Out of the Dark
Out of the Dark
(Du plus loin de l'oubli)
PATRICK MODIANO
Translated by Jordan Stump
Uni\'ersity of Nebraska Press
Lincoln
C> Editions Gallimard,
11196. Translation and
introduction C> 19911
by dtc Univcnity of
Nebraska Press. All
rights reserved. Manufactured in dtc Unitm States of America
9The paper in dtis
book meets dte
minimum requirements
of American National
Standard for
Information Sciences
Permanence of Paper
for Printm Library
Materials, AN s 1 z
39 ..... ·19114-
·Library of Congress
Cataloging-in
Publication Data
Modiano, Patrick, 194-S[Du plus loin de l'oubli.
English] Out ofdte
dark = Du plus loin
de l'qubli I Patrick
Modiano ; ttanslatm by
Jordan Stump. p. em.
ISBN o-IOJ:�-3196-2
(hardcover : alk.
paper). -ISBN 0-
8032-1229-X (pbk. :
alk. paper) I. Stump,
Jordan, 19S9- .
II. Title.
PQ:z673.03D8313 19911
1143' ·914---dCZI
91-IJIQO CIP
Translator's I ntroduction
I find it difficult to preface this nm·cl without alluding to a very different age- nearly thirty years before the publication of Out of tbe Dark in F ranee - and to a year that looms large in the French imagination : 1968. This was a year of many changes in France. A massi\·e springtime uprising among students and workers paralyzed the nation, shaking many of its most solidly establ ished instin1tions (notably the university system) to their foundations and ushering in a newly visible and newly powelful youth culture, a culture of contestation and anti-traditionalism that would dramatically change the look and feel of the country. Charles de Gaulle, who had dominated French politics since the early days of World War I I , would not survive the blow to his credibility and reputation dealt by his intransigence toward the young revolutionaries; he would resign early the following year.
De Gaulle was not alone: many of the great icons of twentieth-century France were finding themselves forced to make way for something new. Jean-Paul Sartre was open ly mocked by the insurgent students when he tried to join one of their ral lies. The daring of the New Novelists, the avantgarde of the decade before, was beginning to seem less daring than the work of the so-called New New Novelists, who were blending a purely literary discourse with a new critical and theoretical awareness influenced by stmcturalism and v
semiotics. And the purely theoretical discourse of those disciplines- and most particularly of deconstruction and poststmcturalism- was beginning to imprint itself on the public imagination, allowing a rigorous and implacable questioning of languagc, tmth, and the ideologies behind them. Existentialism and humanism were rapidly losing ground to a far more radical way of thinking, whose influence is still with us today. In many ways, 1968 was a moment when the shape of the century changed.
It was also i n1968 that Editions Gallimard published Patrick Modiano's first no\'el, La Place de /'Etoile, which brought its twenty-three-year-old author immediate critical and public acclaim. La Place de /'Etoile is not fully a product of its time: it is not exactly rebel lious or transgressi\'e in the way that many texts by young writers were at that time, and it docs not incorporate the latest advances in stmcturalist or poststructuralist theory. Its gaze is turned not toward a bright remlutionary future but toward a rather faded past, and toward a subject that might ha\·e seemed strangely anachronistic to the forward-looking reader of the late sixtics: the place of the Jew in France. The no\'el's protagonist, a presumably young man with the unlikely name of Raphael Schlemilo\'itch, haunts the holy places of Frenchncss, from seaside resorts to Alpine meadows, contaminating them with his \'cry presence, not unlike a character in a no\'cl by the \'imlently anti-Semitic Ccline, of whose writing La Place de /'Etoile prm·ides a de\'astating pastiche. This harsh, funny.
profoundly ironic no\'cl offers no hopcfi.•l \'isions for the fi.Jture; rather, dredging up old hostilities that France would prefer to forget, it casts the Jew as a continual outsider, a
\'1
pariah, an object of acute terror and loathing. The nation's past, it would seem, could nor be done away with quite so easil\' as some would wish.
Today Ln J>lnce de /'Etoile seems as thoroughly singular a no\'cl as ever, standing wel l apart from its contemporaries.
Indeed, both in style and in subject, it is a deeply persmzal book, whose themes of persecution and exclusion have their roots in Modiano's own fami ly background. His father was a Jew of Alexandrian extraction, his mother an aspiring actress from Belgium; the couple met and fell in love in the uneasy Paris of the early forties. Modiano was born in 1945, and his childhood was profoundly marked by memories of rhe Occupation, the Deportation, and the atmosphere of menace and clandestinity that had haunted the years just before his birth . E\'en ifModiano himself did not l ive through that dark time, he nevertheless 'remembers' it, both as a h istorical event and as a way of life, a free-floating and pervasive presence. It is this presence, this unfading past, that forms the backdrop for all his nm·els, obscssi\'cly remrning, though never in the same form- only as a palpable but indefinable ambience whose source is ne,·cr made clear, and that cannot simply be traced to one chronological moment. In other words, Modiano does nor write 'historical' novels, even if they arc all profoundly shaped by a certain history, a history of marginalization and effacement . Time and again, h is central characters arc caught up in an atmosphere of exclusion, imminent danger, uncertain or concealed identities; time and again they find themscl\·es in milieux that arc about to be wiped out by the approaching shadows: quaintly glamorous resorts, elegant clubs, places of innocent pleasure
\'II
for mo\'ie stars or up-and-coming champions in tennis or skiing. The story is always the same, and yet the great preoccupation of Modiano's writing cannot be defined by one event, even if it is always a question of the same phenomenon: nothing less (and nothing more precise) than the obliteration of a past.
So insistently docs this story recur that Modiano is often said to be 'forc\·er writing the same book.' This is not exactly true: each novel has a perfectly distinct (if sometimes bewildering) plot, perfectly defined (if sometimes ambiguous) characters, a particular ( if sometimes permeable) setting in time and space. Still, there is a very strong phenomenon of repetition at work in Modiano's writing, both within each nm·cl and from one to another. It is not onlv the same talc of loss that repeats itself in his books; again and again, we find ourselves before the same colors (blue in particular), the same sounds (a voice half CO\'ercd by some sort of noise) , the same settings (empty rooms, deserted streets), even the same gestures (an arm raised in greeting or farewell, a forehead pressed against a windowpane) . In themselves, these repetitions create a haunting and unforgettable atmosphere, instantly recognizable to any reader familiar with Modiano's work; set against the m·erwhclming sense of loss and disappearance that is the nm·cls' other most ,·isible clement, they make of our reading a deeply disorient-ing experience, sad and strange. Everyth i ng disappcarsl his books seem to tell us, and also - in small but omnipresent echoes- everything somehow stays. This presence of an obliterated past is meant neither to comfort us nor to terrify us : it is there to remind us endlessly of that loss, I think, so VIII
that the loss is not itsdf lost, so that it remains sharp, insistent, present, so that we arc continually cal led to a lite that has long since disappeared.
This is the story told by Out oftbc Dnrk, Modiano's fourteenth novel, which appeared in 1996. Its setting is not the Occupation but the early sixties; ne,·erthelcss, the opprcssi\'c, menacing atmosphere of that earlier time seems to have lingered long after its disappearance. The young narrator, like his friends or even his older self, appears to be on the nm from something (but what?), living a strangely worried life whose uncertain joys seem always about to be wiped out; like his friends or even his older self, he has a vaguely marginal air about him, even i f we can't quite sec why he should or what makes him so. \Vc arc far from the dark days of the past, then, but strangely close as well.
At the same time, however, Out of the Dark is a sadly fi.mny and touching lm·e story and a personal reminiscence that may well seem oddly familiar to many readers. This is perhaps the most extraordinary of Modiano's feats as a writer: howc,·cr pri,·ate his work seems, howe\'er inseparable from a personal past, it always speaks to us of something we ted we know, as if these were our own faded memories, our own shapeless uncertainties and apprehensions, our own loose ends. The potency of his strikingly simple, enigmatic, and profoundly moving prose is no secret in France, where Modiano is a perennial best-seller and a household name, still enjoying the same critical acclaim and public success that greeted his first novel. Outside of academic circles, however, most readers in the United States have yet to discover him; they have a great surprise in store.
IX
..
Modiano is never easy to translate; the apparent simplicity and neutrality of his style conceals a wealth of subtle difficulties for the translator, and I wish to thank here several people who helped me through those difficulties. The French title of this book, Du pitts loiu de l'ottbli, poses a particularly thorny problem, since the English language has no real equi\'alcnt for ottbli, nor e\'en a simple way of saying dtt pitts loiu. The phrase, taken from a French translation of a poem by the German writer Stefan George, is literally equivalent to 'from the furthest point of forgotten ness,' and I ha\·e found no way to express this idea with the eloquent simplicity of the original. I would like to extend my most grateful thanks to Eleanor Hardin for coming up with the current title, and for all the im·aluable help she has given me with this translation; thanks, too, to \Varrcn Motte and Tom Vosteen for their sympathetic reading and insightful suggestions.
X
Out of the Dark
For Peter Handke
Du plus loin de l'oubli ...
Stefan George
She was a woman of average height; he, Gerard Van Rc,·cr, was slightly shorter. The night of our first meeting, that winter thirty years ago, I had gone with them to a hotel on the Quai de Ia Tourncllc and found myself in their room. Two beds, one ncar the door, the other beneath the window. The window didn't face the quai, and as I remember it was set into a gable.
1'-:othing in the room was out of place. The beds were made. No suitcases. No clothes. Only a large alarm clock, sitting on one of the nightstands. And despite that alarm clock, it seemed as though they were li,·ing here in secret, trying to leave no sign of their presence. We had spent only a brief moment in the room that first night, just long enough to drop off some art books I was tired of carrying, which I hadn't managed to sell to a secondhand book dealer on the Place Saint-Michel.
And it was on the Place Saint-Michel that thev had first spoken to me, late that afternoon, as all around us the crowds streamed down the steps to the metro or up the boulc\'ard in the opposite direction. They had asked me where they might find a post office nearby. I was afraid my directions might be too vague for them to follow, since I've nc\·cr been able to describe the shortest route between two points. I had decided it would be best to 5
show them to the Odeon post office myself. On the way there, she had stopped in a cafc-tabac and bought three stamps. As she sntck them to the cm·clope, I had time to read the address : Majorca.
She had slipped the letter into one of the mailboxes without checking to sec whether it was the one marked AIR MAIL- FOREIGN. \\'c had turned back toward the Place Saint-Michel and the quais. She was concerned to sec me carrying the books, since 'they were probably heavy.' She had said sharply to Gerard Van Be\'er:
'You could help him.'
He had smiled at me and taken one of the books - the largest - under his arm.
In their room on the Quai de Ia Tournellc, I had set the b<x>ks at the foot of the nightstand, the one with the alarm clock. I couldn't hear it ticking. The hands pointed to three o'clock. A spot on the pillowcase. Bending down to set the h<x>ks on the floor, I had noticed a smell of ether coming from the pillow and the bed. Her am1 had bmshed against me, and she had switched on the bedside lamp.
We had dined in a cafe on the quai, next door to their hotel. We had ordered only the main dish of that night's special . Van Be\'er had paid the check. I had no money with me that night, and Van Be\'er thought he was fi\·c francs short. He had searched through the pockets of hi!; m·ercoat and his jacket and finally found fi\'e francs in change. She said nothing and watched him absently, smoking a cigarette. She had gi\'en us her dish to share and had eaten only a few bites from Van Be\·cr's plate.
6
She had mrned to me and said in her slightly graYclly
\"OICe:
'Next time we'll go to a real restaurant . . . .'
Later, we had both waited byt he front door of the hotel while Van Be,·er went up to the room for my books. I broke the si lence by asking if they had lived here long and if they came from the provinces or from abroad. No, they were from around Paris. They'd been living here for two months. That was all she had told me that night. And her fi rst name: Jacqueline.
Van Bever had come down and gi,·en me my books.
He had asked if I would try to sell them again the next day, and if I made much money this way. They had suggested we meet again. It was difficult for them to give me a precise time, but they could often be found in a cafe on the corner of the Rue Dante.
I go back there sometimes in my dreams. The other night, a February sunset blinded me as I walked up the Rue Dante. After all these years, it hadn't changed.
I stood at the glassed-in terrace and looked in at the bar, the pinball machine, and the handful of tables, set up as if around a dance floor.
As I crossed the street, the tall apartment building opposite on the Boulevard Saint-Germain cast its shadow over me. But behind me the sidewalk was still lit by the sun.
When I awoke, the time in my life when I had known Jacqueline appeared to me with the same contrast of shadow and light. Pale wintertime streets, and the sun filtering through the slats of the shutters.
7
Gerard Van Bever wore a herringbone overcoat that was too large for him. I can sec him standing at the pinball machine in the cafe on the Rue Dante. But Jacqueline is the one playing. Her arms and shoulders scarcely move as the machi ne rattles and flashes. Van Bever's overcoat was voluminous and came down past his knees. He stood very straight, with his collar turned up and his hands in his pockets. Jacqueline wore a gray cable-knit n1rtlcncck and a brown jacket made of soft leather.
The first time I found them at the Cafe Dante, Jacqueline mrned to me, smiled, and went back to her pinball game. I sat down at a table. Her arms and her upper body looked delicate next to the huge machine, whose jolts and shudders threatened to toss her backward at any moment. She was struggling to stay upright, like someone in danger of falling overboard. She came to join me at the table, and Van Bever took his turn at the machine.
At first I was surprised by how much ti me they spent playing that game. I often interrupted their match; ifl hadn't come, it would have gone on indefinitely.
In the afternoon the cafe was almost empty, but after six o'clock the customers were shoulder to shoulder at the bar and at the tables. I couldn't immediate!\• make out Van Bever and Jacqueline through the roar of cmwersations, the 8
rattling of the pinball machine, and all the customers squeezed in together. I caught sight of Van Bever's herringbone O\'ercoat first, and then of Jacqueline. I had already come here se\·eral times and not found them, and each time I had waited and waited, sitting at a table. I thought I would nc,·er see them again, that they had disappeared into the crowds and the noise. And then one day, in the early afternoon, at the far end of the deserted cafe, they were there, standing side by side at the pinball machine.
I can scarcely remember any other details of that time of my lite. l'\'e almost forgotten my parents' faces. I had stayed on a while longer in their apartment, and then I had gi\'en up on my studies and begun selling old books for money.
Not long after meeting Jacqueline and Van Be\·er, I rented a room in a hotel near theirs, the Hotel de Lima.
I had altered the birth date on my passport to make myself one year older and no longer a minor.
The week before I mo\'ed i nto the Hotel de Lima I had no place to sleep, so they had left me the key to their room while thev
.
were out of town at one of the casinos thev
.
often
went to.
They had fallen i nto this habit before we met, at the Enghien casino and two or three others in small resort towns in Normandy. Then they had settled on Dieppe, Forges-les
Eaux, and Bagnolles-dc-l'Orne. They always left on Sarurday and came back on Monday with the money they had won, which was never more than a thousand francs. Van Bever had come up with a martingale 'around the neutral 9
fi\'e,' as he said, but it was only profitable if he limited h imself to small bets.
I ne\'er went with them to the casinos. I waited for them until Monday, ne\'er lea,•ing the neighborhood . And then, after a while, Van Be\'er began going only to 'Forges'- as he called it- because it was closer than Bagnolles-de-I'Orne, while Jacqueline stayed in Paris.
The smell of ether was always hanging in thei r room when I spent the night alone there. The blue bottle sat on the shelf abm·e the sink. There were clothes in the closet: a man's jacket, a pair of trousers, a bra, and one of the gray turtleneck sweaters that Jacqueline wore.
I slept badly those nights. I woke up not knowing where I was. It took me a long time to recognize the room. If someone had asked me about Van Be,·er and Jacqueline, I wou ld ha,·e had trouble coming up with answers or justifying my presence here. Would they e\'er come back? I began to doubt it. The man behind the dark wooden counter at the entrance to the hotel was ne\·er concerned to see me heading upstairs to thei r room or keeping the key with me when I went out. He greeted me with a nod.
On the last night, I had awoken about fi,·e o'clock and couldn't get back to sleep. I was probably in Jacqueline's bed, and the clock was ticking so loudly that I wanted to put it away in the closet or hide it under a pillow. But I ,\·as afraid of the silence. I had got up and left the hotel. I had walked along the quai to the gates of the Jardin des Plantes and then into the only cafe open that early, across from the Austerlitz train station.
1 0
The week bctore, they had gone off to gamble at the Dieppe casino and returned very early in the morning. It would be the same today. One more hour, two more hours to wait . . . . The commuters were emerging from the Gare d'Austerlitz in greater and greater numbers, drinking a cup of coffee at the bar, then heading for the entry to the metro.
It was still dark. I walked along the edge of the Jardin des Planres again, and then along the fence around the old Halle aux Vins.
I sparred their silhouenes from far away. Van Bever's herringbone m"Crcoat stood our in the darkness. They were sitting on a bench on the other side of the quai, facing the closed display cases of the sidewalk book dealers. They were j ust back from D ieppe. They had knocked on the door of the room, but no one had answered. And I had left not long before, keeping the key in my pocket.
In the Hotel de Lima, my window overlooked the Boule
,·ard Saint-Germain and the upper end of the Rue des Bernard ins. When I lay on the bed I could sec the steeple of a church whose name I have forgonen, framed by the window. And the hours rang throughout the night, after the traffic noise had fallen off. Jacqueline and Van Bever often walked me back to my hotel. \Ve had gone to dinner at a Chinese restaurant. \\'e had gone to a movie.
Those nights, nothing distinguished us from the students on the Boulevard Saint-Michel. Van Bever's slightly worn coat and Jacqueline's leather jacket blended in with the drab backdrop of the Latin Quarter. I wore an old raincoat of 11
dirty beige and carried books under my arm. �o. there was nothing to draw attention to us.
On the registration form at the Hotel de Lima I had put myself down as a 'uni,·crsity student: but this was only a formality. since the man behind the desk had nc,·cr asked me for any further infom1ation. All he asked was that I pay for the room e\·cry week. One day as I was lca,;ng with a load of books I was planning to sell to a book dealer I knew. he asked me:
'So. how arc your studies going?"
At first I thought I heard something sarcastic in his mice.
But he was completely serious.
The Hotel de Ia Tournelle was as quiet as the Lima. \·an Be,·er and Jacqueline were the only lodgers. They had explained to me that the hotel was about to close so that it could be com·erted into apartments. During the day you could hear hanlll1cring in the surrounding rooms.
Had they filled out a registration form. and what was their occupation? \·an Bever answered that in his papers he was listed as a 'door-to-door salesman: but he might ha\"e been joking. Jacqueline shrugged. She had no occupation.
Salesman: I could ha,·e claimed the same title. since I spent my days ca�;ng books from one secondhand dealer to the next.
It was cold. The snow melting on the sidewalks and q uais. the black and gray of winter come to me in my memory. And Jacqueline always went out in her leather jacket. far too light for that weather.
1 2
It was on one of those winter days that Van Rever first went to Forges-les-Eam: alone, while Jacqueline stayed in Paris. She and I walked with Van Re,·er across the Seine to the Pont
Marie metro stop, since his train would be lea,·ing from the Gare Saint-Lazare. He told us that he might go on to the Dieppe casino as well, and that he wanted to make more money than usual. His herringbone m·ercoat disappeared into the entrance of the metro and Jacqueline and I found ourseh·es together.
I had always seen her with Van Re,·er and had never had an opporrunity for a real conversation with her. Resides, she sometimes went an entire c\·ening without saying a word.
Or else she would curtly ask Van Re\'er to go and get her some cigarettes, as if she were trying to get rid of him. And of me too. Rut little by little I had grown used to her silences and her sharpness.
As Van Re,·er walked down the steps into the metro that day, I thought she must be sorry not to be setting off with him as she usually did. \\e walked along the Quai de
)'Hotel-de-Ville instead of crossing m·er to the Left Rank.
She was quiet. I expected her to say good-bye to me at any moment. Rut no. She continued to walk beside me.
A mist was floating o\'er the Seine and the quais. Jacqueline must have been freezing in that light leather jacket. We 1 3
walked along the Square de I'Arche,·cchc. at the end of the l ie de Ia Cite, and she began to cough uncontrollably. Finally she caught her breath. I told her she should ha\"c something hot to drink, and we entered d1e cafe on the Rue Dante.
The usual late-afternoon msh was on. Two silhouettes were standing at the pinball machine, but Jacqueline didn't want to play. I ordered a hot toddy for her and she drank it with a grimace, as if she were taking poison. I told her, 'You shouldn't go out in such a light jacket.' E,·en though I had known her for some time, I had ne\"er spoken to her as a friend. She always kept a sort of distance between us.
We were sitting at a table in the back, near the pinball machine. She leaned toward me and said she hadn't lett with Van Be,·er because she was feeling out of sorrs. She was speaking in a low ,·oice, and I brought my face close to hers. Our foreheads were nearly touching. She told me a secret: once winter was o\·cr, she planned to lea,·e Paris. And go where?
'To Majorca . . .'
I remembered the letter she had mailed the day we met, addressed to Majorca.
'But it would be better if we could lea,·e tomorrow . . .'
