I remember that we often strolled in the Bois de Boulogne. It was late in the afternoon, on days when I had to wait for her behind the building on Avenue Victor-Hugo. I will never know why she exited on that side and not through the main entrance, as if she were afraid of running into someone at that time of day. We followed the avenue up to La Muette. As we walked on the path along the lakes, I felt as if a weight had lifted. So did she: she said she’d like it if we could live in a room in one of those rows of buildings bordering the woods. A neutral zone, cut off from everything, among infrequent neighbors whose language we couldn’t understand, so that we wouldn’t have to talk to them or answer their questions. We wouldn’t be accountable to anyone. Eventually we would forget those black holes of Paris: the Unic Hôtel, La Petite-Roquette, the ground floor on the quay with its corpse, all those evil places that made both of us walk on eggshells.
One late afternoon in October, the sky was already dark, and around us wafted a smell of dead leaves, wet earth, and stables. We were walking along the Jardin d’Acclimatation and had arrived at the edge of the Saint-James Pond. We sat on a bench. I was brooding about the manuscript I’d left in the country house. She had told me we could never go back there. It would be dangerous. But she didn’t specify what sort of danger. She had kept the keys to the country house, as she had the ones to the apartment on Avenue Félix-Faure, though she should have given them back a long time ago. I suspected she might have made copies, unbeknownst to the owners. No doubt she was afraid someone would catch us in the house like thieves.
“Don’t fret about it, Jean. We’ll get your manuscript back one of these days.” She added that I was giving myself a lot of worry over nothing. All I had to do was poke through secondhand booksellers’ bins and choose one of those old novels whose few readers were long dead, and which living readers had never heard of. And copy it over. By hand. And say that we had written it.
“What do you think of my idea, Jean?”
I didn’t know what to say. I recalled the opening sentence of my manuscript: “Return I must to a time in my youth when they called me the False Knight of Warwick.” I thought that with the help of my black notebook, I could rewrite and improve those lost pages. So in the end, she was right: it would almost feel as if I were copying them. By hand. That’s what I’m doing today.
She pressed against me and repeated in a murmur, “Don’t fret about it, Jean . . .”
Sometime later, one morning, I found an envelope that someone had slid under the door to my room:
Jean,
I’m leaving, and this time it’s likely we won’t see each other for a long while. I won’t tell you where I’m going because I don’t yet know myself. Wherever it is, you won’t find me. It will be far away—not Paris, in any case. I’m leaving because I don’t want you to get in any trouble on my account . . .
PS: I told you a little white lie that’s been bothering me. I’m not 21, as I said. I’m 24. So you see, soon I’ll be an old lady.
She had copied the letter from a tattered novel that we’d bought one afternoon on the quays. I can still hear her telling me, “Don’t fret about it, Jean . . .” The Bois de Boulogne, the empty avenues, the dark mass of the buildings, a lit window that makes you feel you’ve neglected to turn off the lights in another life, or that someone is still expecting you . . . You must be hiding out in one of those neighborhoods. Under what name? Sooner or later I’ll find the street. But every day the hours grow shorter, and every day I tell myself it will be for another time.
Almost nothing. Like an insect bite that initially strikes you as very slight. At least that is what you tell yourself in a low voice so as to reassure yourself. The telephone had rung at about four o’clock in the afternoon at Jean Daragane’s home, in the room that he called the “study”. He was dozing on the sofa at the far end, shielded from the sunlight. And these ringing sounds, which he had been unaccustomed to hearing for a long time, went on continuously. Why this insistence? Perhaps they had forgotten to ring off at the other end of the line. Finally, he got to his feet and walked over to the area of the room near the windows, where the sun was beating down too strongly.
“I should like to speak to Monsieur Jean Daragane.”
A dreary and threatening voice. That was his first impression.
“Monsieur Daragane? Can you hear me?”
Daragane wanted to hang up. But what was the point? The ringing would start again, without ever stopping. And, short of cutting the telephone cord permanently . . .
“This is he.”
“It’s about your address book, monsieur.”
He had lost it last month on a train that was taking him to the Côte d’Azur. Yes, it could only have been in this train. The address book had probably slipped from his coat pocket just as he was taking out his ticket to hand it to the collector.
“I found an address book with your name on it.”
Written on the grey cover was: IF FOUND RETURN THIS NOTEBOOK TO. And one day, without thinking, Daragane had jotted down his name there, his address and his telephone number.
“I’ll bring it to your home. On whatever day and time would suit you.”
Yes, a dreary and threatening voice, for sure. And even, Daragane thought, the tone of a blackmailer.
“I’d prefer us to meet somewhere else.”
He had made an effort to overcome his uneasiness. But his voice, which he intended to sound detached, suddenly struck him as flat.
“As you wish, monsieur.”
There was a silence.
“That’s a shame. I’m very close to where you live. I should have liked to hand it over to you personally.”
