Шоколад / Chocolat - стр. 20
I know all their favourites. It’s a knack, a professional secret like a fortune-teller reading palms: My mother would have laughed at this waste of my skills, but I have no desire to probe further into their lives than this. I do not want their secrets or their innermost thoughts. Nor do I want their fears or gratitude. A tame alchemist, she would have called me with kindly contempt, working domestic magic when I could have wielded marvels. But I like these people. I like their small and introverted concerns. I can read their eyes, their mouths, so easily: this one with its hint of bitterness will relish my zesty orange twists; this sweet-smiling one the soft-centred apricot hearts; this girl with the windblown hair will love the mendiants; this brisk, cheery woman the chocolate brazils. For Guillaume, the florentines, eaten neatly over a saucer in his tidy bachelor’s house. Narcisse’s appetite for double-chocolate truffles reveals the gentle heart beneath the gruff exterior. Caroline Clairmont will dream of cinder toffee tonight and wake hungry and irritable. And the children… Chocolate curls, white buttons with coloured vermicelli, pains d’epices with gilded edging, marzipan fruits in their nests of ruffled paper, peanut brittle, clusters, cracknels, assorted misshapes in half-kilo boxes… I sell dreams, small comforts, sweet harmless temptations to bring down a multitude of saints crash-crash-crashing amongst the hazels and nougatines.
Is that so bad? Cure Reynaud thinks so, apparently.
“Here, Charly. Here boy.”
Guillaume’s voice is warm when he speaks to his dog, but always a little sad. He bought the animal when his father died, he tells me. That was eighteen years ago. But a dog’s life is shorter than a man’s, and they grew old together.
“It’s here.” He brings my attention to a growth under Charly’s chin. It is about the size of a hen’s egg, gnarled like an elm burr. “It’s growing.” A pause during which the dog stretches luxuriously, one leg pedalling as, his master scratches his belly. “The vet says there’s nothing to be done.”
I begin to understand the look of guilt and love I see in Guillaume’s eyes.
“You wouldn’t put an old man to sleep,” he tells me earnestly. “Not if he still had”– he struggles for words “some quality of life. Charly doesn’t suffer. Not really.”
I nod, aware he is trying to convince himself.
“The drugs keep it under control.”
For the moment. The words ring out unspoken.
“When the time comes, I’ll know.” His eyes are soft and horrified. “I’ll know what to do. I won’t be afraid.”
I top up his chocolate-glass without a word and sprinkle the froth with cocoa powder, but Guillaume is too busy with his dog to see. Charly rolls onto his back, head lolling.
“M’sieur le Cure says animals don’t have souls,” says Guillaume softly. “He says I should put Charly out of his misery.”
“Everything has a soul,” I answer. “That’s what my mother used to tell me. Everything.”
He nods, alone in his circle of fear and guilt.
“What would I do without him?” he asks, face still turned towards the dog, and I understand he has forgotten my presence. “What would I do without you?”
Behind the counter I clench my fist in silent rage. I know that look – fear, guilt, covetousness – I know it well. It is the look on my mother’s face the night of the Black Man. His words – What would I do without you? – are the words she whispered to me all through that miserable night. As I glance into my mirror last thing in the evening, as I awake with the growing fear – knowledge, certainty – that my own daughter is slipping away from me, that I am losing her, that I will lose her if I do not find The Place… it is the look on my own.