It wore a red leather collar with a metal tag and, when I bent down, I saw a phone number engraved on it. With a collar, you’d think twice about taking it to the pound. As for me, I still kept an old, out-of-date passport in the inside pocket of my sheepskin jacket. I had fudged the date of birth to make myself older, and so it looked like I was twenty-one. For the past few nights, however, I no longer feared police checks. Reading The Wonders of the Heavens had lifted my spirits. From then on, I considered things from high above.
The dog walked in front of me. At first, it looked around to check that I was following, and then it walked at a steady pace, certain I would follow. I walked at the same slow pace as the dog. Nothing interrupted the silence. Grass seemed to be growing in between the cobblestones. Time had ceased. It must have been what Bouvière called the ‘eternal return’. The façades of buildings, the trees, the glimmer of the streetlamps took on an intensity that I had never seen in them before.
The dog hesitated for a moment when I turned onto the Trocadéro esplanade. It seemed to want to continue straight ahead. It ended up following me. I paused for a while to look at the gardens below, the big pool where the water appeared phosphorescent and, beyond the Seine, the apartment buildings along the quays and around the Champ-de-Mars.
I thought of my father. I imagined him over there, in a room somewhere, or in a café, just before closing time, sitting alone under the neon lights, looking through his files. Perhaps there was still a chance I would find him. After all, time had been abolished, given that this dog had emerged from the depths of the past, from Rue du Docteur-Kurzenne. I watched the dog move away from me, as though it would soon have to leave me or it might miss another engagement. I followed. It walked alongside the façade of the Musée de l’Homme and started down Rue Vineuse. I’d never been down this road. If the dog was leading me there, it wasn’t by chance. I had the feeling of both arriving at my destination and returning to familiar ground. But there was no light from the windows and I walked along in half-darkness. I moved closer to the dog so I wouldn’t lose sight of it. Silence surrounded us. I could hear the sound of my footsteps. The road turned almost at a right angle and I thought it would come out near La Closerie de Passy where, at that hour, the parrot in its cage would be repeating, Sea-green Fiat, sea-green Fiat, for no reason, while the manager and her friends played cards. After the angle in the road, an unlit sign. A restaurant or, rather, a bar, closed. It was Sunday. What an odd place for a bar: the pale wooden shopfront and sign would have been better suited to the Champs-Élysées or Pigalle.
I stopped for a moment and tried to decipher the sign above the entrance: Vol de Nuit. Then I looked ahead for the dog. I couldn’t see it. I hurried to catch up. But there was no trace of it. I ran and came out at the crossroads on Boulevard Delessert. The streetlamps were so bright they made me squint. No dog to be seen, not on the pavement that ran downhill, not on the other side of the boulevard, not opposite me near the little metro station and the steps that led down to the Seine. The light was white, the brightness of the northern lights: the black dog would have been visible from a distance. But it had disappeared. I felt a sensation of emptiness with which I was familiar and which I had forgotten for a few days, thanks to the calming effect of reading The Wonders of the Heavens. I regretted not having made a note of the phone number on the dog’s collar.
*
I slept badly that night. I dreamed of the dog that had sprung out of the past only to disappear again. In the morning, I was in good spirits and I was sure that neither the dog nor I were in danger of anything anymore. No car could ever knock us over again.
It was not quite seven o’clock. One of the cafés on the quay was open, the one where I had come across Solière. On that occasion, my father’s old address book was stuffed into the pocket of my sheepskin jacket. I always kept something in my pockets: the copy of The Wonders of the Heavens or the Michelin map of Loir-et-Cher.
