“Maria! shouted a voice that slowly faded into the night.
“She stared at me for a moment, then jumped up and ran off. I watched her like a white wraith wandering beneath the moon. She opened the garden gate among the cypresses and disappeared. I sat on the rock for a few seconds. Then someone closed her bedroom window and lowered the shutter. We met the day after that at the Ricards. As ever, she was at the piano. I am fond of music and turned the pages of her score. As she was playing, she told me — without looking at me — that it was her first kiss. I blushed when I heard that, like a young child, and someone asked if I was feeling well.”
I left him mid-flow. I hurriedly opened our compartment door. I finished dressing in the corridor. I knotted my tie while gazing through the window at a village. Then I went back inside to retrieve my luggage. I saw him lying there on his couchette, his hands behind his neck, staring at the ceiling.
I don’t know how long I stayed in the corridor. Maybe three or four hours. The train seemed as if it would never reach Paris. The hours seemed endless in the state I was in. At one point I even almost alighted at the first stop and continued on the next train. I think that from the corridor I once heard snoring in the compartment …
I even bumped into him again in the exit from Orsay station. When he saw me, he doffed his hat pleasantly my way.
Boulevard Saint-Michel, Paris
Years ago I lived for a while at number 145, Boulevard Saint-Michel, in Paris, right at the end, where it meets the L’Observatoire, Montparnasse and Port-Royal boulevards. This crossroads is an ugly part of the city, bleak and sprawling in winter, though it has the advantage of being close to wonderful places, like the horse-chestnut-lined avenue of L’Observatoire, in my view one of the most beautiful in Paris, and Le Jardin du Luxembourg, which is uniquely delightful, despite its drawbacks, and slightly further afield, Le Jardin des Plantes.
There is a famous café at this crossroads, La Closerie des Lilas, opposite which stands a statue of Maréschal Ney flourishing his sword. Opposite is the famous Bal Bullier, where so many carnivals were held, renowned in the era when students lived on fresh air and young ladies of limited means loved them for free. L’Observatoire, the scientific establishment that gives the avenue its name, stands at the far end, crowned by domes as round as white turtle eggs. Near the Bal Bullier, at 145 Boulevard Saint-Michel, there once was a restaurant by the name of Chez Émile, with a small front terrace fenced off by a few plants, and it was a fine restaurant in my day. It no longer exists. It’s all gone downhill.
The owner, Monsieur Émile Hasenbolher, was a striking presence: fair-haired, pale complexion, small blue eyes, and little in the way of hair. He was so astonishingly voluminous that when he donned his chef’s apron and hat and stood in the doorway, people stopped and stared at the spectacle. Day in, day out one sees signs of anxiety or pain on almost anyone’s face. In his case it was impossible. His face was so compacted with flab the state of his soul could never surface: it was solid, motionless, impermeable flab. He was good-hearted, with a cheery gift of the gab, and driven by one costly vice: he bet obsessively on races at Auteuil and Longchamps. Like so many people mad about horses, he liked to say he’d had a tip, that it was a sure bet, that his sources were firsthand. The truth was his finances were rocky. His cold, cunning, ambitious wife was constantly annoyed by her husband’s mania. This meant her interests were rarely in harmony with those of the restaurant’s customers or humanity in general. However, that didn’t stop Chez Émile always having stupendous foie gras from Strasbourg on the menu, or a kirsch difficult to find elsewhere in the neighborhood.
A courtyard behind the restaurant led to a rather gloomy stairway up to the building’s interior apartments. Monsieur Émile rented a first-floor apartment and sublet individual rooms in order to have a pot of money that, added to his earnings from the restaurant, helped him withstand the savage inroads the horses made into his finances. It was a picturesque courtyard, and rest home to all the items the restaurant spewed out: bottles, demijohns, boxes and cardboard packaging. At night it wasn’t unusual to stumble over one thing or another.
One of the rooms was let to Mademoiselle Ivonne Dubreil, who devoted her time to amorous passions in a gray, unassuming, oblique manner. Another was the residence of a mustachioed citizen, Henri Gide, who was an employee in the Porte d’Orléans toll house, the octroi, namely, a dues collector at the said Paris gate. This kind of employment still existed at the time. The dues collector was married to Marianne Monnanteil, who was very courteous and always bowed deferentially. I lived in the room in between these two. Monsieur Émile had himself suggested I did so at a very reasonable price, presumably because I had praised his restaurant’s kirsch and Alsatian cuisine to the skies.
It was a small apartment. Apart from the three bedrooms there was a pleasantly grimy, somber inactive kitchen with a tap that worked and three boxes of coal. I must mention these boxes of coal because, as we were extremely poor, they led to conflicts generated by our way of life that was in turn occasioned by our breadline existence. The first belonged to Mlle Dubreil, the second to citizen Gide, and the third was mine — per modo di dire — to phrase it Italian style. The dues collector always thought I was pinching his coal, I always thought Mademoiselle Ivonne was pinching mine, and Mlle Ivonne had no doubts as to the pinching proclivities of the dues collector. If it had gone to court there would have been a nil outcome in terms of compensation for the parties in dispute. The fact is I always had very little coal, so my room was freezing cold throughout that winter. Mlle Ivonne lit a “Petit Parisien” in her stove when she had a male visitor, no doubt to create an impression of well-being based on pure illusion. It was dues collector Gide who burnt the most, because like all good state employees he was accustomed to living in the warm at everyone else’s expense. Considering that Mlle Dubreil and I very occasionally had a minute amount of coal, reality genuinely afforded us the objective proof to deduce that the dues collector was the thief. Those arguments meant we got to know each other. They brought us together. It turned out that all in all we were paid-up members of the bourgeoisie committed to the defense of private property.
The walls separating our rooms were on the thin side. We could hear but not see each other. Moreover, I was positioned centrally. In the usual conventional language one could not claim in this case that the center was a responsible place to be. One can say, however, that I did need a degree of discretion and patience to survive there.
Mademoiselle Ivonne was a specter: she was a mystic soul driven by the wondrous, the magical and the mysterious. If she was walking along a street and met a street-seller manipulating some strange device — for example, making a doll dance above the sidewalk — she simply had to stop and gape in awe at the performance. I had bumped into her several times doing just this on the Rue Gay-Lussac. She was even more transported when at a fair — like the one at the beginning of summer on the Rue du Maine — she watched a stern-faced, hieratically posed artisan making mysterious gestures with one hand, as if wanting to conjure up some magic. Ivonne’s spirit felt riveted by the strange gestures and she looked entranced. Sometimes, he’d roll a cigarette in front of her and drop the leftover paper on the ground. Her hypnotized eyes followed the paper as it fell and stared at the small white blotch on the ground. After a while when she looked up, we felt she was struggling to cast off the dense haze enveloping her.