Paris Nocturne

~ ~ ~

I FOUND A hotel past the Pont de Bir-Hakeim on a small avenue that ran onto the quay. After three days, I no longer wanted to go back to my room in Porte d’Orléans, so I took a room at the Hôtel Fremiet, and wondered who the other guests were. It was a more comfortable room than the one on Rue de la Voie-Verte, with a telephone and even its own bathroom. But I could afford this luxury thanks to the money the man named Solière had given me, which he had turned down when I tried to give it back. That was his bad luck. It was foolish of me to have any scruples about it. After all, he was no choirboy.

At night, in my room, I decided never to return to Rue de la Voie-Verte. I had taken some clothes and the navy-blue cardboard box in which I kept my old papers. I had to face the facts: there was no trace of me left there. Far from making me sad, the thought gave me courage for the future. A weight had been lifted.

I used to get back late to the hotel. I’d eat dinner in a large restaurant, past the steps from the bridge and the entrance to the metro station. I still remember the name: La Closerie de Passy. It wasn’t very busy. Some nights I would find myself alone with the manager, a woman with short brown hair, and the waiter, who wore a white naval jacket. Every time I went, I hoped Jacqueline Beausergent would come in and walk over to the bar like the two or three people who sat and talked with the manager. I always chose the closest table to the entrance. I would stand up and walk towards her. I had already decided what I would say to her: ‘We were both in an accident at Place des Pyramides…’ Seeing me walk would be enough. The split moccasin, the bandage… At the Hôtel Fremiet, the man at reception had looked me over with a frown. The bloodstain on my old sheepskin jacket was still there. He didn’t seem to trust me. I paid a fortnight’s rent in advance.

But the manager of La Closerie de Passy wasn’t fazed by my bandage and the bloodstain on my old sheepskin jacket. Apparently she had seen it all before, in neighbourhoods that weren’t as quiet as this one. Next to the bar was a parrot in a large yellow cage. Decades later, I was leafing through a magazine from the time and, on the last page, there were advertisements for restaurants. One of them jumped out at me: ‘La Closerie de Passy and its parrot, Pépère. Open seven days a week.’ A seemingly harmless phrase, but it made my heart race. One night, I was feeling so lonely that I went to sit at the bar with the others and I sensed that the manager took pity on me because of my stained sheepskin jacket, my bandage, and because I was so thin. She advised me to drink some Viandox. When I asked her a question about the parrot she said, ‘You can teach him a sentence if you like.’ So I thought about it and ended up saying as clearly as possible, ‘I’m looking for a sea-green Fiat car.’ It didn’t take long to teach it to him. His way of saying it was more concise and efficient: ‘sea-green Fiat’, and his voice was more shrill and imperious than mine.

La Closerie de Passy isn’t there anymore and one night last summer when I was going along Boulevard Delessert in a taxi, it looked as if there was a bank in its place. But parrots live to a very old age. Perhaps this one, after thirty years, is still repeating my phrase in another neighbourhood of Paris and in the commotion of another café, without anyone understanding it or really paying any attention. Nowadays only parrots remain faithful to the past.

*

I used to prolong my dinner at La Closerie de Passy as long as possible. At around ten o’clock the manager and her friends would sit at a table at the back, near the bar and near Pépère’s yellow cage. They would begin playing cards. She even invited me to join them one night. But it was time for me to continue my search. SEA-GREEN FIAT.

I thought that by walking around the streets of the neighbourhood towards midnight, I might be lucky enough to come across the car parked somewhere. Jacqueline Beausergent would surely be home at that time. It seemed more likely that I would eventually find THESEA-GREEN FIAT at night rather than during the day.

The streets were silent, the cold went straight through me. Of course, now and again, I was frightened that a police van doing its rounds would stop alongside me and ask to see my papers. My bloodstained sheepskin jacket and the bandage visible through my split moccasin must have made me look like a prowler. And I was still a few months shy of twenty-one. But, luckily, on those particular nights no police van stopped to drive me to the nearest police station or to the large, dingy buildings of the juvenile police department on the banks of the Seine.