I sat at a table close to the bay window. Over on the other side of the bridge, metro carriages disappeared one after the other. I leafed through the address book. The names were in inks of different colours—blue, black, purple. The names in purple seemed to be the oldest and in more careful handwriting. A few of them had been crossed out. I noticed rather a lot of names, which, to my surprise, had addresses in the neighbourhood I was in at that moment. I kept the notebook and here is the transcription:
Yvan Schaposchnikoff, 1 Avenue Paul-Doumer
KLÉBER 73 46
Guy de Voisins, 23 Rue Raynouard JASMIN 33 18
Nick de Morgoli, 14 Square de l’Alboni
TROCADÉRO 65 81
Toddie Werner, 28 Rue Scheffer PASSY 90 90
Mary Tchernycheff, 30 Quai de Passy JASMIN 64 76
And again, 30 Quai de Passy: Alexis Moutafolo,
AUTEUIL 70 66
In the afternoon, out of curiosity, I went to some of these addresses. Again, the same pale façades with bay windows and large terraces, like 4 Avenue Albert-de-Mun. I assume these apartments were said to have ‘modern comforts’ and certain features: heated flooring, marble tiles instead of parquet, sliding doors, giving the impression of being on a stationary cruise ship in the middle of the ocean. And the void behind the luxury all too visible. I knew that since his childhood, my father had often lived in this type of building, and that he didn’t pay the rent. In winter, in the empty rooms, the electricity would be cut off. He was one of those transients who were forever changing their identity, never settling anywhere, never leaving a trace. Yes, the type of person whose existence one would have trouble proving later on. It was useless to collect precise details: phone numbers, letters of the alphabet marking different stairwells in courtyards. That’s why I felt discouraged the other night on Avenue Albert-de-Mun. If I went through the porte-cochère, it wouldn’t lead anywhere. It was this, rather than the fear of being arrested for prowling, that held me back. I was conducting a search around streets where everything was an optical illusion. My task seemed as vain as that of a surveyor trying to draw up a plan in an empty space. But I said to myself: is it really beyond me to track down this Jacqueline Beausergent?
I REMEMBER THAT night I had taken a break from reading The Wonders of the Heavens, in the middle of a chapter on constellations of the southern hemisphere. I left the hotel without handing in my room key—there was no one at the reception desk. I wanted to buy a packet of cigarettes. The only café-tabac still open was on Place du Trocadéro.
From the quay, I climbed the steps and, after passing the little station, I thought I heard the rasping voice of the parrot from La Closerie repeating: Sea-green Fiat, sea-green Fiat. There was light at the window. They were still playing their card game. I was surprised by how warm the air was for a winter’s night. It had been snowing over the previous few days and there were still patches of snow dotted around the gardens below, in front of the Musée de l’Homme.
While I was buying cigarettes at the bigger café-tabac, a group of tourists sat down at the tables on the terrace. I could hear their peals of laughter. I was surprised that tables had been put outside and for an instant I felt a kind of vertigo. I wondered if I hadn’t perhaps confused the seasons. But no, the trees around the square had indeed lost their leaves and there would still be a long wait before summer came around again. I had been walking around for months and months in so much cold and fog that I no longer knew if the veil would ever be stripped away again. Was it really demanding too much from life to want to lie in the sun, drinking orangeade with a straw?
I remained awhile on the esplanade breathing in the ocean air. I thought about the black dog that had come to accompany me the other night, the dog that had come from so far away, across all these years…How stupid not to have kept the phone number.
I headed along Rue Vineuse, as I had the other night. It was still dark there. Perhaps there had been a power cut. I saw the bar or restaurant with its illuminated sign, but so faint that I could only just make out the dark mass of
a car parked just before the turn in the road. When I got to it, my heart skipped a beat. It was the sea-green Fiat. It wasn’t really a surprise; I had never given up hope that I would find it. I’d just had to be patient, that was all, and I felt I had huge reserves of patience within me. Come rain or snow, I was prepared to wait for hours in the street.
The bumper bar and one of the mudguards were damaged. There were probably a lot of sea-green Fiats in Paris, but this one certainly bore the signs of the accident. I took my passport out of the pocket of my sheepskin jacket. It contained the folded piece of paper that Solière had made me sign. Yes, it was the same licence plate number.
