‘Where did you say?’
‘The Mirabeau Clinic.’
‘You must be mistaken.’
He looked me up and down, perhaps to gauge the threat I posed. He noticed my left shoe. I had widened the split in my moccasin — for the bandage. If I remember correctly, I had even cut away most of the leather to free my ankle and I wore it without a sock, like the bandages that thoroughbreds sometimes have wrapped around their ankles because of their fragility.
‘It was the accident,’ I said. But he didn’t seem to understand. ‘Yes, the accident the other night…Place des Pyramides…’ He looked at me in silence. I got the impression he was taunting me. ‘Speaking of which,’ I said, ‘I wanted to know if there’s been any news from Jacqueline Beausergent…’
He put a cigarette in his mouth and the other man held out a lighter, without taking his eyes off me either. ‘I don’t understand a word of what you’re saying, sir.’ His tone was quite contemptuous, the way you’d address a homeless person or a drunk.
The boss of the café came over, surprised at the way I was behaving with a customer he seemed to respect — even fear. And it was true that there was something unsettling about this man’s face and his low, dark hairline. And even the tone of his slightly hoarse voice. But he didn’t scare me. Ever since I was a child, I’d seen so many strange men in my father’s company…This man was no more fearsome than the others.
‘I also wanted to let you know…I really don’t need all this money.’ And from the inside pocket of my sheepskin jacket I took out the large wad of notes he had given me when I left the Mirabeau Clinic and which I was still carrying with me. He gave a disdainful flick of the hand.
‘Sorry, sir…That’s quite enough.’ Then he turned back to the man next to him. They continued their conversation in hushed tones, ignoring my presence. I went and sat back down at my table. Behind the counter, the boss stared at me, shaking his head as if to say that my behaviour had been inappropriate and that I had got off lightly. Why? I would have loved to know.
When they left the café, they didn’t even glance over at me. Through the window, I watched them walk along the pavement next to the quay. I thought about following them. No, it was better not to rush things. And already I regretted having lost my composure in front of him. I ought to have stayed in my corner, without attracting his attention, and waited until he left to follow him. And then find out who he was and see if he could lead me to her. But having wasted this chance, I feared I had burned my bridges.
From behind the counter, the boss continued to look at me somewhat disapprovingly.
‘I must have mistaken him for someone else,’ I said.
‘Do you know that man’s name?’ He seemed reluctant and hesitated a moment, then he blurted it out, as if despite himself.
‘Solière.’
He said that I was lucky Solière hadn’t taken offence at my bad manners. What bad manners? A car had knocked me over the other night and I was simply trying to identify and find the driver. Was that unreasonable of me? I think I managed to convince him.
‘I understand…’ He smiled.
‘And who exactly is this Solière?’ I asked.
His smile broadened. My question seemed to amuse him. ‘He’s no choirboy,’ he said. ‘No, he’s no choirboy…’ I could tell from his evasive tone that I wouldn’t get any more out of him.
‘Does he live in the neighbourhood?’
‘He used to live around here, but not any more, I don’t think,’ he said.
‘And do you know if he’s married?’
‘I couldn’t tell you.’
Other customers arrived and interrupted our conversation. He had forgotten about me, anyway. It was presumptuous of me to think he gave a second thought to my exchange with Solière. Customers come and go, they whisper among themselves. There’s shouting too. Sometimes, very late at night, the police have to be called. In all the commotion, the comings and goings, a few faces, a few names stand out. But not for very long.
*
I thought that, with a little luck, the car would turn up again, parked somewhere in the neighbourhood. I walked up to the big garage on the quay and asked the petrol-pump assistant if, among his customers, he knew of a blonde woman who had recently been in a car accident and had injuries to her face. She drove a sea-green Fiat. He thought about it for a moment. No, he couldn’t help me. There was so much traffic on the quay…You’d think it was a motorway. He didn’t even notice his customers’ faces anymore. Far too many customers. And Fiats. And so many blonde women… Then I ended up further down the quay, in the Trocadéro Gardens. I thought it was the first time I’d walked in the gardens, but in front of the aquarium building, a vague childhood memory came back to me. I bought a ticket and went in. I stayed a long time watching the fish behind the glass. Their phosphorescent colours reminded me of something. Someone had brought me here, but I couldn’t say exactly when. Before Biarritz? Between Biarritz and Jouy-en-Josas? Or was it shortly after I returned to Paris, just before I had quite reached the age of reason?
I thought it was around the same time as when I was hit by the van outside the school. And then, contemplating the fish in silence, I remembered the café boss’s reply when I asked him who exactly the man named Solière was: ‘He’s no choirboy.’ I had been a choirboy, at one point in my life. It was not something I ever thought about, and the memory of it came back to me suddenly. It was at midnight mass in a village church. Although I searched through my memory, it could only have been Fossombronne-la-Forêt, where the school and the convent were, as well as a certain Dr Divoire, who directory enquiries had told me was no longer in the phone book. She was the only one who could have taken me to midnight mass and to the Trocadéro aquarium. Under the van’s tarpaulin, she held my hand and leaned over me.
The memory was far more distinct in this silent space, illuminated by the light of the tanks. Returning from midnight mass, along a small street, up to the front door of the house, someone was holding my hand. It was the same person. And I had come here during the same period, I had contemplated the same multicoloured fish gliding by behind the glass in silence. I wouldn’t have been surprised to hear footsteps behind me and to see her coming towards me when I turned around, as if all those years amounted to nothing. What’s more, we made the journey from Fossombronne-la-Forêt to Paris in the same car as the one that hit me on Place des Pyramides, a sea-green car. It had never stopped driving around the streets of Paris at night, looking for me.
When I left the aquarium, I was overwhelmed by the cold. Along the paths and lawns of the gardens, there were little piles of snow. The sky was a limpid blue. I felt I could see clearly for the first time in my life. This blue, against which the Palais de Chaillot was sharply silhouetted, this bracing cold after years and years of torpor…The accident the other night had come at the right time. I needed a shock to wake me out of my lethargy. I couldn’t carry on walking around in fog. And it happened a few months before I turned twenty-one. What a strange coincidence. I’d been saved just in time. That accident would probably be one of the most defining events of my life. A return to order.
The school and the van with a tarpaulin: it was the first time I revisited the past. It was triggered by the shock of the accident the other night. Until that point I had lived from one day to the next. I’d been driving on a road covered with black ice in what could have been described as zero-visibility conditions. I’d had to avoid looking back. Perhaps I’d turned onto a bridge that was too narrow. It was impossible to turn around. One glance in the rear-view mirror and I would have been consumed by vertigo. But now I could look back over those unfortunate years without fear. It was as though someone other than myself had a bird’s eye view of my life, or that I was looking at my own X-ray against a backlit screen. Everything was so clear, the lines so precise and pure…Only the essential elements were left: the van, the face leaning over me under the tarpaulin, ether, midnight mass and the walk home up to the front gate of the house where her room was on the first floor, at the end of the corridor.