They hadn't put the lights on in the salon, because of the curfew. They had stood for a few moments at one of the French windows, watching the great patch of the Arc de Triomphe, which was darker than the night, and the Place rendered phosphorescent by the snow.
•
"Were you asleep?"
I hadn't heard him come into the room; he had an oil lamp in his hand. Night had fallen, and I was lying on the bed. He put the lamp down on the bedside table.
"Are you going to move into the flat right away?"
"I don't know yet."
"I'll give you a pair of sheets, if you like."
The lamp cast shadows on the walls, and l could have imagined that my dream was continuing if I had been alone. But this man's presence seemed very real. And his voice was very clearly audible. I got up.
"You already have some blankets …"
He pointed to the tartan rugs on the beds.
"Did they belong to Monsieur Rigaud?" I asked. "Certainly. They're the only things that were left here, apart from the beds and the wardrobe."
"Then he lived here with a woman?"
"Yes. I remember that they were living here when there was the first air raid over Paris … Neither of them wanted to go down to the cellar …"
He came and leant out of the window by my side. The Boulevard Soult was deserted, and there was a breeze.
"You'll have the telephone at the beginning of next week … Luckily the water hasn't been cut off, and I've had the shower in the kitchen repaired."
"Do you look after the flat yourself?"
"Yes. I rent it out from time to time, to make a bit of pocket money."
He took a long puff on his cigarette.
"What if Monsieur Rigaud came back?" I asked.
He contemplated the boulevard below with a thoughtful air.
"After the war, I believe they lived in the Midi … They didn't often come to Paris … And then, she must have left him … He was on his own … For maybe ten years I still saw him from time to time. He used to stay here for a while … He came to collect his mail … And then I didn't see him any more … And I don't think he'll come back."
The grave tone in which he said these last words surprised me. He was staring at a spot below, on the other side of the boulevard.
"People don't come back any more. Haven't you noticed that, Monsieur?"
"I have."
I wanted to ask him what he meant. But I thought better of it.
"By the way, tell me whether you need some sheets?" "I'm not going to spend the night here yet. All my things are at the Dodds Hotel."
"If you're looking for someone for your move tomorrow, we're here, me and my friend at the garage."
"I have hardly any luggage."
"The shower works well, but there's no soap. I can bring you some up later on. And even some toothpaste …"
"No, I'll spend another night at the hotel …"
"As you wish, Monsieur. I must give you the key."
He took a little yellow key out of his trouser pocket and handed it to me.
"Don't lose it."
Was it the same key that Ingrid and Rigaud had used, long ago?
"I'll leave you, now. I'm on duty at the filling station to help my friend out. You'll find me there …"
He shook my hand briskly.
"I'll leave you the oil lamp. Don't bother to see me out. I know my way in the dark."
He shut the door gently behind him. I leaned out of the window. I saw him leave the building and slowly pad his way to the service station. I had noticed earlier that he was wearing slippers. His white shirt and beige trousers added a holiday note to the night.
He had joined the Kabyle in the blue dungarees and they were sitting on chairs by the petrol pump. And they must have been smoking peacefully. I too was smoking. I had put out the oil lamp, and the glowing red tip of my cigarette was reflected in the mirror.
There would still be some more beautiful evenings like these, when people would put their chairs out on the pavement to get some fresh air. It was up to me to take advantage of this respite before the first leaves began to fall.
•
It was at the same time of year, one evening at the end of July, that I met Ingrid for the last time. I had gone with Cavanaugh to the Gare des Invalides. He was flying to Brazil, where I was to join him a month later. We were just starting out as professional explorers, and I could never have been able to foresee that one day I would pretend to leave for the same country and then come and take refuge in an hotel in the twelfth arrondissement.
He got into the Orly coach and I found myself alone, not knowing very well what to do with my evening. Annette was spending a few days in Copenhagen with her parents. At that time we were living in a room in the big house that belonged to the Explorers' Club, in Montmartre. I didn't feel like going back there immediately, as it was still light.
I walked at random in a district I hardly knew. I'm shutting my eyes and trying to reconstruct my itinerary. I crossed the Esplanade, walked round the Invalides and came to a zone which, looking back over the years, now seems to me even more deserted than the Boulevard Soult did last Sunday. Wide, shady avenues. The rays of the setting sun lingering on the tops of the buildings.
Someone was walking about ten metres in front of me. There was no one else on the pavement in that avenue running along the side of the École Militaire. Its walls gave the district the appearance of a very distant, very ancient garrison town through which that woman was walking hesitantly, as if she was drunk …
I finally caught her up, and cast a furtive sideways glance at her. I recognized her at once. It was just three years since I had met them for the first time in the Midi, her and Rigaud … She took not the slightest notice of me. She went on walking, with an absent look, an uncertain gait, and I wondered whether she actually knew where she was going. She must have got lost in that district, along the rectangular avenues which all look alike, and be vainly trying to find some point of reference, a taxi, or a métro station.
I went up closer to her, but she still hadn't noticed that I was there. We walked side by side for a few moments, but I didn't dare speak to her. Finally she turned her head in my direction.