Suddenly she looked ,·cry pale. The man sitting next to us had put his elbow on the edge of our table as if he hadn't noticed us, and he went on talki ng to the person across from him. Jacqueline had retreated to the far end of the bench.
The pinball machine rattled oppressi\"cly.
I too dreamt of leaving Paris when the snow melted on the sidewalks and I went out in my old slip-ons.
'Why wait until the end of winter?' I asked her.
14
She smiled.
'\\'e'\"e got to ha,·e some money sa\·cd up first.'
She lit a cigarette. She coughed. She smoked too much.
And always the same brand, with the slightly stale smell of French blond tobacco.
'\\'c'll ne\"cr sa\"C up enough from selling your books.'
I was happy to hear her say 'we,' as if our funtrcs were linked from now on.
'Gerard will probably bring back a lot of money from Forges-les-Eau.x and Dicppe.' I said.
She shrugged.
'\Ve'\"e been using his martingale for sLx months, but it's nc\·er made us much mone\·.'
She didn't seem to ha\'e much faith in the 'around the neutral fi\"e' martingale.
'Have you known Gerard long?'
'Yes . . . we met in Athis-Mons, outside Paris . . . .'
She was looking silently into my eyes. She was probably trying to tell me there was noth ing more to say on this subject.
'So you come from Athis-Mons ?'
'Yes.'
I knew the nan1e well, since Athis-Mons was ncar Ablon, where one of my friends li\'cd. He used to borrow his parents' car and drh·c me to Orly at night. We would go to the movie theater and one of the bars in the airport. We stayed
\"cry late l istening to the announcements of arri,·als and departures for distant places, and we strolled through the central hall. When he drove me back to Paris we nc\'Cr took the freeway, but instead detoured through Villeneu\"c-lc- Roi, 15
Athis-Mons, other towns in the southern suburbs. I might have passed by Jacqueline one night back then.
'Have you traveled much ?'
It was one of those questions people ask to enliven a dull conversation, and I had spoken it in a falsely casual way.
'Not really traveled,' she said. 'But now, if we could get our hands on a little money . . . .'
She was speaking even more quietly, as if she didn't want an\'onc else to hear. And it was difficult to make out what she said amid all the noise.
I leaned toward her, and again our foreheads were nearly touching.
'Gerard and I know an American who writes no\'els . . . .
He li\'cs on Majorca . . . . He'll find us a house there. \\'e met him in the English bookstore on the quai .'
I used to go to that bookstore often. It was a maze of little rooms lined with books, where it was easy to be alone.
The customers came from far away to visit it. It stayed open very late. I had bought a few novels from the Tauchnitz collection there, which I had then tried to sel l. Shelves fu ll of books on the sidewalk in front of the shop, with chairs and even a couch. It was like the terrace of a cafe. You could sec Notre Dame from there. And yet once you crossed the threshold, it felt like Amsterdam or San Francisco.
So the letter she had mailed from the Odeon post office was addressed to the 'American who wrote novels . . . .'
What was his name? Maybe I had read one of his books . . . .
'William McGivern . . .'
No, I had never heard of this McGivern. She lit another cigarette. She coughed . She was sti ll as pale as before.
16
'I must ha,·e the flu.' she said.
'You should drink another hot toddy.'
'No thanks.'
She looked worried all of a sudden.
'I hope e\·erything goes well for Gerard . . . .'
'Me too . . .'
'I'm always worried when Gerard isn't here . . . .'
She had lingered m·er the syllables of 'Gerard' with great tenderness. Of course, she was sometimes short with him, but she took his arm in the street, or laid her head on his shoulder when we were sitting at one of the tables in the Cafe Dante. One afternoon when I had knocked on the door to their room, she had told me to come in, and they were both lying in one of the narrow beds, the one nearest the window.
'I can't do without Gerard . . . .'
The words had come mshing out, as if she were speaking to herself and had forgotten I was there. Suddenly I was in the way. Maybe it was best for her to be alone. And just as I was trying to find an excuse to lea\'e, she turned her gaze on me, an absent gaze at first. Then finally she saw me.
I was the one who broke the silence.
'Is \'OUr
.
flu an\. ' better?'
'I need some aspirin. Do you know of a pharmacy around here?'
So far, my role consisted of directing them to the nearest post office or pharmacy.
There was one ncar my hotel on the Boulevard Saint
Germain. She bought some aspirin, but also a bottle of I7
ether. We walked together for a few minutes more, to the corner of the Rue des Bernardins. She stopped at the door to my hotel.
'\ Ve could meet for dinner, if you like.'
She squeezed my hand. She smiled at me. I had to stop mysclf from asking i f l could stay with her.
'Come and pick me up at se,·en o'clock,' she said.
She turned the comer. I couldn't help watching her walk toward the quai, in that leather jacket that was too light for this kind of weather. She had put her hands in her pockets.
I spent the afternoon in my room. The heat was off, and I had stretched out on the bed without remo\'ing my coat.
Now and then I fell half asleep, or stared at a point on the ceiling thinki ng about Jacquel ine and Gerard Van Be\'er.
Had she gone back to her hotel? Or was she meeting someone, somewhere in Paris ? I remembered an e\'ening when she had left Van Be,·er and me on our own. He and I had gone to sec a mo\'ie, the late show, and Van Bc\'er seemed ner\'ous. He had taken me to the mm·ics with him so that the time would pass more quickly. About one o'clock in the morning, we had gone to meet Jacqueline in a cafe on the Rue Cujas. She hadn't told us how she'd spent the c\·ening. And Van Be\'er hadn't asked any questions, as if 1�1y presence were keeping them from speaking freely. I was in the way that night. l11cy had walked me back to the Hotel de Lima. They were silent. It was a Friday, the day before they usually left for Dieppc or Forgcs-les-Eaux . I had asked them what train they would be taking.
18
'\\'c're staying in Paris tomorrow,' Van BeYer had said curtly.
They had left me at the entrance to the hotel. Van Bever had said, 'Sec you tomorrow,' with no good-bye handshake.
Jacqueline had smiled at me, a slightly forced smile. She seemed anxious at the prospect of being left alone with Van Be,·cr, as though she wanted someone else around. And yet as I watched them walk away, Van Bever had taken Jacqueline's arm. What were they saying? Was Jacqueline trying to justify something she had done? Was Van Bever rebuking her? Or was I imagining it all ?
Night had long since fallen when I left the hotel . I followed the Rue des Bcrnardins to the quai. I knocked on her door.
She came to let me in. She was wearing one of her gray cable-knit turtlenecks and her black pants, narrow at the ankles. She was barefoot. The bed ncar the window was unmade, and the curtains were drawn. Someone had removed the shade from the bedside lamp, but the tiny bulb left part of the room in shadow. And still that smell of ether, stronger than usual .
She sat down on the edge of the bed, and I took the room's only chair, against the wall, next to the sink.
I asked if she was feeling better.
'A little better . . .'
She saw me looking at the open bottle of ether in the center of the nightstand. It must have oc\.·urrcd to her that I could smell the odor.
'I take that to stop my cough . . . .'
And she repeated in a defensive tone:
19
'It's true . . . it's very good for coughs.'
And since she realized that I was prepared to bclie\'C her, she asked :
'Have you ever tried ir?'
'No.'
She handed me a cotton ball she had soaked in the ether.
I hesitated to rake it for a few seconds, bur if ir would bring us together . . . I inhaled rhe fumes from the carton ball and then from rhe ether bottle. She did the same after me. A coolness filled my lungs. I was lying next to her. We were pressed together, falling through space. The feeling of coolness grL'W stronger and stronger as the ticking of the clock stood out more and more clearly against the silence, so clearly that I could hear its echo.
We left rhe hotel ar about six o'clock in rhe morning and walked ro rhe cafe on the Rue Cujas, which stayed open all night. That was where we had arranged to meet rhe week before on their return from Forges-les-Eaux. They had arrived at about seven in the morning, and we had eaten breakfast together. Bur neither of rhem looked like they had been up all night, and they were much livelier than usual.
Especially Jacqueline. They had won rwo thousand francs.
This rime Van Bever would nor be coming back by train, but in the car of someone they had mer at rhe Langrm\e casino, someone who li,·ed in Paris. As we left rhe hotel, Jacqueline told me he m ight already be waiting ar rhe cafe.
I asked whether she wouldn't rather go and meet him alone, whether my presence was really necessary. Bur she shrugged and said she wanted me to come along.
20
There was no one but us in the cafe. The fluorescent l ight blinded me. It was still dark outside, and I had lost my sense of time. We were sitting side by side in a booth ncar the plate glass window, and it felt like the beginning of the e\·enmg.
Through the glass, I saw a black car stop across from the cafe. Van Bever got out, wearing his herringbone overcoat.
He leaned toward the dri\'er before shutting the door. He looked around the room but didn't sec us. He thought we were at the far end of the cafe. He was squinting because of the fluorescent light. Then he came and sat down across from us.
He didn't seem surprised to find me there, or was he too tired to be suspicious ? He i mmediately ordered a double coffee and croissants.
'I decided to go to Dicppc . . . .'
He had kept his m·ercoat on and his collar turned up. He leaned over the table with his back curved and shoulders hunched, as he often did when he was sitting. In that position, he reminded me of a jockey. When he stood, on the other hand, he stood very straight, as if he wanted to look taller than he was.
'I won three thousand francs at Dicppc ... .'
He said it with a slightly defiant air. Maybe he was showing h is displeasure at finding me there with Jacqueline. He had taken her hand. He was ignoring me.
'That's good,' said Jacqueline.
She was caressing his hand.
'You could buy a ticket for Majorca,' I said.
Van Bever looked at me, astonished.
2 1
'I told him about our plan,' Jacqueline said.
'So you know about it? I hope you'll come with us . . . .'
No, he definitely didn't seem angry that I was there. But he still spoke to me with a certain formality. Se\'eral times I had tried to talk with him like friends. It nc\'cr worked. He always answered politely but rescr•edly.
'I'll come along if you want me to,' I told them.
'But of course we want you to,' said Jacqueline.
She was smiling at me. Now she had put her hand O\'er his. The waiter brought the coficc and croissants.
'I ha\'cn't eaten fc:>r twenty-four hours,' said Van Bc\'cr.
His face was pale under the fluorescent lights, and he had circles under h is eyes. He ate SC\'Cral croissants \'cry quickly, one after another.
'That's better . . . . A little while ago, in the car, I fell asleep . . . .'
Jacqueline seemed better. She had stopped coughing. Because of the ether? I wondered i f l hadn't dreamt the hours I had spent with her, that feeling of emptiness, of coolness and lightness, the two of us in the narrow bed, lurching as if a wh irlwind had come O\'Cr us, the echo of her \'oice resounding more clearly than the ticking of the alarm clock.
There had been no distance between us then . Now she was as aloof as before . And Gerard Van Be\'er was there. I would ha\'e to wait unt i l he went back ro Forgcs-les-Eam or Dieppc, and there was no way to be sure she would C\'Cn stay in Paris with me.
'And you, what did you do while I was gone?'
For a moment, I thought he suspected something. But he had asked the question absentmindedly, as if out of habit.
22
'Nothing in particular,' said Jacqueline. 'We went to the mo\'ies.'
She was looking at me as if she wanted me to join in this lie. She still had her hand O\'er his.
'\Vhat mo\'ie did you sec?'
'1Hoonjleet,' I said.
'Was it good? '
He pulled his h and away from Jacqueline's.
'It was \'ery good.'
He looked at us closely one after the other. Jacqueline returned his gaze.
'You'll h a\'C to tell me all about it . . . . But some other time . . . there's no hurry.'
There was a sarcastic tone in his voice and I noticed that Jacqueline was looking slightly apprchensi\'e. She frowned.
Finally she said to him:
'Do you want to go back to the hotel ? '
She had taken his hand again. She had forgotten I was there.
'Not yet . . . I want another coffee . . . .'
'And then we'll go back to the hotel,' she repeated tenderly.
Suddenly I realized what time it was, and the spell was broken. E\'erything that had made that night extraordi nary faded away. Nothing but a pale, dark-haired girl in a brown leather jacket sitting across from a character in a herringbone O\'ercoat. They were holding hands in a cafe in the Latin Quarter. They were about to go back to their hotel.
And another winter day was beginning, after so many others. I would have to wander through the grayness of the 23
Boule\'ard Saint-M ichel once again, among the crowds of people walking to their schools or unh·crsitics . They were my age, but they were strangers to me. I scarcely understood the language they spoke. One day, I had told Van Be\·er that I wanted to mm·e to another neighborhood because I felt u ncomfortable among all the students. He had said to me:
'That would be a mistake. With them around, no one notices you .'
Jacqueline had n1rncd away, as if she were bored by this subject and worried that Van Bc,·er would tell me something he shouldn't.
'Why?' I had asked him. 'Arc you afraid ofbeing noticed ?'
He hadn't answered. But I didn't need an explanation . I was always afraid of being noticed too.
'Well? Shall we go back to the hotel?'
She was still speaking in that tender \'Oicc. She was caressing h is h and. I remembered what she had said that afternoon, in the Cafe Dante : 'I can't do withom Gerard.' They would walk into their room. Would they inhale from the ether bottle, as we had done the night before? No. A little earlier, as we were lca\'ing the hotel, Jacqueline had taken the bottle from her pocket and had thrown it into a sewer farther along the quai.
'I promised Gerard not to touch that filthy stuff an)n;ore.'
Apparently she felt no such scm pies with me. I was disappointed, but also strangely happy that she and I were now in collusion, since she had wanted to share 'that filthy stuff'
with me.
24
I walked them hack to the quai. As they entered the hotel, Van Rc\'cr held out his hand.
'Sec \'OU soon.'
She was looking away.
'\\'c'll sec each other later at the Cafe Dante,' she said.
I watched them climh the stairs. She was holding h is arm.
I stood still in the entryway. Then I heard the door of their room closing.
I walked along the Quai de Ia Tourncllc, under the leafless plane trees, in the mist and the wet cold. I was glad to be wearing snow boots, but the thought of my badly heated room and brown wooden bed gnawed at me. Van Bever had won three thousand francs at Dieppe. How would I C\'Cr get hold of that kind of money? I tried to figure the \'aluc of the ft.w books I had left to sell. Not much. In any case, I thought that C\'en if I had a great deal of money, it would mean nothing to Jacqueline.
She had said, '\Yc'll sec each other later at the Cafe Dante.'
She had left it vague. So I would ha\·e to spend an afternoon waiting for them, and then another, like the first time. And as I waited, a thought would come to me: she didn't want to see me anymore, because of what had happened between us last n ight. I had become a problem for her because of what I knew.
I walked up the Boule\·ard Saint-Michel, and I felt as though I'd been walking these same sidewalks since long before, a prisoner of this neighborhood for no particular reason. Except one : I had a false student ID card in my pocket in case I was stopped, so it was better to stay in a smdent neighborhood.
25
When I got to the Henl de Lima, I hesitated to go in.
But I couldn't spend the whole day outside, surrounded by these people with their leather bricfcascs and satchels, headed fOI' the Iycecs, the Sorbonne., the Ecole des Mines. I lay down on the bed. 1bc room 'W3S too small fOI' anything else: � wae no chairs.
The church steeple 'W3S framed by the window, along with the branches of a chestnut trtt. I wished that I could sec them covered with lcm:s, but it would be another month before spring came. I don't remember if I evtT
thought about the fUture in those days. I imagine I lival in the p� making vague plans to run away, as I do today, and hoping to sec them soon, him and Jacqudinc, in the Cafe Dante.
26
They int roduced me to Cartaud later on, at around one in the morning. I had waited for them in vain at the Cafe Dante that evening, and I didn't ha\'c the ncr\'c to stop by their hotel. I had eaten in one of the Chinese restaurants on the Rue du Sommerard. The idea that I might never sec Jacqueline again killed my appetite. I tried to reassure myself: they wouldn't mm·e out of the hotel just like that, and c\'cn i f they did, they would leave their new address for me with the concierge. But what particular reason would they have for lca\'ing me their address? No matter; I would spend my Saturdays and Sundays hanging around the casinos of Dicppe and Forges-lcs-Eaux until I found them.
I spent a long time in the English bookstore on the quai, ncar Saint-Julien-lc-Pam·re. I bought a book there : A High Wi11d in Jamaica, which I had read in French when I was about fifteen, as U1z cyclo11e a Ia Jamaiipte. I walked aimlessly for a whi le, finally ending up in another bookstore, also open very late, on the Rue Saine-Severin. Then I came back to my room and tried to read.
I went out again and found myself heading for the cafe where we had met that morning, on the Rue Cujas. My heart jumped : they were sitting in that same booth, near the window, along with a dark-haired man. Van Bever was on his right. Then I could only sec Jacqueline, sitting across 2 7
from them, alone on the bench, her arms folded. She was there behind the glass, in the yellow light, and I wish I could tra\'el back in time. I would find myself on the sidewalk of the Rue Cujas just where I was before, but as I am today, and it would be simple for me to lead Jacqueline out of that fishbowl and into the open air.
I felt sheepish approaching their table as ifl were trying to surprise them. Seeing me, Van Be\"er made a gestu re of greeting. Jacqueline smiled at me, showing no surprise at all. Van Be\"er introduced me to the other man :
'Pierre Cartaud . . .'
I shook his hand and sat down next to Jacqueline.
'Were you in the neighborhood?' asked Van Be\"er in the polite tone of \'oice he would ha\'e used for a \"ague acquaintance.
'Yes . . . Completely by chance . . .'
I was \"cry determined to stay where I was, in the booth.
Jacqueline was a\"oiding my gaze. Was it Cartaud's presence that was making them so distant toward me ? I must ha,·e interntpted their con\"ersation.
'Would you like a drink?' Cartaud asked me.
He had the deep, resonant \'Oice of someone who was practiced at speaking and influencing people.
'A grenadine.'
He was older than us, about thirty-fi\'e. Dark, with regular features. He was wearing a gray suit.
Lea\'ing the hotel, I had stuffed A Higb 1Viud in Jamaica into the pocket of my raincoat. I found it reassuring always to h a\'e with me a no\'el I liked. I set it on the table as I felt 28
deep in my pocket for a pack of cigarettes, and Cartaud noticed it.
'You read English ?'
I told him yes. Since Jacqueline and Van Be,·er were still silent, he finally said :
'Ha\·e you known each other long?'
'We met in the neighborhood,' said Jacqueline.
'Oh \'es . . . I see . . . .
'
What exactly did he see? He lit a cigarette.
'And do you go to the casinos with them?'
'�o.'
Van Bever and Jacqueline were still keeping quiet. What could they find so troubling about my being here?
'So you've ne\·er seen them play boztle for three hours straight . . . .'
He let out a loud laugh.
Jacqueline turned to me.
'We met this gentleman at Langrune,' she told me.
'I spotted them right away,' said Cartaud. 'They had such an odd way of playing . . . .'
'Why odd?' said Van Bever. with feigned nai\'ete.
'And we might ask just what .vott were up to at Langrune ?'
said Jacqueline, smiling at him.
Van Be\·er had struck his customary jockey pose: his back cun·ed, his head between his shoulders. He seemed uncomfortable.
'Do you gamble at the casino?' I asked Cartaud.
'�at really. I find it amusing to go there, for no special reason . . . when things are slack . . . .'
And what was h is occupation when things weren't slack?
29
Little by little, Jacqueline and Van Be\·er relaxed. Had they been worried that I might say something to displease Cartaud, or that in the course of our conversation he would reveal someth ing that they both wanted to keep hidden from me?
'And next week . . . forges?'
Cartaud was looking at them with amusement .
'No, Dicppc,' said Van Bever.
'I could give you a ride there in my car. It's \'cry fast . . . .'
He n1rncd to Jacqueline and me :
'Yestcrdav it took us a little over an hour to come back from Dicppe . . . .'
So he was the one who had driven Van Bever back to Paris. I remembered the black car stopped on the Rue Cujas.
'That would be \-cry nice of you,' said Jacqueline. 'It's such a bore taking the train every time.'
She was looking at Cartaud in a strange way, as if she found him impressive and couldn't help feeling somehow attracted to him. H ad Van Bever noticed?
'I'd be delighted to help you,' said Cartaud. 'I hope you'll join us . . . .'
He was staring at me with his sardonic look. It was as if he had already made up his mind about me and had settled on an attinidc of slight condescension.
'I don't go to casinos in the provinces,' I said cunly.
He blinked. Jacqueline was surprised at my reply as well.
Van Bc,·cr showed no emotion.
'You're missing out. Really very amusing, casinos in the provinces . . .'
H is gaze had hardened . I must have offended him. He 30
wasn't expecting tlt<lt kind of comeback from such a meeklooking boy. But I wanted to ease the tension. So I said:
'You're right. They're ,·cry amusing . . . . Especially Langnmc . . .'
Yes, I would have liked to know what he was doing at Langrune when he met Jacqueline and Van Be\·cr. I knew the place, because I had spent an afternoon there with some friends during a trip to l\'orntandy the year before. I had a hard time imagining him there, wearing his gray suit and walking along the row of nm-down \'ill as by the sea, in the rain, looking for the casino. I \'aguely remembered that the casino was not in Langrune itself but a few hundred meters down the road, at Luc-sur-.Mer.
'Arc you a smdent?'
