This passionate but difficult relationship produced a little girl. Mélanie, whom everyone lovingly called Méla, was a shy little creature with an overdeveloped imagination. Her headstrong mother—who, at thirty-nine, was not exactly young when she had her first child—belonged to an aristocratic family that had a little castle on the Loire. She was a great nature lover, passionate about riding, and, at the beginning, Allan Wood, the city dweller, had found her extraordinarily fascinating. But her increasing mulishness, her deeply felt prejudices against Americans, her refusal to set foot in a city, and her rides—which grew ever longer—finally drove this sensitive man to flee.
“I mean, it really wasn’t easy for me, Al-lang. There were no horses at all where I grew up, and I really have no clue about those gigantic beasts with their big yellow teeth. They scare me.” Allan Wood shuddered as he said this. “But at the end, it was always just horses, horses, horses. It began at breakfast—I mean, I couldn’t even read the paper without her yakking about some Arab she wanted to cover her mare. It was called Fleur, and it was a brute. It disliked me from the very beginning—I could see that from its shifty looks. It was very jealous of me. Once when I was standing behind it, it kicked me with its hoof—right here.” Allan Wood put his hands in his lap and grimaced painfully.
The omens for Hélène and Allan weren’t good, and so what had to happen happened. The couple grew ever further apart in the most literal sense of the word. And in the end, they were divided not only by the Atlantic Ocean but also an inability to communicate.
When Méla was eight, her father sat down by pure chance on a bench in Battery Park in Manhattan, looking out across the Hudson River. And there, on that bench, with the spring wind blowing around them, he became involved in conversation with a young woman who loved arguing. She was, as quickly became obvious, a lecturer in literature at Columbia University, and she had, which was even better, a deep aversion to horses. Too much nature made her just as nervous as it did Allan Wood. And so the two of them walked the streets of Manhattan, talking and laughing, and Allan, who had become almost dumb during his relationship with the horsewoman, made the glorious discovery of how fresh and new everything becomes once more when you talk about it with a beautiful young woman whose interests seem inexhaustible. Excitement and guilt alternated in quick sequence, but in the end excitement won—both in the intellectual and physical sense.
Allan Wood left Hélène, whom he’d never married, by the way, and wed Lucinda, thirteen years younger, with whom he soon afterward had a son.
Hélène was beside herself with rage. She shook her chestnut brown curls and, consumed with hate, swore that she’d never see him again. Then she went off to an ashram in India. In the meantime, Méla went to a boarding school, but Hélène had infected her daughter with hatred for her treacherous father.
Allan Wood looked into his glass a little guiltily as he came to the end of his story. “Of course that was all rather unpleasant,” he said. “But you know, my friend, when you get older and more thoughtful and eventually realize that life is not that long, then it’s like a gift from the heavens to be able to be with a young person like that. To suddenly be able to share once more in that carefree lightness that you’ve lost over the course of the years, but which you never cease to yearn for.”
I nodded. Thoughts like that were foreign to me—so far. But Allan Wood remained true to his yearning. A few years earlier, he had separated from the literature lecturer. Since then, he’d married for the third time.
“And you think Méla—I mean Mélanie—could be the woman in the red coat?” I asked, feeling butterflies in my stomach.
“I don’t think it can be ruled out. Méla has always been very impulsive. Perhaps she found out that I’m in Paris, in your cinema, and then took flight.”
“But … but where … I mean how …”
Allan Wood raised his eyebrows. “The papers were full of it—that the film was to be made on location in Paris, and in the Cinéma Paradis.”
I squirmed in excitement on the leather sofa and remembered with terror that in the interview with Monsieur Patisse, I had even babbled something about how much I admired Allan Wood, how likable I found him, and that during our very first conversation, I’d already felt that I was talking to a friend. ALLAN AND ALAIN—BEST FRIENDS was the headline the journalist had given his article, quite proud of the way he’d brought in the film reference.
And if you looked at it carefully, it was a fact that Mélanie had vanished from my life at the very moment that Allan Wood appeared in it. All of a sudden, thousands of thoughts shot through my mind. There was the similarity in name and age. My Mélanie also had beautiful brown eyes. And hadn’t Allan Wood said something about walking upright like a ballerina? I began feverishly looking for similarities.
