“Aren’t you just full of information,” she said to me. Her smile grew ironic. She seemed to have let her guard down a bit. She ordered two more glasses from Suzanne. I wasn’t used to drinking much in the way of alcohol, and one glass was already plenty for me. But I didn’t have the nerve to say no. To get it over with more quickly, I drank it in one go. She was still watching me silently.
“Do you go to school?”
I hesitated before I replied. I had always dreamed of being a student, because I found the idea quite glamorous. But that dream had been cut short the day they had rejected my application to the Lycée Jules-Ferry. Was it the self-confidence induced by the champagne? I leaned toward her and, perhaps in order to be more convincing, I brought my face closer to hers.
“Yes, I’m a student.”
That first time, I hadn’t noticed the other customers around us. Nothing at all like the Condé. If I wasn’t worried that I might run into certain ghosts, I would quite happily return to that place one night in order to better understand where I come from. But it pays to be prudent. That said, I’m running the risk of finding it closed down. New ownership. None of it had much of a future.
“A student of what?”
She caught me off guard. The candor of her stare had encouraged me. She certainly couldn’t suspect that I was lying.
“Oriental languages.”
She seemed impressed. She never asked me subsequently for any details about my studies in Oriental languages, nor for the schedule of the classes, nor the location of the school. She ought to have realized that I wasn’t attending any such school. But I believe that for her—and for me as well—it was in some way a title of nobility that I bore, the sort that is inherited without one having to do anything. She introduced me as “the student” to all the regulars in the bar on rue de La Rochefoucauld, and perhaps some of them there still remember me that way.
That night she accompanied me all the way home. In turn, I had wanted to know what she did with her life. She told me that she had been a dancer, but that she’d had to give up that line of work because of an injury. A ballet dancer? No, not exactly, although she had been classically trained. Looking back, I’m left with a question that never would have occurred to me at the time: Had she been a dancer as much as I had been a student? We were following rue Fontaine towards place Blanche. She explained to me that “for the time being” she was a “business partner” of Suzanne’s, one of her oldest friends, sort of her “big sister.” The two of them ran the spot she had taken me to that evening, which was also a restaurant.
She asked me if I lived alone. Yes, alone with my mother. She wanted to know what my mother did for a living. I didn’t speak the words “Moulin Rouge.” Dryly, I replied, “Certified accountant.” After all, my mother could have been a certified accountant. She was certainly serious enough and had the discretion.
We parted company in front of the coach entrance. It was without the slightest trace of lightheartedness that I returned to that apartment each night. I knew that sooner or later I would leave it for good. I was counting a great deal on the people I would eventually meet, which would put an end to my loneliness. This girl was my first encounter and perhaps she would help me take flight on my own.
“See you tomorrow?” She seemed surprised by my question. I had blurted it out far too abruptly, without managing to conceal my nervousness.
“Of course. Whenever you like.”
She shot me another one of her tender, ironic smiles, the same one she had given me earlier when I had explained what I meant by “the lower slopes.”
There are holes in my memory. Or rather, certain details are out of order in my mind. For the past five years I have avoided thinking about all of this. And it was enough for the taxi to climb that street and for me to rediscover those illuminated signs: Aux Noctambules, Aux Pierrots . . . I no longer remember the name of the place on rue de La Rochefoucauld. The Rouge Cloître? Chez Dante? The Canter? Yes, the Canter. None of the customers of the Condé would have ever patronized the Canter. There are certain invisible boundaries in our lives. And yet, the first few times I went to the Condé, I had been quite surprised to recognize one of the customers I had seen at the Canter: Maurice Raphaël, the one whom everyone called the Jaguar. Never in a million years would I have guessed that this man was a writer. Nothing set him apart from those who played cards and other games in the bar’s small back room, behind the wrought-iron gate. I recognized him. I hadn’t felt that my face was familiar to him. So much the better. What a relief.
