So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood

~ ~ ~

IN HIS STUDY, HE DECIDED TO RECONNECT THE TELEPHONE and the answering machine in case Chantal Grippay should try to get in touch with him. But no doubt Ottolini, back from the casino at Charbonnières, was not letting her out of his sight. She would have to collect the black dress with swallows. It was hanging there, on the back of the sofa, like those objects that don’t want to leave you and follow you around all your life. Rather like that blue Volkswagen in his youth that he had had to get rid of after a few years. Yet, every time he moved home, he found it parked outside his building — and that had gone on for a long time. The car remained faithful to him and followed him wherever he went. But he had lost the keys. And then, one day, it had disappeared, perhaps into one of those automobile scrap-yards, beyond Porte d’Italie, on the site where they had begun staking out the Autoroute du Sud.

He wished he could have found “Return to Saint-Leu-la-Forêt”, the first chapter of his first book, but his search would have been pointless. That night, as he was admiring the attractive leaves in the courtyard of the building next door, he realised that he had torn up that chapter. He was certain of it.

He had also discarded a second chapter: “Place Blanche”, written immediately after “Return to Saint-Leu-la-Forêt”. And so he had started all over again from the beginning with the painful sense that he was correcting a false start. And yet the only memories he retained of this first novel were the two chapters he had discarded that had served as underpinning for everything else, or rather the scaffolding you remove, once the book is finished.

He had written the twenty pages of “Place Blanche” in a room at 11 rue Coustou, a former hotel. He was living in lower Montmartre again, fifteen years after discovering it because of Annie. In fact, they had ended up there, when they had left Saint-Leu-la-Forêt. And that is why he thought he could write a book more easily if he returned to the places he had known with her.

They must have changed in appearance since that time, but he was barely aware of the fact. Forty years later, in the twenty-first century, in a taxi one afternoon, he happened to be passing through the neighbourhood. The car had stopped in a traffic jam at the corner of boulevard de Clichy and rue Coustou. For a few minutes, he had not recognised anything, as though he had been struck with amnesia and was merely a stranger in his own city. But for him this was of no importance. The fronts of the buildings and the crossroads had, over the course of years, become an inner landscape that had eventually come to cover over the sleek and well-stuffed Paris of the present day. Over there, on the right, he thought he could see the garage sign in rue Coustou and he would gladly have asked the taxi driver to drop him there so that, after forty years, he could revisit his old room.

In those days, on the floor above his, they were starting the building works that would transform the old hotel bedrooms into studio flats. In order to write his book without hearing the sounds of hammering on the walls, he took shelter in a café on rue Puget that formed the corner with rue Coustou and was overlooked from his bedroom window.

In the afternoons, there were no customers in this establishment known as the Aero, a bar rather than a café, to judge by its pale wood panelling, its ornamental ceiling, its equally pale wooden frontage, with a window protected by a sort of moucharaby. A man of about forty, with dark hair, used to stand behind the bar, reading a newspaper. During the course of the afternoon, he would sometimes disappear up a small staircase. The first time, Daragane had called to him so that he could pay his bill, but to no avail. And afterwards, he grew accustomed to his absences and left him a five-franc note on the table.

He had to wait for a few days before the man spoke to him. Up until then, he ignored him deliberately. Every time Daragane ordered a coffee, the man appeared not to hear him, and Daragane was astonished when he eventually switched on the percolator. He came and placed the coffee cup on the table without even glancing at him. And Daragane sat down at the back of the room as if he himself wished to go unnoticed.

One afternoon when he had managed to correct a page of his manuscript, he heard a solemn voice:

“So, are you doing your accounts?”

He looked up. Over there, behind the bar, the man was smiling at him.

“You come at the wrong time. . In the afternoons it’s deserted here.”

He walked over to his table, still with the same quizzical smile:

“May I?”

He pulled out the chair and sat down in front of him. “What exactly are you writing?”

Daragane hesitated before replying.

“A detective story.”

The other man nodded and gave him a searching stare.

“I live at the building on the corner, but there are refurbishments going on and there’s too much noise to be able to work.”

“The former Hotel Puget? Opposite the garage?”

“Yes,” said Daragane. “And you, have you been here long?”

He would often change the subject in order to avoid talking about himself. His method was to reply to one question with another one.

“I’ve always been in the neighbourhood. Before that, I ran a hotel, a little further down, on rue Laferrière. .”

