We parted company in front of the coach entrance. It was without the slightest trace of lightheartedness that I returned to that apartment each night. I knew that sooner or later I would leave it for good. I was counting a great deal on the people I would eventually meet, which would put an end to my loneliness. This girl was my first encounter and perhaps she would help me take flight on my own.
“See you tomorrow?” She seemed surprised by my question. I had blurted it out far too abruptly, without managing to conceal my nervousness.
“Of course. Whenever you like.”
She shot me another one of her tender, ironic smiles, the same one she had given me earlier when I had explained what I meant by “the lower slopes.”
There are holes in my memory. Or rather, certain details are out of order in my mind. For the past five years I have avoided thinking about all of this. And it was enough for the taxi to climb that street and for me to rediscover those illuminated signs: Aux Noctambules, Aux Pierrots… I no longer remember the name of the place on rue de La Rochefoucauld. The Rouge Cloître? Chez Dante? The Canter? Yes, the Canter. None of the customers of the Condé would have ever patronized the Canter. There are certain invisible boundaries in our lives. And yet, the first few times I went to the Condé, I had been quite surprised to recognize one of the customers I had seen at the Canter: Maurice Raphaël, the one whom everyone called the Jaguar. Never in a million years would I have guessed that this man was a writer. Nothing set him apart from those who played cards and other games in the bar’s small back room, behind the wrought-iron gate. I recognized him. I hadn’t felt that my face was familiar to him. So much the better. What a relief.
I never really understood what Jeannette Gaul’s role was at the Canter. Sometimes she took orders and waited on the customers. She sat with them at the tables. She knew most of them. She introduced me to a tall dark-haired man with a Mediterranean look to him, very well dressed, who gave the impression of being well-educated. A certain Accad, the son of a doctor in the neighborhood. He was always accompanied by two friends, Godinger and Mario Bay. Sometimes, they played cards and other games with the older men in the little back room. This would often go on until five in the morning. One of the cardplayers was apparently the Canter’s actual owner. A man in his fifties with short gray hair, also very well dressed, a grim-looking man whom Jeannette told me was a “former lawyer.” I remember his name: Mocellini. Once in a while he would get up and join Suzanne behind the bar. Some nights he would stand in for her and serve the drinks himself, just as if he were at home in his own apartment and all of the customers were his guests. He called Jeannette “my dear” or “Crossbones” without my ever understanding why, and the first few times I went to the Canter he looked me over with a fair amount of suspicion. One night, he asked me how old I was. I did my best to make myself look older and said, “Twenty-one years old.” He continued to observe me with a frown, he didn’t believe me. “You’re sure you’re twenty-one?” I was growing more and more embarrassed and was nearly ready to tell him my real age, but all of the severity abruptly left his face. He smiled at me and shrugged his shoulders. “Well then, twenty-one years old it is.”
Jeannette had a thing for Mario Bay. He wore tinted glasses, but not out of affectation. Light hurt his eyes. He had very delicate hands. At first, Jeannette had taken him for a pianist, one of those, she told me, who perform at Salle Gaveau or the Pleyel. He was around thirty, as were Accad and Godinger. But if he wasn’t a pianist, what was it that he did for a living? He and Accad were very tight with Mocellini. According to Jeannette, they had worked for Mocellini when he was still a lawyer. They had worked for him ever since. Doing what? Various business ventures, she told me. But what did that actually mean, “business ventures”? At the Canter, they would often invite us to join them at their table, and Jeannette let on that Accad had a crush on me. Right from the start I got the feeling that she wanted me to get together with him, perhaps in order to strengthen her relationship with Mario Bay. If anything, I had the impression that it was Godinger who had taken a liking to me. He was as dark as Accad, but taller. Jeannette didn’t know him as well as the other two. Apparently he had a lot of money and a car that he always parked in front of the Canter. He lived in the hotel upstairs and often traveled to Belgium.
Black holes. As well as details that randomly pop into my head, details as precise as they are insignificant. He lived in the hotel upstairs and he often traveled to Belgium. The other evening, I repeated that stupid sentence over and over as if it were the refrain of a lullaby that you might sing softly in the dark to calm yourself. And why did Mocellini call Jeannette “Crossbones”? Details that conceal other details, much more painful ones. I remember the afternoon a few years later that Jeannette came to visit me in Neuilly. It was a couple of weeks after I married Jean-Pierre Choureau. I never learned to call him anything but Jean-Pierre Choureau, likely because he was older than I was and because he too addressed me so formally. She rang three times as I had requested. For a brief moment, I had the impulse not to answer the door, but that was idiotic, she knew my phone number and address. She came in, sliding through the crack of the half-opened door, and you would have thought she was creeping stealthily into the apartment to commit a burglary. Once we were in the living room, she took a look around, the white walls, the coffee table, the stack of magazines, the red-shaded lamp, the portrait of Jean-Pierre Choureau’s mother above the sofa. She didn’t say a word. She shook her head. She wanted to take a look around. She seemed stunned when she saw that Jean-Pierre Choureau and I slept in separate rooms. We stretched out on the bed in my bedroom.
“So does he come from a good family?” said Jeannette. And she burst out laughing.
I hadn’t seen her since the hotel on rue d’Armaillé. Her laughter made me feel uncomfortable. I was worried she would drag me backwards, back to the days of the Canter. Still, when she had come to visit me in rue d’Armaillé the year before, she had informed me that she no longer had anything to do with the others.
“Such a little girl’s room.”
Atop the chest of drawers, a picture of Jean-Pierre Choureau in a wine-red leather frame.
“He’s pretty handsome. So what’s with the separate rooms?”
She once again stretched out on the bed beside me. Then I told her I would prefer to see her anywhere but there. I was worried that she would feel awkward around Jean-Pierre Choureau. And also, we wouldn’t be able to speak freely, just the two of us.
“Are you worried I’ll bring the others when I come to see you?”
She laughed, but her laughter was less frank than earlier. She was right, I was afraid, even in Neuilly, to run into Accad. I was amazed he hadn’t caught wind of me when I was living in the hotels on rue d’Armaillé and then rue de l’Étoile.
“Don’t worry. They left Paris a long time ago. They’re in Morocco.”
She was softly stroking my forehead, as if she wanted to soothe me.
“I’d imagine you haven’t told your husband about the parties at Cabassud.”
There was no sarcasm in her tone as she spoke. On the contrary, I was touched by the sadness in her voice. It had been her friend Mario Bay, the guy with the tinted glasses and the pianist’s hands, who had referred to them as “parties,” those nights when he and Accad took us to spend the night at Cabassud, a country home not far from Paris.
“It’s so calm here. It’s nothing like it was at Cabassud. You remember those nights?”
Details that made me want to squeeze my eyes shut, like a light that was too bright. And yet, the other night, when we had parted company with Guy de Vere’s friends and I was returning from Montmartre with Roland, I kept my eyes wide open. Everything was more distinct, crisp, and clear, an intense light dazzled me and I gradually grew used to it. One night at the Canter, I found myself engulfed by that same light as I sat at a table with Jeannette, by the entrance. Everyone had left except for Mocellini and the others, who were playing cards in the room at the back, behind the gate. My mother would have arrived home hours ago. I wondered if she was worried by my absence. I almost missed the night she had come to pick me up at the Grandes-Carrières police station. It dawned on me that from that point on, she would no longer be able to come and find me. I was too far away. I tried to withstand a wave of anxiety that swept over me, preventing me from being able to breathe. Jeannette brought her face up to mine.