“Oh good grief, what nonsense I’m talking,” I said, shaking my head. “Please excuse me. Forget all that stuff about loyalty points. Will you accept my invitation? Please say yes!”
My heart was hammering to the staccato rhythm of my idiotic outburst.
The woman in the red coat raised her eyebrows, bit her lower lip, bowed her head a little, and smiled broadly. Her cheeks were fiery red. Then she finally said something.
She said yes!
Six
Almost automatically, we landed in La Palette. The people around us were laughing, talking, and drinking, but I didn’t notice them. I had eyes only for the woman at my table, and even an earthquake couldn’t have torn me away from her spell.
Never in my life had I longed for the end of a film as much as I did that evening. Again and again, I had peered through the little window into the auditorium to see what stage the film was at—I’d seen it so often that I could almost recite the words along with it. And after kooky Delphine had finally seen the green glow, that strangely propitious phenomenon that can be seen only for a few seconds—and then not every time—as the sun sinks into the sea, and was ready to dare the adventure of love, I pulled open the auditorium doors to release the audience back into their own lives.
She was one of the first out of the door, and stepped aside to let the other members of the audience past her as they slowly and dreamily came into the foyer, blinking in the sudden light, before returning to reality and heading for the exit, chatting and laughing.
“Just one moment. I’ll be ready right away,” I said, and she strolled along the foyer wall, studying the posters intently.
“Is there really such a thing as that green glow?” I heard a student ask. Her boyfriend shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know, but we should try to find out,” he replied, putting his arm tenderly around her.
I saw the professor coming out. He was leaning on his walking stick and looked at me questioningly from under his silver eyebrows. I nodded, and glanced unobtrusively to the part of the foyer where the woman in the red coat was still looking at the posters. A look of benevolence and—was I imagining it?—a kind of joyful recognition crossed the old man’s face as he winked at me and went out into the street.
Then we were alone at last. Madame Clément was bustling about in the auditorium—she was going up and down the rows to check if anyone had left anything behind.
“Bonne nuit,” I shouted to François as he stuck his head out of the projection booth for a moment. Then I put on my jacket, said “Shall we?” and accompanied the woman in the red coat to the exit.
We smiled at each other and walked a few steps in silence along the dark street. It was a strangely intimate moment—this sudden closeness, the silence of the street, the quiet tapping of her heels on the old cobbles. I walked along beside her, not wanting to spoil the moment by speaking—but of course I was going to have to say something to her sometime. I was just racking my brains for something suitable to say, when she looked up at me and tucked her hair behind her ear.
“You have really enchanting ears,” I heard myself say, and cursed myself at the same moment. What was I? An ear fetishist? “I mean … everything about you is enchanting,” I added. “I can’t tell you how glad I am that you’ve accepted my invitation. You know, you caught my attention quite a while ago.”
She smiled. “And you caught mine, too,” she said. “By the way, my name is Mélanie.”
“Mélanie—what a lovely name,” I said, and it seemed to me that this was a nod from the Fates. Hadn’t I said to Robert that very lunchtime that she reminded me of Mélanie Laurent, the actress?
“And you look a bit like Mélanie Laurent.”
“Do you think so?” It seemed to please her.
“Yes, yes … absolutely.” The spell was broken, and I got a bit reckless. “But your eyes are definitely lovelier.”
She gave a flattered laugh. “And you?” she asked. To be honest, the attractiveness of my eyes had never crossed my mind. They were brown and quite passable, I thought.
“My eyes are neither here nor there,” I said.
“I meant what’s your name?”
“Oh. I see. Alain.”
“Alain. That suits you.” She tilted her head to one side and gave me a searching look. “And you look a bit like Alain Delon.”
“That’s the nicest lie I’ve ever heard,” I said, and stopped outside La Palette, a rather pleasant bistro that is quite close to my apartment. Without my really thinking about it, my internal navigational system had led me to the rue de Seine, as it had on so many other evenings when I went there for a snack after the show. I opened the door, and we went in.
