Paris Nocturne (11 page)

‘They thought you had taken toxic substances.'

She said these last words very carefully. I don't believe I had ever heard anyone speak to me so calmly, with such
a soft voice. Listening to her produced the same soothing effect as reading
The Wonders of the Heavens
. I couldn't take my eyes off the large graze across her forehead, just above her eyebrows. Her clear eyes, her shoulder-length chestnut hair, the upturned collar of her coat…Because of the late hour and the darkness around us, she looked just as she had in the police van the other night.

She ran her index finger along the graze above her eyebrows and, again, she gave her wry smile.

‘For a first meeting,' she said, ‘it was a bit of a shock.'

She stared straight into my eyes in silence, as if she was trying to read my thoughts—I had never before experienced such attentiveness.

‘I thought you purposely chose that moment to cross Place des Pyramides…'

That's not what I thought. I had always resisted the pull of vertigo. I would never have been capable of throwing myself into the void from the top of a bridge or from a window. Or even under a car, as she seemed to believe. For me, at the last moment, life was always the stronger force.

‘I don't think you were quite yourself…'

She glanced again at my sheepskin jacket and the split moccasin on my left foot. I had tried my best to reapply the
bandage, but I mustn't have looked very prepossessing. I apologised for my appearance. Yes, I was quite keen to look human again.

She said in a quiet voice, ‘All you have to do is change your sheepskin jacket. And perhaps your shoes, too.'

I felt more and more at ease. I confessed that I had spent the last few weeks trying to find her. It wasn't easy with a street name but no number. So I had looked all over the neighbourhood for her sea-green Fiat.

‘Sea-green?'

She seemed intrigued by this adjective, but that was how it had been described on the report that Solière made me sign. A report? She wasn't aware of any report. It was still in the inside pocket of my sheepskin jacket, so I showed it to her. She read it, frowning.

‘I'm not surprised. He's always been wary.'

‘He also gave me some money.'

‘He's a generous man,' she said.

I wanted to know what the link was between her and Solière. ‘Do you live on Square de l'Alboni?'

‘No. It's the address of one of Monsieur Solière's offices.'

Whenever she said his name, it was inflected with a certain respect.

‘And Avenue Albert-de-Mun?' To my great shame, I sounded like a cop who throws in an unexpected question to unnerve a suspect.

‘It's one of Monsieur Solière's apartments.' She wasn't fazed in the slightest. ‘How do you know about this address?' she asked.

I told her that I had met Solière the other day in a café and that he had pretended not to recognise me.

‘He's very distrustful, you know. He always thinks people are after him. He has a lot of lawyers.'

‘He's your boss?'

I immediately regretted asking the question.

‘I've worked for him for two years.' She answered calmly, as if it were an entirely ordinary question. And it was, surely. Why search for mystery where there is none?

‘That night, I was meeting Monsieur Solière at Place des Pyramides in the lobby of the Hôtel Régina. And then, just as I arrived, we had our…accident.' She hesitated before saying the word. She looked at my left hand. When the car knocked me down, I grazed the back of it. But it was almost healed. I hadn't put a dressing on it.

‘Then if I've understood correctly, Monsieur Solière arrived at the right moment?'

He had walked towards us slowly that night, in his dark coat. I even wonder if he had a cigarette at the corner of his mouth. And this girl had a meeting with him in the lobby of the hotel…I also had meetings with my father in hotel lobbies, which all looked the same and where the marble, the chandeliers, the wood engravings and the sofas were all fake. It's the same precarious situation as being in a railway station waiting room between catching two trains, or in a police station before an interrogation.

‘It seems he's no choirboy,' I said.

‘Who?'

‘Solière.'

For the first time, she seemed embarrassed.

‘What does he do for a living?'

‘Business.'

She lowered her head as if I might be shocked by this response.

‘And you're his secretary?'

‘Sort of, I suppose…But only part-time.'

