“Oh yeah?” he said. “Well, it may be so. Perhaps everything will run according to plan.” He gave a skeptical little laugh. “And if things turn out differently, you could always stand on the bridges of Paris, waiting for Mélanie to pass by one evening—she does love bridges, after all.”
*
Mélanie had left a message for me at the Cinéma Paradis that very same day. That was a triumph, because it proved my friend a liar. And a pity, because I wasn’t there to receive the message myself, because then I could have seen Mélanie once more before she left. And this time, I would definitely have asked for her number.
So it was François who gave me the white envelope as I arrived at the cinema at half past four. I stared at it in his hand. It had my name on it.
“What’s this?”
“From the woman in the red coat,” explained François calmly, giving me a quizzical look from behind his steel-rimmed glasses. “She asked for ‘Alain’ and then gave me this letter.”
“Thanks.” I literally tore the letter from his grasp, fleeing with it into the auditorium, which was empty at the time. I hastily opened the envelope in the rash hope that it might contain something nice. It was just a short letter. After hastily scanning the lines written in dark blue ink, I gave a sigh of relief and settled down to read the letter once more, sentence by sentence.
Dear Alain,
Did you get home all right last night? I would really have loved to walk back to the rue de l’Université with you, but in that way, we’d just have wandered back and forth all night, and I had to get up early this morning. But I still couldn’t sleep. I’d hardly gotten up to the apartment when I began to miss you. And when I looked out of the window after I got up, this morning and saw the old chestnut tree, I suddenly felt very happy.
I don’t know if you’ll be in the cinema later (that would be the nicest thing) or if I’ll just have to leave my letter behind the grille, so that you’ll find a little sign from me before I go away. I’m not adventurous, Alain, but I’m looking forward to next Wednesday, to you, and to everything that is about to happen.
Kisses, M.
“I’m not adventurous,” she had written, and it moved me, even though it was a quotation. Or perhaps precisely because it was. The words came from the film The Green Ray, which had been showing in the Cinéma Paradis the previous evening. The somewhat diffident Delphine says them to her friends: “I’m not adventurous.”
“Oh, sweet Mélanie!” I murmured in the semidarkness of the auditorium. “No, you’re not adventurous, but that doesn’t matter. That’s precisely what I love about you. Your vulnerability, your shyness. This world is not just for the rash and the fearless, for the loud go-getters—no, the shy and the quiet, the dreamy and the eccentric have their place there, too. Without them, there would be no nuances, no light blue watercolors, no unsaid words that give the imagination space to work. And isn’t it precisely the dreamers who know that the truest and greatest adventures take place in the heart?”
I would probably have continued my apologia for humanity from the second row for some time had there not been a rustling noise that made me look up. There in the doorway of the auditorium, Madame Clément in her flowery apron was leaning on a broom and watching me with fascination.
“Madame Clément!” I called, and cleared my throat to try to regain my composure. “Are you eavesdropping on me?” I stood up hastily. “How long have you been standing there?”
“Oh, Monsieur Bonnard.” She sighed, not answering my question. “Those things you were saying were so lovely, with the still waters and the blue pictures and the dreams. I could have gone on listening to you for hours. I had a box of watercolor paints when I was a child—I’ve no idea where it’s gotten to. At some stage in life, you give up painting, and dreaming. It’s a shame, isn’t it?” A dreamy smile played on her lips. “But when you fall in love, you start dreaming again.”
I nodded in some confusion, folded the precious letter, and put it in my jacket pocket. I hadn’t known that there was a philosopher slumbering in Madame Clément.
“Has she written to you? What does she say?” She looked at me with a conspiratorial grin.
“What!” I exclaimed. “Well, really, Madame Clément, I must say!” I felt like I’d been caught out, and I was not prepared to reveal the state of my heart to her. How on earth did she know that?
“François told me about the letter, of course.” She gave me a benevolent glance.
I raised my eyebrows. “Of course,” I repeated, glad to hear how well communications in my little cinema were functioning.
