10 In the Shadow of Notre-Dame #3
“You were there when there was a conversation about Chariots of Fire at the wedding, right? I don’t think so.
It just came out. Some people have already seen it and loved it.
They said it was really good and that no doubt it’ll win all the Oscars: for best picture, screenplay, cinematography, costume design.
They said the music should win an award. Or do you have a better plan?”
“I have only one plan: Spend time with you.”
Jean-Pierre had done it again with his silver tongue.
He picked up a copy of Libération from a kiosk, opened it up to check the movie times, and put it back before the vendor, who was counting the days to his retirement, could so much as bat an eyelid.
“If we hurry, we can make it to the Gaumont theaters on boulevard des Capucines. It’s right by the opera.”
Paulina hadn’t expected there to be a line.
Had she been with her husband, they would have already turned around or picked another movie rather than endure that snaking line that went down to the corner.
Manuel could not stand being cut in front of, and was always suspicious someone was trying to do it.
In fact, they probably hadn’t gone to the theater at all since Gina had been born.
At most, they watched a movie on the living room sofa on a Saturday night. One of them always fell asleep.
There weren’t many seats left when they entered the dark movie theater, and they had to sit farther to the front than they would have liked.
By the time they found their seats, the British athletes were already running barefoot along the beach, dressed in an impeccable white.
The Scotsman Eric Liddell, a devout Protestant who trusted more in his prayer than his own legs, refused to run on a Sunday at the 1924 Olympic Games, held there in Paris, against the English Harold Abrahams, a Jewish man who held all the records.
It was a cinematic duel that might have seemed like it was about sports from the poster, but was actually about religion and culture.
“The music really is good,” Jean-Pierre whispered.
Paulina didn’t respond. She had been taught not to speak at the movies, and this was sacred to her. She was concentrating hard on the film, with its time shifts, which were even trickier in a language that wasn’t her own.
Jean-Pierre reached for her hand after the two runners raced Trinity College’s Great Court Run before the clock struck noon.
He caressed her fingers for a little while.
Then he rested his hand on Paulina’s, which rested on her jeans.
She noticed that he even traced the outline of her wedding ring like it was nothing.
Had he noticed her wearing it? Was he passing his fingers over it as a way of saying he didn’t care?
Then, as if afraid someone might see them, they unfolded their arms and dropped their clasped hands between the seats, locking their fingers like an anchor.
They held hands tightly. Neither of them wanted to let go before the movie ended.
They were happy together, touching, sensing each other. Skin against skin.
“Did you like it?”
Jean-Pierre assumed the no-talking rule had been lifted once the credits rolled. Eyes still on the screen, Paulina took a while to answer. She turned and looked him in the eyes.
“A lot. And I really liked watching it with you.”
It wasn’t until then, when the theater lights came on, that they let go of each other’s hands.
They had dinner at Brasserie Lipp, also on boulevard Saint-Germain, on the opposite side of the church and Les Deux Magots, the onion soup café from the night before.
Lipp was perhaps the brasserie par excellence, the place that never went out of style.
Its kitchen stayed open until two in the morning, ideal hours for politicians, artists, and other scoundrels fond of conspiring.
Jean-Pierre and Paulina entered without a reservation shortly before eight, according to the train-station clock hanging on two chains in the dining room.
The restaurant had been founded in the nineteenth century by an Alsatian who had come to Paris to make his fortune and succeeded.
Léonard Lipp quickly became renowned for his sauerkraut and beer, and the restaurant carried on this specialty more than a hundred years later.
It might have looked like any ordinary restaurant from the outside, but once you passed through the revolving door, it was a paradise of sounds and smells, amplified by the large mirrors covering every wall.
Jean-Pierre, whose pipe rested in a pocket of his blazer, made Pau enter ahead of him—out of gallantry, but primarily as not to block her first view of the place.
The floor was a checkerboard of large gleaming squares.
The rectangular tables, barely a hand’s breadth and a half wide, were so close together the waiters had to pull one out entirely to let a customer reach the brown moleskin bench next to the wall.
There was no more than two fingers’ width of space between each table, the exact amount needed to set a clean linen tablecloth after each meal.