This word, Laferrière, made his heart thump. When he had left Saint-Leu-la-Forêt with Annie to come to this neighbourhood, they both lived in a room on rue Laferrière. She would be away, from time to time, and she gave him a duplicate key. “If you go for a walk, don’t get lost.” On a sheet of paper folded in four that he kept in his pocket, she had written: “6 rue Laferrière” in her big handwriting.

“I knew a woman who used to live there,” said Daragane in an expressionless voice. “Annie Astrand.”

The man looked at him in surprise.

“Then you really must have been very young. That’s about twenty or so years ago.”

“I’d say more like fifteen.”

“I mainly knew her brother Pierre. It was he who lived in rue Laferrière. He ran the garage next door. . but I haven’t heard anything of him for a long time.”

“Do you remember her?”

“Slightly. . She was very young when she left the neighbourhood. According to what Pierre had told me, she was protected by a woman who ran a nightclub in rue de Ponthieu. .”

Daragane wondered whether he was not confusing Annie with someone else. And yet a girlfriend of hers, Colette, often came to Saint-Leu-la-Forêt and, one day, they had driven her back to Paris by car, to a street near the Champs-Élysées gardens where the postage stamp market used to take place. Rue de Ponthieu? The two women had gone into a building together. And he had waited for Annie on the back seat of the car.

“You don’t know what became of her?”

The man looked at him somewhat suspiciously.

“No. Why? Was she really a friend of yours?”

“I knew her in my childhood.”

“Well, that changes everything. . It’s all in the past now. .”

He had begun to smile again and he leant over towards Daragane.

“A longtime ago, Pierre told me that she had had some problems and that she had been in prison.”

He had used the same words that Perrin de Lara had, the evening of the previous month when he had come across him sitting alone on the terrace of a café. “She had been in prison.” The tone of each of the two men was different: a slightly disdainful, distant manner, in the case of Perrin de Lara, as though Daragane had obliged him to talk about someone who was not from his world; a kind of familiarity in the case of the other, since he knew “her brother Pierre” and because “being in prison” appeared to be fairly commonplace to him. Was it on account of certain customers of his who came, he had explained to Daragane, “after eleven o’clock at night”?

He thought that Annie would have given him some explanations if she was still alive. Later on, when his book had been published and he had been fortunate enough to see her again, he had not asked her a single question about this matter. She would not have replied. Neither had he mentioned the room in rue Laferrière, nor the sheet of paper folded in four on which she had written their address. He had lost that sheet of paper. And even if he had been able to keep hold of it for fifteen years and had shown it to her, she would have said: “But, Jean dear, that’s not at all like my handwriting.”

The man at the Aero did not know why she had been in prison. “Her brother Pierre” had not given him any details about it. But Daragane remembered that the day before they left Saint-Leu-la-Forêt she seemed nervous. She had even forgotten to come to collect him from school at half-past four, and he had returned to the house on his own. That had not really bothered him. It was easy, all you had to do was continue straight along the road. Annie was on the phone in the drawing room. She had given him a wave and had gone on talking on the phone. In the evening, she had taken him to her bedroom, and he watched her filling a suitcase with clothing. He was frightened that she might leave him alone in the house. But she had told him that tomorrow they would both be going to Paris.

In the night, he had heard voices in Annie’s bedroom. He had recognised that of Roger Vincent. A little later on, the noise from the engine of the American car grew fainter and eventually subsided. He was frightened of hearing her car starting up. And then he fell asleep.

One late afternoon when he was leaving the Aero after having written two pages of his book — the building works in the former hotel stopped at about six o’clock in the evening — he wondered whether the walks he had been on fifteen years ago while Annie was away had taken him as far as this. There could not have been very many of these walks and they must have been shorter than he remembered. Had Annie really allowed a child to wander around alone in this neighbourhood? The address written in her handwriting on the sheet of paper folded in four — a detail that he could not have invented — was certainly proof of this.

