We All Ran into the Sunlight (13 page)

Paris was the mountain. The well-spring of immigrant violence came from that mountain and trickled down through the rest of the country, reaching various troubled industrial cities where it swirled under the bridges and went again, thinning out through the rest of France, where most people tended to live quietly with log-burning fires and family meals and some people, right out in the middle, couldn’t yet read. By the time it got to the Pyrenees, you wouldn’t know much about it; only a trickle of
something
cold and wet that leaked into conversation in the dining room but was nothing that couldn’t be muffled in a glass of something at the bar or mopped up with a beautiful new towel. If you kept yourself clear of the daily news, and you didn’t go into the
banlieue
, you probably wouldn’t know much about it. When it all came down to it, most people wanted peace and tranquility; they wanted to work an honest day and sleep, to eat with their children and come to these mountains to ski. They wanted as much of the bounty of niceties as their circumstances would
allow
. Baseema had put the bath towels she had ordered in all of the bathrooms now. They were white and fluffy and folded on a heated shelf. She had taken the delivery
herself
, out in the cold driveway this morning, from the man who complained about the roads. It was March. There was unemployment. In Paris there were labour protest riots. In the
banlieue
the immigrants were still torching cars. But that was Paris. And Baseema felt no connection to the city or to her roots. It was only Lollo who knew and liked to remind her.
Maghreb
, he would murmur when she made a sauce that was too piquant. Baseema ignored her husband when he said such things. She ignored him quite a lot these days and left him on his hateful sofa while she busied herself with the tasks that were required of her as hotel manager. Each morning she pulled on a clean turtleneck and coiled the thick length of her silvery hair into a neat bun at her neck. One of the chefs said that Baseema was like a swan.

Lollo felt she was up herself and by this he meant aloof. He said his wife had taught herself the pragmatism that comes with a certain inner desolation. She was cool on the inside. Which kept her calm. But Baseema was an intelligent woman who’d found it was easier, as she got older, to find the end of a thought, and leave it there. She had begun to feel that there were sinkholes in her memory. She saw what it was like in the blind man’s paintings – the man who came to eat from time to time in the restaurant at the hotel, who painted people without faces. He did little sculptures too and she kept a few of them beside the till. Even the sculptures didn’t have faces, they had been smudged out – a thumb pressed into the clay – making a splodge of what used to be a nose, the pinprick of an eye. Baseema loved these smudged-out empty faces, for all that they kept private and unexplained. Memory was a fickle thing. Who could tell for certain what had happened and what was real when so much depended on perception and the storing of data in the fly-by-night filing system of the mind?

In many ways it was remarkable what she had done; how she had managed to draw a line between the life she had led there in the village and the years she had been here, high up in the mountains, working in a place that clung to the edge of a flinty outcrop – only snow in the winter, and trees. It suited her. It went with the
detachment
. She was good (she had always been good) at rolling up her sleeves, pressing on, not stopping to wonder much, to analyse or peer. Feeling led, more often than not, to nothing but pain, which was a hindrance and to be
avoided
as much as possible at all times.

Which was why, when she received emails like these at her desk from Sylvie, she didn’t trouble herself with
images
of her daughter sitting, shoulders hunched, her freckly face pockmarked and glistening in the light of the screen. Sylvie had gone back to the village because she wanted to. For a long time now she had been there living her life with a face that was quite unspeakable. What else could she do? From his sofa, Lollo had looked at the photograph of his children when Frederic was seven and Sylvie almost six and cried. But what could they really know about how Sylvie was managing these days? Humans had their own ways of coping and Baseema felt it was wrong to pry into someone else’s way of doing things and patronise their attempts to get on. It would be the worst possible
indiscretion
to impose her own feelings on the beret that Sylvie wore to hide the scars on the right side of her face and the drooping eye – the only structural reminder of the steel girder she had worn to hold the pieces of her face together in that hospital in Toulouse.

Instead Baseema thought, without sentimentality, of the length and thickness of Sylvie’s hair. She thought of the window boxes of bright geranium, and the house on the square. She was well liked in the village, and the dog – whose name was Coco – brought her companionship and warmth without the stress of a human relationship that Baseema supposed her daughter was too vulnerable to bear.

Baseema smiled to the young man in the burgundy scarf making his enquiries at the desk. Her hand moved the mouse onto print while she kept her eyes on her guest. Inside the mechanism something clicked, the light flashed blue.

It was white out; snow had been falling on these mountains for three days. Tiny flakes of snow dancing, as if someone grand had opened a compact of loose silvery powder and shaken it over the hotel. It was a good thing to have it, though, because the season hadn’t been a good one and the slopes were much in need of a little fluffing here and there.

Baseema’s gaudy bracelets chattered about her wrist as she slid the local magazine across the desk.

‘There’s a lovely concert in town, Monsieur. For Easter. This will tell you everything. It’s candlelit. They begin at five. They sing to start with in the dark. Then all the candles come on. It is quite enchanting.’

‘But is there somewhere in town I can buy a
newspaper
?’

‘We’ve got an art exhibition too, Monsieur. A local artist, he paints these mountains, both in summer and winter. Lovely abstract paintings. I could draw you a map.’

‘That’s ok,’ he said. ‘Maybe later. But I’m a journalist and it would be good to have the papers delivered while I’m here. I’m covering the riots in Paris. I guess there’s an internet connection in the room but still it would be great, you know, to have the actual papers.’

Baseema folded her hands in front of her stomach. She smiled.

‘Many of our guests ask not to be given a newspaper, Monsieur. Not be shown anything that resembles anything close to a newspaper. We provide refuge, you see, from the noise of the world. It’s a peaceful place. Space and
comfort
. Far from the chatter and madness.’ She smiled. Her voice was soft and clear. ‘People come with their loved ones. To get close, you see? To walk and ski, to eat well. We have a pool. It lights up in the evening.’

‘Right,’ he said, and he flicked his hair away from his face. He was a lovely-looking young man, and patient with his success, which was rare in such types, she felt. No, he wasn’t finding this a problem. He held out his hand. It was springtime in the Pyrenees. He was here for a long weekend with his sweet beloved girl. Perhaps they would wander down to the concert together. Hold hands at the back, in the shadows. After that they could go to a wine bar, have some sweet, hot wine.

‘I must tell you about the
patisserie
, Monsieur. They sell the bread for which we are famous here. And “Le Petit Blanc”, the
chocolatier
.’

The journalist was smiling as he backed away, shaking his head. He knew he had the upper hand. He was the guest, she the server. He didn’t bother to look her in the eye before he turned and picked up his case. He didn’t need anything from her. He had his views on Paris, and his face in the national newspapers. It was a question of power, of identity. France was struggling with hers.
Clearly
, this confident, well-mannered boy was sure of his.