The person I had met several weeks earlier, whose name I hesitate to write—even after fifty years, I’m wary of precise details that would allow someone to identify her—had called me very late one night, in that month of June 1965, to tell me there had been an “accident” in the apartment of Martine Hayward, 2 Avenue Rodin, where we had been introduced, and where, every Sunday evening, the motley group that Martine Hayward called “the nighthawks” would gather. She begged me to come.
In the living room of the apartment, on the carpet, lay the body of Ludo F., the shadiest member of that group of “nighthawks.” She had killed him “by accident,” she told me, while holding a gun that she had “found on one of the bookshelves in the library.” She handed me the weapon, which she had put back in its suede case. But what was she doing alone in the apartment that evening with Ludo F.? She would explain everything “as soon as we’re far away from here, in the open air.”
Without switching on the hall light, I took her arm and helped her down the stairs in the dark, preferring not to take the elevator. On the ground floor, light behind the glassed door of the concierge’s lodge. I pulled her toward the street exit and, just as we passed by the lodge, a man came out, small and dark with a brush-cut. He watched us in the dim light as I groped at the street door. It was locked. After a moment—and that moment seemed an eternity—I spotted the button on the wall that released the latch. I heard the click and pulled it open. I performed each movement in slow motion, to make it as precise as possible, and I didn’t take my eyes off the short man with brush-cut hair, as if I were daring him to etch my features in his memory. She grew impatient, and I let her go ahead of me; then, before following her out, I stood still for a few moments in the doorway, my eyes riveted on the concierge. I expected him to come toward me, but he too stood still, watching. Time had stopped. She was about a dozen yards ahead of me and I didn’t know if I could catch up: my steps grew slower, ever slower, and I felt as if I were floating, my slightest movements broken down.
We arrived at Place du Trocadéro. About two in the morning. The cafés were closed. I felt increasingly calm and I breathed more and more normally, without having to make an effort. Where did such tranquility come from? From the silence and limpid air of Place du Trocadéro? That air felt as soft and glacial as on the slopes of the Haute-Savoie. I was certainly under the sway of the book I had been reading the past several days, Dreams and How to Direct Them by Hervey de Saint-Denys, which lay on my bedside table. I felt like I had communicated my calm to her and that she and I were now walking in step. She asked where we were going, exactly. It was much too late to return to Montmartre, to the Hôtel Alsina, or to her place in Saint-Maur-des-Fossés. I spotted a hotel sign at the very beginning of one of the avenues that led away from Place du Trocadéro. But I had kept the revolver in its suede case in one of my jacket pockets. I looked for a sewer in which to drop it. Since I was holding it in my hand, she threw me some worried looks. I tried to reassure her. We were alone in the plaza. And even if, by chance, someone was watching us from a dark window in one of the buildings, it didn’t matter. He couldn’t do anything to us. I had only to redirect the dream, following Hervey de Saint-Denys’s prescriptions, like giving the steering wheel a slight turn. And the car would roll smoothly—one of those American cars from the period, that seemed to glide over the water, in silence.
We skirted the plaza and I ended up shoving the gun in the bottom of a trash can, in front of the maritime museum. Then we turned down the avenue with the small hotel whose sign I had spotted. Hôtel Malakoff. Since then, I’ve had occasion to walk past it and, one evening five years ago, when it was as warm as on that night in June 1965, I stopped at the entrance, thinking I might take a room, perhaps the same one as back then. It would serve as a pretext, I told myself, to flip through the registration cards and see whether my name was still there for the date of June 28, 1965. But did they keep the old registers, which might be checked from time to time by members of the vice squad? That night fifty years ago, given the late hour, only the night watchman was on duty at the reception desk. She stood back, and I was the one who wrote my name, address, and date of birth on the registration card, even though the watchman didn’t ask us for anything, not even an ID. I was sure that Hervey de Saint-Denys, who was so familiar with dreams and how to redirect them, would have approved of my compunction. As I traced the letters—and I wanted to use my best handwriting, with proper upstrokes and downstrokes, but the ballpoint pen didn’t allow it—I felt a soothing calm that I had never experienced before. I even put down my address as 2 Avenue Rodin, where Ludo F. lay stretched out on the carpet, resting in peace.
