Шоколад / Chocolat

“Foul stuff,” she commented without rancour, sipping the drink from one of her hand-painted cups. “They say you can’t taste the difference. But you can.” She made a wry face… “Caro brings it when she comes. Goes through my cupboards. I suppose she means well. Can’t help being a ninny.”

I told her she ought to take more care. Armande snorted.

“When you get to my age,” she told me, “things start to break down. If it isn’t one thing, then it’s another. It’s a fact of life.” She took another sip of the bitter coffee.

“When he was sixteen Rimbaud said he wanted to experience as much as possible with the greatest possible intensity. Well, I’m going on eighty now, and I’m beginning to think he was right.”

She grinned, and I was again struck by the youthfulness of her face, a quality that has less to do with colouring or bone structure than with a kind of inner brightness and anticipation, the look of someone who has hardly begun to discover what life has to offer.

“I think you’re probably too old to join the Foreign Legion,” I told her with a smile. “And didn’t Rimbaud’s experiences run rather to excess at times?”

Armande shot me an impish look.

“That’s right,” she replied. “I could do with a bit more excess. From now on I’m going to be immoderate – and volatile – I shall enjoy loud music and lurid poetry. I shall be rampant,” she declared with satisfaction.

I laughed.

“You are quite absurd,” I said with mock severity.

“No wonder your family despairs of you.”

But even though she laughed with me, rocking with merriment in her chair, what I recall now is not her laughter but what I glimpsed behind the laughter; that look of giddy abandon, desperate glee.

And it was only later, late into the night when I awoke sweating from some dark half-forgotten nightmare, that I remembered where I had seen that look before.

How about Florida, sweetheart? The Everglades? The Keys? How about Disneyland, cherie, or New York, Chicago, the Grand Canyon, Chinatown, New Mexico, the Rocky Mountains?

But with Armande there was none of my mother’s fear, none of her delicate parrying and wrangling with death, none of her mad hit-and-run flights of fantasy into the unknown.

With Armande there was only the hunger, the desire, the terrible awareness of time.

I wonder what the doctor said to her this morning, and how much she really understands.