He had come around to that question. At first I wanted to say yes, but such a simple answer would only complicate things, since I would ha\'e to go on to tell him what I was smdying.
'No. I work for book dealers.'
I hoped that would be enough for him. Had he asked Jacqueline and Van Be\·cr the same question? And what was their answer? Had Van Be\'er told him he was a door-todoor salesman ? I didn't think so.
'I used to be a smdent, just across the way . . . .'
He was pointing at a small building on the other side of the street. 'That was the French School of Orthopedics. I was there for a year. . . . Then I smdied dentistry at a school on the A\·enue de Chois\' . . . .'
3 1
His tone had become confidential. Was this really sinccrd ,\;laybe he was hoping to make us forget that he was not our age and no longer a smdent.
'I chose dental school so that I could find a specific direction to take. I had a tendency to drift, like you . . . .'
In the end, I could th ink of only one explanation for the fact that this thirty-fi\'c-ycar-old man in his gray suit should be sitting with us at this hour in this Latin Quarter cafe : he was interested in Jacqueline.
'You want something else to drink? I 'll ha\'c another whiskey . . . .'
Van Rc\'er and Jacqueline did not show the slightest sign of impatience. As for me, J stayed where J was in the booth, like in those nightmares where you can't stand up because your legs arc as hea\'y as lead. From time to time I turned toward Jacqueline, wanting to ask her to lea,·e this cafe and walk with me to the Garc de Lyon. \\'e would ha\'C taken a night trai n, and the next morning we would ha\'e found oursch·cs on the Riviera or in Italy.
The car was parked a little farther up the Rue Cujas, where the sidewalk became steps with iron handrails. Jacqueline got into the front scat.
Cartaud asked me for the address of my hotel, and we took the Rue Saint-Jacques to reach the Roule\'ard Saint
Germai n.
'IfJ understand correctly,' he said, 'you all li\'e in hotels . . . .'
He turned his head toward Van Rc\'cr and me. He looked 3 2
us OYer again with his sardonic smile, and I had the feeling he saw us as utterly insignificant.
'A wry Bohemian life, in other words . . .'
�laybc he was trying to strike a flippant and sympathetic tone. If so, he was doing it awkwardly, as older people do who arc intimidated by youth.
'And how long will you go on living in hotels?'
This time he was talking to Jacqueline. She was smoking and dropping the ash out the half-open window.
'Until we can leave Paris,' she said. 'It all depends on our American friend who l ives on Majorca.'
A little earlier, I had looked for a book by this McGh·crn person in the English bookstore on the quai but found nothing. The only proof of his existence was the envelope with the Majorcan address that I had seen in Jacqueline's hand that first day. But I wasn't sure the nan1c on the em·elope was 'McGh·ern .'
'Arc you sure you can count on him?' Cartaud asked.
Van BeYer, sitting next to me, seemed uncomfortable. Finally Jacqueline said :
'Of course . . . H e suggested we come t o Majorca.'
She was speaking in a matter-of-fact tone I didn't recogn ize. I got the impression that she wanted to lord it over Cartaud with this 'American friend' and to let him know that he, Cartaud, wasn't the only one interested in her and Van Bever.
He stopped the car in front of my hotel . So this was my cue to say goodnight, and I was afraid I would never sec them again, like those afternoons when I waited for them in the Cafe Dante. Cartaud wouldn't take them straight back 33
to their hotel, and they wou ld end the e\'ening together somewhere on the Right Rank. Or they might C\'en ha\'c one last drink somewhere in this neighborhood. Bur they wanted to get rid of me first.
Van Bc\·er got our of the car, leaving the door open. I thought I saw Cartaud's hand brush Jacqueline 's knee, bur it m ight ha\'c been an illusion caused by the semidarkness.
She had said good-bye to me, \'cry quietly. Cartaud had fa\'orcd me with a noncommittal good-night. I was clearly in rhe way. Standing on the sidewalk, Van Be\"Cr had waited for me to get out of the car. And he had shaken my hand.
'One of these days in the Cafe Dante, maybe,' he 'd said.
At the door of the hotel, I turned around. Van Be\'er wa\'ed at me and got back i n the car. The door slammed.
:r\ow he was alone in the rear sear.
The car started off in the direction of the Seine. That was also the way to the Austerlitz and Lyon train stations, and I thought to myself that they were going ro lea\'e Paris.
B efore going upstairs to my room I asked the night clerk for a telephone book, bur I wasn't quite sure how to spell 'Cartaud,' and I found listings for Carrau, Cartaud, Carrault, Cartaux, Carteau, Carteaud, Cartcaux. :r\onc of them was n amed Pierre.
I couldn't get to sleep, and I regretted not ha,•ing asked Carraud some questions. But would he ha,·e answered ? I f he had really gone to dental school, did he ha\'e a practice now?
I tried to imagine him in a white dentist's smock, rccei\'ing patients in his office. Then my thoughts returned to Jacque-34
line, and Cartaud's hand on her knee. Maybe Van Bever could explain some of this for me. I slept restlessly. In my dream, names written in glowing letters were marching by.
Cartau, Cartaud, Cartault, Cartaux, Carteau, Carteaud, Carteaux.
35
I woke up at about eight o'clock: someone was knocking on the door to my room. It was Jacqueline. I must ha\'e had the haggard look of someone who hasn't slept well. She said she would wait for me outside.
It was dark. I saw her from the window. She was sitting on the bench across the boulevard. She had turned up the collar of her leather jacket and buried her hands in her pockets to protect herself from the cold.
\Ve walked together toward the Seine and went into the last cafe before the Halle aux Vins. How was it that she was sitting there, across from me? The night before, getting out ofCartaud's car, I would ne\'er ha\'e dreamt this could happen so simply. I could only imagine spending many long afternoons waiting for her in the Cafe Dante, in ,·ain. She explained that Van Be,·er had left for Athis-Mons to pick up their birth certificates so that they could get new passports.
They had lost the old ones during a trip to Belgium three months earlier.
She showed no sign of the indifference that had troubled me so much the night before, when I found them both with Cartaud. She seemed just as she had been before, in the moments we had spent together. I asked her if she was O\'cr her flu.
36
She: shrugged. It was even colder than yesterday, and she was still wearing that thin lc:athcr jacket.
'You should get a real coat,' I told her.
She looked i mo my eyes and ga,·c me a slightly mocking smile:.
'\Vhat do you think of as 'a real coat'?'
I wasn't expecting that question. As if she wanted to reassure me, she said:
'Anyway, winter's nearly m·er.'
She was waiting for news from Majorca. And she expected to be hearing something any day now. She hoped to lea,·e in the spring. Obviously, I would come with them, if l wanted to. I was relieved to hear her say it.
'And Cartaud ? What do you hear from h im ?'
At the mention of the name Cartaud, she frowned. I had spoken in an ordinary tone of mice, like someone talking about the weather.
'You remember his name?'
'It's an easy name to remember.'
And did he have a profession, this Cartaud? Yes, he worked in the office of a dental surgeon on the Boulevard Haussmann, next door to the Jacquemart-Andrc Museum.
With a ner\'ous gesture, she lit a cigarette.
'He might lend us money. That would be useful for our trip.'
She seemed to be watching my reaction intently.
'Is he rich ?' I asked her.
She smiled.
'You were talking about a coat, just now . . . . \Veil, I'll ask h im to gi\'e me a fur coat . . . .'
37
She laid her hand on mine, as I had seen her do with Van Be\'er in the catc on the Rue Cujas, and brought her face close to mine.
'Don't worry: she said. 'I really don't like fi.Ir coats at all.'
I n my room, she drew the black curtains. I'd ne\'er done so before because the color of the curtains bothered me. Every morning the sunlight woke me up. Now the light was streaming through the gap between the mrtains. It was strange to sec her jacket and her clothes scattered O\'Cr the floor. �luch later, we fel l asleep. Com ings and goings in the stairway brought me back to consciousness, but I didn't mo\'e. She was still sleeping, her head against my shoulder. I looked at my wristwatch . It was two o'clock in the afternoon.
As she left the room, she told me it would be best not to sec each other tonight. Van Bever had probably been back from Athis-Mons for some time, and he was expecting her at their hotel on the Quai de Ia Tourncllc. I didn't want to ask how she would explain her absence.
When I was alone again, I felt as though I were back where I had been the night before: once again there was nothi ng I could be sure of, and I had no choice but to wait here, or at the Cafe Dante, or maybe to go by the Rue Cujas around one in the morning. And again, on Santrday, \ran Bc\'Cr would lca\'e for Forgcs-lcs-Eaux or Dicppc, and we would walk him to the metro station. And if he let her sta\'
in Paris, it would be exactly like before. And so on until the end of time.
38
I gathered together three or four art books in my beige canvas carryall and went downstairs.
I asked the man standing behind the front desk if he had a directory of the streets of Paris, and he handed me one that looked brand-new, with a blue cover. I looked up all the numbers on the Boulevard Haussmann until I found the Jacquemart-Andre Museum at number 158. At 16o there really was a dentist, a Pierre Robbes. I wrote down his telephone number, just in case it might be useful : Wagram 13 18.
Then, with my beige carryall in my hand, I walked to the English bookstore by Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, where I managed to sell one of the books I was carrying, Italian Villas and Their Gardens, for 150 francs.
39
I hesitated for a moment before the building at 160 Boulevard Haussmann, and then I stepped into the entryway. On the wall, a plaque listed the names and floors in large printed letters :
Doctor P. Robbcs P. Canaud
3rd floor
The name Canaud wasn't written in the same lettering as the others, and it seemed to have been inserted sometime afterward . I decided to try the office on the third floor, but I didn't take the e levator, whose cage and glass double doors shone in the semidarkness. Slowly I climbed the stairs, practicing what I would say to the person who came and opened the door - 'I ha\'e an appointment with Dr. Canaud.' If they showed me in to sec him, I would take on the jovial tone of someone paying a spur-of-the-moment call on a friend.
With this one small difference : he had only seen me once, and it was possible that he wou ldn't recognize me.
On the door there was a gi lded plaque with the words : D E N TAL S UR G EON
I buzzed once, twice, three ti mes, but no one answered.
40
I left the build ing. Beyond the Jacquemart-Andre Museum, a catc with a glassed-in terrace. I chose a table with a
\"iew of the front door of number 160. I waited for Cartaud to ;lrri\"e. I wasn't e\"cn sure he meant anything to Jacqueline and Van Bc\"cr. It was only one of those chance meetings.
They might nc\"cr sec Cartaud again in their li,·cs.
I had already drunk sc,·cral grenadines and it was fh·e o'clock in the afternoon. I was beginning to forget just why I was waiting in this cafe. I hadn't set foot on the Right Bank tor months, and now the Quai de Ia Tournclle and the Latin Quarter seemed thousands of miles away.
Night was falling. The cafe, which was deserted when I sat down at my table, was gradually filling up with customers who must haYc come from the offices in the neighborhood. I could hear the sound of a pinball machine, as in the Cafe Dante.
A black car pulled up alongside the Jacqucmart-Andrc Museum. I watched it absently at first. Then suddenly I felt a jolt: it was Cartaud's. I recognized it because it was an English model, not ,·cry common in France. He got out of the car and went around to open the left door for someone : it was Jacqueline. They would be able to sec me behind the glass wall of the terrace as they walked toward the building's front door, but I didn't mo\'e from my table. I e\·en kept my eyes fixed on them, as if I were trying to attract their attention.
They passed by unaware of my presence. Cartaud pushed open the front door to let Jacqueline go in. He was wearing a naYy blue O\'ercoat and Jacqueline her light leather jacket.
I bought a token for the telephone at the bar. The phone 4 1
booth was in the basement. I dialed Wagram 13 18. Someone answered.
'Is this Pierre Cartaud ?'
'Who's calling?'
'Could I speak to Jacqueline ?'
A few seconds of silence. I hung up.
42
I met them, her and Van Re,·er, the next afternoon at the Cafe Dante. They were alone at the far end of the room, at the pinball machine. They didn't interrupt their game when I came i n . Jacqueline was wearing her black pants, narrow at the ankles, and red lace-up espadrilles. They weren't the kind of shoes to wear in winter.
Van Bever went to get some cigarettes, and Jacqueline and I were left alone, facing each other. I took advantage of the moment to say:
'How's Cartaud ? How was everything yesterday on the Boule,•ard Haussmann1'
She became very pale.
'Why do you ask me that?'
'I saw you go into his building with him.'
I was forcing myself to smile and to speak in a lighthearted \'oice.
'You were following me?'
Her eyes were wide. When Van Rever came back, she leaned toward me and said quietly:
'This stays between us.'
I thought of the bottle of ether - that filthy stuff, as she called it - that I had shared with her the other night.
'You look worried . . . .'
Van Be\·er was standing before me and had tapped me on 43
the shou lder, as if he were trying to bring me out of a bad dream . He was holding out a pack of cigarettes.
'You want to try another pinball game?' Jacqueline asked him.
It was as if she were trying to keep him away from me.
'Not right now. It gives me a migrai ne.'
Me too. I cou ld hear the sound of the pinball machine even when I wasn't at the Cafe Dante.
I asked Van Bever:
'Ha,·e you heard from Cartaud lately?'
Jacqueline frowned, probably as a way of telling me to stay off that subject.
'Why? Are you interested in him?'
His voice sounded sharp. He seemed surprised that I had remembered Cartaud's name.
'Is he a good dentist?' I asked.
I remembered the gray suit and the deep, resonant voice, which were not without a certain distinction.
'I don't know,' said Van Bever.
Jacqueline was pretending not to listen . She was looki ng away, toward the entrance to the cafe. Van Bever was smi ling a little stiffly.
'He works in Paris half the time,' he said.
'And other than that, where docs he work?'
'I n the provinces.'
The other n ight, in the cafe on the Rue Cujas, there was a sort of awkwardness between them and Cartaud, and, despite the mundane co1wersation we'd had when I sat down at their table, it had never gone away. And I found that same 4 4
awkwardness now in Jacqueline's silence and Van Bever's cvasi\'e replies.
'The trouble with that one is he's hard to get rid of,' said Jacqueline.
Van Bc,·cr seemed rclic\'ed that she had taken the initiati\'e to let me in on the secret, as if, from now on, they no longer had anything to hide from me.
'\Vc don't particularly want to sec him,' he added. 'He comes chasing after us . . . .'
Yes, that was just what Cartaud had said the other night.
They had met him two months before in the Langrune casino. He was alone at the bottle table, playing halfheartedly, just killing time. He had in\'itcd them to dinner in the only restaurant that was still open, a l ittle up the road in Luc-sur
Mer, and had explained to them that he worked as a dentist in the area. In Le Havre.
'And do you think it's true?' I asked.
Van Be\'cr seemed surprised that I would express any doubt about Cartaud's profession. A dentist in Le Hane. I had gone there several times, long ago, to board a boat for England, and I'd walked through the streets ncar the docks.
I tried to remember arri,·ing at the train station and going to the port. B ig concrete buildings, all the same, lining a\'enucs that seemed too wide. The gigantic buildings and the esplan ades had gi\'en me a feeling of emptiness. And now I had to imagine Cartaud in that setting.
'He even gave us his address in Lc Hane,' Van Be,·er said.
I didn't dare ask him in front ofJacqucline if he also knew his other address, in Paris, on the Boulc\'ard Haussmann.
45
She had a bemused look all of a sudden, as if she thought Van Bc\'cr was simplifying things and making them much less confused than they were: a man you meet in a coastal resort in i\'ormandy and who works as a dentist in Lc Hane, all \'cry banal, real ly. I remembered that I'd always waited for boarding time in a cafe by the docks: La Porte Occane . . . .
Did Cartaud go there? And in Lc Havre, did he wear the same gray suit? Tomorrow I would buy a map of Le Havre, and when I was alone with Jacqueline she would explain it all for me.
'\Ve thought we would lose him in Paris, but three weeks ago we saw him again . . . .'
And Van Be,·er hunched his back a little more and lowered h is head between his shoulders, as i f he were about to jump an obstacle.
'You met him in the street?' I asked.
'Yes,' said Jacqueline. 'I ran into him by chance. He was waiting for a ta.xi on the Place du Chatelet. I ga,·e him the address of our hotel.'
Suddenly she seemed ,·cry distressed that we were still talking about this.
'Now rhar he's i n Paris half the rime,' said Van Bc,·er, 'he wants ro sec us. \\'e can't say no . . . .'
Yesterday afternoon, Jacqueline got our of the car after Carraud had opened the door, and followed him into the building on the Boulenrd H aussmann. I had watched them both. There was no trace of unhappiness on Jacqueline's face.
'Are you really obligated to sec him?'
'In a way,' said Van Be,·cr.
46
He smiled at me. He hesitated a moment, then added :
'You could do us a favor . . . . Stay with us, next time he hunts us down . . . .'
'Your being there would make things easier for us,' said Jacqueline. 'You don't mind?'
'No, not at all. It will be a pleasure.'
I would have done anything for her.
47
That Sam rday Van Re\'er went to Forges-les-Eaux. I was waiting for them in front of their hotel at about fi,·e in the afternoon, as they had asked. Van Re\'er came out first.
He suggested we take a quick walk along the Quai de Ia Tournelle.
'I'm counting on you to keep an eye on Jacqueline.'
These words took me by surprise. A little embarrassed, he explained that Cartaud had called the day before to say he wouldn't be able to gi\'e h im a ride to Forges-Ies-Eaux because he had work to do. Rut Cartaud's apparent thoughtfulness and false friendliness were not to be trusted. Cartaud only wanted to take ad\'antage of h is absence, Van Re\·er's, to see Jacqueline.
So why didn't he take her with him to Forges-lcs-Eaux ?
He answered that if he did, Cartaud would only come and find them there, and it would be precisely the same th ing.
Jacqueline came out of the hotel to meet us.
'I suppose you were talking about Cartaud,' she said..
She looked at us intently, one after the other.
'I asked him to stay with you,' said Van Re\'er.
'That's n ice.'
\Ve walked him to the Pont-Marie metro station, as before. They were both quiet. And I no longer felt like asking 48
questions. I was giving in to my namral indiflcrence. All that really mattered was that I would be alone with Jacqueline. I e\'en had Van Be\'er's authorization to do so, since he had asked me to ser\'e as her guardian . \Vhat more could I ask?
Before he walked down the steps i nto the metro, he said :
'I'll try to be back tomorrow morning.'
At the bottom of the staircase he stood still tor a moment,
\'cry straight, in h is herringbone m·crcoat. He stared at Jacqueline.
'If you want to get in touch with me, you ha,·c the phone number for the casino at Forges . . . .'
Suddenly he had a weary look on his face.
He pushed open one of the doors, and it swung shut behind him.
We were crossing the Ilc Saint-Louis heading for the Left Bank, and Jacqueline had taken my arm.
'When arc we going to nm into Cartaud?'
My question seemed to annoy her slightly. She didn't answer.
I was expecting her to say good-bye at the door of her hotel. But she led me up to her room.
Night had fallen. She mrned on the lamp next to the bed.
I was sitting on the chair near the sink, and she was on the floor, with her back against the edge of the bed and her arms around her knees.
'I ha\'e to wait for him to call,' she said.
She was talking about Cartaud. But why was she forced to wait for him to call?
49
'So you were spying on me yesterday on the Boulevard
� Iaussmann ?'
'Yes.'
She lit a cigarette . She began to cough after the first puff.
I got u p from the chair and sat down on the floor next to her. \\'e leaned back against the edge of the bed.
I took the cigarette from her hands. Smoke didn't agree with her, and I wished she would stop coughing.
'I didn't want to tal k about it in front of Gerard . . . . He would have been embarrassed with you there . . . . But I wanted to tel l you that he knows all about it . . . .'
She was looking defiantly into my eyes :
'For now, there's nothing I can do . . . . \\'<: need him . . . .'
I was about to ask her a question, but she reached over and turned off the lamp. She leaned toward me and I felt the caress of her lips on my neck.
'\Vouldn't you like to think about something else now?'
She was right. You never knew what trouble the future m ight hold.
Around seven o'clock in the e\"ening, someone knocked on the door and said in a gra\·elly \"Oice: 'You're wanted on the telephone.' Jacqueline got up from the bed, slipped on my raincoat, and left the room without n1rning on the l ight, leaving the door ajar.
The telephone hung on the wall in the corridor. I could hear her answering yes or no and repeating se\"era l times that 'there was really no need for her to come ton ight,' as if the person on the other end d idn't understand what she was saying, or as if she wanted to be begged.
50
She closed the door, then came and sat down on the bed.
She looked t\mny in that raincoat; it was roo big for her, and she'd pushed the slee\"es up.
·rm meeting him in half an hour . . . . He's going to come and pick me up . . . . He thinks I'm alone here . . . .
'
She drew nearer to me and said, in a lower voice :
'I need you to do me a fa\"or . . . .'
Cartaud was going to take her to dinner with some friends of his. Afi:er that, she didn't really know how the e\·ening would end. This was the fa\"or she wanted from me: to leave the hotel before Cartaud arri,·ed. She would gi\·e me a key. It belonged to the apartment on the Boule,·ard Haussmann. I was to go and pick up a suitcase, which I would find in one of the cupboards in the dentist's office, 'the one next to the window.' I would take the suitcase and bring it back here, to this room. All \"cry simple. She would call me at about ten o'clock to let me know where to meet her.
