So, she set about reading. A new routine was established: she rose early, made Zaide’s breakfast and checked her schoolbag, followed her down the iron staircase which echoed their footsteps, waved her off as she held open the heavy double doors, and then went into the office.
The books were there, waiting for her. Juliette had learned to navigate nimbly between the piles, avoiding the sharp corners of the boxes, and to brush against the bookcases without causing a collapse. She no longer had that suffocating feeling which had previously made her leave the room, then the courtyard, and stride through the streets, her arms folded over her chest to shield herself from the biting wind. The books had become a friendly presence, a sort of soft eiderdown in which she liked to snuggle. She even thought, when she had shut the glazed door behind her, that she heard a sort of buzz, or rather, a vibration, coming from the pages, calling her. She stood still, holding her breath, and waited. The call was louder from this side—no, from the other. It came from the blocked-up hearth or from the dark cranny behind the stepladder. Then she would walk over, cautiously, her hand outstretched to caress the cardboard or worn leather spine. Then she would freeze.
It was here. It was this one.
Juliette had understood from the beginning that she would not be capable of choosing by herself from among the thousands of books Soliman had accumulated. So she had relied on random selection, already tried and tested during her Métro “missions.” You simply had to wait. And stay calm. She couldn’t see inside the books—those millions of sentences, words teeming like colonies of ants—but the books could see her. She offered herself to them. Does an easy prey that stays in the open, without trying to run away, arouse the predator’s suspicion? Should she really see the books as wild animals dreaming of escaping from their paper cages, ready to throw themselves on her and devour her?
Perhaps. It was of no importance. She wanted to be devoured. A desire that kept her awake at night, drove her out of bed at dawn, and kept her up late under the industrial-style lamp she’d bought at a yard sale in the neighboring avenue—never had she ventured that far before, having contented herself with doing her shopping at the corner grocery store.
She read lying on her stomach on her bed or crouched against the guardrail of the gallery when a ray of sunshine warmed the air; she read propped on her elbows at Soliman’s desk and at the kitchen table where she made Zaide’s meals; she read as she flipped the burgers in the frying pan, sautéed mushrooms, or stirred a béchamel sauce. She had even found a position, although somewhat uncomfortable, that enabled her to read while peeling vegetables: she simply had to cradle the book in the crook of her arm and turn the pages with a fork held between her teeth. It was childlike, if you thought about it. She read in the bath, like Chloe’s buyer (had she finished Rebecca? Had the end of the novel brought the end of her happiness in the apartment whose imperfections had been concealed by the glamour of a love story?), while drinking coffee, and even during visits from the passeurs, darting intermittent glances at the page she was on as she nudged a pile of randomly selected books toward them—with an apologetic smile to boot.
Juliette slipped into each story as if into a shiny new skin; her pores imbibed the salt; the perfume used to preserve the suppleness of the limbs of Tahoser, the heroine of Théophile Gautier’s 1858 novel The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt; the caresses of a stranger encountered aboard a ship. Her ears rang with the boom of gongs, the shrill notes of ancient flutes, hands clapping the rhythm of a dance or applauding a speech, the hissing of waves, rolling smooth pebbles in their blue-green belly. Her eyes stung by the wind, teared up, the heavy face paint of courtesans. Her lips swollen by a thousand kisses. Her fingers covered in invisible gold dust.
From this chaotic reading, she sometimes emerged exhausted, but most often intoxicated. It was no longer she who, at 4:45 P.M., greeted Zaide at the kitchen door: it was Salammbô, Alexander, Sancho Panza, or Calvino’s Baron in the Trees, the terrifying Lady Macbeth, Goethe’s Charlotte, Catherine Earnshaw—and Heathcliff.
“Tell me the story,” the little girl would demand.
And Juliette obliged while spreading butter and jam on three slices of bread, not one more, not one less. Zaide would eat them taking small bites—to draw out the pleasure.
“You’re like Soliman,” she said on the fifth day. Juliette had noticed that she rarely said “Papa.” In her eyes, Zaide was a mini adult, much too earnest sometimes, with a relentless logic.
“Why like Soliman?”
“He always says that he’s been to the ends of the earth without moving from his chair. Are you going to do the same? You never go out anymore. You travel inside your head. I couldn’t do that.”
“But you like stories,” replied Juliette, as she plunged her finger into the jar of strawberry jam and licked it, forgetting that she was supposed to set a good example.
“Yes, because…”
Zaide wedged her little fist under her chin and began to ponder, knitting her eyebrows. Her expression made the resemblance to her father so striking that Juliette felt emotional—upset. She missed Soliman. She’d had no news from him and was beginning to worry.
“Because the stories make me want to have adventures, too,” said Zaide at length. “But I can’t, because I’m still too little. But you, you don’t like adventures.”
“Of course I do!”
“But not real ones. I bet you’d even be afraid on the Métro now.”
Juliette raised her right hand, presenting her palm to Zaide.
“Do you want to bet?”
“Depends what we’re betting,” replied Zaide mischievously. “Adults’ bets are no fun. I bet a journey.”
Juliette, surprised, raised an eyebrow.
“A journey? But I don’t know whether—”
“A journey anywhere. To the building site behind the school. To the big tower blocks I saw one day when I went to the dentist. Anywhere. A journey is when you go to a place you don’t know,” she added.
“Okay,” muttered Juliette, with a lump in her throat.
“What about you, what do you bet?”
Juliette gulped. She couldn’t burst into tears in front of this little scrap of a girl who dreamed of faraway places so close to home, as if going beyond her neighborhood was a rare gift.
“The same thing.”
Zaide’s luminous smile was both a reward and a punishment.
“Tomorrow,” Juliette said, “I’ll take the Métro again.”
“You’ll travel the whole length of the line.”
“The whole line, I promise. In both directions.”
“Several times?”
“Several times, if you like. Why?”
“It’s better, you’ll see.”
This child was just like her father. Too much so.