“Does she have dark blond hair? Sort of caramel blond?” I asked.
Allan Wood thought for a moment. “Well,” he said. “You know how it is with women. They like changing the color of their hair. As a child, Méla had chestnut brown hair, like her mother. Then all at once she had black hair. The last time I saw her, her hair was blond—even if it wasn’t exactly caramel blond.” He smiled. “You have a real eye for detail, Al-lang; I thought that when you first told me about your list. One item on the list struck me—you mentioned that Mélanie had said that her mother didn’t like jewelry. Hélène was the same. ‘I have other charms; I don’t like the feel of metal on my skin,’ she said when I wanted to buy her a bracelet.” He grinned. “Though I suppose she might have accepted a wedding ring.” He stirred his glass thoughtfully with his straw. “She did actually get married later, but as far as I know, the marriage broke up very quickly and without any children.”
This made me think of Mélanie’s ring with the roses. All of a sudden, I was assailed by doubts. Mélanie had said the ring was a memento of her mother. Her dead mother.
“Do you know if Hélène is still alive?” I asked, afraid of hearing the answer.
Allan Wood sighed and shook his head regretfully. “She was so obstinate; even when she was over sixty, she had to get on some stupid nag and go for a ride.” He wrinkled his forehead in disapproval, and I felt sick with relief.
So it was true. Mélanie’s mother had died and Mélanie wore Hélène’s ring—the only thing she had left. She had no siblings. And the fact that she hadn’t said a word about her father no longer surprised me, under the circumstances.
“I’ve always said that those brutes are dangerous, but she always did as she pleased. She broke her neck. An accident—two years ago. I even got a card … but not until weeks later. After the funeral, which was a private one for close family. Which I’m no longer part of. I’m persona non grata with the Bécassarts.” He took a sip from his glass. “But I’d still like to see Méla again. Perhaps we’ll find a way to make peace with each other. She is my daughter, after all.” His voice sounded wistful.
“I’d also very much like to see your daughter again,” I said, my heart pounding. All of a sudden, I was wide awake. It was unbelievable and delightful at the same time, and I could hardly believe that after all the effort wasted on trying to find Mélanie, a new line of investigation was opening. I could have hugged the man with the horn-rimmed glasses, who had that evening become a kind of relative. “I’d like nothing better than to finally see Mélanie again,” I said once more. “Will you help me with that, Allan?”
Allan Wood smiled and held out his hand to me. “I’ll find Méla. That’s a promise.”
Nineteen
Filming had begun. It transformed my little cinema into a bustling, crazy, humming microcosm, a barely controllable, highly explosive conglomerate of snaking cables, harsh spotlights, rolling cameras and snapping clapboards, bellowed instructions, and tense silences. It was a world all of its own, which combined human vanity, heated rivalry, and great professionalism in the strangest way.
That Monday, when I climbed over the two rows of seats that had been removed and were
now standing across the foyer, blocking the entrance, I realized that the whole place had been practically demolished. Massive changes had taken place in the Cinéma Paradis. Not even Attila the Hun had produced such devastation when he invaded the plains of Pannonia.
Incredulous, I came to a halt in the foyer, staring at the chaos that had broken out around me. A panting, sweating man carrying a cable jostled against me; I took a step back and almost tripped over the foot of a lamp, which began to sway dangerously.
“Attention, Monsieur! Out of the way.” Two men hurried past me, groaning. They were hauling a massive chandelier into the auditorium, and I tottered to the side once more, this time bumping into a human being—one wearing a floral dress. It was Madame Clément.
“Oh God, oh God, Monsieur Bonnard, there you are at last,” she said, gesticulating wildly in the air. “Mon Dieu, what a shambles!” Madame Clément’s cheeks were bright red and she seemed extremely worked up. “Have you seen what they’ve done to my box office? I couldn’t stop them, Monsieur Bonnard. Those catering people just don’t care—even though they’ve got their great big truck parked outside the cinema.” She pointed reproachfully at the box office, which was filled to bursting with cases of drinks, cans, and paper plates. On the wooden counter where the cash register normally stood, a coffee machine was hissing away. “I can only hope they’ll put everything back in order when they’ve finished here, Monsieur Bonnard. My goodness, what a shambles,” she repeated.
