She had left at about midday and Daragane was alone, as usual, in his study. She was worried that Gilles Ottolini might be back already. When he went to the casino in Charbonnières, he sometimes caught the train for Paris very early on the Monday morning. Through the window, he had watched her walk away wearing her shirt and her black trousers. She was not carrying the plastic bag. She had left it behind on the sofa along with the dress. It took Daragane a long time before he found the visiting card she had given him, a faded paper visiting card. But the mobile telephone number did not answer. She would surely ring him back in due course, as soon as she noticed that she had forgotten the dress.
He took it out of the bag and looked at the label again: “Silvy-Rosa. Fashion design. Rue Estelle. Marseille”. This reminded him of something, even though he had never been to Marseille. He had read this address before, or else heard the name. When he was younger, this type of apparently insignificant mystery could keep him busy for several days during which he searched stubbornly for a solution. Even if it were a matter of a tiny detail, he experienced a feeling of anxiety and privation for as long as he failed to make the connection, rather like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle that has been lost. Sometimes, it was a phrase or a line of verse for which he wanted to find the author, sometimes, a simple name. “Silvy-Rosa. Fashion design. Rue Estelle. Marseille”. He closed his eyes and tried to concentrate. Two words came to mind that seemed to be associated with this label: “La Chinoise”. It would require the patience of a deep-sea diver to discover the link between “Silvy-Rosa” and “La Chinoise”, but for several years he had no longer had the strength to devote himself to this type of exploit. No, he was too old, he preferred to float along calmly . . . “La Chinoise” . . . Was it on account of this Chantal Grippay’s black hair and slightly slanted eyes?
He sat down at his desk. That night, she had not noticed the scattered pages and the deletions in blue pencil. He opened the cardboard folder that he had left by the telephone and took out the book that was inside it. He started to leaf through Le Flâneur hippique. It was a recent reprint of a book whose copyright dated from before the war. How could Gilles Ottolini have the cheek, or the naivety, to claim to be its author? He closed the book and glanced at the sheets of paper in front of him. During his first reading, he had skipped sentences because the letters were too cramped together.
Once again, the words danced. There were clearly other details relating to Annie Astrand, but he felt too tired to take them in. He would do so later, in the afternoon, when he had had a rest. Or else he might decide to tear up the pages, one by one. Yes, he would see about that later.
Just as he was putting the “dossier” back in its cardboard folder, his eyes fell on the photograph of the child, which he had forgotten about. On the back of it, he read: “3 passport photos. Unidentified child. Search and arrest Astrand, Annie. Customs post Ventimiglia. Monday, 21 July 1952.” Yes, it was indeed the enlargement of a passport photograph, as he had thought yesterday afternoon in the room in rue de Charonne.
He could not keep his eyes off this photograph and he wondered why he had forgotten it among the sheets in the “dossier”. Was it something that embarrassed him, an exhibit, to use the legal language, and which he, Daragane, had wanted to erase from his memory? He experienced a sort of giddiness, a tingling sensation at the roots of his hair. This child, so detached from him over such a very long time to the extent that he had become a stranger, was, he was forced to acknowledge, himself.
DURING A DIFFERENT AUTUMN TO THAT SUNDAY at Le Tremblay, an autumn equally long ago, Daragane had received a letter at square du Graisivaudan. He was walking past the concierge’s door just as she was about to distribute the post.
“I suppose you’re Jean Daragane.” And she handed him a letter that had his name written in blue ink on the envelope. He had never received any post at this address. He did not recognise the handwriting, a very large handwriting that covered the entire envelope: Jean Daragane, 8 square du Graisivaudan, Paris. There was not enough space for the number of the arrondissement. On the back of the envelope, a name and an address: A. Astrand, 18 rue Alfred-Dehodencq, Paris.
