conversations.from: human
conversations.value: a title for a book about B><I, Green</I, Green with the genre: Biographies & Memoirs, Arts & Literature
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'Self-Portrait in Green'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first four paragraphs for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Self-Portrait in Green
  We all know the river can rise nine meters above its banks before it overflows, thanks to the levees surrounding the village.
  That much we know. It's the first thing you learn when you make up your mind to settle in this place, eternally under threat from the floodwaters of the Garonne. What we don't know this evening is what's coming tonight, or tomorrow—if, like last time, ten months ago, the water will stop at the top of the levees, or, as it did twenty-two years ago, spill over, submerge the streets, invade the ground floor of the houses, sometimes the second floor, sometimes the whole house.
  We can only wait and watch. Once the level nears eight and a half meters, we'll be told to park our various vehicles on the plateau, just outside the next village. That hasn't happened yet.
  We can only keep waiting and watching. No sign, for the moment, of the long, slow column of trucks, cars, tractors, campers, and combines rolling through the night, crossing the canal, making for a place the Garonne will never reach.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me four more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The house seems to be empty. Jenny knocks, waits and waits, then goes in all the same. The kitchen and living room sit frozen in an atypical tidiness. She hesitates, sits down. She takes the wife's pack of cigarettes from the little table. She hesitates again, then pulls one out and lights it somewhat clumsily with the lighter she knows so well, which she's found lying on the table like a thing not so much put down as put away. She crosses her legs and smokes. She's aware of her flushed face, her shame. She imagines her parents, eyeing her sternly, reproaching her for being a woman and smoking, for being worthless and smoking.
  And then she suddenly stands up and bolts down to the basement, still holding the cigarette. Her shoes clap sharply against the cement steps. In her haste, she almost trips, almost tumbles headlong down the stairway.
  She embraces Ivan's wife's thighs and hips. The wife is wearing green corduroy pants and a blouse of green satin. Her feet are bare, and Jenny notes their soles, gray with dust.
  What's left of the cigarette is still clasped between Jenny's lips. She'd like to wash off those feet, already cold, rub them, implore them. Straining to hoist up the body so she can loosen the knot on the rope, she spits out her cigarette butt, then presses her face into Ivan's wife's bulging belly and begins to sob in horror and dismay, now and then shouting out toward the basement walls, which bounce her cry back to her in a feeble echo. The house is deserted, she can call out all she likes—who will hear her?
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last four paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The children ask if I saw it, if I can tell them the name of what I saw. They turn their bewitched little faces toward mine. Some of them seem sated, exhausted, like lion cubs after a feast.
  Then the children eye each other gravely. Their lips are very red. Then they look away, and fall silent.
  December 2003 – The water's stopped rising. But in La Réole the riverside streets are submerged, and the ground floors of the modest houses are flooded. Above them, on the bridge, the passersby stand motionless, looking at the water, waiting for nothing more, only the simple spectacle of water where it's not supposed to be.
  And then... driving slowly across the flooded plain, on the one passable road... I wonder... the water muddy and calm on either side of the roadway... is the Garonne... is the Garonne a woman in green?