What was in this suitcase ? She smiled sheepishly and said,
'Some money.' I wasn't particularly surprised. And how would Cartaud react when he found it missing? Well, he would ne\"er suspect that we were the ones who had stolen it. Of course, he had no idea that we had a copy of the key to h is apartment. She had had it made without his knowledge at the 'Fastkey' counter in the Gare Saint-Lazare.
I was touched by her use of the word 'we,' because she meant herself and me. All the same, I wanted to know if Van Be\"er was in on this plan . Yes. Bur he preferred to let her tell me about it. So I was only to play a minor role in all this, and what they wanted from me was a sort of burglary.
To help me O\"ercomc my qualms, she went on to say that 5 1
Cartaud wasn't 'a good person,' and that in any case 'he owed it to her . . . .'
'Is it a heavv suitcase ?' I asked her.
'No.'
'Because I don't know if it wou ld be better to take a ta..xi or the metro.'
She seemed amazed that I wasn't expressing any misgivings.
'It doesn't bother you to do this for me?'
She probably wanted to add that I would be in no danger, but I didn't need encouraging. To tell the truth, ever since my childhood, I had seen my father carrying so many bags - suitcases with false bottoms, leather satchels or overn ight bags, even those black briefcases that ga,·e him a false air of respectability . . . . And I never knew just what was in them.
'It will be a pleasure,' I told her.
She smiled. She thanked me, adding that she would ne\·er again ask me to do anything like this. I was a little disappointed that Van Bever was involved, but there was nothing else at all that bothered me about it. I was used to su itcases.
Standing in the doorway of her room, she ga\"C me the key and kissed me.
I ran down the stairs and quickly crossed the quai �n the direction of the Pont de Ia Tournclle, hoping not to meet up with Cartaud .
In the metro, it was still msh hour. I tclt at case there, squeezed in with the other tra\"Clers. There was no risk of drawing attention to myself.
52
\\ 11c:n I came b.Kk with the suitcase, I would definitely take the metro.
I waited to switch to the Miromesnil line in the H a\'Te
Caumartin station. I had plenty of time. Jacqueline wouldn't call me at the hotel before ten o'clock. I let two or three trains go by. \\by had she sent me on this mission rather than Van Re\"er? And had she really told him I would be going after the suitcase? With her. you ne,·er knew.
Coming out of the metro I was feeling apprehensi,·e, but that soon faded. There were only a few other pedestrians in the street. and the windows of the buildings were dark: offices whose occupants had just left for the day. When I came to number 160 I looked up. Only the fifth-floor windows were lit.
I crossed the lobb\· in the dark. The cle,•ator climbed slowly and the yellow light of the ceiling lamp m·er my head cast the shadow of the grillwork onto the stairway wall. I left the elc\·ator door ajar to gh·e me light as I slipped the key into the lock.
Around the vestibule, the double doors of the rooms were all wide open, and there was a white glow coming from the streetlights on the boulevard. I n1rned to the left and stepped into the dentist's office. Standing in the middle of the room, the chair with its reclining leather back made a sort of elevated couch where you could stretch out if you liked.
By the light from the street I opened the metal cabinet, the one that stood ncar the windows. The suitcase was there, on a shelf, a simple tinplate suitcase like the ones soldiers on lca,·c earn·.
5 3
I took the suitcase and found myself back in the vestibule.
Opposite the dentist's office, a waiting room. I flipped the switch. Light fell from a crystal chandel ier. Green \'civet armchairs. On a coftce table, piles of magazines. I crossed the waiting room and entered a little bedroom with a narrow bed, left unmade. I mmed on the bedside lamp.
A pajama top lay on the pillow, cmmplcd into a ball .
Hanging in the closet, two suits, the same color gray and the same cut as the one Cartaud was wearing in the cafe on the Rue Cujas. And beneath the window, a pair of brown shoes, with shoe trees.
So th is was Cartaud's bedroom. I n the wicker wastebasket I noticed a pack of Royalcs, the cigarettes Jacqueline smoked. She must ha\'e thrown it away the other night when she was here with him.
Without thinking, I opened the nightstand drawer, in which boxes of sleeping pills and aspirin were piled up next to a stack of business cards bearing the name Pierre Robbes, dental surgeon, 160 Boulc\'ard Haussmann, \Vagram 13 18.
The suitcase was locked and I hesitated to force it. It wasn't heavy. It was probably full of banknotcs. I went through the pockets of the suits and finally found a black billfold holding an identity card, dated a year earlier, in the name of Pierre Cartaud, born 15 June 1923 in Bordeaux (Gironde), address 160 Boulevard Haussmann, Paris.
So Cartaud had been lh·ing here for at least a year . . . .
And this was also the address of the person known as Pierre Robbcs, dental surgeon . It was too late to question the concierge, and I could n't \"cry well appear at his door with this tinplate suitcase in my hand.
54
I had sat down on the edge of the bed. I could smell ether, and I felt a sudden pang, as if]acquclinc had just left the room.
On my way out of the building I decided to knock on the glass door of the concierge's office, where a light was on. A dark-haired man, not \'cry tall, opened it a crack and put his head out. He looked at me suspiciously.
'I'd l i ke to sec Dr. Robbes,' I told him.
'Dr. Robbes isn't in Paris at the moment.'
'Do you have any idea how I could get in touch with him?'
He seemed more and more suspicious, and his gaze lingered on the tinplate suitcase I was carrying.
'Don't you have h is address?'
'I can't gi,·e it to you, monsieur. I don't know who you arc.'
'I'm a relative of Dr. Robbes. I'm doing my military ser-vice, and I have a few days' leave.'
That seemed to reassure him a little.
'Dr. Robbcs is at his house in Bchoust.'
I couldn't quite make out the name. I asked him to spell it for me: B E H O UST.
'I'm sorry,' I said. 'But I thought Dr. Robbcs had moved away. There's another name on the list of tenants.'
And I pointed at it, and Cartaud's nan1c.
'He's a colleague of Dr. Robbcs . . . .'
I saw the wariness come back into his face. He said :
'Good-bye, monsieur.'
And he quickly closed the door behind him.
55
Outside, I decided to walk to the metro stop at the Gare Saint-Lazare. The suitcase really wasn't hea\"y at all. The boule\'ard was deserted, the fac;ades of the buildings were dark, and from time to time a car passed by, headed for the Place de I'Etoile. It might ha,·e been a mistake to knock on the concierge's door, since he would be able to gi\'e my description . I reassured myself with the thought that no one not Cartaud, not the ghostly Dr. Robbes, not the concierge of number 160 - could touch me. Yes, what I had done entering a strange apartment and taking a suitcase that didn't belong to me, an act that for someone else could be quite serious - was of no consequence for me.
I didn't want to go back to the Quai de Ia Tournelle right awa\·. I climbed the stairs in the train station and came out into the huge lobby known as the Salle des Pas Perdus. There were still many people heading toward the platforms of the suburban lines. I sat down on a bench with the suitcase between my legs. Little by little I began to feel as though I too were a tra,·eler or a soldier on lea,·e. The Gare Saint-Lazare offered me an escape route that extended far beyond the suburbs or the prm·ince of Normandy, where these trains were headed. Buy a ticket for Lc Ha\"re, Cartaud's town.
And from Le H ane, disappear anywhere, anywhere in the world, through the Porte Occane . . .
Why did they call th is the Salle des Pas Perdus, th6 room oflost steps ? It probably took only a l ittle time here before noth ing meant anything an)more, not e\'en your footsteps.
I walked to the buffet restaurant at the far end of the lobby. There were two soldiers sitting on the terrace, each with a suitcase identical to mine. I nearlv asked them for the 56
linlc key to their suitcases so that I could try to open the one I was carrying. But I was afraid that once it was open the bundles of banknotes it contained would be visible to everyone around me, and particularly to one of the plainclothes officers I had heard about: the station police. Those two words made me think ofJacqucline and Van Bever, as if they had dragged me into an affair that would expose me to the menace of the station police for the rest of my life.
I went into the buffet restaurant and decided to sit down at one of the tables near the bay windows overlooking the Rue d'Amsterdam. I wasn't hungry. I ordered a grenadine. I kept the suitcase clasped between my legs. There was a couple at the next table speaking in quiet voices. The man was dark-haired, in his thirties, with pockmarked skin over his cheekbones. He hadn't taken off his m·ercoat. The woman also had dark hair and was wearing a fur coat. They were finishing their dinner. The woman was smoking Royales, like Jacqueline. Sining next to them, a fat black briefcase and a leather suitcase of the same color. I wondered if they had just arri\·ed in Paris or if they were about to leave. The woman said in a more audible voice:
'\Vc could just take the next train.'
'When is it?'
'Ten fifteen.'
'o K,' said the man.
They were looking at each other in an odd way. Ten fifteen. That was about when Jacqueline would call me at the hotel on the Quai de Ia Toumelle.
The man paid the check and they stood up. He picked up 57
the black briefcase and the suitcase. They passed by my table, but they took no notice of me at all .
The waiter leaned down toward me.
'Have you decided ?'
He was pointing at the menu.
'This section is reserved for diners . . . . I can't serve you just a drink . . . .'
'I'm waiting for someone,' I told him.
Through the bay window I suddenly saw the man and the woman, on the sidewalk of the Rue d'Amsterdam. He had taken her arm. They walked into a hotel, just a little down the street.
The waiter came back to my table.
'You'll have to make up your mind, monsieur . . . my shift is ending . . . .'
I looked at my watch. Eight fifteen. I wanted to stay where I was rather than wander around outside in the cold, and I ordered the special. Rush hour was over. They'd all taken their trains to the suburbs.
Down below, on the Rue d'Amsterdam, there was a crowd behind the windows of the last cafe before the Place de Budapest. The light there was yellower and murkier than in the Cafe Dante. I used to wonder why all these people came and lost themselves in the area around the Gare Saint
Lazare, until I learned that this was one of the lowest areas of Paris. They slid here down a gentle slope. The cou'ple who had been here a moment ago didn't fight the slope.
They had let the time of their train go by, to end up in a room with black curtains like the Hotel de Lima, but with dirtier wallpaper and sheets mmpled by the people who had 5 8
been there bctore them. Lying on the bed, she wouldn't e\·cn take otf hcr fur coat.
I finished eating. I put the suitcase on the scat next to me. I picked up my knitc and tried to fit the end of it into the lock, but the hole was too small. The lock was attached to the suitcase by bolts, which I could ha\'C pulled out if l'd had some pliers. Why bother? I would wait until I was with Jacqueline in the room on the Quai de Ia Tourncllc.
I could also lea,·c town on my own and lose contact with her and Van Be\'cr fore,·er. My only good memories up to now were memories of escape.
I thought of cutting a sheet of paper into little squares.
On each of the squares, I would write a name and a place: Jacqueline
Van Bc\'er
Canaud
Dr. Robbcs
160 Boulc\'ard Haussman n, third floor Hotel de Ia Tournclle, 65 Quai de Ia Tourncllc Hotel de Lima, +6 Boulevard Saint-Germain Le Cujas, 22 Rue Cujas
Cafe Dante
Forgcs-lcs-Eaux, Dicppc, Bagnollcs-de-l'Ornc, Enghien, Luc-sur-Mcr, Langnmc
Lc Ha,·re
Athis-Mons
I would shuffle the papers like a deck of cards and l ay them out on the table. So this was my life ? So my whole 59
existence at this moment came down to about twenty unconnected names and addresses that had nothing in common but me: And wlw these rather than others ? What did I have to do with these names and places ? I was in one of those dreams where you know you can wake up at any time, whenever things turn threatening. If i liked, I could walk away from this table and it would all come undone; e\·erything would disappear into emptiness. There would be nothing left but a tinplate suitcase and a few scraps of paper on which someone had scrawled names and places that no longer meant anythi ng to anyone.
I crossed the Salle des Pas Perdus again, almost deserted now, and walked toward the platforms. I looked at the big board m·erhead to find the destination of the 10:15 train the couple that had been sitting next to me would take: LE
H AV R E. I began to think that none of these trains went anywhere at all, and that we were condemned to wander from the buffet to the Sal le des Pas Perdus and from there to the commercial gallery and the surrounding streets. One more hour to kill. I stopped by a telephone booth near the suburban lines. Should I go back to 160 Boule\·ard Haussmann and leave the suitcase where I'd found it? That \\'a\'
everything would be restored to normal and I would have nothing on my conscience. I looked at the phone bqok in the booth, because I had forgotten Dr. Robbes's number.
It rang again and again. There was no one in the apartment.
Should I call this Dr. Robbes in Behoust and make a full confession ? And where m ight Jacqueline and Cartaud be right now? I hung up. I decided to keep the suitcase and 60
bring it back to Jacqueline, since that was the only way to stay in contact with her.
I lcatcd through the phone book. The streets of Paris passed by before my eyes, along with the addresses of buildings and the names of their occupants. I came across SAINT-LAZARE (Gare), and I was surprised to find that there were names there as well:
Railwar Police
Lab 28 42
WAG O N S - L ITS
Eur 44 46
CAFE ROME
Eur 48 30
HOTE L TERM I N US
Eur 36 So
Porters' Cooperative
Eur 58 77
Gabrielle Debrie, florist, Salle des Pas Perdus Lab 02 47
Commercial Gallery:
1 . Bernois
Eur 45 66
5. Biddeloo et Dilley Mmes
Eur 42 48
Geo Shoes
Eur 44 6 3
CINEAC
Lab S o 74
1 9 . Bourgeois ( Renee)
Eur 3 5 20
25 . Stop private mail sen·ice
Eur 45 96
25 bis. :s'ono-:s'anette
Eur 42 62
27. Discobolos (The)
Eur 4 1 43
Was it possible to get in touch with these people? Was Renee Bourgeois still somewhere in the stati0n at this hour?
Behind the glass of one of the waiting rooms, I could see only a m an in an old brown overcoat, slumped on one of the benches, asleep, with a newspaper sticking out of the pocket of his m·ercoat. Bernois?
I climbed the central staircase and entered the commer-61
cial gallery. All the shops were closed. I could hear the sound of diesel engines coming from the taxi stand in the Cour d'Amsterdam. The commercial gallery was \'Cry brightly l it, and I was sudden ly afraid I might run into one of the agents of the 'Rai lway Police,' as they were listed in the phone book. He would ask me to open the su itcase and I would ha\'c to nm. They would ha,·c no trouble catching me, and they would drag me into their office in the station.
It was too smpid.
I entered the Cincac and paid my two francs fifty at the ticket counter. The usherette, a blonde with short hair, wanted to lead me to the front rows with her little flashlight, but I preferred to sit in the back. The newsreel picmrcs were passing by, and the narrator prm·idcd a commentary in a grating \'oice that was \'ery fami liar to me: that same \'Oicc, for more than twenty-fi,·e years. I had heard it the year before at the Cinema Bonaparte, which was showing a montage of old newsreels.
I had set the suitcase on the scat to my right. I counted seven separate silhouettes in front of me, SC\'en people alone. The theater was filled with that warm smell of ozone that h its you when you walk m·cr a subway grating. I hardly glanced at the picmrcs of the week's e\'cnts. E\'CI')' fifteen minutes these same picn1rcs would appear on the screen, timeless, like that piercing mice, which sounded to Q1e as if it could ha\'c been produced through some sort of prosthesis.
The newsreel went by a third time, and I looked at my watch. Nine thirty. There were only two silhouettes left in front of me. They were probably asleep. The usherette was 62
sitting ncar the entrance on a l ittle scat that folded out from the wall . I heard the scat clack. The beam from her flashlight swept owr the row of seats where I was sitting b ut on the other side of the aisle. She was showing a young man in uniform to his seat. She mrncd off her flashlight and they sat down together. I o\"erheard a few words of their com·ersation. He would be taking the train for Le Havre as well. He would try to be back in Paris in two weeks. He would call to let her know the exact date of his return. They were quite close to me. Only the aisle separated us. They were talking out loud, as if they didn't know I and the two sleeping silhouettes in front of us were here. They stopped tal king.
They were squeezed together, and they were kissing. The grating ,·oice was stil l discussing the images on the screen : a parade of striking workers, a foreign statesman's motorcade passing through Paris, bombings . . . I wished that \"Oice would fall silent forc\·er. The thought that it would go on just as it was, commenting on future catastrophes without the slightest hint of compassion, sent a shiver down my spine. Now the usherette was straddling her companion's knees. She was moving rhythmically abo\"e him, and the springs were squeaking. And soon her sighs and moans drowned out the commentator's quavering ,·oice.
In the Cour de Rome, I looked through my pockets to sec if l had enough money left. Ten francs. I could take a ta."Xi.
That would be much faster than the metro : I would ha,·e had to change at the Opera station and carry the suitcase through the corridors.
The driver got out to put the suitcase i n the trunk, but I 63
wanted to keep it with me. \\'e drove down the A\'enue de I'Opcra and followed the quais. Paris was deserted that n ight, like a city I was about to leave forever. Once I was at the Quai de Ia Tournelle, I was afraid I'd lost the key to the room, but it was in one of my raincoat pockets after al l.
I walked past the little reception counter and asked the man who usually sat there until midnight if anyone had called for room 3. He answered no, but it was only ten to ten .
I cli mbed the stairs without any objection from him.
Maybe he couldn't tell the difference between Van Bever and me. Or else he didn't feel like worrying about people's comings and goings anymore, in this hotel that was about to be closed down.
I left the door of the room ajar so that I would be sure to hear him when he called me to the telephone. I put the suitcase flat on the floor and stretched out on Jacqueli ne's bed.
The smell of ether clung sn1bbornly to the pillow. Had she been taking it again ? Would that smell be fore,·cr associated in my mind with Jacqueline?
At ten o'clock I began to worry: she would never call, and I would ne\'cr sec her again . I often expected people I had met to disappear at any moment, not to be heard from again . I myself sometimes arranged to meet people and nc\'cr showed up, and sometimes I e\'en took advantage of the momentary distraction of someone I was walking with in the street to disappear. A porte-cochcrc on the Place Saint-Michel had often been extremely useful to me. Once you passed through it you could cross a courtyard and come out on the Rue de I'H irondelle. And in a little black note-64
book I had made a list of all the apartment buildings with two exits . . . .
I heard the man's ,·oice in the stairway: telephone for room 3· It was ten fifteen and I had already gi,·cn up on her.
She had slipped away from Cartaud. She was in the se\·entccnth arrondissement. She asked if l had the suitcase. I was to pack her clothes in an overnight bag and go get my things as well from the Hotel de Lima, then wait for her in the Cafe Dante. But I had to get away from the Quai de Ia Tourncllc as quickly as possible, because that was the first place Cartaud would come looking. She spoke in a \'cry calm \'Oicc, as if she had prepared all this in her head beforeh and. I found an old O\'cmight bag in the closet and in it I put her two pairs of pants, her leather jacket, her bras, her pairs of red espadrilles, her ntrtleneck sweater, and the \'arious toiletries lined up on the shelf abm·c the sink, among them a bottle of ether. There was nothing left but Van Bc,·er's clothes. I left the light on so the concierge would think someone was still in the room, and I closed the door behind me. What time would Van Be\'er come back? He might \'cry well join us at the Cafe Dante. Had she called him in Forges or Dicppe, and had she said the same thing to him as she'd said to me?
I left the stairway light off as I went downstairs. I didn't want to attract the concierge's attention carrying this suitcase and m·ernight bag. He was hunched O\'Cr a newspaper, doing the crossword puzzle. I couldn't help looking at him as I walked by, but he didn't C\'Cn lift his head. Out on the Quai de Ia Tournellc, I was afraid I might hear someone behind me shouting 'Monsieur, monsieur . . . \Yould you please come back at once . . . .' And I was also expecting to 65
see Cartaud pull alongside me and stop. But once I got to the Rue des Bemardins I calmed down. I quickly went up to my room and put the few clothes and the two books I had left into Jacqueline's bag.
Then I went downstairs and asked for the bill. The night concierge asked me no questions. Outside on the Boulevard Saint-Germain I felt the same euphoria that always welled up in me when I was about to run away.
I "
66
I sat down at the table in the back of the cafe and laid the suitcase down flat on the bench. No one sitting at the tables.
Only one customer was standing at the bar. On the wall abm·e the cigarettes, the hands of the clock pointed to ten th irty. Next to me, the pinball machine was quiet for the first time. Now I was sure she would come and meet me.
She came in, but she didn't look around for me right away. She went to buy some cigarettes at the counter. She sat down. She spotted the suitcase, then put her elbows on the table and let out a long sigh.
'I managed to get rid of him,' she told me.
They were having dinner in a restaurant ncar the Place Pcreirc, she, Cartaud, and another couple. She wanted to get away at the end of the meal, but from the terrace of the restaurant they might ha\·e been able to sec her walking toward the taxi stand or the metro entrance.
They had left the restaurant, and she had no choice but to get into a car with them. They'd taken her to a nearby bar, in a hotel called Lcs Marronniers, for one last drink.
And in Les �1arronniers she had gi\'en them the slip. Once she was free, she'd called me from a cafe on the Boulevard de Courcellcs.
