Paris Nocturne

~ ~ ~

I REMEMBER THAT night I had taken a break from reading The Wonders of the Heavens, in the middle of a chapter on constellations of the southern hemisphere. I left the hotel without handing in my room key — there was no one at the reception desk. I wanted to buy a packet of cigarettes. The only café-tabac still open was on Place du Trocadéro.

From the quay, I climbed the steps and, after passing the little station, I thought I heard the rasping voice of the parrot from La Closerie repeating: Sea-green Fiat, sea-green Fiat. There was light at the window. They were still playing their card game. I was surprised by how warm the air was for a winter’s night. It had been snowing over the previous few days and there were still patches of snow dotted around the gardens below, in front of the Musée de l’Homme.

While I was buying cigarettes at the bigger café-tabac, a group of tourists sat down at the tables on the terrace. I could hear their peals of laughter. I was surprised that tables had been put outside and for an instant I felt a kind of vertigo. I wondered if I hadn’t perhaps confused the seasons. But no, the trees around the square had indeed lost their leaves and there would still be a long wait before summer came around again. I had been walking around for months and months in so much cold and fog that I no longer knew if the veil would ever be stripped away again. Was it really demanding too much from life to want to lie in the sun, drinking orangeade with a straw?

I remained awhile on the esplanade breathing in the ocean air. I thought about the black dog that had come to accompany me the other night, the dog that had come from so far away, across all these years…How stupid not to have kept the phone number.

I headed along Rue Vineuse, as I had the other night. It was still dark there. Perhaps there had been a power cut. I saw the bar or restaurant with its illuminated sign, but so faint that I could only just make out the dark mass of a car parked just before the turn in the road. When I got to it, my heart skipped a beat. It was the sea-green Fiat. It wasn’t really a surprise; I had never given up hope that I would find it. I’d just had to be patient, that was all, and I felt I had huge reserves of patience within me. Come rain or snow, I was prepared to wait for hours in the street.

The bumper bar and one of the mudguards were damaged. There were probably a lot of sea-green Fiats in Paris, but this one certainly bore the signs of the accident. I took my passport out of the pocket of my sheepskin jacket. It contained the folded piece of paper that Solière had made me sign. Yes, it was the same licence plate number.

I looked in through the window. A travel bag on the back seat. I could have left a note under the windscreen wiper, giving my name and the address of the Hôtel Fremiet. But I wanted to get to the bottom of it there and then. The car was parked right in front of the restaurant. So I pushed the pale wooden door and went in.

Light fell from a wall lamp behind the bar, leaving the few tables arranged along the walls on either side in darkness. And yet, I can see these walls clearly in my memory; they are draped with very worn, red velvet that is ripped and torn here and there, as though, long ago, the place had been quite lavish, but no one went there anymore. Apart from me. At first I thought it was well after closing time. A woman was sitting at the bar wearing a dark brown coat. A young man, the size of a jockey and the look of one, was clearing the tables. He looked askance at me.

‘What can I do for you?’

It would take too long to explain. I walked towards the bar and, instead of sitting on one of the stools, I stopped behind her. I put my hand on her shoulder. She turned around with a start. She stared at me, astonished. There was a large graze across her forehead, just above the eyebrows.

‘Are you Jacqueline Beausergent?’

I was surprised by the detachment in my voice; I even had the impression that someone else had spoken for me. She gazed at me in silence. She lowered her eyes; they lingered on the stain on my sheepskin jacket, then lower down, on my shoe where the bandage was dangling out.

‘We’ve already met at Place des Pyramides…’

My voice seemed even clearer and more detached. I was standing behind her.

‘Yes…Yes…I remember very well. Place des Pyramides.’

Without looking away, she gave a slightly wry smile, the same — it seemed — as the other night, in the police van.

‘Why don’t we sit down…’

She gestured to the table closest to the bar, which was still covered with a white tablecloth. We sat opposite each other. She put her glass down on the tablecloth. I wondered what kind of alcohol it contained.

‘You should drink something,’ she said. ‘Something to warm you up. You’re very pale.’

She said the words with great seriousness and even a kind of solemn affection that no one had ever shown towards me until then. I felt embarrassed.

‘Have a margarita like me.’

