So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood

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IT WAS IN AUTUMN, ON ALL SAINTS’ DAY. IT WAS sunny, that afternoon. For the first time in his life, the words “All Saints” did not instil in him a feeling of sadness. At place Blanche, he had taken the métro. Two changes were required. At Étoile and Trocadéro. On Sundays and public holidays, the trains took a long time coming, and he thought to himself that he would have been unable to have seen Annie Astrand again except on a public holiday. He counted the years: fifteen, since the afternoon she had taken him to the Photomaton shop. He remembered a morning, at the gare de Lyon. They had both boarded the train, a crowded train on the first day of the summer holidays.

While waiting for the train at Trocadéro station, he had a sudden doubt: she might not be in Paris that day. After fifteen years, he would no longer recognise her.

There were railings at the end of the street. Behind them were the trees in the Ranelagh gardens. Not a single car the entire length of the pavement. The silence. Hard to imagine anyone living here. Number 18 was at the very end, on the right, before the railings and the trees. A white building, or rather a large house with two storeys. At the entrance door, an intercom. And a name, alongside the single button of this intercom: VINCENT.

The building seemed to him to be deserted, like the street. He pressed the button. From the intercom, he heard a crackling sound, which could have been the rustle of the wind in the trees. He leant forward and, enunciating the syllables clearly, he said twice: “JEAN DARAGANE”. A woman’s voice, partly muffled by the noise of the wind, replied: “First floor.”

The glazed door opened slowly and he found himself in a white entrance hall lit by a wall lamp. He did not take the lift and went up by the right-angled staircase. When he reached the landing, she was standing at the half-open door, her face partly hidden. Then she drew back the door and stared at him as though she had difficulty recognising him.

“Come in, Jean dear. .”

A timid, but slightly husky voice, just as it had been fifteen years ago. The face had not altered either, nor had the expression. Her hair was not as short. It reached down to her shoulders. How old was she now? Thirty-six? In the hallway, she was still looking at him with curiosity. He tried to think of something to say to her:

“I didn’t know whether I should press the button that said ‘Vincent’. .”

“My name is Vincent now. . I’ve even changed my first name, would you believe. . Agnès Vincent. .”

She showed him into the adjoining room, which was probably used as a drawing room, although the only furniture consisted of a sofa and, next to it, a floor lamp. A large bay window through which he could see trees that had not lost their leaves. It was still light. Glimmers of sunshine on the wooden floor and on the walls.

“Sit down, Jean dear. .”

She sat down at the other end of the sofa, as if to observe him better.

“Do you remember Roger Vincent, perhaps?”

Scarcely had she uttered this name than he did in fact remember an American car, a convertible, parked outside the house at Saint-Leu-la-Forêt, and in the driver’s seat sat a man, whom he had assumed, at first, was also American on account of his height and a slight accent when he spoke.

“I got married a few years ago to Roger Vincent. .”

She looked at him and she had an embarrassed smile on her face. So that he should forgive her for this marriage?

“He’s in Paris less and less. . I think he’d be glad to see you again. . I phoned him the other day and I told him that you had written a book. .”

One afternoon, at Saint-Leu-la-Forêt, Roger Vincent had come to collect him outside school in his convertible American car. It glided so quietly along rue de l’Ermitage that you could not hear the sound of the engine.

“I haven’t read your book to the end yet. . I stumbled on the passage about the Photomaton shop straight away. . I never read novels, you know. .”

She seemed to be apologising, as she had done just now when she had informed him about her marriage to Roger Vincent. But no, there was no point in her reading the book “to the end” now that they were sitting on the sofa together.

“You must have wondered how I was able to get your address. . I met someone who drove you home last year. .” She frowned and seemed to be searching for a name. But Daragane himself came up with:

“Guy Torstel?”

“Yes. . Guy Torstel. .”

Why do people whose existence you are unaware of, whom you meet once and will never see again, come to play, behind the scenes, an important role in your life? Thanks to this individual, he had found Annie again. He would have liked to thank this Torstel.

“I’d completely forgotten this man. . He must live in the neighbourhood. . He accosted me in the street. . He told me that he had come to the house at Saint-Leu-la-Forêt fifteen years ago. .”