I looked in through the window. A travel bag on the back seat. I could have left a note under the windscreen wiper, giving my name and the address of the Hôtel Fremiet. But I wanted to get to the bottom of it there and then. The car was parked right in front of the restaurant. So I pushed the pale wooden door and went in.
Light fell from a wall lamp behind the bar, leaving the few tables arranged along the walls on either side in darkness. And yet, I can see these walls clearly in my memory; they are draped with very worn, red velvet that is ripped and torn here and there, as though, long ago, the place had been quite lavish, but no one went there anymore. Apart from me. At first I thought it was well after closing time. A woman was sitting at the bar wearing a dark brown coat. A young man, the size of a jockey and the look of one, was clearing the tables. He looked askance at me.
‘What can I do for you?’
It would take too long to explain. I walked towards the bar and, instead of sitting on one of the stools, I stopped behind her. I put my hand on her shoulder. She turned around with a start. She stared at me, astonished. There was a large graze across her forehead, just above the eyebrows.
‘Are you Jacqueline Beausergent?’
I was surprised by the detachment in my voice; I even had the impression that someone else had spoken for me. She gazed at me in silence. She lowered her eyes; they lingered on the stain on my sheepskin jacket, then lower down, on my shoe where the bandage was dangling out.
‘We’ve already met at Place des Pyramides…’
My voice seemed even clearer and more detached. I was standing behind her.
‘Yes…Yes…I remember very well. Place des Pyramides.’
Without looking away, she gave a slightly wry smile, the same—it seemed—as the other night, in the police van.
‘Why don’t we sit down…’
She gestured to the table closest to the bar, which was still covered with a white tablecloth. We sat opposite each other. She put her glass down on the tablecloth. I wondered what kind of alcohol it contained.
‘You should drink something,’ she said. ‘Something to warm you up. You’re very pale.’
She said the words with great seriousness and even a kind of solemn affection that no one had ever shown towards me until then. I felt embarrassed.
‘Have a margarita like me.’
The jockey brought me a margarita and then disappeared through a glass door behind the bar.
‘I didn’t know you’d left the clinic,’ she said. ‘I’ve been away from Paris for a few weeks…I’d planned on finding out how you were.’
It seems to me now, after decades, that it was very gloomy in that place where we’d found ourselves sitting face to face. We were in darkness, like in an eye clinic where they hold up lenses of different strengths in front of your eyes so that eventually you can make out the letters, over there on the backlit screen.
‘You should have stayed longer at the clinic…Did you escape?’ She smiled again. Stayed longer? I didn’t understand. The letters were still very blurry on the screen.
‘They told me to leave,’ I said. ‘A Mr Solière came to find me.’
She seemed surprised. She shrugged. ‘He didn’t tell me about it. I think he was afraid of you.’
Afraid of me? I would never have imagined frightening anyone.
‘You struck him as quite strange. He’s not used to people like you.’
She seemed embarrassed. I didn’t venture to ask what it was exactly that constituted my strangeness in the eyes of this Solière.
‘I came to see you two or three times at the clinic. Unfortunately, it was always when you were asleep.’
I hadn’t been told about these visits. Suddenly, a doubt crossed my mind.
‘Did I stay long at the clinic?’
‘About ten days. It was Mr Solière’s idea to have you taken there. They wouldn’t have been able to keep you at the Hôtel-Dieu in the state you were in.’
‘That bad?’
‘They thought you had taken toxic substances.’
She said these last words very carefully. I don’t believe I had ever heard anyone speak to me so calmly, with such a soft voice. Listening to her produced the same soothing effect as reading The Wonders of the Heavens. I couldn’t take my eyes off the large graze across her forehead, just above her eyebrows. Her clear eyes, her shoulder-length chestnut hair, the upturned collar of her coat…Because of the late hour and the darkness around us, she looked just as she had in the police van the other night.
She ran her index finger along the graze above her eyebrows and, again, she gave her wry smile.
