Chocolat (20 page)

       “Who, me?” Roux was uneasy. Caro glanced at him with undisguised contempt.

       “I think that at a time like this, Maman, your family should be the —”

       “If I need you, I know where to call,” said Armande tartly. “For the moment, I want to make arrangements.”

       Caro looked at Roux. “O-oh?” The syllable was silky with dislike. “Arrangements?” She flicked her eyes up and down him, and I saw him flinch slightly. It was the same reflex I had seen previously with Josephine; a stiffening, a slight hunching of the shoulders, a drilling of the hands into the pockets as if to present a smaller target. Beneath that knowing scrutiny every flaw is revealed. For a second he sees himself as she sees him: filthy, uncouth.

       Perversely he acts out the role she has handed him, snarling: “What the fuck d’you think you’re looking at?”

       She gives him a startled look and backs away.

       Armande grins. “I’ll see you later,” she tells me. “And thank you.”

       Caro followed me with visible chagrin. Caught between curiosity and her reluctance to talk to me, she is brisk and condescending. I gave her the facts with no elaboration. Reynaud listened, expressionless as one of his statues. Georges tried for diplomacy, smiling sheepishly, delivered platitudes. No-one offered me a lift back home.

TWENTY-EIGHT

   Saturday, March 15

       I WENT TO SPEAK TO ARMANDE VOIZIN once again this morning. Once again she refused to see me. Her redhaired watchdog opened the door and growled at me in his uncouth patois, wedging his shoulders against the frame to prevent me from entering. Armande is quite well, he tells me. A little rest will bring about a complete recovery. Her grandson is with her, and her friends visit every day — this with a sarcasm which makes me bite my tongue. She is not to be disturbed. It galls me to plead with this man, pere, but I know my duty. Whatever low company she has fallen into, whatever taunts she flings at me, my duty remains clear. To comfort — even where comfort is refused — and to guide. But it is impossible to speak to this man about the soul — his eyes are blank and indifferent as an animal’s. I try to explain. Armande is old, I tell him. Old and stubborn. There is so little time for both of us. Doesn’t he see that? Will he allow her to kill herself with neglect and arrogance?

       He shrugs. “She’s fine,” he tells me, his face bland with dislike. “No-one’s neglecting her. She’ll be just fine now.”

       “That isn’t true.” My voice is deliberately harsh. “She’s playing Russian roulette with her medication. Refusing to listen to what the doctor tells her. Eating chocolates, for God’s sake! Have you only thought what that might do to her, in her condition?”

       His face closes, becomes hostile and aloof. Flatly: “She doesn’t want to see you.”

       “Don’t you care? Don’t you care that she’s killing herself with gluttony?”

       He shrugs. I can feel his rage through the thin pretence of indifference. Impossible to appeal to his better nature — he simply stands guard, as he has been instructed. Muscat tells me Armande has offered him money. Perhaps he has an interest in seeing her die. I know her perversity. To disinherit her family for the sake of this stranger would appeal to that part of her.

       “I’ll, wait,” I told him: “All day, if I have to.”

       I waited for two hours outside in the garden. After that time it began to rain. I had no umbrella, and my soutane was heavy with moisture. I began to feel dizzy and numb. After a while a window opened and I caught the maddening smell of coffee and hot bread from the kitchen. I saw the watchdog looking at me with that look of surly disdain and knew that I might fall unconscious to the ground without his making a move to help me. I felt his eyes on my back as I returned slowly up the hill towards St Jerome’s. Somewhere across the water I thought I heard a sound of laughter.

       I have failed too with Josephine Muscat. Though she refuses to go to church, I have spoken with her several times, but to no avail. There is a deep core of some stubborn metal in her now, a kind of defiance, though she remains respectful and soft-spoken throughout our conversation. She never ventures far from La Celeste Praline, and it was outside the shop that I saw her today. She was sweeping the cobbles by the doorway, her hair tied with a yellow scarf. As I made my way towards her I could hear her singing to herself.

       “Good morning, Madame Muscat.” I greeted her politely…I know that if she is to be won back it must be by gentleness and reason. She may be made to repent later, when our work is done.

       She gave me a narrow smile. She looks more confident now, back straight, head high, mannerisms she has copied from Vianne Rocher.

       “I’m Josephine Bonnet now, pere.”

       “Not under the law, Madame.”

       “Bof, the law.” She shrugged.

       “God’s law,” I told her with emphasis, fixing her with reproach. “I have prayed for you, ma fille. I have prayed for your deliverance.”

