Chocolat

by Joanne Harris

  “I miss reading,” she said. “It’s getting too hard to see print nowadays, but Luc reads to me sometimes. Remember how I got him to read Rimbaud to me at that first meeting?”

  I nodded. “You make it sound as if it was years ago,” I told her.

  “It was.” Her voice was light, almost uninflected. “I’ve had what I thought I’d never be able to have, Vianne. My grandson visits me every day. We talk like adults. He’s a good lad, kind enough to grieve for me a little?”

  “He loves you, Armande,” I interrupted. “We all do.”

  She chuckled. “Maybe not all,” she said. “Still, that doesn’t matter. I have everything I’ve ever wanted right here and now. My house, my friends, Luc…” She gave me a stubborn look. “I’m not going to have any of that taken away from me,” she declared mutinously.

  “I don’t understand. No-one can force you to?”

  “I’m not talking about any one,” she interrupted sharply. “Cussonnet can talk as much as he likes about his retinal implants and his scans and laser therapies and what he likes”— her contempt for such things was apparent — “but that doesn’t change the plain facts. The truth is I’m going blind, and there’s not a lot anyone can do to stop it.” She folded her arms with a gesture of finality.

  “I should have gone to him sooner,” she said without bitterness. “Now it’s irreversible, and worsening. Six months of partial sight is the most he can give me, then Le Mortoir, like it or not, till the day I die.” She paused. “I could live another ten years,” she said reflectively, echoing my words to Reynaud.

  I opened my mouth to argue, to tell her it might not be all that bad, then closed it again.

  “Don’t look like that, girl.” Armande gave me a rallying nudge. “After a five-course banquet you’d want coffee and liqueurs, wouldn’t you? You wouldn’t suddenly decide to round it all off with a bowl of pap, would you? Just so you could have an extra course?”

  “Armande ?”

  “Don’t interrupt.” Her eyes were bright. “I’m saying you need to know when to stop, Vianne. You need to know when to push away your plate and call for those liqueurs. I’ll be eighty-one in a fortnight?”

  “That’s not so old,” I wailed in spite of myself. “I can’t believe you’re giving up like this!”

  She looked at me. “And yet you were the one, weren’t you, who told Guillaume to leave Charly some dignity.”

  “You’re not a dog!” I retorted, angry now.

  “No,” replied Armande softly, “and I have a choice.”

  A bitter place, New York, with its gaudy mysteries; cold in winter and flashing with heat in summer. After three months even the noise becomes familiar, unremarkable, the sounds of cars-voices-cabs melting into a single sheet of sound which covers the place like rain. Crossing the road from the deli with our lunch in a brown sack between her folded arms, I meeting her halfway, catching her eye across a busy street, a billboard advertising Marlboro cigarettes at her back; a man standing against a vista of red mountains. I saw it coming. Opened my mouth to shout, to warn her…Froze. For a second, that was all, a single second. Was it fear which stapled my tongue to the roof of my mouth? Was it simply the slowness of the body’s reaction when faced with the imminence of danger, the thought reaching the brain an aching eternity from the dull flesh’s response? Or was it hope, the kind of hope which comes when all dreams have been stripped away and what remains is the long slow agony of pretence? Of course, Maman, of course we’ll make it to Florida. Of course we will.

  Her face, rigid with smiling, her eyes far too bright, bright as Fourth-of-July fireworks.

  What would I do, what would I do without you?

  It’s OK, Maman. We’ll make it. I promise. Trust me.

  The Black Man stands by with a flickering smile on his face and for that interminable second I know that there are worse things, much worse things, than dying. Then the paralysis breaks and I scream, but the cry of warning comes too late. She turns her face vaguely towards me, a smile forming on her pale lips — Why, what is it, dear? and the cry which should have been her name is lost in the squealing of brakes.