“We were all wondering how your evening with the pretty woman in the red coat panned out,” Madame Clément continued. She actually said “all,” as if she were part of a great royal court that spent all its time following the activities of its beloved ruler. “But if she asked for you today and even left you a love letter, it must have been a pleasant evening.”
“And so it was.” I had to laugh. “And why are you so sure it’s a love letter?”
She tipped her head to one side and put her free hand on her hip. “Now listen, Monsieur Bonnard, I wasn’t born yesterday, and you only have to look at your face to see what’s going on. She wrote you a love letter. C’est ça!” Her large hands grasped the handle of the broom and swept it along the floor to emphasize her words. “And now please get out of the way so that I can sweep this place before the performance begins.”
I sketched a bow and left the room. When I saw my face in the big Art Deco mirror in the foyer, I had to admit that Madame Clément was right. The tall, slim man with the thick dark hair, the telltale gleaming eyes, and that very peculiar smile was in love. Anyone with eyes in their head could see that.
I turned away and reached for the letter in my jacket pocket. Was it a love letter? I took it out once more and smiled as I scanned the tender words. I smiled, but little did I know that I would be reading this letter over and over again in the next few weeks, and clutching it as a drowning man clutches a straw, because it was the only evidence to show that that happy evening that ended under an old chestnut tree in the rue de Bourgogne had actually happened.
I stared at the poster for The Things of Life, which I’d hung in the foyer the previous afternoon with a notice saying “Next Wednesday in the series Les Amours au Paradis,” and wished it was already next Wednesday. I would gladly have done away with the laws of time and given up a whole week of my life to see Mélanie right then, but she was presumably already on the way to Brittany.
For the next few days, Mélanie’s letter sat in my jacket pocket like a talisman. I kept it with me all the time—as a kind of insurance policy for love. I read it in the evening as—under Orphée’s watchful gaze—I sat on the sofa with a glass of red wine, not wanting to go to bed; I read it the next morning as I drank my espresso at one of the round tables in the Vieux Colombier, staring absently at the rain pattering on the sidewalk.
Of course it was a love letter. And it was also the loveliest surprise that exciting week had brought me. At least that’s what I thought until the moment on Friday evening when I lowered the shutters on the cinema after the last performance and a little man in a trench coat stepped out of the shadows and spoke to me.
I knew the man, and I knew the woman beside him. But I only realized that a few seconds later.
No one could blame me for opening my eyes wide and letting the bunch of keys slip from my hand. The whole scene was—in the words of the shy bookseller from Notting Hill—“surreal but nice.”
As if he had fallen from the skies, the famous New York film director Allan Wood was standing in front of me, and at his side was a breathtakingly beautiful woman whom I had often admired on the screen.
Solène Avril, one of the best-known actresses of our times, shook my hand as naturally as if we were old friends. “Bonsoir, Alain,” she said, giving me a radiant smile. “I’m Solène, and I love this cinema.”
Eleven
“
Mon Dieu, it really is exactly as I remember it, wonderful—c’est ravissant!”
With childlike enthusiasm, Solène Avril was going through the rows of seats, stroking the old red plush upholstery. “Isn’t it just incredible, chéri? Was I exaggerating? You must admit we would never have found anything like this in America.”
Allan Wood pushed his horn-rimmed glasses up on his nose and was just about to answer, when Solène fell into one of the seats and gracefully crossed her silk-stockinged legs. “It’s perfect, simply perfect,” she went on, leaning her mop of blond hair against the back of the seat. For one moment, all I could see of her was her hair, flowing like liquid gold over the red velvet, and the tip of her well-formed knee, excitedly jiggling up and down. “And so madly atmospheric. Just the smell in this old auditorium inspires me … Aaaah, lovely, isn’t it? Come and sit here beside me, chéri!”
Allan Wood, who had been standing near me the whole time to allow the “great atmosphere” of my cinema to work on him in a rather more restrained way, gave me an apologetic smile before moving toward the front and threading his way along the row where Solène was sitting. I watched him with some astonishment, and this unreal scene made my own cinema suddenly seem almost alien to me.