She l it a cigarette and began to cough. She lay her hand on mine just as I'd seen her do with Van Bc\·cr in the cafe on 67
the Rue Cujas. And she kept coughing, that terrible cough she had.
I took her cigarette and put it out in the ashtray. She said :
'\ \'c both ha\"c to lea\"c Paris . . . . Is that all right with you?'
Of course it was all right.
'Where would you like to go?' I asked.
'Anywhere.'
The Garc de Lyon was quire close. We only had to walk down the quai to the Jardin des Plames and cross the Seine.
\Vc'd both touched bottom, and now the time had come to gi\"c the mud a kick that would bring us to the surface again.
Back at Les Marronnicrs, Cartaud was probably becoming concerned about Jacqueline's absence. Van Bc\"cr might still be in Dicppc or Forges.
'What about Gerard ? Aren't we going to wait for him ?' I asked her.
She shook her head and her fean1rcs began to cmmple up. She was about to dissolve into tears. I realized that the reason she wanted to go away with me was so that she could put an end to an episode of her life. And me too: I was leaving behind me all the gray, uncertain years I had li\"cd up to then.
I wanted to tell her again : 'Maybe we should wait for Gerard.' I said nothing. A silhouette in a herringbone m·crcoat would remain frozen fore\"cr in the winter of that \'car.
A few words would come back to me: the neutral fh·c. And also a brown-haired man in a gray suit, with whom I'd had only the most fleering encounter, and nC\'Cr learned whether he was a dentist or nor. And the faces, dimmer and dimmer, of my parents.
68
I reached into my raincoat pocket for the key to the apartment on the Boulevard Haussmann that she had given me, and I set it on the table.
'What shall we do with this?'
'We'll keep it as a souvenir.'
No one was left at the bar. I could hear the fluorescent lights crackling in the silence around us. The light they put out contrasted with the black of the terrace windows. It was too bright, like a promise of springs and summers to come.
'We should go south . . . .'
It gave me pleasure to say the word south. That night, in that deserted cafe, under the fluorescent lights, life did not yet have any weight at all, and it was so easy to run . . . . Past midnight. The manager came to our table to tell us that the Cafe Dante was closing.
69
In the suitcase we found two thin bundles ofbanknotes, a pair of gloves, books on dental surgery, and a stapler. Jacqueline seemed disappointed to see how thin the bundles were.
We decided to pass through London before heading south to Majorca. We left the suitcase at the checkroom in the Gare du Nord.
We had to wait more than an hour in the buffet for our train. I bought an envelope and a stamp, and I mailed the claim stub to Cartaud at 16o Boulevard Haussmann. I added a note promising to repay the money in the very near future.
70
I n London that spring only married adults could get a room in a hotel. We ended up in a sort of t:uuily boardinghouse in Bloomsbury whose landlady pretended to bclie,·e we were brother and sister. She ga,·e us a room that was meant to sen·e as a smoking room or a library, furnished with three couches and a bookshelt: \ \'e could only stay five days, and we had to pay in ad,·ance.
After that, by appearing at the front desk one after the other as if we weren't acquainted, we managed to get two rooms in the Cumberland, whose massiw fa\ade stood m·er
�larblc Arch. But there, too, we left after three days, once they had caught on to the deception.
We really didn't know where we would sleep. After Marble Arch we walked straight ahead, along Hyde Park, and turned onto Sussex Gardens, an avenue that climbed toward Paddington Station. One little hotel followed another along the left-hand sidewalk. We picked one at random, and this ti me they didn't even ask to see our papers.
71
Doubt always overtook us at the same time: at night, on the way back to the hotel, as we thought of rcmrning to the room where we were living like fugitives, only as long as the owner allowed us to stay.
\Vc walked up and down Sussex Gardens before we crossed the threshold of the hotel. Neither of us had any desire to go back to Paris. From now on the Quai de Ia Tourncllc and the Latin Quarter were dosed to us. Paris is a big city, of course, and we could ha,·c mm·cd to another neighborhood where there would be no danger of nmning into Gerard Van Rc,·cr or Carraud. Rut it was better not to look back.
How much time went by before we made the acquaintance of Linda, Peter Rachman, and Michael Savoundra?
Maybe two weeks. Two endless weeks of rain. \Vc went to the mm·ies as an escape from our room and its mildewflecked wallpaper. Then we took a walk, always along Oxford Street. We came to Bloomsbury, to the street of the boardinghouse where we had spent our first night in London. And once again we walked the length of Oxford Street, in the opposite direction.
\Vc were trying to put off the moment when we would return to the hotel. We couldn't go on walking in this rain.
\Ve could always sec another mm·ie or go into a dcpartmenr 72
store or a cafe. Rut then we would only have to give up and rum back toward Sussex Gardens.
Late one afternoon, when we had ,·enrurcd farther along to the other bank of the Thames, I felt myself being m•crcomc by pan ic. It was rush hour: a stream of suburbanites was crossing Waterloo Rridge in the direction of the station. We were walking across the bridge in the opposite direction, and I was afraid we would be caught up in the oncoming current. Rut we managed to free ourselves. \Vc sat down on a bench i n Trafalgar Square. We hadn't spoken a s ingle word as we walked.
'Is something wrong?' Jacqueline asked me. 'You're so pale . . . .
'
She was smiling at me. I could sec that she was struggling to keep calm. The thought of walking back to the hotel through the crowds on Oxford Street was too much to bear. I didn't dare ask if she was feeling as anxious as I was.
I said:
'Don't you think this city is too big?'
I tried to smile as well. She was looking at me with a frown .
'Th is city is too big, and we don't know anyone . . . .
'
My voice was desperate. I couldn't get another word out.
She had lit a cigarette. She was wearing her light leather jacket and coughing from time to time, as she used to do in Paris. I missed the Quai de Ia Toumclle, the Boulevard H aussmann, and the Garc Saint-Lazare. 'It was easier in Paris . . . .'
Rut I had spoken so softly that I wasn't sure she'd heard 73
me. She was absorbed in her thoughts. She had forgotten I was there. In front of us, a red telephone booth, from which a woman had just emerged.
'It's too bad there's no one we can call . . . ,' I said.
She turned to me and put her hand on my arm. She had o\'ercome the despair she must ha\'e been feeling a moment before, as we were walking along the Strand toward Trafalgar Square.
'All we need is some money to get to Majorca . . . .'
She had been fixated on that idea from the moment I met her, when I saw the address on the em·clope.
'In Majorca things will be easier for us. You'll be able to write vour books . . . .'
One day I had let slip that I hoped to write books someday, but we had ne\·er talked about it again . Maybe she mentioned it now as a way of reassuring me. She really was a much steadier person than I was.
All the same, I wondered how she was planning to find the money. She didn't flinch :
'It's only in big cities that you can find money . . . . Imagine if we were stuck in some backwater out in the middle of nowhere . . .'
Yes, she was right. Suddenly Trafalgar Square looked much friendlier to me. I was watching the water flow from the fountains, and that helped calmed me. \Ve were not condemned to stay in this city and drown in the crowds on Oxford Street. We had a \'cry simple goal: to find some money and go to M ajorca. It was like Van Be\'cr's martingale. With all the streets and intersections around us our chances only 74
increased, and we would surely bring about a happy coincidence i n the end.
From then on we a\'oided Oxford Street and the center of town, and we always walked west toward Holland Park and the Kensington neighborhood.
One afternoon, at the Holland Park underground station, we had our picmres taken in a Photomat. \Ve posed with our faces close together. I kept the pictures as a som·enir. Jacqueline's face is in the foreground, and mine, slightly set back, is cur off by the edge of the photo so that my left car can't be seen. After the flash we couldn't stop laughing, and she wanted to stay on my knees i n the booth. Then we followed the avenue alongside Holland Park, past the big white houses with their porticoes. The sun was shining for the first rime since our arri\'al i n London, and as I remember, the weather was always bright and warm from that day onward, as if summer had come early.
75
At lunchtime, in a cafe on Notting H ill Gate, we made the acquaintance of a woman named Linda Jacobsen . She spoke to us first. A dark-haired girl, our age, long hair, high cheekbones and slightly slanted blue eyes.
She asked what region of France we were from . She spoke slowly, as if she were hesitating over e\'ery word, so it was easy to ha\'e a conversation with her in English. She seemed surprised that we were living in one of those seedy Sussex Gardens hotels. Rut we explained that we had no other choice because we were both underage.
The next day we found her in the same place again, and she came to sit down at our table. She asked if we would be staying long in London. To my great surprise, Jacqueline told her we planned to stay for se\·eral months and e\·en to look for work here.
'Rut in that case you can't go on living in that hotel. . . .'
E\·ery night we longed to mo\'e out because ofth� smell that hung i n the room, a sickly sweet smell that might ha\'e come from the drains, from a kitchen, or from the rotting carpet. In the morning we would go fc:>r a long walk in Hyde Park to get rid of the smell, which impregnated our clothes.
It went away, but during the day it would come back, and I would ask Jacquel ine:
'Do you smell it?'
76
It was depressing to think that it would be following us for the rest of our lh·es.
'The worst thing,' Jacqueline told her in French, 'is the smell i n the hotel. . . .'
I had to translate for her as best I could. Finally Linda understood. She asked if we had some money. Of the two small bundles in the suitcase, only one was left.
'Not much.' I said.
She looked at us both in ntrn. She smiled. I was always amazed when people were kind to us. Much later, I found the Photomat picntre from Holland Park at the bottom of a shoebox full of old letters, and I was struck by the innocence of our faces. We inspired trust in people. And we had no real qualities, except the one that youth gives to everyone for a very brief time, like a ,·ague promise that will never be kept.
'I h ave a friend who might be able to help you,' Linda told us. 'I'll introduce you to him tomorrow.'
They often arranged to meet in this cafe. She li,·ed nearby, and he, her friend, had an office a little way up the street on \Vestbournc GrO\'e, the a\'enue with the two movie theaters Jacqueline and I often went to. \Ve always saw the l ast showing of the e\·ening, as a way of delaying our rentrn to the hotel, and it scarcely mattered to us that we saw the same films c\·ery night.
77
The next day, about noon, we were with Linda when Peter Rachman came into the cafe. He sat down at our table without even saying hello. He was smoki ng a cigar and dropping the ash onto the lapels of his jacket.
I was surprised at his appearance: he seemed old to me, but he was only in his forties. He was of a\'erage height, quite fat, round face, bald in front and on top, and he wore tortoise-shell glasses. His childlike hands contrasted with his substantial build.
Linda explained our situation to him, but she spoke too quickly for me to understand. He kept his little creased eyes on Jacqueline. From time to time he puftcd nerYously on his cigar and blew the smoke into Linda's face.
She stopped talking and he smiled at us, at Jacqueline and me. But his eves were still cold. He asked me the name of our hotel on Sussex Gardens. I told him: the Radnor. He burst out i n a brief laugh.
'Don't pay the bill . . . . I own the place . . . . Tell the concierge I said there wou ld be no charge for you . . . .'
He turned to Jacqueline.
'Is it possible that such a pretty woman could be living in the Radnor?'
He had tried to sound suave and worldly, and it made him burst out laughing.
78
'You're in the hotel business?'
He didn't answer my question. Again he blew the smoke from his cigar into Linda's face. He shmgged his shoulders.
'Don't worry . . . , ' he said in English.
He repeated these words se\·eral times, speaking to himself. He got up to make a telephone call. Linda sensed that we were a little confused, and she tried to explain some things for us. This Peter Rachman was in the business of buyi ng and reselling apartment houses. Maybe it was too great a stretch to call them 'apartment houses'; they were only decrepit old tenements, scarcely more than hovels, most of them in this neighborhood, as well as in Bayswater and Netting H i ll. She didn't understand his business very well. But despite his bmtish appearance, he was - she wanted us to know from the start - really a lm·ely fellow.
Rachman's Jaguar was parked a few steps down the street.
Linda got into the front seat. She turned to us:
'You can come and stay with me while you wait for Peter to find you another place . . . .'
He started up the car and followed along Kensington Gardens. Then he turned onto Sussex Gardens. He stopped in front of the Hotel Radnor.
'Go pack your bags,' he told us. 'And remember, don't pay the bill. . . .'
There was no one at the front desk. I took the key to our room from its hook. For the whole of our stay here, we had kept our clothes in our two bags. I picked them up and we went straight downstairs. Rachman was pacing in front of 79
the hotel, h is cigar in his mouth and his hands in the pockets of his jacket.
'Happy to be lca\"ing the Radnor?'
He opened the trunk of the Jaguar and I put in our bags.
Before starting up again, he said to Linda:
'I ha\"e to go by the Lido for a moment. I'll drive you home afterwards . . . .
'
I could sti l l smell the sickly odor of the hotel, and I wondered how many days it would be before it disappeared from our lives fore,·er.
The Lido was a bathing establishment in Hyde Park, on the Serpentine. Rachman bought four tickets at the window.
'It's funny . . . . This place reminds me of the Deligny pool in Paris,' I said to Jacqueline.
But once we were inside, we came to a sort of ri\·crside beach, with a few tables and parasols set up around the edge. Rachman chose a table in the shade. He still had his cigar in his mouth . We all sat down. He mopped his forehead and his neck with a big white handkerchief. He mrned to Jacqueline :
'Take a swim, if you like . . . .
'
'I don't ha,·e a suit,' said Jacqueline.
'\Ye can get hold of one . . . . I'll send someone to find you a suit . . . .'
'Don't bother,' Linda said sharply. 'She doesn't want to swim .'
Rachman lowered his head. He was still mopping his forehead and his neck.
'Would you care for some refreshment ?' he offered.
80
Then, speaking to Linda:
'I'm to meet Sa,·oundra here.'
The name conjured up an exotic silhouette in my imagination, and I was expecting to sec a Hindu woman in a sari walk toward our table.
But it was a blond man of about thirty who wa,·ed in our direction, then can1c and clapped Rachman on the shoulder.
He i ntroduced himself to Jacqueline and me :
'� lichael Sa\'Oundra.'
Linda told him we were French.
He took one of the chairs from the next table and sat down beside Rachman.
'\\'ell, what's new?' Rachman asked, staring at him with his cold little e\'es.
'l'\'c done some more work on the script . . . . \\'c'll sec . . . .'
'Yes . . . as you say, we'll see . . . .'
Rachman had taken a disdainful tone. Sa\'Oundra crossed h is am1s, and his gaze lingered on Jacqueline and me.
'Ha,·e you been in London long?' he asked in French.
'Three weeks,' I said.
He seemed \'cry interested in Jacqueline.
'I lh·ed in Paris for a while,' he said in his halting French.
'In the Hotel de Ia Louisianc, on the Rue de Seine . . . . I tried to make a film in Paris . . . .'
'Unfommately, it didn't work out,' said Rachman in his disdainful \'oice, and I was surprised that he had understood the sentence in French.
There was a moment of silence.
81
'Rut I'm sure it will work out this time,' said Linda.
'Right, Peter?'
Rachman shrugged. Embarrassed, Samundra asked Jacqueline, still in French :
'You live in Paris?'
'Yes,' I answered, before Jacqueline could speak. '!':or verY far from the Hotel de Ia Louisiane.'
Jacqueline's eyes met mine. She winked. Suddenly I longed to be in from of the Hotel de Ia Louisianc, to walk to the Seine and stroll past the stands of the secondhand book dealers until I reached the Quai de Ia Tournelle. Why did I sudden!\· miss Paris ?
Rachman asked Sa,·oundra a question and h e answered with a great flurry of words. Linda joined in the com·ersation. But I wasn't trying to understand them anymore. And I could sec that Jacqueline wasn't paying any anention to what they were saying either. This was the time of day when we often dozed off, because we ne\·er slept well at the Hotel Radnor, barely four or fh·e hours a night. And since we went out early in the morning and came back as late as possible at night, we often took a nap on the grass in Hyde Park.
They were still talking. From time to time Jacqueline closed her eyes, and I was afraid that I would fall asleep as well. But we gave each other linlc kicks under the table when we thought that the other one was about to drift off.
I must have dozed for a few moments. The murmur of their c01wersation blended in with the laughter and shouts coming from the beach and the sound of people di,·ing into the 82
water. Where were we? By the .\lame River or the Lake of Enghien? This place reminded me of another Lido, the one in Chcncvicrcs, or of the Sporting in La Varennc. Tonight we would go back to Paris, Jacqueline and I, by the Vincennes train.
Someone was tapping me heavily on the shoulder. It was Rachman.
'Tired ?'
Across the table from me, Jacqueline was doing her best to keep her eyes wide open.
'You must not have slept much in that hotel of mine,' said Rachman.
'\Vhcrc were you?' asked Savoundra in French.
'In a place much less comfortable than the Hotel de Ia Louisiane,' I told him.
'It's a good thing I ran into them,' said Linda. 'They're going to come and live with me . . . .'
I wondered why they were showing us such kindness.
Samundra's gaze was still fixed on Jacqueline, but she didn't know it, or pretended not to notice. He bore a strong resemblance to an American actor whose name I couldn't quite recall. Of course. Joseph Cotten.
'You'll sec,' said Linda. 'You'll be right at home at my place . . . .'
'In any case,' said Rachman, 'there's no lack of apartments. I can let you usc one starring next week . . . .'
Savoundra was cxan1ining us curiously. He turned to Jacqueline:
'Arc you brother and sister?' he asked in English.
83
'You're out of luck, M ichael,' said Rachman icily. 'They're husband and wi fe.'
Leaving the Lido, Savoundra shook hands with us .
'I hope to sec you again very quickly,' he said in French.
Then he asked Rachman if he'd read his script.
'Not yet. I need time. I scarcely know how to read . . . .'
And he let out his short laugh, his eyes as cold as C\'Cr behind his tortoise-shell glasses.
Trying to fill the awkward silence, Sa\·oundra turned to Jacqueline and me :
'I'd be very pleased if you would read the script. Some of the scenes take place in Paris, and you could correct the mistakes i n the French .'
'Good idea,' said Rachman. 'Let them read it . . . . That way, they can write up a summary for me . . . .'
Savoundra disappeared down a walkway through Hyde Park, and we found ourselves back in the rear scat of Rachman's Jaguar.
'Is his script any good?' I asked.
'Oh yes . . . I'm sure it must be \'Cf)' good,' said Linda.
'You can rake it,' said Rachman. 'It's on the floor.'
There was a beige folder lying beneath rhc rear scar. I picked it up and set it on my knees.
'He wams me to give him thirty thousand pounds to make his movie,' said Rachman. 'That's a lor for a scri pt I'll never read . . . .'
We were back in the Sussex Gardens neighborhood. I was afraid he would rake us back to the hotel, and once again I smelled the sickly odor of the hallway and the room. But he 84
kept on dri\·ing, in the direction of Noning Hill. He turned right, toward the a\·enue with the mo\"ie theaters, and he entered a street lined with trees and white houses with porticoes. He stopped in front of one of them.
We got out of the car with Linda. Rachman stayed beh ind the wheel. I took the two bags from the tnmk and Linda opened the iron door. A ,·ery steep staircase. Linda walked ahead of us. Two doors on the landing. Linda opened the one on the left. A room with white walls. Its windows m·erlooked the street. :N'o furniture. A large mattress on the floor. There was a bathroom adjoining.
'You'll be comfortable here,' said Linda.
Through the window, I could sec Rachman's black car in a patch of sunlight.
'You're \"cry kind,' I told her.
'�o, no . . . It's Peter . . . . It belongs to him . . . . He has loads of apartments . . . .'
She wanted to show us her room. Its entrance was the other door on the landing. Clothes and records were scattered m·er the bed and the floor. There was an odor here too, as penetrating as the one in the Hotel Radnor, but sweeter: the smell of marijuana.
'Don't look too closely,' Linda said. 'My room is always such a mess . . . .'
Rachman had got out of the car and was standing before the entrance to the house. Once again, he was mopping his neck and forehead with his white handkerchief.
'You probably need some spending money?'
And he held out a light blue cm·clope. I was about to tell-85
him we didn't need it, bur Jacqueline casually took the em·elope from his hand.
'Thanks ,·cry much,' she said, as if this were all perfectly namral. 'We'll pay you back as quickly as possible.'
'I hope so,' said Rachman. '\Vith interest . . . Anyway, I'm sure you'll find some way to express your gratitude . . . .'
He laughed out loud.
Linda handed me a small key ring.
'There arc two keys,' she said. 'One for the front door, the other for the apartment .'
They got into the car. And before Rachman dro\'e ofi�
Linda lowered the window on her side :
'I'll gi\'e you the address of the apartment, in case you get lost . . . .
'
She wrote it on the back of the light blue em·elope: 22
Chepstows Villas.
Back in the room, Jacqueline opened the en\'elope. I t held a hundred pounds.
'\Ye shouldn't ha\'e taken th is money,' I told her.
'Yes we should ha\'e . . . . \Ve'll need it to go to Majorca . . . .'
She realized I wasn't convinced.
'\Vc'll need about rwenry thousand francs to find a house and to li\'e in Majorca . . . . Once we're there, we won't need anyone anymore . . . .'
She went into the bathroom. I heard water nmning in the rub.
'This is mar\'clous,' she called to me. 'It's been so long since l'\'e had a bath . . . .'
