Locked-down, Loved-up Literature
Canvas asked four New Zealand authors to write about love, what it means, where they see it, how does it look right now; does it surprise or has it the same old face despite the circumstances ... how better is it to feel love now, than to clench in fear? So they each wrote a short story. Part one: and
The Blue Room
The blue room looked as if it hadn’t been slept in for months. In the dull light hanging from the blue ceiling, the blue painted walls, the blue bed cover, the blue carpet, the windowless room seemed shrouded in gloom. It was one o’clock in the morning in Paris. We had travelled, my husband and I, by train from Rome. The man at the desk at the little hotel in Montmartre had no record of our booking. But I did and so we found ourselves in the emergency room below stairs.
What will we do for a fortnight in Paris, my husband had asked. I had been to Paris before but he had not. Now I had no answer. We would move in the morning, somewhere, anywhere but here, I promised. In the morning we woke to bells chiming. We staggered to the breakfast room. A manager appeared, offering apologies. We would immediately be transferred to the red room upstairs. The red room was as red as the blue room had been blue. We looked now directly into the source of the chiming bells, the exquisite art nouveau church of Saint-jean de Montmartre.
My husband’s spirits were lifting. We went outside. On a wall next door to the little hotel the words “I love you” were painted in 132 different languages. “I love you,” my husband said. “Je t’aime,” I said. “Te amo,” he said, going all Spanish on me. The words, they were there in te reo, too. Like home. By the metro station at the end of rue des Abbesses, a man was playing an accordion. My husband went and sat beside him. They smiled at one another.
We decided we would stay on at the little hotel. The next day we were promoted again, to the yellow room at the top. Now we looked directly into the bell tower of the church. We declared that we never wanted to leave. Every day we read more and more of the phrases aloud to each other and each day the accordionist played as if we were the only people there in the street.
We came home to New Zealand. Over the years we went back and forth to the little hotel. The last time I was alone and visited without staying. The phrases on the wall had gone. But there was the accordionist, grey, bent over, still playing. He played something familiar, as if he remembered. I entered Saint-jean. I lit a candle. For memory. For hope. Light in dark times.
Fiona Kidman’s All the Way to Summer: Stories of love and longing (Vintage, is available now as an ebook, $13).