by Nina George
‘I’ve often wondered why people don’t write more books about living. Anyone can die. But living?’
‘You’re right, Madame. There is so much to say about living. Living with books, living with children, living for beginners.’
‘Write one then.’
As if I could give anyone any advice.
‘I’d rather write an encyclopedia about common emotions,’ he admitted. ‘From A for “Anxiety about picking up hitchhikers” to E for “Early risers’ smugness” through to Z for “Zealous toe concealment, or the fear that the sight of your feet might destroy someone’s love for you”.’
Perdu wondered why he was telling a stranger all this.
If only he hadn’t opened the room.
The grandmother patted his knee. He gave a quick shudder: physical contact was dangerous.
‘An encyclopedia of emotions,’ she repeated with a smile. ‘I know that feeling about toes. An almanac of common feelings … Do you know the German writer Erich Kästner?’
Perdu nodded. In 1936, shortly before Europe sank into the black-and-brown gloom, Kästner had published a Lyrical Medicine Chest from the poetic medicine cabinet of his works. ‘This volume is dedicated to the therapy of private life,’ wrote the poet in the foreword. ‘It addresses – mainly in homeopathic doses – the minor and major ailments of existence and helps with the “treatment of the average inner life”.’
‘Kästner was one reason I called my book barge the Literary Apothecary,’ said Perdu. ‘I wanted to treat feelings that are not recognised as afflictions and are never diagnosed by doctors. All those little feelings and emotions no therapist is interested in, because they are apparently too minor and intangible. The feeling that washes over you when another summer nears its end. Or when you recognise that you haven’t got your whole life left to find out where you belong. Or the slight sense of grief when a friendship doesn’t develop as you thought, and you have to continue your search for a lifelong companion. Or those birthday morning blues. Nostalgia for the air of your childhood. Things like that.’ He recalled his mother once confiding to him that she suffered from a pain for which there was no antidote. ‘There are women who only look at another woman’s shoes and never at her face. And others who always look women in the face and only occasionally at their shoes.’ She preferred the second type; Lirabelle felt humiliated and misjudged by the former.
It was precisely to relieve such inexplicable yet real suffering that he had bought the boat, which was a working barge then and originally called Lulu; he had converted it with his own hands and filled it with books, the only remedy for countless, undefined afflictions of the soul.
‘You should write it. An encyclopedia of emotions for literary pharmacists.’ The old woman sat up straighter and grew more lively and animated. ‘Add “Confidence in strangers” under C. The odd feeling you get in trains when you open up far more to someone you’ve never met than you ever have to your own family. And “Grandchildren comfort” under G. That’s the sense that life goes on …’ She fell silent, far away.
‘A zealous toe concealer – I was one. But he liked … he liked my feet after all.’
As the grandmother, mother and girl said their good-byes and went on their way, Perdu reflected that it was a common misconception that booksellers looked after books.
They look after people.
When the stream of customers abated around midday – eating was more sacred to the French than state, religion and money combined – Perdu swept the gangway with the stiff broom, disturbing a nest of bridge spiders. Then he saw Kafka and Lindgren sloping towards him beneath the avenue of trees that lined the embankment. Those were the names he’d given to the two stray cats that paid him daily visits on the basis of certain preferences they had developed. The grey tomcat with the white priest’s collar enjoyed sharpening his claws on Franz Kafka’s Investigations of a Dog, a fable that analyses the human world from a dog’s perspective. On the other hand, orange-white, long-eared Lindgren liked to lie near the books about Pippi Longstocking; she was a fine-looking cat who peered out from the back of the bookshelves and scrutinised each visitor. Lindgren and Kafka would sometimes do Perdu a favour by dropping off one of the upper shelves without warning onto a third-category customer, one of the greasy-fingered type.
The two well-read strays waited until they could come aboard without fear of big, blundering feet. Once there, they rubbed themselves against the bookseller’s trouser legs, mewling gently.
Monsieur Perdu stood totally still. Briefly, very briefly, he let down his guard. He enjoyed the cats’ warmth and their softness. For a few seconds he abandoned himself, eyes closed, to the unbelievably soothing sensation against his calves.
These near-caresses were the only physical contact in Perdu’s daily life.
The only ones he allowed.
The precious interlude ended when, behind the bookcase in which Perdu had arranged books against the five categories of urban misery (the hectic pace, the indifference, the heat, the noise and the ubiquitous sadistic bus drivers), someone could be heard having an infernal coughing fit.
5
The cats slunk off into the half-light to search the galley for the tin of tuna Perdu had already set down for them.
‘Hello?’ called Monsieur Perdu. ‘Can I help you?’
‘I’m not looking for anything,’ croaked Max Jordan.
