by Emma Becker
If my recollection of that moment is correct, fleeting as it is, it’s because Monsieur found me, slumped against the wall, at the top of the steps leading to the hotel door, sheltered away from the passing crowds, my eyes wide open, my cheeks wet with a river of tears, stinging me like lemon juice, choking my anguished sounds inside the cup of my hands. I felt an imperceptible shadow close by me and couldn’t care less. I was scared and my stomach was so twisted up inside that I could feel nothing, felt no need to regain any form of dignity. Wildly sobbing under my breath. Everything around me was just too large. I could no longer understand how I was allowed to walk the streets of such a large city on my own. How anyone could trust me in any way.
I glanced to my left, brushing away a wet, salty strand of hair, saw Monsieur and his suit jacket, the careful alignment of his side pocket warped by my scrunched-up panties. I didn’t stop crying. He must have known as soon as I had walked out onto the landing that my legs wouldn’t take me far. It was of no consequence, I was only twenty-one. An age where you rush ahead in overdrive without ever feeling pain or weariness. It just happens, like that, out of the blue, on hotel steps right in the middle of your mad run to nowhere.
‘I beg you, don’t cry,’ he said, his voice so dreadfully overflowing with tenderness it hurt. I lowered my hands from my face to try and mumble something and thought, for a moment, that Monsieur was about to touch me, but before I had a chance to say anything, he’d pulled a large bone-coloured silk handkerchief from his inside pocket, his initials C.S. sewn into the bottom right hand corner.
‘Take it,’ I heard, and half a second later I was holding between my fingers the most exquisite velvety piece of material Man has ever created, fabric evoking an endless, armless, bodyless embrace, but an embrace nonetheless.
With an effort I summoned up from deep inside my soul, I sketched a thin smile, looked at Monsieur who was also smiling at me, the shadow of grief spreading across his small wrinkles, a sight I had never witnessed before. We looked at each other for ages, impervious to the outside world. Then my heart that I’d already thought shattered broke into a thousand pieces again and I buried my face into the handkerchief that smelled of Guerlain, opened my mouth, but already Monsieur had taken flight, his eyes lowered, hopping down the twelve small steps leading to the street four at a time. Stretching my neck until it hurt, my eyes followed him for a few metres, the blue of his scarf a point of reference, but he soon turned a corner, disappeared as he knew how to do so well, and all that was left was Ellie, rue des Dames, Ellie and her handkerchief smelling of Habit Rouge.
Sometimes you pull a splinter out. Sometimes you are the splinter. Everything else is unimportant. All the rest is just a long process of falling out of love by which all little girls return to shores where they unlearn the pain, the compromise, the sacrifice, the torment. A place where grief is less poignant and pleasure is weaker.