This Jean-Pierre Choureau had called me to set up a meeting, his voice devoid of expression. All he let me know was that it was about his wife. As I approached his home, I saw him walking along the bridle path, as I was, passing the amusement rides of the Jardin d’Acclimatation. How old was he? The timbre of his voice had seemed youthful to me, but voices can often be misleading.
What drama or marital hell would he drag me into? I felt assailed by discouragement, and I wasn’t completely sure I wanted to go to this meeting. I headed across the Bois towards the Mare Saint-James and the small lake the ice skaters frequented during the winter. I was the only one walking there and I got the impression that I was far from Paris, maybe somewhere in Sologne. Once again, I managed to overcome the discouragement. A vague professional curiosity made me interrupt my stroll through the woods and return towards the outskirts of Neuilly. Sologne. Neuilly. I imagined long rainy afternoons in Neuilly for the Choureaus. And over there, in Sologne, you could hear the horns of the hunt at dusk. Did his wife ride sidesaddle? I burst out laughing as I remembered Blémant’s remark: “Caisley, you go way too far, way too fast. You ought to have been a novelist.”
•
He lived at the far end, by the Porte de Madrid, in a modern building with a large windowed entrance. He had told me to go to the end of the hall and then to turn left. I would see his name on the door. “It’s an apartment on the ground floor.” I had been surprised by the sadness with which he had said “ground floor.” Then there was a long silence, as if he regretted the admission.
“And the exact address?” I had asked him.
“Eleven, avenue de Bretteville. Have you got that? Eleven. At four o’clock, would that work for you?”
His voice had grown steadier, taking on an almost conversational tone.
The small golden plaque on the door read “Jean-Pierre Choureau,” over which I noticed a peephole. I rang. I waited. There, in that deserted and silent hallway, I told myself that I had come too late. He had committed suicide. I felt ashamed by such a thought and, once again, I had a strong desire to drop the whole thing, to leave that hall, to return to my walk in the fresh air, in Sologne. I rang again, this time in three short bursts. The door opened straight away, as if he had been stationed behind it, observing me through the peephole.
A man of some forty years, with short-cropped brown hair, well above average height. He wore a navy blue suit and a sky blue shirt, the collar open. He led me wordlessly towards what one might have referred to as the living room. He motioned to a sofa behind a coffee table, and we sat down side by side. He struggled to speak. To put him at ease, I said to him, in the softest voice possible, “So this is about your wife?”
He tried to take on a detached tone, shooting me a lifeless smile. Yes, his wife had disappeared two months ago after an unspectacular argument. Could I be the first person that he had spoken to since her disappearance? The iron shutter of one of the bay windows was lowered, and I wondered if this man had cloistered himself in his apartment for the past two months. But other than the shutter, there was no trace of disorder or sloppiness in the living room. As for him, after wavering for a moment, he regained a certain self-composure.
“I would like this situation to be cleared up rather quickly,” he finally told me.
I took a closer look at him. Very light-colored eyes below black brows, high cheekbones, unremarkable features. In his appearance and his way of moving, there was an athletic vigor that was accentuated by his short hair. You could have easily imagined him on a sailboat, shirtless, a solitary navigator. And in spite of such apparent vitality and charm, his wife had left him.
I wanted to know whether during all that time he had made any attempts to find her. No. She had telephoned him three or four times, letting him know that she would not be coming back. She had strongly advised against his trying to get in touch with her and gave him no explanation. Her voice had changed. This was no longer even the same person. A very calm voice, very confident, a change that he had found quite disconcerting. He and his wife were almost fifteen years apart in age. She, twenty-two. He, thirty-six. As he gave me those details, I felt about him a certain distance, even a coldness, clearly the fruit of what one would call a proper education. And now I needed to ask him questions that were increasingly specific and I no longer knew if it was worth the trouble. What exactly was it that he wanted? For his wife to return? Or was he simply seeking to understand why she had left him? Perhaps this would be enough for him. With the exception of the sofa and coffee table, there was no furniture in the living room. The bay windows gave on to the avenue where cars passed by only occasionally, so infrequently that the ground-floor level of the apartment wasn’t a concern. Night was falling. He lit the red-shaded tripod lamp that stood next to the sofa on my right. The light made me blink my eyes, a white light that made the silence even more profound. I think he was waiting for my questions. He had crossed his legs. To buy some time, I took my spiral-bound notebook and my ballpoint pen from the inside pocket of my coat and made a few notes. “Him, 36 yrs old. Her, 22. Neuilly. First-floor apartment. No furniture. Bay windows looking onto avenue de Bretteville. No traffic. A few magazines on the coffee table.” He waited without saying a thing as if I were a doctor writing a prescription.
“Your wife’s maiden name?”
“Delanque. Jacqueline Delanque.”
I asked him the date and place of birth of this Jacqueline Delanque. The date, also, of their marriage. Did she have a driver’s license? A steady job? No. Did she have any family left? In Paris? In the provinces? A checkbook? As he answered me in a sad voice, I jotted down all of those details that are often the sole things that bear witness to the passage of a human being on Earth. Provided that one day someone finds the spiral-bound notebook in which they were recorded in a tiny, difficult-to-read script such as my own.
Now it was necessary for me to move on to more delicate questions, the ones that grant access to a man’s private life without first having to ask his permission. What gives us the right?
“You have friends?”
Yes, a few people that he saw regularly enough. He knew them from business school. A few had also been classmates at the Lycée Jean-Baptiste Say.
He had even tried to open a firm with three of them before going to work for the Zannetacci Real Estate Company as an active partner.
“Are you still working?”
“Yes. At 20, rue de la Paix.”
What means of transportation did he use when he went to the office? Every detail, no matter how trivial it may seem, is telling. By automobile. He traveled for Zannetacci from time to time. Lyon. Bordeaux. The Côte d’Azur. Geneva. And Jacqueline Choureau, née Delanque, did she stay behind on her own in Neuilly? He had taken her along on these trips a few times, they had gone to the Côte d’Azur. And when she was on her own, what did she do with her free time? There truly wasn’t anyone who might be able to give him information concerning the disappearance of Jacqueline, married name Choureau, born Delanque, to give him the slightest clue? “I don’t know, a secret she might have told you one day when she was feeling blue?” “No. She would never have confided in anyone.” Often, she reproached him for his friends’ total lack of imagination. It was important to keep in mind, as well, that she was nearly fifteen years younger than they were.
I had now arrived at a question that already bothered me a great deal, but one that it was necessary to ask: “Do you think she had a lover?”
The tone of my voice struck me as a bit brutal and a bit stupid. But that’s how it was. He frowned.