The Little Paris Bookshop

by Nina George

  ‘So?’ it says. ‘Did you really think you were a woman without qualities?’ (Jean says that quoting Musil’s The Man Without Qualities is not a sign of intelligence, merely of a well-trained memory.)

  But what exactly is happening to us?

  This damned freedom! It means I have to be as silent as a tree stump about what I am up to while my family and Luc mistakenly imagine me in a seminar at the Sorbonne or working hard in the evenings. It means I have to control myself, destroy and hide myself in Bonnieux, and not expect anyone to take my confession or listen to the truth of my secret life.

  I feel as if I’m sitting on top of Mount Ventoux, exposed to the sun, the rain and the horizon. I can see further and breathe more freely than ever before; but I am stripped of my defences. To be free is to lose one’s certainty, says Jean.

  But do I really know what I’m losing?

  And do I really know what he’s giving up by choosing me? He says he wants no other woman but me. It’s enough that I’m leading two lives; he didn’t want to do the same. Each time he makes things easy for me I could weep with gratitude. Never a reproach, barely a tricky question; he makes me feel that I’m a gift, not simply a bad person who makes too many demands on life.

  If I confided in someone back home, he or she would be forced to lie with me and keep it secret and silent. I need to make it difficult for myself, not for others: those are the rules for the fallen.

  Not once have I mentioned Jean’s name. I’m worried that the way I say it could allow Maman, Papa or Luc to see straight through me.

  Maybe each of them in their own way would show understanding. Maman, because she knows a woman’s longings. They are there in all of us, even as small girls when we can hardly see over the table in the corner of the kitchen, and spend our time chatting to our long-suffering soft toys and wise ponies.

  Papa, because he knows the animal lust that lurks inside us, would understand the wild, nourishing side to my behaviour; perhaps he would even recognise the biological instinct – like a potato’s urge to germinate. (I’ll ask him for help if I don’t know what to do. Or Mamapapa, as Sanary wrote in a book that Jean read aloud to me.)

  Luc would understand because he knows me, because it was his decision to stay with me even knowing I needed more. He always stands by his decisions: what’s right is right, even if it hurts or later turns out to be wrong.

  But what happens if I tell him about Jean, and thirty years from now he admits how badly I hurt him when I couldn’t keep my mouth shut?

  I know my future husband – he would spend many horrible hours and nights. He would look at me and see the other man over my shoulder. He would sleep with me and think: Is she thinking of him? Is it good, is it better with him? Whenever I talked to a man at the village fete or the Bastille Day procession, would he wonder: Is he the next one? When will she finally be satisfied? He would come to terms with it all on his own and wouldn’t breathe a word of reproach to me. What was it he said? ‘This is the only life we have. I want to spend mine with you, but without impeding yours.’

  For Luc’s sake too I must keep my mouth shut.

  And for my sake – I want Jean all to myself.

  I hate wanting all of this – it’s more than I bargained for …

  Oh, merciless freedom, you continue to overwhelm me! You demand that I challenge myself and feel ashamed, and yet continue to feel so outrageously proud to live a life full of my desires.

  How I will enjoy looking back on all our experiences when I am old and can no longer touch my toes!

  Those nights when we lay in the grass in the fort at Buoux, searching the stars. Those weeks when we turned wild in the Camargue. Oh, and those fabulous evenings when Jean introduced me to a life with books as we sprawled naked on the divan with Castor the cat, and Jean used my backside as a book rest. I didn’t know there was such an infinite number of thoughts and marvels, and so much knowledge to be had. The world’s rulers should be forced to take a reader’s licence. Only when they have read five thousand – no, make that ten thousand – books will they be anywhere near qualified to understand humans and how they behave. I often felt better, no longer so bad, fake and unfaithful, when Jean read me bits where good people did nasty things out of love or necessity or their hunger for life.

  ‘Did you think you were the only one, Manon?’ he asked – and yes, it really did feel that awful, as if I were the only one unable to rein in my appetite.

