I knew that every evening at roughly nine forty-five, she would say, onstage, facing the audience:
“We counted for so little in his life . . .”
And writing it today, half a century later—or even after a century; I’ve forgotten how to count the years—I momentarily escape the sense of emptiness I feel. Taxi waiting at eight in the evening, fear of arriving after the curtain went up, parka against the cold and snow, once-common gestures fallen into disuse, a play that no one will ever see again, long-gone laughter and applause, the theater itself demolished . . . We counted for so little in his life . . . On her Mondays off, there was a light in her window, and that, too, reassured me. The other evenings, I was alone in that small building. I sometimes felt I had lost my memory and couldn’t understand what I was doing there. Until Dannie returned.
I was walking with her in the neighborhood where I grew up, an area I normally avoided because it brought back painful memories—an area now so changed that it has become completely foreign and indifferent to me. We went past the Royal Saint-Germain and arrived in front of the Hôtel Taranne. I saw that writer I admired coming out of the hotel, the one who had written a poem called “Dannie.” Behind us, a man’s voice called out, “Jacques!” and he turned around. He glanced at me in surprise, thinking I’d been the one to call him by name. I was tempted to take advantage of the coincidence, walk up and shake his hand. I would have asked him why his poem was called “Dannie” and whether he, too, had known a girl by that name. But I didn’t dare. Someone came up to him, once more saying “Jacques,” and he realized his mistake. I think he even smiled at me. The two men followed the boulevard ahead of us, walking toward the Seine.
“You should go say hello to him,” Dannie said. She offered to accost him for me, but I held her back. And then it was too late: they had disappeared, turning left onto Boulevard Raspail. We doubled back. Once more, we were at the entrance of the Hôtel Taranne.
“Why don’t you leave a note for him, asking to meet?” Dannie said.
No—but the next time I ran into him, I would overcome my shyness and go shake his hand. Unfortunately, I never saw him again, and decades later I learned from a friend of his that if you shook his hand, he would make a weary face and say, “Still only five fingers?” Yes, sometimes life can be monotonous and quotidian, like today when I’m writing these pages, hoping to find an escape route and vanish through a breach in time. The two of us were sitting on the bench between the taxi stand and the Hôtel Taranne. The following year, I would also learn that a crime had been committed at that very spot, just behind us. They had made a man—a Moroccan politician—get into a car, supposedly a police car, but it was actually a kidnapping, then a murder. And the name of that Georges who often sat in the lobby of the Unic Hôtel had been cited in the papers as one of the perpetrators. And each time, I expected to find the names of Paul Chastagnier, Duwelz, Gérard Marciano, and Aghamouri, whose thoughts about all this I would have loved to know. But it frightened me, and I recalled what he had said that evening in the café near the Lutèce Theater: “It’s as if we had the plague . . . Around us, you’re in danger of catching leprosy . . .” One afternoon, I entered a telephone booth at the western edge of town, near Auteuil. And that distance helped reassure me. It felt as if the Unic Hôtel were in another city. I dialed the number of the Moroccan Pavilion at the Cité Universitaire, which Aghamouri had given me the first time I met him with Dannie and which I’d jotted down in my black notebook: POR 58-17. There was little chance he would still have a room there. I heard myself asking in a flat voice:
“May I speak to Ghali Aghamouri?”
There was a moment’s silence. I nearly hung up. But I was seized by vertigo, like someone who could take cover but instead feels the sudden impulse to run toward danger.
“Who’s calling?”
The man had asked the question in the gruff tone of a police detective.
“A friend.”
“State your name.”
I was about to succumb to that vertigo, give him my name and address. But I checked myself in time.
“Tristan Corbière.”
A pause. He must have been writing it down.
“And why do you want to speak to Ghali Aghamouri?”
“Because I want to speak to him.”
I, too, had adopted a gruff tone, even gruffer than his.
“Ghali Aghamouri no longer lives at the Moroccan Pavilion. You hear that, mister? You hear that?”
This time I kept silent. And I could feel the person at the other end of the line growing tense, anxious, because of my silence. I hung up. After that, I often walked on the block where the Royal Saint-Germain and the Hôtel Taranne had been located, but neither one existed anymore, as if they had wanted to alter the crime scene to make people forget. Last week, I noticed that they’d even removed the bench next to the taxi stand where we had sat that evening, Dannie and I.
“It’s stupid . . . I could have gone up to him before and told him my name is Dannie, like in his poem . . .”
She laughed. Yes, that man, judging from what I had read of him and from his easygoing looks, would surely have been kind enough to spend a few moments with us. Sometimes, when I walked alone in the street, I would recite verses he had written:
If I die then go my bride
To Javel near Citron . . .
