After the Circus

~ ~ ~

We had decided to leave the dog in the apartment, intending to come back and get him as soon as we could. But the moment we shut the door, he started barking and whining incessantly, so we had to resign ourselves to taking him with us to the appointment.

It was still light when we arrived at the Bois de Boulogne. We were early, so we stopped in front of the old Château de Madrid. We walked in the clearing lined with umbrella pines up to the Saint-James pond, where I had watched the ice skaters one winter in my childhood. The smell of wet earth and the gathering dark again reminded me of bygone Sunday evenings, so much so that I felt the same muted anxiety as I used to feel at the thought of returning to boarding school the next morning. Of course, the situation was different now; I was walking in the Bois de Boulogne with her and not with my father, or with my pals Charell or Karvé. But something similar was hovering in the air, the same odor, and it was also a Sunday.

“Let’s get going,” she said.

She, too, looked anxious. To steady my nerves, I kept my eyes fixed on the dog running ahead of us. I asked whether we should take the car. She said it wasn’t worth it.

We walked down Rue de la Ferme. Now she had the dog on a leash. We went past the entryway of the Charells’ building, then past the Howlett riding stables, which looked abandoned. The Charells had surely moved away. They belonged to that category of people who never really settle anywhere. Where could Alain Charell have been this evening? Somewhere in Mexico? I heard a distant clacking of horseshoes. I turned around: two riders, visible only in silhouette, had just appeared at the end of the street. Was one of them the man we had to approach in a little while?

Gradually they moved closer to us. There was still time to turn back, take the car, leave it in front of the building on Rue Raffet, vanish with the dog and never be heard from again.

She gave my arm a tight squeeze.

“This won’t take long,” she said.

“You think so?”

“Once we’ve talked to this guy, we leave the café and let them sort out the rest themselves.”

The two riders had turned right, into narrow Rue Saint-James. The clacking of horseshoes faded away.

We had reached the café. Farther on, in the part of Rue de la Ferme nearer the Seine, I noticed Ansart’s car. Someone was sitting on one of the fenders. Jacques de Bavière? I wasn’t sure. Two silhouettes occupied the front seats.

We went in. I was surprised by how fancy the place was: I’d expected just a simple café. A bar and round tables made of mahogany. Armchairs of slightly worn leather. Wood paneling on the walls. In the brick fireplace, they had lit a fire.

We took our seats at the table closest to the door. Around us were a few patrons, but I didn’t recognize our man among them.

The dog had lain down submissively at our feet. We ordered two coffees and I paid the check, so that we could leave as soon as we had delivered our message to the unknown man.

Gisèle pulled Grabley’s cigarettes from the pocket of her raincoat and lit one. She inhaled, clumsily. Her hand was shaking.

I asked:

“Are you afraid?”

“Not at all.”

The door opened and three people walked in, a woman and two men. One of them was definitely the man in the photo: wide forehead, very dark hair, brushed back.

They were having a lively conversation. The woman burst out laughing.

They sat at a table in back, near the fireplace. The man had removed his navy blue overcoat. He was not wearing riding breeches.

Gisèle stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray. She was looking down. Was she trying to avoid the man’s eyes?

He was facing us, over there, at the table in back. The other two, a brunette of about thirty and a blond man with a narrow face and aquiline nose, were in profile.

The woman had a loud voice. The man seemed younger than on the enlarged identity photo.

I stood up, my palms moist.

I moved forward. I was standing next to their table. They stopped talking.

I leaned toward him:

“I have a message for you.”

“A message from whom?”

He had a high-pitched voice, as if strangled, and he seemed annoyed that I should come bother him.

“From Pierre Ansart. He’s waiting for you in the car on the corner.”

I stood stiffly, straining to articulate the syllables as clearly as possible.

“Ansart?”

His face expressed the discomfiture of someone being reprimanded when and where he least expected it.

“He wants to see me right now?”

“Yes.”

He glanced anxiously toward the entrance.

“Excuse me for a moment,” he said to his two companions. “I just have to go say hello to a friend who’s waiting outside.”

The other two gave me a condescending once-over: was it because of my extreme youth and careless attire? It occurred to me that I could be identified later. Had they noticed Gisèle’s presence?