I started at Square de l’Alboni. No sea-green Fiat among the cars parked there, on either side of the road. I was convinced that she could never find a spot out the front of her apartment, that she would drive around for ages in the neighbourhood looking for somewhere to park. No doubt she ended up quite far away. Unless her car was in a garage. There was one near her place, on Boulevard Delessert. I went in one night. There was a man at the back, in a sort of glass-walled office. He saw me from afar. As I pushed the door open, he stood up and I got the feeling that he was on the defensive. At that moment I regretted not wearing a new coat. As soon as I started talking, he relaxed. A car had knocked me over the other night and I was almost certain that the driver lived in the area. I hadn’t heard anything from the driver and I wanted to get in contact. Incidentally, it was a female driver. Yes, Square de l’Alboni. A sea-green Fiat. The woman had some injuries on her face and the Fiat was a bit damaged.

He consulted a large register that was already lying open on his desk. He put his index finger to his lower lip and slowly turned the pages. It was a gesture my father often made while examining mysterious files at the Corona or the Ruc-Univers. ‘You did say a sea-green Fiat?’ He held his index finger in the middle of the page, pointing at something. My heart was pounding. Actually there was a sea-green Fiat, licence plate…He lifted his head and considered me with the solemnity of a doctor in a consultation.

‘The car belongs to a certain Solière,’ he said. ‘I have his address.’

‘Does he live on Square de l’Alboni?’

‘No, not at all.’ He frowned as if thinking twice about giving me his address.

‘You said it was a woman. Are you sure it’s the same car?’ So I took him back through the events of that night: she and I going in the police van with Solière, the Hôtel-Dieu, the Mirabeau Clinic, and Solière again, waiting for me in the foyer when I left the clinic. I didn’t want to tell him about my last encounter with him in the café, when he pretended not to recognise me.

‘He lives at 4 Avenue Albert-de-Mun,’ he said. ‘But he’s not one of our regular clients. It was the first time he’s been here.’ I asked him where Avenue Albert-de-Mun was. Over that way. It runs along Trocadéro Gardens. Near the aquarium? A bit further on. An avenue that runs down towards the quay. The windscreen and one of the headlights had been replaced, but someone had come to collect the car before the repairs were finished. Solière himself? He couldn’t tell me, he was away that day. He would ask his business partner. From time to time he glanced at my split moccasin and bandage. ‘You’ve pressed charges, haven’t you?’ His tone was reprimanding but almost affectionate, like the pharmacist’s the other day. Against whom? The only charges I could press were against myself. Up until then my life had been chaotic. The accident was going to bring an end to all the years of confusion and uncertainty. It was time.

‘And is there any sign of a Madame Solière?’ I asked. ‘Or a Jacqueline Beausergent? Not in the register, in any case. A blonde woman, with injuries on her face? You’ve never seen her around the neighbourhood?’

He shrugged his shoulders. ‘I’m always in the office, you know. Apart from when I go home, to Vanves. Are you sure she was driving?’

I was sure. That night, we’d sat next to each other for a long time on the sofa in the hotel lobby, before the man named Solière had walked towards us and we’d got in the police van. I could go and check at the hotel on Place des Pyramides. There must have been a witness. But I didn’t need a witness. All I needed was to find this woman to clear things up with her, that was all.

‘Go and see at Avenue-Albert-de-Mun,’ he said. ‘If they happen to bring the Fiat back, I’ll let you know. Where can I reach you?’ I gave him the address of the Hôtel Fremiet. After all, he didn’t mean me any harm.

It was around midnight and I walked to the Trocadéro Gardens. Solière. I repeated the name…I had kept an old address book of my father’s, which should be in the navy-blue cardboard box. I would check under the letter S.

I walked along the pathway to the aquarium. Yes, Avenue Albert-de-Mun ran down towards the Seine and along the Trocadéro Gardens. Number 4 was one of two apartment buildings before the quay. It stood on the corner of a small street and there was a terrace on the top floor. No light at any of the windows. The building looked abandoned. From time to time a car went past on the quay. I walked up to the glass doorway, but I didn’t dare go in. Any concierge, seeing me dressed as I was, and at that hour, would be sure to call the police. Was there a concierge? And what floor did this Solière live on? I remained standing on the pavement, next to the gardens, without taking my eyes off the façade. It was in there, on one of the floors, that I was to learn something important about my life. It seemed to me that one afternoon in my childhood, after leaving the aquarium, I had walked down this road, alongside the gardens. Four Avenue Albert-de-Mun. Still, I would check in my father’s old notebook to see if the address appeared on any of the pages, preceded by a name, Solière or another name. Perhaps the village of Fossombronne-la-Forêt was mentioned. Sooner or later, I would find out what connected the two places. I must have made numerous journeys between Fossombronne-la-Forêt and Paris in the sea-green Fiat or in another older car that this Jacqueline Beausergent drove. The longer I contemplated the white façade, the more I felt that I had seen it before — a fleeting sensation like the fragments of a dream that slip away as you wake up, or light from the moon. In my room at Porte d’Orléans, I would never have imagined that this neighbourhood and the Avenue Albert-de-Mun would become a magnetic zone for me. Up until then, I lived on the fringes, in the suburbs of life, waiting for something. Even now in my dreams, I find myself back in these neighbourhoods where I’m lost among all the tall apartment buildings on the outskirts of Paris. I search in vain for my old room, the one from before the accident.