For a few seconds, this name did not register with him at all. Was it because of the simple initial “A” that concealed the first name? Later on, he reckoned that he had had a premonition because he hesitated to open the letter. He walked to the boundary between Neuilly and Levallois, through that area where, in two or three years’ time, the garages and humble houses would be torn down to build the ring road. ASTRAND. How could he not have realised, in that very instant, whom it referred to?
He turned around and walked into the café beneath one of the blocks of flats. He sat down, took the letter out of his pocket, asked for an orange juice, and, if possible, a knife. He opened the letter with the knife, because he feared that if he used his hands he might tear the address on the back of the envelope. All it contained were three passport photos. In all three, he recognised himself as a child. He remembered the afternoon on which they had been taken, in a shop, the other side of the pont Saint-Michel, opposite the Palais de Justice. Since then, he had often walked past this shop, exactly as it was in the old days.
He needed to find these passport photos to compare them with the enlargement that was part of Ottolini’s “file”. In the suitcase in which he had crammed letters and papers that were at least forty years old and to which he had, fortunately, lost the key? No point. They were certainly the same photographs. “Unidentified child. Search and arrest Astrand, Annie. Customs post Ventimiglia. Monday 21 July 1952.” They must have arrested and searched her at the very moment she was preparing to cross the frontier.
She had read his novel, Le Noir de l’été and she had recognised an episode from that particular summer. Otherwise, why would she have written to him after fifteen years? But how could she have known his temporary address? Especially since he rarely slept at square du Graisivaudan. He spent the greater part of his time in a room in rue Coustou and in the place Blanche neighbourhood.
He had written this book only in the hope that she might get in touch with him. Writing a book, for him, was also a way of beaming a searchlight or sending out coded signals to certain people with whom he had lost touch. It was enough to scatter their names at random through the pages and wait until they finally produced news of themselves. But in the case of Annie Astrand, he had not mentioned her name and he had endeavoured to cover his tracks. She would not be able to recognise herself in any of his characters. He had never understood why anyone should want to put someone who had mattered to them into a novel. Once that person had drifted into a novel in much the same way as one might walk through a mirror, he escaped from you forever. He had never existed in real life. He had been reduced to nothingness . . . You needed to go about it in a more subtle way. For example, in Le Noir de l’été, the only page in the book that might attract Annie Astrand’s attention was the scene in which the woman and the child walk into the shop with the instant-photo Photomaton booth, on the boulevard du Palais. He does not understand why she pushes him into the booth. She tells him to stare into the screen and not to move his head. She draws the black curtain. He is sitting on the stool. A flash blinds him and he closes his eyes. She draws the black curtain again, and he leaves the booth. They wait for the photos to fall from the slot. And he has to do it all over again because his eyes are shut in the photos. Afterwards, she had taken him to have a grenadine at the nearby café. That was what had happened. He had described the scene precisely and he knew that this passage did not fit with the rest of the novel. It was a fragment of reality that he had smuggled in, one of those private messages that people put in small ads in newspapers and that can only be deciphered by one person.
TOWARDS THE END OF THE AFTERNOON, HE WAS surprised not to have received a phone call from Chantal Grippay. Yet she must have noticed that she had forgotten her black dress. He rang her mobile number, but there was no answer. After the signal, there was sil
ence. You had reached the edge of a cliff beyond which there was nothing but empty space. He wondered whether the number was still functioning or whether Chantal Grippay might have lost her mobile. Or whether she was still alive.
As if by contagion, a doubt arose in his mind concerning Gilles Ottolini. He typed out on the keyboard of his computer: “Agence Sweerts, Paris”. No Sweerts agency in Paris, neither in the gare Saint-Lazare area nor in any other district. The supposed author of Le Flâneur hippique was merely a bogus employee of an imaginary agency.