The bestselling author stepped tentatively forward with a honeydew melon in each hand. His obligatory earmuffs were riveted to his head.
‘Have the three of you been standing there long, Monsieur Jordan?’ asked Perdu with exaggerated sternness.
Jordan nodded, and a blush of embarrassment spread to the roots of his dark hair.
‘I arrived just as you were refusing to sell my book to that lady,’ he said unhappily.
Oh dear. That was rather bad timing.
‘Do you really think it’s that terrible?’
‘No,’ Perdu answered quickly. Jordan would have taken the slightest hesitation for a yes. There was no need to inflict that on him. What was more, Perdu honestly didn’t think the book was terrible.
‘Then why did you say I didn’t suit her.’
‘Monsieur … um …’
‘Please call me Max.’
That would mean that the boy can call me by my first name too.
The last one to do so, with that chocolate-warm voice, was—.
‘Let’s stick to Monsieur Jordan for the moment. Monsieur Jordan, if you don’t mind. You see, I sell books like medicine. There are books that are suitable for a million people, others only for a hundred. There are even medicines – sorry, books – that were written for one person only.’
‘Oh, God. One person? A single person? After all those years of work?’
‘Of course – if it saves that person’s life! That customer didn’t need Night right now. She couldn’t have coped with it. The side effects are too severe.’
Jordan considered this. He looked at the thousands of books on the freighter – on the bookshelves, on the chairs and piled on the floor.
‘But how can you know what a person’s problem is and what the side effects are?’
Now, how was he to explain to Jordan that he didn’t know exactly how he did it?
Perdu used his ears, his eyes and his instincts. From a single conversation, he was able to discern what each soul lacked. To a certain degree, he could read from a body’s posture, its movements and its gestures, what was burdening or oppressing it. And finally, he had what his father had called transperception. ‘You can see and hear through most people’s camouflage. And behind it you see all the things they worry and dream about, and the things they lack.’
Every person had a gift, and his happened to be transperception.
One of his regular customers, the therapist Eric Lanson, whose surgery was near the Élysée Palace and who treated government officials, had once confessed to Perdu that he was jealous of his ‘psychometric
ability to scan the soul more accurately than a therapist who suffers from tinnitus after thirty years of listening’.
Lanson spent every Friday afternoon at the Literary Apothecary. He relished Dungeons & Dragons fantasy, and would attempt to elicit a smile from Perdu by psychoanalysing the characters. Lanson also referred politicians and stressed members of their administrative staff to Monsieur Perdu – with ‘prescriptions’ on which the therapist noted their neuroses in literary code: ‘Kafkaesque with a touch of Pynchon’, ‘Sherlock, totally irrational’ or ‘a splendid example of Potter-under-the-stairs syndrome’.
Perdu saw it as a challenge to induct people (mainly men) who had daily dealings with greed, abuse of power and the Sisyphean nature of office work into the world of books. How gratifying it was when one of these tormented yes-men quit the job that had robbed him of every last drop of singularity! Often a book played a part in this liberation.
‘You see, Jordan,’ said Perdu, taking a different tack, ‘a book is both medic and medicine at once. It makes a diagnosis as well as offering therapy. Putting the right novels to the appropriate ailments: that’s how I sell books.’
‘I get it. And my novel was the dentist when the lady needed a gynecologist.’
‘Er … no.’
‘No?’
‘Books are more than doctors, of course. Some novels are loving, lifelong companions; some give you a clip around the ear; others are friends who wrap you in warm towels when you’ve got those autumn blues. And some … well, some are pink candy floss that tingles in your brain for three seconds and leaves a blissful void. Like a short, torrid love affair.’
‘So Night is one of literature’s one-night stands? A tart?’
Damn. An old rule of bookselling: never talk to authors about books by other writers.
‘No. Books are like people, and people are like books. I’ll tell you how I go about it. I ask myself: Is he or she the main character in his or her life? What is her motive? Or is she a secondary character in her own tale? Is she in the process of editing herself out of her story, because her husband, her career, her children or her job are consuming her entire text?’
Max Jordan’s eyes widened.
‘I’ve got about thirty thousand stories in my head, which isn’t very many, you know, given that there are over a million titles available in France alone. I’ve got the most useful eight thousand works here, as a first-aid kit, but I also compile courses of treatment. I prepare a medicine made of letters: a cookbook with recipes that read like a wonderful family Sunday. A novel whose hero resembles the reader; poetry to make tears flow that would otherwise be poisonous if swallowed. I listen with …’
Perdu pointed to his solar plexus.
‘And I listen to this too.’ He rubbed the back of his head. ‘And to this.’ Now he pointed to the soft spot above his upper lip. ‘If it tingles here …’
‘Come on, that can’t be …’
‘You bet it can.’ He could do it for about 99.99 per cent of people.