It was probably this meeting with Torstel at the racecourse last autumn that had jogged his memory of her. Torstel had talked about the house at Saint-Leu-la-Forêt. When Torstel had said: “I can’t remember what this place on the outskirts of Paris was”, and also: “The child, it was you, I imagine”, he, Daragane, had not wished to answer. He had not thought about Annie Astrand, or about Saint-Leu-la-Forêt for a long time. However, this encounter had suddenly revived memories that, without his being fully aware of them, he was careful not to awaken. And now, he had done so. They were very tenacious, these memories. That very evening he began to write his book.

“He told me that he had met you at a racecourse. .”

She smiled as though it were a joke.

“I hope you’re not a gambler.”

“No, not at all.”

He, a gambler? He had never understood why all these people in casinos spent so long standing around tables, silent and motionless, looking as though they were more dead than alive. And every time Paul had talked to him about doubling up on his losses, he found it difficult to maintain his concentration.

“With gamblers, things always end up very badly, Jean dear.”

Perhaps she knew a great deal about the subject. She frequently used to return very late to the house at Saint-Leu-la-Forêt, and he, Daragane, had sometimes found he could not get to sleep until she returned. What a comfort to hear the sound of her car’s tyres on the gravel and the engine which you knew was about to be switched off. And her footsteps along the corridor. . What did she do in Paris until two in the morning? Perhaps she gambled. After all these years, and now that he was no longer a child, he would have liked to put the question to her.

“I didn’t really understand what this Monsieur Torstel does. . I believe he’s an antique dealer at the Palais-Royal. .”

It was clear she did not know what to say to him. He would have liked to make her feel at ease. She probably felt as he did, as though there were a shadowy presence between them, which neither of them was able to speak about.

“So, you’re a writer now?”

She was smiling at him, and this smile struck him as ironical. A writer. Why not confess to her that he had written Le Noir de l’été in the style of a missing person advertisement? With a bit of luck, the book would attract her attention, and she would get in touch with him. That is what he had thought. Nothing more.

The daylight was fading, but she did not switch on the standard lamp beside her.

“I should have got in touch with you before now, but I had rather a turbulent life. .”

She had just used the perfect tense, as though her life were over.

“It didn’t surprise me that you should have become a writer. When you were little, at Saint-Leu-la-Forêt, you read a lot. .”

Daragane would have preferred her to talk about her own life, but she seemed not to want to do so. She was sitting on the sofa, in profile. An image that had retained great clarity, in spite of all these lost years, came back to him. One afternoon, Annie, in the same position, head and shoulders to the right, in profile, seated at the wheel of her car and he, a child, beside her. The car was parked outside the gate of the house, at Saint-Leu-la-Forêt. He had noticed a tear, barely visible, slipping down her right cheek. She had made a sudden movement with her elbow to wipe it away. Then she started up the engine, as though nothing were the matter.

“Last year,” said Daragane, “I met someone else who knew you. . in the Saint-Leu-la Forêt days. .”

She turned towards him and cast him an anxious look.

“Who?”

“A Jacques Perrin de Lara.”

“No, I can’t think who. . I met so many people in the Saint-Leu-la-Forêt days. .”

“And Bob Bugnand, does that mean anything to you?”

“No, nothing at all.”

She had drawn closer to him and was stroking his forehead. “What’s going on inside that head of yours, Jean dear? Do you want to cross-question me?”

She looked him full in the eyes. No threat in this gaze. Just a slight anxiety. She stroked his forehead again.

“You know. . I’ve got a bad memory. .”

He recalled Perrin de Lara’s words: “The only thing I can tell you is that she had been in prison.” If he were to repeat this to her, she would show huge surprise. She would shrug and she would reply to him, “He must be confusing me with someone else”, or else, “And you believed him, Jean dear?” And perhaps she would be genuine. In the end, we forget the details of our lives that embarrass us or are too painful. We just lie back and allow ourselves to float along calmly over the deep waters, with our eyes closed. No, it is not always a matter of deliberate forgetfulness, a doctor whom he had engaged in conversation had explained to him, in the café below the blocks of flats in square du Graisivaudan. This man had also inscribed a little book to him that he had written for Presses universitaires de France, L’Oubli.