The jockey brought me a margarita and then disappeared through a glass door behind the bar.

‘I didn’t know you’d left the clinic,’ she said. ‘I’ve been away from Paris for a few weeks…I’d planned on finding out how you were.’

It seems to me now, after decades, that it was very gloomy in that place where we’d found ourselves sitting face to face. We were in darkness, like in an eye clinic where they hold up lenses of different strengths in front of your eyes so that eventually you can make out the letters, over there on the backlit screen.

‘You should have stayed longer at the clinic…Did you escape?’ She smiled again. Stayed longer? I didn’t understand. The letters were still very blurry on the screen.

‘They told me to leave,’ I said. ‘A Mr Solière came to find me.’

She seemed surprised. She shrugged. ‘He didn’t tell me about it. I think he was afraid of you.’

Afraid of me? I would never have imagined frightening anyone.

‘You struck him as quite strange. He’s not used to people like you.’

She seemed embarrassed. I didn’t venture to ask what it was exactly that constituted my strangeness in the eyes of this Solière.

‘I came to see you two or three times at the clinic. Unfortunately, it was always when you were asleep.’

I hadn’t been told about these visits. Suddenly, a doubt crossed my mind.

‘Did I stay long at the clinic?’

‘About ten days. It was Mr Solière’s idea to have you taken there. They wouldn’t have been able to keep you at the Hôtel-Dieu in the state you were in.’

‘That bad?’

‘They thought you had taken toxic substances.’

She said these last words very carefully. I don’t believe I had ever heard anyone speak to me so calmly, with such a soft voice. Listening to her produced the same soothing effect as reading The Wonders of the Heavens. I couldn’t take my eyes off the large graze across her forehead, just above her eyebrows. Her clear eyes, her shoulder-length chestnut hair, the upturned collar of her coat…Because of the late hour and the darkness around us, she looked just as she had in the police van the other night.

She ran her index finger along the graze above her eyebrows and, again, she gave her wry smile.

‘For a first meeting,’ she said, ‘it was a bit of a shock.’

She stared straight into my eyes in silence, as if she was trying to read my thoughts — I had never before experienced such attentiveness.

‘I thought you purposely chose that moment to cross Place des Pyramides…’

That’s not what I thought. I had always resisted the pull of vertigo. I would never have been capable of throwing myself into the void from the top of a bridge or from a window. Or even under a car, as she seemed to believe. For me, at the last moment, life was always the stronger force.

‘I don’t think you were quite yourself…’

She glanced again at my sheepskin jacket and the split moccasin on my left foot. I had tried my best to reapply the bandage, but I mustn’t have looked very prepossessing. I apologised for my appearance. Yes, I was quite keen to look human again.

She said in a quiet voice, ‘All you have to do is change your sheepskin jacket. And perhaps your shoes, too.’

I felt more and more at ease. I confessed that I had spent the last few weeks trying to find her. It wasn’t easy with a street name but no number. So I had looked all over the neighbourhood for her sea-green Fiat.

‘Sea-green?’

She seemed intrigued by this adjective, but that was how it had been described on the report that Solière made me sign. A report? She wasn’t aware of any report. It was still in the inside pocket of my sheepskin jacket, so I showed it to her. She read it, frowning.

‘I’m not surprised. He’s always been wary.’

‘He also gave me some money.’

‘He’s a generous man,’ she said.

I wanted to know what the link was between her and Solière. ‘Do you live on Square de l’Alboni?’

‘No. It’s the address of one of Monsieur Solière’s offices.’

Whenever she said his name, it was inflected with a certain respect.

‘And Avenue Albert-de-Mun?’ To my great shame, I sounded like a cop who throws in an unexpected question to unnerve a suspect.

‘It’s one of Monsieur Solière’s apartments.’ She wasn’t fazed in the slightest. ‘How do you know about this address?’ she asked.

I told her that I had met Solière the other day in a café and that he had pretended not to recognise me.

‘He’s very distrustful, you know. He always thinks people are after him. He has a lot of lawyers.’

‘He’s your boss?’

I immediately regretted asking the question.

‘I’ve worked for him for two years.’ She answered calmly, as if it were an entirely ordinary question. And it was, surely. Why search for mystery where there is none?