He stood up and slipped on his navy blue overcoat. He turned toward the blond man and said:

“Book a table for tonight … There’ll be eight of us …”

“That’s silly,” the woman said. “We could have dinner at my place …”

“Nonsense … Back in a minute …”

I remained standing firmly in front of them. He said to me:

“So where is this car?”

“I’ll show you.”

I walked ahead of him to the exit. Gisèle was waiting, standing by our table with the dog. He seemed surprised by her presence. I held the door and let the two of them pass.

The car pulled up. They had parked on the corner of Rue de Longchamp. Jacques de Bavière was standing, leaning slightly against the carriage. Ansart got out, leaving the front door open, and waved his arm at us. The street was brightly lit. In the cold, limpid air, the car stood out starkly against the building façades and sections of wall.

The man walked toward them, and we remained in place on the sidewalk. He had forgotten us. He, too, raised his arm, waving at Ansart.

He said:

“This is a surprise …”

He and Ansart chatted in the middle of the street. We could only hear the murmur of their voices. We could have joined them. It would only have taken a few steps. But I sensed that if we went toward them, we would be entering a danger zone. Besides, neither Ansart nor Jacques de Bavière was paying us the slightest attention. Suddenly, they were far away, in another space — I’d say, in another time — and today that scene has frozen forever.

Even the dog, which wasn’t on its leash, stood still, at our sides, as if he, too, could sense an invisible boundary between them and us.

Jacques de Bavière opened one of the rear doors and let the man get in, then sat next to him. Ansart took his seat in front. The one at the wheel hadn’t left the car and I couldn’t make out his face. The doors shut. The car made a U-turn and headed down Rue de la Ferme toward the Seine.

I watched it go until it disappeared around the corner of the quay.

I asked Gisèle:

“Where do you think they’re going?”

“They’re taking him to Rue Raffet …”

“But he told his friends he’d be right back …”

And yet, they hadn’t forced him into the car. It was probably Ansart who had persuaded him to go with them, during their brief conversation in the middle of the street.

“Maybe I should go tell the other two not to wait,” I said.

“No … Let’s not get mixed up in this …”

I was surprised by her categorical tone, and I got the distinct impression she knew more than I did.

“You really think we shouldn’t tell them?”

“No, of course not … They won’t trust us … and they’ll ask questions …”

I pictured myself standing next to their table, explaining that their friend had left in a car. And the questions would rain down like blows, increasingly numerous and insistent:

You’re sure you saw him leave? Who with?

Who gave you this message?

Where do these people live?

Who are you, anyway?

And I, unable to flee the avalanche of their questions, my legs leaden as in a nightmare.

“We shouldn’t stay here,” I said to her.

They could have come out at any moment to look for their friend. We took Rue de la Ferme toward the Bois. As we passed by the Charells’ old building, I wondered what Alain would have thought of all this.

I felt uneasy. A man had taken his leave of two people, saying he’d be “back in a minute.” Instead, he had been made to get in a car that had headed off toward the Seine. We were, she and I, witnesses but also accessories to this disappearance. It had all happened in a street in Neuilly, near the Bois de Boulogne, a neighborhood that reminded me of other Sundays … I used to walk in the alleys of the Bois with my father and one of his friends, a very tall, thin man, who had retained, from a time of former prosperity, only a fur coat and a blazer, which he wore according to the season. At the time, I had noticed how threadbare his clothes were. We would walk him home in the evening, to his hotel in Neuilly that looked like a boardinghouse. His room, he said, was small but adequate.

“What are you thinking about?”

She had taken my arm. We skirted the clearing with the umbrella pines. Had we bisected it, we would have arrived faster at the place where the car was parked. But it was too dark and only Boulevard Richard-Wallace was lit.

I was thinking about that man’s outline, his smile and well-preserved face. But after a while, you noticed that he had become one with the threadbare blazer and fur coat, and that his spirit was broken. Who was he? What had become of him? He had certainly disappeared, just like that other man, a little while ago.

She started the car and we drove toward the Jardin d’Acclimatation. I looked at the lights in the apartment windows.

She had stopped at a red light on Avenue de Madrid. She was frowning. She seemed to be feeling the same unease as I was.