I stretched out on the mattress. I was trying hard not to 86
till! asleep. I cou ld hear the sound of her bathing. At one point, she said to me :
'You'll sec how nice it is to ha,·c hot water . . . .'
In the sink in our room at the Hotel Radnor we'd only had a thin stream of cold water.
The light blue cn\'elope was sitting next to me on the mattress. A gentle torpor was coming m·er me, dissolving my scruples.
About se\·cn o'clock in the e\'ening, the sound ofJamaican music coming from Linda's room woke us up. I knocked on her door before we went downstairs. I could smell marijuana.
After a long wait, she opened the door. She was wearing a red terrycloth bathrobe. She stuck her head out.
'I'm sorry . . . . I'm with someone . . . .'
'\Yc just wanted to say good C\'ening,' said Jacqueline.
Linda hesitated, then finally made up her m ind to speak:
'Can I ask you to do me a fa\'or? When we sec Peter, you mustn't let him find out that I ha\'e someone here . . . . He's
\'cry jealous . . . . Last time, he came by when I wasn't expecting him, and he was this close to smashing the place up and throwing me out the window.'
'What if he comes tonight?' I said.
'He's away for two days. He went to the seaside, to Blackpool, to buy up some more old dumps.'
'Why is he so kind to us?' Jacqueline asked.
'Peter's \'cry fond of young people. He hardly C\'er sees anyone his own age. He only likes young people . . . .'
8 7
A man's \'oicc was calling her, a \'cry quiet \'oice, almost drowned out by the music.
'Excuse me . . . . Sec you soon . . . . And make yoursel\'cs at home . . . .'
She smi led and dosed the door. The music got louder, and we could still hear it from far awa\' in the street.
'That Rachman seems like an odd type,' I said to Jacqueline.
She shmgged.
'Oh, he's noth ing to be afraid of . . . .'
She said it as if she'd already met men of his sort, and found him completely inoffensi,·e.
'At any rate, he likes young people . . . .'
I had spoken those words in a lugubrious tone that made her laugh. Night had fallen. She had taken my arm, and I no longer wanted to ask questions or worry about the future.
\Ve walked toward Kensington down quiet little streets that seemed out of place in this h uge city. A ta.xi passed by, and Jacqueline raised her arm to make it stop. She ga\'e the address of an I tali an restaurant in the Knightsbridge area, which she h ad spotted during one of our walks and thought would be a good place to go for dinner when we were rich .
.
The apartment was quiet, and there was no light under Linda's door. \Vc opened the window. Not a sound from the street. Across the way, under the boughs of the trees, an empty red phone booth was lit up.
That night we felt as though we had li\'cd in this apartment for a long time. I had left Michael Sa\'Oundra's script on the floor. I began to read it. Its title was Rlnckpool Suu-88
dn_1•. The: two heroes, a boy and a gi rl of twenty, wandered through the: suburbs of London. They went to the Lido on the St:rpc:ntinc: and to the beach at Blackpool in August.
They came from modest families and spoke with a Cockney accent. Then they left England. \\'e next saw them in Paris, and then on an island in the Mediterranean that might have been �lajorca, where they were finally living 'the good life.' I summarized the plot for Jacqueline as I went along. According to his introduction, Samundra hoped to film this script as if it were a documentary, casting a boy and girl who weren't professional actors.
I remembered that he'd suggested I correct the French in the part of the script that took place in Paris. There were a few m istakes, and also some very small errors in the street names of the Saint-Germain-des-Pres neighborhood. As I went further, I thought of certain details that I would add, or others that I would modifv. I wanted to tell Samundra about all this, and maybe, if he was willing, to work with him on Blnckpool Sttndny.
89
For the next few days I d idn't ha\'c a chance to sec Michael Samundra again . Reading Blackpool Szmday had suddenly gh·cn me the desi re to write a story. One morning I woke up ''cry early and made as little noise as possible so as not to dismrb Jacqueline, who usually slept until noon.
I bought a pad of lcttcr paper in a shop on Notting Hill Gate. Then I walked straight ahead along Holland Park A\'cnuc in the summer morning light. Yes, during our stay in London we were at the \'cry heart of the summer. So I remember Peter Rachman as a huge black silhouette, lit from behind, beside the Serpentine. The strong contrast of shadow and sunlight makes it impossible to distinguish his feamres. Bursts of laughter. Sounds of di\'ing. And those
\'Oices from the beach with their l impid, faraway sound, under the ctrcct of the sun and the hazy heat. Linda's mice.
Michael Samundra's mice asking Jacqueline:
'Ha,·e you been in London long?'
I sat down in a cafeteria ncar Holland Park. I had no idea of the story I wanted to tell. I thought I should put down a few sentences at random. It would be like priming a pump or getting a sei7.cd-up engine started.
As I wrote the first words, I realized how much influence B/ackpool Szmday had on me. But it didn't matter if Sa-90
,·mmdra's script served as my springboard. The two heroes arrive at the Gare du Nord one winter evening. They're in Paris for the first time in their lives. They walk through the neighborhood for some time, looking for a place to stay. On the Boulevard de Magenta they find a hotel whose concierge agrees to accept them: the Hotel d'Anglcterre et de Belgique. Next door, at the Hotel de Londres et d'Anvers, they were turned down because they weren't adults.
They never leave the neighborhood, as if they were afraid to risk wandering any farther. At night, in a cafe just across from the Gare du Nord, on the corner of the Rue de Compicgne and the Rue de Dunkerque, they are sitting at a table next to a strange couple, the Charells, and it is not quite clear what they are doing here : she is a very elegant-looking blonde, he a dark-haired man with a quiet voice. The couple im·ites them to an apartment on the Boulevard de Magenta, not far from their hotel. The rooms are half-lit. Mme Charell pours them a drink . . . .
I stopped there. Three and a half pages. The two heroes of Blackpool Su11day, on arri,•ing in Paris, immediately find themselves in Saint-Germain-des-Pres, at the Hotel de Ia Louisiane. Whereas I prevented them from crossing the Seine, letting them sink in and lose themselves in the depths of the Gare du Nord neighborhood.
The Charells were not in the script. Another liberty I had taken . I was in a hurry to write more, but I was still too inexperienced and lazy to keep my concentration for more than an hour, or to write more than three pages a day.
91
Every morn ing I went and wrote ncar Holland Park, and I was no longer in London but in front of the Garc du .:\ord and walking along the Boulevard de �1agcnta. Today, thirty years later, in Paris, I am trying to escape from this month of July 199+ to that other summer, when the breeze gently caressed the boughs of the trees in Holland Park. The contrast of shadow and sun was the strongest I have ever seen.
I had managed to free myself from the influence of Blnckpool Sunday, but I was grateful to Michael Samundra for having given me a sort of push. I asked Linda if I could sec h i m . \Vc met one evening, he, Jacqueline, Linda, and I, at the Rio in Koning Hill, a popular bar among Jamaicans. We were the only white people there that evening, but Linda knew the place well . I th ink this was where she got the marijuana whose smell impregnated the walls of the apartment.
I told Savoundra I'd corrected the French in the section of h is script that was set in Saint-Gcrmain-dcs-Prcs.'He was worried. He was wondering whether Rachman was going to gi,·c him the money, and whether it might not be better to get in touch with some producers in Paris. They were ready to place their faith in 'young people' . . .
'But I hear Rachman likes young people as well,' I observed .
92
And I looked at Jacqueline, who smiled. I .inda repeated pensh·cly:
'I t's rme . . . . He likes young people . . . .'
A Jamaican in his thirties, small, with the look of a jockey, came to sit next to her. He put his arm around her shoulders. She int roduced him to us:
'Edgcrosc . . .'
All these years J'yc remembered his name. Edgerose. He said he was pleased to meet us. I recognized the quiet voice of the man who h ad called to Linda from behind the door to her room.
And as Edgerose was explaining to me that he was a musician and that he'd just come back from a tour of Sweden, Peter Rachman appeared. He walked toward our table, his gaze too unwa\·ering behind his tortoise-shell glasses. Linda made a gesture of surprise.
He came and stood before her, and stmck her with the back of his hand.
Edgerose stood up and took hold of Rachman's left check between his thumb and index finger. Rachman pulled his head back to get free and lost his tortoise-shell glasses.
Sa\·oundra and I tried to separate them. The other Jamaican customers were already gathered around our table. Jacqueline kept her calm. She seemed completely indifferent to this scene. She had l it a cigarette.
Edgcrosc was holding Rachman by the check and pulling him toward the exit, like a teacher expelling a troublesome smdent from the classroom. Rachman was trying to escape, and with a sudden mm·ement of his left arm he ga,·c Edgerose a punch on the nose. Edgcrose let go. Rachman 93
opened the door to the cafe and stood motionless in the middle of the sidewalk.
I went to join him and held out h is tortoise-shell glasses, which I had picked up off the floor. He was suddenly \'cry calm. He mbbcd his check.
'Thanks, old man,' he said. 'There's no point making a fuss O\'Cr an English whore . . . .
'
He had taken his white handkerchief from the pocket of h is jacket and he was carefully wiping the lenses of his glasses. Then he fit them over his eyes with a ceremonious gesture, one hand on each earpiece.
He got into the Jaguar. Reforc driving away, he lowered the window:
'My one wish for you, old man , is that your fiancee won't turn out to be like all these English whores . . . .
'
S itting around the table, e\'eryonc was quiet. Linda and Michael Sa\·oundra seemed uneasy. Edgerose was calmly smoking a cigarette. He had a drop of blood on one of his nostrils.
'Peter's going to be in a hell of a mood,' said Savoundra.
'It'll l ast a few days,' said Linda with a shmg. 'And then it'll pass.'
Our eyes met, Jacqueline's and mine. I had the fee1ing we were asking ourselves the same questions: Should we stay on at Chcpstows Villas ? And what exactly were we doing with these th ree people? Some Jamaican friends of Edgerose came to say hello to him, and the cafe was filling up with people and noise. Closing your eyes, you might ha\'e thought you were in the Cafe Dante.
94
M ichael Savoundra insisted on walking us partway home.
\\'c had left Li nda, Edgcrosc, and thei r friends, who had begun to ignore us after a while, as if we were in the way.
Savoundra was walking between Jacquel ine and me.
'You must miss Paris,' he said.
'1'\ot really,' said Jacqueline.
'It's different for me,' I told him. 'E,·ery morning, I'm in Paris.'
And I explained that I was working on a novel and that the beginning of it took place in the area of the Gare du Nord.
'My inspiration came from Blackpool Sunday,' I admitted to him. 'This is also the story of two young people . . . .'
B ut he didn't seem to hold it against me. He looked at us both.
'Is it about the two of you ?'
'Not exactly,' I said.
He was worried. He was wondering if things would be sorted out with Rachman. Rachman was perfectly capable of giving him a suitcase with the thi rty thousand pounds in cash tomorrow morning, without having read the script. Or he might tell him no, blowing a puff of cigar smoke in his face.
According to him, the scene we'd just wimcssed was a frequent occurrence. To tell the truth, Rachman found it all
\'cry entertaining. It was a way to take his mind off" his neurasthenia. His life would have made a good subject for a novel . Rachman had arrived in London just after the war, among other refugees coming from the East. He was born somewhere in the middle of the tangled borders of Austria-95
Hungary, Poland, and Russia, i n one of those little garrison towns that had changed names more than once.
'You should ask him some questions,' Sa\'oundra told me.
·�taybe for you he would be willing to answer. . . .'
\Ve had arri\'ed at \Vestbourne Gro\'e. Sa\'oundra hailed a passing cab :
'Please forgi\'e me for not walking with you all the way . . . . But I'm dead tired . . . .'
Before disappearing into the taxi, he wrote h is address and telephone n umber on an empty cigarette pack. He was counting on my getting in touch with him as soon as possible so that together we could go O\'cr my corrections to Rlackpool Sunday.
\Ve were alone again, the two of us.
'We could take a walk before we go home,' I said to Jacquel ine.
\Vh at was awaiting us at Chcpstows Villas? Rachman throwing the fur n i ture out the window, as Linda had told us ? Or maybe he was staking out the place so that he could catch her, her and her Jamaican friends.
\Vc came upon a little park whose n ame l'\'c forgotten. It was ncar the apartment, and I'YC often looked at a map of London trying to find it. Was it Lad broke Square, or \vas it farther along, ncar Bayswater? The fa<;ades of the houses around it were dark, and if the streetlights had been turned ofr that night we would ha\'e been able to find our way by the light of the full moon.
Someone had left the key in the little gri llwork g.ue. I opened it, we entered the park, and I turned the key from 96
the inside. \Vc were locked in here, and no one could e\'er come in again. A coolness came o\'er us, as if we were following a path through the forest. The lea\·es on the trees abm·e us were so thick that they scarcely let the moonlight through. The grass hadn't been cut for a long time. We disco\·ered a wooden bench, with gra\'el spread around it. \Ve sat down. My eyes grew accustomed to the dark and I could make out, in the middle of a square, a stone pedestal on which stood the silhouette of an animal that had been left there, and I wondered if it was a lion or a jaguar, or only a dog.
'It's n ice here,' said Jacqueline.
She rested her head on my shoulder. The leaves hid the houses around the park. We no longer felt the stifling heat that for the last few days had been hanging m·er London, a city where we only had to turn a corner to end up i n a forest.
97
Yes, as Savoundra said, I could ha\'e written a ml\'cl about Rachman . A sentence that he had jokingly thrown out to Jacqueline, that first day, had worried me :
'I'm sure you'll find some way to express your gratitude . . . .'
He'd said it as she took the em·clope with the hundred pounds. One afternoon, I had gone for a walk alone in the Hampstead area because Jacqueline wanted to nm some errands with Linda. I came back to the apartment around seven o'clock at night. Jacqueline was alone. An em·elope was lying on the bed, the same size and the same light blue color as the fi rst, but this one had three hundred pounds in it. Jacqueline seemed uncomfortable. She had waited for Linda all afternoon, but Linda hadn't shown up. Rachman had come by. He had also waited for Linda. He had gi,·en her this em·elope, which she'd accepted. And I thought to myself that e\'ening that she had found a way to expre:o;s her gratitude.
There was a smell of S\'nthol in the room . Rachman always kept a bottle of that medicine with him. Thanks to Linda, I had learned what his habits were. She'd told me that when he went out to dinner at a restaurant he brought along his own dishes and toured the kitchens before the meal to be sure they were clean. He bathed three times a 98
day, and rubbed his body with Synthol. In cafes he ordered a bottle of mineral water, which he insisted on opening himself, and he drank from the bottle so that his lips would not touch a glass that hadn't been washed properly.
He kept girls much younger than he was, and he put them up in apartments like the one in Chepstows Villas. He came to see them in the afternoon, and, without undressing, with no preliminaries, ordering them to tum their back to him, he took them very quickly, as coldly and mechanically as if he were brushing his teeth. Then he would play a game of chess with them on a little chessboard he always carried with him in his black briefcase.
99
From then on we were alone in the apartmenr. Li nda had disappeared. We no longer heard Jamaican music and laughter at n ight. It felt a little strange to us, because we had become accustomed to the ray of light streaming from under Linda's door. I tried se\·eral times to call M ichael Savoundra, but the phone rang again and agai n with no answer.
It was as if we had ne\'er met them. They had faded into the landscape, and in the end we ourselves could no longer really explain what we were doing in this room. We began to feel as though we'd come here by breaking into the building.
Every morning I wrote one or two pages of my novel and went by the Lido to see i f Peter Rachman might be sitting at the same table as the first time, on the beach, beside the Serpentine. No. And the man at the ticket booth, whom I had questioned, didn't know anyone by the name of Peter Rachman. I went by Michael Savoundra's place, on \Yalton Street. I rang, but there was no answer, and I went into the bakery on the ground floor, whose sign bore the name of a certain Justin de Blancke. Why has that name stayed in my memory? This Justin de Blancke was also unable to tell me anything. He knew Samundra \'aguely, by sight. Yes, a blond man who looked like Joseph Cotten. But he didn't think he was here \'en· often.
100
Jacqueline and I walked to the Rio, at the far end of Notting Hill, and asked the Jamaican who ran it if he knew anything of Linda and Edgerose. He answered that he hadn't heard from them for a few days, and he and the other customers seemed suspicious of us.
101
One morni ng as I was coming out of the house as usual with my pad of tener paper, I recognized Rachman's Jaguar parked at the corner ofChepsrows Villas and Ledbury Road.
He pur his head our the lowered window.
'How arc you, old man ? \Vould you like to go for a dri\'e with me?'
He opened the door for me and I sat down next to him.
'We didn't know what had become of you,' I told him.
I didn't dare mention Linda. Maybe he'd been sitting in h is car for hours, lying i n wait.
'A lor of work . . . A lor of worries . . . Always the same thing . . .'
He was looking at me with his cold eyes behind his tortoise-shell glasses.
'What about you ? Arc you happy?'
I answered with an embarrassed smile.
He had stopped the car i n a little street full of half-ruined houses, looking as if they had just been through a bombardment.
'You sec?' he said. 'This is the sort of place I always work in . . . .'
Standing on the sidewalk, he pulled a ring of keys from a black briefcase he was holding, bur he changed his mind .md stuffed them into the pocket of his jacket.
1 02
'There's no point anymore . . . .'
\Vith one kick he opened the door of one of the houses, a door with peeling paint and nothing but a hole where the lock should ha,·e been. We went in. The floor was cm·ered with debris. I was overcome by a smell like the one in the hotel on Sussex Gardens, but stronger. I suddenly felt nauseated. Rachman rummaged through his briefcase again and pulled out a flashlight. He mm·ed the beam of light around him, re\'ealing a rusty old stove at the far end of the room. A steep staircase climbed to the second floor, and its wooden banister was broken.
'Since you have paper and pen,' he said, 'you might take notes . . . .
'
He inspected the neighboring houses, which were in the same state of abandonment, and as we went along he dictated information for me to take down, after looking in a little notebook he'd taken from his black briefcase.
The next day I continued my no\'cl on the other side of the sheet where I'd written those notes, and I ha\'e kept them to this day. Why did he dictate them to me ? Maybe he wanted there to be a copy of them somewhere.
The first place we had stopped, in the Notting Hill neighborhood, was called Powis Square, and it led to Powis Terrace and Powis Gardens. Under Rachman's dictation, I took an in\'entory of numbers s, 9, ro, rr, and 12 on Powis Terrace, numbers 3, 4, 6, and 7 on Powis Gardens, and numbers 13,
+S, 46, and +7 on Powis Square. Rows of houses with porticoes from the 'Edwardian' era, Rachman told me. They'd been occupied by ]an1aicans since the end of the war, but he, Rachman, had bought the lot of them just as they were 1 03
about to be torn down. And now that no one was li\'ing in them anymore, he had come up with the idea of restoring them.
He had found the names of the former occupants, the ones before the Jamaicans. So at number 5 on Powis Gardens, I wrote down one Lewis Jones, and at number 6, a Miss Dudgeon ; at number 13 on Powis Square, a Charles Edward Boden, at +6, an Anhur Philip Cohen, at number
+7, a M iss Marie !\lotto
Rachman needed them
now, twenty years later, to sign a paper of some kind, but he really didn't think so. In response to a question I had asked about all these people. he had said that most of them had probably disappeared in the Blitz.
We crossed the Bayswater neighborhood, heading toward Paddington Station. This time we ended up at Orsctt Terrace, where the ponicocd houses, taller than the last ones, adjoined a railroad track. The locks were still fixed to the front doors, and Rachman had to usc his ring of keys.
No debris, no mildewed wallpaper, no broken staircases inside, but the rooms showed no trace of human presence, as if these houses were a film set they had forgotten to take down.
'These used to be hotels for tra\'clers,' Rachman told me.
What tra\·clers ? I imagined shadows at night, emerging from Paddington Station just as the sirens began to blow.
At the end of Orsctt Terrace, I was surprised to sec a mined church that was being demolished. Its na\'e was already open to the sky.
'I should ha\'e bought that as well,' said Rachman.
104
We pass�d by Holland Park and arri\'cd at Hammersmith. I had ne\'cr been this far. Rachman stopped on Talgarth Road in tront of a row of abandoned houses that looked like cottages or little ,·illas by the seaside. We went into one and climbed to the second floor. The glass in the bow window was broken. You could hear the roar of traffic. In one corner of the room I saw a folding cot, and on it a suit wrapped in cellophane as if it had just come from the cleaners, as well as a pajama top. Rachman noticed that I was looking at it:
'Sometimes I come here for a nap,' he told me.
'Doesn't the sound of the traffic bother you?'
He shrugged. Then he picked up the cellophane-wrapped suit and we went downstairs. He walked ahead of me, the suit folded over his right arm, his black briefcase in his left hand, looking like a tra\'eling salesman leaving the house to set out on a tour of the pro\'inces.
He gently draped the suit over the rear seat of the car and sat down behind the wheel again . He n1rned the car around, toward Kensington Gardens.
'I've slept in much less comfortable places . . . .
'
He looked me m·er with his cold eyes.
'I was about your age . . . .'
We were following Holland Park A\·enue and would soon pass by the cafeteria where I was usually sitting and working on my novel at th is time of day . . . .
'At the end of the war, I'd escaped from a camp . . . . I slept in the basement of an apartment building . . . . There were rats c\'erywhcrc . . . . I thought they'd cat me if l fell asleep . . . .'
