The Ingredients of Love (3 page)

This maxim had been written by someone called Joseph Conrad, and I still remember that for a long time I thought that he must be a famous German cook, so that I was all the more surprised when I chanced upon his novel
Heart of Darkness
. Out of loyalty to the name I even bought it—but never got round to reading it.

Anyway, that title sounded as gloomy as my mood that day. Perhaps this would have been the right time to get the book out, I thought bitterly. But I don't read books when I'm unhappy: I plant flowers.

At least, that was what I thought at that moment, not knowing that I would spend that very night leafing with almost unseemly haste through the pages of a novel that had, as it were, thrown itself into my path. Chance? Even today I still don't believe that it was chance.

I greeted Philippe, one of the waiters from the Procope, who gave me a friendly wave through the café window, passed heedlessly by the glittering display in Harem, the little jewelry shop on the corner, and turned into the Boulevard Saint-Germain. It had begun to rain; cars sprayed past me and I pulled my shawl tighter around me as I marched determinedly along the boulevard.

Why do awful or depressing things always have to happen in November? November is the worst time I could conceive of for being unhappy. The choice of flowers you can plant is very limited.

I kicked an empty cola can, which clattered across the pavement and ended up lying in the gutter.

It was just like that unbelievably sad song by Anne Sylvestre,
“La Chanson de Toute Seule,”
the one about the pebbles that first roll and then an instant later sink in the Seine. Everyone had abandoned me. Papa was dead, Claude had vanished, and I was alone as I had never ever been before in my life. Then my mobile phone rang.

“Hello?” I said, and almost choked. I could feel the adrenaline coursing through my body at the thought that it might be Claude.

“What's up, my love?” Bernadette went straight to the point, as always.

A taxi driver screeched to a halt beside me, hooting like a madman because a cyclist hadn't given way. It sounded like the apocalypse.

“My goodness, what's that?” shouted Bernadette, before I could say anything. “Is everything okay? Where are you?”

“Somewhere on the Boulevard Saint-Germain,” I replied miserably and stepped for a moment under the awning of a shop that sold bright umbrellas with ducks' heads as handles. The rain trickled out of my wet hair and I was drowning in a flood of self-pity.

“Somewhere on the Boulevard Saint-Germain? What in heaven's name are you doing ‘somewhere on the Boulevard Saint-Germain'? Your message said that something had cropped up!”

“Claude's gone,” I said, and sniffed into my phone.

“How do you mean, gone?” As always when Claude was in question, Bernadette's voice immediately became a touch impatient. “Has the idiot gone to ground again without letting you know where he is?”

I had foolishly told Bernadette about Claude's tendency toward escapism, and she hadn't found it at all funny.

“Gone forever,” I said with a sob. “He's left me. I'm so unhappy.”

“Oh, good grief,” said Bernadette, and her voice was like an embrace. “Oh, goodness gracious! My poor, poor Aurélie. What's happened?”

“He's … got … someone … else…” I sobbed. “Yesterday, when I got home, all his stuff had gone and there was a note … a note—”

“He didn't even tell you
to your face
? What an asshole,” Bernadette interrupted me and took an angry breath. “I've always said that Claude's an asshole. Over and over. A note! That's just too bad … no, that really takes the cake!”

“Please, Bernadette…”

“What? You're not still defending that idiot?”

I shook my head wordlessly.

“Now listen, my dear,” said Bernadette, and I narrowed my eyes. When Bernadette begins a sentence with “Now listen” it's normally the signal that she's about to let loose with deeply grounded opinions, which are often right, but often hard to accept. “Forget that creep as quickly as you can! Of course it's bad at the moment…”

“Very bad,” I sobbed.

“Okay,
very
bad. But that man was really unspeakable, and deep inside you know that too. Now try and calm down. Everything will be all right, and I promise you that you'll soon find a very nice man, a
really
nice man who knows how to appreciate a wonderful woman like you.”

