Paris Nocturne (7 page)

*

Outside, I wondered if I ought to go and wait for the night bus again. But I was overcome with panic at the prospect of going back to my hotel room alone. The Porte d'Orléans neighbourhood suddenly seemed bleak, perhaps because it reminded me of a recent past: the silhouette of my father walking away towards Montrouge as if to meet a firing squad, and of all our missed meetings at the Zeyer, the Rotonde and the Terminus in this hinterland…That was the time of
evening I would have most needed Hélène Navachine's company. I would have found it reassuring to go back to my room with her and we could even have made the journey on foot through the dead Sunday-night streets. We would have laughed harder than the fellow in the shapka and his friends earlier at Les Calanques.

I tried to muster some courage by telling myself that not everything was that gloomy in the Porte d'Orléans neighbourhood. On summer days there, the great bronze lion would sit under the foliage and each time I looked at him from a distance, his presence on the horizon reassured me. He kept watch over the past, but also over the future. That night, the lion would be a landmark for me. I trusted this sentinel.

I quickened my pace as far as Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois. When I reached the arcades of Rue de Rivoli, it was as if I had suddenly been woken up. Les Calanques… The guy in the shapka who tried to kiss the blonde woman… Walking the length of the arcades, I felt as though I had reached open air again. To the left was the Palais du Louvre and, just up ahead, the Tuileries Gardens of my childhood. As I made my way towards Place de la Concorde, I would try to picture what was on the other side of the railings in
the darkness: the first ornamental lake, the open-air theatre, the merry-go-round, the second ornamental lake…Just a few more steps and I would breathe in the sea air. Straight ahead. And the lion at the end, seated, keeping watch, in the middle of the crossroad…That night, the city was more mysterious than usual. I had never experienced such a profound silence around me. Not a single car. A moment later, I would cross Place de la Concorde without a thought about green or red lights, just as one would cross a prairie. I was in a dream again, but a more peaceful one than earlier at Les Calanques. The car appeared just as I reached Place des Pyramides and the pain in my leg told me I was about to wake up.

IN THE ROOM at the Mirabeau Clinic, after the accident, I had time to think things over. First of all, I remembered the dog that had been run over one afternoon when I was a child; then an episode from the same period came back to me little by little. I think I'd avoided dwelling on it until then. Only the smell of ether would bring it back to me occasionally, that monochromatic smell that carries you to a fragile tipping point between life and death. Coolness and the impression of finally breathing in the open air, but also, sometimes, the weight of a shroud. The previous night, at the Hôtel-Dieu, when the fellow put a muzzle over my face to send me to sleep, I remembered that I had gone through it all before. The same night, the same accident, the same smell of ether.

It was outside a school. The playground looked out onto an avenue on a slight incline, lined with trees and houses, but I no longer knew if they were mansions, country houses or detached suburban houses. Throughout my childhood, I had stayed in so many different places that I ended up getting them confused in my mind. My memory of this avenue had perhaps become mixed up with that of an avenue in Biarritz or of a sloping road in Jouy-en-Josas. During the same period, I had lived in both places, and I think the dog was run over on Rue Docteur-Kurzenne, in Jouy-en-Josas.

I was leaving class at the end of the afternoon. It must have been winter. It was dark. I was waiting on the pavement for someone to come and collect me. Soon there was no one else left. The school gate was closed. There was no light at the windows. I didn't know the way home. I tried to cross the avenue, but as soon as I stepped off the pavement a van braked suddenly and knocked me down. My ankle was injured. They laid me down in the back of the van under the tarpaulin. One of the two men from the van was with me. As the engine started up, a woman got in. I knew her. We lived in the same house. I can still see her face. She was young, about twenty-five, blonde or light brown hair, a scar on her
cheek. She leaned over me and held my hand. She was out of breath, as if she had been running. She was explaining to the man next to us that she was late because her car had broken down. She said to him that she
came from Paris
. The van stopped alongside the railings of a garden. One of the men carried me and we crossed the garden. She kept hold of my hand. We went into the house. I was laid down on a bed. A room with white walls. Two nuns leaned over me, their faces taut in their white wimples. They put the same black muzzle over my nose as the one at the Hôtel-Dieu. And before falling asleep, I smelled the monochromatic odour of ether.

