The Black Notebook (3 page)

It was around two or three in the morning. She told me she often missed the last metro at Luxembourg, and that was why she'd noticed this café, which she called “the 66,” the only one in the area open all night. Sometime after being questioned by Langlais, I was walking, very late, toward the upper end of Boulevard Saint-Michel, and from a distance I saw a police van on the sidewalk, blocking the overly lit window of the 66. They were rounding up customers. Yes, it was just what I had felt standing at the bar with Dannie that night. Dazzled moths caught in the glare, before a police raid. I think I'd even uttered the word “raid” in her ear, and she'd smiled.

In Paris at the time, at night, there were places that were too well lit, that acted as traps, and I did my best to avoid them. When I ended up in one of them, finding myself among odd customers, I was always on the alert, and cast about for the emergency exits. “You're acting like you're in Pigalle,” she said. I was amazed to hear the word “Pigalle” trip so familiarly off her tongue. Outside, we skirted the fence of the Jardin du Luxembourg. And I repeated the word “Pigalle” and burst out laughing. She did too. All around us was silence. Through the fence came the rustling of trees. The Luxembourg metro stop was closed, and we'd have to wait until six o'clock for the first train. Behind us, they had turned off the lights in the 66. We could go home on foot, and with her beside me I was ready to confront the long and sinister Rue de la Santé.

On the way, we tried a shortcut and got lost in the narrow streets around the Val-de-Grâce Hospital. The silence was even deeper, and we could hear the sound of our footsteps. I wondered if we hadn't strayed far outside Paris, to some provincial town: Angers, Vendôme, Saumur, the names of towns I didn't know, whose quiet streets looked like Rue du Val-de-Grâce, at the end of which a tall fence protected a garden.

She had taken my arm. In the distance we saw a light much duller than the one in the 66, on the ground floor of a building.

A hotel. The glass door was open and the light came from the lobby, in the middle of which a dog lay asleep, its chin resting on the tile floor. Toward the back, behind the reception desk, the bald-headed night porter was leafing through a magazine. There on the sidewalk, I no longer had the courage to walk past the walls of the prison and the hospital and follow Rue de la Santé.

I don't remember which of us led the way. In the lobby, we stepped over the dog without waking it. Room 5 was available. I remember that number, 5, I who always forget room numbers, the colors of walls, furniture, and curtains, as if it were preferable that my life from that time should gradually fade away. And yet, the walls of room 5 have stuck in my memory, as have the curtains: wallpaper with light blue patterns, and those black drapes that I later learned dated from the war and let no light filter out, following the rules of what they used to call “passive defense.”

Later that night, I sensed she wanted to confide in me, but she hesitated. Why the Cité Universitaire, the American Pavilion, when she was neither a student nor American? Anyway, the truest encounters take place between two people who ultimately know nothing about each other, even at night in a hotel room. “Those people at 66, earlier, they were a little strange,” I said to her. “Good thing there wasn't a raid.” Yes, those people around us, who talked too loudly under those glaring white lights—how had they washed up in the provincial Latin Quarter at that late hour? “You ask so many questions,” she whispered to me. A clock chimed every quarter-hour. The dog barked. Once more, I felt as if I were far outside Paris. I even seemed to hear, just before daybreak, the fading sound of hooves. Saumur? Many years later, one afternoon when I was walking near the Val-de-Grâce, I tried to find that hotel. I hadn't recorded its name or address in the black notebook, the way we tend not to write down the most intimate details of our lives, for fear that, once fixed on paper, they'll no longer be ours.

 

 

In his office on the Quai de Gesvres, Langlais had asked me, “You lived at the Unic Hôtel, right?” He had adopted a distracted tone, as if he already knew the answer and expected only a simple confirmation.

“No.”

“And you frequented the 66?”

This time he looked me straight in the eye. I was surprised to hear him say “the 66.” Up until then, I had thought Dannie was the only one who called it that. I, too, had occasionally given cafés names other than their real ones, names from Paris's past, and would say, for instance, “Let's meet at Tortoni's,” or, “Nine o'clock at the Rocher de Cancale.”

“The 66?” I pretended to search my memory. I again heard Dannie saying in her hushed voice, “You're acting like you're in Pigalle.”

“The 66 in Pigalle?” I said to Langlais, feigning puzzlement.

“Not exactly . . . It's a café in the Latin Quarter.”

