A private street lined by identical buildings with beige and brick façades. Same wrought-iron doors under the same old-fashioned streetlights. Same rows of windows. Once through the gate, we found the square at rue Alexandre Cabanel before us. I wanted to write that name down, because that was where our paths first crossed. We lingered a moment in the middle of the square, trying to think of something to say. I was the one to break the silence.
“Do you live in the neighborhood?”
“No, over by Étoile.”
I was looking for an excuse not to leave her right away. “We could walk partway together.”
We walked under the viaduct, along boulevard de Grenelle. She had suggested we follow the stretch of the Métro that runs above ground towards Étoile. If she got tired, she could always take the Métro the rest of the way. It must have been a Sunday night or a holiday. There was no traffic, all of the cafés were closed. In any case, as I remember it, that night we were in a deserted city. Our having met, when I think about it now, seems like the meeting of two people who were completely without moorings in life. I think that we were both alone in the world.
“Have you known Guy de Vere long?” I asked her.
“No, I just met him at the beginning of the year, through a friend. And you?”
“Through the Vega bookstore.”
She wasn’t familiar with that bookstore, a shop on boulevard Saint-Germain whose windows bore, in blue lettering, the inscription: “Orientalism and Comparative Religion.” That was where I first heard Guy de Vere speak. One evening, the bookseller had given me one of the bristol board invitation cards, telling me that I was welcome to attend the lecture. “It’s totally for people like you.” I would have liked to ask him what he meant by “people like you.” He was looking at me with a fair amount of kindness and it didn’t necessarily have to be pejorative. He even offered to “put in a good word” for me with this Guy de Vere.
“Is it any good, this Vega bookstore?”
She had asked me the question with a hint of irony in her voice. Although maybe it was her Parisian accent that gave me that impression.
“You can find all sorts of interesting books there. I’ll take you sometime.”
I wanted to know what sort of books she read and what had drawn her to Guy de Vere’s lectures. The first book that de Vere had recommended to her was Lost Horizon. She had read it very carefully. She had arrived at the previous lecture before the others, and de Vere had led her into his office. He hunted through the shelves of his library, which occupied two full walls, for another book to lend her. After a moment, as if an idea had suddenly come to him, he had gone over to his desk and taken up a book that lay among the disorderly heaps of folders and letters. He told her, “You can read this one. I’d be very curious to know what you think of it.” She had been extremely intimidated. De Vere always spoke to others as if they were as intelligent and as cultivated as he was. How long could that go on? At some point he would realize that we didn’t measure up. The book that he had given her that night was called Louise, Sister of the Void. No, I wasn’t familiar with it. It related the life story of Louise of the Void, a seventeenth-century nun, and included all the letters she had written. She wasn’t reading it from front to back, she just opened it at random. Some pages really made an impression on her. Even more so than Lost Horizon. Before meeting de Vere, she had read science fiction novels like The Dreaming Jewels. And books about astronomy. What a coincidence. I too had a thing for astronomy.
At Bir-Hakeim station, I wondered if she was going to take the Métro or if she wanted to keep walking and cross the Seine. Above our heads, at regular intervals, the clattering of the trains. We stopped on the bridge and continued our conversation.
“I live up by Étoile, too,” I told her. “Maybe not too far from your place.”
She was hesitating. She seemed to want to tell me something that was bothering her.
“To be honest, I’m married. I live with my husband in Neuilly.” You would have thought she was confessing to a crime.
“Have you been married long?”
“No, not very long. Since last April.”
We had resumed walking. We reached the middle of the bridge, where the stairs led to the allée des Cygnes below. She entered the stairwell and I followed her. She made her way down the steps confidently, as if she were on her way to meet someone. And she spoke more and more quickly.
“At one point, I was looking for work. I came across an ad. It was for a job as a temp secretary.”
Having reached the landing, we followed the allée des Cygnes. On either side, the Seine and the lights of the quays. I got the impression that I was on the promenade deck of a ship run aground in the dead of night.
“At the office, a man gave me work to do. He was nice to me. He was older… After a while, he wanted to get married.”
It seemed as if she was trying to justify herself to a childhood friend whom she hadn’t heard from in a long time and had run into in the street.
“What about you? Did you want to get married?”
She shrugged her shoulders, as if my question was absurd. All the while, I was waiting for her to say, “Now look, you know me well enough.”
After all, I must have known her in a previous life.
“He always told me he wanted what was best for me. It’s true… He does want what’s best for me. He kind of takes himself for my father.”
I got the feeling she was waiting for my opinion. She didn’t seem to be in the habit of confiding in people.
“And he never attends the lectures with you?”
“No. He has too much work to do.”
She had met de Vere through an old friend of her husband’s. This friend had brought de Vere with him to dinner at their place in Neuilly. She shared all of those details with me, her forehead creased, as if she was afraid to forget a single one, even the most trivial.
We had reached the end of the alleyway, opposite the Statue de la Liberté. A bench on the right. I can’t remember which one of us took the initiative to sit down, or perhaps we both had the idea at the same time. I asked her if she shouldn’t be getting home. This was the third or fourth time she had attended Guy de Vere’s lectures, and each time, towards eleven o’clock at night, she found herself at the foot of the stairs leading into Cambronne station. And each time, at the thought of returning to Neuilly, she felt a kind of discouragement. As it stood, she was doomed to keep taking the same line of the Métro home until the end of her days. Transfer at Étoile. Get off at Sablons.
I could feel her shoulder against mine. She told me that after the dinner at which she had met Guy de Vere for the first time, he had invited her to a talk he was giving in a small room over by Odéon. That day, the subject had been “the Great Noon” and “green light.” Upon leaving the room, she had wandered the neighborhood. She floated in the limpid green light Guy de Vere had discussed. Evening, five o’clock. There was a lot of traffic on the boulevard and, at Carrefour de l’Odéon, the crowd jostled her as she walked against the tide, not wanting to go down the stairs into the Métro with them. A deserted street led gently up towards the Jardin du Luxembourg. And there, at mid-slope, she had gone into a café below a building on the corner: the Condé. “Do you know the Condé?” She looked at me inquiringly, suddenly seeming more comfortable. No, I wasn’t familiar with the Condé. To be honest, I’m not very fond of the Latin Quarter and all of its schools. It reminded me of my childhood, of the dormitory at the boarding school from which I had been expelled, and of the school cafeteria on the corner of rue Dauphine where I ate my meals thanks to a fake student card. I was starving. Ever since that first time, she had often taken refuge at the Condé. It hadn’t taken her long to get to know most of the regulars, and in particular two writers: a fellow named Maurice Raphaël and an Arthur Adamov. Had I heard of them? Sure. I knew who Adamov was. I had even seen him around, over by Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre. A worried look. I would go so far as to say terrified. He walked around wearing sandals on his bare feet. She hadn’t read any of Adamov’s books. At the Condé, he would occasionally ask her to walk him back to his hotel because he was afraid to walk alone at night. Having become a regular at the Condé, the others had given her a nickname. Her real name was Jacqueline, but they called her Louki. If I wanted, she would introduce me to Adamov and the others. And to Jimmy Campbell, an English singer. And to a Tunisian friend of hers, Ali Cherif. We could meet up at the Condé during the day. She also sometimes went at night when her husband was out. He often returned from work quite late. She looked up at me, and after a moment’s hesitation, she told me that each time, she found it a little more difficult to go back to her husband in Neuilly. She seemed troubled and said no more.