Seven
“Whenever I’m looking for love, I go to the Cinéma Paradis.” Mélanie took a sip from her glass of red wine, then held it in the palms of both hands as her gaze became lost in a mysterious distance that lay somewhere beyond the windows of La Palette, and to which I had no access. Her eyes shone and she had a thoughtful smile on her lips.
That was probably the moment I fell in love with her. Her words moved me deeply, and I immediately felt my heart take flight. That one sentence, and the strange little smile that accompanied it. When I think back to it today, I remember that even then something about her words struck me as being unusual, even though I could not have said what it actually was.
A few weeks later, when I was desperately looking for the woman in the red coat, those strange words were to come back to me. They were the key to everything, but I didn’t know it then as, in a spontaneous gesture, I put my hands around Mélanie’s. It was the first time we’d touched, and it couldn’t have been any other way.
“Oh, Mélanie, that’s beautiful. You’re a poet!”
She looked at me, and once more her smile was for me. Her hands stayed in mine, and she was still holding the wineglass. We both sat there holding it as if it were a kind of happiness that, like a wild bird, you have to hold gently and carefully so that it doesn’t fly away.
“No, no, there’s no way I’m a poet. I’m just a bit nostalgic, that’s all.”
Nostalgic was a word I hadn’t heard for a long time, and it delighted me. “But that’s wonderful!” I leaned forward toward her and the red wine swayed in its round-bellied glass. “Where would we be in this soulless universe if there weren’t a few people who hold on to memories, their hearts yearning for long-lost feelings?”
She laughed. “Who’s the poet now?” she said. Then she put the wineglass down carefully on the table, and I regretfully let go of her hands. “That’s the thing about memories,” she said, and was silent for a moment. “They can sometimes make you sad, even if they’re good memories. You like thinking back to them; they’re the greatest treasure we have, and yet it always makes you a little sad because something is irretrievably past.” She rested her cheek on her right hand and painted little circles on the tabletop with her left.
“Tempi passati,” I said—quite the philosopher—and wondered whether I dared to try holding her hand again. “That’s why I love films. Everything comes back to life in them, even if it’s only for a couple of hours. And you can return to your lost paradise.” I reached for her hand, and she didn’t take it away.
“Is that why your cinema’s called Cinéma Paradis?”
“No … Yes … Maybe.” We both laughed. “To be honest, I don’t really know. I’d have to ask my uncle—he used to own the cinema, but unfortunately he’s no longer alive.”
I raised my hands regretfully. Good old Uncle Bernard! His wonderful time in the south had come to a sudden but peaceful end late the previous fall. “This is a really good wine,” he had said to Claudine as he sat one evening in his cane chair on the terrace, holding the glass up to the low setting sun. “Could you get us another bottle, my love?” When Claudine came back, Uncle Bernard was sitting with his eyes half-open, leaning back in his cane chair as if he were looking up at the tall old pines whose smell he so loved in the summer. But he was dead.<
br />
The funeral was a very quiet one. In fact, there were only Claudine, a married couple from the village whom they’d become friends with, his oldest friend, Bruno, and me. My parents, who were traveling in New Zealand, sent a wreath and a letter of condolence to Claudine. Still, it was a good and dignified funeral, no matter how sad it was. Instead of a flower, I threw an old reel of Cinema Paradiso into Bernard’s grave. I sighed as I thought about it, and gazed into Melanie’s big brown eyes, which were looking at me with sympathy. “At least he died happy,” I said. “I liked him a lot, old Uncle Bernard. In the past, I always thought he’d named the cinema after that Italian film …”
“Cinema Paradiso,” Mélanie said, and I nodded.
“Yes, that’s right, Cinema Paradiso. It was one of his favorite films. But the cinema was in existence long before the film.”
“It must be great to own a little dream factory like that.”
“Great and difficult at the same time,” I said. “It’s not going to make me rich. Everyone in my family was quite annoyed when I gave up my well-paid job in a big firm in Lyon that exported bathtubs and washbasins to Abu Dhabi just to take on an old art-house cinema.”
