One Evening in Paris

by Nicolas Barreau

  When I reopened the Cinéma Paradis, a lot of people who had known it in the past came again. And a lot of people who were curious also came, because the reopening had seemed worth a couple of column inches to the press. The first few months were good, and then came the times when the auditorium was only half-full, if that. When Madame Clément showed me in sign language how many were in the audience some evenings, ten fingers were often more than enough.

  Not that I’d believed that a small cinema was a gold mine anyway, but my savings were melting away and I needed an idea. What came to me was the idea of having an extra late-night performance on a Wednesday, showing the old films that had so inspired me. The special thing about this concept was that the films changed every week, and that they were all films about love, in the broadest sense. I called the whole thing Les Amours au Paradis and was pleased to see the late Wednesday performances beginning to fill up.

  And when, on those evenings, I opened the doors after the titles had run and saw the loving couples leaving the auditorium arm in arm with glistening eyes, a businessman who for sheer elation had forgotten his briefcase under his seat, or an old lady who came up to me and shook my hand, saying, with longing in her eyes, that the film reminded her of the days of her youth, I knew that I had the most wonderful job in the world. On these evenings a very special enchantment lay over the Cinéma Paradis. It was my cinema that gave people the gift of dreams, just as Uncle Bernard had always said.

  But after the young woman in the red coat began coming to the late performances and, every time she came to the box office, gave me a shy smile, it was I who began to dream.

  Four

  “What do you mean, you haven’t asked her yet? How long has she been coming to your cinema?”

  My friend Robert rocked impatiently on his chair. We were sitting outside the Café de la Mairie, a little place to the left of the church of Saint-Sulpice, and although it was only March and the weather in recent weeks had been quite rainy, the sun was blazing in our faces.

  When we meet at lunchtime, Robert always wants to go to the Café de la Mairie, because they’re supposed to have the best vinaigrette for his beloved salade paysanne—there are little bottles full of it on every table.

  “Well,” I said as I watched him empty the whole bottle over his salad in one go, “I’d say it’s been going on since December.”

  My friend looked at me in amazement. “‘It’? What do you mean by that? Are you two an item or not?”

  I shook my head and sighed. For Robert, the first and only important question is whether a man and a woman are “an item.” None of the rest interests him. He’s a scientist, and profoundly unromantic. Subtleties are totally alien to him, and the delight of stolen glances leaves him cold. If he fancies a woman, then something happens—usually on the very first evening. No idea how he does it. Of course, he can be very charming and funny. And he approaches women with a disarming openness, which most of them seem unable to resist.

  I leaned back, took a sip of wine and blinked into the sun, because I didn’t have my sunglasses with me. “No, nothing’s going on, at least not in the way you would understand it.” I told him the whole truth. “But she’s been coming to the late-night show since December, and I just have the feeling that … Oh, I just don’t know.”

  Robert speared a cube of cheese dripping with golden-yellow vinaigrette, counting off the months with his other hand. “December, January, February, March.” He looked at me sternly. “You mean to tell me that this girl you fancy so much has been coming to the cinema for four months and you still haven’t even spoken to her?”

  “But she only comes once a week, always on Wednesday, when I run that series of old films—you know, Les Amours au Paradis—and of course I’ve spoken to her. The sort of things you say. ‘Did you like the film?’ ‘Terrible weather today, don’t you think?’ ‘Would you like to leave your umbrella here?’ That sort of thing.”

  “Does she have a guy with her?”

  I shook my head. “No, she always comes alone. But that doesn’t necessarily mean anything.” I tapped the edge of my glass. “At first, I thought she was married, because she wears a gold ring. But then I looked very carefully and saw that it wasn’t a wedding ring—at least not a normal one. It has little red-gold roses on—”

  “And she’s really cute?” my friend asked, interrupting me. “Nice teeth, good figure, and all that?”

  I nodded again and thought back to the time the girl with the red coat had first appeared at the box office. I always called her “the girl,” but in fact she was a young woman, somewhere around twenty-five to twenty-eight, with shoulder-length caramel hair, which she parted at the side, a delicate heart-shaped face with a scattering of freckles, and shining dark eyes. To me, she always seemed a little lost—in her thoughts, or in the world—and had a habit of nervously tucking her hair behind her ear with her right hand as she waited for me to tear a ticket off for her. But when she smiled, the whole place seemed to fill with light, and her expression became a bit roguish. And yes, she had a lovely mouth and wonderful teeth.

  “She’s a bit like Mélanie Laurent, you know.”

  “Mélanie Laurent? Never heard of her. Who on earth is she?”

  “The actress from Beginners.”

  Robert stuffed the cube of cheese in his mouth and chewed thoughtfully. “Not a clue. I only know Angelina Jolie. She’s fabulous. Great body.”

  “Okay, okay. You might come to my cinema a little more often, and then you might have some idea of what I’m talking about. I’d let you in for free anyway.”