I walked down to the quay. No sea-green Fiat there either. I walked around the apartment block. Perhaps she was away. And how would I find Solière’s phone number? Considering his demeanour in the café the other day, he didn’t seem the type you’d find in the phone book.

*

The pharmacist on Rue Raynouard was kind enough to change my dressings a few times. He disinfected the cut with Mercurochrome and advised me not to walk so much and to find a more appropriate shoe than the split moccasin for my left foot. Each time I went, I promised to follow his advice. But I knew very well that I wouldn’t change my shoes until I found the sea-green Fiat.

I tried to walk less than the previous days and I spent long afternoons in the Hôtel Fremiet. I thought about the past and the present. I had made a note of the names of the people living at 4 Avenue Albert-de-Mun who were in the phone book.

Boscher (J.): PASSY 13 51

Trocadéro Finance and Real Estate Co: PASSY 48 00

Destombe (J.): PASSY 03 97

Dupont (A.): PASSY 24 35

Goodwin (Mme C.): PASSY 41 48

Grunberg (A.): PASSY 05 00

McLachlan (G. V.): PASSY 04 38

No Solière. I called each of the numbers and asked to speak to a Monsieur Solière or a Mademoiselle Jacqueline Beausergent, but neither of the names seemed to ring a bell for any of the people I spoke to. There was no answer from the Trocadéro Finance and Real Estate Company. So perhaps that was the right number.

My father’s address book was there in the navy-blue cardboard box. He’d forgotten it on the table at a café one night and I’d slipped it into my pocket. He never mentioned it during our subsequent meetings. Losing it was evidently not a problem for him, or perhaps he couldn’t imagine that I would take it. During the few months before he disappeared into the fog around Montrouge I don’t think any of those names were of much use to him any longer. No Solière under the letter S. And no mention of Fossombronne-la-Forêt among the addresses.

Some nights, I wondered if this search was meaningless and I questioned why I had embarked upon it. Was it naïve of me? Very early on, perhaps even before adolescence, I had the feeling that I came from nothing. I remembered a rainy afternoon in the Latin Quarter, a fellow with a jawline beard in a grey trench coat was handing out leaflets. It was a questionnaire for a study about young people. The questions seemed strange to me: What family structure did you grow up in? I answered: none. Do you have a strong image of your mother and father? I answered: nebulous. Do you think you are a good son (or daughter)? I answered: I have never been a son. In the studies you have undertaken, have you endeavoured to keep your parents’ respect and to conform to your social group? No studies. No parents. No social group. Would you prefer to be part of the revolution or contemplate a beautiful landscape? Contemplate a beautiful landscape. Which do you prefer? The depth of torment or the lightness of happiness? The lightness of happiness. Do you want to change your life or rediscover a lost harmony? Rediscover a lost harmony. These two words were the stuff of dreams, but what could a lost harmony really consist of? In the room at the Hôtel Fremiet, I asked myself if I wasn’t trying to discover, despite the obscurity of my origins and the chaos of my childhood, a fixed point, something reassuring, a landscape even, that would help me to regain my footing. There was perhaps a whole section of my life that I didn’t know about, a solid foundation beneath the shifting sands. And I was relying on the sea-green Fiat and its driver to help me discover it.

