The Virgin Blue (6 page)

One morning I was sitting in a café on the square, drinking coffee and reading the paper. Several other people were scattered among the tables. The proprietor passed among us, chatting and joking, handing out candy to the children. I had been there a few times; he and I were on nodding terms now but had not progressed to conversation. Give that about ten years, I thought sourly.

A few tables away, a woman younger than me sat with a five-month-old baby who was strapped into a car seat set on a chair, shaking a rattle. The woman wore tight jeans and had an irritating laugh. She soon got up and went inside. The baby didn't seem to notice she'd gone.

I concentrated on
Le Monde
. I was forcing myself to read the entire front page before I was allowed to touch the
International Herald Tribune
. It was like wading through mud: not just because of the language, but also all the names I didn't recognize, the political situations I knew nothing about. Even when I understood a story I wasn't necessarily interested in it.

I was ploughing through a piece about an imminent postal strike – a phenomenon I wasn't accustomed to in the States – when I heard a strange noise, or rather, silence. I looked up. The baby had stopped shaking the rattle and let it drop into his lap. His face began to crumple like a napkin being scrunched after a meal. Right, here comes the crying, I thought. I glanced into the café: his mother was leaning against the bar, talking on the phone and playing idly with a coaster.

The baby didn't cry: his face grew redder and redder, as if he were trying to but couldn't. Then he turned purple and blue in quick succession.

I jumped up, my chair falling backwards with a bang. ‘He's choking!’ I shouted.

I was only ten feet away but by the time I reached him a ring of customers had formed around him. A man was crouched in front of the baby, patting his blue cheeks. I tried to squeeze through but the proprietor, his back to me, kept stepping in front of me.

‘Hang on, he's choking!’ I cried. I was facing a wall of shoulders. I ran to the other side of the circle. ‘I can help him!’

The people I was pushing between looked at me, their faces hard and cold.

‘You have to pound him on the back, he's not getting any air.’

I stopped. I had been speaking in English.

The mother appeared, melting through the barricade of people. She began frantically hitting the baby's back, too hard, I thought. Everyone stood watching her in an eerie silence. I was wondering how to say ‘Heimlich manoeuvre’ in French when the baby suddenly coughed and a red candy lozenge shot out of his mouth. He gasped for air, then began to cry, his face going bright red again.

There was a collective sigh and the ring of people broke up. I caught the proprietor's eye; he looked at me coolly. I opened my mouth to say something, but he turned away, picked up his tray and went inside. I gathered up my newspapers and left without paying.

After that I felt uncomfortable in town. I avoided the café and the woman with her baby. I found it hard to look people in the eye. My French became less confident and my accent deteriorated.

Madame Sentier noticed immediately. ‘But what has happened?’ she asked. ‘You were progressing so well!’

An image of a ring of shoulders came to mind. I said nothing.

One day at the
boulangerie
I heard the woman ahead of me say she was on her way to ‘
la bibliothèque
’, gesturing as if it were just around the corner. Madame handed her a plastic-covered book; it was a cheap romance. I bought my baguettes and quiches in a rush, cutting short my awkward ritual conversation with Madame. I ducked out and trailed the other woman as she made her daily purchases around the square. She stopped to say hello to several people and argued with all the storekeepers while I sat on a bench in the square and kept an eye on her over my newspaper. She made stops on three sides of the square before abruptly entering the town hall on the last side. I folded my paper and raced after her, then found myself having to hover in the lobby examining wedding banns and planning permission notices while she laboured up a long flight of stairs. I took the stairs two at a time and slipped through the door after her. Shutting it behind me, I turned to face the first place in town that felt familiar.

The library had exactly that mixture of seediness and comforting quiet that made me love public libraries back home. Though it was small – only two rooms – it had high ceilings and several unshuttered windows, giving it an unusually airy feel for such an old building. Several people looked up from what they were doing to stare at me, but their attention was mercifully short and one by one they went back to reading or talking together in low voices.

I had a look around and then went to the main desk to apply for a library card. A pleasant, middle-aged woman in a smart olive suit told me I would need to bring in something with my French address on it as proof of residence. She also tactfully pointed me in the direction of a multi-volume French-English dictionary and a small English-language section.

The woman wasn't behind the desk the second time I visited the library; in her place a man stood talking on the phone, his sharp brown eyes focused on a point out in the square, a sardonic smile on his angular face. About my height, he was wearing black trousers and a white shirt without a tie, buttoned at the collar, sleeves rolled up above his elbows. A lone wolf. I smiled to myself: one to avoid.

I veered away from him and headed for the English-language section. It looked like some tourists had donated a sackful of vacation reading: it was full of thrillers and sex-and-shopping novels. There was also a good selection of Agatha Christie. I found one I hadn't read, then browsed in the French fiction section. Madame Sentier had recommended Françoise Sagan as a painless way to ease myself into reading in French; I chose
Bonjour Tristesse
. I started toward the front desk, glanced at the wolf behind it, then at my two frivolous books, and stopped. I went back to the English section, dug around and added
Portrait of a Lady
to my pile.