I never really understood what Jeannette Gaul’s role was at the Canter. Sometimes she took orders and waited on the customers. She sat with them at the tables. She knew most of them. She introduced me to a tall dark-haired man with a Mediterranean look to him, very well dressed, who gave the impression of being well-educated. A certain Accad, the son of a doctor in the neighborhood. He was always accompanied by two friends, Godinger and Mario Bay. Sometimes, they played cards and other games with the older men in the little back room. This would often go on until five in the morning. One of the cardplayers was apparently the Canter’s actual owner. A man in his fifties with short gray hair, also very well dressed, a grim-looking man whom Jeannette told me was a “former lawyer.” I remember his name: Mocellini. Once in a while he would get up and join Suzanne behind the bar. Some nights he would stand in for her and serve the drinks himself, just as if he were at home in his own apartment and all of the customers were his guests. He called Jeannette “my dear” or “Crossbones” without my ever understanding why, and the first few times I went to the Canter he looked me over with a fair amount of suspicion. One night, he asked me how old I was. I did my best to make myself look older and said, “Twenty-one years old.” He continued to observe me with a frown, he didn’t believe me. “You’re sure you’re twenty-one?” I was growing more and more embarrassed and was nearly ready to tell him my real age, but all of the severity abruptly left his face. He smiled at me and shrugged his shoulders. “Well then, twenty-one years old it is.”
Jeannette had a thing for Mario Bay. He wore tinted glasses, but not out of affectation. Light hurt his eyes. He had very delicate hands. At first, Jeannette had taken him for a pianist, one of those, she told me, who perform at Salle Gaveau or the Pleyel. He was around thirty, as were Accad and Godinger. But if he wasn’t a pianist, what was it that he did for a living? He and Accad were very tight with Mocellini. According to Jeannette, they had worked for Mocellini when he was still a lawyer. They had worked for him ever since. Doing what? Various business ventures, she told me. But what did that actually mean, “business ventures”? At the Canter, they would often invite us to join them at their table, and Jeannette let on that Accad had a crush on me. Right from the start I got the feeling that she wanted me to get together with him, perhaps in order to strengthen her relationship with Mario Bay. If anything, I had the impression that it was Godinger who had taken a liking to me. He was as dark as Accad, but taller. Jeannette didn’t know him as well as the other two. Apparently he had a lot of money and a car that he always parked in front of the Canter. He lived in the hotel upstairs and often traveled to Belgium.
Black holes. As well as details that randomly pop into my head, details as precise as they are insignificant. He lived in the hotel upstairs and he often traveled to Belgium. The other evening, I repeated that stupid sentence over and over as if it were the refrain of a lullaby that you might sing softly in the dark to calm yourself. And why did Mocellini call Jeannette “Crossbones”? Details that conceal other details, much more painful ones. I remember the afternoon a few years later that Jeannette came to visit me in Neuilly. It was a couple of weeks after I married Jean-Pierre Choureau. I never learned to call him anything but Jean-Pierre Choureau, likely because he was older than I was and because he too addressed me so formally. She rang three times as I had requested. For a brief moment, I had the impulse not to answer the door, but that was idiotic, she knew my phone number and
address. She came in, sliding through the crack of the half-opened door, and you would have thought she was creeping stealthily into the apartment to commit a burglary. Once we were in the living room, she took a look around, the white walls, the coffee table, the stack of magazines, the red-shaded lamp, the portrait of Jean-Pierre Choureau’s mother above the sofa. She didn’t say a word. She shook her head. She wanted to take a look around. She seemed stunned when she saw that Jean-Pierre Choureau and I slept in separate rooms. We stretched out on the bed in my bedroom.
“So does he come from a good family?” said Jeannette. And she burst out laughing.
I hadn’t seen her since the hotel on rue d’Armaillé. Her laughter made me feel uncomfortable. I was worried she would drag me backwards, back to the days of the Canter. Still, when she had come to visit me in rue d’Armaillé the year before, she had informed me that she no longer had anything to do with the others.
“Such a little girl’s room.”
Atop the chest of drawers, a picture of Jean-Pierre Choureau in a wine-red leather frame.
“He’s pretty handsome. So what’s with the separate rooms?”
