10 In the Shadow of Notre-Dame #2
In the room at the back there was an open piano and a wooden chair, giving the impression that someone was about to sit down and play a Chopin nocturne.
In the middle of the hallway, she discovered a single tiny office with a low ceiling, where only half a person fit, and not even very comfortably.
Both ceiling and walls were covered with scraps of paper—glued, pinned, or hanging—where visitors had immortalized some thought.
A portable typewriter with a plastic case from the seventies rested on the tiny desk.
Paulina assumed it was merely decorative.
She was tempted to step in, sit down, and type a message to Jean-Pierre, but she didn’t want to be told off for breaking the rules.
She continued to explore the back of the second floor, guided by curiosity and the beam of light entering through the only window, flung wide open.
The final room was the final chapter of the bookshop.
It was a room made to function like a library.
It was the only place in Shakespeare and Company where book lovers could sit for a while and leaf through the paragraphs of a novel that had caught their eye.
No two chairs were alike in the library.
There were armchairs, stools, wooden chairs with wobbly legs, and a rickety love seat.
And, of course, if you leaned out ever so slightly from the windowsill, you could spot the two towers of Notre-Dame from a unique perspective.
She took her time. Jean-Pierre’s instructions had been clear, and she followed them.
She picked up a book of Baudelaire’s poems just as easily as she might have picked any other volume within reach and sat down in the wicker rocking chair in the library to contemplate nothingness.
She didn’t open the book. She gazed into the silence.
The other Sunday wanderers who entered the tiny library respected the focus of those who had journeyed onto the paths of fiction.
It was more like a room for prayer. Only the buzzing of a hesitant hornet that flew in and out of the window, every now and then, caused a couple of the avid readers to look up in mild annoyance.
Others, absorbed in a good story, were not distracted by anything.
“Do you know what they called libraries in Egypt?” Jean-Pierre had asked her. “The treasure that cures the soul.”
When she had had enough, Paulina retraced her steps. She hunched her shoulders to descend the staircase and, dodging other customers who were browsing the shelves, stepped outside, exhilarated, to rejoin Jean-Pierre.
“So, Monsieur Zanardi, if you ever go missing, we’ll know to look for you here.”
“If I ever go missing in Paris, that is.”
“It has a special charm. I get it.”
“If you think I’m in Paris, look for me here, or in any of the magnificent bookshops around the world.
I’ve visited many, but I have more that I’ve yet to discover.
I’ve heard about two secondhand shops in Scotland, in Inverness and Glasgow.
One day I’ll have to make my way up there to see them.
A bookshop is . . .” He paused to think before finishing in a way that wasn’t arrogant.
“A home of freedom, a refuge of words, a real museum of thought.”
“What are you searching for in there? Words?”
“Butterflies. Always. Books about butterflies, catalogs, volumes that might show me a species I’ve never seen.”
“I’d like us to go in together.”
“Now?”
“You don’t feel like it?”
“After you, milady . . .”
It says a lot when a country’s zero-mile marker is inside a bookstore, especially one that houses all types of wisdom, the entire weight of literature, and the passing of history. Jean-Pierre held his pipe in his hand. It was still warm even though some time had passed since he had smoked.
“The owner is an American friend of mine. He recently had a daughter at sixty-seven years old. George Whitman from New Jersey. The man has had a life worthy of the movies. He arrived in Paris, having never been to France, after World War II. He stayed, opened a secondhand bookshop in Saint-Michel, and, not too long after, bought this place. I think this is an old convent.”
“Is that him?” She used her elbow to point at an extremely skinny man who was kneeling on the floor and rummaging through a pile of books near the stairs.
“Yes. There he is.”
“His face says it all.”
“He’s an eccentric. A lunatic, a romantic . . .”
“A bohemian?”
“Call him whatever you want. Some days he wears a tie. Sometimes, depending on his mood, he wears the most outlandish blazers. You should see him on the nights he organizes poetry readings here in the shop. He’s crazy about books. If only there were more people like him.”
Paulina laughed under her breath and spoke quietly so George, who couldn’t find what he was looking for, wouldn’t hear her.
“Have you noticed the tips of his collar? They could poke your eye out if you get too close.”
