The Little French Bistro

by Nina George

  As Marianne was paying, Marie-Claude said, “Your admirer is going to be impressed.”

  “My what?”

  “Or your husband.” The hairdresser peered at Marianne’s ring finger, but Marianne’s hands were tanned from her daily outings and the white band had faded.

  “Je ne comprends pas,” Marianne said hastily.

  “Don’t you have a husband? Well, the way you look now, you could have a husband and a few lovers on the side. Probably not the youngest men, but there are enough gentlemen of an interesting age around here. Has anyone particularly caught your eye?”

  “I don’t understand,” Marianne repeated, but she could feel the blood shooting into her cheeks. Marie-Claude noticed it too. Luckily she can’t read my mind, thought Marianne, who could still see Yann Gamé before her and still feel that touch in Pascale’s garden in her fingers.

  “Colette, which lover could we recommend today?” Marie-Claude asked the gallery owner, whose presence made Marianne immediately feel dowdy once again.

  Colette looked at Marianne with eyes like a cat’s. Her face was a maze of wrinkles, but Marianne was still very impressed by her slenderness and perfect ballet posture.

  “We should ask Madame what she has in mind,” replied Colette. “Some men are good for life, but unsuitable as lovers. Others are good for sex, but are deaf to any difficulties or feelings.”

  “Yes, and then there are those who can’t do either,” Marie-Claude summed up. “That’s the kind I’ve always had,” she added, sighing.

  —

  Marianne and Colette left the salon together and walked side by side down the steep lane. Marianne paused as they passed the fashion boutique.

  “Please,” she began, “would you help me? I need…” She pointed to her clothes. “I need style,” she said simply.

  “Fashion has nothing to do with style,” said Colette in her husky voice. “It all depends on whether you want to conceal or reveal who you are.”

  She offered Marianne her arm. “Come on. Let’s see what kind of a woman is hiding inside you. And when we’ve met her, we won’t reproach her for having stayed out of sight all this time, d’accord?”

  On the first floor of the boutique, Colette settled into an armchair with another Bellini and a cigarette, and shot instructions at Katell, the saleswoman. While Katell was away looking for the first items of clothing, from out of nowhere Colette suddenly related an anecdote about her former neighbor in Paris.

  “Madame Loos was a woman who kept herself strenuously to herself,” she began, sorting the heap of clothes that Katell had brought into two piles with a confident hand. “She had made it through life well enough—in her marriage, with her children, at work. Always in the right place at the right time. Always nice, polite and inconspicuously dressed. Then one night…” Colette leaned forward to stare at Marianne, who was peering uncertainly from all angles at a delightful dress the color of ripe Mirabelle plums, “one night something happened.”

  Marianne slipped into a soft, champagne-colored roll-neck sweater that showed her waist and her bust to advantage: she had never worn such a tight sweater before in her entire life. It further enhanced the glow of her new hair coloring. Then she pulled on a cool pair of dark jeans that Colette had laid out for her.

  “Madame Loos banged on my door as if she’d gone mad. She needed my car, she said: her younger sister was at death’s door in Dijon. I gave her the keys, of course. She sped away, but she crashed into another vehicle on the Place de la Concorde, and amid all the excitement she slapped a policeman, fled the scene with a guy from Rennes, told him the story of her life, had sex with him, borrowed his car and arrived too late: her sister was already dead. That looks good on you, by the way. Try on these pumps with it.”

  Colette got up and peered over Marianne’s shoulder at the mirror. “Madame Loos returned the car, spent a second night with the man and came back to Paris a completely different woman—by bus.”

  She handed Marianne a fine-knit cardigan that draped itself lightly and softly around her body. When Marianne twisted to catch a glimpse in the mirror, she saw a woman who was perhaps no longer the youngest, but very chic and feminine. The only thing that didn’t fit this new image was her timid, doe-eyed expression.

  “Madame Loos managed to emerge from her hiding place, get rid of her husband and his mistresses and set up her own tearoom.” Colette gently laid an amber necklace around Marianne’s neck.

  “What about the man from Rennes?”

  “Completely incidental.” She took off her sunglasses and placed them daintily on Marianne’s nose. “One might have to be a little ruthless to seize back control of one’s life, don’t you think?”

