“You’re really pale. Aren’t you feeling well?”
I wanted to give her a smile to reassure her, but I felt myself grimace instead.
“No. It’s nothing.”
Ever since I began sneaking out of the apartment at night, I had brief panic attacks, or rather “low blood pressure,” as the pharmacist at place Blanche had put it one night when I tried to explain to him what I had been experiencing. But each time a word came out, it seemed either false or meaningless. Better to keep quiet. A feeling of emptiness would come over me in the street. The first time it was in front of the tobacconist’s, just past the Cyrano. The street was full of people but that didn’t reassure me. I felt as if I were going to faint right there on the spot, and they would just keep on walking straight ahead without paying me any mind at all. Low blood pressure. A power outage. I had to make an internal effort to reset the breaker. That night, I had gone into the tobacconist’s and asked for stamps, postcards, a ballpoint pen, and a pack of cigarettes. I sat down at the counter. I took out a postcard and began to write. “Have a little patience. I think things are going to get better.” I lit a cigarette and affixed a stamp to the card. But to whom should I address it? I would have liked to write a few words on each one of the cards, reassuring words: “The weather here is beautiful, my vacation is going great. I hope all is well with you too. See you soon. Hugs and kisses.” I’m sitting on the patio of a café overlooking the sea, very early in the morning. And I’m writing postcards to all my friends.
“How are you feeling? Any better?” Jeannette asked me. Her face was even closer to mine. “You want to go out and get some fresh air?”
The street had never seemed that deserted and silent. It was lit by streetlights left over from another era. And to think that climbing the slope was all it would take to rejoin the Saturday-night crowds a few hundred yards farther up, the neon signs promising “The Most Beautiful Nudes in the World,” the tourist buses parked in front of the Moulin Rouge. I was scared of all that agitation. I said to Jeannette, “We could stay at mid-slope.”
We walked as far as where the lights began, the intersection at the end of rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette. But there we made a U-turn and descended the hill the same way we had come. I felt more and more relieved as I walked back down the shady side of the slope. I just needed to let myself go. Jeannette held me tightly by the arm. We had nearly arrived at the bottom of the slope, where the street met rue de la Tour-des-Dames. She said to me, “What would you say to us having a little snow?”
I didn’t really understand what she meant by that, but the word “snow” caught me off guard. I got the feeling that it would start to fall at any moment and would render the silence that surrounded us even more intense. We would hear nothing but the crunching of our steps in the snow. A clock sounded out somewhere nearby, and, I’m not sure why, I thought it was signaling the start of midnight mass. Jeannette was guiding me. I let myself be carried along. We were following rue d’Aumale, whose every building was shrouded in darkness. It was almost as if they formed a single black wall on either side that spanned from one end of the street to the other.
“Come on into my flat, we’ll have ourselves a little snow.”
Once we arrived, I would ask her what she meant by “having a little snow.” It seemed even colder because of the dark façades. Was I only dreaming when I heard our footsteps echo so distinctly?
Since that day, I have often followed that same route, both with her and alone. I would go and find her in her room during the day, or sometimes I would spend the night there when we stayed too late at the Canter. She lived in a hotel on rue Laferrière, a street located in the lower slopes zone that forms a semicircle where you feel isolated from everything else. An elevator with a wire-mesh door. It climbed very slowly. She lived on the last floor, all the way at the top. Maybe the elevator wouldn’t stop. She whispered in my ear, “You’ll see, it’s going to be great, we’ll have ourselves a little snow.”
Her hands were trembling. In the dim light of the hallway, she was so nervous that she couldn’t manage to insert the key into the keyhole.
“Go ahead, you try. I can’t seem to do it.”
Her voice grew increasingly unsteady. She had dropped the key. I bent down to grope around for it in the dark. I managed to slide it into the lock. The light was on, a yellow light cast by a ceiling fixture. The bed was unmade, the curtains drawn. She sat down on the edge of the bed and fumbled in the drawer of the nightstand. She withdrew a small metal box. She told me to inhale the white powder she called “snow.” After a moment, I began to feel fresh and light. I was certain the anxiety and the feeling of emptiness that often came over me in the street would never return. Ever since the pharmacist at place Blanche had spoken to me about low blood pressure, I had believed that I needed to harden myself, struggle against myself, strive to control myself. Nothing to be done, life had been tough love thus far. Sink or swim. If I fell, everyone else would just keep on walking down the boulevard de Clichy. There was no reason to have any illusions about it. But from now on, things were going to be different. The streets and boundaries of the neighborhood suddenly seemed far too narrow.
A book and stationery shop on the boulevard de Clichy stayed open until one in the morning. Mattei. A lone name stenciled on the front window. The owner’s name? I never got up the nerve to ask the brown-haired man with the mustache and the Prince of Wales check suit jacket who was always sitting there reading behind the desk. Customers continually interrupted his reading to buy postcards or a pad of paper. At the time of night I usually went in, there were rarely any customers other than the occasional person coming out of Minuit Chansons next door. Most of the time, he and I were alone in the bookshop. The same books were always on display in the front window, books I soon realized were science fiction novels. He had suggested that I read them. I remember a few of the titles: Pebble in the Sky, Stowaway to Mars, Vandals of the Void. I’ve only held on to one of them: The Dreaming Jewels.
The used books devoted to astronomy were filed on the right-hand side, on the shelves nearest the window. I had come across one with a torn-up orange cover: Journey into Infinity. That one I still have. The Saturday night I had intended to buy it, I was the only customer in the store and I could scarcely hear the din of the boulevard. A few neon signs could be seen through the window, including the blue and white of “The Most Beautiful Nudes in the World,” but they seemed so very far off. I wasn’t bold enough to disturb the man as he read, sitting there, his head down. I stood there in silence the better part of ten minutes before he turned his head my way. I held the book out to him. He smiled. “Very good, this one. Very good. Journey into Infinity.” I began to get out the money to pay for the book, but he raised his hand. “No, no. This one’s on me. And I hope you have a lovely journey.”