‘That night, I was meeting Monsieur Solière at Place des Pyramides in the lobby of the Hôtel Régina. And then, just as I arrived, we had our…accident.’ She hesitated before saying the word. She looked at my left hand. When the car knocked me down, I grazed the back of it. But it was almost healed. I hadn’t put a dressing on it.

‘Then if I’ve understood correctly, Monsieur Solière arrived at the right moment?’

He had walked towards us slowly that night, in his dark coat. I even wonder if he had a cigarette at the corner of his mouth. And this girl had a meeting with him in the lobby of the hotel…I also had meetings with my father in hotel lobbies, which all looked the same and where the marble, the chandeliers, the wood engravings and the sofas were all fake. It’s the same precarious situation as being in a railway station waiting room between catching two trains, or in a police station before an interrogation.

‘It seems he’s no choirboy,’ I said.

‘Who?’

‘Solière.’

For the first time, she seemed embarrassed.

‘What does he do for a living?’

‘Business.’

She lowered her head as if I might be shocked by this response.

‘And you’re his secretary?’

‘Sort of, I suppose…But only part-time.’

There under the light of the wall lamp, she seemed younger than in the police van. It must have been the fur coat that made her seem older the other night. And besides, after the shock, I didn’t have my wits about me. That night, I thought she was blonde.

‘And the work isn’t too complicated?’

I really wanted to know everything. Time was running out. At that hour, they were perhaps about to close the restaurant.

‘When I came to Paris, I studied nursing,’ she said, and started speaking more and more quickly as if she was in a hurry to explain it all to me. ‘And then I started work… home nursing…I met Monsieur Solière…’

I wasn’t listening anymore. I asked her how old she was. Twenty-six. So she was a few years older than me. But it was unlikely that she was the woman from Fossombronne-la-Forêt. I tried to remember the face of the woman or girl who had climbed into the van and held my hand.

‘During my childhood, I had an accident that was similar to the one the other night. I was leaving school…’

As I told her the story, I spoke more and more quickly, too, the words tumbling out. We were like two people allowed a few minutes together in the visiting room of a prison and who wouldn’t have enough time to tell each other everything.

‘I thought the girl in the van was you.’

She burst out laughing.

‘But that’s impossible. I was twelve years old then.’

An entire episode of my life, the face of someone who must have loved me, a house, all of it tipped into oblivion, into the unknown, forever.

‘A place called Fossombronne-la-Forêt…A Dr Divoire.’ I thought I had said it under my breath, to myself.

‘I know that name,’ she said. ‘It’s in Sologne. I was born around there.’

I took the Michelin map of the Loir-et-Cher from the pocket of my sheepskin jacket, where I had kept it for several days. I unfolded it on the tablecloth. She seemed apprehensive.

‘Where were you born?’ I asked.

‘La Versanne.’

I leaned over the map. The light from the wall lamp wasn’t strong enough for me to make out all the names of the villages in such tiny print.

She craned her neck to look, too. Our foreheads were almost touching.

‘Try to find Blois,’ she said. ‘Slightly to the right you have Chambord. Below there’s the Boulogne forest. And Bracieux…and, to the right, La Versanne.’

It was easy to find my bearings with the forest marked in green. There it was. I’d found La Versanne.

‘Do you think it’s far from Fossombronne?’

‘About twenty kilometres.’

The first time I’d discovered it on the map, I should have underlined the name Fossombronne-la-Forêt in red ink. Now I’d lost it.

‘It’s on the road to Milançay,’ she said.

I looked for the road to Milançay. Now I was managing to read the names of the villages: Fontaines-en-Sologne, Montgiron, Marcheval…

‘If you really want to, I could show you around the area one day,’ she said, staring at me with a perplexed look.

I leaned over the map again.

‘We’d still have to find the route from La Versanne to Fossombronne.’

I buried myself in the map again, tracing departmental roads, heading from village to village at random: Le Plessis, Tréfontaine, Boizardiaire, La Viorne…At the end of a little winding road, I read: FOSSOMBRONNE-LA-FORÊT.

‘And what if we went there tonight?’

She thought about it for a moment, as if my suggestion seemed perfectly natural. ‘Not tonight, I’m too tired.’

