I Looked for the One My Heart Loves Page 7

  Finally, François gave in and stood in the long line leading up to the building. As she took a narrow path that snaked around bushes, Anne took deep breaths, enjoying the smell given off by the flowers. She was about to stop to remove a pebble stuck in her sandal when a group of students caught her attention. Crowding around a water fountain, they were goofing off. To the side, their chaperone poured over a map. Anne shuddered. No! This couldn’t be! Without thinking, she walked over to him.

  “Excuse me …” she said. “Aren’t you Alexis? Alexis Messager?”

  The man looked at her before answering, with some wariness, “That’s right.”

  “Alexis! It’s me … Anne.”

  “I’m sorry … but …”

  “Anne Chastel. Bernard’s sister. We used to live in Montmartre.”

  “Yes! I remember you! You played a ghost in that play! I can’t believe you recognized me. I’ve really changed so little?”

  Not being able to say that his features had remained etched in her memory, Anne said, “I’m very observant.”

  “Still! Tell me … What’s become of Bernard?”

  “He took over our grandfather’s carpentry shop, in Touraine. It was his dream.”

  “What about you? Are you still in Montmartre?”

  “No, I live near the Opéra.” Seeing his eyes land on her stomach, she added, “With my husband.”

  As Alexis folded his map, Anne felt her throat constrict. Was she going to wake up or had she really just run into him, right here, right now? She had thought about him so much throughout the years … His hair was darker now, but just as disheveled as before. She noticed his slender wrists, his long hands. He must be about thirty, she thought.

  “Where did your family stay after the exodus?”

  “On Lake Geneva.”

  Lake Geneva!

  “One of my aunts lives in Evian. She put us up during the war. Everything would’ve been fine if the Germans hadn’t arrested my father, in 1943, near Digne. He had joined the Résistance. We never saw him again after that.”

  Alexis’ expression darkened.

  “After the Liberation, my mother settled in Lyon. I stayed with her until the end of my studies. Then I taught literature at the Lycée Français in Cairo. Unfortunately, there was the Suez Canal crisis, and I had to flee Egypt in a hurry. For the past two years, I’ve been teaching in a private school. But I just found another job in Montreal. …”

  Even though the question was burning on her lips, she didn’t dare ask if he was married. She noticed that he wasn’t wearing a ring.

  “What have you been doing all this time?” he asked.

  “I studied at the École du Louvre.”

  He didn’t react. Had he forgotten all about the treasures of ancient Egypt?

  “I work in an art gallery,” Anne said. Then, turning to the boys a few yards away, she asked, “Are those your students?”

  Alexis nodded.

  “We’ve been here since morning,” he said. “They want to see everything! Test every single thing they see! They’re tireless.”

  Spotting her husband, who was out of the Atomium and looking for her, Anne was annoyed. As soon as he spotted Anne, François hurried over to her.

  “François, let me introduce you to Alexis … a childhood friend.”

  The two men shook hands. They couldn’t possibly have been more different. Compared to Alexis, François looked bland. In a few sentences, she told her husband about the old Montmartre neighborhood where she and Alexis grew up.

  Suddenly, two of the boys began shoving each other. A fight was going to break out.

  “Excuse me,” Alexis muttered.

  As Alexis tried to break up the fight, François glanced at his watch, and then put his arm under Anne’s.

  “We have to hurry if we don’t want to miss the eight thirty shuttle.”

