“It’s port,” he explains when I take the small glass curiously. “A good after-dinner drink.”
It’s sweet and thick, and I take another sip immediately after the first, enjoying the syrupy taste on my tongue.
“It’s really good,” I manage, and Alexandre smiles, reaching for a leather-bound book next to his chair.
I watch him as he flips it open, the way he slouches slightly in the chair, shifting until he gets comfortable, finally resting one ankle on the knee of his other leg and settling the book against his thigh, flipping through the thin pages until he lands on whatever it is that he was looking for.
I expect him to read in silence, but instead, he startles me as he starts to read aloud, his smooth, silkily accented voice drifting quietly towards me over the warm crackle of the fire.
“Demain, dès l’aube, à l’heure où blanchit la campagne,
Je partirai. Vois-tu, je sais que tu m’attends.
J’irai par la forêt, j’irai par la montagne.
Je ne puis demeurer loin de toi plus longtemps.”
He pauses, glancing up at me, and then smiles ruefully. “You don’t speak French, do you,petit?”
The familiar nickname makes my chest tighten. “Not much,” I admit. “I took some classes in high school, and you have to learn some as a ballerina, but I’m not fluent.”
“Ah.” Alexandre shrugs. “Well, perhaps you’ll learn here. At any rate, I’m quite well-spoken in English.”
I can’t tell if he’s being sarcastic or not, but a moment later, he turns his attention back to the book and reads what I think is the same poem over again, this time in richly accented English.
“Tomorrow, from dawn, at the hour when the countryside whitens,
I'll leave. See, I know you're expecting me.
I'll go through the forest, I'll go through the mountains.
I can't stay away from you any longer.”
The words of the poem hang in the air between us, floating heavily, and I don’t know what to say. It’s too romantic a poem for us, for him to be reading ittome, or is it? Am I meant to think that’s what this is? I meet his eyes shyly, flickering my gaze up quickly to see his sky-blue eyes on mine, but I can’t read what he’s thinking.
“Victor Hugo,” Alexandre says quietly. “Did you know he wrote poetry?”
I shake my head, grateful for a change in subject. “No,” I say quickly. “All I know of his isLes Miserables.”
“That’s most people,” Alexandre says with a laugh. He flips through the pages again, reading in French when he stops.
“L’amour s’en va comme cette eau courante
L’amour s’en va
Comme la vie est lente
Et comme l’Espérance est violente.”
And then without my asking him to, again in English:
“Love goes away like this running water
Love is leaving
How slow life is
And how Hope is violent.”