In the days that followed, the anxiety that had gripped me in that bar on Boulevard Saint-Michel died down. Perhaps it had been caused by the proximity of the courthouse and the police headquarters, which were visible nearby, just across the bridge. I knew that detectives frequented certain cafés in Place Saint-Michel. From then on, we remained in Montmartre; we felt safer there, and ended up wondering whether the events of the other night had really happened.
I have some trepidation about bringing up those days. They are the last and most memorable days of a part of my youth. From then on, nothing would have quite the same coloration. Did the death of Ludo F., a man we barely knew, serve as a slap of reality? Still later after that event, I was often jolted awake by gunshots and, after a moment, I realized those gunshots hadn’t been fired in real life, but in my dreams. Every day, upon leaving the Hôtel Alsina, I went to buy the newspapers in a small shop on Rue Caulaincourt—France-Soir, L’Aurore, the ones that carried human interest stories—and read them in secret, so as not to alarm her. Nothing about Ludo F. Evidently he was of no interest to anyone. Or else the people in his circle had managed to cover up his death. No doubt to avoid getting mixed up in it themselves. A little farther up Rue Caulaincourt, at the sidewalk of the café Le Rêve, I wrote in the margins of one of those newspapers the names of the people I remembered from those Sunday evening “gatherings,” where I had met her.
And today, fifty years later, I can’t help, once more, writing on this blank sheet some of those names. Martine and Philippe Hayward, Jean Terrail, Andrée Karvé, Guy Lavigne, Roger Favart and his wife, who had freckles and gray eyes . . . others . . .
Not one of them has been in touch these last fifty years. I must have been invisible to them at the time. Or else, quite simply, we live at the mercy of certain silences.
June. July 1965. The days passed, that summer in Montmartre, all of them the same, with their late mornings and sunny afternoons. You had only to let yourself glide into their tranquil current and float on your back. We would end up forgetting all about the dead man, about whom she didn’t seem to know much, except that she had met him when she worked in a perfume shop on Rue de Ponthieu. He had come in to talk to her, and she had run into him again in the café next door, where she usually ordered a sandwich for lunch. A few times, he had brought her to those Sunday evening gatherings that Martine Hayward hosted on Avenue Rodin, where she and I had met. That was all of it. And what had happened there, the other night, was an “accident.” And she would say no more about it.
When I think about that summer, it feels as though it’s become detached from the rest of my life. A parenthesis, or rather, an ellipsis.
Several years after that, I was living in Montmartre, at 9 Rue de l’Orient, with the woman I loved. The neighborhood was not the same. Neither was I. We had both regained our innocence. One afternoon, I stopped in front of the Hôtel Alsina, which had been broken up into apartments. The Montmartre of summer 1965, as I thought I envisioned it in memory, suddenly seemed to me an imaginary Montmartre. And I no longer had anything to fear.
We rarely crossed the southernmost boundary, defined by the median strip of Boulevard de Clichy. We kept to a fairly narrow sector, through which rose Rue Caulaincourt. That month of July, we were the only ones at the sidewalk tables of Le Rêve; and in the afternoons, a
bit farther north, we were also alone in the half-light of the San Cristobal, halfway up the stairway at the Lamarck-Caulaincourt metro stop. Our actions were always the same, in the same places, at the same hours, and under the same sun. I remember empty streets on sweltering days. And yet, a menace hung in the air. The body on the carpet, in the apartment that we had left without turning off the lamps . . . The windows would remain lit in broad daylight, like an alarm signal. I tried to understand why I had stood there so long, motionless in the presence of the concierge. And what a strange idea to have written, on the registration card at the Hôtel Malakoff, my name and the address of the apartment, 2 Avenue Rodin . . . They’d notice that a “homicide” had been committed that same night at that same address. What kind of vertigo had come over me as I was filling out the card? Or was it that the book by Hervey de Saint-Denys, which I’d been reading when she called and begged me to come, had muddled my thoughts? I was convinced it was all a bad dream. I was in no danger. I could “direct” that dream as I pleased and, if I so desired, could wake myself up at any moment.
