The Celestial Alter Ego
The Friend of God from the Oberland
The Hymn of the Pearl
The Pillar of Dawn
The Twelve Saviors of the Treasure of Light
The Subtle Organs or Centers
The Secret Rose Garden
The Seventh Valley
Small booklets with pale green covers. At first, in my room on rue d’Argentine, we would read them aloud, she and I taking turns. It was a kind of self-discipline, for when we weren’t feeling very motivated. I don’t believe we read those publications in the same fashion. She hoped to discover some meaning to life within them, whereas it was the sound of the words and the music of the sentences that captivated me. That evening, at the Vega bookstore, she seemed to have forgotten all about this Mocellini and the bad memories he conjured up. Thinking back, I realize that it wasn’t only a code of conduct that she sought by reading the pale green booklets and the biography of Louise of the Void. She wanted to escape, to run farther and farther away, to break violently with her everyday life, to finally be able to breathe. And then there were also the panic attacks, from time to time, at the thought that those shadowy figures you had left behind might find you and ask you to account for yourself. It was necessary to hide in order to avoid these blackmailers, hoping that one day you would be beyond their reach, once and for all. Way up there, in the fresh mountain air. Or the salty air of the sea. I understood those feelings all too well. I too still carried the bad memories and the nightmarish figures of my childhood around with me, and I hoped that one day I would finally be able to give the finger to the whole lot of them and move on.
I told her that it was foolish to change sidewalks. I ended up convincing her. From then on, when we got off the Métro at Mabillon, we no longer avoided La Pergola. I even dragged her inside the café one night. We stood at the bar and we waited resolutely for Mocellini. And all the rest of the shadows of the past. When she was with me, she wasn’t afraid of anything. No better way to make ghosts dissipate than to look them right in the eye. I suspect she had begun to regain her self-confidence and I doubt that she would even have flinched if Mocellini had turned up. I suggested she use the line I had grown accustomed to using in such situations, saying as firmly as possible, “I’m afraid not, sir. That’s not me. I’m sorry, you must be mistaken.”
We waited in vain for Mocellini that evening. And we never again saw him behind that window.
•
That February, the month she stopped going home to her husband, it snowed a great deal, and for us, on rue d’Argentine, it was almost as if we were stranded in a remote Alpine lodge. I was coming to realize that it could be difficult to live in a neutral zone. Honestly, it made sense to move closer to the center. The strangest thing about rue d’Argentine — although I had taken an inventory of several other streets in Paris that were quite similar — was that it didn’t correspond to the arrondissement where it was situated. It didn’t correspond to anything; it was completely disconnected. With that layer of snow, it opened onto the void on either side. I’ll have to try to find the list of streets within Paris that are not only neutral zones but also black holes. Or rather, patches of dark matter, which renders everything invisible and which even withstands ultraviolet light, infrared, and X-rays. Yes, in the long run, we will likely all be swallowed up by the dark matter anyway.
She didn’t want to remain in a neighborhood that was so close to where her husband lived. Barely two Métro stations away. She was looking for a hotel on the Rive Gauche, in the vicinity of the Condé or near Guy de Vere’s apartment. That way she could make the journey on foot. Personally, I was afraid to return to the other side of the Seine, towards the sixth arrondissement of my youth. So many painful memories… But what good is there in talking about it, seeing that these days the sixth only exists for those who run the luxury shops that line its streets and the rich foreigners who have bought up its apartments. Back then, I could still find traces of my childhood there: the dilapidated hotels of rue Dauphine, the Sunday-school hall, the Café Odéon where the odd deserter from an American base did his shady dealings, the dark stairs leading to Vert-Galant, and an inscription on the grimy wall of rue Mazarine that I read each time I made my way to schooclass="underline" WORK IS FOR SUCKERS.
When she rented a room a little to the south of there, down towards Montparnasse, I stayed behind near Étoile. I wanted to avoid running into the ghosts on the Rive Gauche. Other than the Condé and the Vega bookstore, I preferred not to spend too much time in my old neighborhood.
•
And then there was the question of money. She had sold a fur coat that had most likely been a gift from her husband. All she was left with was a raincoat that was much too light to hold up against the winter. She read the want ads, just as she had done shortly before she was married. And once in a while, she went to see a mechanic in Auteuil, an old friend of her mother’s who would help her out. I’m embarrassed to admit the sort of work I did myself in those days. But why hide the truth?
A fellow named Béraud-Bedoin lived in the block of houses in which my hotel was located. At 8, rue de Saïgon, to be exact. A furnished apartment. I ran into him quite often, and I can no longer recall when we first ended up having a conversation. A shifty fellow with wavy hair who was always dressed impeccably and gave off an air of world-weary indifference. One winter afternoon as the snow fell on Paris, I sat across from him at a table in the cafe-restaurant on rue d’Argentine. I admitted to him that I wanted to be a writer when he asked me the usual question: “So, what do you do?” As for Béraud-Bedoin, I never really understood what exactly it was that he did. That afternoon, I accompanied him to his “office”—“just around the way,” he told me. Our steps left footprints in the snow. We walked straight ahead until we hit rue Chalgrin. I’ve since consulted an old directory from that year to see exactly where Béraud-Bedoin “worked.” Sometimes you remember certain episodes of your life and you need proof that you haven’t dreamed them. Fourteen, rue Chalgrin. Commercial Publishers of France. That must be it. Right now I haven’t the courage to go down there and see if I recognize the building. I’m too old. He didn’t invite me up to his office that day, but we met the following day, same time, same café. He offered me some work. It consisted of writing several brochures about various companies or organizations for which he was in some capacity the promoter or the advertising agent, brochures that would then be printed by his publishing house. He would pay me five thousand francs. His name would appear on the texts. I was to act as his ghostwriter. He would supply all the information. And that is how I ended up working on a dozen short texts, The Hot Springs of La Bourboule, Tourism on Brittany’s Emerald Coast, The History of the Hotels and Casinos of Bagnoles-de-l’Orne, as well as monographs about the Jordaan, Seligmann, Mirabaud, and Demachy banks. Each time I sat down at my writing table, I was worried I would fall asleep out of sheer boredom. But it was simple enough, just a matter of reshaping Béraud-Bedoin’s notes. I had been surprised the first time he took me to the head office of Commercial Publishers of France: a single windowless ground-floor room. But at the age I was then, you don’t ask too many questions. You just trust in life. After two or three months, all contact with my publisher suddenly ceased. He had only given me half the agreed-upon sum, but it was more than enough for me. Maybe one day — why not tomorrow, if I’ve got the strength — I should go on a pilgrimage to rue de Saïgon and rue Chalgrin, a neutral zone from which both Béraud-Bedoin and Commercial Publishers of France had evaporated that winter along with the snow. But then again, now that I think about it, I haven’t really got the courage. I even wonder if those streets still exist, or if they haven’t finally been absorbed by the dark matter once and for all.