L'Etoile Rose

Chapter 13

I was the last to enter the "The Bookshop of the Sloping Street". The girls had scattered in the store, each looking at what they were interested in. Entering without saying a word, appreciating the silence that reigned there, I quickly spotted the "pocket-books" department and began to leaf through here and there, choosing the books according to their title and the drawing on the cover, inhaling the smell of new paper, with the desire to buy the entire store.

Aurélian was there too, I had checked, with a different cover, a picture of a border of the Seine in gray weather. I ended up sitting on the floor, between two shelves of books, having opened a novel with a cover as poetic as its title: in the shade of young girls in bloom.

"Ah, Betty, here you are! We were looking for you." It was Chantal who helped me up, and return the few books I had taken out of the shelves.

"That book, you want to buy it?" she asked, glancing at the cover.

" No, no, I haven't finished the book I'm reading right now. And mom must have it ... How about you? Are you taking anything?" I said, reluctantly leaving Proust's novel, because my mom did in fact have it in a collection that had been sitting on the shelf of the living room for decades, old and austere, which had hitherto prevented me from reading it.

"I took a novel in English, there wasn't much choice, the New York trilogy, I hope I'll go beyond the first page. I need to improve my English, it's very important in my job!"

We had headed for the cashier, laughing. For me, I would have liked staying longer in the bookstore, to read, but the girls wanted to eat at a cafe near the beach, and we had resumed our walk, in a chatty and lively group.

"Look what I took for Julien, I wanted you to help me choose, but I didn't see you in the bookstore..." Sitting next to me on the terrace of the cafe, Anne had pulled out, from a brown paper bag, a book of mainly old black and white photographs, and I had read, astonished at her choice, 'nostalgic Russia'.

" That's it! What a funny idea!"

" You don't like it?"

"Yes, of course I do, why wouldn't I ... But why?

Anne burst out laughing and so did I, making me realise that my wording was funny. Then she confided to me that Julian was of Russian origin, that he was part of this community of white Russians settled in Paris for several generations now, since the Revolution, but who had nonetheless kept in his heart love for Russia and the Russian language. 

"Ah, okay ... yes, I studied the October revolution a bit." I was still turning the pages of the photo book, suddenly aware that another world offered itself to us, while we were waiting for our avocado-grapefruit-shrimp salads, sitting at the Royan waterfront. 

It was as if all of a sudden my field of vision was stretching, widening in length and width, in space and time.

" And you Betty, what did you buy at the bookstore?"

"Nothing," I said, handing her the album she intended for Julien.

"No way! I thought you liked books!"

"Actually, I have almost no money left, I have to keep a little until the end of the course, buying clothes wasn't part of the plan"

"OK, I understand ... But I don't regret having pushed you to buy them, because the books, you'll always have the desire and the time to read them, it's what you do spontaneously, whereas here, is an opportunity for you to do what you don't usually do, to live a little differently, right?

"I don't know if it's really me, this dress, these colours, or if im disguising myself ... You, for instance, why do you always dress in white? I expressed my discomfort brutally, a little confused, mixing things and Anne had smiled, staying silent for a second, without an answer.

"I'm..", she explained at last, "I'm older than you, and what I want now ... is to always go to the essential, as often as possible say. To dress in white is to purify oneself of all that, of this culture of fashion and seduction. I want to just be me, no frills."

Chantal had come to join us. 

"What are you guys talking about?"

"Betty regrets a little having bought these clothes that take her out of her usual white or blue jeans-T-shirt uniform."

The summary of Anne seemed very clear, a little too clear even and reductive.

"Well, you'll be happy to have them Friday night, when we get ready to go to the concert! Isn't that it, the pinacle of happiness, to have a new dress to go dancing?!"

Everyone laughed, but I had leaned towards Anne, to insist in a low voice: "I too, like to go to the essential".

She had once again smiled without answering, a little embarrassed perhaps. It was not the place or the time to philosophise. So I was silent again, letting the others chat with each other, at times looking at the rough sea, in constant motion, other times, at the changing faces of my friends.

"I like the cold of the churches," said Anne, passing under the huge vault of reinforced concrete, entering the nave. I watched them, Sophie, Delphine and Anne enter this place of prayer by making the sign of the cross. I had followed them in, just to observe, but with a certain distance and a strange feeling of loneliness. The rather modern building seemed already ageing as if it had not been designed to last, the concrete of the walls gnawed by the salt of the sea air, revealing in some places, the rusty iron frame. 

Here and there, rainwater entered the church, leaving brown marks on the walls and even puddles of water on the ground. I had walked around silently, as a tourist, looking at the coloured windows, the candles and the statues, all a setting that was unfamiliar to me, and noting that Anne had sat on a bench and had taken out her notebook to take notes. 

Without disturbing her, I left the church after a few moments to wait on the main square. My parents were Catholics and we, their children, had been baptized, but over time their view of their religion had evolved to become very critical and even sarcastic, so much in fact that we had grown up without much religion. It was now a foreign world, unknown.

And while I had been spending the day shopping with my friends, eating at the restaurant and wandering about in this beautiful city like a tourist among the other vacationers without feeling any morbid presentiment or unexplained exaltation, at that moment, as I crossed the main square of Royan to join Chantal and Delphine who had remained outside to take pictures, I had felt the marine wind engulf itself around me as if to take me away, while above from my head suddenly burst the shattering knell of church bells...

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