I dawdled for a while, poring over a copy of
Paris-Match
. Finally I carried my books up to the desk. The man behind it looked hard at me, made some mental calculation as he glanced at the books and, with the faintest smirk, said in English, ‘Your card?’

Damn you, I thought. I hated that sneering appraisal, the assumption that I couldn't speak French, that I looked so American.

‘I would like to apply for a card,’ I replied carefully in French, trying to pronounce the words without any trace of an American accent.

He handed me a form. ‘Fill out this,’ he commanded in English.

I was so annoyed that when I filled in the application I wrote down my last name as Tournier rather than Turner. I pushed the sheet defiantly toward him along with driver's licence, credit card and a letter from the bank with our French address on it. He glanced at the pieces of identification, then frowned at the sheet.

‘What is this “Tournier”?’ he asked, tapping his finger on my name. ‘It is Turner, yes? Like Tina Turner?’

I continued to answer in French. ‘Yes, but my family name was originally Tournier. They changed it when they moved to the United States. In the nineteenth century. They took out the “o” and the “i” so that the name would be more American.’ This was the one bit of family lore I knew and I was proud of it, but it was clear he wasn't impressed. ‘Lots of families changed their names when they emigrated —’ I trailed off and looked away from his mocking eyes.

‘Your name is Turner, so there must be Turner on the card, yes?’

I lapsed into English. ‘I – since I'm living here now I thought I'd start using Tournier.’

‘But you have no card or letter with Tournier on it, no?’

I shook my head and scowled at the stack of books, elbows clenched to my sides. To my mortification my eyes began to fill with tears. ‘Never mind, it's nothing,’ I muttered. Careful not to look at him, I scooped up the cards and letter, turned around and pushed my way out.

That night I opened the front door of our house to shoo away two cats fighting in the street and stumbled over the stack of books on the front step. The library card was sitting on top and was made out to Ella Tournier.

I stayed away from the library, stifling my urge to make a special trip to thank the librarian. I hadn't yet learned how to thank French people. When I was buying something they seemed to thank me too many times during the exchange, yet I always doubted their sincerity. It was hard to analyze the tone of their words. But the librarian's sarcasm had been undeniable; I couldn't imagine him accepting thanks with grace.

A few days after the card appeared I was walking along the road by the river and saw him sitting in a patch of sunlight in front of the café by the bridge, where I'd begun going for coffee. He seemed mesmerized by the water far below and I stopped, trying to decide whether or not to say something to him, wondering if I could pass by quietly so he wouldn't notice. He glanced up then and caught me watching him. His expression didn't change; he looked as if his thoughts were far away.

‘
Bonjour
,’ I said, feeling foolish.

‘
Bonjour
.’ He shifted slightly in his seat and gestured to the chair next to him. ‘
Café
?’

I hesitated. ‘
Oui, s'il vous plaît
,’ I said at last. I sat down and he nodded at the waiter. For a moment I felt acutely embarrassed and cast my eyes out over the Tarn so I wouldn't have to look at him. It was a big river, about 100 yards wide, green and placid and seemingly still. But as I watched I noticed there was a slow roll to the water; I kept my eyes on it and saw occasional flashes of a dark, rust-red substance boiling to the surface and then disappearing again. Fascinated, I followed the red patches with my eyes.

The waiter arrived with the coffee on a silver tray, blocking my view of the river. I turned to the librarian. ‘That red there in the Tarn, what is it?’ I asked in French.

He answered in English. ‘Clay deposits from the hills. There was a landslide recently that exposed the clay under the soil. It washes down into the river.’

My eyes were drawn back to the water. Still watching the clay I switched to English. ‘What's your name?’

‘Jean-Paul.’

‘Thank you for the library card, Jean-Paul. That was very nice of you.’

He shrugged and I was glad I hadn't made a bigger deal of it.

We sat without speaking for a long time, drinking our coffee and looking at the river. It was warm in the late May sun and I would have taken off my jacket but I didn't want him to see the psoriasis on my arms.

‘Why aren't you at the library?’ I asked abruptly.

He looked up. ‘It's Wednesday. Library's closed.’

‘Ah. How long have you worked there?’

‘Three years. Before that I was at a library in Nîmes.’

‘So that's your career? You're a librarian?’

He gave me a sideways look as he lit a cigarette. ‘Yes. Why do you ask?’

‘It's just – you don't seem like a librarian.’

‘What do I seem like?’

I looked him over. He was wearing black jeans and a soft salmon-coloured cotton shirt; a black blazer was draped over the back of his chair. His arms were tanned, the forearms densely covered with black hair.

‘A gangster,’ I replied. ‘Except you need sunglasses.’

Jean-Paul smiled slightly and let smoke trickle from his mouth so that it formed a blue curtain around his face. ‘What is it you Americans say? “Don't judge a book by its cover”.’

I smiled back. ‘
Touché
.’

‘So why are you here in France, Ella Tournier?’

‘My husband is working as an architect in Toulouse.’