‘Do you live in the neighbourhood?’
I told her I lived near Place de Clichy and that I was about to go home on the metro when I’d felt sick. I was on the point of telling her about my visit to the Death Cheater’s apartment block in Vincennes but, for her to understand properly, I would have had to go back a long way, perhaps to that afternoon when I was waiting outside the school gate — I’d love to remember exactly where that school was. It wasn’t long before everyone had gone home, the pavement was empty, the school gate shut. I was still waiting; no one had come to collect me. Thanks to the ether, I couldn’t feel the pain in my ankle anymore, and I drifted off to sleep. A year or two later, in one of the bathrooms in the apartment near the Bois de Boulogne, I came across a bottle of ether. I was mesmerised by the midnight-blue colour of the bottle. Every time my mother had one of her episodes, when she didn’t want to see anyone and asked me to bring her meals to her room on a tray or to massage her ankles, I took a whiff from the bottle so I felt brave enough to go to her. It was all too much to explain now. I just wanted to lie there, without speaking, my legs up on the stool.
‘Do you feel a bit better?’
I had never met anyone who was so gentle and assured. I had to tell her everything. Did my mother really die in Morocco? The more I went through the biscuit tin, the more doubts crept into my mind. It was the photos that made me uneasy. And especially the one that my mother wanted taken of me in the studio near the Champs-Élysées. She asked the photographer who had just taken a series of shots of her in various poses. I remembered that afternoon well. I was there from the beginning of the session. And the detail in the photos reminded me of the particular accessories that had, I would go so far as to say, branded me. The loose-fitting tulle dress that my mother wore belted at the waist; the tight-fitting velvet bodice; and the veil that made her look, under those bright, white camera lights, like a fake fairy. And me, in my dress: I was a fake child prodigy, a poor little circus animal. A toy poodle. Years later, looking at those photos, I finally understood that she was so keen to push me onto the dance floor because then she could make a fresh start herself. She had failed, but it was up to me to become a star. Was she really dead? The same old threat was still hanging over my head. But now I had the chance to talk it all through with someone. I didn’t even need to say anything. I would show her the photos.
I got up from the armchair. Now was the moment to say something, but I had no idea where to begin.
‘Are you sure you’re steady on your feet?’
So attentive, her voice so calm. We had left the little room and were back in the shop.
‘You should see a doctor. Perhaps you’re anaemic.’ She looked me in the eye, and smiled. ‘The doctor will prescribe vitamin B injections for you. I’m not giving them to you right now…Come back and see me.’
I stood in front of her. I was trying to delay the moment when I’d walk out of the chemist and find myself alone again.
‘How are you getting home?’
‘On the metro.’
At that time of evening there were plenty of people in the metro. They were on their way home after a movie or a stroll down the Grands Boulevards. I no longer felt up to the metro trip back to my room. This time I was frightened of getting lost for good. And then there was the other problem: if I had to change trains at Châtelet, I did not want to risk coming across that yellow coat again. Everything was going to happen all over again, in the same places, at the same times, until the end. I was trapped in the same old chain of events.
‘I’ll come with you.’
She saved my life; it was a close call.
She turned off the lights in the chemist and locked the door. The neon sign stayed on. We walked side by side, something I was so unaccustomed to that I could scarcely believe it. I was terrified that, at any moment, I’d wake up in my room. Her hands were in the pockets of her fur coat. I was too scared to take her arm. She was taller than I was.
‘What are you thinking about?’ she asked.
And she took my arm.
We had reached the intersection that I had crossed earlier and we were now going down the street at the end of which I could see the Gare de Lyon and the clock.
‘I think you’re really nice and that I’m wasting your time.’
She turned towards me. The collar of her fur coat brushed her cheek.
‘Of course not. You’re not wasting my time at all.’ She paused for a second. ‘I was wondering if your parents are still alive.’
I told her that I still had a mother, who lived in the suburbs.
‘And your father?’
My father? He must have been somewhere in the suburbs, too, or in central Paris, or somewhere far away in the big wide world. Or else he died a long time ago.
‘I’m not sure about my father’s identity.’
I kept my tone casual, as I was worried about making her uneasy. And I wasn’t used to confiding in people.
She remained silent. I had shocked her with all that sadness and gloom. I tried to think of something more cheerful, a brighter note.
‘But fortunately I was brought up by an uncle who was kind to me.’
It wasn’t really a lie. For two or three years, Jean Borand had looked after me every Thursday. Once he had taken me to the Trône fair, not far from his place. Was he my uncle? Perhaps he was my father, after all? When we were living in the apartment near the Bois de Boulogne, my mother used to cover her tracks and embellish the truth. She said to me one day that she ‘didn’t like vulgar things’; I had no idea what she was referring to. Back when we were living in the big apartment, her name wasn’t Suzanne Cardères anymore. She was the Comtesse Sonia O’Dauyé.
‘I don’t want to bore you with my family stories.’
She still had her arm in mine. We had arrived at the Gare de Lyon, near the metro station. So it was all over now. She would leave me at the top of the stairs.
‘I’ll take you home in a taxi.’
She led me over to the station. I was so surprised I couldn’t bring myself to thank her. There was a line of taxis along the street. Next thing, the taxi driver was waiting for directions. I managed to say, ‘Place Blanche.’
The pharmacist asked if I had been living in the neighbourhood for long. No, just a few months. A room in a place on a little street. It used to be a hotel. The rent wasn’t much. Besides, I’d found a job. The taxi drove along the river and the empty streets.
‘But you’ve got friends, haven’t you?’
At Trois Quartiers, one of my co-workers, Muriel, had introduced me to a small group of people she went out with on Saturday nights. For a little while, I’d been part of the gang. They would go out to dinner and then on to a nightclub. Sales girls, fellows who were starting off at the stock exchange or in jewellery shops or car dealerships. Department managers. One of them seemed more interesting than the others and I went out with him. He used to invite me to dinner and to Studio 28, a cinema in Montmartre, to watch old American movies. One night, after the movie, he took me to a hotel near Châtelet, and I let him have his way. I have only a vague memory of all those people and all those evenings out. None of it mattered at all to me. I couldn’t even remember his first name. His surname was all I’d retained: Wurlitzer.
‘I don’t have many friends anymore,’ I said.
‘You mustn’t be by yourself all the time like that… Otherwise you won’t be able to keep fighting your demons.’
She turned and looked at me with a slightly mischievous smile. I couldn’t bring myself to ask her how old she was. Perhaps ten or fifteen years older than I was, the same age as my mother at the time of the big apartment and the two photos, of her and of me. All the same, what an odd thing to do, to go and die in Morocco. ‘She wasn’t a nasty woman,’ Frédérique told me one night when we were talking about my mother. ‘She was just unlucky.’ She had come to Paris when she was very young, to learn classical ballet at the Paris Opera Ballet School. It was all she wanted to do. Then she’d had an accident ‘with her ankles’ and had to stop ballet. At twenty, she was dancing, but as a chorus girl in obscure cabaret shows, at Ferrari, Préludes, the Moulin Rouge, all those names I’d heard, during their conversations, from the brunette who didn’t like my mother and who, like her, had worked in those clubs. ‘You see,’ Frédérique said, ‘because of her ankles, she was like a wounded racehorse on the way to the abattoir.’