19 We Have the Words We Deserve #2
“We agreed we’d write as long as she wanted. Do you want to know?”
“Of course.” Why do you think I came? she thought.
“I sent the letter through Julie, your aunt. She read it to her, I suppose by phone, and if Pauline wanted, she replied directly to me. That was the arrangement. The first letter, she answered, in the heat of the moment. After that, she didn’t answer anymore.
When a year had passed since we’d met, I wrote again, but there were no more signs of life, and I thought that, for whatever reason, she no longer wanted to continue. ”
“Can I tell you something?” Gina chose her words carefully. “The second letter, the one that was also in Aunt Julie’s box, Julie never even opened it. The envelope was perfectly sealed. It’s not that my mother didn’t read it. It’s that Aunt Julie didn’t even open it.”
“I understand . . .” He forced himself to be steady. “Pauline must have asked her not to open it, not to read it to her . . .”
“Then why didn’t she tear it up or throw it away?”
“I don’t know. Maybe because one day, who knows, with time, Pauline would want to read it. But she didn’t have time. Or perhaps in case you, later, might want to read it.”
“You think?”
“I don’t know. But that’s how it happened. In the end, we all have the words we deserve.”
“Do you want them?” Gina glanced at the letters. “They’re yours.”
“Thank you, Gina. I know perfectly well what they say. You can keep them . . . I have enough with your mother’s.”
“The letter you sent Aunt Julie when my mother died is honestly the most tender thing I’ve ever read, Jean-Pierre.”
“It’s easy to write passionately when someone you love dies.”
He handed the letters back with a polite gesture and took a sip of water.
He could have recited word for word the two letters he’d sent Pauline.
He remembered nothing of the letter about her death addressed to Julie.
He had no desire to. It had been a long time since he’d gulped down an entire glass.
“You know, you asked me earlier what brought me here.” Gina got up and continued, her eyes on the horizon.
“Deep down, I think it’s . . . I don’t know .
. . the need to know my mother. I don’t know who she was, I don’t know what she was like.
Everyone has their own tragedy. And maybe this is mine.
From the letters Aunt Julie kept, I know my mother loved you above everything, and I need you to tell me how she lived, how she felt, how she thought . . .”
“I only knew her for one long weekend.” The pipe gave him time to think twice before saying it. “Have you asked your father?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
Gina turned so she wouldn’t be speaking with her back to him. Some things must be said looking someone in the eye.
“It feels like those four days with you contained more life than ten years with my father.”
“I wouldn’t get ahead of myself.” He bought time, pressing down the tobacco with his little finger.
“Your mother loved me, yes. Very much. As much as I loved her. But . . . how do I say this without it sounding like a reproach, because it isn’t.
Look . . . We never spoke of it, your mother and I, but I’ve often wondered why we didn’t take the step to be together. Why we didn’t, if we were dying to.”
Now it was Gina’s turn to be left with her mouth agape. She began to sense what Jean-Pierre was about to say.
“I had only things to gain. She had things to gain and things to lose.”
“But . . .”
“I was single, I lived alone, and I had nothing to lose. She had you. If your mother didn’t take that step, let me phrase it this way, it was because of you. I’m sure of it.”
“I don’t want that burden on my conscience.”
“It’s not a reproach. Not to you or to Pauline, not at all.
I don’t want you to misunderstand me. I loved and love Pauline as if we’d lived together from the night we met.
But if you wanted to know what your mother was like, the woman who died when you were nine, here is your answer.
This was your mother. And you can be very proud. ”
Jean-Pierre didn’t expect Gina not to react after saying that. No cold, no heat. He was surprised to see her bend down silently, take the enormous satchel from beside the chair, and pull out a parcel. The day’s surprises weren’t over.
“This is for you . . .”
A gift. A book wrapped in marbled paper. For what?
“You shouldn’t have,” he said, careful not to tear the sticker from a Venetian bookshop.
“I knew you wouldn’t have this one . . .” She settled back into the chesterfield. “Though it’s not as if you lack any books here . . .”
“Everyone has a hobby. Someone said we are what we’ve lived, but we are also the books we’ve read. And sometimes the ones we’ve only leafed through, because you can’t read everything. We would need three lives to read it all. I claim the right to skip pages.”
He unwrapped it with clumsy hands, trying not to rip the glossy paper.
