The Little French Bistro

by Nina George

  “The more willing you are to act like an idiot, the sooner you’ll fall in love. Do it! Otherwise you’ll grow old on your own and die earlier than you’d like.”

  Yes, Pascale, queen of passion. Yann knew full well that she had driven dozens of men crazy in her youth. As an air stewardess she had met men from all over the world. Yann was happier for those men than he was for his friend Emile. They’d surely got to know one of the most exciting women of their lives, but Pascale loved only Emile. The ways of love were sometimes strange.

  Love—a feeling that swells in the face of death. It finishes and you’re cold turkey, amputated of your head and your heart.

  Yann had spent until his thirtieth birthday getting over his first great love. Thinking of Renée hurt a little less each year, and it took him a long time until he could finally feel angry about her affairs, which for her were as natural and necessary as breathing. He then began to forgive himself for loving her.

  But did that other love really exist—the everlasting, golden, everyday love? Toujours l’amour was the term used for red wines of which you didn’t expect much. Damn, thought the painter, I miss love, being loved, a face looking at me and smiling simply because I’m there, a hand searching for mine in sleep. Someone with whom I am fully me. Someone whose face I’d like to be the last thing I see before I go to sleep forever. Someone who’s my home.

  “All right then,” he said after a while. He put his glasses back on. Yann Gamé felt like painting something he hadn’t yet seen—the face of a woman who loved him. He couldn’t imagine what this woman might look like who was silly enough to fall in love with a shortsighted painter.

  When he glanced up, Pascale was studying him anxiously, obviously confused. “Who the hell are you?” she asked.

  “I’m painting you,” he answered, trying to find some cheerful words to conceal the pain her confusion caused him.

  “That’s right, mon coeur, Monsieur Gamé is painting your portrait,” said Emile. He had just got back from shopping, a task that exhausted him now that Monsieur Parkinson had moved in and the three of them lived with Madame Dementia under one roof.

  Pascale began to weep. “Madame Bouvet the housekeeper keeps shouting at me because I get everything mixed up.”

  Emile brushed some strands of hair into place behind his wife’s ear. She was over seventy, but she looked younger every day. Her face was that of a young girl and her eyes were clear, the color of water. One couldn’t tell that those eyes sometimes saw the world differently from how it was in reality. Right now they were looking back to their sixth housekeeper, who had been utterly overwhelmed by Pascale’s symptoms and mood swings. Tomorrow Madame Roche would arrive: number seven. Emile hoped she was made of sterner stuff.

  “Do you like me?” Pascale asked her husband.

  Emile sat down beside her, took her hand and nodded. “I love you.”

  Pascale looked at him with momentary surprise. “Oh! Does Papa know?”

  Emile nodded again.

  “I don’t think much of women who shout,” Pascale declared, and braced her hand on Emile’s knee to lever herself into a standing position. When she entered the kitchen and caught sight of the baskets of shopping, her hand flew to her forehead like a startled bird.

  “I must tidy up!” she said to the two men. She reached for the straw hat hanging next to the fridge, then walked over to the tap, held the hat under the running water and began to use it to wipe the stains from the windowpanes. Emile hobbled toward her and laid his hand on her bare arm.

  “Mon coeur,” he whispered, lacking the strength to say anything else.

  Pascale turned to face him. “Oh yes,” she said, beaming, “how silly of me,” and put the hat on her head. Water streamed down her temples and cheeks as she picked up the sponge and rubbed the window with it while humming the “Ode to Joy.”

  Yann glanced at Emile, who shrugged and joined in with Pascale’s humming. The couple began to dance slowly around the kitchen.

  Yes, it did exist, this everyday love, toujours l’amour, and it took the sting out of pain.

  Her doomsday didn’t come the next day or the day after that. For the past eleven days Marianne had woken shortly before sunrise and set off through the misty woods to die in the sea. But each day she grew stronger, shedding her world-weariness. The sun began to tan her skin, and the sea made her eyes brighter. Her knee seldom hurt her now.