  Marianne gave an uneasy shrug. She regarded ruthlessness as the most socially acceptable form of gratuitous violence. But hadn’t she herself acted ruthlessly by coming here? Her sense of guilt toward Lothar was growing ever more insistent. Did he not at the very least deserve some answers so as to know where he stood?

  “How about something red? Red is your color,” suggested Colette and called for Katell again.

  The world had taken on a more intensive hue as Marianne stepped out of the boutique with Colette. Or was that the effect of the double cognac she had drunk after their shopping spree was over? She thought of the jeans—her first ever pair of jeans—that made her legs look longer than they really were; of the bottle-green leather jacket that contrasted beautifully with her new hair coloring, banishing the gray from her cheeks; of the red dress, the cream-colored sweater, the pumps in which she must first learn to walk, as the height of the heels almost took her breath away. She guessed that deep in the big shiny bags were other items of clothing bought as if in a frenzy with the aid of Colette’s credit card.

  Could clothes transform a woman? No, but they might help her to rediscover who she was. Marianne had found inside her something she thought she had never possessed: femininity. And now she was extraordinarily hungry, craving bread and cheese, and so the two women went into the bakery on Pont-Aven’s market square.

  “I bless you, oh bread, so that all witchcraft, shackles and slander by eye and mouth may be destroyed and dispelled,” chanted the baker in Latin as he scored the sign of the cross in the bottom of the rye loaf. Only then did he allow Marianne to pack it away in her shopping basket.

  Colette gave an inadvertent snort. “I’ve never got used to that trick with the bread,” she said to Marianne. “During the Palm Sunday procession in Saintes, the women carry a hollowed-out loaf on the end of a stick; it looks like a phallus. The priest blesses the bread to protect it from the witches’ gaze, and the women keep it for the whole year. They certainly don’t eat it, so God knows what they do with it!”

  Marianne giggled and dreamily caressed the silky fabric of the plum-colored wrap dress she was still wearing. It concealed her birthmark, but gave her cleavage she’d never known she had. Admittedly, Katell had sold her the requisite bra.

  “No need to bless my loaf,” said Colette loudly, interrupting Marianne’s thoughts.

  “If that’s what you want, there’s no problem, Madame,” muttered the baker. “The bread is protected either way. You must know Pascale Goichon, the white witch in the woods. She consecrates fires and drives the ghosts from ships and rooms! She blessed this oven too,” he said, pointing behind him.

  Marianne’s ears pricked up at the mention of Pascale’s name.

  “Lucky she isn’t a black witch! Did you hear what happened in Saint-Connec four years ago?” He wiped his floury hands on his apron.

  “Oh that old chestnut again.” Colette was growing impatient.

  “Madame Gallerne had been dozing in a near-death state for years. The livestock on the farm had been dying in mysterious ways, and nothing grew anymore. Fernand Gallerne was in despair, for an evil spell had been cast on his farm.” The baker paused for dramatic effect. “And it could only be broken by…” He lowered his voice even more, until it was no more than a hoarse wh
isper: “Michel La Mer!”

  “Le magnétiseur?” gasped the baker’s young wife. He nodded. “He can do anything,” she said rapturously, her cheeks turning a deep shade of pink. “They say he can drive out Satan and cure cancer, infertility, athlete’s foot and mad cow disease. All with his hands!”

  “Yes, yes,” the baker interrupted rudely. “In any case, La Mer paid a visit to the Gallernes’ farm and discovered that Fernand’s neighbor Valérie Morice had cursed the land and was to blame for Madame Gallerne’s illness. She’d always been so nice to them, but she was an unmarried woman with two children by an unknown man. She was the one who had cursed the poor wretches, purely—and literally—for the hell of it! La Mer lifted the curse for a hundred and fifty-two euros.”

  “A hundred and fifty-two euros!” Colette repeated in disbelief. “That’s a lot of money for denouncing a woman!”

  This earned her a glare from the baker. “Protection from the evil eye is priceless! La Mer charges a hundred and fifty-two euros for lifting evil spells from farms, a hundred and twenty-two euros for businesses and ninety-two euros for houses.”

  “And Madame Morice?” the baker’s wife asked breathlessly.