  As soon as he turned off the bedside lamp, François fell asleep. Anne, on the other hand, couldn’t keep her eyes shut. The light from the streetlamps outside slithered through the slits between the shutters, creating moving shadows on the bedroom’s walls. Lying on her back, she relived her encounter with Alexis. It had taken eighteen years for her dearest wish to be fulfilled. Eighteen years during which he had never thought about her. Anne teetered back and forth between confusion and mortification. She was sad to think she had been deluding herself, and hurt at having been forgotten so easily. At the same time, she couldn’t blame him for turning his back on the past. The many uprootings, his father’s death, his mother’s grief and widowhood had overshadowed everything. Mouth dry, she relived their conversation and kicked herself for having been so stupid. Why didn’t she ask for Alexis’s contact information under the pretense that she’d pass it on to Bernard? What an idiot! But wasn’t it better this way? Anne believed in signs. This encounter took place while she was pregnant. Didn’t that mean that Alexis had to disappear completely from her life? She tried to convince herself of that, but seeing him again had shaken her to the core. A man had replaced the young adolescent: a stranger, almost, with his own life story, his secrets, his virtues as well as his foibles. What were his motivations, his hopes, his tastes? She had no idea. On the other hand, she knew that he had forgotten about her as soon as he left Montmartre. “I’ll protect you.” As soon as he had uttered those tantalizing words, he had promptly forgotten about them! She longed to free herself from this unreasonable attachment, but she still felt the pain eating at her. Outside, drunken pedestrians laughed and talked loudly. Disturbed by the noise, François mumbled a few unintelligible words before falling back asleep. Anne got up and stepped onto the balcony. Leaning against the railing, she tried to imagine her future, hoping that it would peaceful.

  11

  On September 8, Anne began to feel contractions. François took her to the hospital, where she gave birth to a little­ girl at the end of a long labor. The baby wasn’t named Caroline­ or Aurélie, but Isabelle. Anne forgot all about her exhaustion when the nurse brought the child to her. Barely daring to touch her, she looked at the baby’s creased skin, her swollen eyelids with delight. Seeing how fragile the baby was, a bit of anxiety overshadowed Anne’s happiness. Would she be able to take care of her? As soon as François took them back home, she felt more comfortable. A crib with a chiffon ruffled skirt in an immaculately white room awaited Isabelle. From a suitcase, Anne took out some basic necessities, as well as the presents her in-laws had given them. Though she still wasn’t crazy about François’s parents, she tried to be pleasant toward them. Madame Saulnier had even asked Anne to call her Mama. She did, but had to stifle a smile of irony each time. Monsieur Saulnier made no request of the sort, but Anne decided to call him Papa in order to make things easier.

  After Isabelle’s birth, Anne’s parents came up to Paris for a few days. Not only did Monique help Anne out with her daily tasks, she also gave her some confidence.

  “Don’t be afraid to put that sweater on her! She’s not made of sugar, you know.”

  Under her mother’s guidance, Anne became more and more self-assured. She bathed Isabelle in the portable tub, dressed her, sterilized the feeding bottles. At night, she heard every sound Isabelle made and rushed over to see if she was okay. In spite of her fatigue, she felt at peace with herself.

  That fall, Anne dedicated herself to her family. But that didn’t prevent her from going to the gallery twice a week. Most of the time, Amanda Kircher was on the phone when Anne arrived. Not thrilled at taking care of the gallery’s daily chores, Amanda couldn’t wait for her assistant to come back. For her part, Anne was doing everything she could to get back to work with peace of mind. After a long search, she had hired a nanny, a lady in her fifties whose husband had run off with a much younger woman as soon as their son became an adult. Her name was Edith Rageot. She had a pleasant face, energy, and a lot of common sense. François had receive
d a raise at work, so they hired her five days a week, from nine in the morning until six thirty at night. Edith won Isabelle over in no time. Still, Anne was heartbroken when she went back to work full-time in January. As she walked toward Rue Saint-Honoré, she wondered if she wasn’t making a huge mistake entrusting her child to someone else. Then she thought of Edith who, midway through her life, had found herself abandoned and without any work experience. And so Anne picked up the pace and headed for the gallery. Sirens blared as two motorcycle cops stopped traffic on Rue des Pyramides. In their wake, a motorcade sped down Rue de Rivoli. Ever since General de Gaulle had become president of the Republic and settled in the Élysée Palace, the coming and going of ministers was never-ending!

  With Anna’s return, the gallery settled back into its routine. Amanda discovered a Cuban artist who, having foreseen the turn of events, had left his native island before Fidel Castro took power. Thanks to her connections, Amanda helped him settle in an inexpensive art studio near Parc des Buttes-Chaumont. The exhibition of his work was to take place in April. Looking at his paintings for the first time, Anne was taken aback. Violent and lush colors combined with dark tones to express tenacious despair.

