‘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’?