“Do you want me to explain why I took you to have passport photos made?”

Daragane felt she was not embarking on this subject willingly. But dusk was closing in and, in this drawing room, the dim light could make revelations easier.

“It’s very simple. . In the absence of your parents, I wanted to take you with me to Italy. . but for that, you needed a passport. .”

In the yellow cardboard suitcase that he had humped around from room to room for some years, which contained exercise books, certificates, postcards sent to him when he was a child and the books that he was reading at that time—Arbre, mon ami, Le Cargo du mystère, Le Cheval sans tête, Les Mille et Une Nuits—there might be an old passport in his name, with the photograph, one of those navy-blue passports. But he never opened the suitcase. It was locked, and he had lost the key. Like the passport, no doubt.

“And then, I wasn’t able to take you to Italy. . I had to stay in France. . We spent a few days on the Côte d’Azur. . And afterwards, you went back home. .”

His father had come to collect him from an empty house, and they had caught the train back to Paris. What exactly had she meant by “home”? However much he racked his memory, he had not the slightest recollection of what in present-day language is known as “a home of one’s own”. The train had arrived, very early in the morning at the gare de Lyon. And after that, long, endless years of boarding school.

“When I read the passage in your book, I searched among my papers and I found the passport photos. .”

Daragane would have to wait for over forty years to learn another detail of this affair: the passport photos of an “unidentified child” that had been confiscated during a search at the customs post at Ventimiglia. “All I know about this woman,” Perrin de Lara had said to him, “is that she had been in prison.” In that case, the passport photographs and other things removed during the search when she was released from prison had certainly been returned to her. But sitting beside her there, on this sofa, Daragane did not yet know these details. We discover, often too late to talk to them about it, an episode from their life that a loved one has concealed from you. Has he really hidden it from you? He has forgotten, or more likely, over time, he no longer thinks about it. Or, quite simply, he can’t find the words.

“It’s a pity we weren’t able to go to Italy,” said Daragane with a big smile.

He sensed that she wanted to tell him something in confidence. But she shook her head gently, as though she were dismissing bad thoughts — or bad memories.

“So, you live in square du Graisivaudan?”

“Not really anymore. I found a room to let in another neighbourhood.”

The owner was not in Paris and so he had kept the key to the square du Graisivaudan room. So, he did go there illegally sometimes. The prospect of taking refuge in two different places put his mind at ease.

“Yes, a room near place Blanche. .”

“At Blanche?”

This word seemed to conjure up a terrain that was familiar to her.

“Will you take me to your room one day?”

It was almost dark, and she switched on the standard lamp. They were both sitting in the middle of a halo of light, and the drawing room remained in the shade.

“I knew the place Blanche area well. . Do you remember my brother Pierre? He had a garage over there.”

A young man with dark hair. At Saint-Leu-la-Forêt, he sometimes slept in the small bedroom, on the left, at the end of the corridor, the one with the window that gave onto the courtyard and the well. Daragane remembered his sheepskin jacket and his car, a Renault 4. One Sunday, this brother of Annie’s — after all this time, he had forgotten his first name — had taken him to the Cirque Médrano. Afterwards, they had driven back in the Renault 4 to Saint-Leu-la-Forêt.

“I haven’t seen Pierre since I’ve been living here. .”

“Strange sort of place,” said Daragane.

And he looked around at the bay window — a large black screen behind which the leaves of the trees could no longer be seen.

“We’re in the back of beyond here, Jean dear. Don’t you think?”

He had been surprised earlier by the silence of the street and by the railings that created a dead end to the road. When night fell, you could imagine the building being on the edge of a forest.

“It’s Roger Vincent who’s rented this house since the war. . It had been impounded. . It belonged to people who must have left France. . With Roger Vincent, you know, things are always a bit complicated. .”

She called him “Roger Vincent”, and never simply “Roger”. Daragane, too, as a child, used to greet him with a “Good morning, Roger Vincent”.

“I’m not going to be able to stay here. . They’re going to let the house to an embassy, or knock it down. . At night, sometimes, I’m frightened of finding myself all alone here. . The ground floor and the second floor are unoccupied. . And Roger Vincent is hardly ever there.”