They laughed at the out-of-style and razor-sharp collar points.
George Whitman was a peculiar man in his physique as well.
His white hair hung like soggy endives from his head.
He had a hook nose and a wiry little goatee that had certainly seen better days.
He was himself, a one-of-a-kind man, gaunt, with a whole lot of leg and very little body, and the beginnings of hunchback from a life of bookselling.
Or maybe he was asthmatic, as the two conditions often look alike.
“Want to know the best part? Look at how young all the workers are.”
“And it looks like they’re all foreigners.”
“The man has it made. He lets young writers from all over the world, or anyone really who wants to become a writer, sleep upstairs, inside the bookshop itself, next to the piano or in the library. Didn’t you see all the mattresses on the ground?”
“I wasn’t paying much attention.”
“The bookshop has become an unusual writers’ residence.
They come to Paris without a place to stay, and George lets them sleep here with three conditions.
First, the young person must read a book a day.
Second, they have to work two hours in the shop daily.
And third, they have to write at the very least one page of autobiographical material each day. What do you think?”
“That’s brilliant, Jean-Pierre.”
“He gets cheap labor, and people line up to sleep and work here for free. All the while he collects thousands and thousands of autobiographies from young writers who, who knows, might one day become famous.”
They went back up to the second floor. Jean-Pierre walked ahead.
“Did you see the little desk?” He crouched inside and sat down.
“I loved it. The typewriter ready to . . .”
“They say Lawrence Durrell wrote a fragment of the Alexandria Quartet in here. Have you read the books?”
“Have you ever written anything yourself?”
“Me?” Jean-Pierre felt trapped. “Nothing worthwhile. A few lines in my youth.”
“Poems?”
“No, no. A roman, a long sort of story.” He was embarrassed. “I don’t even know if I even kept it.”
“I want to see it.”
“It’s not worthwhile, Pauline, really.”
“And what about him?”
“Who?”
“The owner. Has he ever written anything?”
“George? He once told me—you’ll like this—that he’s only ever written love letters.”
“Oh . . .”
“And you know what? I believe him.”
“He looks like the type maybe.”
Jean-Pierre stretched out to escape Durrell’s office.
“Let’s head down, and I’ll introduce you to him.”
“George?”
“If you want?”
“And who will you tell him I am?”
She wanted to meet him but was scared.
“What do you want me to say? The truth? A cousin from Barcelona? A friend, a client of the gallery, a model for ready-to-wear clothing? The perfect recipient of love letters? Take your pick.”
She laughed nervously.
“Drop it. I’m embarrassed.”
“Look.” He seduced her with a new idea. “I’ll drop it if you promise me one thing: that you’ll never forget this place.”
“Not this place or this moment.”
Paulina moved toward him, slowly. When she was close to him, she kissed him deeply and wildly.
A reader with a face reminiscent of a puppet, who had been leafing through Georges Simenon’s Maigret and the Yellow Dog, looked up from the page, glanced at them from the corner of his eye, and returned to Maigret’s investigation.
He was more interested in learning how dogs smell death before anyone else than in the impetuous kiss between two strangers.
Paulina noticed that, with Jean-Pierre by her side, the days went by quickly.
Just as they had on Saturday, they had met again on Sunday, at first with a polite caution, a respectful tact, almost an aristocratic refinement.
With a certain coldness, she might also say, on Jean-Pierre’s part, if it hadn’t been for the bouquet of flowers.
But as they spent more time together, she felt the hours and emotions piling on top of one another.
The calm faded, the intensity grew, and vibrations and conversations spun like a centrifuge inside her.
Jean-Pierre showed her new worlds and taught her things she didn’t know.
He captivated her with his words, his gestures, with a kind of old-fashioned courtesy that enveloped her, lifted her, transported her until she was floating.
He was more Marcello than Jean-Pierre. Or as much of one as of the other.
Or the exact sum of the two seductive men.
Paulina, who did not doubt her own charms but was no longer in the habit of making others fall in love, at times feared she might not be up for the task and had to hide.
“We could go to the movies this afternoon.”
“Is that what you want?”
“I’ve never been to a theater in Paris.”
“Well, here you have seats and a screen. They turn off the lights, and a man with a flashlight . . .”