       She laughed at that, not unkindly. “Then your prayers have been answered, pere. I’ve never been so happy.”

       She seems impregnable. Barely a week of that woman’s influence and already I can hear that other’s voice through hers. Their laughter is unendurable. Their mockery, like Armande’s, a goad which makes me stupid and enraged. Already I feel something in me respond, pere, something weak to which I thought I was immune. Looking across the square at the chocolaterie, its bright window, the boxes of pink and red and orange geraniums at the balconies and at either side of the door, I feel the insidious creeping of doubt in my mind, and my mouth fills at the memory of its perfume, like cream and marshmallow and burnt sugar and the heady mingling of cognac and fresh-ground cocoa beans. It is the scent of a woman’s hair, just where the nape joins the skull’s tender hollow, the scent of ripe apricots in the sun, of warm brioche and cinnamon rolls, lemon tea and lily-of-the-valley. It is an incense diffused on the wind and unfurling softly like a banner of revolt, this devil’s spoor, not sulphurous as we were taught as children but this lightest, most evocative of perfumes, combined essence of a thousand spices, making the head ring and the spirit soar. I find myself standing outside St Jerome’s with my head lifted into the wind, straining to catch a trace of that perfume. It suffuses my dreams, and I awake sweating and famished. In my dreams I gorge on chocolates, I roll in chocolates, and their texture is not brittle but soft as flesh, like a thousand mouths on my body, devouring me in fluttering small bites. To die beneath their tender gluttony seems the culmination of every temptation I have ever known, and in such moments I can almost understand Armande Voizin, risking her life with every rapturous mouthful.

       I said almost.

       I know my duty. I sleep very little now, having extended my penance to include these stray moments of abandon. My joints ache, but I welcome the distraction. Physical pleasure is the crack into which the devil sends his roots. I avoid sweet scents. I eat a single meal a day, and then only the plainest and most flavourless of foods. When I am not going about my duties in the parish I work in the churchyard, digging the beds and weeding around the graves. There has been neglect there for the past two years, and I am conscious of a feeling of unease when I see what riot there is now in that hitherto orderly garden. Lavender, marjoram, goldenrod and purple sage have shot up in lavish abandon amongst the grasses and blue thistles. So many scents disturb me. I would like orderly rows of shrubs and flowers, perhaps with a box hedge around the whole. This profusion seems somehow wrong, irreverent, a savage thrusting of life, one plant choking another in a vain attempt at dominance. We were given mastery over these things, the Bible tells us. And yet I feel no mastery. What I feel is a kind of helplessness, for as I dig and prune and cut, the serried green armies simply fill the spaces at my back, pushing out long green tongues of derision at my efforts. Narcisse looks at me in amused contempt.

       “Better get some planting done, pere,” he tells me. “Fill those spaces with something worthwhile. Otherwise the weeds will always get in.”

       He is right, of course. I have ordered a hundred plants from his nursery, docile plants which I will put in by rows. I like the white begonias and the dwarf iris and the pale yellow dahlias and the Easter lilies, scentless but so lovely in their prim whorls of leaf. Lovely, but not invasive, promises Narcisse. Nature tamed by man.

       Vianne Rocher comes over to look at my work. I ignore her. She is wearing a turquoise pullover and jeans with small purple suede boots. Her hair is a pirate flag in the wind.

       “You’ve got a lovely garden,” she remarks. She lets one hand trail across a swathe of vegetation; she clenches her fist and brings it to her face full of scent.

       “So many herbs,” she says. “Lemon balm and eau-de-cologne mint and pineapple sage?”

       “I don’t know their names.” My voice is abrupt. “I’m no gardener. Besides, they’re just weeds.”

       “I like weeds.”

       She would. I felt my heart swell with anger — or was it the scent? I stood up hip-deep in rippling grasses and felt my lower vertebrae crackle under the sudden pressure. “Tell me something, Mademoiselle.”

       She looked at me obediently, smiling.

       “Tell me what you think to achieve by encouraging my parishioners to uproot their lives, to give up their security?”

       She gave me a blank look. “Uproot?” She glanced uncertainly at the heap of weeds on the path at my side.

       “I refer to Josephine Muscat,” I snapped.

       “Oh.” She tweaked at a stem of green lavender. “She was unhappy.” She seemed to think that explained everything.

       “And now, having broken her marriage vows, left everything she had, given up her old life, you think she will be happier?”

       “Of course.”

       “A fine philosophy,” I sneered, “if you’re the kind of person who doesn’t believe in sin.”

