by Nina George
The woman from earlier that morning appeared at the galley door. Her eyes were red from crying, but they were bright.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘Give me the books that are kind to me, and to hell with the men who don’t give a damn about me.’
Max’s jaw hit the floor.
6
Perdu rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt, checked that his black tie was straight, took out the reading glasses he had recently started wearing and with a deferential gesture, escorted the customer into the heart of his literary world: the leather armchair with a footstool in front of a large plate-glass window that framed a view of the Eiffel Tower. There was, of course, a side table for handbags too – donated by Lirabelle. And next to it, an old piano that Perdu had tuned twice a year, even though he couldn’t play it himself.
Perdu asked the customer, whose name was Anna, a few questions. Job, morning routine, her favourite animal as a child, nightmares she’d had in the past few years, the most recent books she’d read … and whether her mother had told her how to dress.
Personal questions, but not too personal. He had to ask these questions and then remain absolutely silent. Listening in silence was essential to making a comprehensive scan of a person’s soul.
Anna worked in television advertising, she told him.
‘In an agency with guys past their sell-by date, who mistake women for a cross between an espresso machine and a sofa.’ She set three alarm clocks every morning to drag her out of a brutally deep sleep – and took a hot shower to get warm for the coldness of the day to come.
As a child, she’d taken a liking to the slow loris, a provocatively lazy species of small monkey with a permanently moist nose.
During childhood, Anna most liked wearing short red lederhosen, to her mother’s horror. She often dreamed of sinking into quicksand in front of important men, dressed only in her vest. And all of them, every last one, were tearing at her vest, but none would help her out of the pit.
‘No one ever helped me,’ she repeated to herself in a quiet, bitter voice. She looked at Perdu with shiny eyes.
‘So?’ she said. ‘How stupid am I?’
‘Not very,’ he replied.
The last time Anna had really read anything was when she was a student. José Saramago’s Blindness. It had left her perplexed.
‘No wonder,’ said Perdu. ‘It’s not a book for someone starting out in life. It’s for people in the middle of it. Who wonder where the devil the first half went. Who raise their eyes from the feet they’d been eagerly placing one in front of the other without looking where they’ve been running so sensibly and diligently all this time. Only those who are blind to life need Saramago’s fable. You, Anna, can see.’
After that, Anna had stopped reading; she’d worked instead. Too much, too long, accumulating more and more exhaustion inside her. So far, she had not once succeeded in including a man in one of her advertisements for household cleaners or nappies.
‘Advertising is the final bastion of the patriarchy,’ she informed Perdu and the rapt Jordan. ‘Even more than the military. Only in publicity is the world as it always was.’
Having offered up all these confessions, she leaned back in her chair. ‘So?’ her expression said. ‘Can I be cured? Give me the plain truth.’
Her answers didn’t affect Perdu’s book selection one bit. They were merely meant to familiarise him with Anna’s voice, its pitch and her way of speaking.
Perdu collected the words that stood out from the stream of everyday expressions. The shining words were the ones that revealed how this woman saw and smelled and felt. What was really important to her, what bothered her and how she was feeling right now. What she wished to conceal behind a fog of words. Pains and longings.
Monsieur Perdu fished out these words. Anna often said: ‘That wasn’t the plan’ and ‘I didn’t count on that.’ She talked about ‘countless’ attempts and ‘a sequence of nightmares.’ She lived in a world of mathematics, an elaborate device for ordering the irrational and personal. She wouldn’t allow herself to follow her intuition or consider the impossible possible.
Yet that was only one part of what Perdu listened out for and recorded: what was making the soul unhappy. Then there was the second part: what made the soul happy. Monsieur Perdu knew that the texture of the things a person loves rubs off on his or her language too.
Madame Bernard, the owner of number 27, transposed her love of fabric onto houses and people; ‘Manners like a creased polyester shirt’ was one of her favourite sayings. The pianist, Clara Violette, expressed herself in musical parlance: ‘The Goldenbergs’ little girl plays only third fiddle in her mother’s life.’ Goldenberg the grocer saw the world in terms of flavours, described someone’s character as ‘rotten’ and a job promotion as ‘overripe’. His youngest girl, Brigitte, the ‘third fiddle’, loved the sea – a magnet for sensitive dispositions. The fourteen-year-old, a precocious beauty, had compared Max Jordan to ‘the sea view from Cassis, deep and distant’. The third fiddle was in love with the writer, of course. Until very recently Brigitte had wanted to be a boy. Now, though, she desperately wanted to be a woman.
Perdu swore to himself that he would soon take Brigitte a book that could be her island haven in the ocean of first love.
‘Do you often say sorry?’ Perdu now asked Anna. Women always felt guiltier than they ought.
‘Do you mean: “Sorry, I haven’t finished what I wanted to say” or more like “Sorry for being in love with you and only giving you headaches”?’
‘Both. Any request for forgiveness. Maybe you’ve got used to feeling guilty for everything you are. Often it’s not we who shape words, but the words we use that shape us.’
‘You’re a funny bookseller, you know that?’
