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I remember the night she decided she wouldn’t go home to her husband anymore. At the Condé that day, she had introduced me to Adamov and Ali Cherif. I was hauling around the typewriter that Zacharias had lent me. I wanted to start On Neutral Zones.
I placed the typewriter on the small pitch-pine table in my room. I already had the opening sentence in my mind: “Neutral zones have at least one advantage: They are only a starting point and we always leave them sooner or later.” I was aware that once I sat down in front of the typewriter, everything would be much less straightforward. I would likely end up crossing out that first sentence. And the following one. And yet I found myself full of courage and resolve.
She was expected back in Neuilly for dinner, but at eight o’clock she was still stretched out on the bed. She didn’t even switch on the bedside lamp. Eventually I let her know it was time.
“Time to what?”
From the tone of her voice, I understood that she would never again take the Métro out to Sablons. A long silence passed between us. I sat down in front of the typewriter and tapped my fingers lightly on the keys.
“We could go to the movies,” she said to me. “That would kill some time.”
All we needed to do was cross to the other side of avenue de la Grande-Armée and the Studio Obligado cinema was right there. That evening, I don’t think either of us paid the least bit of attention to the film. I don’t remember there being many spectators in the theater. The odd person that a district court had declared “absentee”? And what about us? Who were we? I turned and looked at her now and again. She wasn’t watching the screen, her head was down and she seemed lost in thought. I was worried she would get up and go back to Neuilly. But no, she stayed until the end of the film.
Once we had left Studio Obligado, she seemed relieved. She told me that it was already too late for her to go back to her husband’s place. He had invited a few of his friends out for dinner. There, end of story. There wouldn’t be any more dinners in Neuilly, not ever again.
We didn’t go back to my room right away. We spent a long time wandering around that neutral zone where we had both taken refuge at different times. She wanted to show me the hotels where she had lived, on rue d’Armaillé and rue de l’Étoile. I’m trying to recall what she said to me that night. It was all rather confused. Nothing but snippets. And it’s too late to find the details I’m missing now, or those that I’ve somehow forgotten. Quite young, she had left her mother and the neighborhood they lived in together. Her mother was dead. She still had a friend from those days that she saw from time to time, a girl named Jeannette Gaul. On two or three occasions we had dinner with Jeannette Gaul on rue d’Argentine, in the run-down restaurant next to my hotel. A blonde with green eyes. Louki told me that people called her Crossbones because of her gaunt face, which stood out in contrast to her generous curves. Later on, Jeannette Gaul would visit her at the hotel on rue Cels, and I ought to have raised an eyebrow the day I walked in on them in her room and the pungent smell of ether was in the air. And then one breezy, sunny day on the quays, across from Notre-Dame, I was browsing through the books in the used-book stalls as I waited for the two of them. Jeannette Gaul had said that she needed to meet someone on rue des Grands-Degrés, someone who was bringing her “a little snow.” The word “snow” made her grin, considering it was the middle of July. In one of the booksellers’ green bins, I came across a pocket book entitled The Beautiful Summer. Yes, it was a beautiful summer, because to me it seemed endless. And I spotted them, all of a sudden, on the quay’s other sidewalk, coming from the direction of rue des Grands-Degrés. Louki waved at me. They were walking towards me through the sunshine and the silence. I often see them that way in my dreams, the two of them, down by Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre. I think I was happy that afternoon.
I didn’t understand why they called Jeannette Gaul “Crossbones.” Because of her high cheekbones and slanted eyes? And yet nothing about her face evoked death. In those days, she was still in that period of her life when youth is more resilient than all else. Nothing — not nights of insomnia, not snow, as she put it — left the slightest mark on her. But for how long? I should have been more wary of her. Louki didn’t take her along to the Condé, nor to Guy de Vere’s lectures, as if that girl was her dark little secret. I only ever heard them speak of their mutual past in my presence one time, and only cryptically. I got the feeling they had a number of shared secrets. One day as Louki and I stepped out of the Métro at Mabillon — a November day, around six o’clock in the evening, night had already fallen — she recognized someone seated at a table in the large front window of La Pergola. She cringed slightly. A man of about fifty with a stern face and slicked brown hair. He was nearly facing our direction and could have easily seen us as well. But I think he was talking to someone beside him. She took me by the arm and led me to the other side of rue du Four. She told me that she had known the guy a few years earlier, through Jeannette Gaul, and that he ran a restaurant in the ninth arrondissement. She hadn’t ever expected to run into him here on the Rive Gauche. She seemed quite anxious. She had used the words “Rive Gauche” as if the Seine were a dividing line separating two different cities, some sort of iron curtain. And the man at La Pergola had somehow managed to cross over that boundary. His presence there, right in front of Mabillon station, really concerned her. I asked her his name. Mocellini. And why was she avoiding him? She didn’t give me a clear answer. Quite simply, the guy dredged up unpleasant memories. When she severed ties with people, it was for good, they were dead to her. If this man was still alive and there was a chance she might run into him, then it might be best to move to another neighborhood.
I tried to reassure her. La Pergola wasn’t like the other cafés in the area, and its rather shady clientele wasn’t at all in keeping with the neighborhood full of students and bohemians through which we were walking. She had told me that she had known this Mocellini in the ninth arrondissement? Well that was precisely it, La Pergola was pretty much an annex to Pigalle that just happened to be in Saint-Germain-des-Prés without anyone really knowing why. It would suffice to take the other sidewalk and avoid La Pergola. No need to move to another neighborhood.
I ought to have insisted on her telling me more, but I knew more or less how she would respond, if she even responded at all. I had been around plenty of Mocellinis during my childhood and teenage years, more than enough of those people about whom, years later, we are left to wonder what kind of racket they were involved in. Hadn’t I seen my own father in the company of that sort of person often enough? I could look into this Mocellini character after all these years. But what good would come of it? I wouldn’t learn anything about Louki that I didn’t know or hadn’t already guessed. Can we really be held responsible for those questionable characters, not at all of our choosing, whose paths crossed ours as we were growing up? Am I responsible for my father and for all of those shadowy figures who spoke to him with hushed voices in hotel hallways or in the back rooms of cafés, who carried around suitcases whose contents I would never know? That evening, after our unpleasant encounter, we continued on down the boulevard Saint-Germain. When we entered the Vega bookstore, she seemed relieved. She had a list of a few titles Guy de Vere had recommended to her. I’ve held on to that list. He used to give it to everyone who attended his lectures. “There is no need to read them all at the same time,” he would say. “Instead, choose a single book and read a page of it each night before you go to sleep.”