Early one afternoon, we were walking up the slope of Rue Caulaincourt, empty in the sunlight, and it felt as if we were the only inhabitants of Montmartre. I told her, to reassure myself, that we were in a little port on the Mediterranean at siesta time. Nobody at the San Cristobal. We sat down at a table near the tinted windows that left the room in semidarkness. It was cool, like at the bottom of an aquarium. “It’s a bad dream. Just a bad dream . . .” I hardly realized I was saying this aloud. The body of Ludo F. on the carpet and the lights we left on in the apartment . . . She laid her hand on mine. “Don’t think about it,” she said in a murmur. Until that moment, I’d been under the impression that she didn’t want to think about it, and in the early days I didn’t dare tell her I read the newspapers every morning, dreading to find a notice with Ludo F.’s name printed in it. But she shared my fears. We didn’t need to say it to each other, we had only to exchange a glance. The evening, for instance, when we came home to Avenue Junot, to the Hôtel Alsina, as we were taking the elevator. It was an elevator in light-colored wood with two glassed swinging doors, as they still had back then. It rose so slowly that it threatened to stop between floors. I was afraid a policeman would be waiting for us at the door to our room, while another had taken up position downstairs, at the reception desk. They were the same ones who frequented the cafés on Place Saint-Michel. I had been able to identify them by overhearing bits of their conversations. I was the one they were after, since they knew my name. She had nothing to worry about. I wanted to tell her this, right there in the elevator, but we had arrived at our floor. No one at the door. Or in the room. It would be for another time. Once again I had managed, at the last moment, to redirect the dream, following the prescriptions of Hervey de Saint-Denys.
There were two restaurants we went to in the evening: one on the corner of Rue Constance and Rue Joseph-de-Maistre, the other at the end of Rue Caulaincourt, at the foot of the stairway. There were a lot of people in both, which contrasted with the empty streets in daytime. We passed unnoticed amid those crowds, and the hubbub of their conversations protected us. Customers came in until midnight, and they set up tables on the sidewalk. We stayed as late as possible, among all those diners who seemed like holiday-makers. After all, we too were on holiday. At around one in the morning, when it was time to return to the Hôtel Alsina, our eyes met. We would have to walk up deserted Avenue Junot and enter the hotel without knowing who might be at the reception desk. At that hour, we avoided taking the elevator. We didn’t feel very reassured at first, standing in the silence of the room. I stayed behind the door, listening for the sound of footsteps in the hallway. In short, it was when there were a lot of people around, in the evening, in the two restaurants, that we felt most at ease, like just two more vacationers who had spent the day on the beach at Pampelonne. We could even talk about the delicate subject that preoccupied us both. Our voices were lost in the din of other voices, and we carefully avoided precise terms, merely alluded to things, so that those at the next table wouldn’t understand even if they were eavesdropping. We left out certain words, spoke in ellipses. I would have liked her to give me further information about Ludo F., for I was sure she knew more about him than she let on. That first meeting in the perfume shop on Rue de Ponthieu did not seem entirely consistent with the truth. Some details had been left out, I was sure of it. But I could sense her reluctance to answer. What worried me was that they might establish a connection between her and the one we called “the dead man.” Was there any tangible proof that she had known “the dead man”? A letter? Her name and address in his little black book? What would the others say if they were interrogated about her and her relations with “the dead man”? To each of my questions, she merely shrugged. She didn’t seem on very close terms with the others who attended the Sunday evening gatherings at 2 Avenue Rodin, at Martine Hayward’s. Whenever I mentioned a name—Andrée Karvé, Guy Lavigne, Roger Favart and his wife, Vincent Berlen, Marion Le Phat-Vinh, those few names I had scribbled in the margins of a newspaper and that I wrest one final time from oblivion—she shook her head. Besides, she said, none of those people knew anything about her and couldn’t testify against her. She leaned toward me as if she wanted to add something under her breath, but it was a needless precaution: our neighbors were talking loudly and, at that same instant, the voice of the guitarist who came by the restaurant on Rue Caulaincourt at the same time each evening to play a Neapolitan song by Roberto Murolo, “Anema e core,” added to the noise of the conversations. She whispered, “You shouldn’t have used your real name on the hotel register.”
