Madame Ferrand had invested the sum total of her meagre savings in these modest premises twenty years earlier. She had had no hesitation in entrusting little Bernard, then aged two, to the care of her parents, leaving her free to seek her fortune in Vals-les-Bains. Why Vals-les-Bains? Perhaps because of Jean Ferrat, whose revolutionary lyrics could not fail to ignite the pure working-class heart of a mother seduced by a stockbroker from Lyon, who vanished without trace when baby Bernard was born. Unless it was something as mundane as an ad in Le Dauphiné that put the idea into her head one lonely evening, kindling in her the hope of escaping her unremittingly squalid fate.
She was thirty-five, feisty, determined, good with her hands and not without talent. Ignoring the derision of neighbouring shopkeepers, she worked on her hats by night and fixed the place up during the day, successfully transforming an old-fashioned haberdasher’s into a stylish millinery boutique in the space of a month. Chez Anaïs opened on schedule at the end of May, just in time for the tourist season. But by October, she had to face facts: she had not found her clientele. Her extravagant headpieces certainly amused the spa visitors who came to try them on, giggling in front of the mirrors, but they never bought anything.
After a period of understandable despondency, she sold her stock to a ragman for next to nothing and, with the same enthusiasm and pugnacity as before, opened a local handicrafts shop with a young hippy by the name of Daphne. A new sign, ‘Aux Herbes Tendres’, went up in place of the old. They sold beeswax candles, real leather belts and bags, brass jewellery, weird preserves, strange infusions and incense sticks, a lot of incense sticks, some of which were kept tucked inside Daphne’s long woollen coat. Business was going pretty well until the day Anaïs’s partner ran off with the till, leaving her with nothing but her eyes to cry with, a few armfuls of lavender and bitter memories of her first Sapphic love affair. ‘La femme est l’avenir de l’homme,’ crooned Jean Ferrat, so couldn’t a woman be another woman’s future too? She was furious with Jean Ferrat that autumn and furious with the rest of humanity too, which is what set her thinking about going into dog grooming. You rarely come across a retired couple on a spa break without one of those hideous golden poodles in tow. Of course, Anaïs knew nothing about dogs and the equipment costs would be substantial, but nothing ventured, nothing gained. This time, she was sure she was onto something. She’d had it with the human race and was putting her faith in man’s best friend. Come spring, Madame Ferrand donned an immaculate white coat to welcome the first customers to her pooch parlour. But at the beginning of July, she was forced to close the doors due to an unfortunate incident. A faulty switch on a drier had turned a dachshund called Caruso into a hot dog. The sale of the equipment just about covered the legal fees.
Anaïs was by no means the only one to experience a run of bad luck. One by one, the shops along Rue Jean-Jaurès went under, turning it into a ghost town. Only those supplying life’s basic essentials (namely the baker, the butcher and the tobacconist) were able to survive. This part of town, where tourists wandered aimlessly as if roaming the ruins of a lost civilisation, seemed destined for oblivion. After buying a few postcards, they would hurry back across the Volane to the reassuring shade of manicured hotel gardens.
But Anaïs was not one to throw in the towel at the first hurdle, nor the second, nor even the third. There must be a lesson to be learnt from this string of failures. One evening, as she groped for her glasses in the storeroom, her light-bulb moment came: ‘That’s it! Seeing!’ The scent of incense wafted back to her as she recalled her former partner’s mysterious revelations, secrets she had made her solemnly swear never to share.
‘No way am I going to keep that to myself, you old bitch!’
True, she might have drunk a little too much rum from the bottle of Negrita she was clutching, but she was just as shrewd as the next person!
Within a month she had digested the Egyptian Book of the Dead, that of the Tibetans and even the Popol Vuh. She mastered palm reading as easily as a shareholder learning about the stock exchange or a racegoer studying form. Finally, she saw a future ahead. Even better, the investment required was paltry: a pedestal table, a tarot set, a clock and that was it. Not to mention the fact that, in order for her to concentrate, she would need to be in complete darkness, drastically reducing her electricity bills. With the last of her money she had business cards printed to drop through letterboxes. It was cold, it was winter, she wheezed and her legs puffed up, but the Negrita kept her going. All she needed to do was wait.
Her first three clients suffered violent deaths in quick succession. One choked on a plum stone, another was hit head-on by a bus on her way to mass and the last was devoured by her own dog. Rumours spread quickly in small towns like this and nobody else took the risk of consulting her.
Anaïs took to coughing to pass the time, a hacking cough which tolled like a death knell inside her chest and which she had come to accept, like an old dog that had latched onto her.
In one last, admirable burst of optimism, she wrote a slate sign: ‘Anaïs’s Bric-à-Brac’, which she hung in the shop window. The only remnants of her failed ventures were a few musty felt hats, some bunches of dried flowers, three or four candles which had lost their scent, a dozen cracked leather dog collars and a tarot set. Strangely enough, she sold the lot.
These days she lived off her incurable cough, which brought her a small disability allowance, along with the modest but regular parcels she received from Bernard. It was enough to buy her daily bottle of Negrita, enabling her to watch calmly as the dust settled like grey snow on a life that should not have been. ‘My past is a joke, my present’s a disaster, thank goodness I have no future,’ she would say to console herself.
‘Mother, lunch is almost ready, come and sit down!’
Walking past Béatrix ice-cream parlour down the road from his hotel, Simon gave in to a childish whim. He sat down at a table underneath the plane trees whose leaves filtered the sunlight, casting extraordinary shadows. With the defiance of a little boy, he ordered the biggest and most expensive ice cream on the menu. While he waited for it to arrive, he flicked through the spa brochure he had picked up from reception that morning. The town boasted six springs: Constantine was the best for treating weight problems, dyspepsia and gout; Précieuse was the one to go to for liver conditions and diabetes; Dominique was very effective against anaemia and fatigue; Désirée was recommended for its laxative effects; Rigolette was prescribed for colitis; Camuse, to ease digestion. These waters could only be drunk on prescription, but there were three others – Saint-Jean, Favorite and Béatrix – which could be consumed in limitless quantities. The list of the conditions they were capable of curing was both endless and disconcerting: industrial dermatitis, nasal fractures, tropical liver diseases, trigger finger, abnormally large intestines … There were as many ailments to treat as there were ice creams on the menu. Who could claim not to suffer from a single one of them?
He glanced up. The average age of the clientele was somewhere between sixty and a hundred. Though he fell into this age bracket himself, the sight of so many pensioners in one place made him dizzy. While he had always considered his presence on earth to be a miscasting and had done his best to distance himself from his playmates from a tender age, he had never felt so trapped, in the clutches of some merciless predator. A young waitress set down in front of him the huge glass of garish ice cream studded with ridiculous cocktail umbrellas. Aside from her, he could see only three humanoids who had so far escaped the ravages of time. All of them were on wheels (bicycle, skateboard and rollerblades) as they zipped past, intent on dodging the Zimmer frames.
Why on earth had he stopped at Vals-les-Bains?