Page 10 of Vianne

Sunday is the day that Louis goes to see Margot at Saint-Pierre.

It is a grand old cemetery, replete with the tombs of the wealthy, but Marguerite isn’t buried there.

Instead, she rests in what they call La Cathédrale du Silence ; a modern mausoleum not unlike the high-rise flats of the poorest neighbourhoods, in which the dead are stacked, ten thousand deep, in identical concrete alcoves overlooking the necropolis.

In this city, the dead have as many problems finding accommodation as the living; and this was the cheapest option.

Of course, he doesn’t own the plot: it’s only rented for twenty-five years, and after that what’s left of her will go into the fosse commune .

He expresses this sentiment with deliberate brutality; although I can see the colours of his grief like a nimbus around him.

But Louis is deliberate; the words – like these visits to the cemetery – are a form of penance.

I sense it as he prepares to leave; the suit that he would have worn to church paired with well-polished shoes and the hat he only wears on Sundays.

And I can see it in his walk; as if every step is on broken glass.

Of course Louis told me none of this. Instead, he left me with a list of jobs to do around the house, along with a curt instruction to rest. I rushed through the chores at speed, then went to look at Margot’s recipes.

I took care in handling the book; the pages were brittle as Bible-skin, and covered in footnotes and crossings-out.

I tried to count the recipes – there must have been fifty pages or more, with many recipes from the Dordogne, from Monpazier to Bergerac.

Grandmother’s Pescajoune . Simone’s foie gras .

Maman’s candied walnut tart . Many of these recipes have a family connection.

All have a date, indicating when the page was added.

And many have little side notes: Make this up the day before: it tastes much better heated up!

A recipe against sadness. Serve with a glass of good red, and a smile.

I wonder how long it will take me to learn to make all of these dishes.

A month, at least, assuming that I learn two recipes a day.

That’s a long time to stay in one place.

More than enough to get attached . To my mother, attachment was death.

The Lovers , the most dangerous of all the cards in the Tarot pack.

We have each other , she would say. That’s already danger enough .

And so we moved on like shadows, from village to village, town to town.

We slept together in the same bed. My friendships were as brief and bright as a handful of flowers picked by the road; lasting a couple of days at most; forgotten as soon as we moved on.

By the time I started to notice boys, I knew the rules.

Take what you need, but Love is too heavy to carry.

I wondered how she could reconcile that perspective with keeping me .

But now, I’m free to write my own rules.

I can stay as long as I choose, make friends as I choose, dream as I choose.

Four walls, a job, a family – things I only know from books.

And love; not like flowers picked by the road, but love like a tree that grows and bears fruit.

Love that shines on the good days, and weathers the bad days like a storm.

Love like a set of wooden spoons. Love like Louis and Marguerite.

I put back the bundle of recipes on the shelf in the kitchen.

One day I’ll have my own recipes , I told myself.

My own kitchen. One day perhaps, my own café, or a little shop of my own.

I can see these things in the smoke that rises from the harbourside.

I can even see my child – slyly, from the tail of my eye.

I sometimes feel as if I could reach out and take her in my arms. But there’s no man in these dreams of mine; not even my daughter’s father.

Perhaps that’s because I’m already complete in a way that Margot was not.

Recipes are like children , I thought, remembering the bouillabaisse.

Maybe she felt that way, too. Perhaps she lives on in her recipes, the way others do in their children.

Perhaps that’s why she feels so close when I am in her kitchen.

And perhaps it is my pregnancy that makes me aware of her presence.

The kitchen clock said half past one. I remembered my promise to Guy and Mahmed to visit their chocolaterie . I took the keys to the bistrot from the hook behind the door. Then, I locked up and made my way on foot, towards the address Guy had given me. Xocolatl. Allée du Pieu; no street number.

It took me a while to find it. The Vieux Quartier of Marseille is a warren of cobbled lanes, some almost too small for access, over which hang sheets and washing-lines, and little balconies crowded with flower pots and garden chairs and children’s toys and votive figurines.

And I’d expected a chichi place, like the chocolate shops in Rome and Milan.

Instead I found a cul-de-sac, half-blocked with rubbish and packing-crates, where hung, above an unnumbered door, between a Chinese takeaway and a long-defunct print shop, a shaky, handwritten cardboard sign bearing the word: XOCOLATL .

The door was a dark and ancient green, chipped in many places to reveal the ghosts of businesses past. I couldn’t imagine any of them to have been successful; the place had a sad look of neglect and decades-long dereliction.

I knocked, and heard sounds of machinery; eventually the door opened a crack and I recognized Mahmed, wearing his hair in a messy bun, and wrapped in an apron that – judging by the stains – might have been worn to commit a particularly gruesome murder.

‘Oh, it’s you. Come in,’ he said, opening the door wider. ‘Guy’s in the shop. I was cooking.’

‘Cooking what ?’

He looked down at his apron. ‘Chocolate. What else?’

It didn’t look like chocolate to me, and I said so. There was a scent, though: a dark, fruity, fermented scent, like someone’s home-brewed wine gone wrong. I wondered if there was a still hidden away inside the building.

‘I know it looks like blood,’ said Mahmed. ‘This is raw cacao liquor, bled from the fruit of the cacao tree. Bled at some cost, in fact, although Guy assures me that this is the only way to do it.’

I looked uncertainly at my surroundings.

The place looked less like a shop, and more like a kind of shelter, in which crates and metal drums had been piled chaotically from floor to ceiling.

A passage, lit by a naked bulb, led to a clearer space, and I followed behind Mahmed as the scent of fermentation grew, until I found myself in a room that looked like a kind of laboratory.

Glass jars and demijohns against one wall; in the centre, a long metal table covered with something like almonds, but with a dry and dusty look that made me think they must be old.

‘Cacao beans,’ said Mahmed.

I picked one up and crushed it. It felt at the same time greasy and dry.

But the scent it released was complex; dark and sweet and throaty.

It made me think of ancient maps and places long-forgotten.

Vanilla, from the scented isles. Saffron from Morocco.

I thought back to that little bar of Poulain chocolate; as a child, I’d never asked myself what it was, or from what part of the world it had come.

But there was history in that scent; history and a terrible age.

And yet there was also childhood; a half-remembered sadness; a memory of different skies; a sweetness all but forgotten.

I looked up from the crushed bean in my hand to find Guy standing next to me, holding a cup of something. ‘The Mayans and the Aztecs drank this thousands of years ago. Go on, taste it. Give it a try.’

It tasted bitter, like wormwood and sloes. He smiled at my expression. ‘They called it xocolatl. The name means ‘bitter water’.

‘Oh.’ I understood the shop sign now. ‘Do you think people will understand the reference?’

He shrugged. ‘Maybe they’ll learn something.’

Mahmed’s tone was censorious, but his eyes were warm and soft. ‘Maybe they don’t want to learn anything. Maybe all they really want is Easter eggs, and chocolate mice, and little boxes of pretty things to give their wives and girlfriends.’

Guy shrugged again. ‘So what? They’ll have them, too. You’ll see, at our grand opening.’

‘I’m saying there are easier ways,’ said Mahmed, in the voice of a man who has said this many times before.

Guy grinned. ‘Who wants easy?’

‘ We do,’ said Mahmed, returning his smile. ‘We both do. Easy, and very lucrative.’

I laughed. Mahmed joined in the laughter, and once again I saw in him that gleam of warm affection. ‘I think you’re in the wrong business, friend,’ said Guy, then, turning to me again, took my arm. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I’ll show you how the magic works.’