*

I was having trouble sleeping. I was tempted to go and ask the pharmacist for one of the midnight-blue vials of ether I knew so well. But I stopped myself in time. It wasn’t the moment to give in. I had to remain as lucid as possible. During those sleepless nights, what I regretted most was having left all my books in my room on Rue de la Voie-Verte. There weren’t many bookshops in the area. I walked towards l’Étoile to find one. I bought some detective novels and an old secondhand book, the title of which intrigued me: The Wonders of the Heavens. To my great surprise, I couldn’t bring myself to read detective novels anymore. But hardly had I opened The Wonders of the Heavens, which bore on its first page the words ‘Night reading’, than I realised just how much this book was going to mean to me. Nebula. The Milky Way. The Sidereal World. The Northern Constellations. The Zodiac, Distant Universes…As I read through the chapters, I no longer even knew why I was lying on that bed in that hotel room. I had forgotten where I was, which country, which city, and none of it mattered anymore. No drug, not ether or morphine or opium, could have given me that sense of calm, which gradually engulfed me. All I had to do was turn the pages. This ‘night reading’ should have been recommended to me a long time ago. It would have spared me much pointless suffering and many restless nights. The Milky Way. The Sidereal World. Finally, the horizon stretched out infinitely before me and I felt utterly content looking at stars from afar and trying to make out all the variable, temporary, extinguished or faded stars. I was nothing in this infinity, but I could finally breathe.

Was it the influence of my reading? When I walked around the neighbourhood at night, I continued to feel a sense of fulfilment. All my anxiety was gone. I had been freed from some kind of suffocating restraint. My leg didn’t hurt anymore. The bandage had come undone and was dangling from my shoe. The wound was healing. The neighbourhood took on an aspect that was different from when I first arrived. For a few nights the sky was so clear that I could see more stars than ever before. Or perhaps I hadn’t noticed them until then. But now I had read The Wonders of the Heavens.

My walks often led to the Trocadéro esplanade. At least one could breathe the ocean air there. This zone now seemed to be crisscrossed by large avenues that one could reach from the Seine via gardens, sequences of stairways and walkways that looked like country paths. The light from the streetlamps was more and more dazzling. I was surprised that there were no cars parked along the kerb. Every avenue was deserted, and it would be easy for me to spot the sea-green Fiat from a distance. Perhaps parking in the area had been prohibited for the past few nights. They had decided that from then on the neighbourhood would be what they called a ‘blue zone’. And I was the only pedestrian. Had a curfew been brought in which forbade people from going out after eleven o’clock at night? But I didn’t care: it was as if I had a special pass in the pocket of my sheepskin jacket, which exempted me from police checks.

One night, a dog followed me from Pont de l’Alma to the Trocadéro esplanade. It was the same black colouring and the same breed as the one that had been hit by a car in my childhood. I walked up the avenue on the right-hand side. At first, the dog stayed about ten metres behind me and then gradually it came closer. By the time we reached the railings of the Galliera Gardens, we were walking side by side. I don’t know where I’d read — perhaps in a footnote in The Wonders of the Heavens—that at certain hours of the night, you can slip into a parallel world: an empty apartment where the light wasn’t switched off, even a small dead-end street. It’s where you find objects lost long ago: a lucky charm, a letter, an umbrella, a key, and cats, dogs and horses that were lost over the course of your life. I thought that dog was the one from Rue du Docteur-Kurzenne.

It wore a red leather collar with a metal tag and, when I bent down, I saw a phone number engraved on it. With a collar, you’d think twice about taking it to the pound. As for me, I still kept an old, out-of-date passport in the inside pocket of my sheepskin jacket. I had fudged the date of birth to make myself older, and so it looked like I was twenty-one. For the past few nights, however, I no longer feared police checks. Reading The Wonders of the Heavens had lifted my spirits. From then on, I considered things from high above.

The dog walked in front of me. At first, it looked around to check that I was following, and then it walked at a steady pace, certain I would follow. I walked at the same slow pace as the dog. Nothing interrupted the silence. Grass seemed to be growing in between the cobblestones. Time had ceased. It must have been what Bouvière called the ‘eternal return’. The façades of buildings, the trees, the glimmer of the streetlamps took on an intensity that I had never seen in them before.

The dog hesitated for a moment when I turned onto the Trocadéro esplanade. It seemed to want to continue straight ahead. It ended up following me. I paused for a while to look at the gardens below, the big pool where the water appeared phosphorescent and, beyond the Seine, the apartment buildings along the quays and around the Champ-de-Mars.

