Шоколад / Chocolat - стр. 65
“I think you’re probably too old to join the Foreign Legion,” I told her with a smile. “And didn’t Rimbaud’s experiences run rather to excess at times?”
Armande shot me an impish look.
“That’s right,” she replied. “I could do with a bit more excess. From now on I’m going to be immoderate – and volatile – I shall enjoy loud music and lurid poetry. I shall be rampant,” she declared with satisfaction.
I laughed.
“You are quite absurd,” I said with mock severity. “No wonder your family despairs of you.”
But even though she laughed with me, rocking with merriment in her chair, what I recall now is not her laughter but what I glimpsed behind the laughter; that look of giddy abandon, desperate glee.
And it was only later, late into the night when I awoke sweating from some dark half-forgotten nightmare, that I remembered where I had seen that look before.
How about Florida, sweetheart? The Everglades? The Keys? How about Disneyland, cherie, or New York, Chicago, the Grand Canyon, Chinatown, New Mexico, the Rocky Mountains?
But with Armande there was none of my mother’s fear, none of her delicate parrying and wrangling with death, none of her mad hit-and-run flights of fantasy into the unknown. With Armande there was only the hunger, the desire, the terrible awareness of time.
I wonder what the doctor said to her this morning, and how much she really understands. I lay awake for a long time wondering, and when I finally slept, I dreamed of myself and Armande walking through Disneyland with Reynaud and Caro hand-in-hand as the Red Queen and the White Rabbit from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, with big, white, cartoon gloves on their hands. Caro had a red crown on her giant head, and Armande had a stick of candyfloss in each fist.
Somewhere in the distance I could hear the sounds of New York traffic, the blaring of horns getting closer.
“Oh my, oh don’t eat that, it’s poison,” squeaked Reynaud shrilly, but Armande went on gobbling candyfloss with both hands, her face glossy and self-possessed. I tried to warn her about the cab, but she looked at me and said in my mother’s voice, “Life’s a carnival, cherie, more people die every year crossing the road, it’s a statistical fact,” and went on eating in that terrible voracious way, and Reynaud turned towards me and squeaked, in a voice made all the more menacing for its lack of resonance, “This is all your fault, you and your chocolate festival, everything was all right until you came along and now everyone’s dying DYING DYING DYING?”
I held my hands out protectively. “It isn’t me,” I whispered. “It’s you, it’s supposed to be you, you’re the Black Man, you’re – ” Then I was falling backwards through the looking glass with cards spraying out in all directions around me, nine of Swords, DEATH. Three of Swords, DEATH. The Tower, DEATH. The Chariot, DEATH.
I awoke screaming, with Anouk standing above me, her dark face blurry with sleep and anxiety.
“Maman, what is it?”
Her arms are warm around my neck. She smells of chocolate and vanilla and peaceful untroubled sleep.
“Nothing. A dream. Nothing.”
She croons to me in her small soft voice, and I have an unnerving impression of the world reversed, of myself melting into her like a nautilus into its spiral, round-around-around, of her hand cool on my forehead, her mouth against my hair.