Le Bouquiniste

I recently visited Paris for the first time in many years, and what a joy it was! One of the great things about Paris is les bouquinistes, the secondhand-book sellers who have lined the banks of the Seine since the 1700s. Today, there are about 900 of the famous green “book boxes”. The word comes from “bouquin”, an old French word for a used book or one of little monetary value.

A number of years ago, I listened to a piece on Radio 4 about les bouquinistes and heard about an American woman who found a children’s book in one of the green boxes that she had actually owned! When she opened the cover, her name was written inside. Well, such true stories are fiction-writers’ gold, and I couldn’t resist writing a short story. The story was published a few years back in a short-fiction anthology, but I’m publishing it here for your reading pleasure. Bonne lecture!

Paris’s famous green “book boxes”

Le Bouquiniste

by Lorna Partington

Anton Marchand deplores those who sell shiny souvenirs to survive. He has been heard to declare he would rather be poor than a peddler of plastic, so penniless he is. Beside the river, where les bouquinistes have traded for centuries, he sits in a folding chair and puffs on thin cigarettes as the tourists peer into his green trunk. Whenever a book is pulled from its row Anton stiffens, as if it were one of his own vertebrae, and braces himself for the inevitable. 

“100 euro? But it’s falling apart!”  

Anton translates whatever language is spoken by the tone of voice, or facial expression, and bellows his retort in French:  “A good book is more than the words on its pages. The story of the book itself is of equal – if not greater – importance. Think of the journey it has made, the hands it has passed through, the houses it has lived in!” 

The tourists hear his fury and leave him muttering to himself. Imbeciles. They believe the value of a book diminishes the more fragrant with age it becomes and, as Anton grows older and more odorous, the more this angers him. Over the years, he has lost interest in books with pristine pages and unbroken spines. Now he acquires for sale only the battered, the tattered, and the coffee spattered, in the belief that, no matter how pitiful a book’s condition, there must be someone out there who wants it.  

One hot day in June, Anton hears the Americans. Their voices soar above the noise of traffic and the bells of Notre Dame de Paris.  Anton tips more red wine into a tumbler from the bottle beneath his chair, rolls another cigarette, and inwardly despises them for living up to their national cliché. Soon there are eight of them, all braying over the oldest books and rubbing their fingers on the worn leather. Anton fumes at their covetousness, their desire to buy age from all over the world to take back to their pubescent country. After several pain-filled minutes, one of his most treasured tomes is chosen and, though well compensated, Anton slumps into his seat to grieve his loss, while the group is lured away by trinkets that twinkle in the sun. 

One, however, stays behind. The woman pushes up her sunglasses into her well coiffed hair and bends forward to inspect the volumes. Her hair, nails, and teeth have all been coloured by chemicals. Only the skin on her neck and hands indicate she might, in fact, be as old as Anton, who feels in his bones each and every year of his half century.  Anton eyes her breasts, which push against her tight, low-cut top. He looks away and then returns his gaze. They are round and smooth like firm balls of bread dough and clearly made to be looked at. In Anton’s experience, when Americans spend money they want you to appreciate it. But these breasts are too spherical.  Anton prefers flatter breasts, like used pastry bags with just a little firmness left beneath large nozzles - the breasts of a woman for whom motherhood is a chapter in the story of her life. 

The American lifts out a book, cooing and purring over the exquisite jacket. She buries her nose between the pages to breathe in its age and then turns to Anton.

“My friends have no interest in literature,” she says.

Anton’s eyebrows register his surprise on hearing perfect French. Smiling, she tells him, “I’m a high school French teacher in Louisiana. It’s wonderful to speak the language properly again!”

Anton suppresses the urge to return the smile because he knows smiling makes his face look strange. He concedes he may have been deceived by the woman’s immaculate appearance and is reminded how easy it is to overlook a valuable book if it has been re-bound and re-stitched. He watches her as closely as he dares. The woman’s left hand moves lightly above a line of books, fingers twitching like divining rods. No wedding band, Anton notes. Then, sensing something, her hand hovers. She gives a squeal of delight as she lifts out a children’s book, so slim it had been almost invisible between two thick volumes.  

“The Magician’s Rabbit! I know this book like the back of my hand,” she says, addressing the illustration on the cover. The cartoon rabbit smiles back, baring its buckteeth. 

Anton nods distractedly, imagining the scars under her breasts where once the surgeon had inserted the jelly sacks. Anton wants to know why she had felt incomplete, if someone had made her feel that way, and whether her breasts bounce with happiness when she makes love, or if they feel heavy with the weight of regret.

“Oh my God!” 

