She offered Marianne her arm. “Come on. Let’s see what kind of a woman is hiding inside you. And when we’ve met her, we won’t reproach her for having stayed out of sight all this time, d’accord?”
On the first floor of the boutique, Colette settled into an armchair with another Bellini and a cigarette, and shot instructions at Katell, the saleswoman. While Katell was away looking for the first items of clothing, from out of nowhere Colette suddenly related an anecdote about her former neighbor in Paris.
“Madame Loos was a woman who kept herself strenuously to herself,” she began, sorting the heap of clothes that Katell had brought into two piles with a confident hand. “She had made it through life well enough—in her marriage, with her children, at work. Always in the right place at the right time. Always nice, polite and inconspicuously dressed. Then one night…” Colette leaned forward to stare at Marianne, who was peering uncertainly from all angles at a delightful dress the color of ripe Mirabelle plums, “one night something happened.”
Marianne slipped into a soft, champagne-colored roll-neck sweater that showed her waist and her bust to advantage: she had never worn such a tight sweater before in her entire life. It further enhanced the glow of her new hair coloring. Then she pulled on a cool pair of dark jeans that Colette had laid out for her.
“Madame Loos banged on my door as if she’d gone mad. She needed my car, she said: her younger sister was at death’s door in Dijon. I gave her the keys, of course. She sped away, but she crashed into another vehicle on the Place de la Concorde, and amid all the excitement she slapped a policeman, fled the scene with a guy from Rennes, told him the story of her life, had sex with him, borrowed his car and arrived too late: her sister was already dead. That looks good on you, by the way. Try on these pumps with it.”
Colette got up and peered over Marianne’s shoulder at the mirror. “Madame Loos returned the car, spent a second night with the man and came back to Paris a completely different woman—by bus.”
She handed Marianne a fine-knit cardigan that draped itself lightly and softly around her body. When Marianne twisted to catch a glimpse in the mirror, she saw a woman who was perhaps no longer the youngest, but very chic and feminine. The only thing that didn’t fit this new image was her timid, doe-eyed expression.
“Madame Loos managed to emerge from her hiding place, get rid of her husband and his mistresses and set up her own tearoom.” Colette gently laid an amber necklace around Marianne’s neck.
“What about the man from Rennes?”
“Completely incidental.” She took off her sunglasses and placed them daintily on Marianne’s nose. “One might have to be a little ruthless to seize back control of one’s life, don’t you think?”
Marianne gave an uneasy shrug. She regarded ruthlessness as the most socially acceptable form of gratuitous violence. But hadn’t she herself acted ruthlessly by coming here? Her sense of guilt toward Lothar was growing ever more insistent. Did he not at the very least deserve some answers so as to know where he stood?
“How about something red? Red is your color,” suggested Colette and called for Katell again.
The world had taken on a more intensive hue as Marianne stepped out of the boutique with Colette. Or was that the effect of the double cognac she had drunk after their shopping spree was over? She thought of the jeans—her first ever pair of jeans—that made her legs look longer than they really were; of the bottle-green leather jacket that contrasted beautifully with her new hair coloring, banishing the gray from her cheeks; of the red dress, the cream-colored sweater, the pumps in which she must first learn to walk, as the height of the heels almost took her breath away. She guessed that deep in the big shiny bags were other items of clothing bought as if in a frenzy with the aid of Colette’s credit card.
Could clothes transform a woman? No, but they might help her to rediscover who she was. Marianne had found inside her something she thought she had never possessed: femininity. And now she was extraordinarily hungry, craving bread and cheese, and so the two women went into the bakery on Pont-Aven’s market square.
“I bless you, oh bread, so that all witchcraft, shackles and slander by eye and mouth may be destroyed and dispelled,” chanted the baker in Latin as he scored the sign of the cross in the bottom of the rye loaf. Only then did he allow Marianne to pack it away in her shopping basket.
Colette gave an inadvertent snort. “I’ve never got used to that trick with the bread,” she said to Marianne. “During the Palm Sunday procession in Saintes, the women carry a hollowed-out loaf on the end of a stick; it looks like a phallus. The priest blesses the bread to protect it from the witches’ gaze, and the women keep it for the whole year. They certainly don’t eat it, so God knows what they do with it!”
Marianne giggled and dreamily caressed the silky fabric of the plum-colored wrap dress she was still wearing. It concealed her birthmark, but gave her cleavage she’d never known she had. Admittedly, Katell had sold her the requisite bra.
“No need to bless my loaf,” said Colette loudly, interrupting Marianne’s thoughts.
“If that’s what you want, there’s no problem, Madame,” muttered the baker. “The bread is protected either way. You must know Pascale Goichon, the white witch in the woods. She consecrates fires and drives the ghosts from ships and rooms! She blessed this oven too,” he said, pointing behind him.
Marianne’s ears pricked up at the mention of Pascale’s name.
“Lucky she isn’t a black witch! Did you hear what happened in Saint-Connec four years ago?” He wiped his floury hands on his apron.
“Oh that old chestnut again.” Colette was growing impatient.
“Madame Gallerne had been dozing in a near-death state for years. The livestock on the farm had been dying in mysterious ways, and nothing grew anymore. Fernand Gallerne was in despair, for an evil spell had been cast on his farm.” The baker paused for dramatic effect. “And it could only be broken by…” He lowered his voice even more, until it was no more than a hoarse whisper: “Michel La Mer!”
“Le magnétiseur?” gasped the baker’s young wife. He nodded. “He can do anything,” she said rapturously, her cheeks turning a deep shade of pink. “They say he can drive out Satan and cure cancer, infertility, athlete’s foot and mad cow disease. All with his hands!”
“Yes, yes,” the baker interrupted rudely. “In any case, La Mer paid a visit to the Gallernes’ farm and discovered that Fernand’s neighbor Valérie Morice had cursed the land and was to blame for Madame Gallerne’s illness. She’d always been so nice to them, but she was an unmarried woman with two children by an unknown man. She was the one who had cursed the poor wretches, purely—and literally—for the hell of it! La Mer lifted the curse for a hundred and fifty-two euros.”