There under the light of the wall lamp, she seemed younger than in the police van. It must have been the fur coat that made her seem older the other night. And besides, after the shock, I didn't have my wits about me.
That night, I thought she was blonde.

‘And the work isn't too complicated?'

I really wanted to know everything. Time was running out. At that hour, they were perhaps about to close the restaurant.

‘When I came to Paris, I studied nursing,' she said, and started speaking more and more quickly as if she was in a hurry to explain it all to me. ‘And then I started work… home nursing…I met Monsieur Solière…'

I wasn't listening anymore. I asked her how old she was. Twenty-six. So she was a few years older than me. But it was unlikely that she was the woman from Fossombronne-la-Forêt. I tried to remember the face of the woman or girl who had climbed into the van and held my hand.

‘During my childhood, I had an accident that was similar to the one the other night. I was leaving school…'

As I told her the story, I spoke more and more quickly, too, the words tumbling out. We were like two people allowed a few minutes together in the visiting room of a prison and who wouldn't have enough time to tell each other everything.

‘I thought the girl in the van was you.'

She burst out laughing.

‘But that's impossible. I was twelve years old then.'

An entire episode of my life, the face of someone who must have loved me, a house, all of it tipped into oblivion, into the unknown, forever.

‘A place called Fossombronne-la-Forêt…A Dr Divoire.' I thought I had said it under my breath, to myself.

‘I know that name,' she said. ‘It's in Sologne. I was born around there.'

I took the Michelin map of the Loir-et-Cher from the pocket of my sheepskin jacket, where I had kept it for several days. I unfolded it on the tablecloth. She seemed apprehensive.

‘Where were you born?' I asked.

‘La Versanne.'

I leaned over the map. The light from the wall lamp wasn't strong enough for me to make out all the names of the villages in such tiny print.

She craned her neck to look, too. Our foreheads were almost touching.

‘Try to find Blois,' she said. ‘Slightly to the right you have Chambord. Below there's the Boulogne forest. And Bracieux…and, to the right, La Versanne.'

It was easy to find my bearings with the forest marked
in green. There it was. I'd found La Versanne.

‘Do you think it's far from Fossombronne?'

‘About twenty kilometres.'

The first time I'd discovered it on the map, I should have underlined the name Fossombronne-la-Forêt in red ink. Now I'd lost it.

‘It's on the road to Milançay,' she said.

I looked for the road to Milançay. Now I was managing to read the names of the villages: Fontaines-en-Sologne, Montgiron, Marcheval…

‘If you really want to, I could show you around the area one day,' she said, staring at me with a perplexed look.

I leaned over the map again.

‘We'd still have to find the route from La Versanne to Fossombronne.'

I buried myself in the map again, tracing departmental roads, heading from village to village at random: Le Plessis, Tréfontaine, Boizardiaire, La Viorne…At the end of a little winding road, I read:
FOSSOMBRONNE-LA-FORÊT.

‘And what if we went there tonight?'

She thought about it for a moment, as if my suggestion seemed perfectly natural. ‘Not tonight, I'm too tired.'

I said that I was joking, but I wasn't sure. I couldn't tear
my eyes from the names of all the hamlets, forests and little lakes. I wanted to merge with the landscape. Already at that time, I was convinced that a man without a landscape was thoroughly diminished. An invalid of sorts. I had become aware of it when I was very young, in Paris, when my dog died and I didn't know where to bury him. No field. No village. No land of our own. Not even a garden. I folded up the map and stuffed it into my pocket.

‘Do you live with Solière?'

‘Not at all. I just take care of his offices and his apartment when he's away from Paris. He travels a lot for business.'

It was funny; my father used to travel a lot for business as well and, despite all the meetings he arranged with me in increasingly distant hotel lobbies and cafés, I had never understood what line of business he was in. The same as Solière's?

‘Do you come to this bar often?' I asked.

‘No, not often. It's the only place open late in the area.'

