The Ingredients of Love (4 page)

“No, definitely not.”

“Then take care of yourself.”

“I will.” I pressed my lips together and nodded my head a couple of times. This was the second man in twenty-four hours who'd told me to take care of myself. I raised my hand briefly, turned round, and leaned with my elbows on the parapet. I gave my full attention to studying the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, which rose like a medieval spaceship from the darkness at the end of the Île de la Cité.

I heard someone clear his throat behind me. I tensed my back and then turned slowly to face the street once more.

“Yes?” I said.

“Which is it then?” he asked, and grinned like George Clooney in the Nespresso commercial. “Mademoiselle or madame?”

Oh. My. God. I just wanted to be miserable in peace, and a policeman was flirting with me.

“Mademoiselle, what else?” I responded, and decided to take flight. The bells of Notre-Dame rang out toward me, and I walked quickly over the bridge to the Île Saint-Louis.

Many people say that this little island in the Seine, directly behind the much larger Île de la Cité and reachable only by means of bridges, is the heart of Paris. But that heart beats very, very slowly. I very rarely went there, and every time I did I was surprised anew by the calm that reigns in that district.

As I turned into the Rue Saint-Louis, the main street lined with peaceful little shops and restaurants, I saw from the corner of my eye that a tall, slim figure was following me at a respectable distance. My guardian angel was not giving up. What was this man thinking anyway? That I was going to try again at the next bridge?

I speeded up until I was almost running and then tore open the door of the first shop that still had its lights on. It was a little bookshop, and as I stumbled in I would never have thought that this step would change my life forever.

At first I thought that there was no one in the shop, but in fact it was so packed with books, bookshelves, and tables that I did not see the owner, who was standing at the end of the room with his head bent forward behind an old-fashioned counter stacked precariously with piles of books. He was deep in contemplation of an illustrated volume, turning the pages with extreme care. He looked so peaceful standing there with his wavy, silver-gray hair and his half-moon reading glasses that I hardly dared to disturb him. I paused for a moment in this cocoon of warmth and yellowish light, and my heart began to beat more calmly. I carefully risked a glance outside. Through the window, which was inscribed in faded gold letters
LIBRAIRIE CAPRICORNE PASCAL FERMIER
,
I saw my guardian angel standing, earnestly examining the display.

I sighed involuntarily, and the old bookseller looked up from his book and stared at me in surprise, then pushed his spectacles up.

“Ah …
bonsoir, mademoiselle
—I didn't hear you coming in,” he said in a friendly way, and his kind face with his intelligent eyes and delicate smile reminded me of a picture of Marc Chagall in his studio. Except that this man wasn't holding a brush in his hand.

“Bonsoir, monsieur,”
I answered in some embarrassment. “Forgive me, I didn't mean to startle you.”

“Not at all,” he said, raising his hands. “It's just that I thought I'd locked the door.” He looked over at the door, where a bunch of keys was hanging from the lock, and shook his head. “I'm starting to get a bit forgetful.”

“Then you're actually already closed?” I asked, taking a step forward and hoping that the guardian angel outside the window would finally fly away.

“Take your time and look around, mademoiselle. There's no hurry.” He smiled. “Are you looking for anything in particular?”

I'm looking for someone to really love me, I answered to myself. I'm running away from a policeman who thinks I want to jump off a bridge, and I'm pretending that I want to buy a book. I'm thirty-two years old and I've lost my umbrella. I wish something nice would happen to me for a change.

My stomach rumbled audibly. “No … no, nothing in particular,” I said quickly. “Just something … nice.” I went red. Now he probably thought I was an ignoramus whose powers of expression were exhausted by the meaningless little word “nice.” I hoped that my words had at least drowned out my stomach's rumblings.

“Would you like a cookie?” asked Monsieur Chagall.

He held a silver dish of shortbread out under my nose, and after a short moment's hesitation, I took one gratefully. There was something consoling about the sweet cookie, and it calmed my stomach immediately.