       She laughed. “But I don’t,” she said. “I don’t believe in it at all.”

       “Then I pity your poor child,” I said tartly. “Brought up without God and without morality.”

       She gave me a narrow unamused look. “Anouk knows what’s right and wrong,” she said, and I knew that at last I had reached her. One small point scored. “As for God?” She bit off the phrase. “I don’t think that white collar gives you sole right of access to the Divine,” she finished more gently. “I think there may be room somewhere for both of us, don’t you?”

       I did not deign to answer. I can see through her pretended tolerance. “If you really want to do good,” I told her with dignity, “you will persuade Madame Muscat to reconsider her rash decision. And you will make Armande Voizin see sense.”

       “Sense?” She pretended ignorance, but she knew what I meant.

       I repeated much of what I had told the watchdog. Armande was old, I told her. Self-willed and stubborn. But her generation is ill-equipped to understand medical matters. The importance of diet and medication — the stubborn refusal to listen to the facts.

       “But Armande is quite happy where she is.” Her voice is almost reasonable. “She doesn’t want to leave her house and go into a nursing-home. She wants to die where she is.”

       “She has no right!” I heard my voice crack whiplike across the square. “It isn’t her decision to make. She could live a long time, another ten years perhaps?”

       “She still may.” Her tone was reproachful. “She is still mobile, lucid, independent?”

       “Independent!” I could barely conceal my disdain. “When she’ll be stone blind in six months? What is she going to do then?”

       For the first time she looked confused. “I don’t understand,” she said at last. “Armande’s eyes are all right, aren’t they? I mean, she doesn’t even wear glasses.”

       I looked at her sharply. She didn’t know. “You haven’t spoken to the doctor, have you?”

       “Why should I? Armande?”

       I cut her short. “Armande has a problem,” I told her. “One which she has systematically been denying. You see the extent of her stubbornness. She refuses to admit, even to herself, even to her family?.”

       “Tell me. Please.”Her eyes were hard as agates.

       I told her.

TWENTY-NINE

    Sunday, March 16

       AT FIRST ARMANDE PRETENDED SHE DIDN’T KNOW WHAT I was talking about. Then switching to a high-handed tone, demanded to know who had blabbed, while at the same time declaring that I was an interfering busybody, and that I had no idea what I was talking about.

       “Armande,” I said as soon as she paused for breath. “Talk to me. Tell me what it means. Diabetic retinopathy?”

       She shrugged. “I might as well, if that damn doctor’s going to blab it all over the village.” She sounded petulant. “Treating me as if I wasn’t fit to make my own decisions any more.” She gave me a stern look. “And you’re no better, madam,” she said. “Clucking over me, fussing — I’m not a child, Vianne.”

       “I know you’re not.”

       “Well, then.” She reached for the teacup at her elbow. I saw the care with which she secured it between her fingers, testing its position before she picked it up. It is not she, but I, who have been blind. The red-ribboned walking-stick, the tentative gestures, the unfinished tapestry, the eyes shadowed beneath a succession of hats…

       “It isn’t as if you could do anything to help,” continued Armande in a gentler tone. “From what I understood it’s incurable, so it’s nobody’s business but my own.” She took a sip of the tea and grimaced. “Camomile,” she said without enthusiasm. “Supposed to eliminate toxins. Tastes like cat’s piss.” She put the cup down again with the same careful gesture.

       “I miss reading,” she said. “It’s getting too hard to see print nowadays, but Luc reads to me sometimes. Remember how I got him to read Rimbaud to me at that first meeting?”

       I nodded. “You make it sound as if it was years ago,” I told her.

       “It was.” Her voice was light, almost uninflected. “I’ve had what I thought I’d never be able to have, Vianne. My grandson visits me every day. We talk like adults. He’s a good lad, kind enough to grieve for me a little?”

       “He loves you, Armande,” I interrupted. “We all do.”

       She chuckled. “Maybe not all,” she said. “Still, that doesn’t matter. I have everything I’ve ever wanted right here and now. My house, my friends, Luc…” She gave me a stubborn look. “I’m not going to have any of that taken away from me,” she declared mutinously.

       “I don’t understand. No-one can force you to?”

       “I’m not talking about any one,” she interrupted sharply. “Cussonnet can talk as much as he likes about his retinal implants and his scans and laser therapies and what he likes”— her contempt for such things was apparent — “but that doesn’t change the plain facts. The truth is I’m going blind, and there’s not a lot anyone can do to stop it.” She folded her arms with a gesture of finality.