The building façades paraded by. It was a shame we didn’t know anyone there. We could have knocked at one of those quiet apartments. We would have been invited in to dinner, along with distinguished and reassuring company. I remembered what the man had said:

“Book a table for tonight … There’ll be eight of us …”

Had they made the reservation anyway, after vainly waiting for his return? In that case, the seven guests had gathered and were still waiting for the eighth to show. But the chair would remain empty.

A restaurant open on Sunday evening … We used to go to one, my father, his friend, and I, near Place de l’Etoile. We would go early, around seven-thirty. The diners would start arriving when we had finished eating. One Sunday evening, a group of very elegant people came in and, even at age eleven, I had been dazzled by the beauty and vivaciousness of the women. The gaze of one of them suddenly fell on my father’s friend. He was wearing his threadbare blazer. She appeared stunned to see him there, but after a moment her face regained its smooth composure. She went to join her dinner companions at a table far from ours.

He, on the other hand, had grown very pale. He leaned toward my father and said something that has been etched in my memory:

“Gaëlle just went by … I recognized her immediately … But I’ve changed so much since the war …”

We had reached the Porte Maillot. She turned to me.

“Where do you feel like going?”

“I have no idea …”

We both felt disoriented, helpless. Should we go to Ansart’s to find out what had happened? But it wasn’t really our business. I would have preferred never to see those people again and to get out of Paris right away.

“Now’s when we should leave for Rome,” I said to her.

“Sure, but we don’t have enough money.”

I had on me the seven thousand five hundred francs that Dell’Aversano had given me, plus the four thousand from Ansart. It was more than enough. I didn’t dare ask how much money she had.

I repeated that I’d been promised a steady job in Rome and that we wouldn’t have any problems. I ended up persuading her.

“We’ll have to bring the dog,” she said.

“Of course …”

After a moment’s reflection, she added:

“The easiest way would be to go in this car. Even if we don’t ask them, they could hardly file a complaint …”

She laughed, a nervous laugh. Indeed, they wouldn’t file a complaint because this evening we had become their accomplices and they were dependent on our silence. The thought sent a chill up my spine. I was the one who had said, “I have a message for you from Pierre Ansart. He’s waiting for you in the car on the corner.” And in front of two witnesses. And I’d taken money for it.

I must have had a strange expression on my face, because she put her arm around my shoulder and I felt her lips brush my cheek.

“Don’t you worry about a thing,” she murmured in my ear.

“Shall we go see Grabley …? At around nine, he’ll be at the Tomate …”

There was something homey and reassuring about the sound of the word “Tomate.”

“If you want …”

Naturally, I wasn’t expecting any moral support from Grabley. He had something in common with my father: they both wore suits, ties, and shoes like everyone else. They spoke unaccented French, smoked cigarettes, drank espresso, and ate oysters. But when in their company, you were seized by doubt and you felt like touching them, the way you rub cloth between your fingers, to make sure they really existed.

“Do you think he can do anything for us?” she asked.

“Who knows?”

It was too early to go meet him. We still had two hours to kill. On the left, just nearby, on the avenue, I noticed the lit façade of the Maillot Palace cinema, and I suggested we go see the film they were showing: Cattle Queen of Montana. The usherette didn’t say a word about the dog.

Once we’d settled into the red velvet seats, my uneasiness dissipated.

Rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette was dark and the sidewalks deserted. At that hour, people were finishing their dinner and going to bed early. Tomorrow would be another day of school and work. Up above, the Tomate’s neon sign shone to no purpose in a dead street. Who would be there to watch the Sunday night show? A sailor on shore leave, before heading back to the Gare Saint-Lazare to catch the Cherbourg train?

The usherette pointed the way backstage. The dressing rooms were in the basement. We went down a flight of stairs leading to a small lounge, its walls decorated with old posters from the place.

Grabley was standing by one of the dressing room doors, wearing a glen plaid suit and a suede tie. He looked worried.

“What a nice surprise … It was good of you to come …”

But he confided to us that Sylvette was in a very bad mood. She was in her dressing room, changing. We’d made the right choice coming when we did, as there would be no ten-thirty performance. He suggested we go find our seats. I answered that we were happier staying there with him. Besides, they wouldn’t let us in the auditorium with the dog.

“Too bad for you.”

He was visibly offended by our lack of enthusiasm for the show.