I said that I was joking, but I wasn’t sure. I couldn’t tear my eyes from the names of all the hamlets, forests and little lakes. I wanted to merge with the landscape. Already at that time, I was convinced that a man without a landscape was thoroughly diminished. An invalid of sorts. I had become aware of it when I was very young, in Paris, when my dog died and I didn’t know where to bury him. No field. No village. No land of our own. Not even a garden. I folded up the map and stuffed it into my pocket.

‘Do you live with Solière?’

‘Not at all. I just take care of his offices and his apartment when he’s away from Paris. He travels a lot for business.’

It was funny; my father used to travel a lot for business as well and, despite all the meetings he arranged with me in increasingly distant hotel lobbies and cafés, I had never understood what line of business he was in. The same as Solière’s?

‘Do you come to this bar often?’ I asked.

‘No, not often. It’s the only place open late in the area.’

I remarked that there weren’t many customers, but she told me they came much later at night. A strange clientele, she said. And yet, in my memory, the place seems abandoned. It’s as if she and I had broken in that night. There we are opposite each other and I can hear some of that muffled music played after the curfew hour — music which you can dance to and live a few moments of stolen happiness.

‘Don’t you think that after the shock of our first encounter, we should get to know each other better?’

She said this in a soft voice, but with clear, precise enunciation. I had read that in Touraine that they spoke the purest French. But listening to her, I wondered if it wasn’t actually in Sologne, around La Versanne and Fossombronne-la-Forêt. She laid her hand on mine, my left hand where the cut was healing without a dressing.

*

Out in the street, a veil had been stripped away. The bonnet of the car was gleaming in the moonlight. I wondered if it was a mirage or the effect of the alcohol I’d drunk. I tapped on the car near the bonnet to make sure I wasn’t dreaming.

‘One day I’ll have to get all that repaired,’ she said, gesturing to the bumper and the damaged mudguard.

I confessed that it was at a garage that I’d been tipped off about her car.

‘You’ve given yourself a lot of trouble for nothing,’ she said. ‘It’s been parked in front of my place for the last three weeks. I live at 2 Square Léon-Guillot in the fifteenth arrondissement.’

So it turned out that we didn’t live that far from each other. Porte d’Orléans. Porte de Vanves. With a little luck we might have come across each other there, in that hinterland. That would have simplified things. We were both from the same world.

I sat on the bonnet.

‘Well, if you’re going back to the fifteenth, I’d be glad of a lift home…’

But no. She said that she had to sleep at Solière’s apartment that night, on Avenue Albert-de-Mun, and stay there for a while so that it wouldn’t be empty while he was away. Solière had gone to Geneva and Madrid on business.

‘If I understand correctly, you’re employed as a caretaker and night watcher?’

‘Sort of, I suppose.’

She opened the right-hand door for me to get into the car. After all those days and all these nights spent wandering around the neighbourhood, it seemed natural. I was even convinced that I had already lived that moment in a dream.

It was suddenly very cold, a dry cold that added a sharpness and clarity to everything around us: the white light of the streetlamps, the red traffic lights, the new façades of the buildings. In the silence, I thought I heard the steady footsteps of someone approaching.

She squeezed my wrist, just like the other night in the police van.

‘Are you feeling better?’ she asked.

Place du Trocadéro was much more vast and deserted than usual because of the moonlight. Crossing it would take forever, and the slowness felt good. I was sure that, if I looked at the black windows, I would be able to penetrate the darkness of the apartments, as if I could perceive infrared and ultraviolet light. But I didn’t have to go to the trouble. I just had to let myself glide down the hill I had walked up the other night with the dog.

‘I also tried to find you,’ she said, ‘but they didn’t have your address at the clinic…Paris is big…You have to be careful…People like us end up getting lost.’

After the Palais de Chaillot, she turned right and we passed alongside huge buildings, which looked abandoned. I no longer knew which city I was in. It was a city whose inhabitants had just deserted it, but it didn’t matter at all. I was no longer alone in the world. The road became steeper as it ran down to the Seine. I recognised Avenue Albert-de-Mun, the garden around the aquarium and the white façade of the apartment building. She parked in front of the porte-cochère.

‘You should come and see the apartment. It’s on the top floor. There’s a big terrace and a view over the whole of Paris.’