  Every morning she walked barefoot into the foaming waves, but the urge to surrender to them was always washed away by a defiance she couldn’t fathom. Once it was the pumpernickel she was desperate to bake for Jean-Rémy during one of their evening French lessons. Another time she had promised to go with him to the organic market in Trégunc. Then there was one of the weekly Wednesday concerts that Laurine wanted to take her to on their evening off. And if she was already there, she might as well take a look at the island off Raguenez, at the northern end of Tahiti Beach, which one could reach on foot at low tide. This was where the two lovers in Benoîte Groult’s novel Salt on our Skin had first slept with each other.

  “I need a word with you,” Marianne said to Jean-Rémy on the twelfth day. He was tying up dough in linen bags, which he tossed into the simmering kig ha farz casserole, a traditional dish whose ingredients were pancakes, oxtail, flank of beef, cured pork, savoy cabbage and celeriac.

  Marianne pushed the cauliflower florets to one side; the kaolenn-fleur came from a field directly by the coast. She started reading from the small order pad she used as an exercise book.

  “This silliness. With you and Laurine. Stop it. Send her flowers every day. Be a man, not a…triñschin…an, umm, cabbage-head!”

  “Not sorrel?!” Jean-Rémy said with irritation before spelling out Marianne’s tasks to her. “First, mix the pig’s blood with flour, sugar, raisins, salt, pepper and a little chocolate. Paul’s twins are celebrating their birthday tomorrow and they’ve ordered silzig—blood sausage.”

  Marianne collected herself. “Jean-Rémy. I was talking about Laurine!”

  “Second, clean the morgazen—the squid. Remove the skin, the spikes, the beak and the suckers.”

  At a sign from Jean-Rémy Marianne passed him a bowl filled with bottle corks, which he poured into the pot with the washed calamari tubes. The corks were intended to neutralize the proteins that made the calamari so chewy, and render the white flesh exquisitely tender.

  “How about flowers?” Marianne continued to beseech him.

  “The potatoes need peeling too!”

  “Write her a love letter, will you?”

  Jean-Rémy fled into the cooler. “Madame, tomorrow is the first day of the summer holidays, and the next day half of Paris will have moved to Brittany. The sleepy villages suddenly become frantic beehives, with tourists swarming in and out of this place, hungry for mussels and lobster. We won’t have a day off until the end of August. When do you want me to write letters?”

  “At night?” Marianne said, then more gently, “You little triñschin.”

  —

  Catching Marianne’s words, Madame Geneviève smiled to herself behind the bar. She was making an inventory of bottles, polished cutlery, glasses and cruet sets. She thanked every god in Brittany for this woman. Marianne had cleaned the guesthouse and washed and ironed mountains of bedsheets, pillowcases, tablecloths and curtains. The German woman was bringing the guesthouse to life.

  Geneviève checked the buttons of her black dress and pulled her hair back until her temples hurt. Fate had done her proud: this Marianne had a heart so big that a supertanker could do a U-turn inside it. The guesthouse owner wished she had that much room in her own heart.

  Yes, there had been moments. There had been that one man, that love, laying existence bare in a way that made everything else pale into insignificance, swelling her heart to bursting point and making it big enough to hold the entire world. But then fate had unleashed its fury upon her.

  Geneviève sighed and walked out of the restaurant
and along the quayside. Gardeners were transplanting seedlings into pots on the terrace and removing the tangled weeds from around the front door of the guesthouse.

  Laurine was sweeping Ar Mor’s terrace with a broom. “Mon amour, oh, mon amour,” she whispered to the broomstick, “je t’aime, sleep with me, right here and now.” She closed her eyes and began to waltz.

  “Laurine!” The startled young woman dropped the broom, which clattered onto the polished planks. Her face went dark red under her bangs. “What’s wrong with you? Are you daydreaming?”

  “Yes, Madame. I was dreaming that this was my lover and we were naked and he—”

  “Silence!” thundered Geneviève.

  Laurine picked up the broom and pressed it to her bosom.

  “Go home and dream!”

  “But there’s no one there.”

  “There’s no one here either.”

  The girl dumbfounded Geneviève. Nature had created her to make legions of men unhappy, and what did she do? She made herself unhappy.

  Just as Madame Geneviève grabbed the broom from Laurine’s hand, an old Renault came coasting down the slope toward the harbor. Geneviève turned pale and clung to the broomstick.

