Exchange Place

Blank Who

In Passage des Panoramas Kilpatrick stopped and ordered a coffee at a table outside Gocce di Caffè. The Drop of Coffee. From his briefcase he took out Rue des boutiques obscures, the Patrick Modiano novel he had bought in St Sulpice. Published by Gallimard, 1978. Gallimard also published the complete works of Jean Cocteau, he remembered. He read the blurb on the back cover of Rue des boutiques obscures.

Qui pousse un certain Guy Roland, employé d’une agence de police privée que dirige un baron balte, à partir à la recherche d’un inconnu, disparu depuis longtemps? Le besoin de se retrouver lui-même après des années d’amnesie? Au cours de sa recherche, il receuille des bribes de la vie de cet homme qui était peut-être lui et à qui, de toute façon, il finit par s’identifier: What impels a certain Guy Roland, employee of a private detective agency overseen by a Baltic baron, to leave in search of an unknown man, long since disappeared? The need to find himself again after years of amnesia? In the course of his search, he recollects fragments of the life of this man who is perhaps himself, and who, in any case, he ends up identifying with.

He turned to the beginning of Rue des boutiques obscures and read the opening sentences: Je ne suis rien. Rien qu’une silhouette claire, ce soir-là, à la terrace d’un café. I am nothing. Nothing but a clear silhouette, this evening, on a café terrace. He wondered about his translation for the word claire. It was one of those words that might mean a number of things in English, and ‘clear silhouette’ did not sound like something one would say in English. Clear-cut? Clean? Sharp? Transparent? Limpid? These, too, did not seem quite right. And should silhouette be ‘outline’? Kilpatrick thought he knew what the expression meant in French, he could see the man in question in his mind’s eye, but somehow he could not find the proper English words. It was as if a fog intervened between one language and the other, the person who was thinking in one language lost to the one who thought in the other. His coffee arrived and he put the book away, thinking of himself as the unknown man sitting outside a café in Passage des Panoramas, a blank silhouette. Unknown, certainly, to those who passed him by, tourists, casual strollers, browsers, shoppers, others whose purposeful stride suggested native Parisians, for whom the passage was a short-cut, a matter of daily routine. Perhaps he was known in a manner of speaking to the man who had served him his coffee, for Kilpatrick had taken coffee there before, and the same man had served him then; but then he doubted if the man remembered him from among the hundreds of customers he must have served since then, and though he had nodded to Kilpatrick as he set his coffee on the table — Voilà, un café, monsieur — he did not think it was a nod of recognition. He finished his coffee and continued down Passage des Panoramas.

He stopped at a stamp shop called La Postale, one of several in the arcade, traditionally a philatelists’ haven. French stamps, naturally. As a boy Kilpatrick had collected stamps, specializing in those of Ireland and the British Empire, and only gradually realizing that France had had an empire nearly as extensive as that of Britain. His eye was caught by two stamps on a display card headed 1948, one commemorating Louis Braille, the other Louis Auguste Blanqui, bearing portraits of their subjects. Kilpatrick knew Blanqui from his reading of Walter Benjamin, Blanqui the revolutionary who during one of his many terms of imprisonment had written L’Eternité par les astres, in which he propounded a universe of infinite worlds and endlessly repeated variations, endlessly doubled lives. Kilpatrick had toyed with the idea that Blanqui could be translated as Blank Who. As for Braille, when he thought of Braille he thought of Louis Braille as a boy stumbling in his father’s saddler’s shop, clutching the stitching-awl that an instant later would blind him, and of Braille punching out the raised dots of his writing system with the selfsame awl. Braille sounded like an awl. Une braille.

At that instant he remembered the blind man he would often see crossing his path in Belfast, waving his long white wand from side to side like the antenna of a mine-detector, the cane ticking against street furniture: lamp-posts, bollards, parking signs. Echo-location. Kilpatrick saw himself sitting outside a Belfast café, the blind man inclining his head towards him as he lit a cigarette; he supposed the blind man had heard the rasp of the flint lighter. Kilpatrick had not thought of Belfast since he had come to Paris — what was it, ten days, a fortnight ago? A month? It seemed like another world, the person he had been in Belfast someone else. Kilpatrick saw himself in his mind’s eye as the man in the navy linen suit, the man in the Harris tweed jacket, the man in tan Oxfords or oxblood brogues, the man in the herringbone Crombie coat, the man in the camel coat, the man wearing this hat or that, as if all these men were other men; and he saw the blind man infallibly wearing the same outfit, a grey army-surplus anorak, jeans and white trainers, hatless, always the same man, reliably threading his way through the city with a sure step, as if he knew where he was going better than Kilpatrick knew himself.

Kilpatrick continued on slowly down Passage des Panoramas, blind to Passage des Panoramas. In his mind’s eye he was in North Street Arcade in Belfast. Light poured in from the glass roof. He felt transparent, weightless. He would stop at a record store, a vintage clothing store, an art shop, a café. He would stop for a coffee before emerging into Lower Donegall Street and turning right, crossing the street and walking for some fifty yards before turning left into the archway that led to Exchange Place, where John Bourne had his studio. From the ticket pocket of his Donegal tweed jacket he would take out the old-style latchkey given to him by Bourne, unlock the heavy wooden entrance door and take the three flights of worn wooden stairs to the loft at the top of the building. As he entered Bourne’s room Bourne would nod without turning round and say, Kilpatrick, I know your step. Bourne, Kilpatrick would reply. Bourne would be standing at the easel, a cigarette in one hand and a brush in the other, looking at what he had just painted. The floor of the studio was covered with what looked like debris, the contents of a skip, though Kilpatrick knew that for Bourne it constituted a resource: books, pages torn from books, Xeroxes of images, wrapping paper, swatches of linen and cotton samples, coils of old film stock. It was all grist to Bourne’s mill. Kilpatrick would pick his way through the litter. He would stop and stand and look over Bourne’s shoulder. What do you think? Bourne would say, and before Kilpatrick could reply, Bourne would step over to the butcher’s block he used as a table, lift a boning knife and with two swift movements slash an X into the canvas. I don’t like it, Bourne would say. It’s not me.