I nodded with a sigh of resignation. I, too, hoped that my little cinema would emerge from this hurricane undamaged.
“Have you seen Madame Avril yet?” Madame Clément asked. “A delightful person—she’s in your office at this very moment with the makeup people,” she said with a self-important expression. “And Howard Galloway’s in the projection booth, freshening up. He wasn’t happy about his part; he wants more lines.” She shrugged her shoulders. “I’ve just taken him a café crème; he takes it with three lumps of sugar.”
Madame Clément’s eyes gleamed, and I wondered how on earth you could freshen up in the projection booth. But I didn’t really want to know, and I stared at the caterer as he walked past us in his white apron, carrying trays of sandwiches and finger food in both hands to a folding table that had been set up in the corner of the foyer. A tall, almost bald man who was writing things down in a notebook made his way with all the confidence of a sleepwalker through reels of cable and amplifiers to reach the room that until very recently had been my office. Now it was the wardrobe area. I took a tentative look inside.
Dresses, jackets, and scarves on metal hangers were crammed onto a clothes stand. Peering behind it, I could see a wash basket heaped higgledy-piggledy with files and documents. My desk was bare—or rather, it had been swept bare. Now it was piled with hundreds of jars and pots, brushes and powder puffs, hair clips and sprays. And enthroned in the middle was a Styrofoam head crowned with a hairpiece. They’d hung a gigantic mirror over the desk, and I wondered for a moment what had become of the two pretty watercolors of Cap d’Antibes.
Solène was sitting at the mirror, her back to the door, attended by two women who were busily combing her hair. She didn’t notice me. No one seemed to notice me, except perhaps for Madame Clément, who had obviously become one of the crew herself.
I tottered into the auditorium, where the temperature was tropical, and had to shut my eyes, blinded by the lights. When I opened them again, I saw a big bearded man standing behind a camera, taking test shots with the lighting double.
“A bit more to the right, Jasmin! … Yes, that’s just fine!” The bearded man waved and checked the viewfinder once more.
A screwdriver landed at my feet. I leaped to one side and looked up. Vertiginously high up on a ladder were the two men who had just carried the gigantic chandelier across the foyer. They were taking down the old ceiling lights. The intention was obviously to increase the nostalgia factor of the Cinéma Paradis by several degrees of magnitude.
I looked over at the two front rows, where the seats had been replaced by cameras and gigantic lights. A little man in dark glasses was standing there talking very emphatically to a handsome man with dark blond hair, an aristocratic air, and a sulky expression, who later turned out to be Howard Galloway. The little man gave a friendly wave when he saw me. It was Allan Wood, my new friend, the man who was holding all this chaos together.
“Ah, Al-lang! Come here. Come here!” he called, beaming widely. “So, haven’t we done a great job on your little film palace?” He pointed up at the ceiling, where the oversize chandelier was now swinging dangerously. “Now it looks really old, don’t you think?”
Three hours later, the man who was holding everything together was nervously wiping his forehead with his handkerchief. His face was no longer beaming. His patience seemed exhausted. I’d been told that when you’re shooting a film, there are good days and bad days. And then there are the very bad days. This was obviously a very bad day.
“So let’s do it all over again. Concentrate! Three, two, one aaand … action!” shouted Allan Wood. He was standing behind Carl, the cameraman, watching the scene with his thumb under his chin and his index finger to his lips: It was the ninth take. It was supposed to be the first meeting of the main characters, Juliette and Alexandre, in the cinema.
A few seconds later, he waved his hand impatiently to cut the scene. “No, no, no, that won’t do at all! Solène, you should turn in a bit. And a bit more surprise, please. You haven’t seen Alexandre for years. You thought he was long dead. The way you’re talking to him looks like he’s just coming back from the toilet. So, once more … with feeling!” He wiped his forehead wildly with his handkerchief. “And the line is ‘I’ve never forgotten you, Alexandre,’ not ‘I’ve thought of you every second, Alexandre.’ Then look into the camera. Close-up. Cut.”