  A man got out of the Renault. Tall and wiry, wearing jeans, the sleeves of his white shirt rolled up. He must have been handsome as a young man, and that handsomeness had matured into an expressive, virile, vigorous demeanor.

  “Isn’t that…?” Laurine blurted out, eyes widening.

  “It is. Go into the kitchen. Immediately,” Madame Geneviève ordered, and Laurine obeyed her.

  “What do you want?” Geneviève Ecollier asked the man, who approached her as tentatively as a wild animal.

  “To see where my guests will soon be heading,” he said in a voice that thrummed like a D major chord. “It looks as if you’re reopening the guesthouse soon.”

  “Well, now you’ve seen it. Kenavo.”

  “Genoveva…please.” His imploring gaze brought about no change in her impassive face.

  Madame Geneviève pressed the broom to her chest and walked back into Ar Mor, her back ramrod-straight and her head held high.

  “Genoveva,” the man called after her, tenderly, beseechingly.

  —

  Marianne retreated from the corner by the back door. She hadn’t intended to eavesdrop, and she hurried to bring the bunch of thyme from the vegetable patch to Jean-Rémy.

  “Have you said something nice to Laurine today?” she asked casually. Jean-Rémy handed her a bucket of mussels and signaled to her to remove their beards.

  “I told her she’s beautiful.”

  “No you didn’t, triñschin.”

  Jean-Rémy mumbled something unintelligible as he stirred another pan of washed mussels that were bubbling away in a mixture of white wine, butter and shallots.

  “There was a man outside. Do you know him?”

  “Hmm,” Jean-Rémy growled. “Alain Poitier. From the other side. Rozbras. He’s our competitor.” He tipped the mussels into a large dish, picked out the unopened ones, poured the liquid through a sieve into a smaller pot and dusted the sauce with flour. Marianne passed him the saffron, the cream and the sour cream, and he added them to the mussel stock before boiling it down.

  She reflected on what she had just seen. Nothing is colder than a heart that once blazed.

  Alain Poitier wasn’t merely a competitor, she thought. He was also the man who had shaped Geneviève’s experience in such a way that her face only betrayed emotion at night and never in front of anyone.

  Marianne wondered what kind of expression she herself might have had, how her body language might have changed, had she succeeded in making her husband love her, respect her or give her a flower, just one flower, once.

  A few weeks later, on her morning walk along the seafront, Marianne recited every word for “gray” that she had so far learned. Sad, holes-in-the-laughter, plain, rooty: the Bretons had hundreds of names for the gray shades of sky and water. Their country made you want to keep on walking until you’d forgotten what time it was and where your car was parked, and you eventually forgot your old life and never went back to it.

  Marianne couldn’t get enough of exploring Finistère’s footpaths, hiking through its dense woods, along its beaches and through wildflower meadows on the edge of pink cliffs. The roads were narrow and winding and the granite houses old and storm-beaten, their windows generally pointing inland. As she passed the hamlet of Kerambail shortly before Kerdruc, she saw a menhir rearing up from a field of ripe golden wheat, the stalks undulating around it like waves in the blustery westerly wind. She remembered what Paul had told her about these enchanted man-sized standing stones: at the first stroke of the clock at midnight on Christmas Eve, the menhirs would glide toward the coast to drink from the sea. In the dips they had deserted lay hidden treasures, and one had to remove them quickly to avoid being buried under the stone when the clock struck twelve.

  Marianne heard a shot as she was approaching Kerdruc through the woods. It rang briefly in her ears before giving way to a deathly silence.

  —

  When Emile Goichon, Pascale’s husband, heard the sharp crack in the kitchen, he knew that he had lost yet another housekeeper. He took the last match from the box, scraped it across the rough surface and raised it with a trembling hand to the Breton brandy. The library door slammed against the shelf containing Montesquieu’s complete works. The match fizzled out.

  “Outrageous! That woman tried to shoot me!” shouted the new housekeeper.

  “That was my last match.”

  “And all I did, monsieur, was make plum pudding and say to her, ‘Could you please pass me the cinnamon, Madame Pascale?’ And what does she do? She tries to gun me down like a stray dog!”

  “How am I supposed to drink this brandy?”

