“No.”
He hesitated, he looked me right in the eye as if he was waiting for encouragement from me or as if he was searching for the right words. One evening, one of his old business-school friends had come to their place for dinner and had brought along someone called Guy de Vere, a man older than the rest of them. This Guy de Vere was very well versed in the occult sciences and had offered to bring them a few works on the subject. His wife had attended several gatherings and even some sort of conference given regularly by this Guy de Vere. He hadn’t been able to accompany her due to a backlog of work at Zannetacci. His wife developed an interest in these gatherings and spoke of them often, without him really understanding what they were all about. She had borrowed one of the books that Guy de Vere had suggested to her, the one that had seemed the easiest to read. It was called Lost Horizon. Had he been in contact with Guy de Vere after his wife’s disappearance? Yes, he had telephoned him several times, but de Vere didn’t know anything. “Are you positive about that?” He shrugged his shoulders and fixed me with a weary look. This Guy de Vere had been very evasive and it had been clear that he would get no information from him. The exact name and address of this man? He didn’t know his address, it wasn’t in the directory.
I tried to think of other questions to ask him. A moment of silence passed between us, but it didn’t appear to bother him. Seated side by side on that sofa, it was as if we were in a dentist’s or a doctor’s waiting room. White, bare walls. A woman’s portrait hung over the sofa. I nearly picked up one of the magazines from the coffee table. A sense of emptiness came over me. I must admit that at that moment I felt the absence of Jacqueline Choureau née Delanque to the point that it felt definitive to me. But there was no reason to be a pessimist right from the start. And further, wouldn’t this living room have had the same feeling of emptiness even if the woman had been present? Did they dine there? If so, it must have been on a card table that was folded up and put away afterwards. I wanted to know if she had left on the spur of the moment, without bothering to take all of her belongings. No. She had taken her clothing and the few books Guy de Vere had lent her, all of it in a dark red leather suitcase. There wasn’t the slightest trace of her. Even the pictures with her in them — a few vacation photos — had disappeared. Evenings, alone in the apartment, he wondered if he had ever been married to Jacqueline Delanque. The sole remaining proof was the family record book given to them after they had married. Family record book. He repeated these words as if he didn’t understand their meaning.
It was pointless for me to visit the other rooms of the apartment. Empty rooms. Empty closets. And silence, barely disturbed by the passing of a car on avenue de Bretteville. The evenings must have been long.
“Did she take a key with her?”
He shook his head no. Not even the hope of one night hearing the sound of the key in the lock that would announce her return. And he didn’t think it likely that she would ever call again.
“How did you two meet?”
She had been hired at Zannetacci to fill in for an employee. Temporary secretarial work. He had dictated a few client letters to her and that’s how they had gotten to know each other. They had seen each other outside of the office. She told him that she was a student at the École des Langues Orientales, where she took classes twice a week, but he never found out exactly which language she had been studying. Asian languages, she said. And, after two months, they were married one Saturday morning at the city hall in Neuilly, with two colleagues from Zannetacci as witnesses. No one else attended what was for him a simple formality. They had gone to lunch with the witnesses right near his place, just outside the Bois de Boulogne, at a restaurant often frequented by customers from the neighboring amusement park.
He shot me an embarrassed look. Apparently he had wanted to give me a more detailed account of their marriage. I smiled at him. I didn’t need an explanation. Making an effort he took the plunge: “It’s all about trying to create ties, you see.”
Well, sure, I understood. In this life that sometimes seems to be a vast, ill-defined landscape without signposts, amid all of the vanishing lines and the lost horizons, we hope to find reference points, to draw up some sort of land registry so as to shake the impression that we are navigating by chance. So we forge ties, we try to find stability in chance encounters. I kept quiet, my gaze fixed on the stack of magazines. In the middle of the coffee table sat a large yellow ashtray that bore the inscription “Cinzano.” And a paperback book entitled Fare Thee Well, Focolara. Zannetacci. Jean-Pierre Choureau. Cinzano. Jacqueline Delanque. Neuilly City Hall. Focolara. As if we were supposed to find some sense in all of this.
“And of course she was terribly charming. I fell head over heels for her.”
As soon as he had made this admission in a low voice, he seemed to regret it. In the days leading up to her disappearance, had he noticed anything different about her? Well sure, she complained to him more and more about their daily lives. This wasn’t what it was supposed to be like, she said, real life. And when he asked her what it really consisted of, this “real life,” she shrugged her shoulders without answering, as if she knew that he wouldn’t understand her explanation. And then she found her smile once again, and her kindness, and she was almost apologetic for her bad mood. With a look of resignation, she told him that in the end it wasn’t so bad. One day, maybe, he would understand what “real life” was.
“You really don’t have a single photograph of her?”
One afternoon, they were walking along the Seine. He had planned on taking the Métro to Châtelet to get to the office. On the boulevard du Palais, they passed a little photo-booth kiosk. She needed photos for a new passport. He waited for her on the sidewalk. When she came out, she had handed him the photos, telling him that she was afraid she would lose them. Once back at the office, he had put the photos in an envelope and had forgotten to bring them back to Neuilly. After his wife’s disappearance, he had noticed that the envelope was still there, on his desk, among the administrative documents.
“Would you excuse me a moment?”
He left me alone on the sofa. It was dark out. I looked at my watch and I was surprised that the hands only showed a quarter to six. It felt like I had been there much longer.
Two pictures in a gray envelope, on the left of which was printed: “Zannetacci Real Estate, 20, rue de la Paix, Paris 1st.” One shot head on, one in profile, the kind they still insisted on for foreigners at the police headquarters. Her family name, Delanque, and her first name, Jacqueline, were very French all the same. Two pictures that I held between thumb and index finger as I contemplated them in silence. Brown hair, pale-colored eyes, and one of those profiles so unsullied that it gave off charm even in an anthropometric photo. And those two pictures had all the dinginess and all the coldness common to anthropometric photos.
“Lend them to me for a while?” I asked him.
“Of course.”
I stuffed the envelope into a jacket pocket.
There comes a time when you have to stop listening to other people. What did he, Jean-Pierre Choureau, really know about Jacqueline Delanque? Not much. They had lived together for barely a year in this street-level apartment in Neuilly. They had sat side by side on this sofa, they had eaten across from each other, and once in a while they had dined with old friends from business school and from the Lycée Jean-Baptiste Say. Is that enough to guess the entirety of what goes on in someone’s head? Did she still see any family relations? I made one final effort to ask him this question.