‘Yes, I do, Mademoiselle Anna.’
Monsieur Perdu asked Jordan to haul over dozens of books from the Library of Emotions.
‘Here you go, my dear. Novels for willpower, non-fiction for rethinking one’s life, poems for dignity.’ Books about dreaming, about dying, about love and about life as a woman artist. He laid out mystical ballads, hard-edged old stories about chasms, falls, peril and betrayal at her feet. Soon Anna was surrounded by piles of books as a woman in a shoe shop might be surrounded by boxes.
Perdu wanted Anna to feel that she was in a nest. He wanted her to sense the boundless possibilities offered by books. There would always be enough. They would never stop loving their readers. They were a fixed point in an otherwise unpredictable world. In life. In love. After death.
When Lindgren then jumped onto Anna’s lap in one audacious leap, and made herself comfortable, paw by paw, purring loudly, the overworked, love-crossed and conscience-stricken advertising executive reclined in her chair. Her tense shoulders slackened, her thumbs unfurled from her clenched fists. Her face relaxed.
She read.
Monsieur Perdu observed how the words she was reading gave shape to her from within. He saw that Anna was discovering inside herself a sounding board that reacted to words. She was a violin learning to play itself.
Monsieur Perdu recognised Anna’s flickering of joy and felt a pang in his chest.
Is there really no book that could teach me to play the song of life?
7
As Monsieur Perdu directed his steps onto Rue Montagnard, he wondered how Catherine must find this supremely quiet street in the middle of the bustling Marais. ‘Catherine,’ murmured Perdu. ‘Ca-the-rine.’ Her name tripped lightly off his tongue.
Absolutely incredible.
Was number 27 Rue Montagnard an unpleasant exile? Did she see the world in terms of the stain of her husband’s abandonment since he’d said, ‘I don’t want you any more’?
It was rare for someone who didn’t live here to wander into this neighbourhood. The buildings were no more than five storeys high, and each façade was painted a different pastel shade.
A baker, a wine merchant and the Algerian tobacconist lined the s
treet further down Rue Montagnard. The other buildings contained flats, medical practices and offices, all the way to the roundabout. And there was the realm of Ti Breizh, a Breton bistro with a red awning whose savoury pancakes were soft and tasty.
Monsieur Perdu set down for the waiter Thierry an ebook reader that a hectic publishing salesman had left behind. For avid readers like Thierry, who would have his nose in a novel even between orders, and had a crooked back from hauling books around (‘I can only breathe if I read, Perdu’), these devices were the invention of the century; for booksellers, one more nail in their coffin.
Thierry offered Perdu a glass of lambig, Breton apple brandy.
‘Not today,’ Perdu declined. That’s what he said every time. Perdu didn’t drink alcohol. Not any more.
That was because whenever he drank, each sip opened a little further the breach in the dam, against which a foaming lake of thoughts and emotions was pressing. He knew; back then he had tried drinking. Those were the days of smashed furniture.
Today, however, he had a special reason for refusing Thierry’s offer: he wanted to deliver the ‘books for crying’ to Madame Catherine, the former Mme Le P., as quickly as possible.
The green-and-white awning of Joshua Goldenberg’s corner shop protruded next to Ti Breizh. Goldenberg stepped out in front of Perdu when he saw him coming.
‘Say, Monsieur Perdu,’ Goldenberg began, somewhat embarrassed.
Oh no, he’s not going to ask for some soft porn now, is he?
‘It’s to do with Brigitte. I think my little girl is, um, turning into a woman. That causes, er, certain problems, you know what I mean? Do you have a book for that?’
Luckily, this wasn’t going to be a man-to-man talk about one-handed reading material. One more father in despair over his daughter’s puberty and wondering how he could tackle the sex-education stuff before she met the wrong man.
‘Come along to the parents’ clinic.’
‘I’m not sure. Maybe my wife should …’
‘Okay then, both of you come. First Wednesday of the month, eight o’clock. The two of you could go out to dinner afterwards.’
‘Me? With my wife? Why?’
‘It’d probably make her happy.’
Monsieur Perdu walked off before Goldenberg could back out.
He will anyway.
Of course, there would only be mothers at the clinic when it came down to it – and they wouldn’t be discussing their sexually maturing offspring. Most of them were actually looking for sex-education manuals that could teach their husbands some basic female anatomy.
Perdu tapped in the code and opened the front door. He was less than a metre inside when Madame Rosalette came barrelling out of the concierge’s flat with her pug under her arm. Edith the pug clung on sullenly beneath Rosalette’s ample bosom.
‘Monsieur Perdu, you’re back at last!’
‘New hair colour, Madame?’ he asked as he pressed the button to call the lift.
Her hand, red from doing household chores, flew to her bouffant hairstyle. ‘Spanish Rosé. A tiny shade darker than Sherry Brut, but more elegant, I think. How observant you are! But I do have something to confess, Monsieur.’
She fluttered her eyelashes. The pug panted in time.
‘If it’s a secret, I promise I’ll forget it immediately, Madame.’