However, there were some people that Perdu could not transperceive.
Himself, for example.
But Monsieur Jordan doesn’t need to know that right now.
While Perdu had been reasoning with Jordan, a dangerous thought had casually drifted into his mind.
I’d have liked to have had a boy. With—. I’d have liked to have had everything with her.
Perdu gasped for air.
Something had been out of kilter since he had opened the forbidden room. There was a crack in his bulletproof glass – several hairline cracks – and everything would be smashed to pieces if he didn’t regain control of himself.
‘Right now, you look very … underoxygenated,’ Perdu heard Max Jordan’s voice say. ‘I didn’t mean to offend you. I merely wanted to know how people react when you tell them, “I’m not selling you this – you don’t go together.”’
‘Those ones? They walk out. What about you? How’s your next manuscript coming on, Monsieur Jordan?’
The young author sank down, with his melons, into one of the armchairs surrounded by piles of books.
‘Nothing. Not a line.’
‘Oh. When do you have to hand it in?’
‘Six months ago.’
‘Oh. And what does the publisher think of that?’
‘My publisher has no idea where I am. Nobody does. Nobody must find out. I can’t cope any more. I can’t write any more.’
‘Oh.’
Jordan slumped forward and laid his forehead against the melons.
‘What do you do when you can’t go on, Monsieur Perdu?’ he asked wearily.
‘Me? Nothing.’
Next to nothing.
I take night walks through Paris until I’m tired. I clean Lulu’s engine, the hull and the windows, and I keep the boat ready to go, right down to the last screw, even though it hasn’t gone anywhere in two decades.
I read books – twenty at a time. Everywhere: on the toilet, in the kitchen, in cafés, in the metro. I do jigsaw puzzles that take up the whole floor, destroy them when I’ve finished and then start all over again. I feed stray cats. I arrange my groceries in alphabetical order. I sometimes take sleeping tablets. I take a dose of Rilke to wake up. I don’t read any books in which women like — crop up. I gradually turn to stone. I carry on. The same every day. That’s the only way I can survive. But other than that, no, I do nothing.
Perdu made a conscious effort. The boy had asked for help; he didn’t want to know how Perdu was. So give it.
The bookseller fetched his treasure out of the small, old-fashioned safe behind the counter.
Sanary’s Southern Lights.
The only book Sanary had written – under that name, at any rate. ‘Sanary’ – after the erstwhile town of refuge for exiled writers, Sanary-sur-Mer on the south coast of Provence – was an impenetrable pseudonym.
His – or her – publisher, Duprés, was in an old people’s home out in Île-de-France enduring Alzheimer’s with good cheer. During Perdu’s visits, the elderly Duprés had served him up a couple of dozen versions of who Sanary was and how the manuscript had come into his possession.
So Monsieur Perdu kept on searching.
For two decades he had been analysing the rhythms of the language, the choice of words and the cadence of the sentences, comparing the style and the subject matter with other authors’. Perdu had narrowed it down to eleven possible names: seven women and four men.
He would have loved to thank one of them, for Sanary’s Southern Lights was the only thing that pierced him without hurting. Reading Southern Lights was a homeopathic dose of happiness. It was the only balm that could ease Perdu’s pain – a gentle, cold stream over the scorched earth of his soul.
It was not a novel in the conventional sense, but a short story about the various kinds of love, full of wonderful invented words and infused with enormous humanity. The melancholy with which it described an inability to live each day to the full, to take every day for what it really was, namely unique, unrepeatable and precious; how that dolefulness resonated with him.
He handed Jordan his last copy.
‘Read this. Three pages every morning before breakfast, lying down. It has to be the first thing you take in. In a few weeks you won’t feel quite so sore – it’ll be as though you no longer have to atone for your success with writer’s block.’
Max thrust his hands, still holding the two melons, apart and shot him a look of terror through the gap between them. He couldn’t help bursting out: ‘How did you know? I really cannot stand the money and the horrible heat of success! I wish none of it had ever happened. Anyone who’s good at something is hated – or not loved in any case.’
‘Max Jordan, if I were your father, I’d put you over my knee for saying such stupid things. It’s a good thing your book happened, and it deserved the success, every last hard-earned cent of it.’
All of a sudden, Jordan glowed with proud, bashful joy.
What? Wha
t did I say? ‘If I were your father’?
Max Jordan solemnly held out the honeydew melons to Perdu. They smelled good. A dangerous fragrance. Very similar to a summer with—.
‘Shall we have lunch?’ asked the author.
The man with the earmuffs did get on his nerves, but it had been a long time since he had shared a meal with anyone.
And—would have liked him.
As they were slicing the last of the melons, they heard the clatter of smart high heels on the gangway.