He laughed thinly.
105
'I felt like a rat myself . . . . Besides, for the past four years they'd been trying to corwincc me that I was a rat . . . .'
We had left the cafeteria behind us. Yes, I could put Rachman into my no\'el. ,\:ty two heroes would run into Rachman ncar the Gare du Nord.
'Were you born in England?' I asked him.
'No. In L\'o\', in Poland .'
He had answered curtly, and I knew I would get nothi ng more out of him.
Now we were dri\'ing along Hyde Park, heading toward Marble Arch.
'I'm trying to write a book,' I told him timidly, to get the con\'crsation going again.
'A book?'
Since he was born in L\·o\', Poland, before the war, and had survived it, there was no reason why he couldn't be in the Gare du Nord neighborhood now. It was only a matter of chance.
He slowed down by Marylebone Station, and I thought we were going to visit another set of run-down houses by the railroad tracks. But we turned down a narrow street and followed it to Regent's Park.
'A rich neighborhood at last."
He let out a laugh like a whinny.
He had me write down the addresses : 125, 127, and 129
Park Road, at the corner of Lorne Close, three pale green houses with bow windows, the last one half ru ined.
After checking the tags attached to the keys on the ring, he opened the door of the middle house. We found our-1 06
scl\'es on the second floor, i n a room more spacious than the one on Talganh Road. The glass in the window was intact.
At the end of the room, a folding cot like the one on Talgarth Road. He sat down on it with his black briefcase next to him. Then he mopped his forehead with his white handkerchief.
The wallpaper was coming away in spots and there were floorboards missing.
'You should ha\"e a look out the window,' he told me. 'It's wonh it.'
It was tme. I could see the lawns of Regent's Park and the monumental fa<;ades all around. Their white stucco and the green of the lawns gave me a feeling of peace and security.
'Now I'm going to show you something else . . . .
'
He stood up. We walked down a hallway with old wires h anging from the ceiling and emerged into a small room at the back of the house. Its window O\'erlooked the railroad tracks leading from Marylebone Station.
'Both sides have their charm,' Rachman said. 'Wouldn't you say, old man?'
Then we went back to the bedroom, on the Regent's Park side.
He sat down on the cot again and opened his black briefcase. He took out two sandwiches wrapped in foil. He offered me one. I sat down on the floor, facing him.
'I think I m ight leave this house as it is and move in here permanently . . . .'
He bit into his sandwich. I thought of the cellophanewrapped suit. The one he was wearing now was badly mmpled. There was a button missing from the coat as well, 1 07
and his shoes were spattered with mud. Despite his maniacal attention to cleanliness and his tireless battle against germs, some days he gave the impression that he was giving up the fight, and that little by little he was going to become a derelict.
He finished gulping down his sandwich. He stretched out on the cot. He reached over and rummaged in his black briefcase, which he'd set on the floor next to the bed. He pulled out a key ring and removed one of the keys.
'Here ... Take it .... And wake me in an hour. You can go for a walk in Regent's Park.'
He rolled onto his side, facing the wall, and let out a long sigh.
'I recommend a visit to the wo. It's quite close.'
I stood motionless at the window for a moment, in a patch of sunlight, before I noticed that he'd fallen asleep.
108
One night as Jacqueline and I were coming back to Chepstows Villas, there was a ray of light shining from under Linda's door. The Jamaican music played once again until
\'cry late, and the odor of marijuana invaded the apartment, as it had in our first days here.
Peter Rachman used to throw parties in his bachelor apartment on Dolphin Square, a block of buildings by the Thames, and Linda brought us along. There we saw Michael Savoundra, who had been out of town, meeting with producers in Paris. Pierre Roustang had read the script and found it interesting. Pierre Roustang. Another faceless name floating in my memory, but whose syllables have kept a certain resonance, like all the names you hear when you're rwenty years old.
There were many different kinds of people at Rachman's parties. In a few months, a fresh wind would blow over London, with new music and bright clothes. And I bclie\'e that on Dolphin Square I met a few of the people who were soon to become important personalities in a city suddenly grown young.
I never wrote in the morning anymore, only from midn ight on . I wasn't trying to take advantage of the tranquillity and silence. I was only putting off the moment when I would have to begin work. And I managed to m·ercome my 1 09
laziness e\'Cf")' rime. I had another reason for choosing that hour to write: I was terrified rhar the panic I had so often felt those first few da,·s we were in London would come back.
Jacqueline undoubtedly had rhe same fear, bur she needed people and noise around her.
Ar midnight, she would lca,·e the apartment with Linda.
They would go to Rachman's parries or to our-of-the-way spots around Norring Hill. At Rachman's you could meet great numbers of people who would i1wire you to their parries as well. For rhe first rime in London - said Samundra you didn't feel rhar you were our in the pro\'inces. There was electricity in rhe air, they said.
I remember our last walks together. I accompanied her to Rachman's house on Dolphin Square. I didn't want to go in and find myself among all those people. The idea of returning ro the apartment frightened me a little. I would h a,·e ro starr purring the sentences down on the white page again, bur I had no choice.
Those evenings, we'd ask the taxi dri\'er to stop at Victoria Station. And from there we would walk ro the Thames through the streets of Pimlico. It was July. The hear was suffocating, bur whene,·er we walked along the iron fences of a park, a breeze washed m·er us, smelling of pri\'et or lihden.
We would say goodnight under the portico. The clusters of apartment buildings on Dolphin Square stood out against the moonl ight. The shadows of the trees were cast onto the sidewalk, and the lea,·es stood motionless. There was nor a breath of air. Across the quai, beside the Thames, there was a neon sign ad,·errising a restaurant on a barge, 1 10
and the doorman stood at the edge of the gangplank. But apparendy no one ever went into that restaurant. I used to watch the man standing still for hours in his uniform. There were no more cars driving along the quai at that hour, and I had finally arrived at the tranquil, desolate heart of the summer.
Back in Chepstows Villas I wrote, stretched out on the bed.
Then I turned off the light and waited in the dark.
She would come in about three o'clock in the morning, always alone. Linda had disappeared again, sometime before.
She would softly open the door. I pretended to be sleeping.
And then, after a few days, I would stay awake until dawn, but I never again heard her footsteps in the stairway.
111
Yesterday, Saturday the first of October 199+, I took the metro back to my apartment from the Place d'Italic. I had gone looking for videos in a shop that was supposed to ha\'C
a better selection than the others. I hadn't seen the Place d'Italic for a long time, and it seemed \'cry different because of the skyscrapers.
I stood ncar the doors in the metro car. A woman was sitting on the bench in the back of the car, on my left, and I'd noticed her because she was wearing sunglasses, a scarf tied under her chin, and an old beige raincoat. She looked l i ke Jacqueline. The ele,•atcd metro followed along the Boulc
''ard Auguste-Bianqui. Her face seemed thinner in the daylight. I could clearly make out the shape of her mouth and her nose. It was her, I gradually became convinced of it.
She didn't sec me. Her eyes were hidden behind the sunglasses.
She stood up at the Cor.·isart station and I followed her onto the platform. She was holding a shopping bag in her left hand and walking weari ly, almost staggering, not at all the way she used to. I don't know why, but I'd dreamt of her often lately: I saw her in a little fish ing port on the Mediterranean, sitting on the ground, knitting endlessly in the sunl ight. Next to her, a saucer where passers-by left coins.
She crossed the Boulevard Augustc-Bianqui and turned 1 1 2
onto the Rue Corvisart. I followed her along the street, downhill. She stepped int o a grocery store. When she came out, I could tell by the way she was walking that her shopping bag was heavier.
On the little square you come to before the park there was a cafe with the name Lc Muscadct Junior. I watched her through the front window. She was standing at the bar, her shopping bag at her feet, and pouring herself a glass of beer.
I didn't want to speak to her, or follow her any farther and learn her address. After all these years, I was afraid she wouldn't remember me.
And today, the first Sunday of fall, I'm in the metro again, on the same line. The train passes above the trees on the Boulevard Saint-Jacques. Their lca\·cs hang over the tracks. I feel as though I'm floating between heaven and earth, and escaping my current life. Nothing holds me to anythi ng now. In a moment, as I walk out of the Corvisart station, with its glass canopy like the ones in provincial train stations, it will be as ifl were slipping through a crack in time, and I wil l disappear once and for all . I will follow the street downhill, and maybe I will happen to run i nto her.
She must li\·e somewhere in this neighborhood.
Fifteen years ago, I remember, I had this san1e feeling. One August afternoon, I had gone to the town hall of Boulogne
Billancourt to pick up a birth certificate. I had walked back by way of the Porte d'Autcuil and the a\·enues that nm alongside the horse track and the Bois de Boulogne. For the moment, I was living in a hotel room ncar the quai, just beyond the Trocadcro gardens. I didn't know whether I would 1 1 3
stay on permanently in Paris or, to continue the book I had begun on •seaport poets and no\'clists,' spend some time in Buenos Ai res looking for the Argentine poet Hector Pedro Blomberg. I had been intrigued by a few lines of his verse: Schneider was killed last night
In the Paraguayan woman's bar
He had blue eyes and a ,·cry pale face . . .
A sunny late afternoon. Just before the Porte de Ia Mucttc, I'd sat down on a bench in a small park. This neighborhood brought back childhood memories. Bus 63, which I used to catch at Saint-Germain-des-Pres, stopped at the Porte de Ia Muette, and you had to wait for it about six o'clock at night after spending the day in the Bois de Boulogne. But there was no point in summon ing up other more recent memories. They belonged to a previous life I wasn't sure I'd ever li\'cd.
I had taken my birth certificate from my pocket. I was born during the summer ofi9+5, and one afternoon, about fi\'e o'clock, my father had gone to the town hall to sign the papers. I could sec his signamre on the photocopy they'd gi\'en me, an illegible signamre. Then he had rentrned home on foot through the deserted streets of that summcr,_with the crystalline sound of bicycle bells in the silence. And it was the same season as today, the same sunny late afternoon.
I'd put the birth certificate back in my pocket. I was in a dream, and I had to wake up. The tics connecting me to the present were stretching. It would really ha\'C been too bad if I'd ended u p on this bench in a sort of amnesia, progressin:ly losing my identity, unable to gi,·e my address to 1 1 4
passers-by . . . . Fortunately I had that birth certificate in my pocket, like dogs that become lost in Paris but carry their 0\\11er's address and phone number on their collar . . . . And I tried to explain to myself why I was feeling so unfixed. I hadn't seen anyone for sc\·eral weeks. No one I had tried to call was back from vacation yet. And I was wrong to choose a hotel so far from the center of town . At the beginning of the summer I had only planned to stay there a very short time, and then to rent a small apartment or studio. Doubt had crept into my mind: D id I really have any desire to stay in Paris? As long as the summer lasted I would be able to feel as if I were only a tourist, but at the beginning of fall the streets, the people, and the things would revert to their everyday color: gray. And I wasn't sure I still had the courage to fade into that color once again.
It would seem that I had come to the end of a period of my life. It had lasted fifteen years, and now I was going through a slack time before beginning again . I tried to transport myself back fifteen years earlier. Then, too, something had come to an end. I was drifting away from my parents. My father used to meet me in back rooms of cafes, in hotel lobbies, or in train station buffets, as if he were choosing these transitory places to get rid of me and to run away with his secrets. We would sit silently, facing each other.
From time to time he would gi,·e me a sidelong glance. As for my mother, she spoke to me louder and louder. I could tel l by the abrupt way her lips moved, because there was a pane of glass between us, muting her voice.
And then the next fifteen years fel l apart : a few blurry faces, a few vague memories, ashes . . . . I felt no sadness 1 1 5
about this. On the contrary, I was rclie\'ed in a way. I would start again from zero. Of that whole grim succession of days, the only ones that still stood out were from when I knew Jacqueline and Van Re\'er. \Vhy that episode rather than another? Mavbe because it had remained unfinished.
The bench I was sitting on was in the shade now. I crossed the little lawn and sat down in the sun. I felt light. I was responsible to no one, I had no need to mumble excuses or lies. I would become someone else, and my metamorphosis would be so complete that no one I'd met o\'er the past fifteen years wou ld be able to recognize me.
I heard the sound of an engine behind me. Someone was parking a car at the corner of the park and the a\'enue. The engine shut of[ The sound of a car door closing. A woman was walking past the iron fence that surrounded the park.
She was wearing a yellow summer dress and sunglasses. She had light brown hair. I hadn't quite made out her face, but I immediately recognized her walk, a lazy walk. She slowed down, as if unsure of which direction to take. And then she seemed to find her way. It was Jacqueline.
I left the park and followed her. I didn't dare catch up with her. Maybe she wouldn't remember me clearly. tfer hair was shorter than fifteen years before, but that walk couldn't belong to anyone else.
She went into one of the apartment buildings. It was too late to speak to her. And in any case, what would I have said? This a\·cnuc is so far from the Quai de Ia Tournclle and the Cafe Dante . . . .
I walked by the enrryway to the apartment building and 1 16
made a note of the number. Was this really where she lived ?
Or was she paying a cal l on some friends? I began ro wonder if it was possible to recognize people from behind by the way they walk. I n1rned around and headed back toward the park. Her car was there. I was tempted to leave a note on the windshield with the telephone number of my hotel.
At the garage on the Avenue de New-York, the car I had rented the day before was waiting for me. I had come up with this idea in my hotel room. The neighborhood seemed so empty this August in Paris, and I felt so alone when I went out on foot or in the metro that I found the idea of having a car at my disposal comforting. I would feel as though I cou ld lca\'e Paris at any moment, i f l wanted to.
For the past fifteen years I'd felt like a captive of others and myself, and all my dreams were the same: dreams of escape, of departing trains that, unfornmatcly, I always missed. I ne\'er made it to the station. I was lost in the corridors of the metro, and when I reached the platform the metro never came. I also dreamt of walking out my door and climbing into a big American car that glided through deserted streets toward the Rois de Roulogne, its engine nmning silently, and I felt a sensation of lightness and \\•ell-being.
The attendant ga\·e me the key, and I saw h is surprise when I started out in reverse and nearly ran i nto one of the gasoline pumps. I was afraid I wouldn't be able to stop at the next red light. That was how it happened in my dreams : the brakes had given out, and I was mnning all the red lights and dri,·ing down one-way streets in the wrong direction.
I managed to park the car in front of the hotel and asked the concierge for a directory. I looked up her address, but 1 1 7
there was no Jacqueline at that number. She'd probably got married in the past fifteen years. Rut whose wife was she?
Delorme ( P. )
Dintillac
Jones (E. Cecil)
Lacoste ( Rene)
Walter (J.)
Sanchez-Circs
Vidal
I only had to call each of these names.
In the phone booth I dialed the first number. It rang for a long time. Then someone answered. A man's \'oice:
'Yes . . . Hello?'
'Could I speak to Jacqueline?'
'You must be mistaken, monsieur.'
I hung up. I no longer had the ner\'e to dial the other numbers.
I waited for night to fall before lea\•ing the hotel. I sat down behind the wheel and started the car. I knew Paris well, and I would ha,·e taken the most direct route to the Porte de Ia Muette if l'd been on foot, but in this car I was na,·i�ating blind. I hadn't dri\"en for a long time, and I didn't know which streets were one-way. I decided to dri,·e straight ahead.
I went far out of my way along the Quai de Passy and the A\"enue de Versailles. Then I mrncd onto the deserted Roule\·ard Murat. I could ha\"e nm the red lights, but it plcasl·d me to obey them. I dro\"e slowly, unhurriedly, like someone l l 8
em ising along a seaside parkway on a summer night. The stoplights were speaking only to me, with their mysterious and friendly signals.
I stopped in from of the entrance to the apartment building, on the other side of the a\'enue, under the branches of the first trees in the Bois de Boulogne, where the streetlights created an area of semidarkness. The rwo swinging doors of the entryway, with their ironwork and glass, were lit up. So were the windows on the top floor. They were open wide, and I could make our a few silhouettes on one of the balconies. I heard music and the murmur of com·ersation. Se\'eral cars came and parked on the street in front of the building, and I was sure that the people getting out of them and stepping into the enrryway were all headed for the top floor. At one point, someone leaned O\'er the balcony and called out to two silhouettes walking toward the building. A woman's
\"oice. She was telling the other two the floor number. Bur it wasn't Jacqueline's \'oice, or at least I didn't recognize it. I decided nor to stay there any longer spying on them, and to go upstairs. If it was Jacqueline's party, I didn't know how she would react to the sight of someone she hadn't heard from i n fifteen years walking into her apartment unannounced . \Ve'd only known each other for a short while : three or four months. Not much compared to fifteen years.
Bur surely she hadn't forgotten those days . . . . Unless her present life had erased them, in the same way that the blinding beam from a spotlight throws everything outside irs path into the deepest shadows.
I waited for more guests to arri\'e. This rime there were three of them. One of them wa\·ed toward the balconies on l l 9
the top floor. I caught up with them just as they entered the building. Two men and a woman. I said hello. It seemed clear to them that I was also invited upstairs.
\\'e went up in the cJe,·ator. The two men spoke with an accent, but the woman was French . They were a little older than me.
I forced nwsclf to smile. I said to the woman :
'It's going to be a very n ice time, up there . . . .'
She smiled as well.
'Are you a friend of Darius?' she asked me.
'No. I'm a friend of Jacqueline.'
She seemed not to understand.
'I ha,·en't seen Jacqueline for a long time,' I said. 'Is she well ?'
The woman frowned.
'I don't know her.'
Then she exchanged a few words in English with the two others. The elevator stopped.
One of the men rang the doorbell. My hands were sweating. The door opened and from inside I heard a hum of conversation and music. A man with brown, swept-back hair and a dusky complexion was smiling at us. He was wc11ring a beige suit of heavy cotton.
The woman kissed him on both checks .
'Hello, Darius.'
'Hello, my dear.'
He had a deep voice and a slight accent. The two men also greeted him with a 'Hello, Darius.' I shook his hand without speaking, but he didn't seem surprised by my presence.
120
He led us through the entryw.ty •md into a li\'ing room with open bay windows. There were guests standing here and there in sm.tll groups. Darius and the three people I had come up with in the elevator were heading toward one of the balconies. I followed close behind them. The\' were stopped by a couple at the edge of the bakony, and a conversation started u p.
I stood back. They'd torgotten me. I retreated to the other side of the room and sat down at one end of a couch.
At the other end, two young people, pressed together, were speaking qu ietly to each other. No one was paying any attention to me. I tried to spot Jacqueline among the crowd.
About twenty people. I looked at the man they called Darius, O\"Cr by the threshold of the balcony, a slender silhouette in a beige suit. I thought he must be about forty years old. Could Darius be Jacqueline's husband ? The clamor of the conversations was drowned out by music, which seemed to be coming from the balconies.
I examined the face of one woman after another, but in
\"ain; I didn't sec Jacqueline. This was the wrong floor. I wasn't even sure she lh·cd i n this bui lding. Now Darius was i n the middle of the room, a few meters from me, standing with a \'cry elegant blonde woman who was listening to him intently. From time to time she laughed. I tried to make out what language he was speaking, but the music cm·crcd his
\'Oicc. \Vhy not walk up to the man and ask him where Jacqueli ne was ? In his deep, courtly mice he would reveal the solution to this mystery, which was not really a mystery at all : if he knew Jacqueline, ifJacquclinc was his wife, or what floor she lived on. It was as simple as that. He was facing in 1 2 1
my direction. !':ow be was listening to the blonde woman and by chance his gaze had come to rest on me. At first, I had the impression that he didn't sec me. And then be ga\'c me a friendly linlc wa\'c with his hand. He seemed surprised that I was sini ng alone on the couch, speaki ng to no one, but I was much more comfortable now than when I came into the apartment, and a memory from fifteen years earlier came back to me. \Vc had arri,·cd in London, Jacquel ine and I, at Charing Cross Station, about fi\'e o'clock in the afternoon. We had taken a ta.xi to get to the hotel, which we'd chosen at random from a guidebook. Neither of us knew London. \Vhen the ta.xi mrned onto the Mall and that shady, tree-lined avenue opened up before me, the first twenty years of my life fell to dust, like a weight, like handcuff.c; or a harness that I ne\·er thought I would be free of.
Just like that, nothing remained of all those years. And if happiness was the fleeting euphoria I felt that afternoon, then for the first time in my existence I was happy.
Later, it was dark, and we were walking aimlessly in the area of Enn ismore Gardens. \Ve walked along the iron fence surrounding an abandoned garden. There was laughter, music, and the hum ofcom·ersation com ing from the top floor of one of the houses. The windows were wide open, and a group of si lhouenes stood out against the light. \\'e stayed there, leaning on the garden fence. One of the guests sini ng on the edge of the balcony had noticed us and had motioned for us to come up. In big cities, in summertime, people who ha,·e long since lost track of each other or who don't e\'cn know each other meet one e\·ening on a terrace, then lose each other again . And none of it really mancrs.
1 22
Darius had come O\'er to me:
'Ha,·e you lost your friends?' he said with a smile.
It took me a moment to understand who he meant: the three people in the ele\'ator.
'They're not really my friends.'
But I immediately wished I hadn't said that. I didn't want him asking himself what I was doing here.
