‘Have you been going to the meetings for long?’ she asked.
‘A few weeks.’
‘Would you like to have more personal contact with him?’ She asked the question with a certain condescension, as if she was the sole possible intermediary between Bouvière and the mass of disciples.
‘Not just yet,’ I said, ‘I’d prefer to wait a little longer…’ My tone of voice was so solemn that she could no longer doubt my sincerity.
She smiled at me and I believe I even detected, in her big pale-blue eyes, a kind of tenderness. But I was under no illusion. I owed it all to Bouvière.
She wore a man’s watch, which contrasted with the slenderness of her wrist. The black leather strap wasn’t tight enough. Too roughly, she stuffed her book into her bag. The watch slipped and fell off. I leaned down to pick it up. It must have been an old watch of Bouvière’s, I thought. She had asked if she could wear it so that she would always have something of his with her. I wanted to help her tighten the strap around her wrist, but it was clearly too big for her. At the base of her wrist, close to the veins, I noticed a recent scar, still pink, a row of little blisters. At first I felt uneasy. The scar didn’t fit with this sunny winter’s day, sitting on a bus with a blonde, blue-eyed girl. I was just a simple fellow with a taste for happiness and formal French gardens. Dark ideas often crossed my mind, but they were involuntary. It was perhaps the same for her, too. Her smile and her gaze suggested that before meeting Dr Bouvière, she had a carefree nature. He was probably responsible for her losing her love of life.
She realised that I’d seen her scar and she held her hand pressed flat against her knee to hide it. I wanted to talk to her about innocuous things. Was she still studying or had she already found a job? She explained that she had been working as a typist in an office called Opéra Intérim. All of a sudden she spoke naturally and without any of the affectation she had when we talked about the doctor. I ended up convincing myself that, before coming across him, she had been a perfectly simple girl. And I regretted not having met her then.
I asked her how long she had been going to the meetings. Almost a year. At first, it was difficult, she didn’t understand a lot of it. She knew nothing about philosophy. She had left school before the baccalauréat, at fifteen. She felt that she wasn’t good enough and this feeling threw her into a ‘crisis of despair’. Perhaps those words were a way of making me understand why she had the scar on her wrist. Dr Bouvière had helped her overcome this lack of confidence. It had been painful, but, thanks to him, she had managed to get through it. She was truly grateful to him for helping her get to a level that, alone, she would never have been able to reach.
Where had she met him? Oh, in a café. She was eating a sandwich before going back to work at the office. He was preparing one of his classes that he gave at the Hautes Études. When he found out she was a typist, he asked her to type up a text for him. I was about to tell her that I had met Bouvière for the first time in a café as well. But I was afraid of bringing up a painful topic. Perhaps she knew of the existence of the woman with the fur-lined raincoat, the one who said: ‘Next time, you won’t forget my refills, will you.’ What if this woman was the cause of the scar on her wrist? Or was it just Bouvière, whose love life at first seemed rather strange to me…
I wanted to know what stop she was getting off at. Petits-Champs — Danielle Casanova. My ticket was for Gare du Luxembourg, but that didn’t matter. I had decided to stay with her until she got off. She was heading for Opéra Intérim, but soon, she said, she would be leaving that job. The doctor had promised her ‘full-time work’: typing up his class notes and articles, arranging his meetings, and preparing notifications and memos to send out to the different groups. She was happy to have a real job that finally gave her life some meaning.
‘So you’re going to devote yourself entirely to the doctor?’ The question slipped out, and I immediately regretted it. She stared at me, a certain steeliness in her pale-blue eyes. I wanted to make up for my tactlessness with a more general remark: ‘You know, gurus don’t always realise how much power they hold over their followers.’ She softened her gaze. I got the impression she was no longer focused on me and was lost in her thoughts.
‘You think so?’ she asked. I was moved by how much confusion and candour there was in her question. A real job that would finally give her life some meaning…In any case, she had wanted to end it, her life, judging by the scar on her wrist. I would have loved her to confide in me. I dreamed, for a moment, that on the bus she brought her face close to mine and spoke at length up close to my ear so that no one else could hear.
Once more, she looked at me suspiciously. ‘I don’t agree with you,’ she said abruptly. ‘Personally, I need a guru…’ I nodded. I had no response to give her. We had arrived at the Palais-Royal. The bus passed in front of the Ruc-Univers where I had often sat with my father, out on the terrace. He never said anything either, and we parted without breaking the silence. A lot of congestion. The bus lurched along. I should have taken the opportunity to ask her questions quickly and to learn more about this girl, Geneviève Dalame, but she seemed preoccupied. All the way to Petits-Champs — Danielle-Casanova, we didn’t exchange a single word. And then we got off the bus. On the pavement, she shook my hand distractedly, with her left hand, the one with the watch and the scar. ‘See you at the next meeting,’ I said. But at the meetings after that, she always ignored my presence. She walked up Avenue Opéra and I quickly lost sight of her. There were far too many people about at that hour.
~ ~ ~
LAST NIGHT, I dreamed for the first time about one of the saddest experiences of my life. When I was seventeen years old, in order to get rid of me, my father called the police one afternoon, and a police van was waiting for us in front of the apartment block. He handed me over to the superintendent, saying that I was a ‘thug’. I would rather forget this experience but, in my dream last night, a detail that had been erased with all the rest came back and rattled me, forty years on, like a time bomb. I’m sitting on a bench at the back of the police station, waiting, with no idea what they’re going to do with me. Every now and again I would fall into a half-sleep. From midnight onwards, I frequently hear the sound of a car engine and doors slamming. Police officers push a motley group into the room, some of them well dressed, others who look more like homeless people. A round-up. They give their names. Gradually they disappear into a room; I can only see the wide-open door. The last one to present herself to the fellow tapping at the typewriter is a young woman, with chestnut hair, dressed in a fur coat. Several times the police officer makes a mistake spelling her name, and she repeats wearily: JACQUELINE BEAUSERGENT.
Before she goes into the room next door, our eyes meet.
~ ~ ~
I WONDER IF, on the night when the car knocked me over, I hadn’t just accompanied Hélène Navachine to her train at Gare du Nord. Whole sections of our lives end up slipping into oblivion and, sometimes, tiny little sequences in between as well. And on this strip of old film, spots of mould cause shifts in time and give the impression that two events occurring months apart took place on the same day or even simultaneously. How can any sense of chronology be established as we watch these truncated images scroll past before us, overlapping chaotically in our memories, or following one after the other, sometimes slowly, sometimes jolting, in the middle of blanks. It leaves my mind reeling.