‘Did you fall into the water on purpose?’ asked Max.
‘On purpose? Yes, of course,’ Samantha answered. ‘Who goes for a walk on a day like today and accidentally falls in backwards? Now that would be stupid! No, you need to plan this kind of thing.’
‘So you were depressed, and you wanted to, um …?’
‘Oh no, is that how it looked?’
Genuinely bewildered, she turned her heart-shaped face to each of the three men.
‘Practise pushing up the daisies? Send myself over the Styx? Die? Nooo. Why on earth would I do that? No, no. I like being alive, even if it’s occasionally a real struggle and fairly pointless in the grand scheme of things. No. I wanted to know what it felt like to jump into the river in this weather. The river looked so interesting, like soup gone wild. I wanted to know if I’d feel afraid in that soup or if my fear would tell me something important.’
Cuneo nodded as if he understood exactly what she meant.
‘And what was it supposed to tell you?’ Max asked. ‘Something like God is dead, long live extreme sports?’
‘No, I merely wanted to see if a different way of living my life might occur to me. When it comes down to it, you only regret the things you didn’t do. That’s what they say, isn’t it?’
The three men nodded.
‘Anyway, I didn’t want to wind up frustrated. I mean, who wants to bite the dust with the depressing thought that you’ve run out of time to do the really important things?’
‘All right,’ said Jean. ‘Naturally, we can bring our desires into sharper focus. But I’m not sure that really requires jumping into a river.’
Cuneo gave Samantha a rapturous smile, and ran his fingers repeatedly over the tips of his moustache.
‘Hallelujah,’ he muttered, and passed her the pistou.
‘And something important did occur to me as the waves tossed me about and I felt like the last raisin in the cake mix. I realised what I was missing,’ she announced.
And took a spoonful of soup.
And another spoonful.
And … yes … another spoonful.
They waited spellbound for the punch line.
‘I want to kiss a man again, and this time do it properly,’ said the woman after she had scraped the very last spoonful out of the pot. Then she gave a belch of pleasure, reached for Cuneo’s hand, laid it under her cheek and closed her eyes. ‘After I’ve had some sleep,’ she managed to mumble.
‘At your service,’ whispered Cuneo with a slightly glazed expression.
No answer. A smile, that was all. She was soon asleep and snoring like a snuffly little terrier. The three perplexed men looked on. Max laughed to himself and gave a double thumbs-up. Cuneo tried to find a more comfortable sitting position so as not to disturb the stranger’s dreams; her head lay on his large hand like a cat on a cushion.
30
While the storm raged over the town of books and the Seille, cutting swaths through the woods, flipping cars onto their roofs and sending farmhouses up in flames, the male trio did their best to play it cool.
‘So why is Cuisery paradise, as you said about three thousand years ago?’ Max asked Jean quietly.
‘Oh, Cuisery! An avid reader will lose his heart here. The whole village is crazy about books – or crazy full stop – but that’s not unusual. Virtually every shop is a bookshop, a printer’s, a bookbinder’s, a publisher’s, and many of the houses are artists’ workshops. The place is buzzing with creativity and imagination.’
‘You wouldn’t think so right now,’ Max commented. The wind was whistling around the barge, rattling anything that wasn’t nailed down. The cats had bedded down on top of Samantha. Lindgren was nestling by her neck, and Kafka was lying in the hollow between her thighs. Their poses said ‘She belongs to us now.’
‘Every bookseller in Cuisery specialises in something. You can find everything here – and when I say everything, I mean everything,’ explained Perdu.
In a previous life, when he was still a Parisian bookseller, he had contacted some of the rare book dealers – for example when a wealthy customer from Hong Kong, London or Washington decided he had to own a Hemingway first edition worth a hundred thousand euros, complete with buckskin binding and an inscription from Hemingway to his dear old friend Otto ‘Toby’ Bruce. Or a book from Salvador Dalí’s personal library – one the master had supposedly read before having his surrealist melting-clock dreams.
‘So do they have palm leaves too?’ asked Cuneo. He was still kneeling beside Samantha, supporting her face.
‘No. There’s science fiction, the fantastic and fantasy – yes, specialists do make a distinction – as well as—’
‘Palm leaves? What’s that supposed to mean?’ Max wanted to know.
Perdu groaned. ‘Nothing,’ he said hurriedly.
‘Never heard of the library of destiny? Of,’ the Italian was whispering now, ‘the book of life?’