Saint-Christophe-de-Javel. We were in fact coming back from that neighborhood, where I had accompanied Dannie to the post office, as usual. On the way, I had wanted to tell her everything Aghamouri had said, about that “ugly incident” he had alluded to, but I couldn’t find the words, or rather, the right tone, a lighthearted tone, almost jocular, so as not to scare her away . . . I was afraid she’d get her back up—as they said in certain circles, no doubt including the Unic Hôtel—and that it would create distance between us.
We were about to take Rue de Rennes and follow it to Montparnasse. But on the threshold of that wide, sad, rectilinear street that stretched seemingly into infinity—the Tour Montparnasse was not yet darkening it with its funereal block—I recoiled. I asked if she really needed to go back to the Unic Hôtel.
“I have to see Aghamouri,” she said, “so he can give me some papers.”
It was time to clear the air once and for all. I hesitated a few seconds more. Then:
“What kind of papers? Papers in the name of Michèle Aghamouri?”
She stared at me, dumbfounded, frozen on the sidewalk, in front of what is now a Monoprix department store and what was then an abandoned garden plot that sheltered dozens of stray cats.
“Did he tell you that?”
“Yes.”
Her expression hardened, and I thought of Aghamouri. If he had been in front of her at that moment, she would have clawed his eyes out. Then she shrugged and said in an indifferent voice:
“I know it seems a little strange, but it’s completely normal . . . Michèle lent me her student ID . . . I’ve lost all my papers and I have to turn handsprings to get a copy of my birth certificate . . . I was born in Casablanca . . .”
Was it just coincidence? She, too, had ties with Morocco.
“He also told me that someone had gotten you false papers.”
I had said “someone” because I didn’t really know the name of the man with the moon face that the others called Georges, or whether that was his given name, a pseudonym, or his family name.
“Oh, no, nothing like that, no false papers . . . Do you mean Rochard? The one who’s usually in the hotel lobby?”
“The one they call Georges . . .”
“That’s him,” she said. “Rochard . . . He often goes to Morocco . . . He has a hotel in Casablanca . . . And since I was born there, he was able to get me temporary papers . . . While waiting for the real ones to be ready . . .”
We did not take Rue de Rennes. Perhaps the thought of heading to Montparnasse down that wide, mournful street and returning to the Unic Hôtel made her apprehensive, too. We wa
lked toward the Seine.
“Aghamouri told me you needed false papers because you’d gotten involved in an ugly incident . . .”
We had arrived in front of the École des Beaux-Arts. Students were gathered on the sidewalk, celebrating something. Some were clutching musical instruments; others were dressed up as various characters—musketeers, jailbirds—or were simply bare-chested, with different-colored stripes painted on their skin like Indians.
“He used the words ‘ugly incident’?”
She was staring at me, frowning. She seemed not to understand. The others, around us, whooped and played their instruments. I was sorry I had spoken those words: false papers, ugly incident. And to think that we could have been like those nice students who were blocking our path . . . They invited us to their gala later that night. The Bal des Quat’z’Arts. We had a hard time extricating ourselves, but finally their voices and music grew fainter behind us.
“Aghamouri even wanted me to get back the card with his wife’s name that he’d given you . . .”
She burst out laughing, and I couldn’t tell if her laughter was natural or forced.
“And to top it off, he told you I got myself involved in an ugly incident? And you believed all that, Jean?”
We walked along the quays, and I was relieved that we were there rather than on dismal, stifling Rue de Rennes. At least there was space and I could breathe. And very little traffic. And silence. We could hear the sound of our footsteps.
“He’s talking nonsense . . . He’s the one who got involved in an ugly incident . . . Didn’t he tell you?”
“No.”
None of this was important. The only thing that mattered was that we were strolling along the quays without asking anyone’s permission and without leaving anything behind. And we could just as easily cross over the Seine and lose ourselves in other neighborhoods, and even leave Paris for other cities and another life.
“They’re using him to lure someone into a trap, a Moroccan who often comes to Paris . . . He’s not completely on board, but he got himself caught up in it . . . He can’t refuse them anything . . .” I was barely listening to what she said. For me, it was enough to be with her on the quays and hear the sound of her voice. I wasn’t really interested in those bit players from the Unic Hôtel: Chastagnier, Marciano, Duwelz, the one they called Georges but who called himself Rochard, those individuals whose names I force myself to repeat so that they don’t fade from my memory altogether.
“And what about you?” I asked. “Are you obliged to keep seeing those people?”
“Not at all . . . It was Aghamouri who introduced us. I have nothing to do with them.”
“Not even with Rochard?”
It had been an effort to ask that question. I was as indifferent to that Rochard, whom they called Georges, as I was to the others.
“I just asked him for a small favor . . . That’s all.”
“And is your name still Dannie on your false papers?”
“Don’t make fun of me, Jean.”
She had taken my arm and we crossed over the Pont Royal. I don’t know why I always felt a burden lift when I crossed the Seine on that bridge, toward the Right Bank.
In the middle of the bridge, she stopped short and said:
“Whether those papers are real or fake, does it really make any difference to us?”