       “I should have gone to him sooner,” she said without bitterness. “Now it’s irreversible, and worsening. Six months of partial sight is the most he can give me, then Le Mortoir, like it or not, till the day I die.” She paused. “I could live another ten years,” she said reflectively, echoing my words to Reynaud.

       I opened my mouth to argue, to tell her it might not be all that bad, then closed it again.

       “Don’t look like that, girl.” Armande gave me a rallying nudge. “After a five-course banquet you’d want coffee and liqueurs, wouldn’t you? You wouldn’t suddenly decide to round it all off with a bowl of pap, would you? Just so you could have an extra course?”

       “Armande ?”

       “Don’t interrupt.” Her eyes were bright. “I’m saying you need to know when to stop, Vianne. You need to know when to push away your plate and call for those liqueurs. I’ll be eighty-one in a fortnight?”

       “That’s not so old,” I wailed in spite of myself. “I can’t believe you’re giving up like this!”

       She looked at me. “And yet you were the one, weren’t you, who told Guillaume to leave Charly some dignity.”

       “You’re not a dog!” I retorted, angry now.

       “No,” replied Armande softly, “and I have a choice.”

       A bitter place, New York, with its gaudy mysteries; cold in winter and flashing with heat in summer. After three months even the noise becomes familiar, unremarkable, the sounds of cars-voices-cabs melting into a single sheet of sound which covers the place like rain. Crossing the road from the deli with our lunch in a brown sack between her folded arms, I meeting her halfway, catching her eye across a busy street, a billboard advertising Marlboro cigarettes at her back; a man standing against a vista of red mountains. I saw it coming. Opened my mouth to shout, to warn her…Froze. For a second, that was all, a single second. Was it fear which stapled my tongue to the roof of my mouth? Was it simply the slowness of the body’s reaction when faced with the imminence of danger, the thought reaching the brain an aching eternity from the dull flesh’s response? Or was it hope, the kind of hope which comes when all dreams have been stripped away and what remains is the long slow agony of pretence? Of course, Maman, of course we’ll make it to Florida. Of course we will.

       Her face, rigid with smiling, her eyes far too bright, bright as Fourth-of-July fireworks.

       What would I do, what would I do without you?

       It’s OK, Maman. We’ll make it. I promise. Trust me.

       The Black Man stands by with a flickering smile on his face and for that interminable second I know that there are worse things, much worse things, than dying. Then the paralysis breaks and I scream, but the cry of warning comes too late. She turns her face vaguely towards me, a smile forming on her pale lips — Why, what is it, dear? and the cry which should have been her name is lost in the squealing of brakes.

       “Florida!” It sounds like a woman’s name, shrilling across the street, the young woman running through the traffic dropping her purchases as she runs — an armful of groceries, a carton of milk — her face contorting. It sounds like a name, as if the older woman dying in the street is actually called Florida, and she is dead before I reach her, quietly and without drama, so that I feel almost embarrassed to make so much fuss, and a large woman in a pink tracksuit puts her meaty arms around me, but what I feel most is relief, like a lanced boil, and my tears are relief, bitter burning relief that I have reached the end at last. Reached the end intact, or almost.

       “You shouldn’t cry,” said Armande gently. “Aren’t you the one who always says happiness is the only thing that matters?”

       I was surprised to find my face wet.

       “Besides, I need your help.” Pragmatic as always, she passed me a handkerchief from her pocket. It smelt of lavender. “I’m having a party for my birthday,” she declared. “Luc’s idea. Expense no object. I want you to do the catering.”

       “What?” I was confused, passing from death to feasting then back again.

       “My last course,” explained Armande. “I’ll take my medicine till then, like a good girl. I’ll even drink that filthy tea. I want to see my eighty-first birthday, Vianne, with all my friends around me. God knows, I might even invite that idiot daughter of mine. We’ll bring in your chocolate festival in style. And then…” A quick shrug of indifference. “Not everyone gets this lucky,” she observed. “Getting the chance to plan everything, to tidy all the comers. And something else”— she gave me a look of laser intensity — “not a word to anyone,” she said. “Not anyone. I’m not having any interference. It’s my choice, Vianne. My party. I don’t want anyone crying and carrying on at my party. Understand?”

       I nodded.

       “Promise?” It was like talking to a fierce child.

       “I promise.”

       Her face took on the look of contentment it always wears when she speaks of good food. She rubbed her hands together. “Now for the menu.”