Time for the last Métro. We were alone in the car. Before making the transfer at Étoile, she gave me her phone number.
•
Still to this day, some evenings I hear a voice calling me by name in the street. A somewhat husky voice. It drags a bit around certain syllables, and I recognize it immediately: It’s Louki’s voice. I turn around, but there’s nobody there. Not only in the evenings but during that sluggish part of those summer afternoons when you’re no longer even sure what year it is. All will be as it was before. The same days, the same nights, the same places, the same encounters. The Eternal Return.
I often hear that voice in my dreams. It’s all so precise — right down to the smallest detail — that I wonder, upon waking, how it could even be possible. The other night, I dreamed I was leaving Guy de Vere’s building, at the same time of night it had been when Louki and I left that first time. I looked at my watch. Eleven o’clock at night. There was ivy climbing along one of the ground-floor windows. I passed through the metal gate and I was crossing Cambronne Square towards the above-ground Métro when I heard Louki’s voice. She was calling to me: “Roland…” Twice. I could feel the irony in her voice. She had made fun of my name at first, a name that wasn’t even my real name. I had chosen it to simplify matters, an all-purpose, everyday name, one that could also serve as a last name. It was quite practical, Roland. And above all, so very French. My real name was too exotic. In those days, I was trying to avoid attracting attention. “Roland…” I turned around. No one. I was in the middle of the square, just like that first time when we hadn’t known what to say to each other. When I awoke, I decided to go to where Guy de Vere had lived to see if there really was ivy along the ground-floor window. I took the Métro to Cambronne. It was the line Louki had taken when she was still going home to her husband in Neuilly. I accompanied her, and we often got off at Argentine station, not far from the hotel where I was living. Those evenings, she might have stayed all night in my room, but she made a final effort and went home to Neuilly. And then finally, one night she did stay with me, near Argentine.
I experienced a strange feeling that morning as I walked through Cambronne Square, because it had always been night when we had gone to see Guy de Vere. I pushed open the gate and told myself that there was no way I would run into him after all this time. No more Vega bookstore on boulevard Saint-Germain and no more Guy de Vere in Paris. And no more Louki. But there, running along the ground-floor window, was the ivy, just as it had been in my dream. That disturbed me. Had the other night really been a dream? I lingered a moment, standing motionless at the window. I was hoping I would hear Louki’s voice. She would call out my name once again. No. Nothing. Silence. Yet I had the impression that since those days at Guy de Vere’s, no time had passed. Instead it had stood still, frozen into some sort of eternity. I remembered the text I had been trying to write back when I knew Louki. I had called it On Neutral Zones. There was a series of transitional zones in Paris, no-man’s-lands where we were on the border of everything else, in transit, or even held suspended. Within, we benefited from a certain kind of immunity. I might have called them free zones, but neutral zones was more precise. One evening at the Condé, I had asked Maurice Raphaël his opinion, knowing that he was a writer. He shrugged his shoulders and shot me a sardonic smile. “That’s for you to figure out, my friend. I don’t really understand where you’re trying to go with this. I’d say stick with ‘neutral’ and leave it at that.” Cambronne Square, as well as the neighborhood that lay between Ségur and Dupleix, and all of those streets that led to the footbridges of the above-ground Métro, they all belonged to a neutral zone, and it wasn’t by chance that I had met Louki there.
I’ve long since lost that text. Five pages that I had typed on a typewriter lent to me by Zacharias, a customer at the Condé. On the dedication page, I had written, “For Louki of the Neutral Zones.” I don’t know what she thought of my work. I don’t think she had read it all the way through. It was a somewhat off-putting text, a compiled list of the names of the streets, arrondissement by arrondissement, that demarcated the neutral zones. Sometimes a block of houses, sometimes a much larger area. Upon reading the dedication one afternoon at the Condé, she said to me, “You know, Roland, we could go and live a week in each one of these areas you’re talking about.”
•
Rue d’Argentine, where I rented a hotel room, was definitely in one of the neutral zones. Who would have been able to find me there? The people I saw there, few and far between, must have been considered dead as far as the state was concerned. One day while flipping through a newspaper, under the heading “Legal Notices,” I came across a short entry with the title “Declaration of Absence.” Someone named Tarride had never returned home and no one had heard from him in thirty years, so the district court had declared him an “absentee.” I had shown the article to Louki. We were in my room on rue d’Argentine. I told her that I was certain the guy lived on my street, along with dozens of others who had also been declared “absentees.” Incidentally, the buildings neighboring my hotel all bore the inscription “furnished apartments.” Ports of call where no one was asked for identification and where hiding out was easily done. That day, we celebrated La Houpa’s birthday with the others at the Condé. They poured us plenty to drink. Back in my room afterwards, we were a little tipsy. I opened the window. At the top of my lungs, I called out, “Tarride! Tarride!…” The street was deserted and the name resonated strangely. I even had the impression that it echoed around the neighborhood. Louki came and stood beside me, and she too yelled out, “Tarride! Tarride!…” A childish joke that made us laugh. But I ended up believing that this man would show himself and we would resurrect all of the absentees who haunted my street. After a while, the hotel’s night watchman came and knocked at our door. With a voice from beyond the grave, he said, “A little silence, if you please.” We heard him go back down the stairs with a heavy step. After that, I became convinced that he too was an absentee, just like Tarride, and that the two of them were hiding out in the furnished apartments of rue d’Argentine.
I thought about it every time I went down the street on my way back to my room. Louki had told me that before she married, she had also lived in several different hotels in the area, the first a little farther north, on rue d’Armaillé, then on rue de l’Étoile. In those days, we must have passed on the street without ever noticing each other.