Anton snaps out of his reverie and jumps up from the chair, his once-famous chivalrous instinct returning for a split second.  He stares at the woman, unable to interpret her look of distress, since drama is something Anton finds only in books, no longer in his humdrum life. The woman has turned pale.

“Please,” he says, gesturing to his chair.  She drops into it, gulps down the wine offered to her, and puts down the glass.  

“May I have a cigarette?” she whispers.  

Anton pulls the spare from behind his ear.

“Light it for me?” she says.

He sucks the flame into the cigarette and puts it into her trembling hand.  She takes deep inhalations, holds in the smoke for a long time, and then blows it out through her nose.  After a minute, she passes the book to Anton.  He flips through the pages. A first edition. Very charming illustrations, which must have been the reason he acquired it.  

“Read the inscription,” she says.

He turns to the inside cover and reads aloud what is written in French:  “To my darling Bonnie, With love forever from Grandmama.”

Anton looks at the woman and she stares back, eyes wide. 

He points at her, then to the book. “You are Bonnie? . . . You are this Bonnie?”

The woman nods.  “It’s mine! The very same book I had as a child in Louisiana!”  She begins to cry. 

Anton shakes his head slowly. It cannot be possible. How can a book and its owner, separated by decades and continents, cross paths like this?  It is, he thinks, the kind of coincidence that might flow from the quill of a Great Romantic onto the pages of his corpulent novel, but real life is not so wondrous. In his own life, at least, none of the treasures he has lost have ever been returned to him. No, this reunion cannot be pure chance. It must be that this woman – without even knowing it – has always been searching for this one book, a token of a happier time long before the slice of a surgeon’s knife: simply a matter of “seek and you shall find”.

Yet Anton’s heart is pumping, working hard to remind him that it used to beat for something other than the discovery of a rare book, and that he was once a romantic, great in his own way. Perhaps, he thinks, The Fates had not been trying to unite Bonnie and the rabbit, but to bring Bonnie to him. 

During his speechlessness, Bonnie’s tears have ceased, although she sniffs between sobs. Concerned passersby dart disapproving looks at Anton. He pulls out his handkerchief, wishing he had a cleaner one, and says,  “You have had a great shock.” Then, now wanting to open her up and look inside, says in English, “Tell me about your grandmother.” 

Bonnie drinks more wine and then begins to speak in English. Anton has never heard the language sound so musical, and he cannot take his eyes from her lips. At last, she concludes, “My grandmother was the only one that loved my brother and me. When I finally got away from home, my mother threw out everything I’d ever touched.” She looks down again at the rabbit.  “Where have you been all this time?”

Anton tries to recall where he got the book but – addled by adrenaline and alcohol – he cannot. Nevertheless, he says, “I remember the house sale I got this from.  I take you, show you. You will be pleased to know it came from a good home.” 

This is a lie worth telling to see Bonnie again, and he will do his best to remember when he can think straight. If he cannot, he will take her to see the prettiest house he knows.

Bonnie smiles, a line of tears cradled in each eye. “I leave Paris tomorrow.” 

Anton opens his mouth to protest, but no words come. With a heavy hand, he reaches for his brown paper and wraps the book slowly and carefully, trying to slow time and stop it forever at that moment. But the seconds tick by. When he has finished, the woman takes out her Euros, but Anton holds her wrist gently and shakes his head. 

“I have merely been looking after it for you,” he says.  

Bonnie hugs the book to her chest, and Anton sees the child she had once been. She thanks him again and again, backing away, holding his gaze until she is forced to turn by the fast flowing crowd. There is the familiar nibble of bereavement that comes with the loss of every book, but with each step she takes away from him, his grief takes bigger bites. He is rooted to the spot, unable to summon the words to call her back. He looks up to the sky: an instinctual plea for help from the universe.   

Once Bonnie is out of sight, it is already as if she never existed. He looks down at his books, trying to find the space where The Magician’s Rabbit had once been, but the fat volumes have already filled the gap, perhaps grateful for more room to breathe. At the sight of them, he is filled with sorrow. He doubts any of these books are capable of reproducing the kind of miracle that has just occurred. Lightning never strikes twice, so they say, and the books that remain are all sure to disappoint him in the end.  Anton realises he has been waiting all his working life for a customer like Bonnie.

“Where have you been all this time?” he says to himself.

Just then, he feels something land upon his arm, a hand as light as a sparrow. There is Bonnie. His stomach flutters, like wind across the pages of a book, as she steps in close and plants a firm kiss on one cheek and then the other. 

“Perhaps we’ll find each other again one day,” she says.

And once more she is taken off by a surge of tourists, leaving behind wet spots on Anton’s cheeks that feel cold in the breeze that comes off the Seine.