“Ah. Atlas di Farfalle del Mondo. Wonderful. Thank you very much.”
“You’ll immediately say you already have it, or you have it in another language . . .”
“No, no, not at all,” he lied, the way only the French and salesmen can lie.
“I’m sure you have it,” Gina said. “But I don’t care. I’m sure you don’t have exactly”—she emphasized the next words—“this copy. There’s a mystery hidden in it, and you have to give me two minutes to explain.”
“Whatever you like. We’re in no hurry, are we?”
“Do you know what my mother did in the last year before she died?”
Jean-Pierre stopped looking through the book and looked up to listen. For decades he’d asked himself that same question.
“My mother dedicated herself to traveling. More than a year. With my father or without him, she’d get on a plane to go and visit bookshops.
If my father went for work, fine. If not, she went straight ahead alone, because my father never liked flying.
I was very small, so I stayed home with Isabel, the maid, the caregiver, I don’t know what you call her here.
My mother went, as if taking inventory, to what she believed were the ten best bookshops in the world.
We know she was in Glasgow, Buenos Aires, Boston, London, Venice, and who knows where else.
She collected bookshops, but she came back without books.
How is that possible? Why did she go? Why did she come back with her hands in her pockets?
” Jean-Pierre listened, his eyes wide as saucers, as Gina continued, carried away.
“It took me a long time to figure it out. I had to travel too, and I spoke to a contact in London, to find out, and in the end I did. This is not just any book. It’s not just another butterfly book.
I found it at Acqua Alta in Venice, a secondhand bookshop. Do you know it?”
“Yes, yes . . .” He was transfixed by the story.
“My mother went to all those bookshops with a single objective. She looked for butterfly books and, inside, secretly, without anyone seeing her, she left one of her business cards. A personal calling card. From our home.”
He was silent. His eyes teared up.
“In some places she wrote ‘Call me’ in her handwriting. In others she wrote nothing, just the card with her name, address, and telephone. And so, one by one, book by book, shop by shop, she placed her cards in the butterfly books of the world’s great bookshops. Why did my mother do that?”
“I can’t believe it . . .”
“To send you signs. To say to you: ‘Hello, my love, I’m here and I’m thinking of you.’ To surprise you. To prove her love.”
“My God . . .” He wiped his eyes with both hands. “My God, Pauline.”
“Did you never find one?”
He shook his head like a child furious about a punctured ball.
“Even today, surely, there are books out in the world with my mother’s cards inside.
She knew you traveled everywhere to find and buy rare butterfly books, and she had the secret hope that one day, in some secondhand bookshop, in some corner of the world, you would open a book to any page at all and discover that she had performed magic. ”
“That is . . .” He was astonished, stunned, shaken. “. . . Magnificent.”
“I bought this one for you in Venice. You can’t imagine how my heart jumped when I picked up the book, ran my fingers through it like this, and the proof of my mother’s love fell out. If it made me that happy . . .”
Jean-Pierre hurried to turn the atlas upside down so the message from his beloved Pauline would drop into his lap.
A proof of love. He cried and laughed at the same time.
He would have felt ridiculous with anyone else there, but not with Gina, Pauline’s daughter.
Not in that moment, which justified an entire life.
“I thought I had to buy it and bring it to you.”
“Look.” The card fell from the atlas and fluttered in a zigzag, like a butterfly, onto his lap. He couldn’t stop laughing, his cheeks still wet with tears. “How did you ever think of such a thing? How did you ever think of it, my dearest, most beloved Pauline?”
Silence arrived all at once in Capbreton.
Biting her lip, her eyes blurred with emotion, Gina respected Jean-Pierre’s nostalgia.
With the book open on his lap and Pauline’s card in his hands, he seemed transported back to those four spring days that had made all his barriers collapse.
You saved my life, he wrote in one letter.
Gina began to understand how her mother could have fallen in love with this sensitive and cultured man, who still carried charm in every wrinkle.
Twenty minutes later—facing each other without a word, understanding everything—Jean-Pierre closed the atlas and slipped the card inside with exquisite care, as if it were a sacred marker. He set it on the small table and picked up a black leather pouch with a zipper.
“Will you stay a few days?” he asked, already beginning to tease the tobacco loose with his fingers.
“Tomorrow I have to return the car at Bordeaux airport.”