Chapter 54
54
JANUARY 2019, PARIS, FRANCE
Cecilie stares at a black curved rectangle floating above a red curved rectangle, framed in oil the shade of heartache. Her grey feather-down coat is slung over her bag in the warmth of the gallery, her jumper sleeves rolled up. She feels as solemn and as tragic as the artist must have intended. The room is crowded, but people come and go, buzzing and blurring around static Cecilie as if they’re in fast motion. Still she stares, seeing depths of black and red emerge from the wall in front of her. Jumping out and screaming at her. The painting is a thing of frightening beauty and she can’t take her eyes off it. She stands anchored, fixated, waiting to see what else emerges from the picture. Surprised that it hasn’t taken her away to another place. Wondering if perhaps she has lost the ability to.
A schoolgirl knocks into Cecilie and doesn’t say sorry as she rushes past the picture to catch up with her friends. Cecilie’s left knee bends and jerks with force and she has to straighten herself sharply to prevent herself falling over. The painting’s spell is broken .
Cecilie looks into her bag obscured by her slung coat and fumbles for her Paris guidebook.
Where next?
She ponders the map and decides to walk through the 2nd and 9th arrondissements to the Basilica of Sacré-Coeur, to really earn the baguette she hopes to find in a Bohemian cafe there. The air will do her good after three hours in the Pompidou.
I can’t feel any lonelier than I already do.
As Cecilie slowly and gently makes her way out of Salle 29, she doesn’t see Hector Herrera enter the room from the opposite corner behind her, ready to be struck by the painting Cecilie was just mesmerised by.
Hector doesn’t notice the girl with the short white-blonde hair swept across her sad face, leaving the room. Just like he didn’t see her at the top of the escalator when he was at the bottom, gazing through the Perspex tunnel out to the rising vista of Paris, wondering how on earth he could convince Cecilie Wiig to hear him out; whether he should take a chance on Arctic Norway, or stop being crazy and just get his flight back to Mexico.