"I believe we know one another," I said.
I felt that she was trying to pull herself together. It must have taken the same kind of effort that you need to force yourself to speak clearly to someone when the phone has just woken you up.
"We know one another?"
She frowned, and contemplated me with her grey eyes.
"You gave me a lift on the Saint-Raphaël road … I was hitch-hiking …"
"The Saint-Raphaël road …?"
It was as if she was gradually coming up to the surface from the depths.
"Ah yes … I remember …"
"You took me to your villa near Pampelonne beach."
I had the impression that I was helping her to get her bearings. She smiled faintly.
"Ah yes … It wasn't so very long ago …"
"Three years."
"Three years … I'd have thought it was less …"
We were standing still, in the middle of the pavement, facing each other. I was trying to think of something to say to keep her with me. She was going to continue on her way after a few conventional remarks. It was she who broke the silence:
"And you stay in Paris in July? Aren't you going on holiday?"
"No."
"Don't you hitch any more?"
An ironic expression appeared briefly in her eyes.
"If you were hitching here, you wouldn't be likely to find many offers …"
She pointed to the avenue in front of us.
"It's the desert …"I must have been the first person she had spoken to for several days. And it seems to me, twenty years on, that she was in the same situation as I am this evening, in the Boulevard Soult.
"You might be able to help me to cross this desert," she said. She smiled at me, and walked mo
re steadily than before. "How's your husband?"
The moment I said it, this phrase seemed absurd to me. "He's abroad …"
She had replied abruptly, and I understood that I wasn't to broach the subject again.
"I've left the Midi … I've been living in this district for several months …"
She raised her face to me, and I read anxiety in her grey eyes. And then kindness, and curiosity about me.
"And you? Do you know this district?"
"Not very well."
"Then we're in the same situation."
"Do you live quite near here?"
"Yes. In a big office block, on the top floor … I have a beautiful view, but there's too much silence in the flat …" I said nothing. Night was falling.
"I'm keeping you …" she said. "You must have something to do …?"
"No."
"I'd invite you to have dinner at the flat, but there's nothing to eat."
She hesitated. She frowned.
"We might perhaps try to find a café or a restaurant open …"
And she looked straight ahead of her at the deserted avenue and the lines of trees, as far as the eye could see, whose foliage had taken on a sombre hue, just after the sun had set.
•
Many years later, Cavanaugh rented a minute flat in that district, and he still lives there. He may perhaps be there tonight with Annette. It must be very hot in his two little rooms cluttered with African and Oceanian masks, and Annette will have gone out for a moment to get some fresh air. She'll be walking down the Avenue Duquesne. It's not impossible that she's thinking of me and feeling tempted to come and join me at the Porte Dorée, where Ingrid and Rigaud lived during the air raids. That's the way we are always wandering in the same places at different times and, in spite of the gap between the years, we finally meet.
A restaurant was open in the A venue de Lowendal, about a hundred metres from where Cavanaugh would later live. I have often passed this restaurant since, and even though because of Cavanaugh I'm now familiar with the district, every time I have had the same feeling that I had with Ingrid that evening, that I was in a different town from Paris, but a town whose name one could not know.
•
"That'll do nicely …"
She pointed to one of the tables with an authoritarian gesture which surprised me. I remembered the hesitant way she'd been walking when I had seen her alone, from behind, on the pavement.
An hotel restaurant. A group of Japanese were waiting, rigid, in the middle of the reception hall, with their luggage. The decor of the dining room was resolutely modern: black-lacquered walls, glass tables, leather banquettes, spotlights on the ceiling. We were facing each other and, behind the banquette she was sitting on, phosphorescent fish were swimming round in a big aquarium.
She studied the menu.
"You must eat properly … You need to keep up your strength at your age …"
"So do you," I said.
"No … I'm not hungry."
She ordered an hors-d'oeuvre and a main dish for me, and for herself a green salad.
"Are you going to have something to drink?" she asked. "No."
"Don't you drink alcohol? May I have some?"
She gave me an anxious look, as if I was going to refuse my permission.
"You may," I said.
She raised her head to the maître d'hôtel.
"Well then … A beer …"
It was as if she had suddenly decided to do something shameful or forbidden.
"It stops me drinking whisky, or other kinds of alcohol … I just drink a little beer …"
She forced herself to smile. She seemed to feel ill at ease with me.
"I don't know what you think," she said, "but I've always thought it wasn't a woman's drink …"
This time her gaze expressed more than anxiety; distress, rather. And I was so surprised that I couldn't manage to find a comforting word. I finally said:
"I believe you're wrong … I know a lot of women who drink beer …"
"Really? You know a lot?"
Her smile and her ironic look reassured me: earlier, when I had taken her by surprise on the pavement, I had wondered whether she was indeed the same person as she had been on the Côte d'Azur. No, she hadn't really changed in three years.
"Tell me what you do. Is it interesting?" she said.
Her salad and beer had been brought. She drank a few mouthfuls, but left the salad untouched. I imagined her alone in her flat, sitting in front of the same salad and the same glass of beer, in the depths of that silence which I still had no experience of at the time, but which is so familiar to me today.