The heavy red velvet curtain that reached the floor and was now drawn across the screen; the thirty-two rows of seats rising in a slight rake toward the back wall of the auditorium with its little rectangular window that allowed the projectionist to see the screen and the audience; the black-and-white portraits of Charlie Chaplin, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Michel Piccoli, Romy Schneider, Marilyn Monroe, Humphrey Bogart, Audrey Hepburn, Jean Seberg, Cathérine Deneuve, Fanny Ardant, and Jeanne Moreau, smiling from their root-wood frames on the dark walls as if the glow of the spherical lamps were awakening them to new life. But the finest thing of all was the dome, which I rarely looked up at, though it was now attracting the admiration of my late-night guests. Its dark green foliage, where birds of paradise and golden oranges played hide-and-seek, arched over the auditorium.
“Do you understand now why I could only play those scenes here?” Solène Avril stretched her arms out and spread her fingers in a dramatic gesture. “I don’t want to get oversentimental, but this place here … this place here is something completely different from a mock-up in a studio, n’est-ce pas, chéri? I can be authentic here. I can act from the heart here. I can just feel it.” She sighed happily.
Allan Wood sat down beside her, leaned his head back, and stretched his arms out over the seat backs to the left and right of him. For a moment, he said nothing. Then he said, “Yeah, it seems like the perfect place. I really like it! And it has a really … nostalgic aroma.” He waved his little white hand in the air, and in his comic accent with the strongly rolled r, it sounded like “arrrroma.” “It smells”—he clicked his finger as if he’d just had a brainstorm, “of historrry.”
I stood dumbly by the rear wall of my cinema, no longer capable of judging whether Allan Wood was right or not. To be honest, I was no longer capable of judging if I was actually hallucinating.
It was just before midnight, and I was expecting the two heads in the cinema seats to dissolve into thin air, leaving me to wake up in my own bed, shaking my head and muttering that I’d dreamed that a famous American director and one of the most beautiful women in the world had come to my little cinema, wanting to use it as the location for a film. I mean, that’s how it works in dreams, isn’t it?
I shut my eyes for a moment and breathed in deeply. A heavy scent hung in the air of the auditorium. It had entered with Solène Avril and wafted over toward me every time she moved. If that’s what history smelled like, it was a pretty intoxicating smell.
“Is it original—or do you use some kind of spray, Alain?”
“Er … I beg your pardon?” I opened my eyes again. Allan Wood had turned toward me, and his dark eyebrows shot upward. “Oh, you know. A kind of air-freshener spray. I have one at home. It smells like an old library, makes everything feel very homey,” he explained, standing up nimbly from his seat.
I shook my head. “No, no,” I replied. “Everything here is genuine …” I glanced at my watch. It was midnight, and nothing happened. I spread my hands in a gesture of resignation. It was obvious that I wasn’t dreaming and that this strange nocturnal incident, which was to turn my life upside down in the weeks to come, was actually happening. It was unbelievable!
Allan Wood and Solène Avril were really here, in the brightly lit auditorium of my cinema. And they were totally determined—if I agreed, of course—to shoot a film in the Cinéma Paradis in the next few weeks.
I shook my head again and burst out laughing. “Everything is real, even if I have to admit that you two still seem a bit unreal to me.” I shrugged my shoulders. “I mean, things like this don’t happen to a normal guy like me every day.”
Allan Wood took a couple of steps toward me and stopped right in front of me. He was shorter than I, and his friendly brown eyes twinkled with amusement as he looked up at me, stretched his arm out, and plucked at the sleeve of his trench coat.
“But we are real,” he said. “Come on, touch me. Totally real!”
I plucked at his sleeve and grinned. He really was “totally real.”
In spite of the fact that I had initially thought him to be an apparition, I took an immediate liking to the little man in the trench coat. He politely overlooked my obvious confusion. I, however, still found it difficult to get used to the reality of Solène Avril, even though she was standing less than a yard away from me, looking at the famous photo of Audrey Hepburn with her cigarette holder.
