The Little Paris Bookshop (9 page)
Read The Little Paris Bookshop Online
Authors: Nina George
‘… beg you!’
Jean Perdu watched as Max Jordan stood up, rubbed his knee, looked back at where the rest of his things floated on the surface of the water for a second before sinking – and then limped to the wheelhouse with a beaming smile.
‘Hello,’ said the hunted author cheerily. ‘Do you travel on this boat too?’
Perdu rolled his eyes. He’d tear a strip off Max Jordan later and then politely chuck him overboard. Now he had to concentrate on all the things heading his way: sightseeing vessels, working barges, houseboats, birds, flies and spray. What were the rules again? Who had priority, and how fast was he allowed to go? And what did the yellow diamonds on the bottom of the bridge mean?
Max was looking at him as if he were waiting for something.
‘Jordan, take care of the cats and the books. And make some coffee. Meanwhile, I’ll try not to kill anyone with this thing.’
‘What? Whom do you want to kill? The cats?’ the author asked with a blank look.
‘Now take those things off,’ Perdu pointed to Jordan’s earmuffs, ‘and make us some coffee.’
By the time Max Jordan placed a tin cup full of strong coffee in the holder beside the tyre-sized wheel, Perdu had grown more accustomed to the vibrations and to navigating upstream. He hadn’t steered the barge in a long time. Simply nosing this thing along the river – the length of three shipping containers – was so discreet. The book barge cut quietly through the water.
He was so scared and yet so thrilled. He wanted to sing and scream. His fingers clutched the wheel. What he was doing was mad, it was daft; it was …
fan-tas-tic
!
‘Where did you learn to drive a cargo boat and all this?’ asked the writer, gesturing in awe at the navigation instruments.
‘My father showed me. I was twelve. When I was sixteen, I did the Inland Waterways Helmsman’s Certificate because I thought one day I’d be transporting coal to the north.’
And become a big, calm man who never needs to arrive to be happy. My God, how quickly life hurries on.
‘Really? My father didn’t even show me how to make paper boats.’
Paris passed by like a film reel. The Pont Neuf, Notre Dame, the Arsenal Harbour.
‘That was a perfect 007 escape. Milk and sugar, Mr Bond?’ asked Jordan. ‘So what made you do it, anyway?’
‘What do you mean? And no sugar, Miss Moneypenny.’
‘I mean sending your life up in flames. Scramming. Doing a Huckleberry Finn on his raft, a Ford Prefect, a—’
‘A woman.’
‘A woman? I didn’t think you were so interested in women.’
‘In most, I’m not. Only in one. And in her case a lot. I want to see her.’
‘Oh. Great. Why didn’t you take the bus?’
‘Do you think only people in books do crazy things?’
‘No. I’m just thinking that I can’t swim and that you were a kid the last time you drove a monster like this. And I’m thinking about the fact that you arranged the five tins of cat food in alphabetical order. You’re probably insane. My God! Were you really twelve once? An actual small boy? Incredible! You seem as if you’ve always been so …’
‘So?’
‘So grown-up. So … controlled. So totally in command.’
If only he knew what an amateur I am.
‘I wouldn’t have made it to the station. I’d have had too much time to think things over on the way there, Monsieur Jordan. I would have come up with reasons not to go. And I wouldn’t have gone through with it. Then I’d be standing up there’ – he indicated some girls on bikes waving to them from one of the bridges over the Seine – ‘and stay where I’ve always been. I wouldn’t have budged one centimetre from my normal routine. It’s shit, but it’s safe.’
‘You said “shit”.’
‘So what?’
‘Excellent. Now I’m a lot less worried about the ABC in your fridge.’
Perdu reached for his coffee. Wouldn’t Max Jordan worry a whole lot more when he began to suspect that the woman Jean Perdu had suddenly dropped everything for had been dead for twenty-one years? Perdu imagined himself telling Jordan. Soon. If only he knew how to.
‘How about you?’ he asked. ‘What’s driving you away, Monsieur?’
‘I want to … look for a story,’ Jordan falteringly explained. ‘Because … I’ve nothing left inside. I don’t want to go home until I’ve found it. In fact, I only came to the embankment to say good-bye, and then you cast off. May I please come with you? May I?’
He looked at Perdu with such hope in his eyes that for the time being Perdu shelved his plans to set Max Jordan ashore at their next port of call and wish him luck.
With the world ahead, and an unwanted life astern, suddenly he felt once more like the boy he had indeed been – even if that must barely seem possible from Max Jordan’s youthful perspective.
In fact, Jean did feel as he had when he was twelve. When he had seldom been lonely, but liked to be alone or with Vijaya, the weedy son of the Indian mathematician’s family next door; when he had been enough of a kid to believe that his night-time dreams were an alternative real world and a place of trial. He had once even believed that his dreams contained tasks that would move him up a rung in his waking life if he managed to accomplish them.
‘Find the path out of the maze! Learn to fly! Vanquish the hound of hell! Succeed and when you wake up, a wish will come true.’
