19 We Have the Words We Deserve
We Have the Words We Deserve
“Are you sure it’s here? Rue de Seine?”
“Yes, yes,” the driver replied, rolling his window back up before pulling away.
Maybe Jean-Pierre was inside. Maybe the woman approaching the door, dressed head to toe in flamboyant prints, was his new partner. She didn’t want to think about it, though he would have had every right. Why name the gallery after her mother?
The woman—around fifty, a colorful sculpture in her own right—turned the key and opened.
“Bonjour. Come in.”
“Good morning.”
“We keep it locked, for security . . .”
“Oh—good morning.” Gina stepped inside with her suitcase. “I’m looking for Monsieur Jean-Pierre Zanardi.”
“On behalf of?”
Damn. What a question. Gina decided to tell the truth and go straight for it.
“I’m the daughter of a friend of his, from Barcelona, and I’ve brought him something.”
“I’m very sorry, then. Monsieur Jean-Pierre retired a few years ago.”
“Oh . . .”
“He transferred the gallery. We had always been drawn to this space, and we were lucky to be the first to make an offer. Would you like to look around? I’m sure you’ll like it.”
“No need, thank you. Everything’s beautiful. The place, the paintings, I can see that. But forgive me, would you know where I might be able to find him?”
“Oh . . . Not in Paris anymore. He went to . . . He said he would retire to . . . Just a moment, please.”
She called out to the back. “Marcel, où est-ce que Monsieur Zanardi est parti vivre?”
Marcel, dressed like a circus performer to match his wife, emerged from the storeroom and handed her a scrap of paper with Jean-Pierre’s new address.
Gina left so quickly that she never heard the new owners explain that the only contractual condition Jean-Pierre had imposed on them when selling the gallery was that the name Galerie Pauline be kept forever.
Gina rented a car with a full tank, put the suitcase and satchel in the back seat, and headed south.
With the help of a Coke and two vending-machine coffees, she reached Capbreton.
The seaside town, long emptied of summer visitors, had taken on a ghostly air that didn’t trouble her in her distracted state.
At five thirty, she climbed a hill at full throttle, curve after curve, toward a lookout with views over the bay and, not far from there, toward Jean-Pierre’s address.
She parked right in front. She stowed the suitcase out of sight, grabbed her satchel, and entered the grounds.
The door was open. No dog came out. It seemed deserted.
Only birdsong, from magnolias and cypresses, muffled the sound of the sea, and its heroic crashing against the rocks.
The freestanding house had a ground floor and two stories.
The windows must have looked out the back, over the water.
The main facade was peeling here and there from the damp.
Houses age at the pace of their owners, Gina thought.
The threshold sat one step above the doormat.
She stood there decisively, fingers crossed that luck wouldn’t pass her by.
After so many miles and detours, she was about to come face-to-face with her mother’s lover.
A black iron hedgehog used for scraping mud off shoes caught her eye.
Life hadn’t been all flights of fancy for the Frenchman.
She took a deep breath and rang the bell.
Inside, Jean-Pierre was dozing off with the television on, an episode of The Sopranos playing in the background.
“J’arrive!”
He set his pipe down in the ashtray and stood up with some difficulty, leaning his body to the side, pushing with his left hand off the armrest while almost dropping one knee to the floor in a practiced contortion.
Once upright, steady thanks to a balance honed by repetition, he took up a cane with a silver handle.
He walked toward the door in short steps but with as much momentum as he could muster, deftly nudging aside a few photography books that had collapsed into the hallway.
“I’m coming!” he called again, hoping whoever it was hadn’t grown tired of waiting and left. “Who could it be at this hour?”
On the other side of the doorway, Gina pulled her T-shirt down with both hands and adjusted the strap of her oversized satchel. She hated the way it pinched across her chest, a breast on each side. She rang again and, to pass the time, ran her foot over the worn spikes of the hedgehog.
“I’m coming, dammit,” he muttered. “Patience.”
She heard him right behind the door. She breathed out again. When the door opened, a blade of sunlight shot straight into the hall. They were momentarily dazzled. Before her stood a silver-haired man with healthy skin, standing elegantly with the aid of a cane.
“Jean-Pierre?”
She asked with hope on her lips, certain she had found him. He looked her up and down, narrowed his eyes, and exhaled, as if shedding three decades at once.
“No need to tell me who you are.” He smiled. “No need. You’re the spitting image of your mother.”
