9 Like the World Around Them Didn’t Exist #3
And as soon as the light turned green, Paulina began to walk and count softly under her breath. Jean-Pierre, beside her, was also counting in his head and making sure his strides matched those of a Pauline who, beyond her captivating beauty, clearly had hidden talents.
Once at Mabillon, they walked the whole street from end to end, skirting the Saint-Germain market, which gave off a rather unpleasant smell of fishy water and wilted flowers at closing time.
The passersby who crossed their path—unaware of the lovers’ challenge—were surprised to see this elegant woman, with her distracted gaze, counting her steps in a quasi-military fashion.
She was at 350 by the time they reached the side of the nave. They still had to walk toward the square and reach the front facade. Door to door, she had insisted on it when she set the rules.
Jean-Pierre’s eyes widened. He never could have imagined Pauline would come close, not even by a long shot.
Twenty meters from the finish line, she started carefully pacing her steps.
Careful not to give the “judge” any grounds to challenge her, she reached her four hundredth step exactly on the final stride.
“Et voilà!”
Paulina couldn’t contain her enthusiasm.
“Sublime. Brava!”
“You’re paying for dinner.”
“It couldn’t be any other way.” He still couldn’t believe it. “But how on earth did you do it?”
“It wasn’t a trick. And if it were, a magician never reveals their tricks.”
“I had expectations of you, but honestly, this display has blown me out of the water.”
“Didn’t my cousin tell you I’m somewhat of a witch?”
Saint-Sulpice was an imposing church, full of pretension, somewhat out of place. If lightning hadn’t decapitated its dome, it could have been a replica of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. The neoclassical facade, the massive columns, the pale stone, the symmetry.
That was something Paulina noticed: The symmetry was disrupted at the top, by the two bell towers that looked unevenly truncated.
The front facade opened out onto a large traffic-free square lined with a dozen serene acacia trees and a majestic fountain held up by four stone cardinals, a sort of cemetery pantheon, which blocked the view.
Paulina did not get close enough to see that the sculpture was signed by Visconti, the architect her taxi driver had been obsessed with only hours before.
“It’s so tranquil.”
“That’s Paris. You walk two blocks away, and suddenly you find yourself in a peaceful corner seemingly untouched by the world.”
“Maybe that’s part of Paris’s charm.”
“Maybe, deep down, that’s the charm of life.”
Paulina wanted Jean-Pierre to explain what he had meant. They stopped admiring the side of the church like two tourists and faced each other. They stepped closer and reached for each other’s hands at pocket level.
“I was saying that sometimes, maybe, in life, you have to step away from the streets you always walk, to see that there are other paths worth exploring.”
“Right.”
Their eyes glistened with joy and surprise.
“Even if you don’t know where they’ll take you.”
Jean-Pierre’s face slowly drew closer to hers.
“Sometimes . . .”
She did nothing to stop it.
“It’s just life.”
She closed her eyes and let the inevitable happen. A kiss. Passionate and mature. Willing, long, and sweet with all its honeyed flavors. They embraced each other, holding each other tight, and taking turns holding on to one another’s faces ravenously.
They opened their eyes and smiled at each other, delighted by the unexpected, and immediately kissed again, playing with their lips and tongues like it was a first kiss among teens, like the world around them didn’t exist. On their second kiss, Paulina detected the aroma of the tobacco pipe among the flavors.
Sweet, pleasant, even addictive. She had never kissed a smoker before, she briefly thought.
But there she stood on tiptoe, hanging from Jean-Pierre’s neck.
They stayed in the square at Saint-Sulpice for a while. They did not look at the church again.
Having communicated everything with kisses, so as not to say anything they might later regret, they walked back arm in arm along rue Bonaparte. They didn’t count their steps, but they could have counted their heartbeats.
Tactful and full of savoir faire, Jean-Pierre decided everything. He seemed to be the kind of man who never doubted himself.
“We’ll have dinner here. It’s a historic café.”
“Les Deux Magots,” Paulina read on the green awning at the corner of the boulevard and the Saint-Germain square. “I wonder if there’s anywhere in this neighborhood that doesn’t have a history . . . Who came here, Van Gogh?”
“Not that I know of. The surrealists, I think. And they say Sartre wrote something here.”
