It's Not Love, It's Just Paris

by Engel, Patricia

  I didn’t want to burden Cato with these details, as if I could keep our own panorama pristine. But he heard my end of phone conversations with my parents and Santi, and even though we spoke in Spanish, he could see the trepidation on my face. As much as Tarentina proclaimed it, I was not free at all.

  When we were kids, Santi and I used to say, even though we held dual citizenship, we were not American or Colombian. We were del Cielo, our own country. When we learned the pledge of allegiance in school, we made up our own pledge to our family. Ours was the only home I’d ever imagined knowing, and even now, I felt the pull on my heart.

  Cato wanted me to stay.

  One night in bed he’d said to me, “The way it happened between us, I don’t think it could happen again with anybody else. Not like this. Do you?”

  “No. Not like this.”

  He looked up at the ceiling and back at me on the pillow next to him.

  “I don’t want you to go.”

  “I don’t want to go either.”

  I saw that he was beginning to depend on me in the way one depends on family, a love taking root beyond the early tumbles of new romance. I said, and believed, that I still had the choice and that I wanted to stay in France beyond my scheduled departure. For another year or two or forever. He believed me, too, even when my certainty slipped into negotiations: I could do both, return home for a while, then come back to France. I could live in both places. I could find a way to be everything to everybody.

  Loic arrived at my door holding a small tissue-paper bundle like a pigeon in his hands.

  “Gaspard and I have been going through our grandmother’s things, you know, before the others start scavenging and leave us nothing to remember her by. We found this and thought you might want to have it.”

  He handed it to me and within its folds I saw Séraphine’s silk kimono blouse with the dragon painted on the back.

  I wore the blouse that night when Cato and I went for a walk to Île Saint-Louis, a bottle of wine in hand, settling onto the edge of quai Henri IV amid a crowd of lovers and friends. At nine in the evening the city was just beginning to darken, the Notre Dame lights radiating a golden sheen over the river. We found an abandoned padlock on an empty patch of concrete, probably fallen off one of the bicycles lining the quai. Cato decided to keep it. Later, when we started on our way home, we passed in front of the cathedral where painters and artists stood by easels offering cartoonish portraits to tourists. Cato asked one artist if he could paint our names on either side of the lock. The artist, who said she was an art student from Shanghai, used a tiny brush to print our names in yellow paint, and Cato held the lock by the tip of his fingers as it dried, and we crossed back onto the Left Bank, walking the long stretch from quai de la Tournelle to quai Voltaire, where Cato led me to the wall overlooking the water.

  He held me, his face warm against mine.

  “I want you to know that if you leave me you won’t ever leave me.”

  “I’m not leaving you.”

  “But if you do go, it will be all right. We will both be all right.”

  He pulled apart from me and threw the painted lock with the most force I’d seen come out of those arms, so far across the water that it was impossible to know where it broke the surface.

  He took my hand to his lips and kissed my palm.

  “I think we should get married. Nobody would have to know. Just us.”

  “We already are married,” I said, as if it were the most natural thing, and for that reason I knew it was true, in the only way that mattered.

  16

  Antoine de Manou’s prior criticisms of the French national team became the mockery of every newspaper headline as the multiracial équipe Française ascended game by game through the World Cup to hero status. Romain’s boss had a television installed over the bar at Far Niente, so we crowded around our favorite table along the wall to watch Brazil beat Scotland and committed to watch the rest of the tournament there together because there is a sporting tradition dictating that wherever you watch your favorite team play their first match is where you should watch all their games or you’ll break the spell of luck.

  The night that Les Bleus beat Croatia in the semifinal—a particularly humid one, with no air-conditioning in Far Niente, the doors and windows opened to let in the steamy street air—the restaurant crowd vibrated with jubilation, knowing it meant France would face Brazil, the defending champions, in the final. The Cup turns people into patriots, but as our teams, Colombia, the United States, Italy, and Morocco were knocked out in the early rounds, most of our allegiances shifted in support of our host nation, except for Tarentina, forever faithful to her Brazil.

  Romain had the day off, but he still came back to the restaurant to watch the match with us. I sat between him and Cato, and when the match was over and we were on our feet, with victory chants and screams, he threw a bet on the table: If France won the Cup, he’d jump to his dream and book a flight straight to New York the next day.

  We’d only come to the last pages of Martin Eden a few days before. I admired his tenacity—months of reciting each word slowly until there were no slips in his pronunciation and he glided through paragraphs and pages without needing to halt for my correction. He’d only stop himself when he became puzzled by a piece of the narrative, like how Martin could still love Ruth, even after she’d doubted him, questioning his poverty and dismissing his dreams of being a writer. He didn’t understand how a man could love a woman who didn’t believe in him.

  “That’s not love. Love is showing up every day, money or no money.”

  “She did love him.” I found myself defending her. “But she had to make a choice. She trusted that her parents knew what was best for her.”