  “Ha! That woman! She immediately reported him to the police for defamation! She said that the whole village had embarked on a witch-hunt, and her children had been spat on at school! Then she cursed La Mer, and his powers have waned as a result. We ought to pray for his recovery.”

  “Well,” stated Colette, “I don’t believe in faith healers who run around the house with a wet cloth, as La Mer does, to banish the devil. I do believe that the baguettes need to come out of the oven, though. May I have one, Géraldine? Or don’t you sell bread to normal people anymore?”

  As Marianne and Colette emerged, giggling, from the bakery, Marianne bumped into a man who was gazing up into the sky, lost in thought. She apologized and pulled her sunglasses back down over her eyes.

  “Yann!” cried the gallery owner happily. After the obligatory three kisses on the cheeks, Colette turned to Marianne. “May I introduce you to the most underrated painter in France, Madame? This is Yann Gamé.”

  Marianne felt the butterflies in her stomach. The way he looked at her!

  Yann took her hand and pulled her toward him. The strength of his grip made her head spin.

  “Hello again,” he said earnestly.

  Marianne involuntarily closed her eyes as Yann’s lips brushed her cheek. He kissed her on the left, he kissed her on the right, and the third time his kiss was infinitely tender and very close to the corner of her mouth. Marianne hadn’t kissed him; she was incapable of moving a muscle. She was scared that she would stand rooted to the spot like an oak sapling.

  “Hi, Yann!” Her voice was like a splintering branch.

  Good grief! He had no way of knowing that he was the first man to kiss her since Lothar. Everyone was constantly kissing each other here, but for Marianne a kiss was as intimate as…Sweet Jesus, her thoughts were hopping about like a sparrow. She thought of Lothar, and she thought of what might happen after kissing.

  “Well, I hear the call of work. A few crazy English people are coming and they want to decorate their entire house with pictures. Who am I to stop them?” Colette glanced at her watch. “I have to go. Yann, how about showing this fair lady the Yellow Christ in the Chapelle de Trémalo, so she knows why they call this ‘Gauguin country’? All those biscuit tins with pictures of chubby women on them can really get you down. Yes? Merci, mon ami. Au revoir!” With that, she bade them farewell, leaving Marianne and Yann alone in silence.

  Marianne felt as if she were about to faint.

  “Madame, would you do me the honor of accompanying me on Thursday to an…enterrement?” Yann cursed his words the moment he uttered them. Why hadn’t anything better come to his mind? He was out of practice at courting women, but it was too late now.

  Marianne hadn’t really understood Yann’s suggestion, but she had registered that he wanted to see her again. The bubbles inside her chest burst from pure happiness. She felt a sudden surge of guilt, as if she were already being unfaithful and cheating on Lothar.

  They didn’t talk as Yann drove her back to Kerdruc in his decrepit Renault 4, merely glanced at each other again and again, reading the budding love in each other’s face with astonishment, as if they were only now learning its vocabulary.

  Marianne had been waiting on the quayside for twenty minutes by the time Yann picked her up. She simply hadn’t been able to bear sitting in her room any longer, wondering whether she was dressed smartly enough. She could have spent many more hours changing her outfit. Jeans or red dress? Tight blouse or soft sweater? High-heeled pumps or flat-soled linen slippers? Good heavens, she simply had too little experience of what a woman should wear on her first date to make herself attractive but not too inviting. She had opted for the dark-blue jeans, pumps and a white blouse, which she buttoned up to the top.

  She was incredibly excited, and had been for two days. She could barely eat, and above all she couldn’t wipe this ridiculous grin from her face. Excitement didn’t even come close to describing what she felt. Naked panic, more like. Foolish joy. One moment her complexion was pale white, the next bright red.

  Eventually she had gone down to the kitchen to see Jean-Rémy and had let him pour her a shot of rum without any objection. It had calmed her down a little, but only until Jean-Rémy undid the top two buttons of her blouse, turned up the collar slightly and signaled to her to tousle her tidily arranged hair a bit. “Très jolie, très rock’n’roll,” he had said, and Marianne had gone shakily out onto the quayside to continue her wait.