She once again stretched out on the bed beside me. Then I told her I would prefer to see her anywhere but there. I was worried that she would feel awkward around Jean-Pierre Choureau. And also, we wouldn’t be able to speak freely, just the two of us.
“Are you worried I’ll bring the others when I come to see you?”
She laughed, but her laughter was less frank than earlier. She was right, I was afraid, even in Neuilly, to run into Accad. I was amazed he hadn’t caught wind of me when I was living in the hotels on rue d’Armaillé and then rue de l’Étoile.
“Don’t worry. They left Paris a long time ago. They’re in Morocco.”
She was softly stroking my forehead, as if she wanted to soothe me.
“I’d imagine you haven’t told your husband about the parties at Cabassud.”
There was no sarcasm in her tone as she spoke. On the contrary, I was touched by the sadness in her voice. It had been her friend Mario Bay, the guy with the tinted glasses and the pianist’s hands, who had referred to them as “parties,” those nights when he and Accad took us to spend the night at Cabassud, a country home not far from Paris.
“It’s so calm here. It’s nothing like it was at Cabassud. You remember those nights?”
Details that made me want to squeeze my eyes shut, like a light that was too bright. And yet, the other night, when we had parted company with Guy de Vere’s friends and I was returning from Montmartre with Roland, I kept my eyes wide open. Everything was more distinct, crisp, and clear, an intense light dazzled me and I gradually grew used to it. One night at the Canter, I found myself engulfed by that same light as I sat at a table with Jeannette, by the entrance. Everyone had left except for Mocellini and the others, who were playing cards in the room at the back, behind the gate. My mother would have arrived home hours ago. I wondered if she was worried by my absence. I almost missed the night she had come to pick me up at the Grandes-Carrières police station. It dawned on me that from that point on, she would no longer be able to come and find me. I was too far away. I tried to withstand a wave of anxiety that swept over me, preventing me from being able to breathe. Jeannette brought her face up to mine.
“You’re really pale. Aren’t you feeling well?”
I wanted to give her a smile to reassure her, but I felt myself grimace instead.
“No. It’s nothing.”
Ever since I began sneaking out of the apartment at night, I had brief panic attacks, or rather “low blood pressure,” as the pharmacist at place Blanche had put it one night when I tried to explain to him what I had been experiencing. But each time a word came out, it seemed either false or meaningless. Better to keep quiet. A feeling of emptiness would come over me in the street. The first time it was in front of the tobacconist’s, just past the Cyrano. The street was full of people but that didn’t reassure me. I felt as if I were going to faint right there on the spot, and they would just keep on walking straight ahead without paying me any mind at all. Low blood pressure. A power outage. I had to make an internal effort to reset the breaker. That night, I had gone into the tobacconist’s and asked for stamps, postcards, a ballpoint pen, and a pack of cigarettes. I sat down at the counter. I took out a postcard and began to write. “Have a little patience. I think things are going to get better.” I lit a cigarette and affixed a stamp to the card. But to whom should I address it? I would have liked to write a few words on each one of the cards, reassuring words: “The weather here is beautiful, my vacation is going great. I hope all is well with you too. See you soon. Hugs and kisses.” I’m sitting on the patio of a café overlooking the sea, very early in the morning. And I’m writing postcards to all my friends.
“How are you feeling? Any better?” Jeannette asked me. Her face was even closer to mine. “You want to go out and get some fresh air?”
The street had never seemed that deserted and silent. It was lit by streetlights left over from another era. And to think that climbing the slope was all it would take to rejoin the Saturday-night crowds a few hundred yards farther up, the neon signs promising “The Most Beautiful Nudes in the World,” the tourist buses parked in front of the Moulin Rouge. I was scared of all that agitation. I said to Jeannette, “We could stay at mid-slope.”
We walked as far as where the lights began, the intersection at the end of rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette. But there we made a U-turn and descended the hill the same way we had come. I felt more and more relieved as I walked back down the shady side of the slope. I just needed to let myself go. Jeannette held me tightly by the arm. We had nearly arrived at the bottom of the slope, where the street met rue de la Tour-des-Dames. She said to me, “What would you say to us having a little snow?”