*

That afternoon, once I'd left the clinic, I followed the quay towards Pont de Grenelle. I was trying to remember what had happened back then, when I woke up at the convent. After all, the white-walled room where I had been taken looked like the one at the Mirabeau Clinic. And the smell of ether was the same as at the Hôtel-Dieu. That could help me get to the bottom of it. They say that smells bring back the past best, and the smell of ether always had a curious
effect on me. It seemed to be the very essence of my childhood, but as it was bound up with sleep and the numbing of pain, the images that it unveiled clouded over again almost simultaneously. It was surely because of this that my childhood memories were so confused. Ether made me both remember and forget.

Outside school, the van with the tarpaulin, the convent…I searched for other details. I could see myself next to the woman in a car: she opened a door, the car went down a driveway…She had a room on the first floor of the house, the last one at the end of the corridor. But these fragments of memory were so vague that I couldn't hold on to them. Only her face was clear, with the scar on her cheek, and I was truly convinced that it was the same face as the one from the other night, at the Hôtel-Dieu.

Going along the quay, I came to the corner of Rue de l'Alboni, at the spot where the overground metro intersects the road. The square was a little further on, at right angles to the road. I stopped, on a whim, in front of a huge building with a black wrought-iron glass door. I was tempted to go through the porte-cochère, to ask the concierge for Jacqueline Beausergent's floor, and if she did indeed live there, to ring at her door. But it really wasn't like me to show
up unannounced at people's houses. I had never asked for help or requested anything from anyone.

How much time had passed between the accident outside the school and the one the other night at Place des Pyramides? Fifteen years, if that. Both the woman from the police van and the one at the Hôtel-Dieu seemed young. We don't change much in fifteen years. I climbed the steps up to Passy metro station. Waiting for the train on the platform of the little station, I searched for clues that could tell me if this woman from Square de l'Alboni was the same as the one fifteen years ago. And I would have to put a name to the place with the school, the convent and the house where I must have lived for a while, where she had her room at the end of the corridor. It was during the time when we went to stay in Biarritz and Jouy-en-Josas. Before? In between the two? In chronological order, first it was Biarritz then Jouy-en-Josas. And after Jouy-en-Josas, back to Paris and memories that became clearer and clearer, because I had reached what they call the age of reason, around seven years old. Only my father would have been able to give me some vague details, but he had vanished without a trace. So it was up to me to work it out, and that seemed perfectly natural to me anyway. The metro crossed the Seine towards the Left
Bank. It passed alongside façades whose every lit window seemed an enigma to me.

To my surprise, one weekday evening before the accident, I bumped into Dr Bouvière on the metro. He wasn't surprised in the slightest by our meeting and he explained that the same situations, the same faces, often reappear in our lives. He told me he would develop the theme of the ‘eternal return' in one of our next meetings. I felt that he was on the brink of confiding in me. ‘You must have been surprised to see me in such a state the other day.' He stared at me almost tenderly. There was not a trace of bruising left on his face or neck. ‘You see, my boy…There is something that I have been hiding from myself for a long time… something I have never admitted openly.' Then he collected himself. He shook his head. ‘Excuse me…' He smiled at me. He was clearly relieved to have stopped himself at the last moment from making some grave confession. He proceeded to talk too volubly about insignificant things, as if he wanted to throw me off track. He stood up and got off at Pigalle station. I was a little worried about him.

*

When I got out of the metro that afternoon, I dropped into a pharmacy. I handed over the prescription I'd been given at the clinic and asked how I should apply the dressing. The pharmacist wanted to know how I'd sustained my injury. When I explained that I'd been hit by a car, he said, ‘I hope you're going to press charges.' He insisted: ‘So, have you pressed charges…?' I didn't dare show him the piece of paper I had signed at the Mirabeau Clinic. The piece of paper seemed odd. I planned to read it again in my room with a clear head. As I left the pharmacy, he said, ‘And don't forget to disinfect the wound with Mercurochrome every time you change the dressing.'