“Should we share a chateaubriand with béarnaise sauce?”
“I won’t eat much, but that’s perfect. I’m not too hungry.” Nerves always manifested in Paulina’s stomach.
The annoyingly sweet waiter took their order in a scribble that the kitchen could probably only decipher due to long practice.
Even in the nice June weather, all the waiters wore suit coats, vests, and black bow ties in the darkest black shade.
They wore a perfectly ironed white apron over their pants that hung down from their waists to their ankles.
Paulina was surprised at how sharp, straight, and impeccably folded the crease line was.
She would have to mention it to Isabel, who never ironed so meticulously at home.
“Look.” Paulina pointed at the little sign on the table in front of them. “You’ll have to restrain yourself here.”
The scent of perfumed tobacco bothers most of our clients.
Pipe Smokers,
please no smoking in this establishment.
“I don’t smoke perfumed tobacco.” He finished reading the sign. “Haven’t you noticed I don’t smell like a Dutch sailor?”
“You’re right. Your pipe doesn’t smell like pipe smoke.”
She responded that way even though what she really wanted to say was You always smell wonderful.
“I smoke fine-cut tobacco. It’s not pipe tobacco, but I like it better. It doesn’t make my tongue sting. In any case”—Jean-Pierre signaled toward the sign with his eyebrow—“don’t worry, I won’t smoke. I don’t usually smoke while I eat.”
“One day, mark my words, smoking won’t be permitted in restaurants.”
“You think so? It’s part of the business.”
“People will be able to taste their food better. And I think our clothes won’t reek of . . .”
“Impossible. Who’s going to outlaw it? No one would dare.”
“You should know when my father was young, he once said one day people would sell bottled water, and everyone thought he was crazy.”
“What a visionary.”
“I’m telling you now on Sunday, June 14, 1981, that one day they’ll outlaw smoking. We might not live to see the day.”
Voilà!
The meat, cut up and red, was brought on a silver platter. It came with french fries, four spears of asparagus, and a hot béarnaise sauce, with its aromatic scent of butter, shallot, and the seventeen spices of happiness.
They unfolded the giant napkins and placed them on their laps.
Jean-Pierre liked enormous napkins; Paulina liked well-set tables.
She amused herself with the play of mirrors; he explained to her that all those mosaics of painted tiles decorating the restaurant, dominated by greens and yellows, were by Fargue, a master ceramicist of Paris who had .
. . Paulina interrupted him. The images the mosaics depicted weren’t very Alsatian: bamboo, palm trees, and parrots hiding between modernist lamps that illuminated the tables.
Their white lights that did not conceal the saignant chateaubriand, cooked perfectly.
Focused on the steak, the sides, and the company, they didn’t notice that a decadent cupid painted on the ceiling, hidden behind one of the seven wrought-iron lamps, was pointing an arrow at them.
“Why do you love butterflies so much?”
“Don’t you?”
“I do, very much. But I don’t collect . . .”
“Because they fly high, because they fly far. Because the more you look at them, the more fascinating they become. Because they are miracles of nature. Because they come and go. Because when they flutter around you, even for just a moment, those seconds are magical. Because . . .”
He could have listed a thousand more reasons, both poetic and prosaic.
He would have liked to explain why he traveled the world hunting for butterfly books he still didn’t have in his collection, but the attentive waiter slid out the adjacent table, table number seven, so two elderly ladies could slide in.
The ladies were so old and so decked out in jewels that their earrings served as counterweights to their canes to keep them from tipping over.
“Why did they take down the photo of Picasso?” asked one of the ladies as soon as she sat on the bench.
“No, Madame Rentz, it’s in its usual place,” the waiter replied to the ninety-year-old woman. “There, you see it? It’s hanging at the foot of the stairs.”
The two ladies squinted to focus on the faraway item.
If they couldn’t even make out the frame, they sure couldn’t see the photo.
The waiter took it down from the wall and brought it to their table.
Jean-Pierre and Paulina could not help but look at the black-and-white image that the waiter, holding it from behind, rested on the ladies’ tablecloth.
“So now you see it!” said the overly made-up nonagenarian.
“See what?” replied her friend, from the same vintage.
“That Picasso is smoking.”