•
I didn't tell her much of the "interesting" things I was doing. A brief reference to my vocation as an explorer and to my imminent departure for Brazil. She too, she disclosed, had spent a few days in Rio de Janeiro. In those days, she must have been my age. She was living in the United States.
I asked her some questions, and I still wonder why she answered them in such detail. I had the definite impression that she felt no kind of self-satisfaction, and that she didn't particularly enjoy talking about herself. She guessed that I was interested, though, and, as she told me several times, "she didn't want me to have a wasted evening."
It does also happen that one evening, because of someone's attentive gaze, you feel a need to communicate to him not your experience, but quite simply some of the various derails connected by an invisible thread, a thread which is in danger of breaking and which is called the course of a life.
•
While she was speaking, the fish behind her occasionally pressed their heads against the glass sides of the aquarium. Then they went on tirelessly swimming round in the blue water lit up by a little projector. They had switched off the ceiling spots, to intimate to us that it was very late, and time for us to leave. Only the aquarium light was still on.
At about one in the morning, on the pavement in the avenue, the silence was so profound that you could hear the leaves on the trees rustling with their nocturnal breathing. She took my arm:
"You can see me home …"
This time, she was looking for support. It was no longer as it had been that evening when we were walking down the Rue de la Citadelle when, for the first time in my life, I had had the feeling of being under someone's protection. And yet, after a few steps, once again it was she who was guiding me.
We came to a building with big, dark glass windows. Only two, on the top floor, were lit up.
"I always leave the light on," she said. "It's more cheerful."
She smiled. She was relaxed. But perhaps she was only pretending to take things lightly, to cheer me up. This part of the avenue was not planted with trees, but lined with buildings similar to the one she lived in, with all their windows dark. When I used to go to visit Cavanaugh, I couldn't prevent myself from passing that way. I was no longer in Paris, and that avenue led nowhere. Or rather, it was a transit zone to the unknown.
"I must give you my phone number …" She searched her bag, but couldn't find a pen.
"You can tell it to me … I shall remember it …"
I wrote down the number when I was back in Montmartre, in my room at the Explorers' Club. The following days I tried to phone her, several times. There was no answer. In the end I thought I must have remembered the wrong number.
Under the arch over the gate – a wrought-iron gate with opaque glass – she turned round and rested her grey eyes on me. She raised her arm gently and ran the tips of her fingers over my temple and cheek, as if she was for one last time seeking a contact. Then she lowered her arm and the gate closed behind her. That arm suddenly falling and the metallic clank of the gate shutting made me understand that from one moment to another one can lose heart.
I TOOK THE OIL LAMP from the bedside table and once again explored the inside of the wardrobe. Nothing. I picked up the envelope addressed to Rigaud, 3, Rue de Tilsitt, which had been forwarded to 20, Boulevard Soult, an
d put it in my pocket. Then, lamp in hand, I went down the corridor and into the other bedroom.
I opened the metal shutters, and had great difficulty in folding them back because they had rusted. Then I had no more need of the lamplight: a street lamp just opposite the window filled the room with a white light.
On the left was a small cupboard. The top shelf was empty. Against the wall was a pair of old-fashioned skis. At the bottom of the cupboard, a cheap suitcase. It contained a pair of ski boots and a page torn out of a magazine on which I could make out a few photos. I held the piece of glossy paper up to the light coming from the street lamp and read the text that accompanied the photos:
MEGÈVE HAS NOT BEEN DESERTED. FOR SOME YOUNG MEN A BREAK FROM THEIR ARMY LIFE, FOR OTHERS THEIR LAST HOLIDAYS BEFORE JOINING THE FORCES.
I recognized the twenty-year-old Rigaud in two of the photos. One showed him at the top of a piste, leaning on his ski sticks, the other, on the balcony of a chalet with a woman and a man who was wearing big sunglasses. Underneath the second photo was written: Madame Édouard Bourdet, P. Rigaud, university ski champion 1939, and Andy Embiricos. Moustaches had been pencilled-in on Madame Édouard Bourdet's face, and I was certain that this was the work of Rigaud himself.
I imagined that when he moved from the Rue de Tilsitt to the Boulevard Soult he had taken the skis, the boots and the page from the glossy magazine that dated from the phoney war. One evening, in this room where he had taken refuge with Ingrid – the evening of the first air raid over Paris, but neither of them went down to the cellar – he must have contemplated these accessories with stupefaction, as relics of a previous life – that of a dutiful young man. The world he had grown up in and belonged to until he was twenty must have seemed so far-off and so absurd that while waiting for the end of the raid, he had absent-mindedly drawn moustaches on Madame Bourdet.
•
Before shutting the flat door, I checked to see whether the yellow key the concierge had given me was still in my pocket. Then I went down the stairs in semi-darkness, because I hadn't been able to find the light switch.
Down on the boulevard, the night was a little cooler than usual. Outside the service station, the Kabyle in the blue dungarees was sitting on a chair and smoking. He waved to me.
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