“Do you know, I haven't eaten properly today,” I explained as I chewed. Unfortunately I'm one of those uncool people who always feel obliged to explain everything.

“It happens,” said Monsieur Chagall, without commenting on my embarrassment. “Over there”—he pointed at a table piled with novels—“you may well find what you're looking for.”

And I really did! A quarter of an hour later I left the Librairie Capricorne with an orange paper bag with a unicorn printed on it.

“A good choice,” Monsieur Chagall had said as he wrapped the book, which had been written by a young Englishman and was called, pleasantly enough,
The Smiles of Women.

“You'll like this.”

I'd nodded and, red-faced, fumbled for the money. I hardly managed to conceal my amazement, which Monsieur Chagall probably thought was an attack of excessive anticipation of the pleasures of reading as he locked the shop door behind me.

I breathed in deeply and looked down the empty street. My new policeman friend had given up his surveillance. The probability that someone who bought a book would subsequently throw themselves from a bridge over the Seine was obviously very small from a statistical point of view.

But that was not the reason for my surprise, which gradually developed into excitement, causing me to walk much faster and then, with thumping heart, to take a taxi.

On the very first page of the book, which I was pressing to my heart in its pretty orange wrapping like a precious treasure, there was a sentence that bewildered me, aroused my curiosity—electrified me:

The story I would like to tell begins with a smile. It ends in a little restaurant with the auspicious name “Le Temps des Cerises,” which is in Saint-Germain-des-Près, where the heart of Paris beats.

It was to be the second night that I went without sleep. But this time it wasn't a cheating lover who robbed me of my rest but—who would have thought it of a woman who was anything but a passionate reader?—a book! A book that enchanted me from the very first sentences. A book that was sometimes sad, and at other times so funny that I had to laugh out loud. A book that was both beautiful and mysterious, because even if you read a lot of novels you will rarely come across one in which your own little restaurant plays a major role and the heroine is described in such a way that you seem to be seeing yourself in a mirror—even on a day when you're very happy and everything is going well!

When I got home, I hung my wet things over the radiator and slipped into a fresh white nightdress. I brewed a big pot of tea, made myself a couple of sandwiches, and listened to my answering machine. Bernadette had tried to reach me three times, and apologized for trampling on my feelings “with all the sensitivity of an elephant.”

I had to smile when I heard her message: “Listen, Aurélie, if you want to feel sad about that creep, then feel sad, but please don't be mad at me any longer—get in touch. I'm thinking about you such a lot.”

My resentment had evaporated a long time ago. I put the tray with the tea, the sandwiches, and my favorite cup on the rattan table next to my saffron yellow sofa, thought for a moment, and then sent my friend a text:

Dear Bernadette, it's so awful when you are right. Do you want to come over Wednesday morning? Looking forward to seeing you. I'm off to sleep now.
Bises,
Aurélie!

The bit about sleeping was a fib, of course, but everything else was true. I got the paper bag from the Librairie Capricorne off the bureau in the hall, and put it down carefully beside the tray. I had a peculiar feeling, as even then I sensed that this was going to be my very own lucky bag.

I restrained my curiosity for a while longer. First of all, I drank my tea in tiny sips, then I ate the sandwiches, and finally I got up once more and fetched my woolen blanket from the bedroom.

It was as if I wished to delay the start of the actual business of the moment.

And then, finally, I unwrapped the book from the paper and opened it.

If I were now to claim that the hours that followed seemed to fly by, that would only be half the truth. In actual fact I was so immersed in the book that I could not even have said if it was one or three or six hours that had passed. That night I lost all sense of time—I entered into the novel like the main characters in
Orphée,
that old black-and-white Jean Cocteau film, which I had once seen with my father when I was a child. Except that I didn't go through a mirror after pressing it with the palm of my hand, but through the cover of a book.

Time stretched out, contracted, and then vanished completely.