  “Florida!” It sounds like a woman’s name, shrilling across the street, the young woman running through the traffic dropping her purchases as she runs — an armful of groceries, a carton of milk — her face contorting. It sounds like a name, as if the older woman dying in the street is actually called Florida, and she is dead before I reach her, quietly and without drama, so that I feel almost embarrassed to make so much fuss, and a large woman in a pink tracksuit puts her meaty arms around me, but what I feel most is relief, like a lanced boil, and my tears are relief, bitter burning relief that I have reached the end at last. Reached the end intact, or almost.

  “You shouldn’t cry,” said Armande gently. “Aren’t you the one who always says happiness is the only thing that matters?”

  I was surprised to find my face wet.

  “Besides, I need your help.” Pragmatic as always, she passed me a handkerchief from her pocket. It smelt of lavender. “I’m having a party for my birthday,” she declared. “Luc’s idea. Expense no object. I want you to do the catering.”

  “What?” I was confused, passing from death to feasting then back again.

  “My last course,” explained Armande. “I’ll take my medicine till then, like a good girl. I’ll even drink that filthy tea. I want to see my eighty-first birthday, Vianne, with all my friends around me. God knows, I might even invite that idiot daughter of mine. We’ll bring in your chocolate festival in style. And then…” A quick shrug of indifference. “Not everyone gets this lucky,” she observed. “Getting the chance to plan everything, to tidy all the comers. And something else”— she gave me a look of laser intensity — “not a word to anyone,” she said. “Not anyone. I’m not having any interference. It’s my choice, Vianne. My party. I don’t want anyone crying and carrying on at my party. Understand?”

  I nodded.

  “Promise?” It was like talking to a fierce child.

  “I promise.”

  Her face took on the look of contentment it always wears when she speaks of good food. She rubbed her hands together. “Now for the menu.”

  THIRTY

  Tuesday, March 18

  JOSEPHINE COMMENTED ON MY SILENCE AS WE WORKED together. We have made three hundred of the Easter boxes since we began, stacked neatly in the cellar and tied with ribbons, but I plan for twice that many. If I can sell them all we will make a substantial profit, perhaps enough to settle here for good. If not — I do not think of that possibility, though the weathervane creaks laughter at me from its perch. Roux has already started work on Anouk’s room in the loft. The festival is a risk, but our lives have always been determined by such things. And we have made every effort to make the festival a success. Posters have been sent as far as Agen and the neighbouring towns. Local radio will mention it every day of Easter week. There will be music — a few of Narcisse’s old friends have formed a band — flowers, games. I spoke to some of the Thursday traders and there will be stalls in the square selling trinkets and souvenirs. An Easter-egg hunt for the children, led by Anouk and her friends, carnets-surprise for every entrant. And in La Celeste Praline, a giant chocolate statue of Eostre with a corn sheaf in one hand and a basket of eggs in the other, to be shared between the celebrants. Less than two weeks left. We make the delicate liqueur chocolates, the rose-petal clusters, the goldwrapped coins, the violet creams, the chocolate cherries and almond rolls in batches of fifty at a time, laying them out onto greased tins to cool. Hollow eggs and animal figures are carefully split open and filled with these. Nests of spun caramel with hard-shelled sugar eggs, each topped with a triumphantly plump chocolate hen; piebald rabbits heavy with gilded almonds stand in rows, ready to be wrapped and boxed; marzipan creatures march across the shelves. The smells of vanilla essence and cognac and caramelized apple and bitter chocolate fill the house.

  And now there is Armande’s
party to prepare, too. I have a list of what she wants on order from Agen — foie gras, champagne, truffles and fresh chantrelles from Bordeaux, plateaux de fruits de mer from the traiteur in Agen. I will bring the cakes and chocolates myself.

  “It sounds fun,” calls Josephine brightly from the kitchen, as I tell her about the party. I have to remind myself of my promise to Armande.

  “You’re invited,” I told her. “She said so.”

  Josephine flushes with pleasure at the thought. “That’s kind,” she says. “Everyone’s been so kind.”

  She is remarkably unembittered, I tell myself, ready to see kindness in everyone. Even Paul-Marie has not destroyed this optimism in her. His behaviour, she says, is partly her own fault. He is essentially weak; she should have stood up to him long ago. Caro Clairmont and her cronies she dismisses with a smile. “They’re just foolish,” she tells me wisely.