She preferred to talk to him about the present, and Daragane understood this very well. He wondered whether this woman was the same person whom he had known, as a child, at Saint-Leu-la-Forêt. And as for himself, who was he? Forty years later, when the enlargement of the passport photograph would fall into his hands, he would no longer even know whether that child was himself.

Later on, she had wanted to take him to have dinner, close to where she lived, and they had ended up in a brasserie on Chaussée de la Muette. They were sitting, opposite one another, at the very back of the restaurant.

“I remember that we sometimes used to go together to the restaurant, at Saint-Leu-la-Forêt,” Daragane said to her.

“Are you sure?”

“The restaurant was called Chalet de l’Ermitage.”

This name had struck him as a child because it was the same as that of the street.

She shrugged.

“I’m amazed. . I would never have taken a child to a restaurant. .”

She had said this in a stern voice that surprised Daragane.

“Did you stay much longer in the house at Saint-Leu-la-Forêt?”

“No. . Roger Vincent sold it. . That house belonged to Roger Vincent, you know.”

He had always believed that it was Annie Astrand’s house. At the time, these two names seemed to him to be linked: Anniastrand.

“I spent about a year there, didn’t I?”

He had asked the question that was on the tip of his tongue, as though he were afraid it might not be answered.

“Yes. . one year. . I’m not sure. . your mother wanted you to have some country air. . I had the impression that she was trying to get rid of you. .”

“How did you come to know her?”

“Oh. . through friends. . I used to meet so many people in those days. .”

Daragane realised that she was not going to tell him much about that time at Saint-Leu-la-Forêt. He would have to be satisfied with his own memories, memories that were sparse and few and which he was no longer even sure were accurate, since she had just told him that she would never have taken a child to a restaurant.

“Forgive me, Jean dear. . I hardly ever think of the past. .” She paused for a moment, and then:

“I had some difficulties at the time. . I don’t know whether you remember Colette?”

This name awoke a very vague recollection in him, as elusive as a reflection that flickers all too briefly on a wall.

“Colette. . Colette Laurent. . There was a portrait of her in my bedroom, at Saint-Leu-la-Forêt. . she used to pose for artists. . She was a friend from teenage days. .”

He clearly remembered the painting between the two windows. A girl with her elbows on a table, her chin in the palm of her hand.

“She was murdered in a hotel in Paris. . no-one ever knew who by. . She often used to come to Saint-Leu-la-Forêt. .”

When Annie returned from Paris, at about two o’clock in the morning, he had heard shrieks of laughter in the corridor on several occasions. That meant she was not alone. Then the bedroom door was closed and mutterings would reach him through the partitions. One morning, they had given this Colette Laurent a lift to Paris in Annie’s car. She was sitting in the front, beside Annie, and he was alone on the back seat. They had walked with her in the Champs-Élysées gardens, where the postage stamp market was situated. They had stopped at one of the stalls, and Colette Laurent had given him a pack of stamps, a series of different colours bearing the image of the king of Egypt. From that day on, he had begun to collect stamps. The album in which he arranged them gradually in rows behind strips of transparent paper, this album may have been put away in the cardboard suitcase. He had not opened that suitcase for ten years. He could not part with it, but he was nevertheless relieved to have lost the key.

On another day, they had gone, with Colette Laurent, to a village on the other side of Montmorency forest. Annie had parked her car outside a sort of small château, and she had explained to him that this was the boarding school where she and Colette Laurent had met. They had visited the boarding school with him, shown round by the headmistress. The classrooms and the dormitories were deserted.

“So, you don’t remember Colette?”

“Yes. . of course,” said Daragane. “You knew each other at boarding school.”

She looked at him in surprise.

“How did you know?”

“One afternoon, you took me to visit your old boarding school.”

“Are you sure? I have no memory of it.”

“It was on the other side of Montmorency forest.”

“I never took you there with Colette. .”

He did not want to contradict her. He might find explanations in the book that the doctor had inscribed to him, that little book with white covers about forgetfulness.