Oh, man, what are you saying? Do you want to show her that you’re a complete klutz? Robert’s voice sounded so real that I involuntarily looked up. But of course there was no one there except a waiter rushing busily past us to serve the people at the next table.
“Goodness gracious! Bathtubs and washbasins!” Mélanie said, putting her hand over her mouth. “Well, no matter what your family says, I, at least, am glad you’re not doing that anymore. It doesn’t suit you. And you should always be true to yourself. Or have you ever regretted your decision, Alain?”
“No, never!” I replied, and listened in my head to the echo of her voice pronouncing my name for the first time. I leaned forward and brushed a strand of hair off her face. “It was exactly the right decision.” My heart began to thump and I fell head over heels into her glistening eyes. “Most of all because otherwise I would never have met you.”
Mélanie had lowered her gaze, and then suddenly she took my hand, which was hovering near her ear, and held it against her cheek.
Oh, I could have gone on playing this game forever, the game fingers and hands, which intertwine with each other, clasp around each other, the two people aware only of this one moment, which is oblivious of all time and presages complete happiness. Don’t all love stories begin like this?
“I’m also very glad that the Cinéma Paradis is there,” said Mélanie quietly.
I held her hand, and felt the ring she was wearing, stroking the gleaming reddish band of gold with my fingers.
“In the beginning I didn’t dare to speak to you … I thought you were married.”
She shook her head. “No, no, I’m not married, and never have been. This ring is a memento of my mother—her engagement ring. Maman didn’t wear any other jewelry, you know, and when she died, I took the ring so that I would always have something of her with me to remind me. Since then, I have never ever taken it off.” She twisted the ring pensively from side to side, then looked at me. “I live completely alone.”
I found the solemnity with which she said that very moving.
“Oh … I’m very sorry about that,” I said, and began to stammer. “I mean, about your mother.” I wasn’t the slightest bit sorry that Mélanie lived alone—even completely alone. Quite the contrary: I was very glad about it, even if I thought that that “completely alone” had sounded rather sad. “Don’t you have anyone here in Paris?”
She shook her head.
“No family? No brother? No sister? No boyfriend? No dog? Not even a canary?”
She kept on shaking her head, but in the end she couldn’t help laughing. “You’re very inquisitive, Alain, do you know that? No, not even a canary, if you put it that way. The only member of my family who’s left is my aunt Lucie, my mother’s older sister, but she lives in Brittany. I visit her there now and again. In fact, by pure coincidence, I’m going there this very weekend. It’s lovely there by the sea. And otherwise …” She hesitated a moment, then put the wineglass to her lips, drank a little sip, and put it down firmly. She obviously didn’t want to talk about it, but it wasn’t hard to guess that she’d just been thinking about a man.
“Ça y est. Things are as they are,” she went on. “But that’s okay. I have good friends, a wonderful boss, friendly neighbors, and I like living here in Paris.”
“I can’t believe that a charming woman like you doesn’t have a boyfriend,” I said, probing further. I admit this wasn’t very original, but I wanted to be certain. Perhaps that wonderful boss was the man in her life. Perhaps she was one of those women who seem to live alone but in reality carry on an affair with a married man for years, someone no one is supposed to know about.
Mélanie smiled. “And yet it’s true. My last boyfriend cheated on me with a workmate for a whole year. Then I found a green jade earring in his bed, and we split up.” She sighed in comic despair. “I have a talent for falling in love with the wrong men. In the end, there’s always another woman.”
“Not possible,” I said. “They must all be complete idiots.”
Eight
We stayed on at La Palette for a long time. And we would probably have sat there until the early hours of the morning, drinking wine, holding hands, joking, chatting, smiling, and being silent, if the waiters hadn’t begun to express a certain degree of displeasure. They straightened the empty wooden chairs beside the empty table. They clattered glasses together. They leaned on the bar, looked over at us, yawned, and waited. They really showed very little understanding for a man and a woman who were in the process of forgetting that there was anything or anyone else in the world except the two of them. Who was it who wrote that love is egotism for two?