  Such a simple soul. She is serene now, at peace with the world. I find myself becoming less and less so, in a perverse spirit of contradiction. And yet I envy her. It has taken so little to bring her to this state. A little warmth, a few borrowed- clothes and the security of a spare room…Like a flower she grows towards the light, without thinking or examining the process which moves her to do so. I wish I could do the same.

  I find myself returning to Sunday’s conversation with Reynaud. What moves him is still as much of a mystery to me as it ever was. There is a look of desperation about him nowadays as he works in his churchyard, digging and hoeing furiously — sometimes bringing out great clumps of shrubs and flowers along with the weeds — the sweat running down his back and making a dark triangle against his soutane. He does not enjoy the exercise. I see his face as he works, features crunching with the effort. He seems to hate the soil he digs, to hate the plants with which he struggles. He looks like a miser forced to shovel banknotes into a furnace: hunger, disgust and reluctant fascination. And yet he never gives up. Watching him I feel a familiar pang of fear, though for what I am not sure. He is like a machine, this man, my enemy. Looking at him I feel strangely exposed by his scrutiny. It takes all my courage to meet his eyes, to smile, to pretend nonchalance…inside me something screams and struggles frantically to escape. It is not simply the issue of the chocolate festival which enrages him. I know this as keenly as if I had picked it out of his bleak thoughts. It is my very existence which does so. To him I am a living outrage. He is watching me now, covertly from his unfinished garden, his eyes sliding sideways to my window then back to his work in sly satisfaction. We have not spoken since Sunday, and he thinks he has scored a point against me. Armande has not returned to La Praline, and I can see in his eyes that he believes himself to have been the cause of this. Let him think it if it makes him happy.

  Anouk tells me he went to the school yesterday. He spoke about the meaning of Easter — harmless stuff, though it chills me somehow to think of my daughter in his care — read a story, promised to come again. I asked Anouk if he had spoken to her.

  “Oh yes,” she said blithely. “He’s nice. He said I could come and see his church if I wanted. See St Francis and all the little animals.”

  “And do you want to?”

  Anouk shrugged. “Maybe,” she said.

  I tell myself — in the small hours when everything seems possible and my nerves shriek like the unoiled hinges of the weathervane — that my fear is irrational. What could he do to us? How could he hurt us, even if that is his intention? He knows nothing. He can know nothing about us. He has no power.

  Of course he has, says my mother’s voice in me. He’s the Black Man.

  Anouk turns over restlessly in her sleep. Sensitive to my moods, she knows when I am awake and struggles towards wakefulness herself through a morass of dreams. I breathe deeply until she is under again.

  The Black Man is a fiction, I tell myself firmly. An embodiment of fears underneath a carnival head. A tale for dark nights. Shadows in a strange room.

  In lieu of an answer I see that picture again, bright as a transparency: Reynaud at an old man’s bedside, waiting, his lips moving as if in prayer, fire at his back like sunlight through stained glass. It is not a comforting picture. There is something predatory in the priest’s stance, a likeness between the two reddened faces, the glow of flame between them darkly menacing. I try to apply my studies in psychology. It is an image of the Black Man as Death, an archetype which reflects my fear of the unknown. The thought is unconvincing. The part of me that still belongs to my mother speaks with more eloquence.

  You’re my daughter, Vianne, she tells me inexorably. You know what that means.

  It means moving on when the wind changes, seeing futures in the turn of a card, our lives a permanent fugue.

  “I’m nothing special.” I am barely aware that I have spoken aloud.

  “Maman?” Anouk’s voice, doughy with sleep.

  “Shh,” I tell her. “It isn’t morning yet. Sleep some more.”

  “Sing me a song, Maman,” she murmurs, reaching out her hand to me in the darkness. “Sing me the song about the wind again.”

  And so I sing, listening to my own voice against the small sounds of the weathervane:

  V’la l’bon vent, V’la l’joli vent

  V’la l’bon vent, ma vie m’appelle

  V’la l’bon vent, V’la l’joli vent

  V’la l’bon vent, ma mie m’attend.