I’m trying to recall my state of mind at that moment. The next day, alone in the bar on Boulevard Saint-Michel, I had been gripped by panic, but it hadn’t lasted long. After hitting bottom, I rebounded to the surface. I told myself: This will be the start of a new life for me. And the one I had lived up until then seemed like a tangled dream from which I had just awoken. I suddenly understood the meaning of the expression “the future lies before you.” Yes, I ended up convincing myself that, from the vantage point of the future, I had nothing more to fear, and that from then on I was inoculated by a vaccine or protected by a diplomatic passport.
“I’m not in danger anymore,” I told her. “Not anymore.” And my tone must have been so emphatic that the diner closest to us, a blond of about forty, who could easily have been one of the detectives I had spotted in the cafés on Place Saint-Michel, looked over at me. I held his gaze and smiled.
One afternoon, she wanted to go collect some “things” at her place, in Saint-Maur. It was the only day that summer on which we left Montmartre. We waited for the train on the platform at Bastille.
“You don’t think it’s too dangerous to go there, do you?” she asked. “They might have found my address.”
At that moment, I was feeling no particular concern.
“They haven’t identified you. They couldn’t possibly have the address of an unknown person.”
She nodded, as if what I had just said struck her as an incontrovertible truth. She repeated the word “unknown” several times, as if to persuade herself that she was out of danger and that she would forever remain an unknown person.
We were alone in the train compartment. A weekday, an off-peak hour of the afternoon, in midsummer. The night we had met in Martine Hayward’s apartment, we had walked at around two in the morning up to Place de l’Alma. She had hailed a taxi to go back to Saint-Maur, and she had made a date to see me there the next day, writing her address on a scrap of paper: 35 Avenue du Nord. And the next day, I had found myself on the same train, at the same hour of the afternoon, along the same route as now: Bastille. Saint-Mandé. Bois de Vincennes. Nogent-sur-Marne. Saint-Maur.
We followed Avenue du Nord, lined with trees whose branches formed a vault. It was empty that afternoon, like the streets of Montmartre. Dapples of sunlight and shadows of the branches on the sidewalk and pavement
. The first time I’d come here, two weeks earlier, she had been waiting for me in front of her house. We had walked all the way to La Varenne-Saint-Hilaire and the sidewalk tables of a hotel on the banks of the Marne, called the Petit Ritz.
This time, she hesitated a moment before opening the street door and threw me a worried glance. She was feeling the same momentary apprehension as had seized us that night in Montmartre, when we returned to the Hôtel Alsina. A neglected lawn. Grass had invaded the path that sloped down to the door of the house. The lawn formed a kind of valley and the house rose from it partway down the hill, so that at first it was hard to distinguish the ground floor. This house occupied a precarious position and seemed at the mercy of a landslide. It looked like a cross between a private cottage and a suburban two-story.
She told me to wait downstairs while she got her things together. A large room. The only piece of furniture was a couch. The windows looked out, to one side, on the sloping lawn that blocked the horizon, and to the other, on a kind of waste ground at the bottom of that slope. It really gave the sense that the house was in a delicate balance and that it might tip over at any moment. And besides, the silence was so complete that after fifteen minutes I was afraid she had run out on me—just as I myself had often done with the words, “Wait here, I’ll be right back,” when walking past a building with a rear exit, like the one on Place Saint-Michel where you could escape via Rue de l’Hirondelle, or at 1 Rue Lord-Byron, which led you through a maze of hallways and elevators to Avenue des Champs-Elysées.
Sleep of Memory Page 5