I didn’t really understand what she meant by that, but the word “snow” caught me off guard. I got the feeling that it would start to fall at any moment and would render the silence that surrounded us even more intense. We would hear nothing but the crunching of our steps in the snow. A clock sounded out somewhere nearby, and, I’m not sure why, I thought it was signaling the start of midnight mass. Jeannette was guiding me. I let myself be carried along. We were following rue d’Aumale, whose every building was shrouded in darkness. It was almost as if they formed a single black wall on either side that spanned from one end of the street to the other.
“Come on into my flat, we’ll have ourselves a little snow.”
Once we arrived, I would ask her what she meant by “having a little snow.” It seemed even colder because of the dark façades. Was I only dreaming when I heard our footsteps echo so distinctly?
Since that day, I have often followed that same route, both with her and alone. I would go and find her in her room during the day, or sometimes I would spend the night there when we stayed too late at the Canter. She lived in a hotel on rue Laferrière, a street located in the lower slopes zone that forms a semicircle where you feel isolated from everything else. An elevator with a wire-mesh door. It climbed very slowly. She lived on the last floor, all the way at the top. Maybe the elevator wouldn’t stop. She whispered in my ear, “You’ll see, it’s going to be great, we’ll have ourselves a little snow.”
Her hands were trembling. In the dim light of the hallway, she was so nervous that she couldn’t manage to insert the key into the keyhole.
“Go ahead, you try. I can’t seem to do it.”
Her voice grew increasingly unsteady. She had dropped the key. I bent down to grope around for it in the dark. I managed to slide it into the lock. The light was on, a yellow light cast by a ceiling fixture. The bed was unmade, the curtains drawn. She sat down on the edge of the bed and fumbled in the drawer of the nightstand. She withdrew a small metal box. She told me to inhale the white powder she called “snow.” After a moment, I began to feel fresh and light. I was certain the anxiety and the feeling of emptiness that often came over me in the str
eet would never return. Ever since the pharmacist at place Blanche had spoken to me about low blood pressure, I had believed that I needed to harden myself, struggle against myself, strive to control myself. Nothing to be done, life had been tough love thus far. Sink or swim. If I fell, everyone else would just keep on walking down the boulevard de Clichy. There was no reason to have any illusions about it. But from now on, things were going to be different. The streets and boundaries of the neighborhood suddenly seemed far too narrow.
A book and stationery shop on the boulevard de Clichy stayed open until one in the morning. Mattei. A lone name stenciled on the front window. The owner’s name? I never got up the nerve to ask the brown-haired man with the mustache and the Prince of Wales check suit jacket who was always sitting there reading behind the desk. Customers continually interrupted his reading to buy postcards or a pad of paper. At the time of night I usually went in, there were rarely any customers other than the occasional person coming out of Minuit Chansons next door. Most of the time, he and I were alone in the bookshop. The same books were always on display in the front window, books I soon realized were science fiction novels. He had suggested that I read them. I remember a few of the titles: Pebble in the Sky, Stowaway to Mars, Vandals of the Void. I’ve only held on to one of them: The Dreaming Jewels.
The used books devoted to astronomy were filed on the right-hand side, on the shelves nearest the window. I had come across one with a torn-up orange cover: Journey into Infinity. That one I still have. The Saturday night I had intended to buy it, I was the only customer in the store and I could scarcely hear the din of the boulevard. A few neon signs could be seen through the window, including the blue and white of “The Most Beautiful Nudes in the World,” but they seemed so very far off. I wasn’t bold enough to disturb the man as he read, sitting there, his head down. I stood there in silence the better part of ten minutes before he turned his head my way. I held the book out to him. He smiled. “Very good, this one. Very good. Journey into Infinity.” I began to get out the money to pay for the book, but he raised his hand. “No, no. This one’s on me. And I hope you have a lovely journey.”
In the Café of Lost Youth Page 6