“Do you know what? I have an idea,” said Solène. She said it as if she’d just invented the formula for eternal youth, and everyone on the set raised their eyes to the heavens. Solène Avril was well known for having “ideas” that wreaked total havoc with everything.
Allan Wood’s right eye began to twitch. “No, please! No more ideas for today, Solène. I’m the director. I make the decisions.”
“Oh please, don’t be so stuffy, chéri.” Solène smiled winningly. “We’ll just change the whole passage. ‘I’ve thought of you every second, Alexandre’—that sounds better, don’t you think? It sounds so beautifully … intense. Let’s change it.”
Allan Wood shook his head. “No, no, that’s totally … I mean, that’s totally illogical. Don’t you get that?” He sighed. “You haven’t seen Alexandre for thirteen years, so you can’t have been thinking of him every second.”
“No, it’s Ted she’s thinking of every second,” said Carl, the cameraman.
Solène looked angrily at the big bearded man in the blue polo shirt. “Interesting! I never knew that you could read thoughts, too. I thought you only read SMS that were not addressed to you.” She pursed her pretty lips, and Carl looked grimly at the ground. “In any case, I don’t want any close-ups today—I didn’t get a wink of sleep last night.”
Carl narrowed his eyes. “That’s all that stupid cowboy’s fault,” he growled. “Why does the guy have to call in the middle of the night. Doesn’t he realize that the clocks in Paris aren’t set to Texas time?”
“Give it up, will you, Carl? What are all these constant gibes supposed to mean? Do you have a problem with Ted?”
Carl shook his head. “Not as long as he stays on his damn ranch,” he said grimly.
Solène laughed. “I can’t promise that, stupid. You seem to have done your very best to convince him that it would be better if he came to Paris.”
“Could you fight your private feuds later? It’s getting on my nerves!” A bored Howard Galloway glanced at his perfectly manicured nails. “I’d like to get on with it. I’m hungry.”
“Chéri, we’re all hungry,” said Solène. “A
nd you’re not always the center of everything—even if you are, of course, the handsomest man on the set and think that entitles you to the biggest part.”
“Quiet! I must have quiet! Absolute quiet!” Allan Wood was rocking backward and forward and slipped something that looked suspiciously like a stomach tablet into his mouth. Then he held up his hand to attract everyone’s attention. “Now, pull yourselves together. Just this one scene and then we’ll have a coffee break.”
He waved Elisabetta over. The makeup artist—everyone just called her Liz—was a good-natured creature with a round, friendly face. You would have thought she belonged in a farmyard rather than on a film set. With a couple of skilled movements of her powder puff and brush, she conjured up a rosy freshness on the cheeks of the querulous actress and refreshed her lip gloss.
A few minutes later, they were all back in their places. Allan Wood gave a sigh of relief when, a quarter of an hour later, the scene was safely in the can without any more mishaps. “Okay, guys. Let’s take a break,” he called, sticking a final little pill in his mouth.
*
Solène already knew about it. She’d led me into my former office with a conspiratorial smile, pointed me to a stool, and pulled the door to behind us. Now she was sitting opposite me on her chair with a plastic beaker of hot coffee in her hands, and looking at me with shining eyes.
“Quelle histoire!” she said enthusiastically. “I mean, what a story! The owner of a cinema falls in love with a mysterious woman who turns out to be the estranged daughter of a director who’s filming in his cinema. That’s better than any film! Ha-ha-ha!” She laughed gaily.
I nodded, realizing with surprise how familiar this silvery laugh had become. Solène, this capricious, pleasure-loving woman of many ideas, was beginning to grow on me.
“Yes,” I said. “It’s really an incredible coincidence. Allan Wood’s daughter! I mean, you can’t make that stuff up.” My thoughts returned for a moment to the Hemingway Bar and what Allan had told me about Hélène and his daughter. “I just hope he really does find Méla.” I was quite concerned. “There isn’t a woman called Bécassart living in the rue de Bourgogne anyhow. I would have noticed.”
The Secret Paris Cinema Club Page 14