He recalled having walked along a road at the end of which he could see the Moulin-Rouge. He had not dared go further than the central reservation of the boulevard for fear of getting lost. As a matter of fact, it would only have required a few steps for him to find himself at the spot where he was now. And the thought of this gave him a strange sensation, as though time was irrelevant. It happened fifteen years ago, he was walking on his own, very near here, in the July sunshine, and now it was December. Every time he left the Aero, it was already dark. But suddenly, for him, the seasons and the years merged together. He decided to walk as far as rue Laferrière — the same route he used to take in the past — straight on, keep straight on. The streets were on a slope and, as he walked further down, he felt certain that he was going backwards in time. The darkness would grow brighter at the bottom of rue Fontaine, it would be daylight and there would be that July sunshine. Annie had not merely written the address on the sheet of paper folded in four, but the words: SO YOU DON’T GET LOST IN THE NEIGHBOURHOOD, in her large handwriting, an old-fashioned handwriting that was no longer taught at the school in Saint-Leu-la-Forêt.

The slope on rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette was as steep as the previous street. You just had to let yourself glide along. A little further down. On the left. Only once had they gone back together to their room when it was dark. It was the day before they set off by train. She had her hand on his head or on his neck, a protective gesture to assure herself that he really was walking beside her. They were returning from the Hôtel Terrass beyond the bridge that overlooks the cemetery. They had gone into this hotel, and he had recognised Roger Vincent, in an armchair, at the back of the foyer. They sat down with him. Annie and Roger Vincent were talking to one another. They forgot he was there. He listened to them without understanding what they were saying. They were speaking too quietly. At one moment, Roger Vincent repeated the same thing: Annie must “take the train” and she must “leave her car in the garage”. She disagreed, but she had eventually said to him: “Yes, you’re right, it’s more sensible.” Roger Vincent had turned to him and had smiled. “Here, this is for you.” And he had handed him a navy-blue folder and told him to open it. “Your passport.” He had recognised himself on the photograph, one of those they had had taken in the Photomaton booth where, on each occasion, the extreme brightness of the light had made him blink. He could read his first name and his date of birth on the opening page, but the surname was not his, it was Annie’s: ASTRAND. Roger Vincent had told him in a solemn voice that he must use the same name as the “person accompanying him”, and this explanation had been enough for him.

On the way back, Annie and he walked along the central reservation of the boulevard. After the Moulin-Rouge, they had taken a small street, on the left, at the end of which stood the front of a garage. They had passed through a workshop that smelt of darkness and petrol. At the very back was a glass-panelled room. A young man was standing behind a desk, the same young man who sometimes came to Saint-Leu-la-Forêt and had taken him to the Cirque Médrano one afternoon. They spoke about Annie’s car, which could be seen, over there, parked alongside the wall.

He had left the garage with her, it was dark and he had wanted to read the words on the neon sign: “Grand Garage de la Place Blanche”, the same words that he read again, fifteen years later, leaning out of the window of his bedroom at 11 rue Coustou. When he had switched off the light and was trying to get to sleep, reflections in the shape of trellis work were projected onto the wall, opposite his bed. He went to bed early, because of the building works that started up again at about seven o’clock in the morning. It was difficult for him to write after a bad night. In his drowsiness, he could hear Annie’s voice, more and more distant, and all he could understand was the end of a sentence: “. . SO YOU DON’T GET LOST IN THE NEIGHBOURHOOD. .” On waking up, in this bedroom, he realised that it had taken him fifteen years to cross the street.

On that afternoon last year, 4 December 2012—he had jotted down the date in his notebook — there was a long traffic jam and he asked the taxi driver to turn right into rue Coustou. He was mistaken when he thought he could see the garage sign from a distance, for the garage had vanished. And so too, on the same pavement, had the black wooden exterior of the Néant. On both sides, the façades of the buildings looked new, as though they were covered with a glaze or a thin layer of some colourless cellophane that had erased the cracks and stains of the past. And behind, at the very back, they must have resorted to taxidermy in order to create the empty space. On rue Puget, the woodwork and the window of the Aero had been replaced by a white wall, that kind of neutral blank whiteness that is the colour of oblivion. For over forty years, he, too, had drawn a blank over the period when he wrote that first book and over the summer when he walked on his own with the sheet of paper folded in four in his pocket: SO YOU DON’T GET LOST IN THE NEIGHBOURHOOD.

That night, on leaving the garage, Annie and he were unlikely to have changed pavements. They would certainly have walked past the Néant.

Fifteen years later, the Néant still existed. He had never felt he wanted to go inside. He was too frightened of toppling into a black hole. What is more, it seemed to him that nobody crossed its threshold. He had asked the owner of the Aero what kind of show they put on—“I believe that it’s there that Pierre’s sister made her debut at the age of sixteen. Apparently, the customers all sit in the darkness, with acrobats, circus riders and striptease artists who wear skull and crossbones.” That night, had Annie cast a brief glance at the entrance of the establishment where she had made her “debut”?