  “I’m repulsed by that type of woman. Mindless and spineless like a jellyfish.”

  “She thought he was the selfish one for being more devoted to his passion than he was to pleasing her and her family.”

  “She only wanted him back when he became a rich man. She was a coward. And so was he, for loving her for so long.”

  When he came to the end of the novel Romain lit us a pair of cigarettes relishing each word of the final page until there was nothing left to read. We were quiet, and when he was down to a nub of filter, Romain said, as if he’d given the matter serious thought, “I can see why the guy killed himself rather than give her another chance. He was already dead. Me? I’d find another way to go on.”

  That night of the semifinal victory, everyone toasted Romain’s vow to himself, and I wondered what it would take for me to wager my life on a match.

  It was after midnight when Cato and I left the others in the street celebration that formed by the Odéon. Despite the noise of car horns and singing oscillating against the city walls, Cato and I walked home slowly, as if neither of us really wanted to arrive.

  Les Bleus won the 1998 World Cup by three goals and the city didn’t stop vibrating until after Bastille Day, one of the most climactic national celebrations in France’s history; parades, crowds, and fireworks shows, a pedestrian ecstasy, marauding revelers flooding every inch of Les Champs-Élysées from La Défense to Place de la Concorde, down rue de Rivoli all the way to the Bastille, where the strong bodies climbed their way up the Colonne de Juillet, a blanket of pride covering the nation with its leaders proclaiming that this team of diverse faces represented the integrated dream of the future of France.

  It would be a glorious, almost holy moment for the country.

  But by then, I would be gone.

  17

  Séraphine was right when she said good-byes don’t serve anyone. We’d stayed up in Tarentina’s room until near dawn, and when Cato and I returned to my room, the bed stripped of its sheets, I gathered the few things I had left to pack.

  Cato helped the driver load my suitcases into his taxi, as I crept into each of the girls’ rooms to hug them good-bye in their half sleep. I knew I’d see them all again.

  I’d said good-b
ye to Loic early in the evening, thanking him for his kindness and for all he’d done to make me feel welcome in the house. I told him he was right, it was just as he’d promised, I’d been very happy there.

  I stood alone in the foyer taking one long last look. I walked down the hall to Séraphine’s room but found it had been locked and whispered good-bye through the door, hoping, wherever she was, she could hear me. I remembered when she used to say she’d outlived everyone she’d ever cared about, but it was no reason to feel sorry for her, because she’d loved so well in her life, passionément, à la folie, which is more than anyone should ever want from a life, and because, she told me, those you love deeply never disappear.

  Through the help of one of Sharif’s connections, Cato found what was likely the last available room in Paris in a quiet hotel in Montmartre, far from rue du Bac and all that was familiar to us. We wanted to spend our last day and night as tourists. We wanted to pretend we were a young couple coming to Paris for the first time, on our honeymoon, discovering the city through a small window with a view to a thousand chimneys, mansards, and alleyways. We fed bread crumbs to the pigeons on the small ledge of the balcony and soaked in the claw-foot tub.

  I took Cato’s water-shriveled hands in mine and showed them to him.

  “This is how we’ll look when we’re old.”

  I didn’t yet know, didn’t yet understand, despite all the ways he tried to tell me, that he would never grow old the way I would. In that hotel room, we still played at a future together. He held me close, within his thighs, his arms tight around me as the bathwater turned cold, telling me that this winter he’d come visit me in the States. Or we could go somewhere else together. We could take a trip, to an island, to the other side of the world, to Leticia. He didn’t care about the dangers to his lungs anymore. He was angry for the way he’d been raised to fear life and for accepting the limitations on his body. He didn’t know how much life he had ahead of him but he wanted to run into it, fearless. He said he’d wasted too many years in that house by the sea. He didn’t want to go back there now. Not without me.

  I told him we’d do all the things he wanted to do.

  We would go everywhere, together.

  And I believed it.

  I was still full of hope. I thought we had our whole lives ahead of us. I could do everything I needed to do and still find my way back to him.

  I didn’t yet know what was written for us.

  The next morning at the Charles de Gaulle Airport I would run into Romain, who, as vowed, had booked a one-way ticket to New York and found an open seat on the flight after mine.

  Within days of my return home, as long as it took to recover from the time difference and unpack my bags, I would be treated as if I’d never left. My family would stop asking to hear about my year abroad, and I would recalibrate, adjusting to the new anchor of home while remembering, only privately, my other homes: the little bedroom in the House of Stars and Cato’s dark cavern in the house by the sea.

  Instead of going back to school for diplomacy, I would become a teacher and build on my mother’s volunteer efforts, the expansion of the philanthropic arm of Compa’ Foods. I would look after my brother, see him through to his graduation and then college, help him find a new yet forever precarious stability in his routines.

  I’d work hard. I’d believe I was content, productive. Useful. Fulfilled.

  On most days I would feel I was doing all I’d been born to do.