  After a while I begin to hear Anouk’s breathing steady again, and I know she is sleeping. Her hand still rests in mine, soft with sleep. When Roux has finished the work on the house she will have a room of her own again and we will both sleep more easily. Tonight feels too close to those hotel rooms which we shared, my mother and 1, bathed in the moisture of our own breathing, with condensation running down the windows and the sounds of the traffic, interminable, outside.

  V’la l’bon vent, V’la l’joli vent…

  Not this time, I promise myself silently. This time we stay. Whatever happens. But even as I slide back into sleep I find myself considering the thought, not only with longing, but with disbelief.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Wednesday, March 19

  THERE SEEMS TO BE LESS ACTIVITY AT THE ROCHER woman’s shop these days. Armande Voizin has stopped visiting, though I have seen her a few times since her recovery, walking with a determined stride and with only a little help from her stick. Guillaume Duplessis is often with her, trailing that skinny puppy of his, and Luc Clairmont goes down to Les Marauds every day. On learning that her son has been seeing Armande in secret, Caroline Clairmont gives a smirk of chagrin.

  “I can’t do a thing with him these days, pere,” she complains. “Such a good boy, such an obedient boy one moment, and the next?” She raised her manicured hands to her bosom in a theatrical gesture.

  “I only told him — in the mildest possible way — that perhaps he should have told me he was going to visit his grandmother.” She sighed. “As if he thought I would disapprove, silly boy. Of course I don’t, I told him. It’s wonderful that you get on with her as well as you do — after all, you’re going to inherit everything one day — and suddenly he’s shouting at me and saying he doesn’t care about the money, that the reason he didn’t want me to know was that he knew I’d spoil everything, that I was an interfering bible groupie — her words, pere, I’d stake my life on that.” She brushed her eyes with the back of her hand, taking care not to smudge her impeccable make-up.

  “What have I done, pere?” she pleaded. “I’ve done everything for that boy, given him everything. And to see him turn away from me, to throw it all in my face because of that woman…” Her voice was hard beneath the tears: “Sharper than a serpent’s tooth,” she moaned. “You can’t imagine what it’s like for a mother, pere.”

  “Oh, you’re not the only person to have suffered from Madame Rocher’s well-intentioned meddling,” I told her. “Look around you at the changes she’s made in just a few weeks.”

  Caroline sniffed. “Well-intentioned! You’re t
oo kind, pere,” she sneered. “She’s malicious, that’s what she is. She nearly killed my mother, turned my son against me…”

  I nodded encouragingly.

  “Not to mention what she’s done to the Muscats’ marriage,” continued Caroline. “It amazes me that you’ve had so much patience, pere. It really does.” Her eyes glittered with spite. “I’m surprised you haven’t used your influence, pere,” she said.

  I shrugged. “Oh, I’m just a country priest,” I said. “I don’t have any influence as such. I can disapprove, but?.”

  “You can do a sight more than disapprove,” snapped Caroline tautly. “We should have listened to you in the first place, pere. We should never have tolerated her here.”

  I shrugged. “Anyone can say that with hindsight,” I reminded her. “Even you patronized her shop, if I remember.”

  She flushed. “Well, we could help you now,” she said. “Paul Muscat, Georges, the Arnaulds, the Drous, the Prudhommes…We could pull together. Spread the word. We could turn the tide against her, even now.”

  “For what reason? The woman hasn’t broken the law. They’d call it malicious gossip, and you’d be no better off than before.”

  Caroline gave a narrow smile. “We could wreck her precious festival, that’s for sure,” she said.

  “Oh?”

  “Of course.” Intensity of feeling makes her ugly. “Georges sees a lot of people. He’s a wealthy man. Muscat, too, has influence. He sees people. He’s persuasive; the Residents’ Committee…”

  Of course he is. I remember his father, the summer of the river-gypsies.

  “If she makes a loss on the festival — and I hear she’s put quite a sum into preparing it already — then she might be pressured ?”