That Monday, January 18, 1960, I followed the reverse path: from the Café de la Rotonde—so lugubrious on Monday mornings in winter, when we went back to the “hole” via Montrouge and Malakoff—I took the metro to Saint-Germain-des-Prés. At Chez Malafosse, the Danish girl said:
“A whiskey for Old Top here …”
The waiter, behind the bar, smiled and said:
“We don’t serve alcohol to minors, Mademoiselle.”
She let me take a sip from her glass. The whiskey had a particularly acrid taste, but it gave me the courage to confess that I couldn’t go home, as my parents were both away until the following month.
“So you just have to go back to your school,” said the one wearing dark glasses and smoking yellow cigarettes.
I explained that that was impossible: if a student ran away, the punishment was always immediate expulsion. They’d refuse to keep me.
“And there’s nobody home at all?”
“Nobody.”
“And can’t we get hold of your parents?”
“No.”
“Don’t you have the key to your house?”
“No.”
“I’ll take care of Old Top,” said the Danish girl.
She rested her hand on my shoulder. We took our leave of the others and walked out of Chez Malafosse. Her car was parked a little farther on, along the river, past the Ecole des Beaux-Arts: a navy blue Peugeot 203 with red leather seats. I knew that car. I’d seen it in the neighborhood several times, in front of the Louisiane and Montana hotels.
I was sitting next to her on the front seat. She peeled away from the curb.
“Someone is going to have to look after you,” she said in a calm voice.
We followed the quays and crossed the Seine via the Pont de la Concorde. On the Right Bank, I felt better, as if the Seine were a border that protected me from a savage hinterland. We were far from the Café de la Rotonde, La Croix de Berny, and the school … But I couldn’t help thinking of the future with anxiety, as I felt I’d done something irreparable.
“Do you think it’s serious?” I asked her.
“What’s serious?”
She turned to me.
“No, of course not, old top … It’ll work out …”
Her Danish accent reassured me. We drove alongside the Cours la Reine, and I told myself I could at least rely on her.
“They’ll tell the police.”
“Are you afraid of the police?”
She smiled and her periwinkle eyes rested on me.
“Don’t you worry, old top …”
The soft, husky rustle of her voice dissipated my anxiety. We had arrived at Place de l’Alma and were driving along the avenue that leads to Trocadéro. It was the route the 63 bus followed when we took it, my brother and I, to go to the Bois de Boulogne. When it was nice out, we stood on the platform.
She did not turn right, onto the tree-shaded avenue that the number 63 took. She parked the car in front of the large modern buildings at the end of Avenue Paul-Doumer.
“This is where I live.”
On the ground floor, we took a long hallway lit by neons. A silhouette in a raincoat was waiting at her door. A tall, dark man with a fine mustache. A cigarette was hanging from the corner of his mouth. He, too, was someone I’d seen around the streets of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.
“I didn’t have the key,” he said.
He smiled at me, looking mildly surprised.
“He’s a pal of mine,” she said, pointing to me.
“Nice to meet you.”
He shook my hand. She said to me:
“Go take a walk, old top … Come back in an hour … This evening, I’ll take you to a restaurant and afterward we’ll go to the movies …”
She opened her door and the two of them went in. Then she poked her head through the doorway.
“Don’t forget the number of the room when you come back. It’s 23 …”
With her finger she showed me the figure 23, in gilded metal on the pale wood.
“Come back in an hour … This evening, we’ll go have a good tuck-in in Montmartre, at the San Cristobal …”
Her Danish accent was even softer, more caressing because of the outdated slang expression.
She shut the door. For a moment, I stood frozen in the hall. It took a huge effort not to knock. I left the building and walked with slow, regular steps, for I could feel the panic rising in me. I thought I’d never manage to cross the traffic circle at Trocadéro. I talked myself out of entering the first police station I saw and confessing my crime. But no, it was absurd. They’d put me in a real reform school, or what they called a “supervised environment.” Could I really trust the Danish girl? I should have stayed on the sidewalk of Avenue Paul-Doumer, to make sure she didn’t leave. The dark-haired man in the raincoat who’d gone into her place might persuade her not to look after me. Room 23. I mustn’t forget the number. Still three-quarters of an hour to go. And if she wasn’t there, I’d wait for her at the door of her building, keeping out of sight until she returned.