“Oh, Bernadette,” I sighed. It was all very well for Bernadette to talk: She was married to a really nice man who put up with her fanatical attachment to the truth with unbelievable patience.

“Listen,” she said once more. “You just get in a taxi and go straight home, and when I've sorted everything out here I'll come over. Don't get so upset, please! No reason for drama.”

I swallowed. Of course it was good of Bernadette to want to come over and console me. But I had a sinking feeling that her idea of consolation was a bit different from mine. I wasn't sure if I really wanted to spend the evening having her explain that Claude was the most useless guy of all time. After all, I'd been with him until the day before, and I would have found a little bit more sympathy rather nice.

And then good old Bernadette went over the top.

“I'll tell you something, Aurélie,” she said in her schoolmarm voice that allows no contradiction. “I'm glad, yes, I'm actually very glad that Claude has left you. A real stroke of luck, if you ask me! You would never have managed to get rid of him. I know you don't want to hear this now, but I'll say it anyway: I see the fact that that creep has finally disappeared from your life as something to celebrate.”

“Bully for you,” I answered more sharply than I really intended, and I could feel that the subliminal realization that my friend was not entirely wrong was all of a sudden making me absolutely furious.

“D'you know what, Bernadette? You go off and celebrate a bit, and if your great euphoria allows it, just let me be miserable for a couple of days, okay? Just leave me alone!”

I ended the call, breathed in deeply, and then switched my phone right off.

Great! Now I was quarreling with Bernadette as well. The rain poured off the awning onto the street and I pressed myself shivering into a corner and began to think that it might be just as well to go home after all. But the thought of going back to an empty apartment frightened me. I didn't even have a little cat that would be waiting for me and would rub itself purring against me as I ran my fingers through its fur. “Look, Claude, aren't they just adorable?” I had said when Madame Clément, our neighbor, had shown us the tortoiseshell kittens tumbling clumsily over each other in their little basket.

But Claude was allergic to cat hair and didn't like animals anyway.

“I don't like animals, just fish,” he had said a few weeks after we got to know each other. In fact I should have realized then. The likelihood of being happy with a man who only liked fish was for me, Aurélie Bredin, relatively small.

Resolutely, I pushed open the door of the little umbrella shop and bought a sky blue umbrella with white polka dots and a caramel-colored duck's-head handle.

It turned out to be the longest walk of my life. After a while the fashion shops and restaurants that stood on either side of the boulevard disappeared, to be replaced by furniture stores and bathroom suppliers, and then even these gave up and I wandered my lonely way through the rain, past the sandstone façades of the big houses that offered little diversion to the gaze and met my disordered thoughts and emotions with stoic indifference.

At the end of the boulevard, where it reaches the Quai d'Orsay, I turned right and crossed the Seine toward the Place de la Concorde. The obelisk in the middle of the square towered like a dark index finger and it seemed to me that, in its Egyptian sublimity, it had little or nothing to do with the hordes of little tin cars that hurtled hectically around it.

When you're unhappy, you either see nothing at all and the world sinks into meaninglessness, or else you see things preternaturally sharply, and everything suddenly seems to have meaning. Even the most banal things, like a traffic light turning from red to green, can decide whether you turn left or right.

And so a few minutes later I was walking through the Tuileries, a sad little shape under a spotted umbrella that bobbed gently up and down along the empty, newly swept paths of the park, then left it in the direction of the Louvre, glided along the bank of the Seine as twilight descended, past the Île de la Cité, past Notre-Dame, past all the lights of the city as they gradually twinkled into life, until I finally stopped on the little Pont Louis-Philippe, which leads over to the Île Saint-Louis.

The deep blue color of the sky lay over Paris like a velvet cloth. It was just before six, the rain was gradually stopping, and I leaned, somewhat exhausted, over the stone parapet of the old bridge and stared pensively into the Seine. The reflections of the streetlights quivered and glittered on the dark water—magical and fragile, like everything beautiful.