The dressing room door opened and Sylvette appeared. She was wearing a black domino and leopard-skin basque. She greeted us curtly. Then, turning to Grabley, she told him he was under no obligation to hang around the wings waiting for her. She was mortified enough being in this show, but having someone hovering around her all the time, even in her dressing room, only made it worse … The discussion got heated. Yes, any man with half a brain would have understood it was humiliating for a dancer to demean herself like this, but she had to make a living, and it wasn’t like anybody was going to help her. Then she chided him for bringing us here. She hadn’t entirely turned into a circus animal or some beast you go visit in the zoo on Sundays. Grabley lowered his eyes. She ditched us there and headed to the staircase, which she started to climb in her high heels, and the swaying of her hips immediately reminded me of something. Of course! The naked girl with her hair tied back in a ponytail, in one of the magazines in the office — that was she.

Grabley gazed after her until she was gone. The first bars of a Mexican tune blared out from trumpets. No doubt she had just gone onstage.

“She can be so hard,” he said, “so hard …”

Gisèle and I exchanged a look and could barely keep from laughing. Fortunately, he wasn’t paying us any attention. He was staring at the top of the stairs, looking numb, as if she had left for good.

After a while, we weren’t sure whether we should stay or not. And I didn’t feel like laughing anymore. Was it because of the yellow light in the lounge, the old posters on the walls indicating that this had once been a proper cabaret, the Mexican trumpets, this man dressed in his glen plaid suit and suede tie who had just been snapped at? A diffuse melancholy floated over us.

Once more, I thought of my father. I imagined him in the same situation, wearing his navy blue coat and waiting at the dressing room door in a place very much like this: some “Kit Cat” or “Carrousel” in Geneva or Lausanne. I remembered the last Christmas we spent together. I was fifteen. He had come to collect me in a boarding school in the Haute-Savoie where they couldn’t keep me over the holidays.

A woman was waiting for him in Geneva, twenty years younger than he, an Italian with straw-blond hair, and the three of us took the plane for Rome. From that trip, there remains a photograph that I rediscovered thirty years later, at the bottom of a trunk full of papers. It has captured forever the image of a New Year’s Eve celebration in a nightclub near the Via Veneto, where the Italian woman had dragged us after making a scene with my father: you could hear the shouting in the hotel corridor.

We are sitting before a champagne bucket. Several couples are dancing behind us. Around the table, a man with dark hair, slicked back; his face wears an expression of forced gaiety. Next to him, a woman of about thirty, lots of foundation, very frizzy straw-blond hair tied in a bun. And a teenager with a rented tux that is too big for him and a blank look on his face, like all children who find themselves in bad company because they don’t have any say and can’t yet live their lives. If I wanted to return to Rome, it was to erase that past.

“Want to go?” Gisèle asked me.

The dog was getting restless. He had climbed the stairs, then, realizing we weren’t following, had come back down and settled at the foot of the staircase.

Grabley suddenly emerged from his dejection:

“You aren’t leaving, are you? Sylvette will be so disappointed … And she’ll give me an even harder time …”

But I felt no pity for him. He reminded me of my father, the woman’s straw-blond hair, and that New Year’s Eve. These days I was free to come and go as I pleased.

“We can’t stay, old man,” I said. “I have to take Gisèle home to Saint-Leu-la-Forêt.”

“You really don’t want to have a late supper with us?”

He was wearing the same anxious expression as my father had had on that sidewalk on the Via Veneto. In front of us, a group of revelers were tooting little party horns. The woman with the straw-blond hair seemed to be sulking. Suddenly she started walking quickly, then running, as if she wanted to lose us. My father said to me:

“Quick … Catch her … be nice to her … Tell her how much we love her … that we need her … Give her this …”

And he slipped me a small box wrapped in silver paper.

I had run. I was too young at the time. And now I felt a kind of sadness mixed with indifference for that still recent past. None of it mattered anymore. Not my father, not Grabley, not that fellow they had taken away in the car earlier. They could all go to hell.

On the sidewalk, I felt lighter, removed from everything. I wished she could have shared my state of mind. I put my arm around her shoulder and we walked to the car.

The dog went ahead of us. I suggested we leave for Rome right away. But she had left her money in one of the suitcases.

All we had to do was stop by Quai de Conti and stash the suitcases in the trunk of the car.

“Up to you,” she said.

She had become carefree again, like me.