I thought of my father. I imagined him over there, in a room somewhere, or in a café, just before closing time, sitting alone under the neon lights, looking through his files. Perhaps there was still a chance I would find him. After all, time had been abolished, given that this dog had emerged from the depths of the past, from Rue du Docteur-Kurzenne. I watched the dog move away from me, as though it would soon have to leave me or it might miss another engagement. I followed. It walked alongside the façade of the Musée de l’Homme and started down Rue Vineuse. I’d never been down this road. If the dog was leading me there, it wasn’t by chance. I had the feeling of both arriving at my destination and returning to familiar ground. But there was no light from the windows and I walked along in half-darkness. I moved closer to the dog so I wouldn’t lose sight of it. Silence surrounded us. I could hear the sound of my footsteps. The road turned almost at a right angle and I thought it would come out near La Closerie de Passy where, at that hour, the parrot in its cage would be repeating, Sea-green Fiat, sea-green Fiat, for no reason, while the manager and her friends played cards. After the angle in the road, an unlit sign. A restaurant or, rather, a bar, closed. It was Sunday. What an odd place for a bar: the pale wooden shopfront and sign would have been better suited to the Champs-Élysées or Pigalle.

I stopped for a moment and tried to decipher the sign above the entrance: Vol de Nuit. Then I looked ahead for the dog. I couldn’t see it. I hurried to catch up. But there was no trace of it. I ran and came out at the crossroads on Boulevard Delessert. The streetlamps were so bright they made me squint. No dog to be seen, not on the pavement that ran downhill, not on the other side of the boulevard, not opposite me near the little metro station and the steps that led down to the Seine. The light was white, the brightness of the northern lights: the black dog would have been visible from a distance. But it had disappeared. I felt a sensation of emptiness with which I was familiar and which I had forgotten for a few days, thanks to the calming effect of reading The Wonders of the Heavens. I regretted not having made a note of the phone number on the dog’s collar.

*

I slept badly that night. I dreamed of the dog that had sprung out of the past only to disappear again. In the morning, I was in good spirits and I was sure that neither the dog nor I were in danger of anything anymore. No car could ever knock us over again.

It was not quite seven o’clock. One of the cafés on the quay was open, the one where I had come across Solière. On that occasion, my father’s old address book was stuffed into the pocket of my sheepskin jacket. I always kept something in my pockets: the copy of The Wonders of the Heavens or the Michelin map of Loir-et-Cher.

I sat at a table close to the bay window. Over on the other side of the bridge, metro carriages disappeared one after the other. I leafed through the address book. The names were in inks of different colours — blue, black, purple. The names in purple seemed to be the oldest and in more careful handwriting. A few of them had been crossed out. I noticed rather a lot of names, which, to my surprise, had addresses in the neighbourhood I was in at that moment. I kept the notebook and here is the transcription:

Yvan Schaposchnikoff, 1 Avenue Paul-Doumer

KLÉBER 73 46

Guy de Voisins, 23 Rue Raynouard JASMIN 33 18

Nick de Morgoli, 14 Square de l’Alboni

TROCADÉRO 65 81

Toddie Werner, 28 Rue Scheffer PASSY 90 90

Mary Tchernycheff, 30 Quai de Passy JASMIN 64 76

And again, 30 Quai de Passy: Alexis Moutafolo,

AUTEUIL 70 66

In the afternoon, out of curiosity, I went to some of these addresses. Again, the same pale façades with bay windows and large terraces, like 4 Avenue Albert-de-Mun. I assume these apartments were said to have ‘modern comforts’ and certain features: heated flooring, marble tiles instead of parquet, sliding doors, giving the impression of being on a stationary cruise ship in the middle of the ocean. And the void behind the luxury all too visible. I knew that since his childhood, my father had often lived in this type of building, and that he didn’t pay the rent. In winter, in the empty rooms, the electricity would be cut off. He was one of those transients who were forever changing their identity, never settling anywhere, never leaving a trace. Yes, the type of person whose existence one would have trouble proving later on. It was useless to collect precise details: phone numbers, letters of the alphabet marking different stairwells in courtyards. That’s why I felt discouraged the other night on Avenue Albert-de-Mun. If I went through the porte-cochère, it wouldn’t lead anywhere. It was this, rather than the fear of being arrested for prowling, that held me back. I was conducting a search around streets where everything was an optical illusion. My task seemed as vain as that of a surveyor trying to draw up a plan in an empty space. But I said to myself: is it really beyond me to track down this Jacqueline Beausergent?