  “How can you put up with all these tangle-haired, flea-ridden animals, monsieur, these three-legged mongrels and one-eyed cats. They eat off your best china plates. It’s disgusting!”

  “Do you have a match, Madame Roche?” he asked, staring at the source of these loud vociferations. A young woman’s beauty makes up for her lack of intelligence; an old woman’s intelligence makes up for her lack of beauty. But in Madame Roche, nothing made up for anything.

  “This house is a den of iniquity! A den of iniquity, I say!”

  “Piety is a sign that a person will do anything to be important in the world,” Emile remarked, at which Madame Roche’s mouth snapped shut like a mousetrap. Not a drop of warmth clouded her sharp brown eyes.

  “I quit!” she blurted out.

  “Bon courage, Madame! May God go with you. Greet him from us and tell him that he may stop by whenever he likes.”

  Emile waited until he heard the heavy oak front door click shut and the sound of the sharp, quick footsteps on the gravel die away. Then he pushed himself up from the old leather armchair and hobbled down the long corridor and past the fireplace in the living room. He spotted the shattered dish of cream on the sideboard, and next to it the sugar tin with a pistol handle poking out of it. He found the telephone in the bread bin, the bread in the laundry cupboard and a tidy pile of towels in the fridge, but he couldn’t find any matches.

  Pascale was sitting in the larder, rocking back and forth with her legs drawn up to her chest. Emile sat down awkwardly beside her on the cold stone floor. He had known Pascale for his whole life. He had seen her in her prime, during her golden age of strength and beauty, and had enjoyed every stage. He knew every woman she’d ever been.

  He thought of the sharp knife in the kitchen. He wasn’t going to cut the gas supply to the stove and he didn’t lock the front door either. He wouldn’t humiliate Pascale by protecting her from life and death.

  Death was a strange thing. Emile had always hoped that he would one day be so fed up with life that the thought of Ankou—the end to which all paths led—would weigh less heavily upon him. But no, he wanted more than ever to live! He was irritate
d by signs of his decline: the biting drafts of the house in the woods, his diminishing strength, the Parkinson’s. Such wicked twists of fate! No sooner has the mind reached maturity than the flesh begins to wither.

  He kissed his wife behind the ear, the way she liked it. She giggled. He struggled to his feet and went off to look for a Maria Callas record. Her voice was one of the few things capable of getting through to Pascale when she withdrew so deep inside herself.

  —

  Shock had stopped Marianne dead in her tracks. A furious woman came striding along the path toward her, muttering sullenly and angrily to herself. She didn’t deign to look at Marianne.

  Now she heard strains of opera coming from the woods and walked hesitantly in its direction. After crossing a clearing, she reached a beautiful property surrounded by towering deciduous trees with a vine-covered flagstoned terrace and rounded windows. However, wherever she looked in the overgrown vegetable patch, the lettuces had run to seed and the rosebushes were choked with weeds.

  Then she noticed hordes of cats climbing trees or lounging in the cool shade, and dogs sprawling in a corner of the gravel drive. She walked around the outside of the house as Maria Callas’s voice spiraled into the heights.

  “Hello? Anyone there?” she called over the aria.

  A woman came toward her. She was carrying a tray with small plates on it.

  “Guten Tag, I am your steward on this Lufthansa flight from Rome to Frankfurt,” the stranger said to Marianne with a smile. “Please fasten your seat belt and keep it fastened throughout today’s flight.” She set down the plates of lobster tartar before the lounging cats, as if she were handing out drinks thirty thousand feet up in the sky.

  The woman had spoken German! How long had it been since Marianne had last heard someone speak her language?

  “How…how long is our flight?” she asked, also in German.

  Pascale Goichon gave her a smile that immediately faded.

  “I’ve no idea,” she said unhappily. “I have to tell you that I’ve grown a little forgetful.” Joy and grief tussled briefly on her face, with neither scoring a decisive victory. She turned away and began to reel off the names of the cats as she set down little plates in front of their noses. Petit Choux. Framboise. She leaned toward Marianne, as if about to confide in her. “They’re the souls of the dead and of witches. Or of living people who felt lonely and sent out their cat soul to search for a home.”