Rosalette had a chronological streak. She enjoyed registering her fellow citizens’ neuroses, intimacies and habits, plotting them on a scale of decency, and knowledgeably passing on her opinions to others. She was generous in that regard.
‘You’re so naughty! And it’s really none of my business if Madame Gulliver is happy with these young men. No, no. It is … there was … well … a book.’
Perdu pressed the lift button again.
‘And you bought this book from another bookseller? Forgiven, Madame Rosalette, you’re forgiven.’
‘No. Worse. Dug it out of a crate of books in Montmartre for all of fifty cents. But you said yourself that if a book’s over twenty years old, I should pay no more than a few cents for it and rescue it from destruction.’
‘Right, I did say that.’
What’s wrong with this treacherous lift?
Now Rosalette leaned forward, and her coffee-and-cognac breath mingled with that of her dog.
‘Well, I’d rather I hadn’t. That awful cockroach story! The mother chasing her own son away with a broom. Horrible. I was cleaning obsessively for days. Is that typical of this Monsieur Kafka?’
‘You’ve summed it up well, Madame. Some people have to study it for decades to get the meaning.’
Madame Rosalette flashed him a blank but contented smile.
‘Oh yes, the lift is out of order. It’s stuck between the Goldenbergs’ and Madame Gulliver’s again.’
It was the sign that summer would come overnight. It always arrived when the lift was stuck.
Two at a time, Perdu bounded up the stairs, which were covered with Breton, Mexican and Portuguese tiles. Madame Bernard, who owned the building, loved patterns; they were the ‘house’s shoes and, as with women, shoes are a sign of character’. Seen from this perspective, any burglar daring to enter would have assumed from the staircase that number 27 Rue Montagnard was a spectacularly fickle creature.
Perdu was nearing the first floor when a pair of satin mules the colour of golden corn with feather pom-poms on the toes stepped decisively onto the landing and into his line of sight.
On the first floor, above Madame Rosalette, lived Che, the blind chiropodist. He often accompanied Madame Bomme (second floor), who used to work as a secretary for a famous fortune-teller, to do her food shopping at Goldenberg’s (who lived on the third floor) and carried Madame Bomme’s bag. They shuffled along the pavement together – the blind man arm in arm with the old lady pushing her wheeled Zimmer frame.
Kofi – which meant ‘Friday’ in one of the indigenous languages of Ghana – had showed up at Rue Montagnard one day from the outskirts of Paris. He had dark skin, wore gold chains over the top of his hip-hop hoodies and a gold earring in one ear. A good-looking boy, ‘a cross between Grace Jones and a young jaguar’, was Madame Bomme’s opinion. Kofi often carried her white Chanel handbags and attracted suspicious looks from ignorant passers-by. He did caretaking jobs, or made figures from raw leather and painted them with symbols that nobody in the building could understand.
Yet it was neither Che nor Kofi nor Madame Bomme’s wheeled Zimmer that now hove into Perdu’s path. ‘Oh, Monsieur, how lovely to see you! Listen, that Dorian Gray was a very exciting book. How nice of you to recommend it when Burning Desire was out of stock.’
‘I’m pleased to hear it, Madame Gulliver.’
‘Oh, after all this time do call me Claudine. Or at least Mademoiselle. I don’t stand on ceremony. That Gray was so amusing, it only took me two hours. But if I were Dorian, I’d never have looked at that picture. It’s depressing. And they can’t have had Botox back then.’
‘Madame Gulliver, Oscar Wilde spent six years writing it. He was later sentenced to prison and died a short time afterwards. Didn’t he deserve a little more than two hours of your time?’
‘Oh, poppycock. That won’t cheer him up now.’
Claudine Gulliver. A spinster of Rubenesque proportions in her mid-forties, and a registrar at a major auction house. She had to deal with excessively rich, excessively greedy collectors on a daily basis – strange specimens of the human species. Madame Gulliver collected works of art herself, mainly gaudily coloured ones with heels. She had a collection of 176 pairs of high heels with a room of their own.
One of Madame Gulliver’s hobbies was to lie in wait for Monsieur Perdu and invite him on one of her excursions, or tell him about her latest continuing education courses or the new restaurants that opened in Paris every day. Madame Gulliver’s second hobby was reading the kind of novel that starred a heroine who clung to a scoundrel’s broad chest and resisted long and hard before finally he powerfully over �
�� er … powered her. Now she twittered, ‘So, will you come with me tonight to—’
‘No, I’d rather not.’
‘Hear me out first! The university jumble sale at the Sorbonne. Lots of long-legged female art graduates breaking up their group housing, and dumping their books, their furniture and, who knows, their lovers.’ Madame Gulliver arched her eyebrows suggestively. ‘How about it?’
He imagined young men crouching among grandfather clocks and boxes of paperbacks with Post-it notes on their foreheads saying such things as: ‘Used once, almost new, barely touched. Heart in need of minor repairs’; or ‘Thirdhand, basic functions intact.’
‘I really don’t want to.’