As they crossed the boulevard, she had held his hand. For the first time, he was seeing Paris at night. They did not walk down rue Fontaine, that street he was accustomed to taking when he walked about on his own in the daytime. She led him along the central reservation. Fifteen years later, he was walking along the same central reservation, in winter, behind the fairground stalls that had been put up for Christmas and he could not take his eyes off those brightly lit neon signs that called out to him and the increasingly faint Morse code signals. It was as though they were gleaming for the last time and still belonged to the summer when he had found himself in the neighbourhood with Annie. How long had they been there? For months, for years, like those dreams that have seemed so long to you and which you realise, on waking up suddenly, have only lasted a few seconds?

As far as rue Laferrière he could feel her hand on his neck. He was still a child who might escape and get run over. At the foot of the stairs, she had put her index finger to her lips to let him know that they must go upstairs in silence.

That night, he had woken up on several occasions. He was sleeping on a couch in the same bedroom as Annie, and she was in the double bed. Their two suitcases were lying at the foot of the bed, Annie’s leather case and his smaller one, made of tin. She had got up in the middle of the night and she had left the bedroom. He could hear her talking in the room next door to someone who must have been her brother, the man from the garage. He had eventually fallen asleep. Very early the following morning, she had stroked his forehead as she woke him up and they had had breakfast together, with her brother. The three of them were sitting round a table, and she was rummaging in her handbag because she feared she might have lost the blue folder that Roger Vincent had brought to the foyer of the hotel the previous day, his “passport”, in the name of “Jean Astrand”. But no, it was there in her handbag. Later on, at the time of the rue Coustou room, he would ask himself when he had lost this fake passport. Probably in his early adolescence, at the time he had been sent home from his first boarding school.

Annie’s brother had driven them by car to the gare de Lyon. It was difficult to walk on the pavement outside the station and in the great hall, because of the masses of people. Annie’s brother was carrying the suitcases. Annie said that it was the first day of the summer holidays. She was waiting at a counter to get the train tickets, while he stayed with Annie’s brother, who had put down the suitcases. You had to be careful that people did not jostle you and that the porters’ trolleys did not roll over your feet. They were late, they had run to the platform, she was gripping him very hard by the wrist so that he did not get lost in the crowd, and her brother was following them with the suitcases. They had climbed onto one of the first carriages, Annie’s brother behind them. Masses of people in the corridor. Her brother had put down the suitcases at the entrance to the carriage and had kissed Annie. And then, he had smiled at him and whispered in his ear: “Make sure you remember. . Your name is Jean Astrand now. . Astrand.” And he barely had time to get down onto the platform and to wave to them. The train began to pull away. There was one free seat in one of the compartments. “You sit there,” Annie had told him. “I’ll stay in the corridor.” He did not want to leave her, she had dragged him along, holding him by the shoulder. He was frightened she might leave him there, but his seat was next to the door of the compartment, and he could keep an eye on her. Standing in the corridor, she did not move and, from time to time, she turned around to smile at him. She lit a cigarette with her silver lighter, she was pressing her forehead to the window and she would certainly have been admiring the scenery. He kept his head down in order to avoid catching the eye of the other travellers in the compartment. He was frightened that they might ask him questions, as adults often do when they notice a child on his own. He would have liked to stand up so that he could ask Annie whether their two suitcases were still in the same place, at the entrance to the carriage, and whether someone might steal them. She opened the door of the compartment, leant over towards him and said to him in a low voice: “We’ll go to the restaurant car. I’ll be able to sit with you.” It seemed to him as though the travellers in the compartment were looking at both of them. And the images follow one after the other, in fits and starts, like a worn-out film. They are walking down the corridors of the coaches and she is holding him by the neck. He is frightened when they move from one carriage to another above the couplings where the pitching movement is so vigorous that you risk falling over. She grips his arm so that he does not lose his balance. They are sitting opposite one another, at a table in the restaurant car. Luckily, they have the table to themselves, and in any case there is hardly anyone at the other tables. It is a change from all those carriages they have just passed through where the corridors and compartments were packed. She runs her hand over his cheek and tells him that they will stay at their table as long as possible and, should no-one come to disturb them, until the end of the journey. The thing that worries him is their two suitcases, which they have left back there, at the entrance to the other carriage. He wonders whether they may lose them or whether someone may already have stolen them. He must have read a story of this kind in one of the Bibliothèque verte books that Roger Vincent had brought for him one day at Saint-Leu-la-Forêt. And it is probably on account of this that he will be haunted throughout his life by a dream: suitcases that are lost on a train, or else the train leaves with your suitcases and you are left on the platform. If he could remember all his dreams, he would now be counting hundreds and hundreds of lost suitcases.