“Very elegant. Perhaps I should get myself one of those things. What do you think, chéri?” She pouted thoughtfully, then sighed. She turned to me. “But today you can’t even smoke in a bar. Our world has become so vulgar, don’t you agree, Alain?” She smiled at me. “Everything’s changing, mostly for the worse.” She wrinkled her brow, and I admired the play of expressions on her face. “It’s a good thing that Tiffany’s is still there. I find that very reassuring.”
We went back out into the foyer, and I looked out at the street, thinking of the strange encounter of an hour ago. I’d been as little prepared for it as I might have been for an alien landing. Someday, I’d probably be telling my grandchildren how I’d found Allan Wood and Solène Avril standing outside my cinema one night.
“Allan Wood?” I had stammered, after the little man in the trench coat had introduced himself to me, thus confirming my vague feeling that I knew him from somewhere. “That’s really something. The Allan Wood from New York? Of course I’ve heard of you.”
Allan Wood was modesty itself. “I’m so glad that you know me, Monsieur Bonnard. I see that we have the same name. That’s quite amusing, isn’t it? Can I call you Allan?”
“Alain,” I said in a daze, correcting him.
Allan Wood seemed not to hear the difference. “That’s great, Allan,” he said with a friendly nod.
“Alain, chéri, his name is Alain, not Allan!” cried Solène Avril, giving me a sly smile. This Hollywood star had grown up in Paris and was well aware of the nasal pitfalls of the French language.
Allan tried once more, this time emphasizing the second syllable of my name. “Oh, I see … Al-lang. So … Al-lang, please excuse our little intrusion. Solène—what’s the French word?—dragged me here. She insisted on showing me the Cinéma Paradis, and it’s such a stroke of luck that we found you here.”
Solène nodded and winked at me with a smile. I nodded back, grinning like a village idiot. And I was actually finding it difficult to follow the conversation.
“I’d like to talk to you about my new film, Al-lang,” said the little man in the trench coat. Apart from his accent and a few minor errors, Allan Wood spoke French surprisingly well. He gazed up at the old facade and clicked his tongue in admiration. Then he handed me his card, which I stuck in my breast pocket. “I may well need your fine old cinema,” he said.
&nb
sp; “Aha!” I replied. To be honest, nothing better came to mind. What did Allan Wood need my cinema for? Gossip in the business had indeed suggested that the American director with the big horn-rimmed glasses had a number of quirks, but I had not been aware that buying up old French art-house cinemas was one of them. And at that particular moment, I didn’t actually give a damn. I was completely under Solène Avril’s spell. I stared like a sleepwalker at the beautiful blonde as she straightened her woolen stole. It lay on her shoulders like a fluffy cloud and made her look quite angelic. She actually seemed to be floating above the cobbled street.
“Oh, this is all so exciting,” she whispered. “I feel just like a little girl … Could we come in and look around a bit, Alain? Please!” She looked at me and put her hand on my arm. I could feel myself going weak in the knees.
“Of course,” I said. “Of course.” And I fell backward against the closed shutters. I have to say that I was finding all this quite exciting, too. I would never in my wildest dreams have imagined that a screen icon like Solène Avril would one day ask me for something. That was already like something from a movie.
So I’d picked the keys up from the sidewalk and a short while later we’d gone into the foyer, where we were now standing, and where Solène Avril had immediately found some familiar things. Her excited outbursts (“No! I recognize this mirror!” or “Look, chéri—La rêve est réalité—that used to hang above the box office. I told you about it, didn’t I?”) continually interrupted Allan Wood as he explained what he wanted in great detail and with a great deal of gesturing, while Solène lost herself in her little trip down memory lane.
Initially, it wasn’t very easy for me to work out the reason for this nocturnal visit, as both of them seemed to be very skilled at permanently cutting each other short. That made listening difficult, but after a while I understood this much: Allan Wood intended to make a new film starring Solène Avril. The film was to be called Tender Thoughts of Paris and, of course, would be set in Paris. It was a love story, about a woman searching for the lost love of her youth, revolving around an old art-house cinema.
The Secret Paris Cinema Club Page 5