It was outside a school. The playground looked out onto an avenue on a slight incline, lined with trees and houses, but I no longer knew if they were mansions, country houses or detached suburban houses. Throughout my childhood, I had stayed in so many different places that I ended up getting them confused in my mind. My memory of this avenue had perhaps become mixed up with that of an avenue in Biarritz or of a sloping road in Jouy-en-Josas. During the same period, I had lived in both places, and I think the dog was run over on Rue Docteur-Kurzenne, in Jouy-en-Josas.
I was leaving class at the end of the afternoon. It must have been winter. It was dark. I was waiting on the pavement for someone to come and collect me. Soon there was no one else left. The school gate was closed. There was no light at the windows. I didn’t know the way home. I tried to cross the avenue, but as soon as I stepped off the pavement a van braked suddenly and knocked me down. My ankle was injured. They laid me down in the back of the van under the tarpaulin. One of the two men from the van was with me. As the engine started up, a woman got in. I knew her. We lived in the same house. I can still see her face. She was young, about twenty-five, blonde or light brown hair, a scar on her cheek. She leaned over me and held my hand. She was out of breath, as if she had been running. She was explaining to the man next to us that she was late because her car had broken down. She said to him that she came from Paris. The van stopped alongside the railings of a garden. One of the men carried me and we crossed the garden. She kept hold of my hand. We went into the house. I was laid down on a bed. A room with white walls. Two nuns leaned over me, their faces taut in their white wimples. They put the same black muzzle over my nose as the one at the Hôtel-Dieu. And before falling asleep, I smelled the monochromatic odour of ether.
*
That afternoon, once I’d left the clinic, I followed the quay towards Pont de Grenelle. I was trying to remember what had happened back then, when I woke up at the convent. After all, the white-walled room where I had been taken looked like the one at the Mirabeau Clinic. And the smell of ether was the same as at the Hôtel-Dieu. That could help me get to the bottom of it. They say that smells bring back the past best, and the smell of ether always had a curious effect on me. It seemed to be the very essence of my childhood, but as it was bound up with sleep and the numbing of pain, the images that it unveiled clouded over again almost simultaneously. It was surely because of this that my childhood memories were so confused. Ether made me both remember and forget.
Outside school, the van with the tarpaulin, the convent…I searched for other details. I could see myself next to the woman in a car: she opened a door, the car went down a driveway…She had a room on the first floor of the house, the last one at the end of the corridor. But these fragments of memory were so vague that I couldn’t hold on to them. Only her face was clear, with the scar on her cheek, and I was truly convinced that it was the same face as the one from the other night, at the Hôtel-Dieu.
Going along the quay, I came to the corner of Rue de l’Alboni, at the spot where the overground metro intersects the road. The square was a little further on, at right angles to the road. I stopped, on a whim, in front of a huge building with a black wrought-iron glass door. I was tempted to go through the porte-cochère, to ask the concierge for Jacqueline Beausergent’s floor, and if she did indeed live there, to ring at her door. But it really wasn’t like me to show up unannounced at people’s houses. I had never asked for help or requested anything from anyone.
How much time had passed between the accident outside the school and the one the other night at Place des Pyramides? Fifteen years, if that. Both the woman from the police van and the one at the Hôtel-Dieu seemed young. We don’t change much in fifteen years. I climbed the steps up to Passy metro station. Waiting for the train on the platform of the little station, I searched for clues that could tell me if this woman from Square de l’Alboni was the same as the one fifteen years ago. And I would have to put a name to the place with the school, the convent and the house where I must have lived for a while, where she had her room at the end of the corridor. It was during the time when we went to stay in Biarritz and Jouy-en-Josas. Before? In between the two? In chronological order, first it was Biarritz then Jouy-en-Josas. And after Jouy-en-Josas, back to Paris and memories that became clearer and clearer, because I had reached what they call the age of reason, around seven years old. Only my father would have been able to give me some vague details, but he had vanished without a trace. So it was up to me to work it out, and that seemed perfectly natural to me anyway. The metro crossed the Seine towards the Left Bank. It passed alongside façades whose every lit window seemed an enigma to me.
To my surprise, one weekday evening before the accident, I bumped into Dr Bouvière on the metro. He wasn’t surprised in the slightest by our meeting and he explained that the same situations, the same faces, often reappear in our lives. He told me he would develop the theme of the ‘eternal return’ in one of our next meetings. I felt that he was on the brink of confiding in me. ‘You must have been surprised to see me in such a state the other day.’ He stared at me almost tenderly. There was not a trace of bruising left on his face or neck. ‘You see, my boy…There is something that I have been hiding from myself for a long time… something I have never admitted openly.’ Then he collected himself. He shook his head. ‘Excuse me…’ He smiled at me. He was clearly relieved to have stopped himself at the last moment from making some grave confession. He proceeded to talk too volubly about insignificant things, as if he wanted to throw me off track. He stood up and got off at Pigalle station. I was a little worried about him.
*
When I got out of the metro that afternoon, I dropped into a pharmacy. I handed over the prescription I’d been given at the clinic and asked how I should apply the dressing. The pharmacist wanted to know how I’d sustained my injury. When I explained that I’d been hit by a car, he said, ‘I hope you’re going to press charges.’ He insisted: ‘So, have you pressed charges…?’ I didn’t dare show him the piece of paper I had signed at the Mirabeau Clinic. The piece of paper seemed odd. I planned to read it again in my room with a clear head. As I left the pharmacy, he said, ‘And don’t forget to disinfect the wound with Mercurochrome every time you change the dressing.’
When I got back to the hotel, I telephoned directory enquiries to find out Jacqueline Beausergent’s phone number. Unknown at every number on Square de l’Alboni. My room seemed smaller than normal, as if I had returned after years away or even as if I had lived there in a previous life. Could it be that the accident the other night had caused such a fracture in my life that there was now a before and an after? I counted the banknotes. In any case, I had never been so rich. I could take a break from the exhausting buying and selling all over Paris, flogging to one bookshop what I had just bought at another for a tiny profit.
My ankle hurt. I didn’t have the energy to change the dressing. I lay down on my bed, hands crossed under my head, and tried to think about the past. I wasn’t used to it. For a long time, I had tried to forget my childhood, never having felt much nostalgia for it. I didn’t possess a single photo or any physical evidence from that period, apart from an old vaccination card. Yes, thinking about it, the episode outside the school with the van and the nuns came in between Biarritz and Jouy-en-Josas. So I would have been six years old. After Jouy-en-Josas, it was Paris and the primary school on Rue du Pont-de-Lodi, then different boarding schools and barracks across France: Saint Lô, Haute-Savoie, Bordeaux, Metz, Paris again, where I am now. In fact, the only mystery in my life, the only link that didn’t connect with the others, was the first accident with the van and the young woman or young girl who was late that evening because she had broken down coming from Paris. And it took the shock of the other night at Place des Pyramides for this forgotten episode to rise to the surface once again. What would Dr Bouvière have thought of it? Could he have used it as an example, along with so many others, to illustrate the theme of the eternal return in the next meeting at Denfert-Rochereau? But it wasn’t only this. It also seemed that a breach had opened up in my life onto an unknown horizon.