  “It’s disturbing,” she told Amanda, who was waiting for her reaction. “I’m not sure I like it. …”

  When she met the artist, Anne was even more unsure. The man spoke no French at all. Not caring whether or not he was understood, he kept talking and talking in Spanish. Occasionally, he turned to Amanda, and she would simply nod. Then he started ranting again.

  “Well,” Anne said, “the atmosphere during the exhibit should be interesting!”

  “Legends are born from struggle,” Amanda replied.

  With an address book that her competitors would have killed to get their hands on, Amanda Kircher manipulated the media with great skill. She also knew how to pique art collectors’ curiosity. Anne loved listening to her tall tales. With her vivid imagination, Amanda could turn the simplest event into a grand happening. But this modern-day Scheherazade hid many disappointments and regrets. Though she had had lovers, she remained faithful to the memory of her late husband. She said she owed him her life.

  “Even in the worst of times,” Amanda said, “Daniel never gave up. Without his smarts and his tenacity, I never would’ve left France. I would’ve worn the Jewish star and I would’ve been deported. …”

  Many members of her family never made it back from the camps, including her youngest sister.

  “We tried to convince her to come with us. But she’d fallen in love with a married man and didn’t want to be away from him. She was arrested in her home and sent to Drancy. No one ever saw her again. After the war, I learned that she died in Auschwitz. I felt so guilty for having survived the war that for months I stayed in my room. Then I saw two options for myself: either commit suicide or do what my husband was no longer capable of.”

  Anne knew of the legal battle that Amanda had waged in order to get the gallery back.

  “I still don’t understand how Daniel could have made such a mistake in hiring that manager to replace him while we were gone. He was usually so cautious. Without my attorney’s relentlessness, I would’ve lost everything. …”

  Once the ruling was made, Amanda gave her lawyer a few pointers on art, and he bought many René Magritte drawings that Anne loved. Particularly the preparatory sketches for The Lovers. In 1928, the Belgian artist had produced a series of four paintings depicting a couple whose heads are obscured by white sheets. In one painting, they pose cheek to cheek, looking ahead. In another, they are face to face, kissing through the cloth. What was the meaning behind those hoods, Anne had wondered.

  “The lovers are probably Magritte himself and his wife, Georgette,” Amanda said. “But let’s not spoil the secret.”

  Since Isabelle’s birth, Anne had forbidden herself from thinking about Alexis. Her life had taken another turn. Without him! In the company of François and Isabelle, evenings and weekends were joyous, carefree! Months passed quickly. France entered a new decade. A rebellion started in Algeria, a new Franc was put into circulation, a terrible earthquake rocked Agadir, the ocean liner France set sail for the first time, the Olympic Games took place in Rome … But it was John F. Kennedy’s election as president of the United States that captivated Anne.

  “He’s young! He’s handsome! He’s rich!” François teased.

  Anne just shrugged.

  “And his wife is so elegant,” he continued with the same tone.

  “Do I make fun of you when you go on and on about the cosmos?”

  On April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin left the Baikonur Cosmodrome onboard a rocket to complete the first orbit of Earth by a human being. After celebrating the event with his colleagues, François came home with an expression Anne had never seen on him before.

  “I’m in a state of weightlessness, too,” he said, making a beeline for the television set.

  Anne stared at him. His tie undone, he watched the screen with the wide eyes of a child. When they had moved in together, François brought very few personal items with him, except his Jules Verne novels and aeronautics magazines. Spontaneously, she went over to him and put a hand on his shoulder.

  “This is magnificent,” he said, his voice filled with emotion. “Sit next to me.”

  Understanding that it was important for her to share his joy, she sat down.

  “He’s so lucky he was selected for this!”

  “What risks he took!”

  “You don’t turn your back on a challenge like that!”

  “If you’d been given the opportunity, you would’ve said yes?”

  “Of course!”