  Often when we’ve finished making love and haven’t yet started again, Jean tells me about a book that he’s read, wants to read or wants me to read. He calls books freedoms. And homes too. They preserve all the good words that we so seldom use.

  Leniency. Kindness. Contradiction. Forbearance.

  He knows so much; he is a man who knows what it means to love selflessly. He lives when he loves. His confidence falters when he’s loved. Is that why he feels so awkward? He has no idea what is where in his body! Grief, anxiety, laughter – where does it all come from? I’d press my fist into his tummy: ‘Do your butterflies live here?’ I’d blow under his belly button: ‘Virility there?’ I’d put my fingers to his neck: ‘Tears here?’ His body can be frozen, paralysed.

  One evening we went out dancing. Tango argentino. A disaster! Jean was embarrassed and shunted me around, a little this way and a little that, practising the steps he’d learned in dance classes, but only using his hands. He was there, but he was not in control of his own body.

  Impossible – not him, not this man! He wasn’t like men from the north, from Picardy, Normandy or Lorraine, who suffer from a great sterility of the soul, though there are many women in Paris who find that erotic – as if it were a sexual challenge to elicit the tiniest of emotions from a man! That kind of woman imagines that somewhere within this coldness is a blazing passion that will spur him on to throw her over his shoulder and pin her to the floor. We had to break off. We went home, had a drink and tiptoed round the truth. He was exceptionally tender as, naked, we played like a tom and his puss. My despair knew no bounds. If I couldn’t dance with him, then what?

  I am my body. My pussy glistens when I feel desire, my chest perspires when I’m humiliated, and my fingers tingle with fear of my own courage; they quiver when I’m primed to protect and defend. When I ought to be afraid of real things, though – like the knot they found in my armpit and want to remove with a biopsy – I feel both bewildered and calm. My bewilderment makes me want to keep busy; but I’m calm, so calm that I don’t wish to read serious books or listen to grand, sweeping music. All I want to do is sit here and watch the trickle of autumn light onto the red-golden leaves; I want to clean the fireplace; I want to lie down and sleep, exhausted by all these puzzling, insubstantial, ridiculous, fleeting thoughts. Yes, when I feel afraid I want to go to sleep – the soul’s refuge from panic.

  But what about him? When Jean dances, his body is a clothes stand with a shirt, trousers and a jacket hanging from it.

  I stood up, he followed me, I slapped him.

  A burning in my hand, a fire as though I’d reached into the embers.

  ‘Hey!’ he said. ‘What’s that for?’

  I slapped him again; I had hot coals in my fingers now.

  ‘Stop thinking! Feel!’ I screamed at him.

  I went over to the record player and put the ‘Libertango’ on for us. Accordion playing like the lashing of a whip, like blows from a riding crop or the crackling of branches in the fire. Piazzolla, driving the violins up into the heights.

  ‘No, I—’

  ‘Yes. Dance with me. Dance the way you feel! How do you feel?’

  ‘I’m furious! You hit me, Manon!’

  ‘Then dance furiously! Find the instrument in the piece that reflects your emotions and follow it! Grab me with the fury you feel for me!’

  No sooner had I spoken these words than he seized me and pushed me up against the wall with both arms above my head, his grip firm, very firm. The violins wailed. We danced naked; he had chosen the
violin as the instrument of his emotions. His rage turned to desire, then to tenderness, and when I bit and scratched him, resisted his lead and refused to take his hand – my lover became a tanguero. He returned to his body.

  While I leaned against him, heart to heart, and he was making me feel what he felt for me, I saw our shadows dancing across the wall, across the walls of the Lavender Room. They were dancing in the window frame, they were dancing as one, and Castor the tomcat observed us and our shadows from the top of the wardrobe.

  From that evening on we always danced tango – naked at first because it made the swaying and the coaxing and the holding easier. We danced, our hands on our own hearts. And then at some point we switched and laid our hand on the other’s heart.

