The Little Paris Bookshop Read Online Free PDF Page B

in a quiet, bitter voice. She looked at Perdu with shiny eyes.
    ‘So?’ she said. ‘How stupid am I?’
    ‘Not very,’ he replied.
    The last time Anna had really read anything was when she was a student. José Saramago’s
Blindness
. It had left her perplexed.
    ‘No wonder,’ said Perdu. ‘It’s not a book for someone starting out in life. It’s for people in the middle of it. Who wonder where the devil the first half went. Who raise their eyes from the feet they’d been eagerly placing one in front of the other without looking where they’ve been running so sensibly and diligently all this time. Only those who are blind to life need Saramago’s fable. You, Anna, can see.’
    After that, Anna had stopped reading; she’d worked instead. Too much, too long, accumulating more and more exhaustion inside her. So far, she had not once succeeded in including a man in one of her advertisements for household cleaners or nappies.
    ‘Advertising is the final bastion of the patriarchy,’ she informed Perdu and the rapt Jordan. ‘Even more than the military. Only in publicity is the world as it always was.’
    Having offered up all these confessions, she leaned back in her chair. ‘So?’ her expression said. ‘Can I be cured? Give me the plain truth.’
     

     
    Her answers didn’t affect Perdu’s book selection one bit. They were merely meant to familiarise him with Anna’s voice, its pitch and her way of speaking.
    Perdu collected the words that stood out from the stream of everyday expressions. The shining words were the ones that revealed how this woman saw and smelled and felt. What was really important to her, what bothered her and how she was feeling right now. What she wished to conceal behind a fog of words. Pains and longings.
    Monsieur Perdu fished out these words. Anna often said: ‘That wasn’t the plan’ and ‘I didn’t count on that.’ She talked about ‘countless’ attempts and ‘a sequence of nightmares.’ She lived in a world of mathematics, an elaborate device for ordering the irrational and personal. She wouldn’t allow herself to follow her intuition or consider the impossible possible.
    Yet that was only one part of what Perdu listened out for and recorded: what was making the soul unhappy. Then there was the second part: what made the soul happy. Monsieur Perdu knew that the texture of the things a person loves rubs off on his or her language too.
    Madame Bernard, the owner of number 27, transposed her love of fabric onto houses and people; ‘Manners like a creased polyester shirt’ was one of her favourite sayings. The pianist, Clara Violette, expressed herself in musical parlance: ‘The Goldenbergs’ little girl plays only third fiddle in her mother’s life.’ Goldenberg the grocer saw the world in terms of flavours, described someone’s character as ‘rotten’ and a job promotion as ‘overripe’. His youngest girl, Brigitte, the ‘third fiddle’, loved the sea – a magnet for sensitive dispositions. The fourteen-year-old, a precocious beauty, had compared Max Jordan to ‘the sea view from Cassis, deep and distant’. The third fiddle was in love with the writer, of course. Until very recently Brigitte had wanted to be a boy. Now, though, she desperately wanted to be a woman.
    Perdu swore to himself that he would soon take Brigitte a book that could be her island haven in the ocean of first love.
    ‘Do you often say sorry?’ Perdu now asked Anna. Women always felt guiltier than they ought.
    ‘Do you mean: “Sorry, I haven’t finished what I wanted to say” or more like “Sorry for being in love with you and only giving you headaches”?’
    ‘Both. Any request for forgiveness. Maybe you’ve got used to feeling guilty for everything you are. Often it’s not we who shape words, but the words we use that shape us.’
    ‘You’re a funny bookseller, you know that?’
    ‘Yes, I do, Mademoiselle Anna.’
    Monsieur Perdu asked Jordan to haul over dozens of