“Outside or inside?”
“Here will be nice.”
A waiter with a drooping mustache seated them in two wicker chairs that faced the square, next to a small round table.
It was a French tradition. Instead of facing each other, people sat side by side, looking out at the street like they had already seen quite enough of each other and for the love of God needed to look out onto the spectacle the view offered.
The street always provides entertainment, but sometimes you want to have a conversation with someone, but with the tables so close and cramped, only trivial remarks can be exchanged.
Jean-Pierre rebutted all of Paulina’s observations, point by point, with economical arguments.
Parisian terraces are arranged this way because of tradition, because customers expect it, because it’s part of the Parisian landscape, but most of all to maximize space.
The fees establishments have to pay to occupy a few square meters of patio are extremely high.
They pay many taxes and are highly regulated by the municipal leech, so they have to optimize every inch.
Paulina was already spaced out.
Jean-Pierre said everything with the same conviction he seemed to live with. He did admit humbly, to his credit, that he was repeating hearsay, because numbers weren’t his strong suit. He had never really bothered to think about why this particular Parisian postcard shot looked the way it did.
It was an entirely different matter when he discussed art, painting, and culture. There he truly combined sensibility, confidence, and erudition. They hadn’t even spent a day together, and Paulina could already attest to it.
“This is an egg place. Omelets, scrambled eggs, fried eggs . . .”
“I’ll take an onion soup and a beer.” She looked up from the menu. “What’s wrong? It’s what I’m craving. Why are you looking at me like that? Doesn’t onion soup have egg in it?”
“Onion soup in June?”
“It’s on the menu.” Paulina pointed it out, flashing her red fingernail. “I can’t be the only one ordering it.”
Jean-Pierre ordered a ham omelet and another beer.
They watched people as they ate. Every now and then Paulina came up with a story about the lives of the people walking by on their Saturday-evening stroll, unpredictable and uneven.
It was a fun and cheap game she played when she was younger with Tatiana, the neighbor on her floor who was her companion in age and shared secrets.
The two friends would sit at a bar in the Sarrià neighborhood of Barcelona, where they had no problem staying two or three hours.
A Coca-Cola for each was enough to keep them guessing if the woman passing by with the supermarket bags was happy, if the couple walking silently had any children or not, if he worked at a bank, if she had a lover or two.
Jean-Pierre was astonished by Pauline’s novelistic imagination.
In no time she’d turn a woman emerging from the hair salon with teased hair into a Madame Bovary.
And, just by looking at a young man walking a droopy-eared basset hound, she’d dream up a filmlike story in which the young man was an artist who, in order to pay for his life in Paris and for his brushes and oil paints, earned a handful of francs each afternoon by taking the pets of the invalid grandmothers of the Rive Gauche out for a walk.
Aside from the people watching, he pointed out to her that, from the patio of Les Deux Magots, the facade of Saint-Germain-des-Prés on the other side of the square looked like a village church.
It was irregular, austere, and very Alsatian.
Once Paulina had finished playing at imagining other people’s lives, she dared to inquire into Jean-Pierre’s.
“Anouk. What does it mean?” she asked in a calculated innocence.
“Nothing. It’s a name. Like Jean-Pierre.”
“Is it a man’s name?”
“No, not exactly.” Jean-Pierre didn’t want to complicate an unforgettable evening unexpectedly. “I think it’s a woman’s name. It’s not very common.”
“Can I ask, although I hope I’m not prying, why you named your gallery Anouk?”
Jean-Pierre lowered his head and set his pipe on the table.
For the first time, Paulina noticed that the man she’d met at Júlia’s wedding, the one who had just given her the best kiss of her life, was quietly wavering.
Conveniently a waiter placed the bill that Jean-Pierre had requested wordlessly on the table.
It had been enough just to raise his eyebrows and rub his two fingers together.
“Did you know that Marcello Mastroianni lived on the rue de Seine?”
“Is it just me, or are you openly changing the subject?” Paulina figured that she’d also packed wit in her suitcase. It was always as useful as a toothbrush.
“I just thought you might find it interesting. Do you know Mastroianni? The actor, I mean.”
“Yes, of course. Now tell me,” she replied teasingly, pretending to be intrigued. “What’s this crazy story?”