But a thought brought me back to reality. I was underage and I had to get hold of an authorization form to travel abroad, at the bottom of which I’d forge my father’s signature. I didn’t dare tell her.

“Actually, we can’t leave this evening,” I said. “First that Italian has to give me all the information.”

The theater on Rue Fontaine was closed. A few scattered lights toward the top of the building. After following the neighborhood streets haphazardly, we stopped in front of a restaurant, the Gavarny.

We had dinner there. At first, I was afraid Grabley and Sylvette might show up, but I told myself they preferred noisier places. I recognized the man in the white jacket who served us, from the rare times I used to eat there with my mother, on Sunday evenings after her performance.

When we walked in, he was sitting at a table doing a crossword puzzle. I wondered if the music was coming from a speaker at the back of the room or from a radio: music with the lunar sound of a hammered dulcimer.

The dog stretched out at my feet. I petted him to reassure myself he was really there. I was sitting across from her. I didn’t take my eyes off her. I ran my hand over her face. Once again, I felt a stab of fear that she would vanish.

As of that evening, we had cut all our ties. Nothing around us was real anymore. Not Grabley, not my father lost in Switzerland, not my mother, somewhere in the south of Spain, not those people I had met and about whom I knew nothing: Ansart, Jacques de Bavière … The restaurant dining room was also stripped of any reality, like one of those places you frequented long ago and revisit in a dream.

After leaving the Gavarny, my mother and I used to take the number 67 bus at Place Pigalle, which dropped us off at the Quai du Louvre. Just three years since then, and already it was another lifetime … Only the man in the white jacket remained at his post. I would have liked to talk to him, but what could he have told me?

“Pinch me so I know I’m not dreaming …”

She pinched my cheek.

“Harder.”

She burst out laughing. And her laugh echoed in the empty dining room. I asked if she, too, felt as if she were in a dream.

“Yes, sometimes.”

The man in the white jacket had plunged back in to his crossword puzzle. There wouldn’t be any more customers tonight.

She had taken my hand and was looking at me with her pale blue eyes, smiling.

She raised her hand and pinched my cheek, even harder than the other times.

“Wake up …”

The man stood up from his chair and went to turn on the radio behind the bar. A musical theme, then the voice of an announcer reading a news bulletin. I could make out only the timbre of the voice, like background noise.

“So, are you awake?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “I’d rather keep it vague.”

On Sunday evenings, in the boarding school dormitory after our return from holidays, the proctor would turn out the lights at a quarter to nine and it would take a while for sleep to come. I would wake with a start during the night, not knowing where I was. The night-light bathing the rows of bunks in a bluish glow yanked me back to reality. And since that time, whenever I’ve dreamed, I’ve tried to hold off the moment of waking for fear of finding myself back in that dormitory. I tried to explain this to her.

“Me too,” she said, “that often happens to me … I’m afraid of waking up in jail …”

I asked her why in jail? But she seemed embarrassed, and finally answered:

“That’s just how it is …”

Outside, I paused. Going back to the Quai de Conti just seemed too tedious. I would have preferred for us to be in a place that didn’t trigger any past associations. But she said none of that mattered, as long as we were together.

We drive down Rue Blanche. Once more, I feel like I’m in a dream. And in this dream, I experience a sensation of euphoria. The car glides along without my hearing the sound of the engine, as if it were coasting down the slope in idle.

On Avenue de l’Opéra, the lights and empty street open before us. She turns toward me:

“We can leave tomorrow, if you like.”

For the first time in my life, I feel as if the obstacles and constraints holding me back have been removed. Perhaps this is just an illusion that will evaporate tomorrow morning. I lower the window and the cold air heightens my euphoria. Not the slightest fog, the slightest halo around the streetlamps sparkling down the avenue.

We cross the Pont du Carrousel and, in my memory, we follow the quay against traffic, ignoring the one-way signs; we pass by the Pont des Arts, driving slowly, with no cars coming in the opposite direction.

Grabley isn’t there yet. We cross through the foyer and the apartment detaches itself from the past. I enter it for the first time. It’s she who guides me. Ahead of me she climbs the small staircase leading to the fifth floor. In the bedroom, we don’t put on the light.

The lamps along the quay project a beam of light on the ceiling as bright as the kind that, in summer, filters through the slats of the venetian blinds. She is stretched out on the bed, in her black skirt and pullover.