  Tango is a truth drug. It lays bare your problems and your complexes, but also the strengths you hide from others so as not to vex them. It shows what a couple can be for each other, how they can listen to each other. People who only want to listen to themselves will hate tango.

  Jean couldn’t help feeling rather than escaping into abstract thoughts about dancing. He felt me: the fine hairs between my legs, my breasts. Never in all my life has my body felt so feminine as during those hours when Jean and I danced and then made love on the divan, on the floor, sitting on the chair, everywhere. He said, ‘You are the source from which I flow when you are here, and I run dry when you leave.’

  From then on we danced our way through the tango bars of Paris. Jean learned to transmit the energy from his body to mine and to show me which tango he wanted from me – and we learned the Spanish spoken in Argentina. Or at least the quiet poems and verses that a tanguero whispers to his tanguera to get her ready for … tango. The delicious, inexplicable games we began to play: we learned to address each other formally in the bedroom – and this polite address sometimes allowed us to request some very rude things.

  Oh, Luc! With him I am differently – or less – desperate. But less natural too. From the very beginning I never lied to Jean. To Luc I don’t express my desire for him to be harsher or more tender, more courageous or more playful. I’m ashamed because I want more than he can give. Or who knows: maybe he could if only I asked for it? But how?

  ‘Even when you dance with another woman, never betray the tango by holding back,’ we were told by Gitano, a tango teacher at one of the bars.

  He also proclaimed that Jean loved me, and I loved Jean. Gitano could see it in every step we took: we were one being. Maybe that’s not so far from the truth?

  I need to be with Jean because he’s the male part of me. We look at each other and see the same thing.

  Luc is the man whom I stand beside, and we look in the same direction. Unlike the tango teacher, we never talk about love.

  Only the pure and the free may say, ‘I love you’. Romeo and Juliet. But not Romeo, Juliet and Stephen.

  We’re in a constant race against time. We have to do everything at once; otherwise we’ll get nothing done. We sleep together and talk about books at the same time, and in between we eat and are silent and argue and make up, dance and read aloud, sing and look for our lucky star – all at great speed. I long for next summer when Jean will come to Provence and we will search the stars.

  I can see the Palais des Papes, glinting golden in the sun. That light again, at last; at last, people who don’t act as though no one else exists, not in lifts or in the street or on the bus. At last, fresh apricots from the tree again.

  Oh, Avignon. I used to wonder why this city with its sinister palace, always cold and shady-looking, is so full of secret passages and trapdoors. Now I know. This restless lust has been with us since the dawn of mankind. Bowers, private rooms, theatre boxes, corn mazes – all designed for one and the same game!

  Everyone knows this game is going on, but pretends it isn’t, or at least is far away, harmless and unreal.

  Yeah, really.

  I can feel the burning shame in my cheeks; I can feel the longing in my knees; and the lie nestles between my shoulder blades and scrapes them sore.

  Dear Mamapapa, please, don’t make me have to choose between them.

  And make the pea-sized lump in my armpit be just one of the grains of chalk that come trickling out of the taps up there in Valensole, home of the lavender and the world’s most incorruptible cats.

  22

  Monsieur Perdu sensed eyes brushing over him from under mascaraed lashes. If he caught, held and returned a woman’s gaze, he would already be entangled in the cabeceo, the silent exchange of glances that was the currency of every tango negotiation: an ‘invitation with the eyes’.

  ‘Look down at the floor, Jordan. Don’t look directly at a woman,’ he whispered. ‘If your eyes linger, she’ll assume you’re asking her whether you may invite her to dance. Can you dance tango argentino?’

  ‘I was handy at freestyle fan routines.’

  ‘Tango argentino is very similar. There are very few fixed step sequences. You touch chests, heart to heart, and then you listen to how the woman wants to be led.’

  ‘Listen? But nobody’s saying a word.’