  “What about Isabelle and me?”

  Did he even hear the question? All he was paying attention to was the television screen. After a moment, Anne headed for their daughter’s room. Isabelle was sleeping, surrounded by her stuffed animals. Anne caressed her forehead delicately. Since her birth, the child had been easygoing and cheerful. Blonde just like her father, she had pale blue eyes that were almond-shaped, like her mother’s. A turned-up nose and a dimple on the left cheek added to her charm. When she burst out laughing, Anne was thrilled at the sight of her perfect little teeth that looked like pearls. For the past few weeks, Isabelle had found the joy in saying things and watching the effect her words had on her audiences. Between walks in the Jardin du Palais-Royal where Edith took her and weekend trips with her parents who had bought a Dauphine to drive all over the place, Isabelle wasn’t afraid of the outside world. She was sociable and inquisitive by nature. Anne remained at her daughter’s bedside a little while longer and listened to her regular breathing.

  Anne and François agreed not to be cautious anymore. No more complicated calculations to avoid getting pregnant! The birth of a second child would necessitate a different apartment, and Anne began hunting for a place in the same neighborhood. She loved the area. After a few disappointing visits, she found a four-room apartment on the fourth floor of a building not far from the Comédie-Française, on Rue Villedo. The apartment was sunny and the space well designed. In the back, a small balcony overlooked a courtyard filled with flowers. The only problem: the rent was much higher than at their apartment on Rue des Petits-Champs. But this didn’t stop François, who had just been hired by Dassault Aviation. Knowing that Anne loved the apartment, he signed the lease without even telling her. That same evening, he gave her the keys to the place.

  “I’ve surprised you a few times in the past. I hope I didn’t make a mistake this time. …”

  When his meaning finally dawned on her, Anne threw herself into her husband’s arms.

  “What a sly fox you are! What a liar! Just this morning, you were telling me that we’d have to look for a place in a more affordable neighborhood!”

  “It was great fun watching your reaction. …”

  They moved in
early fall. Before their arrival, the owner had the walls and ceilings painted and the wooden floors waxed. The living room had two large windows and a marble fireplace. The master bedroom contained a big closet that Anne began to fill with clothing. On the other side of the vestibule, the kitchen still had its old tiles and a hood above the stove. Edith would have liked to help set things up in the kitchen, but Isabelle had other ideas in mind. Overexcited by her new home, the girl ran from one room to the other, producing piercing screams. To keep her busy, Edith gave her some books to read, but Isabelle couldn’t sit still.

  After three days of unpacking, Anne decided that she deserved a break. Being six months pregnant, she should have been more reasonable, but she hated disorder! Now that the books and magazines were in their proper spots in the bookcases, and the records were neatly piled, she could enjoy her new home sweet home. If she had listened to François, they would have owned only new furniture. To please him, she agreed to buy chairs with tubular lines and chromed feet that matched what she had searching for in flea markets for years. Was it the influence of the École du Louvre? Anne needed to take refuge in the past. She needed wooden articles polished with use, mirrors in which many people had gazed at themselves, bottles that had contained perfumes appreciated by generations. She didn’t need a lot of money to find “treasure.” Her keen eye enabled her to spot gems among heaps of ordinary things. Lying on a couch in the living room, she enjoyed the room’s muted lighting. The apartment was very cozy. Only the paintings remained unpacked. Since she began working for Amanda Kircher, many artists had given her small watercolors or drawings ripped off of sketchpads. On the coffee table in front of Anne there was the bouquet of roses François had given her the day before. Busier and busier at work, he sometimes came home late at night, and even worked on Sundays on occasion. When he talked about Mirage II, the Atar reactor, or supersonic speed, she gave him her full attention, even though most of it went way over her head! On the other hand, she had enjoyed her first flight on board a Caravelle. They flew from Paris to London, leaving from Orly Airport, which had just been inaugurated by General de Gaulle. She loved everything about the trip! The melodious voices coming from the airport speakers, the shops, the different atmosphere … On the plane, she was apprehensive about takeoff, but François managed to comfort her.