  Increasingly she felt like a boat at sea, drifting farther and farther from land until the coast was out of sight. The land of her past was fading in similar fashion. Sixty years appeared to have flashed past like a single day, and it was as if that day had occurred many centuries ago.

  When Yann got out of his car and walked toward her, she was scared that she might either burst out laughing or dissolve into a never-ending fit of weeping. She was so nervous, her hands were sopping wet.

  He gave her that look again. No man had ever looked at her so intently: Marianne could almost feel herself growing warm in the spotlight of Yann’s eyes.

  “Salut,” he murmured as he bent forward to kiss her. This time all three touches of his lips were close to the corners of her mouth. He kissed her slowly and deliberately, and she inhaled his fragrance. He smelled of the outdoors, with a whiff of paint and nice tangy aftershave.

  He guided her to his dilapidated car, opened the door and made sure that he also got to close it. She had no idea what to do with her hands and where to look.

  Yann prayed ardently that he wasn’t about to commit the most stupid mistake of his entire life. Over the past two days he had been continually tempted to come and withdraw his invitation. But a man didn’t do such a thing. Invite someone to a funeral? What on earth had he been thinking?

  Yann had often visited the fisherman Jozeb Pulenn in Penmarc’h to purchase ray and cod. The now late Jozeb had also been helpful in Yann’s search for themes for his work. How often Yann had painted the Notre Dame de la Joie chapel, a Gothic church by the shore, and the Phare d’Eckmühl, France’s tallest lighthouse, which dwarfed the adjacent village of Saint-Guénolé. He loved to remove his glasses and paint everything his senses could absorb, not only what his weak eyes were able to perceive.

  Yet was that a good enough reason for imposing a funeral ceremony on Marianne? Yann hardly dared to look at her, yet when he did, he could feel her smile and a strange emotion welling up inside himself. That emotion was red and pulsing.

  Marianne was shamefully conscious that she blushed every time she looked at Yann or tried to say something to him, so she restricted herself to gazing out of the window or observing the secure yet relaxed grip of Yann’s hands on the steering wheel. Whenever they did catch each other’s gaze, they simultaneously broke into a smile. It was the mo
st wonderful silence Marianne had ever heard.

  After half an hour’s drive along the coast they reached the port of Saint-Guénolé and found a host of Jozeb’s cousins, grandchildren, daughters and brothers-in-law waiting on the breakwater to greet them with proper ceremony. For the first time, Marianne felt slightly ill at ease, a feeling that was only exacerbated when everybody—the more elderly among them in traditional costume with white headdresses made of straw and lace, the younger ones wearing casual clothes and white scarves—gave them a welcome kiss. It took fifteen minutes to complete the greetings.

  She eventually made it to an old lady standing next to a table on which an urn had been placed. Her face was as wizened as a piece of weathered wood, and she seemed to be leaning more on the urn for support than on her walking stick. It was only then that Marianne understood the purpose of this gathering.

  Apple brandy was served, and two men carried the table onto the fishing trawler by the breakwater. The captain lowered the Breton flag to half-mast. As the engine started, Yann offered his hand to Marianne to help her across the short gangway.

  When the trawler had puttered out onto the rolling open sea, leaving behind the foaming waves crashing against the cliffs and rocks, each of the funeral guests scattered a handful of the dead man’s ashes onto the waters. The ashes had the texture of the finest sand, and Marianne hoped that she didn’t happen to be crushing the deceased’s heart, or even his eye, between her fingers. As she let the ashes drift out over the railing, she wished the unknown Jozeb happiness in the other world. If what Pascale had told her were true, then the sea was the widest gate into the realm of spirits and gods, where future, past and present were all irrelevant. The sea was like a church and an island, a final song steeped in darkness and tenderness.

  A few of the mourners stood together at the ship’s prow and struck up a gwerz, a Breton dirge. Marianne could understand only with her heart what these people were singing with such untrammeled emotion. It was a ballad of utter devotion, and she felt tears sting her eyes. Her heart was overflowing, and she groped for Yann’s hand. He pressed it, then laid an arm around her shoulders and pulled her close. When a tear ran down her cheek and caught on her lip, he gently brushed away this salty sign of grief and touched his own lips to her warm temple. They stood beside each other and let themselves sway to the rocking of the boat.