  It was true: none of the women or men or the couples on the dance floor were wasting their breath on talking, and yet they were so eloquent: ‘Lead me more tightly! Not so fast! Give me some room! Let me entice you! Let’s play!’ The women corrected the men: here a rub of the calf with the back of the shoe – ‘Concentrate!’; there a stylised eight on the floor – ‘I’m a princess!’

  At other milongas, men would employ all their powers of persuasion during the four-dance sequence to arouse their partners’ passion. In soft Spanish a man would whisper in his partner’s ear, to her neck and into her hair, where the breath stirred the skin: ‘I’m crazy for your tango. You’re driving me wild with your dancing. My heart will set yours free to sing.’

  Here, though, there were no tango whisperers. Here, everything was done with the eyes.

  ‘Men run their eyes discreetly around the room,’ said Perdu, whispering the rules of cabeceo to Max.

  ‘How do you know all of this? From a—’

  ‘No. Not from a book. Listen. Cast your eyes around slowly, but not too slowly. That’s how you seek out the person with whom you want to dance the next tanda – the set of four pieces of music – or check if someone wants to dance with you. You ask them with a long, direct gaze. If it’s answered, maybe with a nod or a half-smile, then you may consider your invitation accepted. If she looks away it means “No, thank you”.’

  ‘That’s good,’ Max said quietly. ‘That “No, thank you” is so quiet that nobody has to worry about being embarrassed.’

  ‘Exactly. It’s a gallant gesture when you stand up to fetch your partner. On the way over you have time to make sure that she really did mean you … and not the man diagonally behind you.’

  ‘What about after the dance? Do I invite her for a drink?’

  ‘No. You escort her back to her seat, thank her and go back to the men’s side. Tango doesn’t commit you to anything. For three or four songs you share your yearnings, hopes and desires. Some people say it’s like sex, only better – and more frequent. But then it’s over. It would be totally improper to dance more than one tanda with a woman. It’s considered bad manners.’

  They watched the couples under lowered eyelids. After a while Perdu gestured with his chin to a woman who might have been anywhere between her early fifties and her late sixties. Black hair with some grey streaks, tied at the nape of her neck like a flamenco dancer’s; a dress that looked new; three wedding rings on one finger. She had the poise of a ballerina and the slender, firm, supple figure of a young briar. A splendid dancer, secure and precise, and yet charitable enough to make up for her partner’s lack of movement or meekness, disguising the man’s flaws with her grace. She made everything look easy.

  ‘She’ll be your dance partner, Jordan.’

  ‘Her? She’s much too good. I’m scared!’

  ‘Remember the feeling. Someday you’ll want to write
about it, and then it’ll be good to know how the fear feels and to go ahead and dance all the same.’

  As Max tried, half in panic, half pluckily, to attract the proud briar queen’s gaze, Jean weaved his way to the bar, ordered a thimbleful of pastis in a glass and topped it up with the water. He was … excited. Extremely excited.

  As though he were about to step out on stage.

  How frantic he had been whenever he was due to meet Manon! His trembling fingers turned shaving into a bloodbath. He could never decide how to dress, wanting to look strong and slender and elegant and cool all at once. That was when he started running and doing weights to get himself in good shape for her.

  Jean Perdu took a sip of pastis.

  ‘Grazie,’ he said on a hunch.

  ‘Prego, Signor Capitano,’ said the small, round, moustachioed bartender in a singsong Neapolitan accent.

  ‘You flatter me. I’m not really a captain—’

  ‘Oh yes, you are. Cuneo can see.’

  Chart music was spilling out of the loudspeakers: the cortina, time for a change of partners. In thirty seconds the band would launch into the next tanda.

  Perdu saw the briar dancer take pity and allow a pale Max, head held high, to lead her out into the middle of the dance floor. Within a few steps she bore herself like an empress, and this did something in turn to Max, who till then had merely been clinging to her outstretched arm. He took off his earmuffs and tossed them aside. He looked taller now, his shoulders broader, his chest puffed out like a torero’s.