After eight hours, thousands of steps, and even more thousands of thoughts, I had reached this quiet place. It had taken that much time to grasp that the depths of misery that were weighing on my heart like lead were not due just to the fact that Claude had left me. I was thirty-two years old, and it wasn't the first time that a love affair had broken up. I had left, I had been left, I had known far nicer men than Claude, the freak.

I think it was the feeling that everything was crumbling, changing, that people who had held my hand had suddenly disappeared forever, that I was losing my grip and that there was nothing between me and the great big universe but a sky blue umbrella with white polka dots.

That didn't actually make things any better. I was standing alone on a bridge, a couple of cars drove past me, my hair was blowing in my face, and I was holding tightly on to my duck-handled umbrella as if that too might fly away.

“Help!” I whispered quietly, and stumbled slightly against the parapet.

“Mademoiselle? Oh,
mon Dieu,
mademoiselle, don't! Wait,
arrêtez
!” I heard hurried steps behind me, and gave a start.

The umbrella slipped from my hand, turned half over, bounced off the parapet, and fell down in a spiraling dance to land flat on the surface of the water with a barely audible splash.

I turned around in confusion and found myself looking straight into the dark eyes of a young policeman, who was looking at me with great concern. “Is everything all right?” he asked agitatedly. He obviously thought I was intending to commit suicide.

I nodded. “Yes, of course. Everything's fine.” I forced myself to give him a little smile. He raised his eyebrows as if he didn't believe a word of it.

“I don't believe a word you say, mademoiselle,” he said. “I've been watching you for quite some time now, and no woman who's perfectly fine looks like you did standing there.”

I was taken aback, and said nothing—I just watched the white-spotted umbrella for a moment as it sailed slowly off down the Seine. The policeman followed my gaze.

“It's always the same,” he added. “I know these bridges. Only recently we fished a young girl out of the icy water a little bit farther downstream. Just in time. If anyone hangs around on a bridge for a long time you can be sure that they're either madly in love or just about to jump in the water.”

He shook his head. “I've never understood why lovers and suicides have such an affinity for bridges.”

He ended his little lecture, and looked at me suspiciously.

“You look quite upset, mademoiselle. You weren't going to do anything silly, were you? A lovely woman like you. On the bridge.”

“Of course not!” I assured him. “And anyway, completely normal people sometimes stand on bridges for a long time, just because it's nice to look at the river.”

“But you have such sad eyes.” He wouldn't give up. “And it looked just as if you were going to jump.”

“What nonsense!” I replied. “I was just feeling a little faint,” I hurriedly added, and instinctively put my hand to my stomach.

“Oh, pardon! Excusez-moi, mademoiselle … madame!”
He spread his hands in a gesture of embarrassment. “I couldn't have known …
vous êtes … enceinte
? In that case, you ought to look after yourself a little better, if I might say so. Can I see you home?”

I shook my head and almost giggled. No, at least I wasn't pregnant.

He tilted his head to one side and smiled chivalrously. “Are you sure, madame? The protection of the French police is at your service. I wouldn't want you to faint on me again.” He looked protectively at my flat tummy. “When is it due?”

“Listen, monsieur,” I replied in a firm voice. “I'm not pregnant, and am relatively sure that I won't be in the foreseeable future. I was just feeling a bit faint, that's all.”

And no wonder, I thought, because I hadn't had anything all day except a coffee.

“Oh! Madame … I mean
mademoiselle
!” Obviously embarrassed, he took a step backward. “I'm very sorry, I wasn't trying to be indiscreet.”

“That's all right,” I sighed, and waited for him to go.

But the man in the dark blue uniform stayed put. He was the archetype of the Paris policeman of the kind I had often seen on the Île de la Cité, where the police headquarters are: tall, slim, good-looking, always ready to flirt. This one had obviously decided that it was his duty to be my personal guardian angel.

“Well, then…” I leaned back against the parapet, and tried to get rid of him with a smile. An elderly man in a raincoat went past, giving us an interested look.

The policeman raised two fingers to the peak of his kepi. “Well then, if there's nothing more I can do for you…”