Paris Nocturne

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I WONDER IF, on the night when the car knocked me over, I hadn’t just accompanied Hélène Navachine to her train at Gare du Nord. Whole sections of our lives end up slipping into oblivion and, sometimes, tiny little sequences in between as well. And on this strip of old film, spots of mould cause shifts in time and give the impression that two events occurring months apart took place on the same day or even simultaneously. How can any sense of chronology be established as we watch these truncated images scroll past before us, overlapping chaotically in our memories, or following one after the other, sometimes slowly, sometimes jolting, in the middle of blanks. It leaves my mind reeling.

It appears I must have been walking back from Gare du Nord that night. If not, why would I have found myself sitting on a bench so late at night, near Square de la Tour Saint Jacques, in front of the night bus station? A couple was also waiting at the station. The man started speaking to me in an aggressive tone. He wanted me to go with them, him and the woman, to a hotel. The woman said nothing and seemed embarrassed. He took me by the arm and tried to pull me along. He pushed me towards her. ‘She’s nice, isn’t she? And you haven’t seen everything yet.’ I tried to get away from him, but he wouldn’t let me go. Each time, he’d grab me by the arm. The woman smiled contemptuously. He must have been drunk; he thrust his face into mine when he spoke to me. He didn’t smell of alcohol, but of a strange eau de toilette, Aqua di selva. I shoved him away violently with my elbow. He turned to me, open-mouthed, crestfallen.

I started down Rue de la Coutellerie, a small, deserted street that runs at an angle just before the Hôtel de Ville. Over the years since then — and even as recently as today — I have returned to this street to try to understand the uneasiness that it caused me the first time. The feeling of unease is still there. Or rather, the feeling of slipping into a parallel world, outside time. All I have to do is walk along this road to realise that the past is gone for good, without really knowing which present I exist in. It’s a simple through road that cars roar down at night. A forgotten street that no one has ever thought much about. That night, I noticed a red light on the left-hand side. The place was called Les Calanques. I went in. Light came from a paper lantern hanging from the ceiling. Four people were playing cards at one of the tables. A brown-haired man with whiskers stood up and came over to me. ‘For dinner, sir? On the first floor.’ I followed him up the stairs. Here, too, only one table was occupied, also by four people, two women and two men — close to the bay window. He showed me to the first table on the left, at the top of the stairs. The others took no notice of me at all. They were talking quietly, murmurs and occasional laughter. Gifts lay open on the table, as if they were celebrating one of their birthdays or Christmas or New Year’s Eve. On the red tablecloth was the menu. I read: Fish Waterzooi. The names of the other dishes were written in tiny letters that I couldn’t make out under the bright, almost white light. Next to me, there were stifled bursts of laughter.

FISH WATERZOOI. I wondered who the regulars of this place could be. Members of a brotherhood who passed on the address to one another in hushed voices or, as time had no meaning in this street, had these people lost their way and were now gathered around a table for eternity? I no longer knew how I ended up here. I was probably uneasy about Hélène Navachine leaving. And it was a Sunday night, and Sunday nights leave strange memories, like brief interludes of nothingness in our lives. You had to go back to school or to the barracks. You waited on the platform of a station whose name you can’t remember. A little later, you slept badly under the blue night-lights in a dormitory.

And now, there I was at Les Calanques sitting at a table covered with a red tablecloth, and fish waterzooi was on the menu. Over by the window, there were stifled bursts of laughter. One of the two men had put on a black astrakhan hat. His glasses and thin French face contrasted with the Russian or Polish lancer’s hat. A shapka. Yes, it was called a shapka. He leaned over to the blonde woman sitting next to him to kiss her on the shoulder, but she didn’t let him. The others laughed. With the best will in the world I would not have been able to join in their laughter. If I’d gone over to their table, I don’t believe they would have seen me and, if I’d spoken to them, they wouldn’t even have heard the sound of my voice. I tried to hold on to concrete details. Les Calanques, 4 Rue de la Coutellerie. Perhaps my uneasiness came from the topographical position of the street. It led down to the large buildings of the police headquarters on the banks of the Seine. There was no light in any of the windows of those buildings. I stayed sitting at the table, to delay the moment when I’d end up alone again in that area. Even the thought of the lights of Place du Châtelet gave me no comfort. Nor the thought of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois further along the deserted quays. The other man had taken off his shapka and was mopping his brow. No one came to take my order. But I would have been incapable of swallowing a thing. Fish Waterzooi in a restaurant called Les Calanques…There was something unsettling about this combination. I was less and less sure that I could overcome the distress of Sunday nights.

*

Outside, I wondered if I ought to go and wait for the night bus again. But I was overcome with panic at the prospect of going back to my hotel room alone. The Porte d’Orléans neighbourhood suddenly seemed bleak, perhaps because it reminded me of a recent past: the silhouette of my father walking away towards Montrouge as if to meet a firing squad, and of all our missed meetings at the Zeyer, the Rotonde and the Terminus in this hinterland…That was the time of evening I would have most needed Hélène Navachine’s company. I would have found it reassuring to go back to my room with her and we could even have made the journey on foot through the dead Sunday-night streets. We would have laughed harder than the fellow in the shapka and his friends earlier at Les Calanques.

I tried to muster some courage by telling myself that not everything was that gloomy in the Porte d’Orléans neighbourhood. On summer days there, the great bronze lion would sit under the foliage and each time I looked at him from a distance, his presence on the horizon reassured me. He kept watch over the past, but also over the future. That night, the lion would be a landmark for me. I trusted this sentinel.

I quickened my pace as far as Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois. When I reached the arcades of Rue de Rivoli, it was as if I had suddenly been woken up. Les Calanques… The guy in the shapka who tried to kiss the blonde woman… Walking the length of the arcades, I felt as though I had reached open air again. To the left was the Palais du Louvre and, just up ahead, the Tuileries Gardens of my childhood. As I made my way towards Place de la Concorde, I would try to picture what was on the other side of the railings in the darkness: the first ornamental lake, the open-air theatre, the merry-go-round, the second ornamental lake…Just a few more steps and I would breathe in the sea air. Straight ahead. And the lion at the end, seated, keeping watch, in the middle of the crossroad…That night, the city was more mysterious than usual. I had never experienced such a profound silence around me. Not a single car. A moment later, I would cross Place de la Concorde without a thought about green or red lights, just as one would cross a prairie. I was in a dream again, but a more peaceful one than earlier at Les Calanques. The car appeared just as I reached Place des Pyramides and the pain in my leg told me I was about to wake up.