No. No difference at all. Back then, I wasn’t certain of my own identity, so why should she have been any more so? Still today, I have doubts about the authenticity of my birth certificate, and until the very end I’ll be waiting for someone to hand me the long-lost document that shows my real name, my real date of birth, the names of the real parents I never knew.
She leaned forward and whispered in my ear:
“You still ask so many questions . . .”
I think she was wrong. It’s only today, dozens and dozens of years later, that I’m trying to decode the signals that this mysterious correspondent has sent me from the far reaches of the past. At the time, I was content to live day by day, without asking many questions at all. And besides, the ones I asked her—they were few, and not very insistent—she never answered. Except for one evening, between the lines. It was only twenty years later, thanks to the file Langlais had given me, that I learned what “ugly incident” she’d been involved in, as Aghamouri had put it. He had said, “Something serious.” It was serious, all right. There had been a homicide.
Earlier this evening, I was leafing through Langlais’s file and again came across one of those onionskin sheets containing these very precise details: “Two projectiles struck the victim. One of the two projectiles was fired point-blank. The other was fired neither point-blank nor at a short distance . . . The two slugs corresponding to the two spent shells were found . . .” But I don’t have the heart to transcribe the rest. I’ll come back to it later, someday when the weather is clear and the sun and blue sky dissipate the shadows.
We crossed through the Tuileries. I wonder what season it was. Today, as I write these lines, it seems to me it was in January. I see patches of snow in the Carrousel gardens and on the pavement where we walked next to the Tuileries. In front of us, the lampposts under the arcades on Rue de Rivoli are shrouded in a halo of fog. Still, I’m not sure: it could be early autumn. The trees in the Tuileries haven’t shed their leaves. They will lose them soon, but for me autumn does not evoke the end of something. I believe the new year begins in October. Winter. Autumn. The seasons vary and blend together in retrospect, as if memories, rather than being fixed, dead images, lived a life of their own over the years, like a kind of plant life. Yes, the seasons often blend into each other: spring and winter, Indian summer . . . When we reached the arcades, rain was falling very hard, or maybe it was one of those sudden downpours that catch you in summer.
“Do I really look like someone who’d get involved in an ugly incident?”
She leaned her face near mine, as if she wanted me to examine it closely, and looked me squarely in the eye with such a frank gaze . . .
“If I had gotten involved in something sordid, I would tell you.”
I still hear that sentence at night, in hours of insomnia. I had written it down in my black notebook. Still, I must have had my doubts, some vague premonition, to set it down there in black and white. Why didn’t she tell me anything? At most she dropped hints, like that evening as we left the Gare de Lyon, and at the time I hadn’t paid them much attention. Perhaps she was trying not to frighten me off, but if that’s the case, she didn’t know me. I don’t remember which moralist I was reading when I lived on Rue de l’Aude who said that one must always take the people one loves on their own terms, and especially not demand any explanations from them.
“You know,” she said, “pretty soon I’m going to break it off with those losers from the Unic Hôtel.”
Normally so refined in her vocabulary and her diction, every once in a while she came out with a slang word, some of which I didn’t know and took down in my black notebook: calaboose, dirt nap, the heat, flea in his ear. I also found, on a page of the notebook, in parentheses, “those losers from the Unic Hôtel,” and I wonder whether I wasn’t planning at the time to use it as the title of a novel.
“You’re right,” I said. “You can always count on the people who write to you at the post office.”
I had laced those words with a sarcasm that I immediately regretted. But, after all, she was the one who’d started it, by saying “those losers from the Unic Hôtel” in such a mocking tone.
She suddenly looked sad.
“It’s mostly my brother who writes me at the post office . . .”
She had said it very fast, in a hoarse voice that I’d never heard before, and there was so much candor in her avowal that I kicked myself for having doubted the existence of a brother she refused to introduce to me.
Post office. General delivery. In Langlais’s file there was a dirty white sheet of paper that resembled a civil status record. This evening, I
examine it again, hoping it will finally divulge her secret: on the poor-quality photo booth image stapled to the left-hand margin, I recognize Dannie with shorter hair. And yet the form is in the name of one Mireille Sampierry, residing at 23 Rue Blanche, Paris 9th. It is dated the year before we met and bears the heading “Certificate of Authorization to Receive Correspondence and Telegrams General Delivery Without Surcharge.” Even then, it is not for the post office on Rue de la Convention, where I had accompanied her on several occasions, but for “Branch no. 84” at 31 Rue Ballu (9th). To how many general delivery addresses did she have her mail sent? How had this form fallen into the hands of Langlais or members of his squad? Had Dannie left it somewhere? And that name, Mireille Sampierry—is that the name Langlais had questioned me about in his office on the Quai de Gesvres? It’s funny how certain details of your existence, invisible at the time, are revealed to you twenty years later, as when you look at a familiar photograph through a magnifying glass and a face or object that you hadn’t noticed before jumps out at you . . .
The Black Notebook Page 7