'I ha\·cn't known them long,' I told him. 'And they had the idea of bringing me here . . . .
'
He smiled again.
'The friends of my friends arc my friends.'
But he was uncomfortable because he didn't know who I was. To put him at his case, I said, as quietly as possible:
'Do you often throw such nice parties?'
'Yes. In August. And always when my wife is away.'
Most of the guests had left the living room. How could they all fit on the balcon ies?
'I feel so lonely when my wife is away . . . .'
His eyes had taken on a melancholy expression. He was still smiling at me. This was the time to ask him if his wife's name was Jacqueline, but I didn't dare risk it yet.
'And you, do you Ji,·e in Paris?'
He was probably asking just to be polite. After all, I was h is guest, and he didn't want me to be sitting alone on a couch away from all the others.
'Yes, but I don't know if l'm going to stay . . . .'
Suddenly I felt a need to confide in him. It had been three months, more or less, since I had spoken to anyone.
'My work is something I can do anywhere, as long as I have a pen and a sheet of paper . . . .'
1 23
'You're a writer?'
'If you can call it that . . . .'
He wanted me to tell him titles of my books. Maybe he'd read one.
'I don't think so,' I told him.
'It must be exciting to write, hmm?'
He must not ha,·e had much practice with one-to-one conversations on such serious matters.
'I'm keeping you from your guests,' I told him. 'For that matter, I think I might have driven them all away.'
There was almost no one left in the l i\'ing room or on the balconies.
He laughed lightly:
'Not at all . . . Everyone's gone up to the terrace . . . .'
There were still a few guests left in the living room, en-sconced on a couch across the room, a white couch like the one where I was sitting next to Darius.
'It's been a pleasure to make your acquaintance,' he told me.
Then he mo\·ed toward the others, among them the blonde woman he had been speaking with a few moments before and the man in the blazer from the elevator.
'Don't you think we need some music here?' he as�ed them, very loudly, as if he were only there to keep the party going. 'I'll go put on a record.'
He disappeared into the next room. After a moment, the voice of a cbtmtmse came forth.
He sat down with the others on the couch . He had already forgotten me.
It was time for me to leave, but I couldn't tear myself 1 24
away from the sound of con\'ersation and laughter coming from the terr.1ce and, from the couch, the voices of Darius and his guests occasionally breaking through the music. I cou ldn't quite make out what they were saying, and I let myself be lulled by the song.
Someone was ringing the doorbell. Darius stood up and walked toward the front door. He smiled at me as he passed by. The others went on talking, and in the heat of the discussion the man in the blazer was making broad gesmres, as if he were trying to c01wince them of something.
Voices in the entryway. They were coming nearer. I heard Darius and a woman speaking in low tones. I mmed around.
Darius was standing with a couple, and all three of them were at the threshold of the living room. The man was tall, brown-hai rt.'(.i, wearing a gray suit, with rather heavy features, his blue eyes shallow-set. The woman was wearing a yellow summer dress that left her shoulders bare.
'\Ve've come too late,' the man said. 'E,·ei")'One has already left . . . .
'
He had a slight accent.
'No, no,' said Darius. 'They're waiting for us upstairs.'
He took each of them by the arm.
The woman, whom I had seen in three-quarters profile, m rned around. My heart jumped. I recognized Jacqueline.
They were walking toward me. I stood up, like a robot.
Darius introduced them to me:
'George and Therese Caisley.'
I greeted them with a nod. I looked the so-called Therese Caisley squarely in the eyes, but she didn't blink. Apparently 1 2 5
she didn't recognize me. Darius seemed embarrassed not to be able to introduce me by name.
'These arc my downstairs neighbors,' he told me. 'I'm happy they came . . . . And i n any case, they wouldn't ha\'c been able to sleep because of the noise . . . .'
Caisley shmggcd :
'Sleep? . . . But it's sti ll early,' he said. 'The day is only beginning.'
I tried to make eye contact with her. Her gaze was absent. She didn't sec me, or else she was deliberately ignoring my presence. Darius led them across the room to the couch where the others were sitting. The man in the blazer stood up to greet Therese Caislcy. The con\'ersation started up again . Caisley was \'cry talkati\'e. She hung back a little, with a sullen or bored look. I wanted to walk toward her, take her aside, and quietly say to her:
'Hello, Jacqueline.'
But I stood there petrified, trying to find some common thread connecting the Cafe Dante or the Hotel de Ia Tournelle fifteen years ago to this living room with its bay windows open onto the Bois de Boulognc. There was none. I'd fallen prey to a m irage. And yet, now that I thought about it, these places were all in the same city, not so far fro111 each other. I tried to imagine the shortest possible route to the Cafe Dante : follow the Boulc\'ard Periphcriquc as far as the Left Bank, enter the city at the Porte d'Orleans, then drh·e straight ahead toward the Bou fe,·ard Saint-Michel. . . . At that hour, i n August, it would hardly ha\'c taken a quarter of an hour.
The man in the blazer was speaking to her, and she was 1 26
l isten ing to him indifferently. She'd sat down on one of the arms of the couch and lit a cigarette. I saw her in profile.
What had she done to her hair? Fifteen years ago it came down to her waist, and now she wore it a little abo\'e the shoulder. And she was smoking, but she wasn't coughing.
'Will you come up with us ?' Darius asked me.
He had left the others on the couch and was standing with George and Therese Caislcy. Therese. Why had she changed her n ame?
I followed them onto one of the balconies.
'You just haYe to climb the deck ladder,' said Darius.
He pointed to a stairway with concrete steps at the end of the balcom·.
'And where arc we setting sail for, captain?' asked Caisley, slapping Darius's shoulder familiarly.
We were behind them, side by side, Therese Caisley and L She smiled. But it was a polite smile, the kind used for strangers.
'Ha\·e you e\'er been up here?' she asked me.
'No. NeYer. This is the first time.'
'The ,·icw must be beautiful.'
She had said these words so coldly and impersonally that I wasn't eYen sure she was speaking to me.
A large terrace. Most of the guests were sitting in beige canYas chairs.
Darius stopped at one of the groups as he passed by.
They were sitting in a circle. I was walking behind Caisley and his wife, who seemed to ha,·c forgotten I was there.
They met another couple at the edge of the terrace. The four 127
of them stood sti II and began to talk. she and Caisley leaning against the balustrade. Caislcy and the two others were speaking English . From time to rime she punctuated the com·ersation with a short sentence in French . I can1e and rested my elbows on the parapet of the terrace as well. She was just behind me. The other three were still speaking in English. The singer's ,·oice drowned out the murmur of the com·ersations and I began to whistle the refrain of the song.
She turned around.
'Excuse me,' I said.
'That's all right.'
She smiled at me. the same ncant smile as before. And since she was silent again. I had no choice but to add :
'LO\·ely e\·ening . . .'
The discussion between Caisle\· and the two others was growing more animated. Caisley had a slightly nasal mice.
'\\"hat's especially pleasant.' I told her. ·is the cool breeze coming from the Bois de Boulogne . . . .'
'Yes.'
She got out a pack of cigarettes. rook one. and offered me the pack:
'Thanks ,·en· much. I don't smoke.'
'You're smart . . . .'
She lit a cigarette with a lighter.
'I\·e tried to quit se,·eral rimes,' she told me. 'but I just can't do it . . . .'
'Doesn't it make you cough ?'
She seemed surprised by my question.
'I stopped smoking.· I told her. 'because it made me cough:
1 2 8
There was no reaction. She really didn't seem to rccogm ze me.
' It's <l shame you can hear the noise of the Pcriphc riquc from here,' I said.
'Do you think so? I can't hear it from my apartment . . . .
And I live on the founh floor.'
'Sti ll, the Pcriphcriquc is a very useful thing,' I told her.
'It took me no more than ten minutes to drive here from the Quai de Ia Tourncllc tonight.'
Rut my words had no effect on her. She was still smiling her cold smi le.
'Arc vou a friend of Darius?'
I t was the same question the woman had asked me in the elevator.
'No,' I told her. 'I'm a friend of a friend of Darius . . .
Jacqueline . . . .'
I a\·oidcd making eye contact with her. I was staring at one of the streetlights below us, beneath the trees.
'I don't know her.'
'Do you spend summers in Paris?' I asked.
'My husband and I arc leaving for Majorca next week.'
I remembered our first meeting, that winter afternoon on the Place Saint-Michel, and the letter she was carrying, whose envelope said : Majorca.
'Your husband doesn't write detective newels, docs he?'
She gave a sudden laugh. It was strange, because Jacqueline had never laughed like that.
'\Vhat on eanh wou ld make you think he writes detective novels?'
Fifteen years ago, she had told me the name of an Amcri-1 29
can \\'ho wrote detecti\'C no\'els and who might be able to help us get to Majorca: " IcGi\'crn. Later, I had come across a tcw of his books, and I'd e\·en thought of searching him out and asking him if he knew Jacqueline by any chance, and what had become of her.
'I had him mixed up with someone else who li\'cs in Spain . . . William "kGi\'Crn . . . .'
For the first time she looked straight into my eyes, and I thought I cou ld sec someth ing conspi ratorial in her smile.
'What about you ?' she asked me. 'Do you li\'e in Paris?'
'For now. I don't know if I'm going to stay . . . .'
Behind us Caisley was still speaking in his nasal \'oice, and now he was at the center of a \'cry large group.
'I can work anywhere,' I told her. 'I write books.'
Again, her polite smile, her distant voice :
'Oh really? . . . How interesting . . . . I'd very much like to read your books . . . .'
'I'd be afraid they might bore you . . . .'
'Not at all . . . You'll ha\'C to bring them to me one day when \'OU come back to Darius's . . . .'
'With pleasure.'
Caisley had let his gaze fall on me. He was probably wondering who I was and why I was talking to his witc. He .
came to her and put his arm around her shoulders. His shallow blue eyes never left me.
'This gentleman is a friend of Darius and he writes books.'
I should ha\'e introduced myself, but I always tccl uncomfortable speaking my own name.
'I didn't know Darius had any writer friends.'
1 30
He smiled at me. He was about ten wars older than us.
\\"here could she haw met him? In London, maybe. Yes, she had undoubtedly stayed on in London after we lost contact with each other.
'He thought you were a writer as well; she said.
Caisley was shaken by a loud burst of laughter. Then he stood up straight. just as he was before: his shoulders stift: his head high.
'Really, that's what you thought? You think I look like a writer?'
I hadn't gh·en the matter any thought. I didn't care what th is Caisley person did for a Ji,·ing. No matter how many times I told myself he was her husband, he was indistinguishable from e\·eryone else standing on the terrace. We were lost, she and I , in a crowd of extras on a mmie set. She was pretending to know her part, but I wouldn't be able to amid giving myself away. They would soon notice that I didn't belong here. I still hadn't spoken, and Caisley was looking at me closely. It was essential that I find something to sa\·:
'I had you mixed up with an American writer who lh·es in Spain . . . William �lcGh·ern . . . .'
�ow I'd bought myself some time. But it wouldn't be enough. I urgently needed to find other rejoinders, and to speak them in a nan1ral and rcla.xed tone of ,·oice so as not to attract attention. My head was spinning. I was afraid I was going to be ill. I was sweating. The night seemed stiflingly close, unless it was only the harsh illumination of the spotlights, the loud chatter of the conversations, the laughter.
'Do you know Spain well?' Caisley asked me.
1 3 1
She had lit another cigarette, and she was still staring at me with her cold gaze. I was scarcely able to stammer out :
·::-.=o. �ot at all.'
'\\'e ha\"e a house on �lajorca. \\'c spend more than three months a war there.'
And the com·crsation would go on for hours on this terrace. Empty words, hollow sentences, as if she and I had outli,·ed oursch·cs and could no longer make e\·cn the slightest allusion to the past. She was perfectly comfortable in her part. And I didn't blame her: As I went along I too had forgotten nearly e\·crything about my life, and each time whole stretches of it had fallen to dust I'd felt a pleasant sensation of l ighmcss.
'And what's your famrite time of year in �fajorca?' I asked Caisle\'.
I was feeling better now, the air was cooler, the guests around us less noisy, and the singer's \'oicc \·cry sweet.
Caislcy shrugged.
'E\'cry season has its charms in �fajorca.'
I rurned to her:
'And do \"OU feel the san1e wa\'?'
.
.
She smiled as she had a moment before, when I thought I had glimpsed something conspiratorial.
'I feel cxactl\' as nw husband docs.'
And then a sort of giddiness came m·cr me, and I said to her:
'It's funny. You don't cough when you smoke anymore.'
Caisley hadn't heard me. Someone had slapped him on the back and he had rurned arou nd. She frowned.
·�o need to take ether for your cough an�111ore . . . .'
1 3 2
I'd said it lightly, as if on ly making corwersation. She ga\"e me a look of surprise. Rut she was as poised as c\·er. As fix Caislcy, he was talking to the person next to him.
'I didn't understand what you said . . . .'
Now she was looking away, and her gaze had lost its expression . I shook my head briskly, trying to look like someone waking up suddenly.
'Excuse me . . . . I was thinking of the book I'm writing at the moment . . . .'
'A dctccti\'c no\"cl?' she asked me, politely but distractedly.
'Not exactly.'
It was no usc. The surface remained untroubled. Still waters. Or rather a thick sheet of icc, impossible to penetrate after fi fteen years.
'Shall we be going?' asked Caislcy.
He had his arm around her shoulders. He was a massh·c figure, and she seemed \'cry small next to him.
'I'm lca\'ing too,' I said.
'We must say good-night to Darius.'
\Yc looked for him without success among the dusters of guests on the terrace. Then we went downstairs to the li\·ing room. At the far end of the room, four people were sitting around a table playing cards in silence. Darius was one of them.
'\Veil,' said Caisley, 'it's ob\'ious that nothing can compete with poker . . . .'
He shook Darius's hand. Darius stood up and kissed her hand. I shook hands with Darius in mrn .
1 33
'Come back whenever you like,' he told me. 'The door is always open for you.'
On the landing. I waited to take the cle,·ator.
'We'll s;ty good-bye to you here,' said Caisley. '\\'c li,·c just downstairs.'
'I left my purse in the car this afternoon,' she told him.
'I'll be right b.tck up.'
'\Yell, good-bye; said Caislcy, with a nonchalant wa,·c of the am1. 'And it was very nice meeting you.'
He went down the stairs. I heard a door shut. The two of us were in the elc,·ator. She lifted her face toward me :
·� ly car is down the street a little, near the park . . . .'
'I know,' I told her.
She was looking at me, her eyes wide.
'Why? Arc you spying on me ?'
'I saw you by chance this afternoon, getting our of your car.'
The clcntor stopped, the double doors slid open, but she didn't mm·c. She was still looking at me with a slightly surprised expression .
'You haven't changed much,' she told me.
The double doors dosed again with a metallic sound. She lowered her head as if she were trying to shield herself ftom the light of the ceiling lamp in the elc\·aror.
'And me? Do you think I've changed ?'
Her ,·oicc was not the same as it was a while ago. on the terrace; it was the slightly hoarse, slightly gra,·elly voice she used to ha,·e.
'Ko . . . Except your hair and your name . . . .'
134
The a,·enue was silent. You could hear the trees rustling.
'Do you know this neighborhood ? ' she asked me.
'Yes.'
I was no longer very sure I did. �ow that she was walking next to me, I felt as though I had come to this a\·enue for the first time. But I wasn't dreaming. The car was still there, under the trees. I gestured toward it:
'I rented a car. . . . And I hardlv know how to dri,·e . . . .'
'I'm not surprised . . . .'
She had taken my arm. She stopped and gave me a smile :
'Knowing you, you probably get the brake mixed up with the accelerator . . . .'
I also felt as though I knew her well, e,·en if l hadn't seen her for fifteen years and knew nothing of her life. Of all the people I'd met up to now, she was the one who had stayed in my mind the most. As we walked, her ann in mine, I began to convince myself that we had last seen each other the day before.
We came to the park.
'I think it would be better ifl drove you home . . . .'
'Fine with me, but your husband will be expecting you . . . .'
The moment I spoke those words I thought to myself that they rang false.
'No . . . He's probably asleep already.'
We were sitting side by side in the car.
'\\bere do vou live?'
'Not far from here. In a hotel near the Quai de Passy.'
She rook the Boulevard Sucher in the direction of the Porte .Maillot. It was completely the wrong direction.
1 3 5
' I f we sec each other C\'Cr\' fifteen \'Cars ' she s
�
"
'
aid '\'ou
, "
might not recognize me next time.'
What age would we be then ? Fifty years old. And that seemed so strange to me that I couldn't help murmuring,
'Fifty . . .'
as a way of gi\'ing the number some semblance of reality.
She dro\'c, sitti ng a little stiffly, her head high, slowing down at the i ntersections. E,·crything around us was silent.
Except the mstl ing of the trees.
We entered the Rois de Boulogne. She stopped the car under the trees, ncar the booth where you board the little train that runs between the Pone Maillot and the Jardin d'Accli matation. \Ve were in the shadows, beside the path, and ahead of us the lampposts cast a white light on the minianJre train station, the deserted platform, the tiny wagons standi ng still .
She brought her face ncar mine and bmshed my check with her hand, as if she wanted to be sure that I was really there, ali\'e, next to her.
'It was strange, just now,' she said, 'when I walked in and saw you in the li\·ing room . . . .'
I felt her lips on my neck. I stroked her hair. It wasn't as long as it used to be, but nothing had really changed. Tillie had stopped. Or rather, it had returned to the hour shown by the hands of the clock in the Cafe Dante the night we met there just before closing.
1 36
The next afternoon I came to pick up the car, which I'd left in front of the Caisleys' building. Just as I was sitting down behind the wheel I saw Darius walking along the a\·enue in the bright sunlight. He was wearing beige shorts, a red polo shirt, and sunglasses. I wa\'ed my arm at him. He didn't seem at all surprised to find me there.
'Hot day, isn't it? . . . Would you like to come up for a drink?'
I turned down the offer on the pretext that I was meeting someone.
'E\'eryone's abandoning me . . . . The Caisleys left this morning for Majorca . . . . They're smart . . . . It's ridiculous to spend August in Paris . . . .
'
Yesterday, she'd told me she wouldn't be lea\·ing until next week. Once again she'd slipped away from me. I was expecting it.
He leaned m·er the door of the car:
'All the same, drop by some e\'ening . . . . \Ve\·e got to stick together in August . . . .'
Despite his smile, he seemed \'agucly anxious. Something in his \'oice.
'I'll come,' I told him.
'Promise?'
'I promise.'
1 3 7
I started the car, but I accelerated too fast in re\'erse. The car hit the trunk of one of the plane trees. Darius spread his arms in a gesture of commiseration.
I set off toward the Pone d'Auteuil. I was planning to return to the hotel by way of the quais along the Seine. The rear fender was probably damaged, and one of the tires was rubbing against it. I went as slowly as possible.
I began to feel a strange sensation, probably because of the deserted sidewalks, the summer haze, and the silence around me. As I dro\'C down the Boulevard Mur at, my uneasiness took shape: I had finally discm·ercd the neighborhood where I used to walk with Jacqueline in my dreams.
But we'd nc\'er really walked together in this area, or else it was in another life. My heart beat faster, like a pendulum ncar a magnetic field, until I came out onto the Place de Ia Porte-de-Saint-Cloud. I recognized the fountains in the middle of the square. I was sure that Jacqueline and I usually turned down a street to the right, behind the church, but I couldn't find it this afternoon.
1 38
Another fifteen years have gone by, all running together in the fog, and 1\·c heard nothing from Therese Caislcy. There was no answer at the telephone number she'd given me, as if the Caisleys had ne\·cr come back from Majorca.
She might ha,·e died sometime in the past year. Maybe I would find her one Sundav on the Rue Con·isart.
It's cle\·en o'clock at night, in August, and the train has slowed down to pass through the first suburban stations.
Deserted platforms under the mauw fluorescent lights,
\\"here they used to dream of departures for Majorca and martingales around the neutral fi,·e.
B runoy. Montgeron. Athis-Mons. Jacqueline was born somewhere ncar here.
The rhythmic sounds of the wagons fell silent, and the train stopped for a moment at Villcncuvc-Saint-Georges, before the marshaling yard. The fa<;adcs on the Rue de Paris, alongside the tracks, arc dark and shabby. Once there was a succession of cafes, movie theaters, and garages along here. You can still make out their signs. One of them is still lit, like a night-light, for nothing.
1 39
Document Outline
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Translator's Introduction
Out of the Dark
Epigraph
She was a woman of average height...
Gerard Van Bever wore a herringbone...
It was on one of those winter days...
They introduced me to Cartaud later on...
I woke up at about eight o'clock...
I hesitated for a moment...
I met them, her and Van Bever...
That Saturday Van Bever went�
I sat down at the table...
In the suitcase we found two thin bundles...
In London that spring...
Doubt always overtook us...
At lunchtime...
The next day, about noon�
For the next few days...
Every morning I went and wrote...
Yes, as Savoundra said�
From then on we were alone...
One morni ng as I was coming out�
One night as Jacqueline and I were coming back...
Yesterday, Saturday the first of October 1994�
The next afternoon I came to pick up the car...
Another fifteen years have gone by