorging on culture and novelty until they were in sync with the city’s rhythm once more.

  Pascale walked past the pictures like an astonished child. Emile had put one leg up and was sitting in an alcove beside a tall casement window that looked out onto Rue Lepic. Simon came over to him, clutching Grete’s hand tightly. “It’s odd seeing her when she isn’t here herself,” the fisherman said.

  “She is here,” mumbled Emile, turning to gesture with a generous sweep of his arm at Paul and Rozenn, Geneviève and Alain, Colette and Marie-Claude, who was being a little too loud and jolly to cover up her nervousness and the strange feeling of being a freshly minted grandmother. They were all filing slowly past the paintings of Marianne, as if they wanted to print every last detail on their memories. Many of them stopped in front of the picture that showed her as a shimmer of dazzling light onstage. It was called The Moon Musician.

  “See, she’s in their hearts and in their smiles, as they look at her and think of her. Particularly over there.”

  They both looked at Yann Gamé, who was gazing at a portrait of Marianne standing by the window of the Shell Room. Her birthmark, the glowing sky behind her, the line of surf in the background: it was a picture composed of countless shades of red, and the sea glittered in her eyes. Yann had named the painting L’Amour de Marianne.

  “What is it about her?” asked Simon.

  “She reminds you of your dreams, back when you still had some,” Emile said slowly.

  The fisherman nodded. “That’s right. Look at them—they’re all suddenly recalling their dreams.”

  Colette escorted guests over to the pictures, sticking the odd yellow dot on the card bearing the title of the painting to signal that it had been optioned and would be sold after the exhibition.

  Simon, Grete and Emile observed the Parisians who were now appearing in growing numbers at the door of the gallery, some of them wishing to catch up with Colette. Colette looked very frail and pale, dressed entirely in black. Her love for Sidonie had softened her features, but her grief had hardened her movements and made them angular, as if without her companion she could no longer feel the boundaries of her body.

  Now a man in a tweed suit, carrying an official-looking briefcase, approached Yann, stirring the painter from his brooding silence. They walked over to L’Amour de Marianne. The man pointed to the birthmark that had seared Yann to the quick like fire. Yann shrugged, and Emile got up and leaned on Simon so that the two of them might creep closer and eavesdrop on the conversation.

  “…genetic and genealogical research can use pigment disorders such as this striking example to conclude whether someone might be descended from Celtic druids…”

  Yet Yann was no longer listening to the man, who was seeking to explain, in ever more excitable fashion what, in his view, the special pattern of Marianne’s flame mark might mean, namely a trail back to the people who had produced so many magicians and knights, female druids and healers in King Arthur’s day.

  He glanced over at the woman in a red dress who had just entered Galerie Rohan and, slowly removing her chic dark glasses, was now looking around helplessly—at the twenty-seven oil paintings, eighteen ink drawings and thirty watercolors, all of them showing the same woman.

  “Marianne!”

  Marianne didn’t hear Alain’s call. She was seeing herself as she had never seen herself before. Her heart had been beating wildly and she had felt shy as she walked through the city to the art gallery in the red dress with its plunging neckline. It was knee-length, silk and a warm shade of red. She’d found it at a dressmaker’s that did alterations, where it had ended up in the dusty shop window after its owner had forgotten to pick it up for two years. She had thanked the stranger for not being brave enough to face this dress, leaving it instead for her to discover.

  Nicolas, the receptionist at Pension Babette, had not only dug up the Galerie Rohan’s address, but had also gone out into the street to get a better view of Marianne in the light of the dying sun. “Breathtaking,” he had said.

  And now here she was, standing in front of these pictures that revealed to her a Marianne she would never have recognized in herself at first sight. Marianne holding her face to the setting sun. Marianne sleeping. One portrait of her just after a kiss, a smile on her lips, lost in reverie. A woman playing the accordion by the sea. A nude Marianne.

  She saw herself through the eyes of a man who loved her, and she discovered that she was beautiful: she had the particular beauty of women who are loved. Her soul had been transformed. She saw that she had many faces: grief and indulgence, tenderness and pride, dreams and music. And there was one picture where she knew what she had been contemplating—a dead-end road. There was boundless desolation in her expression, her eyes lifeless, her mouth despondent, the lines on her face deep and coarse.

  Without her noticing, the other visitors made room for her, and as she went from picture to picture, some of them gazed after her. “Isn’t that…?” “Looks just like…” “Do you think they’re a couple?”

  Finally she stood in front of L’Amour de Marianne. This face showed how she looked when she was in love. It told her all about her force and her strength, everything about her desires and her willpower: it was the essence of her being. There was a sense of freedom about it, a wild sensuality, an aura. Her love was like a blazing sea.

  Yann stepped up behind her. She sensed his presence without needing to turn around. Neither did she need to ask whether he would have held her back: the power of the paintings had made this question superfluous.

  “Is this how you see me?” she asked quietly.
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  “This is how you are,” he said.

  This is how you are. Your soul is a kaleidoscope of colors.

  Marianne turned to face him.

  “You have a new face. What should I call it?” he asked.

  She looked at him, and she felt with fierce intensity that she could do a great deal with this man in the days she had left, and also that she would never again allow herself to be deprived of this feeling.

  Of all the host of possibilities that were spread before her, choosing Yann was one of the easiest. Of course she could go out into the world and love other men—taller, smaller, with different laughter lines and different eyes that glittered like stars or mountain lakes or melted chocolate. She could travel to another end of the earth, with different friends, where there were different rivers and rooms in which she and her tile would sleep alone, and there would doubtless be a cat to visit them.

  But that wasn’t necessary. She chose the man standing before her. She could not do without him. They could deal with the details later.

  “Marianne is alive,” she answered. “That’s the name of this face.”

  Happiness is loving what we need, and needing what we love—and obtaining it, thought Yann.

  “Will you come back with us to Kerdruc?” he asked.

  “Yes,” said Marianne. Kerdruc had everything she expected from life.

  Then, as if they could no longer bear to gaze at each other without feeling each other, they embraced with such force that their teeth collided as they kissed. They laughed, kissed a second time, more gently, but their laughter grew, and they stood there, intertwined, until it filled the entire room.