I tried to reassure myself by tossing all those ideas around in my head. On the other side of the traffic circle was the stop for the 63 bus. Did I have enough time to ride as far as the Bois de Boulogne and back again? I still had ten francs. But I was scared at the thought of finding myself all alone on that bus, and all alone on the lawn at La Muette and next to the lake, those places where I’d used to go, only a few years before, with my brother. Instead I went onto the esplanade that overlooks Paris. Then I walked down the sloping alleys of the garden that were bathed in winter light. No one was around. I felt better. Above me were the huge windows and cornice of the Palais de Chaillot. It felt as if the auditoriums and galleries inside were as empty as the gardens. I went to sit on a bench. Almost at once, my immobility brought that panic back to the surface. So I stood up again and continued down the alleys, toward the Seine.
I ended up in front of the Aquarium. I bought a ticket. It was like going into a subway station. It was dark at the bottom of the steps, but that comforted me. In the room where I then found myself, only the tanks were lit. Little by little, in the bosom of those shadows, I regained my peace of mind. Nothing mattered. I was far removed from everything: my parents, my school, the commotion of life, in which the only good memory was that soft, murmuring voice with its Danish accent … I approached the tanks. The fish were as brightly colored as the bumper cars of my childhood: pink, turquoise, emerald … They made no noise. They slid along the glass partitions. They opened their mouths without emitting a sound, but now and again bubbles would rise to the surface of the water. They would never call me to account.
There, on the sidewalk of Avenue Henri-Martin, it occurred to me that Sunday evenings in winter are as depressing in the affluent west-side neighborhoods as they are around the Ursulines and on the glacial square of the Panthéon.
I felt pressure in the pit of my stomach, a flower whose petals swelled and became suffocating. I was pinned to the ground. Fortunately, the presence of my daughters kept me anchored in the present. Otherwise, all the old Sunday evenings, with their returns to boarding school, the crossing of the Bois de Boulogne, the long-gone Neuilly riding club, the night lights in the dormitory—those Sundays would have drowned me in their odor of rotting leaves. A few lit windows in the building façades were themselves night lights that had been left burning for thirty years, in empty apartments.
The memory of Jacqueline surged from the rain puddles and lights burning to no purpose in the apartment windows. I don’t know whether she’s still alive somewhere. The last time I saw her was twenty-four years ago, in the main departure hall of the Westbahnhof in Vienna. I was about to leave that city and return to Paris, but she’d decided to stay. She probably remained awhile longer in our room on the Taubstummengasse, behind the Karlskirche, and then I suppose that she, too, must have headed off for new adventures.
I wonder where certain people are today, whom I knew in that sa
me period. I try to imagine in which city I might possibly run into them. I’m certain they’ve left Paris for good. And I think of Rome, where one finally ends up, and where time has stopped like on the clock in the Carrousel gardens in my childhood.
That summer, we’d found ourselves for several months in another foreign city, Vienna, and we were even planning to stay there forever. One night, near the Graben, we had gone into a café that one accessed through the main entrance of an apartment building. The foyer led to a large room with a grayish floor that looked like a dance school or the disused lobby of a hotel, or even a train station cafeteria. Light shone from neon tubes on the walls.
I had discovered this place by chance during a stroll. We sat at one of the tables arranged in rows, widely separated from each other. There were only three or four customers talking among themselves in low voices.
Of course, it was I who’d dragged Jacqueline to the Café Rabe that evening. But that girl, who was exactly my age, had a knack for attracting ghosts. In Paris, on the Sunday evening when I’d noticed her for the first time, she was in such strange company … And now, at the Café Rabe, who would we meet because of her?
A man came in. He was wearing a tweed jacket. He walked with a heavy limp to the counter at the back of the room, helped himself to a pitcher of water and a glass. With his broken gait, he came to sit at the table next to ours.