Daragane wondered whether the man was not standing outside the building and whether he would remain there, waiting for him to come out. He had to be got rid of as quickly as possible.
“Let’s see each other tomorrow afternoon,” he said eventually.
“If you like. But it will have to be close to where I work. Near the gare Saint-Lazare.”
He was on the point of hanging up, but he kept his composure.
“Do you know rue de l’Arcade?” the other man asked. “We could meet at a café. At 42 rue de l’Arcade.”
Daragane jotted down the address. He recovered his breath and said:
“Very well, monsieur. At 42 rue de l’Arcade, tomorrow, at five in the afternoon.”
Then he rang off without waiting for the other person to reply. He immediately regretted behaving in such an abrupt way, but he put it down to the heat that had been hanging over Paris for several days, a heat that was unusual for September. It emphasised his loneliness. It forced him to remain shut up in this room until sunset. And then the telephone had not rung for months. As for the mobile, on his desk, he wondered when he had last used it. He scarcely knew how it operated and frequently made mistakes when he pressed the buttons.
If the stranger had not phoned, he would have totally forgotten the loss of this address book. He tried to recall the names that were in it. The week before, he had even wanted to start a new one and had begun to compose a list on a sheet of white paper. After a short while, he had torn it up. None of the names belonged to people who had mattered in his life: he had never needed to write down their addresses and phone numbers. He knew them by heart. In this notebook there were nothing but contacts of a so-called “professional nature”, a few supposedly useful addresses, no more than about thirty names. And among them several that should have been deleted, because they were no longer current. The only thing that had bothered him about the loss of this notebook was that he had written his own name in it, as well as his address. He could, of course, not keep his promise and leave this person waiting vainly at 42 rue de l’Arcade. But then there would always be something unresolved, a threat. At a low ebb on certain solitary afternoons, he had often dreamt that the telephone would ring and that a gentle voice would make a date with him. He remembered the title of a novel he had read: Le Temps des rencontres. Perha
ps that time of meetings was not yet over for him. But the voice he had just heard did not fill him with confidence. Both dreary and threatening, that voice. Yes.
He asked the taxi driver to drop him at the Madeleine. It was not as hot as on other days and it was possible to walk as long as one chose the pavement that was in the shade. He followed the rue de l’Arcade, deserted and silent in the sunshine.
He had not been in this vicinity for ages. He remembered that his mother once acted in a nearby theatre and that his father had an office at the very end of the street, on the left, at 73 boulevard Haussmann. He was astonished that he still remembered the number 73. But all this past had become so translucent with time . . . a mist that dissipated in the sunlight.
The café was on the corner of the street that adjoined boulevard Haussmann. An empty room, a long counter with shelves built above it, as in a self-service store or a former Wimpy. Daragane sat down at one of the tables at the back. Would this stranger turn up for the appointment? Both doors were open, the one that gave onto the street and the one onto the boulevard, because of the heat. On the other side of the road stood the large building at 73 . . . He wondered whether one of the windows of his father’s office had not overlooked that side of the street. Which floor? But these memories drifted away like bubbles of soap or fragments of a dream that vanished on waking. His memory would have been livelier in the café in rue des Mathurins, opposite the theatre, where he used to wait for his mother, or in the close vicinity of the gare Saint-Lazare, an area he had known well in the past. But no. It would not have been. It was no longer the same city.
“Monsieur Jean Daragane?”
He had recognised the voice. A man of about forty was standing in front of him, accompanied by a girl younger than him.
“Gilles Ottolini.”
It was the same voice, dreary and threatening. He gestured towards the girl:
“A friend . . . Chantal Grippay.”
Daragane remained seated on the bench, not moving, and not even offering to shake hands with them. They both sat down opposite him.
“Please forgive us . . . We’re a little late.”
He had adopted a tongue-in-cheek tone, so as to put on a good front no doubt. Yes, it was the same voice with a slight, almost imperceptible, Southern accent that Daragane had not noticed on the telephone the previous evening.
An ivory-coloured skin, dark eyes, an aquiline nose. The face was slender, as angular at the front as it was in profile.
“Here’s your property,” he said to Daragane, in the same tongue-in-cheek tone that seemed to conceal a certain embarrassment.
And he took out the address book from his coat pocket. He placed it on the table, covering it with his hand, his fingers splayed. It was as though he wanted to prevent Daragane from picking it up.
The girl sat back slightly, as though she did not want to draw attention to herself, a brunette of about thirty years old, with mid-length hair. She was wearing a black blouse and black trousers. She glanced anxiously at Daragane. Because of her cheekbones and her slanting eyes, he wondered whether she was not of Vietnamese extraction originally—or Chinese.
“And where did you find this notebook?”
“On the floor, underneath a bench in the cafeteria at the gare de Lyon.”
He handed him the address book. Daragane thrust it into his pocket. He remembered, in fact, that on the day of his departure for the Côte d’Azur he had arrived early at the gare de Lyon and that he had sat down in the cafeteria on the first floor.