He wanted to know if an Ottolini was listed in square du Graisivaudan, but among the names that featured at the eight numbers of the square, not a single Ottolini. In any case, the black dress was there, on the back of the sofa, proof that he had not been dreaming. He typed out, on the off-chance, “Silvy-Rosa. Fashion design. Rue Estelle. Marseille”, but all he obtained was: “Rosa Alterations, 18 rue du Sauvage, 68100 Mulhouse”. For the past few years, he hardly ever used this computer on which most of his research came to nothing. The rare people whom he would have liked to trace had succeeded in escaping the vigilance of this machine. They had slipped through the net because they belonged to another age and because they were not exactly saints. He remembered his father whom he hardly knew and who used to say to him in a soft voice: “I’d be a tough case for dozens of examining magistrates.” No trace of his father on the computer. Any more than of Torstel or Perrin de Lara whose names he had typed out on the keyboard the previous day, before Chantal Grippay arrived. In the case of Perrin de Lara, the usual phenomenon had occurred: a great many Perrins were displayed on the screen, and the night was not long enough to go through the entire list. Those whom he would have liked to hear from were often hidden among a crowd of anonymous people, or else behind a famous character who bore the same name. And when he typed out a direct question on the keyboard: “Is Jacques Perrin de Lara still alive? If so, give me his address”, the computer seemed incapable of replying and you could sense a certain hesitation and a certain embarrassment passing through the multiple wires that connected the machine to electrical sockets. Sometimes, you were dragged off on false trails: “Astrand” produced results in Sweden, and several people of this name were grouped together in the city of Gothenburg.
The weather was hot and this Indian summer would probably extend into November. He decided to go out instead of waiting in his study until sunset, as he usually did. Later on, when he returned, he would try to decipher with the aid of a magnifying glass the photocopies that he had read through too quickly the previous day. Perhaps in this way he would have the opportunity to learn something about Annie Astrand. He regretted not having asked her these questions when he had seen her again fifteen years after the Photomaton shop episode, but he had very soon realised that he would not receive any response from her.
Outside, he felt more carefree than he had on previous days. He may have been wrong to immerse himself in this distant past. What was the point? He had not thought about it for a number of years, and so eventually it seemed to him that he saw this period of his life through a frosted window. It allowed a vague clarity to filter through, but you could not make out the faces or even the figures. A glazed window, a sort of protective screen. Perhaps, thanks to deliberate forgetfulness, he had managed to protect himself from this past for good. Or else, it was time that had subdued its more intense colours and rough edges.
There, on the pavement, in the light of the Indian summer that lent the Paris streets a timeless softness, he once again had the feeling that he was floating on his back. He had not experienced this sensation since last year, and he wondered whether it might not be linked to the onset of old age. When he was very young, he had known those moments of semi-slumber when you allow yourself to drift—usually after being up all night—but today it was different: the sense of free-wheeling down a slope, when the motor has stopped. How far would you go?
He glided, swept along by a breeze and by his own weight. He bumped into pedestrians who were coming in the opposite direction and had not moved out of the way quickly enough as he passed by. He apologised. It was not his fault. Normally, he displayed far greater vigilance when he walked in the street, ready to change pavements if he saw someone in the distance whom he knew or who might accost him. He was aware that you very seldom met anyone you really had wanted to meet. Twice or three times in a lifetime?
He would happily have walked to rue de Charonne to take Chantal Grippay’s dress back to her, but he risked coming across Gilles Ottolini. And if he did? It would provide an opportunity to be better informed about the uncertain existence of this man. Chantal Grippay’s remark came back to him: “They want to make him redundant at the Sweerts agency.” Yet she must know that the Sweerts agency did not exist. And the book, Le Flâneur hippique, the copyright of which dated from before the war? Had Ottolini taken the manuscript to Éditions du Sablier in a former life and under a different first name? He, Daragane, deserved a few explanations about these matters, after all.