At the time he had believed in the power of his wishes, which were naturally associated with the offer of forgoing something precious or important.
‘Please get my parents to look at each other again over breakfast! I’ll give an eye for it to happen, the left one. I need the right one to steer a barge.’
Yes, that’s how he had bargained when he was still a boy and had not been so … How had Jordan put it? So controlled? He had also written letters to God and sealed them with blood from his thumb. Now, only about a thousand years too late, he stood at the wheel of a gigantic boat and sensed for the first time in a long time that he did indeed have desires.
Perdu let slip a ‘Ha!’ and stood up a little straighter.
Jordan twiddled the knobs of the radio until he had found VNF Seine’s navigation radio, which controlled the river traffic. ‘A repeat announcement for the two comedians who smoked out Champs-Élysées harbour. Greetings from the harbourmaster. Starboard is the side where your thumb’s on the left.’
‘Do they mean us?’ asked Jordan.
‘Who cares,’ said Monsieur Perdu dismissively.
They gave each other a wry grin.
‘What did you want to be when you were a boy, Monsieur … um … Jordan?’
‘A boy? You mean, like, yesterday?’ Max laughed cockily, before falling into a deep silence.
‘I wanted to be a man my father would take seriously. And an interpreter of dreams, which more or less ruled out the former,’ he said eventually.
Perdu cleared his throat. ‘Chart a course to Avignon for us, Monsieur. Find a nice canal route to the south, one that will maybe bring us … significant dreams.’ Perdu gestured towards a stack of charts. The maps showed a dense network of navigable blue channels, canals, marinas and locks.
Jordan gave him a questioning glance, and Monsieur Perdu opened the throttle. Eyes firmly on the water, he said: ‘Sanary says that you have to travel south by water to find answers to your dreams. He says too that you find yourself again there, but only if you get lost on the way – completely lost. Through love. Through longing. Through fear. Down south they listen to the sea in order to understand that laughing and crying sound the same, and that the soul sometimes needs to cry to be happy.’
A bird awoke inside his chest, and it cautiously spread its wings, amazed to find that it was still alive. It wanted out. It wanted to burst from his chest, taking his heart with it, and soar up into the sky.
‘I’m coming,’ muttered Jean Perdu. ‘I’m coming, Manon.’
On My Way Into Life, Between Avignon and Lyons
30 July 1986
It was a miracle that they didn’t all climb aboard with me. It was irritating enough that they (my parents, Aunt ‘women-don’t-need-men’ Julia, my cousins ‘I’m-too-fat’ Daphne and ‘I’m-always-so-tired’ Nicolette) came down to our house from their thyme-scented hills and accompanied me to Avignon to see me actually get on the fast train from Marseilles to Paris. I suspected them all of merely wanting to go to a proper town and visit the cinema again and buy themselves a few Prince records.
Luc didn’t come with me. He was worried I wouldn’t go if he was at the station. And he’s right: I can tell at a distance how he is simply from the way he stands or sits and holds his shoulders and head. He is a southern Frenchman to his marrow; his soul is fire and wine, he’s never cold-blooded, he can’t do anything without feeling, he’s never indifferent. People say that most people in Paris are indifferent to most things.
I’m standing at the window of the express train and feel both young and grown-up at once. It’s the first time I’m truly bidding farewell to the land of my birth. Indeed, I’m seeing it for the first time as I move away from it, mile by mile. The light-drenched sky, the calls of the cicadas from the hundred-year-old trees, the winds wrestling over every almond leaf. The heat like a fever. The golden quivering and sparkling of the air when the sun goes down and turns the steep mountains and their perching villages shades of pink and honey. And the land keeps on giving – it will not stop growing for our benefit. It forces rosemary and thyme through the stones, the cherries almost burst out of their skins, and the swollen lime seeds smell like girls’ laughter when the harvest boys come to them
in the shade of the plane trees. The rivers gleam like fine turquoise threads winding through the craggy rocks, and to the south sparkles a sea of such piercing blue, as blue as the speckles on the skin of black olives when one has made love under one of those trees. The land constantly presses on us humans, comes mercilessly close. Thorns. Rocks. Scent. Papa says that Provence created humans from the trees and the bright rocks and springs, and called them Frenchmen. They are woody and malleable, stony and strong; they speak from deep within their strata and boil over as fast as a pan of water on the stove.
I can already feel the heat subsiding, the sky sinking lower and losing its cobalt streaks. I see the contours of the land growing softer and weaker the further north we go. The cold, cynical north! Can you feel love?
Maman is naturally afraid that something might happen to me in Paris. She isn’t so much thinking that I might be torn to pieces by one of the Lebanese Revolutionary Faction bombs that have gone off in the Galeries Lafayette and on the Champs-Élysées; a man, more like. Or, perish the thought, a woman. One of those Saint-Germain intellectuals, who have everything in their heads and not a feeling to speak of, and who could give me a taste for life in a draughty artists’ household, where it is, as always, the women who end up rinsing the creative gentlemen’s paintbrushes.