“Would you like something to drink?” asked the man called Gilles Ottolini.
Daragane wanted to be rid of them. But he changed his mind.
“A tonic water.”
“Try to catch someone to take the order. I’ll have a coffee,” said Ottolini, turning towards the girl.
She stood up immediately. Clearly, she was used to obeying him.
“It must have been annoying for you to have lost this notebook . . .”
He gave an odd sort of smile which struck Daragane as insolent. But perhaps it was awkwardness on his part or shyness.
“You know,” said Daragane, “I hardly use the telephone anymore.”
The other man looked at him in astonishment. The girl came back to their table and sat down again.
“They’re no longer serving at this hour. They’re about to close.”
It was the first time Daragane heard this girl’s voice, a voice that was husky and that did not have the slight Southern accent of the man sitting next to her. Rather more of a Parisian one, if that still means anything.
“Do you work in the area?” asked Daragane.
“In an advertising agency in rue Pasquier. The Sweerts agency.”
“And you too?”
He had turned towards the girl.
“No,” said Ottolini, without allowing the girl time to reply. “She doesn’t do anything at the moment.” And once again that contorted smile. The girl also gave a flicker of a smile.
Daragane was in a hurry to get away. If he did not do so straight away, would he manage to get rid of them?
“I’ll be frank with you . . .” He was leaning towards Daragane, and his voice was shriller.
Daragane experienced the same feeling as he had the previous day, on the telephone. Yes, this man had the persistence of an insect.
“I took the liberty of leafing through your address book . . . simple curiosity . . .”
The girl had looked away, as if pretending not to hear.
“You’re not angry with me?”
Daragane looked him straight in the eyes. The other man held his gaze.
“Why should I be angry?”
A silence. The man had eventually lowered his gaze. Then, in the same metallic voice:
“There’s someone whose name I found in your address book. I should like you to give me some information about him . . .”
His tone of voice had become more humble.
“Forgive my inquisitiveness . . .”
“Whom does it concern?” asked Daragane reluctantly.
He suddenly felt the need to get to his feet and to step out quickly through the open door onto boulevard Haussmann. And to breathe in the fresh air.
“A certain Guy Torstel.”
He stressed each syllable of the surname and the first name carefully, as if to awaken the other’s dormant memory.
“Who did you say?”
“Guy Torstel.”
Daragane took the address book from his pocket and opened it at the letter T. He read the name, at the very top of the page, but this Guy Torstel meant nothing to him.
“I can’t imagine who this could be.”
“Really?”
The man seemed disappointed.
“There’s a seven-digit phone number,” said Daragane. “It must date back at least thirty years . . .”
He turned over the pages. All the other phone numbers were current ones. With ten digits. And he had only been using this address book for five years.
“This name means nothing to you?”
“No.”
A few years earlier, he would have displayed some of that politeness for which he was renowned. He would have said: “Give me a bit of time to throw some light on the mystery . . .” But the words did not come.
“It’s to do with a news item about which I’ve gathered quite a lot of information,” the man continued. “This name is mentioned. That’s all . . .”
He suddenly seemed to be on the defensive.
“What kind of news item?”
Daragane has asked the question automatically, as though he were rediscovering his former courteous reflexes.
“A very old news item . . . I wanted to write an article about it . . . You know, I used to do some journalism to begin with . . .”
But Daragane’s attention was flagging. He really must get rid of them quickly, otherwise this man was going to tell him his life story.
“I’m sorry,” he told
him. “I’ve forgotten this Torstel . . . At my age, one suffers memory losses . . . I must leave you unfortunately . . .”
He stood up and shook hands with both of them. Ottolini gave him a hard stare, as though Daragane had insulted him and he was ready to respond in a violent way. The girl, for her part, had lowered her gaze.
He walked over towards the wide-open glass door that gave onto boulevard Haussmann, hoping that the man would not block his path. Outside, he breathed in deeply. What a strange idea, this meeting with a stranger, when he himself had not seen anybody for three months and was none the worse for it . . . On the contrary. In his solitude, he had never felt so light-hearted, with strange moments of elation either in the morning or the evening, as though everything were still possible and, as the title of the old film has it, adventure lay at the corner of the street . . . Never, even during the summers of his youth, had life seemed so free of oppression as it had since the beginning of this summer. But in summer, everything is uncertain—a “metaphysical” season, his philosophy teacher, Maurice Caveing, had once told him. It was odd, he remembered the name “Caveing” yet he no longer knew who this Torstel was.
It was still sunny, and a light breeze was cooling the heat. Boulevard Haussmann was deserted at this time of day.
Over the course of the past fifty years, he had often come here, and had done so even during his childhood, when his mother took him to Printemps, the large department store a little further up the boulevard. But this evening, his city seemed unfamiliar to him. He had cast off all the bonds that could still bind him to her, but perhaps it was she who had rejected him.
The Black Notebook Page 11