“Don’t worry, Jean dear,” says Annie, smiling at him. These words reassure him. They are still sitting in the same seats after lunch. No-one else in the restaurant car. The train stops at a large station. He asks her whether they have arrived. Not yet, Annie tells him. She explains to him that it must be six o’clock in the evening and that it is always this time when you arrive in this city. Some years later, he would frequently catch the same train and he would know the name of the city where one arrives at dusk in winter. Lyon. She has taken a pack of cards from her handbag and she wants to teach him how to play patience, but he does not understand it at all.

He has never made such a long journey. No-one has come to disturb them. “They’ve forgotten us,” Annie tells him. And the memories he still has of all this have also been worn away by forgetfulness, apart from a few more distinct images when the film slips and eventually gets stuck on one of them. Annie rummages in her bag and hands him the navy-blue folder — his passport — so that he remembers his new name carefully. In a few days’ time they will cross “the frontier” to go to another country and to a city that is called “Rome”. “Remember this name carefully: Rome. And I swear to you that they won’t be able to find us in Rome. I’ve got friends there.” He does not really understand what she is saying, but because she bursts out laughing, he starts to laugh as well. She plays patience again and he watches her laying the cards in rows on the table. The train stops once more at a large station, and he asks her whether they have arrived. No. She has given him the pack of cards, and he enjoys sorting them out according to their colours. Spades. Diamonds. Clubs. Hearts. She tells him that it is time to go and find the suitcases. They go back along the corridors of the coaches in the opposite direction, and she holds him sometimes by the neck, sometimes by the arm. The corridors and the compartments are empty. She says that all the passengers have got off before them. A ghost train. They find their suitcases in the same place at the entrance to the coach. It is dark and they are on the deserted platform of a very small station. They go down a lane that runs alongside the railway track. She stops in front of a door hollowed out of a surrounding wall and she takes a key from her handbag. They walk down a path in the dark. A large white house with lights on in the windows. They go into a room that is very brightly lit and has black and white tiling. In his memory, however, he confuses this house with the one in Saint-Leu-la-Forêt, probably because of the short time he spent there with Annie. The bedroom he slept in down there, for instance, seems to him to be identical to the one in Saint-Leu-la-Forêt.

Twenty years later, he happened to be on the Côte d’Azur and he had thought he recognised the little station and the lane they had walked down between the railway track and the walls of the houses. Èze-sur-Mer. He had even questioned a man with grey hair who ran a restaurant on the beach. “That must be the old Villa Embiricos on Cap Estel. .” He had jotted down the name just in case, but when the man added, “A Monsieur Vincent had bought it during the war. Afterwards it was impounded. Now, they’ve turned it into a hotel”, he felt afraid. No, he would not return to places for the sake of recognising them. He was too frightened that the grief, buried away until then, might unfurl through the years like a Bickford fuse.

They never go to the beach. In the afternoons, they stay in the garden, from where you can see the sea. She found a car in the garage of the house, a car that was bigger than the one at Saint-Leu-la-Forêt. In the evenings, she takes him to have dinner in the restaurant. They take the Corniche road. It is in this car, she tells him, that they will cross “the frontier” and drive as far as “Rome”. On the last day, she would often leave the garden to make telephone calls and she seemed anxious. They are sitting opposite one another beneath a veranda, and he is watching her playing patience. She leans over and she frowns. She appears to be thinking a great deal before laying down one card after another, but he notices a tear trickling down her cheek, so small that you can hardly see it, as on that day, at Saint-Leu-la-Forêt, when he was sitting in the car beside her. In the night, when she speaks on the telephone in the bedroom next door, he can hear only the sound of her voice and not the words. In the morning, he is woken up by the rays of the sun that peep into his bedroom through the curtains and make orange patches on the wall. To begin with, it is almost nothing, the crunch of tyres on the gravel, the sound of an engine growing fainter, and you need a little more time to realise that there is no-one left in the house apart from you.