When I got back to the hotel, I telephoned directory enquiries to find out Jacqueline Beausergent's phone number. Unknown at every number on Square de l'Alboni. My room seemed smaller than normal, as if I had returned after years away or even as if I had lived there in a previous life. Could it be that the accident the other night had caused such a fracture in my life that there was now a before and an after? I counted the banknotes. In any case, I had never been so rich. I could take a break from the exhausting buying and selling all over Paris, flogging to one bookshop what I had just bought at another for a tiny profit.

My ankle hurt. I didn't have the energy to change the dressing. I lay down on my bed, hands crossed under my head, and tried to think about the past. I wasn't used to it. For a long time, I had tried to forget my childhood, never having felt much nostalgia for it. I didn't possess a single photo or any physical evidence from that period, apart from an old vaccination card. Yes, thinking about it, the episode outside the school with the van and the nuns came in between Biarritz and Jouy-en-Josas. So I would have been six years old. After Jouy-en-Josas, it was Paris and the primary school on Rue du Pont-de-Lodi, then different boarding schools and barracks across France: Saint Lô, Haute-Savoie, Bordeaux, Metz, Paris again, where I am now. In fact, the only mystery in my life, the only link that didn't connect with the others, was the first accident with the van and the young woman or young girl who was late that evening
because she had broken down coming from Paris
. And it took the shock of the other night at Place des Pyramides for this forgotten episode to rise to the surface once again. What would Dr Bouvière have thought of it? Could he have used it as an example, along with so many others, to illustrate the theme of the eternal return in the next meeting at Denfert-Rochereau? But it wasn't only this. It also seemed that a breach had opened
up in my life onto an unknown horizon.

I got up and from the very top shelf of the cupboard I took down the navy-blue cardboard box in which I kept all the old pieces of paper that would later bear witness to my time on earth. A copy of my birth certificate, which I had just obtained from Boulogne-Billancourt Town Hall in order to obtain a passport; an academic certificate from Grenoble proving that I had passed the baccalauréat; a membership card for the Animal Protection Society; and in my military record book: my baptism certificate from Saint Martin's Parish in Biarritz and the very old vaccination card. I opened it up and read for the first time the list of vaccinations and their dates: a certain Dr Valat had given one of them in Biarritz. Then, six months later, another vaccine, indicated by the stamp of a Dr Divoire, in Fossombronne-la-Forêt, Loir-et-Cher. Then another, many years later, in Paris… I had found a clue. It could have been a needle lost forever in a haystack, or, if I was lucky, a thread that I could trace back through time: Dr Divoire, Fossombronne-la-Forêt.

Then I re-read the report of the accident that the huge brown-haired man had given me outside the clinic, of which he had kept a copy. At the time I hadn't realised that it was written in my own name and began: ‘I, the undersigned…'
And the terms used implied that I was responsible for the accident… ‘As I was crossing Place des Pyramides, alongside the arcades on Rue de Rivoli and going towards Place de la Concorde, I paid no attention to the approaching sea-green Fiat automobile, licence plate 3212FX75. The driver, Jacqueline Beausergent, tried to avoid me, resulting in a collision with one of the arcades of the square…' Yes, that must be the truth of it. The car wasn't going fast, and I should have looked left before crossing, but that night, I was in an altered state of mind. Jacqueline Beausergent. Directory enquiries had told me that there was no one by this name in Square de l'Alboni. But that was because she wasn't in the phone book. I asked how many street numbers there were in the square. Thirteen. With a little patience, I would surely end up finding out which one was hers.

Later on, I left my room and called directory enquiries again. No Dr Divoire in Fossombronne-la-Forêt. I walked, limping slightly, as far as the small bookshop at the beginning of Boulevard Jourdan. I bought a Michelin map of Loir-et-Cher. I turned around and walked towards Babel Café. My leg hurt. I sat at one of the tables on the indoor terrace. I was surprised when I saw on the clock that it was only seven in the evening. I was filled with sadness that
Hélène Navachine had left. I wanted to talk to someone. Should I walk up to Geneviève Dalame's building, a little further down the road? But she would be with Dr Bouvière, unless he was still in Pigalle. You have to let people live their lives. And really, I wasn't going to call at Geneviève Dalame's place unannounced…So I unfolded the Michelin map and spent a long time poring over Fossombronne—it was really important to me, and it made me forget my loneliness. Square de l'Alboni. Fossombronne-la-Forêt. I was about to learn something important about myself that would perhaps change the course of my life.