He had reached the arcades of the Palais-Royal. He had walked without any particular aim. But, in crossing the Pont des Arts and the courtyard of the Louvre, he was following a route that was familiar to him from his childhood. He walked along what is known as the Louvre des Antiquaires and he remembered the Christmas windows of the Grands Magasins du Louvre in the same spot. And now that he had paused in the middle of the Galerie de Beaujolais, as though he had reached the end of his walk, another memory came back to him. It had been buried away for so long and so deeply, far from the light of day, that it seemed new. He wondered whether it really was a memory or whether it was a snapshot that no longer belonged to the past, having detached itself like a free electron: his mother and he—one of the rare occasions when they were together—entering a shop that sold books and paintings, and his mother speaking to two men, one of whom was sitting at a desk at the back of the shop while the other stood with his elbow propped against a marble fireplace. Guy Torstel. Jacques Perrin de Lara. Frozen there, until the end of time. How could it be that on that Sun-day in autumn when he had returned from Le Tremblay with Chantal and Paul, in Torstel’s car, this name should not have reminded him of anything, any more than his visiting card did, despite the fact that the address of the shop was printed on it?
In the car, Torstel had even referred to “the house on the outskirts of Paris” where, as a child, he had seen him at Annie Astrand’s house. He, Daragane, had stayed there for almost a year. At Saint-Leu-la-Forêt. “I remember a child,” Torstel had said. “That child was you, I suppose . . .” And Daragane had replied to him curtly, as though this was nothing to do with him. It was the Sunday when he had begun to write Le Noir de l’été after Torstel had dropped him at square du Graisivaudan. And not for a moment had he had the presence of mind to ask him whether he remembered the woman who lived in this house, at Saint-Leu-la-Forêt, “a certain Annie Astrand”. And whether he happened to know what had become of her.
He sat down on a garden bench, in the sunshine, near the arcades of the Galerie de Beaujolais. He must have walked for over an hour without even noticing that it was hotter still than on the other days. Torstel. Perrin de Lara. But yes, he had met Perrin de Lara one final time, in the same year as that Sunday at Le Tremblay—he was barely twenty-one—and this meeting would have vanished into la nuit froide de l’oubli—as the song goes—had it not been to do with Annie Astrand. One evening, he happened to be in a café on the Rond-Point des Champs-Élysées, one that had been converted into a “Drugstore” in the years that followed. It was ten o’clock. A pause before continuing his walk to square du Graisivaudan, or rather to a room in rue Coustou that he had been renting for some time at six hundred francs a month.
He had not immediately noticed the presence, that night, of Perrin de Lara, in front of him, sitting on the terrace. Alone.
Why had he spoken to him? He had not seen him for over ten years, and this man would certainly not recognise him. But he was writing his first b
ook, and Annie Astrand was filling his mind in an obsessive way. Perhaps Perrin de Lara knew something about her?
He had stood in front of his table, and the man had looked up. No, he did not recognise him.
“Jean Daragane.”
“Ah . . . Jean . . .”
He smiled at him, a faint smile, as though he were embarrassed that someone should recognise him at that time of night, on his own, in such a place.
“You’ve grown taller over the years . . . Sit down, Jean . . .”
He pointed to the chair, opposite him. Daragane hesitated for a fraction of a second. The glazed terrace door was ajar. All he had to do was say what he normally said: “Wait . . . I’ll be back . . .” Then go out into the open air of the night, and take a deep breath. And, most importantly, avoid any further contact with a shadow, who would be waiting over there, alone, on a café terrace, for all eternity.
He sat down. Perrin de Lara’s Roman-statue face had become bloated and his hair had acquired a greyish tinge. He was wearing a navy-blue linen jacket that was too flimsy for the season. In front of him, a half-drunk glass of Martini, which Daragane recognised by its colour.
“And your mother? It’s years since I’ve been in touch with her . . . You know . . . we were like brother and sister . . .”
He shrugged, and there was an anxious expression in his eyes.
“I’ve been away from Paris for a long time . . .”
It was clear that he would have liked to tell him about the reasons for this long absence. But he remained silent.
“And have you seen your friends Torstel and Bob Bugnand again?”
So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood Page 5