I wondered if he was the café owner. He must have overheard a few words of our conversation, for he turned toward us:
“Are you French?”
He had a very slight accent. He smiled. He introduced himself:
“Rudy Hiden …”
I had already heard that name without knowing whom it belonged to. His face with its regular features could have been a movie actor’s. At the time, his name, Rudy, had struck me: it was my brother’s name. And he evoked romantic images: Mayerling, Valentino’s funeral, an Austrian emperor who suffered from melancholia in some long-distant past.
We exchanged a few polite words with Rudy Hiden, like travelers who don’t know each other but happen to be sitting at the same table in the restaurant car. He told us he had lived in Paris, that he hadn’t been back in a long time, and that he missed the city very much. He bade us farewell with a ceremonious movement of his head when we left the Café Rabe.
Later, I learned that he’d been the greatest goalie in the history of soccer. I tried to find photos of him and of all his Austrian friends with melodious names who’d been on the Vienna Wunderteam, and who had dazzled the spectators in the stadiums with their grace. Rudy Hiden had had to quit soccer. He had opened a nightclub in Paris, on Rue Magellan. Then a bar on Rue de la Michodière. He had broken his leg. He had returned to Vienna, his native city, where he lived as a vagrant.
I can still see him under the neon lights of the Café Rabe, coming toward us with his broken gait. Is it only by chance that I came across this letter of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s, which reminds me of him? “I honestly think that all the prizefighters, actors, writers who live by their own personal performances ought to have managers in their best years. The ephemeral part of the talent seems, when it is in hiding so apart from one, so ‘otherwise,’ that it seems it ought to have some better custodian than the poor individual with whom it lodges and who is left with the bill.”
Which he will settle at the Café Rabe.
I had met Jacqueline one Sunday evening, in Paris, in the sixteenth. A curious arrondissement. Claude Bernard, for instance, whose police file I’d like to peruse to learn more about the man I met at nineteen, often dined at restaurants in that quarter. The members of the Rue Lauriston gang as well. Pagnon lived in a deluxe furnished apartment at 48-bis Rue des Belles-Feuilles. He frequented the riding club in Neuilly and even the grounds of the Cercle de l’Etrier in the Bois de Boulogne, which he had requisitioned one afternoon through “Henri” so that his mistress could go horseback riding all on her own, without being bothered by anyone …
Rack my brains as I might for memories of the sixteenth arrondissement, I find only empty apartments, as if everything has been repossessed—like in Simone Cordier’s living room.
That Sunday evening, it was raining. It was in October or November. Claude Bernard had arranged to meet me for dinner in a restaurant on Rue de la Tour. The day before, I’d sold him the complete works of Balzac—the Veuve Houssiaux edition. I arrived first. The only customer. I waited in a small room with light wood paneling. Photos of jockeys and riding instructors, most of them inscribed, decorated the walls.
Three people made a noisy entrance: a blond man of about fifty, tall and well built, wearing a hunting jacket and an ascot; a dark-haired man who was much younger and shorter than the first; and a girl about my age, with chestnut hair and light-colored eyes, wrapped in a fur coat. The restaurant owner made a beeline toward them, a smile on his face.
“What’s new?”
Short-and-dark gave him a smug up-and-down look.
“Vierzon to Paris in an hour and a quarter … There was nobody on the road … Averaged a hundred miles an hour … These two were scared witless.”
He nodded toward the girl and the blond man in the riding jacket. The latter shrugged.
“He thinks he’s a racing driver. He forgets I was racing with Wimille and Sommer when I was twenty …”
The three men burst out laughing. As for the girl, she seemed to be sulking. The owner showed them to a table facing mine. He hadn’t noticed my presence. The dark-haired man had his back to me. The other one was seated next to the girl, on the bench. She hadn’t removed her fur. The telephone rang. The phone was on the bar, to my right.