But eventually one of the waiters came to the table and coughed. “Pardon, monsieur. We’d like to close now.”
We looked up in surprise. Only then did we realize that we were the last customers in the place.
“My goodness, it’s half past one,” said Mélanie.
She smiled apologetically at the waiter, took her hand out of mine, and reached for her red coat, which she’d laid carefully over the back of her chair. I stood up to help her into her coat; then I took out my wallet and paid.
“Thanks a lot for taking me out. It’s been a lovely evening,” said Mélanie as the waiter locked the door behind us. She looked at me and then busily buttoned her coat. It was only then that I noticed how old-fashioned the cut was, and how well it suited her.
“Yes, a particularly lovely evening,” I repeated. “And over far too soon.”
It was the middle of the night, I wasn’t at all tired, and the last thing I wanted was for the evening to end—if it had been up to me, it could have gone on and on, as it did for the main characters in Before Sunrise, the two students who wander around Vienna for a whole day and night, unable to part from each other. But I could hardly ask Mélanie to stroll over to the Tuileries with me and lie there romantically in my arms until dawn. It was definitely too cold for that.
At that moment, I wished I had a bit more of Robert’s “your place or mine” mentality. On the other hand, I wasn’t sure if this girl in her old-fashioned coat was the kind of woman you could win over with that kind of approach. And anyway, this was the beginning of something very special, not just any old story. I could definitely sense that.
In the still of the night, words seemed to weigh more heavily than they had inside the snug bistro, where we had just sat at the dark wooden table and chatted, our hands continually touching. Now we were standing beside each other on the street, and I didn’t want to say good-bye, all of a sudden becoming as shy as a schoolboy.
I was thinking about inviting Mélanie to see a film the next evening—not a very original idea for a cinema owner. I dug my hands deep in my pockets and tried to think of something brilliant to say.
“Well
then …” said Mélanie, shrugging her shoulders with a shiver. “I have to go in this direction.” She pointed to the boulevard Saint-Germain. “And you?”
My apartment was only a few minutes away from La Palette, in the rue de l’Université, which was in exactly the opposite direction, but I wasn’t going to let that bother me.
“Well, what do you know. Me, too.” I said, lying, and saw how Mélanie smiled with pleasure. “Yeah, well … I have to go exactly the same way. So I can walk you some of the way if you like.”
She did like the idea. She took my arm and we walked unhurriedly up the rue de Seine to the boulevard Saint-Germain, which even at this late hour was still very lively, passed the crêpe stand—closed at this hour—which nestled at the side of the garden of the old church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, though in the daytime there was always a line of people tempted by the smell to buy a chestnut-cream crêpe or a chocolate waffle.
Outside the Brasserie Lipp, which was still brightly lit, a couple of taxis were waiting for late customers. We crossed over and went farther up the boulevard Saint-Germain then crossed the boulevard Raspail, turning a little bit later into the rue de Grenelle, quiet and dark with its tall old city houses.
“Is this really still on your way?” Mélanie asked every time we entered a new street, and I nodded, said yes, and asked her to go on telling me about her friend who worked in the bar of a grand hotel and was never free on a Wednesday evening to go to the late show in the Cinéma Paradis with her; about her boss, the overweight, cigar-smoking Monsieur Papin, who was at that moment in the hospital with pneumonia, so that she and her colleague were running his little antiques shop, where they sold old furniture and Belle Epoque lamps, Art Nouveau jewelry, and bathing belles in hand-painted porcelain.
“You work in an antiques shop?” I said. “How charming. It kind of suits you.”
I imagined Mélanie in an enchanted place full of precious objects, and was just about to ask her the name of the shop, when she said, “My friend keeps asking me what I find in all that old junk.” She laughed. “But I just like all those old things. They exude peace and warmth. And every object has its own story …”
The Secret Paris Cinema Club Page 3