“Really?” She couldn’t hide her emotion. No one had ever said that to her before, and she felt it at the precise moment she needed it most.
“Come in. Avanti. You’re Gina . . .”
“Yes. Gina Homs. Pleased to meet you.”
She stepped inside, exchanged three kisses with him, and rested her head gently against his chest. He steadied himself and wrapped an arm around her shoulders in a paternal embrace.
She felt that he was strong at nearly eighty.
He must once have been very handsome. In truth, he still was.
She remembered that her cousins had shown her a picture from her Aunt Júlia and Alain’s wedding album in which Jean-Pierre appeared.
They said, “Look, this is him.” She, who couldn’t quite wrap her head around the idea that the man could have been her mother’s lover, had thought him an odd figure, wearing what looked like a baseball-style blazer, with visible seams crudely re-stitched in red thread.
According to the calculations she had made on the flight from Barcelona to Paris, he couldn’t have been older than in his seventies.
“Come in, please. I don’t have much to offer. But we can talk as long as you like. Come in and sit. I’d like to know about you.” Flustered by the unexpected visit, he added, “We’ll be better back there. What brings you here?”
“Curiosity, I suppose. I don’t really know.
The desire to meet you.” She slipped off the satchel, which was heavy as a mountain, and sat on a chesterfield sofa in the glass-walled room, a huge window over the Atlantic.
She understood at once that the tall motorized chair, the one whose back rose and fell and whose footrest slid out, was Jean-Pierre’s. “Are you sorry I came?”
“On the contrary. I’m only sorry you’re calling me vous, as if I were an old man. Tu, please . . . Tu, please.” He let himself drop into the chair as if everything hurt, and set the cane on the floor. “Tu, please.”
“All right. Tu, Jean-Pierre.”
“You’ve come from Barcelona, I imagine? Do you still live there?”
Gina was surprised that Jean-Pierre remembered her name, that he knew where—
“I still live there, yes. But I’ve just come from Paris. Let’s say the clues led me to the wrong place.”
“You went to Paris?” He turned off the television with a remote attached to the chair. Tony Soprano had just strangled Ralph Cifaretto on the kitchen floor.
“What do you think? I looked for you. I went to rue de Seine 44, to the Galerie Anouk, and, my first surprise, I see it’s called something else now.”
“Touché. So I’ve been caught.”
“And now . . .”
“Does it bother you?”
“What? That your gallery has my mother’s name? Galerie Pauline. Please.”
“It isn’t mine anymore.”
“They told me.”
“I sold it. They kept the name. A sign of good taste.” He didn’t feel like talking about a closed chapter. “Really, what would you like to drink?”
He pointed her toward the kitchen. Gina went to the fridge for a pitcher of water and brought it back with two glasses.
She was parched from the drive. She told him she’d rented a Renault on boulevard Raspail and, hypnotized by the GPS, had reached Capbreton in six hours.
She spoke while looking around, left and right, taking in Jean-Pierre’s house.
Jean-Pierre, on alert, unsure where his visitor might be going with all this, took refuge in his pipe.
It appeared that he lived alone. There were no traces of family.
It was the house of a sage, or a widower, or someone with taste who lived there year-round.
It was not, in any case, a summer house.
Neither the house nor the man had been abandoned.
They had simply grown old together. There were books everywhere.
Gina had never seen so many in one place.
The shelves ran from baseboard to ceiling.
There were also books of every size and subject piled on tables, and even stacks on the floor, so lopsided they survived only because of the lack of movement.
One thing didn’t fit. The walls were empty.
She did not see a single painting in the whole house.
Nowhere. Not one frame. What a surprise.
From the chesterfield she still couldn’t spot a single one—figurative or abstract—as if all the art had stayed behind in Paris.
In front of her, beyond the magnificent bay window, only the autumn blue of the ocean was painted.
“Here. I brought you this.” Gina, decided, placed three letters on his knees. “Do you recognize them?”
“You have them?”
“Aunt Julie kept them, in a box. We found them when . . .”
“Oh. Then I’m glad you have them. Did you read them?”
“Thirty, forty times.”
“Are you joking?”
“It’s perfect. I put together the whole story from your three letters. I don’t know if there are more.”
“Your mother only replied to the first. I have it upstairs. I’ve read it fifty or sixty times . . .”
“You win,” Gina said. They laughed. “I wasn’t trying to compete . . .”