  “For God’s sake! I’d fall asleep in there!”

  My friend likes action films and Mafia films, and so we would never—seen purely theoretically—have to fight for the last ticket for the same film.

  “Like the girl in Inglourious Basterds,” I said, trying to broaden our points of contact. “The one who sets fire to the cinema so that all the Nazis burn to death.”

  Robert stopped chewing for a moment, then as he realized who I meant, he raised his eyebrows in recognition and waved his forefinger in circles in front of my face.

  “You mean the pretty chick who’s on the run from the Nazis. That’s Mélanie Laurent? And your girl looks like Mélanie Laurent, you say?”

  “A bit,” I replied.

  Robert fell back in the bistro chair with a crash—it wasn’t made for a man his size—and then shook his head.

  “Boy oh boy, I just don’t understand it. You can be such a dope sometimes,” he said in the refreshingly direct manner I value so much in him. I let his reproaches wash over me—after all, I wanted his advice. But when he began by saying, “That’s exactly like…” and then let rip with a load of astrophysical formulae that by some miracle culminated in a Hubble Constant I’d never heard of, I got completely lost and my thoughts wandered.

  Have I told you that I’m more the reserved type? I should add straightaway that that doesn’t mean boring. Quite the contrary: I have a very rich interior life and a vivid imagination. Just because a man doesn’t take every woman he fancies straight to bed, he isn’t necessarily a total wimp. Unlike all those show-offs, I see a great deal. I don’t mean in the prophetic sense, of course. Perhaps I’ve just seen too many films in my lifetime, but since I’ve been running the Cinéma Paradis, I’ve noticed that I get great pleasure from observing people very closely and drawing my conclusions about them. And without my really wanting it, their stories run to me just like puppies run to other people.

  Some customers come only once; others are here in the Cinéma Paradis quite regularly, and I feel I almost know them. I may not talk a great deal, but I see a lot. I sell them the tickets and see their faces, their stories, their secrets.

  There’s the tall man in the light brown corduroy suit, his few remaining hairs carelessly combed back, who never misses a film by Bunuel, Saura, or Sautet. I imagine that in his youth he was taken with the ideals of communism and later became a professor. His eyes,
which sparkle beneath his bushy silver eyebrows, are bright and full of intelligence. He always wears bright blue shirts under his old corduroy jacket with its threadbare lapels, and I am certain that he is a widower. He is one of the few men of his generation who have outlived their wives, and I’m certain that he loved his. His face is open and friendly. And whenever he leaves the cinema, he always stops for a moment, as if he were waiting for someone, and then continues with an air of surprise.

  Then there’s the woman with the luxuriant black curls and her little daughter. She’s probably in her late thirties, and they both come regularly to the children’s show on the weekend. “Papa will be home late today,” she once said to the child as she hopped along beside her and held her hand, and her face was pale and sad and tired above her bright scarf. Her mouth suddenly pursed in a bitter smile. She never comes late—she’s more likely to be too early. She has a lot of time, and sometimes, as she stands in the foyer waiting to be let in, she twists her wedding ring absentmindedly on her finger. I guess her husband is unfaithful to her, and she knows it. But she doesn’t know if she should actually leave him or not.

  The tubby man with the steel-rimmed glasses, who mostly watches comedies and likes to laugh a lot, has been left by his girlfriend. Since then, his belly has gotten a little rounder and he has an air of uncertainty. He works a lot these days, there are shadows under his eyes, and when he arrives, it’s always just before the show starts—sometimes he’s still carrying his briefcase. Nevertheless, I think things are better for him this way. His girlfriend was a peevish little redheaded witch who constantly criticized him—it was never quite clear for what. The guy wouldn’t harm a fly.

  And so I sit in my cinema evening after evening and indulge in my little speculations. But the customer who puzzles me the most, whose story interests me the most, who always comes on her own and whom I wait for with my heart palpitating every Wednesday, is someone else.

  The woman in the red coat always sits in row seventeen, and I wonder what her secret is. I’d really like to find out about her story, and yet at the same time I’m afraid that it might ultimately not fit in with my own story. I feel like Parsifal, who is forbidden to ask questions, and I already sense that this woman’s story is very special. She’s so very enchanting, and this evening I’m finally going to talk to her and ask her out to dinner.

  A large hand grabbed my sleeve and shook me, and so I returned to the place Saint-Sulpice, where I was sitting in the sun outside the little café with my friend.

  “Hey, Alain, are you actually listening to me?” Robert’s voice sounded reproachful. He looked at me with those piercing bright blue eyes. Behind his shock of blond hair, the sunlit church with its strange angular towers rose in the sky like a gigantic spaceship that had just landed. Robert had obviously just finished giving me a long lecture about Hubble and his constants.

  “I said you ought to speak to her this evening and ask her if she’ll go out to dinner with you! Otherwise, you’ll continue drifting apart like bodies in space.”

  I bit my lower lip and suppressed a smile. “Yes,” I said. “That’s exactly what I was thinking.”

