The Virgin Blue by Tracy Chevalier Page B

myself for being scared off by a dream.’
‘What does the blue look like? Like that?’ He pointed to a sign advertising ice cream for sale in the café. I shook my head.
‘No, that's too bright. I mean, the dream blue is bright. Very vivid. But it's bright and yet dark too. I don't know the technical words to describe it. It reflects lots of light. It's beautiful but in the dream it makes me sad. Elated too. It's like there are two sides to the colour. Funny that I remember the colour. I always thought I dreamed in black and white.’
‘And the voices? Who are they?’
‘I don't know. Sometimes it's my voice. Sometimes I wake up and I've been saying the words. I can almost hear them, as if the room has just then gone silent.’
‘What are the words? What are you saying?’
I thought for a minute, then shook my head. ‘I don't remember.’
He fixed his eyes on me. ‘Try. Close your eyes.’
I did as he said, sitting still as long as I could, Jean-Paul silent next to me. Just as I was about to give up, a fragment floated into my mind. ‘ Je suis un pot cassé ,’ I said suddenly.
I opened my eyes. ‘I am a broken pot? Where did that come from?’
Jean-Paul looked startled.
‘Can you remember any more?’
I closed my eyes again. ‘ Tu es ma tour et forteresse ,’ I mur-mured at last.
I opened my eyes. Jean-Paul's face was screwed up in concentration and he seemed far away. I could see his mind working, travelling over a vast plain of memory, scanning and rejecting, until something clicked and he returned to me. He fixed his eyes on the ice-cream sign and began to recite:
Entre tous ceux-là qui me haient
Mes voisins j'aperçois
Avoir honte de moi:
Il semble que mes amis aient
Horreur de ma rencontre,
Quand dehors je me montre.
Je suis hors de leur souvenance,
Ainsi qu'un trespassé.
Je suis un pot cassé .
As he spoke I felt a pressure in my throat and behind my eyes. It was grief.
I held tightly to the arms of my chair, pushing my body hard against its back as if to brace myself. When he finished I swallowed to ease my throat.
‘What is it?’ I asked quietly.
‘The thirty-first psalm.’
I frowned at him. ‘A psalm? From the Bible?’
‘Yes.’
‘But how could I know it? I don't know any psalms! Hardly in English, and certainly not in French. But those words are so familiar. I must have heard it somewhere. How do you know it?’
‘Church. When I was young we had to memorize many psalms. But also it was in my studying at one time.’
‘You studied psalms for a library science degree?’
‘No, no, before that, when I studied history. The history of the Languedoc. That is what I really do.’
‘What's Languedoc?’
‘An area all around us. From Toulouse and the Pyrenees all the way to the Rhône.’ He drew another circle on his napkin map, encompassing the smaller circle of the Cévennes and a lot of the cow's neck and muzzle. ‘It was named for the language once spoken there. Oc was their word for oui . Langue d'oc – language of oc .’
‘What did the psalm have to do with Languedoc?’
He hesitated. ‘Well, that's curious. It was a psalm the Huguenots used to recite when bad things happened.’
That night after supper I finally told Rick about the dream, describing the blue, the voices, the atmosphere, as accurately as I could. I left out some things too: I didn't tell him that I'd been over this territory with Jean-Paul, that the words were a psalm, that I only had the dream after sex. Since I had to pick and choose what I told him, the process was more self-conscious and not nearly as therapeutic as it had been with Jean-Paul, when it had come out involuntarily and naturally. Now that I was telling it for Rick's sake rather than my own, I found I had to shape it more into a story, and it began to detach itself from me and take on its own fictional life.
Rick took it that way too. Maybe it was the way I told it, but he listened as if he were half paying attention to something else at the