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? What 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.
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.