Maybe it would be better not to try to outsmart him.

“Oh, right! . . . I must have gone there once or twice . . .”

“At night?”

I hesitated before answering. It would have been more prudent to say “in the daytime,” when the main room was open and most of the patrons gathered near the front windows facing out toward the Luxembourg fence. By day, the café was no different from any other. But why lie?

“Yes, at night.”

I remembered the room plunged in darkness around us, and that narrow shaft of light at the rear, like a secret refuge after closing time. And that name, the 66, one of those names that circulate in whispers, among initiates . . .

“Were you alone?”

“Yes, alone.”

He read over a sheet on the desk, on which I could make out a list of names. I was hoping that Dannie's wasn't among them.

“And you didn't know any of the regulars at the 66?”

“Not a one.”

He kept his eyes glued to the sheet of paper. I would have liked him to read me the names of the “regulars at the 66” and explain who all those people were. Maybe Dannie had known some of them. Or Aghamouri. Apparently, neither Gérard Marciano nor Duwelz nor Paul Chastagnier frequented the 66. But I wasn't certain of anything.

“It must be a student café, like all the other ones in the Latin Quarter,” I said.

“By day, yes. But not at night.”

He had adopted a sharp, almost threatening, tone.

“You know,” I said, trying to sound as gentle and conciliatory as possible, “I was never a nighttime regular at the 66.”

He looked at me with his large blue eyes, and there was nothing threatening about his gaze, which seemed weary and rather benign.

“Anyway, you're not on the list.”

Twenty years later, in the file that came into my possession thanks to that same Langlais—he hadn't forgotten me; so it is with sentinels who stand at every crossroads of your life—I found the list of “regulars at the 66,” topped by a certain “Willy of Les Gobelins.” I'll copy it down when I have the time. And I'll also copy a few pages from the file that confirm and complete what I'd recorded in my old black notebook. Just yesterday, I walked past the 66 to see if that part of the café still existed. I pushed open the glass door, the same one that Dannie and I had used and behind which I had watched her, sitting at the bar next to Aghamouri, under those lights that were too strong and too white. I sat at the bar. It was five in the afternoon and patrons filled the other part of the café, the part that looks out on the Luxembourg fence. The bartender seemed surprised that I should order a Cointreau, but I did it in memory of Dannie. And to drink to the health of that “Willy of Les Gobelins,” the first on the list, about whom I knew nothing.

“Do you still stay open late?” I asked the waiter.

He knitted his brow. He didn't seem to understand the question. A young man of about twenty-five.

“We close at nine every evening, sir.”

“Is the café still called the 66?”

I had pronounced those words in a sepulchral voice. He gave me a worried look.

“The 66? No, sir, we're called the Luxembourg.”

I thought of the list of “regulars at the 66.” Yes, I'll copy it down when I have time. But yesterday afternoon, I recalled some of the names on that list: Willy of Les Gobelins, Simone Langelé, Orfanoudakis, Dr. Lucaszek (alias “Doctor Jean”), Jacqueline Giloupe, and one Mireille Sampierry, whom Langlais had mentioned previously.

Behind me, in the main room and outdoors, were tourists and students. At the nearest table, a group whose conversation I was distractedly following was composed of students from the engineering school. They were celebrating something, no doubt the beginning of the summer holidays. They photographed each other with their iPhones in the dull, neutral light of the present. A banal afternoon. And yet, it was there, in that same spot, in the middle of the night, that the fluorescent lights had made me squint and we could barely hear ourselves talk, Dannie and I, because of the hubbub and the voices, now forever lost, of Willy of Les Gobelins and all those shadows surrounding us.

As I recall, there wasn't really much difference between the 66 and the Unic Hôtel, or any of the other places in Paris I used to frequent at the time. A menace hovered over everything, giving life a peculiar coloration. Even when I was away from Paris. One day, Dannie asked me to go with her to a house in the country. On one page of my black notebook I had written: “Country house with Dannie.” Nothing more. On the preceding page, I read: “Dannie, Avenue Victor-Hugo, building with two exits. Meet 7 p.m. at rear entrance on Rue Léonard-de-Vinci.”

I had waited there for her several times, always at the same hour, in front of the same entry porch. At the time, I had drawn a connection between the person to whom she “paid frequent visits”—an old-fashioned phrase I'd been surprised to hear her use—and the country house. Yes, if my memory serves, she had told me that the “country house” belonged to “the person” on Avenue Victor-Hugo.