They were walking along the footpath, next to the Ranelagh gardens. Because of the night, the trees and the presence of Annie, who had taken his arm, Daragane had the impression that he was walking with her, as he used to do, in the Montmorency forest. She stopped the car at a crossroads in the forest, and they walked as far as the Fossombrone pond. He remembered some of the names: the Chêne aux Mouches crossroads. The La Pointe crossroads. One of these names made him feel frightened: the Prince de Condé’s cross. At the little school at which Annie had enrolled him and from which she often came to collect him at half-past four, the teacher had talked about this prince whom they had discovered hanged in his bedroom at the château of Saint-Leu without anyone ever knowing the precise circumstances of his death. She called him “the last of the Condés”.

“What are you thinking about, Jean dear?”

She was leaning her head on his shoulder, and Daragane wanted to tell her that he was thinking about “the last of the Condés”, about school and about walks in the forest. But he was afraid she might reply: “No. . You’re wrong. . I haven’t any memory of it.” He, too, during these past fifteen years, had eventually forgotten everything.

“You must invite me to your room. . I should like to go back to the place Blanche neighbourhood with you.”

Perhaps she remembered that they had spent a few days in this neighbourhood before leaving by train for the south of France. But, there again, he did not dare put the question to her.

“You would find the room too small. .” said Daragane. “And besides, it’s not heated. .”

“That doesn’t matter. . you can’t imagine how we used to freeze to death in this neighbourhood, in winter, when we were very young, my brother Pierre and I.”

And at least this memory was not painful to her, since she burst out laughing.

They had reached the end of the footpath, very close to the Porte de la Muette. He wondered whether this smell of autumn, of leaves and moist earth, did not come from the Bois de Boulogne. Or else, over time, from the Montmorency forest.

They had made a detour to rejoin what she called, with a touch of irony, her “place of residence”. As they walked along together, he felt himself overcome by a gentle amnesia. Eventually, he came to wonder how long he had been in the company of this stranger. Perhaps he had just met her, on the path by the gardens or outside one of these buildings without any windows at the front. And if he happened to notice a light, it was always at the window of a floor at the very top, as though somebody had left a long time ago and forgotten to switch off a lamp.

She squeezed his arm, and it was though she wanted to reassure herself of his presence.

“I always feel frightened when I come back home on foot, at this sort of time. . I no longer know exactly where I am. .”

And it was true that they were crossing a no-man’s-land, or rather a neutral zone in which they were cut off from everything.

“Supposing you needed to buy a pack of cigarettes or find a chemist open at night. . it’s very difficult around here. .”

Once again, she burst out laughing. Her laughter and the noise of their footsteps echoed in these streets, one of which bore the name of a forgotten writer.

She took a bunch of keys out of her coat pocket and tried several of them in the front door lock before finding the right one.

“Jean. . will you come up with me. .? I’m frightened of ghosts. .”

They were in the hallway with its black and white tiling. She opened a double door.

“Would you like me to show you round the ground floor?”

A suite of empty rooms. Pale wooden floors and large bay windows. A white light beamed down from the built-in wall lamps, just below the ceiling.

“This must have been the drawing room, the dining room and the library. . At one time, Roger Vincent used to store goods here. .”

She closed the door, took his arm and led him towards the staircase.

“Would you like to see the second floor?”

Once again, she opened a door and switched on the light which came from the same kind of wall lamps at ceiling-height. An empty room like those on the ground floor. She slid back one of the bay windows, in which the glass was cracked. A large balcony overlooked the trees in the gardens.

“It was the former owner’s gym room. . The one who lived here before the war. .”

Daragane noticed some holes in the floor, a floor that appeared to have the consistency of cork. Attached to the wall was a piece of wooden furniture with slots that supported some small dumbbells.

“It’s full of ghosts here. . I never come here just on my own.”

On the first floor, by the door, she put a hand on his shoulder.

“Jean. . Can you stay with me tonight?”

She led him into the room that was used as a drawing room. She did not switch on the light. On the sofa, she leant over and whispered in his ear:

“When I have to leave here, will you put me up at your room in place Blanche?”

She stroked his forehead. And, still in a low voice:

“Pretend that we hadn’t known each other before. It’s easy. .”

Yes, it was easy after all, since she had told him that she had changed her name, and even her first name.