•
I’d just as soon take a walk down the Champs-Élysées some spring evening. They don’t really exist anymore, but, at night, they still maintain the illusion. Perhaps along the Champs-Élysées I might hear your voice call to me by name. The day you sold the fur coat and the cabochon emerald, I still had about two thousand francs left from the money I had received from Béraud-Bedoin. We were rich. The future was ours. That evening, you were kind enough to come and join me up by Étoile. It was summertime, the same summer we met on the quays, you and me and Crossbones, the afternoon I saw the two of you walking towards me. We went to the restaurant on the corner of rue François-1er and rue Marbeuf. They had put tables out on the sidewalk. It was still daytime. The traffic had thinned and we could hear the murmur of voices and the sound of footsteps. Around ten o’clock, as we made our way down the Champs-Élysées, I asked myself if night would ever fall, if we might be experiencing the midnight sun they get in Russia and the northernmost countries. We walked without any specific destination, we had the whole night ahead of us. There were still patches of sunlight under the arches of rue de Rivoli. It was the beginning of summer, we were going to be leaving soon. Where to? We didn’t know yet. Maybe Majorca or Mexico. Maybe London or Rome. The places no longer mattered in the least, they had all blended together into one. The lone goal of our journey was to go to the heart of summer, that place where time stops and the hands of the clock permanently show the same hour: twelve noon.
By the time we reached the Palais-Royal, night had fallen. We spent a little while on the patio of the Ruc-Univers before continuing on our way. A dog followed us all the way from rue de Rivoli to Saint-Paul. Then he entered the church. We weren’t feeling at all tired, and Louki told me that she felt like she could walk all night. We were crossing a neutral zone just before Arsenal, a few deserted streets that made us wonder if they were uninhabited. On the second floor of a building, we noticed two large illuminated windows. We sat down on a bench opposite them, and we couldn’t help but stare at those windows. It was the red-shaded lamp at the very back of the room that cast that muted light. We could make out a gilt-framed mirror on the left wall. The other walls were bare. I watched for a silhouette to pass behind the windows, but no, there was seemingly no one in that room. We couldn’t tell if it was a living room or a bedroom.
“We should ring the doorbell,” Louki said to me. “I’m sure someone is expecting us.”
The bench was in the center of a kind of island formed by the intersection of two streets. Years later, I was in a taxi heading past Arsenal towards the quays. I asked the driver to stop. I wanted to find that bench and that building. I hoped that the two second-floor windows would still be illuminated after all that time. But I very nearly got lost among the numerous small streets that surrounded the walls of the Célestins barracks. That night, I had told her there was no point in ringing the doorbell. No one would be home. And plus, we were just fine there on that bench. I could even hear a fountain gurgling somewhere nearby.
“Are you sure?” Louki had said. “I don’t hear anything.”
We were the ones who lived in that apartment. We had forgotten to turn out the light. And we had misplaced the key. The dog from earlier must have been waiting for us. He had fallen asleep in our bedroom and he would remain there, waiting for us until the end of time.
Later that night, we were walking northward, and so as not to drift too far, we had set a goaclass="underline" place de la République, although we weren’t certain we were going the right direction. It didn’t really matter, we could always take the Métro back to Argentine if we ended up getting lost. Louki told me she had spent a lot of time in that area when she was younger. Her mother’s friend Guy Lavigne had had a garage nearby. Yes, somewhere near République. We kept stopping at every garage, but it was never the right one. She could no longer find her way. The next time she paid a visit to Guy Lavigne out in Auteuil, she would have to ask him the exact address of his old garage, before he too disappeared. It didn’t seem important, but it was. Otherwise, it was possible to end up without a single reference point in your life. She remembered that her mother and Guy Lavigne used to take her to the Foire du Trône carnival on the Saturday that followed Easter. They walked there, down a never-ending boulevard that looked much like the one we were following. It had to be the same one. But then we must have been moving away from place de la République. On those Saturdays, she walked with her mother and Guy Lavigne all the way to the edge of the Bois de Vincennes.
It was nearly midnight, and it would be strange to find ourselves at the gates of the zoo. We would be able to make out the elephants in the darkness. But there ahead of us sprawled a brightly lit open space in the middle of which stood a statue. Place de la République. As we drew nearer, music grew louder and louder. A ball? I asked Louki if it was the fourteenth of July. She didn’t know any more than I did. For the last while, the days and nights had all been running one into the next for the both of us. The music was coming from a café a little ways from where the boulevard met rue du Grand-Prieuré. A few customers seated on the terrace.
It was too late to catch the last Métro. Just beyond the café, a hotel, its door open. A bare lightbulb illuminated a very steep stairwell with black wooden steps. The night clerk didn’t even ask our names. He simply gave us the number of a room on the second floor. “Maybe we could just live here from now on,” I said to Louki.
A single bed, but it wasn’t too narrow for the two of us. No curtains or shutters on the window. We left it open because of the heat. Below, the music had gone quiet, and we could hear peals of laughter. She whispered in my ear, “You’re right. We should just stay here forever.”
I felt like we were far from Paris, in a small Mediterranean port. At the same time every morning, we followed the path down to the beach. I still remember the hotel’s address: 2, rue du Grand-Prieuré. Hôtel Hivernia. All throughout the bleak years that followed, whenever someone would ask me my address or telephone number, I would say, “You can always write to me at the Hôtel Hivernia, 2, rue Grand-Prieuré. It will be forwarded to me.” I really should go and pick up all the letters that have been waiting there for me for such a long time, letters that have gone unanswered. You were right, we should have stayed there forever.
•
I saw Guy de Vere one last time, quite a few years later. In the street that slopes down toward Odéon, a car came to a halt next to me and I heard someone call me by my former name. I recognized the voice even before I turned around. He leaned his head out the lowered car door window. He smiled at me. He hadn’t changed. Except for slightly shorter hair.
It was in July, around five o’clock in the evening. It was hot out. We both took a seat on the hood of the car to talk. I didn’t have it in me to tell him that we were only a few yards away from the Condé and the door Louki had always used, the one hidden in the shadows. In any case, that door didn’t exist anymore. Facing the street, there was now a window displaying crocodile handbags, boots, even a saddle and riding crops. The Prince de Condé. A leather shop.