“It’s for you, Monsieur …”
The owner held out the receiver to me. I got up. The eyes of all three of them were on me. The dark-haired one had even turned around. Claude Bernard apologized for not being able to join me. He was “stuck”—he said—in his house on the Ile des Loups “owing to an unexpected visit.” He asked if I had enough on me to pay for dinner. Fortunately, I’d kept the three thousand francs from the sale of the Balzac in the inner pocket of my jacket. When I hung up, my eyes met the girl’s. I didn’t dare leave the restaurant without ordering, as I would have had to ask for my coat, which a waiter had put in the cloakroom at the back of the restaurant.
I returned to that place several times. With Claude Bernard, or else alone. Claude Bernard was surprised at my constancy in going to Rue de la Tour. I wanted to know more about that girl who didn’t take off her fur coat and who always looked sullen.
Every Sunday evening, they made their entrance at around nine-thirty. They were in a group of four or five, sometimes more. They were loud, and the owner treated them with affable deference. The girl sat at their table, very stiff, and always next to the blond in the riding jacket. She never said a word. She seemed absent. Her fur coat clashed with the youthfulness of her face.
“Vierzon to Paris in an hour and a quarter … There was nobody on the road …” The echo of those words, which I’d heard that first Sunday, is now so faint that I have to strain my ears. The years have covered them over with static. Vierzon … They were returning from Sologne, where the blond in the hunting jacket owned a chateau and property. He bore the title of marquis. Later, I learned his name, which conjured up the wasp-waisted pages of the Valois court and Morgane le Fay, from which his family claimed to descend.
But I had in front of me only a man with a heavyset face and coarse voice. I felt an unease similar to the one that gripped me a few years later, when I overheard a conversation between forwarding agents and meatpacking truckers at an inn near Paris: they were talking about the poachers who supplied them with deer and venison, about clandestine slaughters and nocturnal deliveries to horse butchers’ shops; the places where they operated were the ones whose graceful names had been sung by Gérard de Nerval: Crépy-en-Valois, Mortefontaine, Loisy, La Chapelle-en-Serval …
So they were returning from Sologne. The marquis was master of the hounds for a
hunting rally that “unleashed”—I had caught that word from their mouths—in the Vierzon forest. The rally was called the “Sologne–Menehou Pond.” And I imagined that pond at the end of a forest path, at sunset. In the distance, a fanfare of hunting horns tugged at my heart. I couldn’t take my eyes off the still waters with their reddish reflections, the water lilies, the bulrushes. Little by little, the surface of the water turned black, and I saw that girl, as a child, at the edge of the pond in Menehou …
After several Sundays, the restaurant owner began to recognize me. I had taken advantage of a moment when the others hadn’t yet arrived for dinner, and I’d asked him who that girl in the fur coat was, with regard to the marquis whom she always seemed to be with and who always sat next to her. “A poor relation,” he’d said with a shrug.
A poor relation, certainly born, like the marquis, into a very old, aristocratic family whose origins were lost in the mists of time and in the depths of the forests of the Ile de France and Sologne … I was certain she’d spent her childhood in a boarding school in Bourges, with the Ursuline sisters. She was the only descendant of one of those extinct families with no male heirs, the kind that people called “overseas half-breeds,” who remained in Constantinople, Greece, and Sicily for centuries after the Crusades. Much later, one of her ancestors had returned to Sologne, their native land, to discover a ruined castle on the banks of the Menehou pond, and linden trees, in whose shade, in summer, large butterflies gently swirled.
One Sunday evening, she was being even sulkier than usual, in her fur coat. From my table I watched the marquis’s attempts to cheer her up: he tickled her chin with his index finger, but she turned her head away sharply, as if she’d been startled by the touch of something viscous. I shared her disgust: the marquis’s hands were thick and ruddy, the hands of a strangler that called to mind the title of a documentary, The Blood of Beasts. That memory joins with the memory of the conversation overheard between agents and meat shippers who crisscrossed the country of Nerval. How dare that hulking blond in his hunting jacket soil such a delicate face with his hand? Claude Bernard, who one Sunday had noticed my interest in the girl, had kindly remarked, “She looks like Joan Fontaine, my favorite actress …”
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