  Five

  I got to the cinema far too early that Wednesday. After lunching with Robert, I’d rushed off as if I had an appointment. Of course I hadn’t, but as you know, the happiest moments are those that you wait for. So I crossed the boulevard Saint-Germain as it basked in the noonday sun and wove my way between the cars waiting at a red light. I lit a cigarette, and a few minutes later was walking along the shady rue Mazarin.

  When I unlocked the door of the Cinéma Paradis, the familiar smell of wood and plush seating wafted toward me, and I calmed down a little and began to refill the showcases.

  This was the day that Eric Rohmer’s The Green Ray was showing in the Les Amours au Paradis series. I put out new leaflets. I checked that there was enough change in the box office. I glanced in at the projection booth and set the reels of film out. Then I went into the auditorium and tried out several seats in row seventeen, trying to see what was special about it, but I didn’t actually notice anything different. It wasn’t even the back row, which is very popular with lovers because they can kiss undisturbed in the darkness.

  I killed time doing some things that were useful, and a few that weren’t, all the time keeping my eye on the hands of the clock in the foyer.

  François arrived and disappeared into the projection booth. Madame Clément arrived, bringing homemade raspberry tarts. And when the audience for the six o’clock performance had taken their seats to follow the fate of an inventive pensioners’ collective in All Together, I opened the door to the projection booth and signaled to François that I was going out for a coffee. François sat hunched over a pile of books and papers. While the films were running, he had enough time to cram for his exams.

  “I’ll be right back,” I said, and he nodded. “And … François? Would you mind locking up this evening? I have something to do after the late show.”

  It was only when I was drinking my café crème in the nearby bistro that I realized that my plan wasn’t exactly brilliant. The late show finished at quarter past eleven. Who on earth would want to go out to dinner then? Perhaps it would be wiser to ask the woman in the red coat out to dinner on the weekend. If she was prepared to let me ask her out at all, that is, and if she actually came to the cinema that evening.

  Suddenly, I went cold with fear. What if she didn’t come? Or never came again? I stirred my coffee nervously, although the sugar had long since dissolved.

  But she’s always come before, I said to myself. Don’t be silly, Alain. She’ll come. And anyway, she seems to like you. She always smiles when she sees you.

  But perhaps that’s just perfectly normal friendliness?

  No, no, there’s more to it than that. I bet she’s just waiting for you to get around to speaking to her. You should have done it long ago, you coward. Long ago!

  I heard a low rustling sound beside me and looked up. The professor with the corduroy jacket was sitting at the next table and nodded to me from behind his newspaper. His eyes shone with amusement.

  Heavens! I hadn’t been talking out loud, had I? Was I one of those people who had no control over what they said? Or could the old gentleman read minds?

  So I nodded back in confusion, and drank my coffee down in a single gulp.

  “I saw that you’re showing The Green Ray today,” said the professor. “A good film—I’ll definitely come and see it.” A thin smile played around the corner of his mouth. “And don’t worry: The young lady will definitely come!”

  I blushed as I stood up and reached for my jacket. “Yes, well then, see you later.”

  “See you later,” he replied. And I really hoped that he was right about the young lady.

  She was the last in the line standing at the box office, and as she held out a bill to pay for her ticket, I seized the opportunity by the forelock.

  “You come to our late show quite often, mademoiselle. Do you like my little film series?” I asked eagerly as I gave her the ticket and her change.

  She tucked a lock of hair behind her ear and smiled shyly. “Oh, yes. A lot, actually.”

  “And I’m very pleased that you come so often,” I blurted, and stared in fascination at her perfectly formed little ear, which was now beginning to turn red.

  She kept smiling but didn’t say a word as she put the coins in her purse. What should she have replied to such a stupid remark?

  I could hear Robert’s voice. Don’t beat about the bush. Get to the point, man. Get to the point.

  “Well … ha-ha … I should actually give you a discount since you come here so often,” I said in an attempt to be witty. “Like those loyalty points they have in the big stores, you know?”

  She took her ticket, and for a second she looked me straight in the eye. Then she smiled again, and I smiled back, as if hypnotized.

  “No need for that, monsieur. The films are worth every cen
t.”

  The cinema door was pulled open and a gust of wind blew through the foyer. Two students came in, giggling, and headed for the box office. I needed to hurry.

  The woman in the red coat turned to go.

  “Just a moment,” I shouted, and she turned back to me. “You … you’ve forgotten something.…”

  She stared at me in amazement.

  “That is, I … I’ve forgotten something,” I went on, in a desperate attempt not to lose her attention.

  “Well?”

  “In fact, I forgot to ask something.” I looked at her. “After the show … would you like to go out to dinner … or for a drink, perhaps? Then … we could discuss the film … if you like. I’d … er … I’d really like to invite you, I mean, since you don’t want any loyalty points.”

  Oh good grief, I was talking such nonsense!

  “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.