I was beside the young Englishman who ends up in Paris because of his Francophile colleague's passion for skiing (compound fracture of the leg in Verbier). He works for the Austin Motor Company and is now tasked with establishing the Mini Cooper in France in the place of the marketing manager, who will be unable to work for some months. The problem: His knowledge of French is as rudimentary as his experience of the French, and he hopes—in total ignorance of the French national character—that everyone in Paris (at least the people in the firm's Paris branch) understands the language of the Empire and will cooperate with him.

He is outraged not only by the adventurous driving style of Parisian drivers—who try to force six lanes of traffic into a two-lane carriageway, have not the slightest interest in what is happening behind them, and abridge the driving school's golden rule of “mirror, signal, maneuver” to its final element—but also by the fact that the dyed-in-the-wool Frenchman doesn't get his dents and scratches repaired and is totally unaffected by advertising slogans such as “Mini—it's like falling in love,” because he would rather make love to women than to cars.

He invites attractive Frenchwomen to dinner, and then almost has a fit as, with a cry of
“Ah, comme j'ai faim!”
they order the entire (expensive) menu but then pick at their
salade au chèvre
a few times, take four forkfuls of
boeuf bourguignon
and two teaspoons of the
crème brûlée,
before dropping their cutlery charmingly in the remains of all that cuisine.

No Frenchman has ever heard of standing in a queue, and no one here talks about the weather. Why should they? There are far more interesting topics. And hardly any taboos. They want to know why, in his mid-thirties, he still has no children (“Really, none at all? Not even one? Zero?”); what he thinks of American policy in Afghanistan or child labor in India; whether the hemp and Styrofoam artworks by Vladimir Wroscht in the Galerie La Borg aren't
très hexagonale
(he knows neither the artist nor the gallery—nor even the meaning of the word “
hexagonale
”); if he's satisfied with his sex life and where he stands on the subject of women dying their pubic hair.

In other words: Our hero moves from one tight spot to another.

He is an English gentleman who doesn't really like talking. And all of a sudden he has to discuss everything. In all possible and impossible places. At work, in the café, in the elevator (four floors are enough for a discussion of car burnings in the
banlieue,
the Paris suburbs), in the gentlemen's toilet (“Is globalization a good or a bad thing?”), and, of course, in the taxi, since French taxi drivers, unlike their London counterparts, have an opinion on every subject (which they also make known), and their passenger is not permitted to sit quietly keeping his thoughts to himself.

He has to
say
something!

In the end the Englishman puts up with it all with British good humor. And when, after many twists and turns, he falls head over heels in love with Sophie, a delightful and somewhat capricious girl, British understatement comes up against French complexity, leading at first to all kinds of misunderstandings and complications.

Until everything finally ends up in a wonderful
entente cordiale.
If not in a Mini, at least in a little French restaurant called Le Temps des Cerises. With red-and-white-checked tablecloths. In the Rue Princesse.

My restaurant!
There was no doubt about it.

I closed the book. It was six in the morning, and I once more believed that love was possible. I had read 320 pages and was not the least bit tired. The novel had been like an extremely exhilarating trip to another world—and yet that world seemed strangely familiar to me.

If an Englishman could describe a restaurant that, unlike La Coupole or the Brasserie Lipp, for example, doesn't crop up in every travel guide, and portray it so exactly, then he must actually have been there.

And if the heroine of his novel looked just like you—even down to the slinky dark green silk dress that was hanging in your wardrobe and the pearl necklace with the big oval cameo that you'd been given for your eighteenth birthday, then that was either a massive coincidence—or that man must have seen that woman at some time.

But if
that woman,
on one of the most miserable days of her life, chose
this very book
out of hundreds of others in a bookshop, then that was no longer a coincidence. It was fate itself speaking to me. But what was it trying to say?

Pensive, I turned the book over and stared at the photo of a likeable-looking man with short blond hair and blue eyes, sitting on a bench in some English park or other, his arm slung carelessly over the back of the seat, and smiling at me.