‘And what if Solière comes back unexpectedly?’

Each time I pronounced this phantom’s name, I wanted to laugh. All I had was the memory of a man in a dark coat in the police van, then in the foyer of the clinic, and in the café on the quay. Was it worth finding out more about him? I sensed that he was the same breed as my father and all his cronies I used to see long ago. You’ll never know anything about those people. You’d have to consult police reports written about them, but those reports, written in such precise and clear language, all contradicted each other. What was the point? For some time, so many things had been teeming around in my poor head, and the accident had been such a big deal for me…

‘Don’t worry. There’s no chance of him coming back now. And even if he did, he’s not a nasty man, you know…’

She burst out laughing again.

‘Has he lived here long?’

‘I’m not sure exactly.’

She seemed to be teasing me. I pointed out that he wasn’t in the phone book at the address on Avenue Albert-de-Mun.

‘It’s crazy,’ she said, ‘how much trouble you’ve gone to for all these details. Anyway, Solière isn’t his real name. It’s the name he uses for everyday life.’

‘Do you know his real name?’

‘Morawski.’

The name sounded familiar, but I didn’t know why. Perhaps it was in my father’s address book.

‘Even under the name Morawski, you wouldn’t find anything in the phone book. Do you think it’s all that important?’

She was right. I didn’t really want to look in the phone book anymore.

*

I remember that we walked along the pathways of the garden, around the aquarium. I needed to breathe the open air. Normally, I lived in a kind of controlled asphyxiation — or, rather, I’d got used to taking shallow breaths, as if I had to ration oxygen. Above all, you have to resist the panic that takes hold of you when you’re afraid of suffocating. Continue to take short, even breaths and wait for the straightjacket crushing your lungs to be removed, or for it to gradually crumble of its own accord.

But that night, in the garden, I breathed deeply for the first time in a long time, since Fossombronne-la-Forêt, the period of my life I had forgotten.

We arrived in front of the aquarium. We could hardly make out the building in the half-light. I asked her if she’d ever been inside. Never.

‘Well, I’ll take you one of these days…’

It was a comfort to make plans. She had taken my arm and I imagined all the multicoloured fish, close to us, circling behind the glass in the darkness and silence. My leg was painful and I limped slightly. But she, too, had the graze on her forehead. I wondered towards what future we were headed. I had the impression that we had already walked together in the same place, at the same time of day, in another time. Walking along these pathways, I no longer really knew where I was. We were almost at the top of the hill. Above us, the dark mass of one of the wings of the Palais de Chaillot. Or, rather, a big hotel in a winter sports station in Engadin. I had never breathed such cold, soft air. It penetrated my lungs with velvet freshness. Yes, we must have been in the mountains, at high altitude.

‘You’re not cold?’ she asked. ‘Perhaps we could go back…’

She drew in the upturned collar of her coat. Go back where? I hesitated for a few seconds. But of course, back to the building at the end of the avenue that ran down towards the Seine. I asked if she planned on staying there long. About a month.

‘And Morawski?’

‘Oh, he’ll be away from Paris the whole time.’

Again, the name seemed familiar. Had I heard my father say it? I thought about the fellow who had called me that day from the Hôtel Palym and whose voice was interrupted by the static on the line. Guy Roussotte. We had an office with your father, he had said. Roussotte. Morawski. He, too, had an office apparently. They all had offices.

I asked what it was that she could possibly do for this Morawski who was called Solière in everyday life. ‘I want to know more. I think there’s something you’re hiding from me.’

She remained silent. Then she said abruptly, ‘Not at all, I’ve nothing to hide. Life is far simpler than you think.’

She addressed me with the familiar tu for the first time. She squeezed my arm and we walked alongside the aquarium building. The air was still just as cold and easy to breathe. Before crossing the avenue, I stopped on the edge of the pavement. I contemplated the car in front of the apartment building. When I came here the other night, it had looked abandoned and the avenue deserted, as if no one came this way anymore.

She said again that there was a big terrace and a view overlooking the whole of Paris. The lift climbed slowly. Her hand was resting on my shoulder and she whispered something in my ear. The timer-light went out. There was nothing above us but the glow of a night-light.