  I would think of Cato often.

  Those first years apart, we would write, call, and plan visits that would be postponed, rescheduled, and eventually canceled because some duty, some obligation on my part, would always interfere. I’d promise to go see him as soon as I could, as soon as my life allowed it, but my promises began to feel hollow, even to me.

  Slowly, I would become more of a coward; gutless, pusillanimous like Romain’s jellyfish, telling myself it was best to let the distance grow between us. It was the logical thing. I would tell myself ours was a beautiful story but it must be over now. He couldn’t possibly still love me. Not after all this time.

  The years would unfold as Tarentina predicted. Some of the girls would hold on and some would let go. Five years after leaving, I would return to France for her wedding, and by then I would have convinced myself Cato had forgotten me and was living life contentedly with a woman better suited for him. I would eventually find a way to live mine with another man, an old college friend of my brother’s, a political journalist with a pilot’s license.

  That night in the Montmartre hotel room I shared with Cato, I didn’t yet know, or perhaps I did know, in some hidden part of my interior, that eleven years from now, in an apartment I shared with my new fiancé, I would receive a phone call that would ruin me for years.

  I’d hear the voice of a woman asking me in French to hold the line for Monsieur Antoine de Manou. And then I would hear the voice of a very old man.

  “Is that Leticia?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Leticia, I am calling to inform you … of … of very unfortunate news.”

  I knew then. He didn’t have to say more.

  I felt my soul fall out of me.

  “My son, Felix, has died. He was convalesced with a persistent bronchial pneumonia for several months. I am told by his doctors that he passed away in his sleep. The service will be this Friday for the family. In fact only Sharif and myself will be in attendance, with Mireille, who took care of him as a boy. With your permission I will have my secretary arrange a plane ticket for you. I thought you should want to join us.”

  I was raw with shame for the ways I’d deserted him, and for the fraud of love I’d erected in his place.

  To forgive myself, an impossibility.

  There he lay before me once again, at the foot of the altar of La Madeleine, sleeping.

  How arrogant and how naive to believe we’d had time when time is the one thing each of us has so little of.

  That final night in Paris, he pressed his body far inside me, whispering into my ear, “I would give you everything if I had anything to give you.”

  “You already gave me everything. And you have all of me.”

  “Say you choose me.”

  “I choose you.”

  “And I choose you.”

  When we were through we studied each other’s faces from across the pillow. I don’t know if he’d felt the urgency as much as I did during those closing days in the pulsing pink summer of Paris, the compulsion to memorize it all then, as it would be a long time before I’d walk those streets again. I’d silently meditated on the finality of even the most insignificant things, like my last shower in the stark House of Stars bath, my last cigarette smoked on our terrace, the last time I dropped my laundry at the wash-and-fold across the way, and tried to ignore the heaving in my chest when Cato and I took our last trip to Blonville-sur-Mer, that last train back to Paris, and the final walk together over the smooth stone path of our bridge.

  “You’re beautiful,” I said. “There is no one more beautiful than you.”

  He reached for my hand.

  “You should have married me when I asked you to. We could have been married all this time. And you would leave me as my wife, and when you come back to me, I will still be your husband.”

  “I’ll marry you now.”

  That night the Basilica of Sacré-Coeur was open and nearly empty except for a few prayerful people scattered in pews. It was ten o’clock at night, and I remember a short old man selling postcards and snow globes on the front steps warned us the church would be closing very soon.

  We walked straight to the back of the church and found ourselves alone in the small chapel behind the altar. We said our vows. We said we chose each other. And we kissed with only statues as witnesses.

  I left him the next morning lying in the mess of sheets, his skin pale against the white cotton. He watched me dress. A taxi waited on the street to take me to the airport, but I told him n
ot to come along. I wanted to go alone. I wanted to remember him like this. His lips still fresh with me. With love in his eyes.

  Acknowledgments

  I am profoundly grateful to Ayesha Pande, Lauren Wein, Elisabeth Schmitz, Jessica Monahan, Deb Seager, and everyone at Grove for their kindness and very hard work. My thanks to all my family and the many dear friends, near and far, who’ve offered their continued support, especially the real girls of rue du Bac for whom this book was written with great affection as promised so long ago. My deepest gratitude and love goes to my brother, his family, and above all, to my parents.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PATRICIA ENGEL’s debut, Vida, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Fiction Award and Young Lions Fiction Award; winner of a Florida Book Award and an Independent Publisher Book Award; and was named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, Barnes & Noble, and L.A. Weekly.

  Her award-winning fiction has appeared in A Public Space, The Atlantic, Boston Review, Guernica, Harvard Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Miami.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

  Praise for VIDA

  “[Engel’s] ability to pierce the hearts of her crazy-ass characters, to fracture a moment into its elementary particles of yearning, cruelty, love, and confusion will leave you breathless. Here, friends, is the debut I have been waiting for.”