Flowers of Darkness by Tatiana Rosnay (free ebook reader for iphone TXT) 📗

She hadn’t looked at her hands for a long time. Stunned, she noticed she was still wearing her wedding ring, the thin golden circle François had slipped on her finger at the town hall in the fifth arrondissement. His name and the date of their marriage were engraved inside it. Despite the passage of time, her hands had remained long and slim, and she slid the ring off easily.

She thought about everything that wedding band had witnessed, seasons, voyages, encounters, lectures, readers, hours of work; simple everyday actions, and the gestures of love: François’s body, the number of times her hands had landed on his skin, how it had become familiar to her, like his beauty spots, his carefully groomed beard, his robust neck. The wedding band that had observed every detail of the secret apartment on rue Dancourt.

She found an envelope, glided the ring inside, and placed it in the back of a drawer. A thin white circle remained on her finger, vestige of the jewel she’d worn for so many years, but a sense of liberty blossomed up within her, powering her with an energy she hadn’t felt for weeks, to such an extent that she grabbed her notebook, the one she hadn’t opened since she got here, a pen, and began to write.

Mia White was waiting for her very nicely, facing number 108, rue du Bac, absorbed not by her mobile, but by a book, an actual book made of paper. She looked like she did in her photos: a lovely young girl with long chestnut hair, wearing jeans, a jacket, and sneakers. Before she went up to her, Clarissa observed her; Mia White seemed captivated by what she was reading, holding her book to her face as if it were a treasure she could not possibly relinquish. The pavement was somewhat narrow in front of Romain Gary’s last home, and the young girl had to regularly step back in order to let pedestrians by, but even when she did that, she never took her eyes off the page. What was she reading with such interest? Clarissa drew nearer. It was a vintage edition of Promise at Dawn, a paperback that had been read over and over again, lent, lost, found, with warped pages and a torn and tattered cover, everything Clarissa loved: a well-thumbed book.

“Oh! It’s you!”

So Mia White had spotted her. What a smile!

“You’re bang on time,” said Clarissa in French.

“I’m the punctual type,” said Mia White, speaking in French, as well.

They turned around to face the large pale building behind them.

“So it was here,” said Mia White.

“Yes, here. But no need to get emotional looking up at those second-floor windows. Romain Gary’s place gave on to an inner courtyard.”

They crossed the street to get a better view.

“I’d like to know…” Mia White paused in mid-sentence, shyly.

“What?”

“That scene, in Topography of Intimacy, about Gary’s apartment. Did it really happen that way? The way you wrote it?”

“More or less.”

“I loved your book, but I especially loved that bit.”

Clarissa searched the young girl’s face. Mia White seemed perfectly sincere. Her magnificent eyes, riveted to Clarissa’s own, brimmed over with discernible esteem. It had been a while since anyone had looked at Clarissa that way. It felt good.

“Would you mind telling me again how it happened? It would be such an honor.”

Mia White spoke in English this time. Not that it made any difference to Clarissa. She knew all too well how true bilinguals were incapable of sticking to one language; they switched from one to the other with astounding changeability, making interlocutors who didn’t have the possibility to express themselves seamlessly in two languages feel giddy. Mia White had no accent in either French or English, like herself.

Clarissa pursued in English, pointing to the building. She told Mia she had first come to 108, rue du Bac several years after Gary died. She had just moved to Paris, after spending her childhood, her adolescence, and her university years in England. She worked as a property surveyor for a notary office and a real estate agency. She lived on rue d’Alésia, with the young man who would soon become her first husband. She had no idea the writer Romain Gary had committed suicide here on December 2, 1980. Her colleagues and she were to assess an apartment on the third floor. While they worked, the writer became the topic of their conversation.

Clarissa knew nothing about Gary. One of her associates was familiar with his life story. Clarissa was captivated by the flamboyance of his existence: Born Roman Kacew in Lithuania, the only child of an impassioned and whimsical mother, he became, in turn, an aviator, war hero, writer, diplomat, and filmmaker. He moved into number 108 in 1963, with his wife, the American actress Jean Seberg. He had lived there for nearly two decades. As Clarissa listened, her inquisitiveness had grown. In those days, the late eighties, with no Internet and no Google, she reminded Mia White, smiling, books were still purchased in bookstores. That evening, she had gone to buy Promise at Dawn. The title had enticed her. Looking at the back cover, she discovered a man with thoughtful features, startlingly clear eyes, a well-drawn mouth. At that point, books didn’t have such a large part in her life. She wasn’t yet the reader she would later become; she read seldom, and slowly.

It had taken her a while to immerse herself in Romain Gary’s realm. She bought other books, The Roots of Heaven, White Dog, and The Life Before Us, which he had published under another name: Émile Ajar. Little by little, Romain Gary’s prose had acted upon her like a sort of drug. She had been taken aback by his seductive fusion of delicacy and potency. His writing, both poetic and brutal, appealed to her. She had been expecting the ascetic and irreproachable works of a grand intellectual; instead, she stepped into the teeming world