I think that Maman is worried that I might discover something far away from Bonnieux and its Atlas cedars, Vermentino vines and pinky twilights that might jeopardise my future life. I heard her weeping with despair out in the summer kitchen last night; she’s afraid for me.
People say that Parisians are fiercely competitive about everything, and men charm women with their coldness. Every woman wants to net herself a man and turn his icy defences into passion. Every woman, especially women from the south. That’s what Daphne says, and I think she’s crazy. Diets obviously make you hallucinate.
Papa is ever the self-controlled Provençal. What can city people offer you? is what he says. I love him when he has one of his five-minute fits of humanism and sees Provence as the cradle of French national culture. He mumbles his Occitan expressions and thinks it’s wonderful that every last olive farmer and unwashed tomato
grower has been speaking the language of artists, philosophers, musicians and young people for four hundred years. Unlike Parisians, who think only their educated classes deserve to be creative and cosmopolitan. Oh, Papa! Plato with a field spade, and so intolerant towards the intolerant.
I’ll miss the spiciness of his breath and the warmth of his embrace. And his voice – rolling thunder on the horizon.
I know that I’ll miss the mountains and the mistral that sweeps and washes the vineyards … I’ve brought a little bag of soil and a bunch of herbs with me. Along with a nectarine stone I’ve sucked clean, and a pebble that I can put under my tongue when I thirst for the springs of home, like Pagnol.
Will I miss Luc? He was always there; I’ve never missed him before. I’ll enjoy pining for him. I don’t know the pull that Cousin I’m-too-fat Daphne spoke of, meaningfully omitting words: ‘It’s as if a man stuck his anchor into your breast, your stomach, between your legs; and when he’s not there, the chains pull and tug.’ It sounded horrible, and yet she was grinning as she said it.
How might it feel to want a man like that? And do I sink the same barbs into him, or do men find it easier to forget? Did Daphne read that in one of her awful novels?
I know all about men, but nothing about man. What is a man like when he’s with a woman? Does he know at twenty how he wants to love her at sixty, because he knows exactly how he’s going to think and act and live career-wise at sixty?
I’ll come back in a year’s time, and Luc and I will get married, like the birds. And then we’ll make wine and children, year after year. I’m free this year and in the future too. Luc won’t ask questions if I come home late from time to time, and if, in the years that follow, I go off to Paris or somewhere else on my own. That was his gift to me when we got engaged: a free marriage. That’s how he is.
Papa wouldn’t understand him – freedom from faithfulness, for love’s sake? ‘Rain isn’t enough for all the land either,’ he would say; love is the rain, man is the land. And what are we women? ‘You cultivate the man and he flourishes in your hands; that’s the power of women.’
I don’t yet know whether I want Luc’s gift of rain. It’s big; maybe I’m too small for it.
And do I want to reciprocate? Luc said he didn’t insist on that, nor was it a condition.
I am the daughter of a tall, strong tree. My timber forms a ship, but it is anchorless, flagless. I set sail for the shade and the light; I drink the wind and forget all ports. To hell with freedom, gifted or seized; if in doubt, always endure alone.
Oh, and I should mention one last thing before my inner Marianne rips off her tunic again and roars more words of freedom. I did indeed get to know the man who saw me crying and writing my travel diary. In the train compartment. He saw my tears, and I hid them and the babyish ‘I-want-it-back’ feeling that overcomes me as soon as I leave my little valley behind …
He asked whether I was badly homesick.
‘It could be lovesickness, couldn’t it?’ I asked him.
‘Homesickness is lovesickness, only worse.’
He’s tall for a Frenchman. A bookseller. His teeth are white and his smile friendly; his eyes are green – the green of herbs. They’re almost the same colour as the cedar outside my bedroom in Bonnieux. Grape-red mouth, hair as thick and strong as sprigs of rosemary.
His name’s Jean. He’s in the process of converting a Flemish working barge; he wants to plant books on it, he says, ‘paper boats for the soul’. He explained that he wants to make it into an apothecary, a
pharmacie littéraire,
to treat all the emotions for which no other remedy exists.
Homesickness, for example. In his opinion there are various kinds: a desire for shelter, family nostalgia, a fear of separation or a yearning for love.
‘The yearning to have something good to love soon: a place, a person, a particular bed.’
He says it in such a way that it doesn’t sound silly; it sounds logical.
Jean promised to give me books that would alleviate my homesickness. He said it as though he were talking about a half-magical, yet nonetheless official form of medicine.
He seems like a white raven, clever and strong and floating above reality. He is like some great proud bird watching over the world.
No, I wasn’t precise enough. He didn’t promise to give me books – he says he cannot stand promises. He suggested it. ‘I can help
you. If you want to cry some more or stop, or laugh so you cry less; I will help you.’
I feel like kissing him to see whether he can do more than talk and know things; whether he can feel and believe as well.
And how high it can fly, this white raven that sees everything inside me.