‘For a first meeting,’ she said, ‘it was a bit of a shock.’
She stared straight into my eyes in silence, as if she was trying to read my thoughts—I had never before experienced such attentiveness.
‘I thought you purposely chose that moment to cross Place des Pyramides…’
That’s not what I thought. I had always resisted the pull of vertigo. I would never have been capable of throwing myself into the void from the top of a bridge or from a window. Or even under a car, as she seemed to believe. For me, at the last moment, life was always the stronger force.
‘I don’t think you were quite yourself…’
She glanced again at my sheepskin jacket and the split moccasin on my left foot. I had tried my best to reapply the bandage, but I mustn’t have looked very prepossessing. I apologised for my appearance. Yes, I was quite keen to look human again.
She said in a quiet voice, ‘All you have to do is change your sheepskin jacket. And perhaps your shoes, too.’
I felt more and more at ease. I confessed that I had spent the last few weeks trying to find her. It wasn’t easy with a street name but no number. So I had looked all over the neighbourhood for her sea-green Fiat.
‘Sea-green?’
She seemed intrigued by this adjective, but that was how it had been described on the report that Solière made me sign. A report? She wasn’t aware of any report. It was still in the inside pocket of my sheepskin jacket, so I showed it to her. She read it, frowning.
‘I’m not surprised. He’s always been wary.’
‘He also gave me some money.’
‘He’s a generous man,’ she said.
I wanted to know what the link was between her and Solière. ‘Do you live on Square de l’Alboni?’
‘No. It’s the address of one of Monsieur Solière’s offices.’
Whenever she said his name, it was inflected with a certain respect.
‘And Avenue Albert-de-Mun?’ To my great shame, I sounded like a cop who throws in an unexpected question to unnerve a suspect.
‘It’s one of Monsieur Solière’s apartments.’ She wasn’t fazed in the slightest. ‘How do you know about this address?’ she asked.
I told her that I had met Solière the other day in a café and that he had pretended not to recognise me.
‘He’s very distrustful, you know. He always thinks people are after him. He has a lot of lawyers.’
‘He’s your boss?’
I immediately regretted asking the question.
‘I’ve worked for him for two years.’ She answered calmly, as if it were an entirely ordinary question. And it was, surely. Why search for mystery where there is none?
‘That night, I was meeting Mon
sieur Solière at Place des Pyramides in the lobby of the Hôtel Régina. And then, just as I arrived, we had our…accident.’ She hesitated before saying the word. She looked at my left hand. When the car knocked me down, I grazed the back of it. But it was almost healed. I hadn’t put a dressing on it.
‘Then if I’ve understood correctly, Monsieur Solière arrived at the right moment?’
He had walked towards us slowly that night, in his dark coat. I even wonder if he had a cigarette at the corner of his mouth. And this girl had a meeting with him in the lobby of the hotel…I also had meetings with my father in hotel lobbies, which all looked the same and where the marble, the chandeliers, the wood engravings and the sofas were all fake. It’s the same precarious situation as being in a railway station waiting room between catching two trains, or in a police station before an interrogation.
‘It seems he’s no choirboy,’ I said.
‘Who?’
‘Solière.’
For the first time, she seemed embarrassed.
‘What does he do for a living?’
‘Business.’
She lowered her head as if I might be shocked by this response.
‘And you’re his secretary?’
‘Sort of, I suppose…But only part-time.’
There under the light of the wall lamp, she seemed younger than in the police van. It must have been the fur coat that made her seem older the other night. And besides, after the shock, I didn’t have my wits about me. That night, I thought she was blonde.
‘And the work isn’t too complicated?’
I really wanted to know everything. Time was running out. At that hour, they were perhaps about to close the restaurant.
‘When I came to Paris, I studied nursing,’ she said, and started speaking more and more quickly as if she was in a hurry to explain it all to me. ‘And then I started work… home nursing…I met Monsieur Solière…’
Paris Nocturne Page 8