“Country house with Dannie.” I hadn't recorded the name of the village. Leafing through the black notebook, I experience two contradictory feelings. If these pages are lacking in precise details, I tell myself it's because nothing surprised me back then. Youthful unconcern? But I read certain phrases, certain names, certain indications, and it seems to me I was sending out coded signals to the future. Yes, it's as if I wanted to leave clues, in black and white, that would help me clarify at some later date what I'd been living through at the time without really understanding it. Signals keyed blindly, in total confusion. And I'd have to wait years and years before I could decipher them.

On the page of the notebook where it says “Country house with Dannie” in black ink, there is also a list of villages that I added in blue ballpoint about ten years ago, when I got it into my head to find that country house. Was it in the Paris region or farther out, near Sologne? I've forgotten why I chose those particular villages rather than others. I believe the sound of their names reminded me of one where we'd stopped for gas. Saint-Léger-des-Aubées. Dormelles-sur-l'Orvanne. Vaucourtois. Ormoy-la-Rivière. Lorrez-le-Bocage. Chevry-en-Sereine. Boisemont. Achères-la-Forêt. La Selle-en-Hermoy. Saint-Vincent-des-Bois.

I had bought a Michelin road map that I've kept and that bears this designation: “Paris, 150-kilometer radius. North-South.” And also a Geological Survey map of the Sologne region. I spent several afternoons poring over them, trying to retrace the route we'd followed in a car that Paul Chastagnier had lent us—not his red Lancia, but a more discreet vehicle, gray in color. We left Paris via the Porte de Saint-Cloud, the tunnel, and the highway. Why this westbound road when the country house was somewhere to the south, toward Sologne?

A little later, at the bottom of a page in the notebook where I had made some jottings about the poet Tristan Corbière, I discovered in tiny letters the word “Feuilleuse,” followed by a telephone number. The name of that village could easily have remained lost among the densely written notes about Corbière. “Feuilleuse. 437-41-10.” But of course: on one occasion I had gone to join Dannie at the country house and she'd given me the phone number. I had taken the bus at Porte de Saint-Cloud. The bus had stopped in a small town. I had phoned Dannie from a café, and she had come to pick me up in a car—the gray car that Paul Chastagnier had lent us. The country house was about a dozen miles from there. I looked up where Feuilleuse was: not in Sologne, but in the Eure-et-Loir.

Four-three-seven, four-one, one-zero. The phone rings and rings with no answer, and I was surprised that after all these years the number was still in service. One evening, when I'd again dialed 437-41-10, I heard static and muffled voices. Perhaps it was one of those lines that had long been abandoned. The numbers were known only by the select few who used them to communicate in secret. I ended up making out a woman's voice, which kept repeating a phrase that I couldn't understand—a monotonous statement, like on a broken record. The voice of the talking clock? Or Dannie's voice, calling to me from another time and from that lost country house?

I consulted an old phone book from the Eure-et-Loir, which I had found at the Saint-Ouen flea market, dumped among hundreds of others. There were only about ten listings for Feuilleuse, and that number was indeed among them, a secret cipher that would open the “Gateway to the Past.” That was the title of a detective novel I'd taken from the library in the country house and that Dannie and I had read. Feuilleuse (Eure-et-Loir). Canton of Senonches. Mme Dorme. La Barberie. 437-41-10. Who was this Mme Dorme? Had Dannie ever mentioned her to me? Perhaps she was still alive. I needed only to get in touch with her. She would know what had happened to Dannie.

I called information. I asked for the new number of La Barberie, in Feuilleuse, Eure-et-Loir. And, as on the day when I'd spoken with the bartender in the Café Luxembourg, my voice was sepulchral. “Is that ‘Feuilleuse' with two l's, sir?” I hung up. What was the use? After all this time, the name Mme Dorme had surely disappeared from the directory. The house must have known a succession of occupants, who would have remodeled it so drastically that I would never have recognized it. I spread the map of the Paris region over the table, sorry to set aside the map of Sologne, which had occupied me for an entire afternoon. The caressing sound of the word “Sologne” had led me astray. And I also remembered the ponds, not far from the house, that reminded me of that region. But it doesn't matter what the Michelin map says: for me, that house would always remain located in an imaginary enclave in Sologne.