I remarked that there weren't many customers, but she told me they came much later at night. A strange clientele, she said. And yet, in my memory, the place seems abandoned. It's as if she and I had broken in that night. There we are opposite each other and I can hear some of that muffled
music played after the curfew hour—music which you can dance to and live a few moments of stolen happiness.

‘Don't you think that after the shock of our first encounter, we should get to know each other better?'

She said this in a soft voice, but with clear, precise enunciation. I had read that in Touraine that they spoke the purest French. But listening to her, I wondered if it wasn't actually in Sologne, around La Versanne and Fossombronne-la-Forêt. She laid her hand on mine, my left hand where the cut was healing without a dressing.

*

Out in the street, a veil had been stripped away. The bonnet of the car was gleaming in the moonlight. I wondered if it was a mirage or the effect of the alcohol I'd drunk. I tapped on the car near the bonnet to make sure I wasn't dreaming.

‘One day I'll have to get all that repaired,' she said, gesturing to the bumper and the damaged mudguard.

I confessed that it was at a garage that I'd been tipped off about her car.

‘You've given yourself a lot of trouble for nothing,' she said. ‘It's been parked in front of my place for the last
three weeks. I live at 2 Square Léon-Guillot in the fifteenth arrondissement.'

So it turned out that we didn't live that far from each other. Porte d'Orléans. Porte de Vanves. With a little luck we might have come across each other there, in that hinterland. That would have simplified things. We were both from the same world.

I sat on the bonnet.

‘Well, if you're going back to the fifteenth, I'd be glad of a lift home…'

But no. She said that she had to sleep at Solière's apartment that night, on Avenue Albert-de-Mun, and stay there for a while so that it wouldn't be empty while he was away. Solière had gone to Geneva and Madrid on business.

‘If I understand correctly, you're employed as a caretaker and night watcher?'

‘Sort of, I suppose.'

She opened the right-hand door for me to get into the car. After all those days and all these nights spent wandering around the neighbourhood, it seemed natural. I was even convinced that I had already lived that moment in a dream.

It was suddenly very cold, a dry cold that added a sharpness and clarity to everything around us: the white light of
the streetlamps, the red traffic lights, the new façades of the buildings. In the silence, I thought I heard the steady footsteps of someone approaching.

She squeezed my wrist, just like the other night in the police van.

‘Are you feeling better?' she asked.

Place du Trocadéro was much more vast and deserted than usual because of the moonlight. Crossing it would take forever, and the slowness felt good. I was sure that, if I looked at the black windows, I would be able to penetrate the darkness of the apartments, as if I could perceive infrared and ultraviolet light. But I didn't have to go to the trouble. I just had to let myself glide down the hill I had walked up the other night with the dog.

‘I also tried to find you,' she said, ‘but they didn't have your address at the clinic…Paris is big…You have to be careful…People like us end up getting lost.'

After the Palais de Chaillot, she turned right and we passed alongside huge buildings, which looked abandoned. I no longer knew which city I was in. It was a city whose inhabitants had just deserted it, but it didn't matter at all. I was no longer alone in the world. The road became steeper as it ran down to the Seine. I recognised Avenue
Albert-de-Mun, the garden around the aquarium and the white façade of the apartment building. She parked in front of the porte-cochère.

‘You should come and see the apartment. It's on the top floor. There's a big terrace and a view over the whole of Paris.'

‘And what if Solière comes back unexpectedly?'

Each time I pronounced this phantom's name, I wanted to laugh. All I had was the memory of a man in a dark coat in the police van, then in the foyer of the clinic, and in the café on the quay. Was it worth finding out more about him? I sensed that he was the same breed as my father and all his cronies I used to see long ago. You'll never know anything about those people. You'd have to consult police reports written about them, but those reports, written in such precise and clear language, all contradicted each other. What was the point? For some time, so many things had been teeming around in my poor head, and the accident had been such a big deal for me…

‘Don't worry. There's no chance of him coming back now. And even if he did, he's not a nasty man, you know…'