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I FOUND A hotel past the Pont de Bir-Hakeim on a small avenue that ran onto the quay. After three days, I no longer wanted to go back to my room in Porte d’Orléans, so I took a room at the Hôtel Fremiet, and wondered who the other guests were. It was a more comfortable room than the one on Rue de la Voie-Verte, with a telephone and even its own bathroom. But I could afford this luxury thanks to the money the man named Solière had given me, which he had turned down when I tried to give it back. That was his bad luck. It was foolish of me to have any scruples about it. After all, he was no choirboy.
At night, in my room, I decided never to return to Rue de la Voie-Verte. I had taken some clothes and the navy-blue cardboard box in which I kept my old papers. I had to face the facts: there was no trace of me left there. Far from making me sad, the thought gave me courage for the future. A weight had been lifted.
I used to get back late to the hotel. I’d eat dinner in a large restaurant, past the steps from the bridge and the entrance to the metro station. I still remember the name: La Closerie de Passy. It wasn’t very busy. Some nights I would find myself alone with the manager, a woman with short brown hair, and the waiter, who wore a white naval jacket. Every time I went, I hoped Jacqueline Beausergent would come in and walk over to the bar like the two or three people who sat and talked with the manager. I always chose the closest table to the entrance. I would stand up and walk towards her. I had already decided what I would say to her: ‘We were both in an accident at Place des Pyramides…’ Seeing me walk would be enough. The split moccasin, the bandage… At the Hôtel Fremiet, the man at reception had looked me over with a frown. The bloodstain on my old sheepskin jacket was still there. He didn’t seem to trust me. I paid a fortnight’s rent in advance.
But the manager of La Closerie de Passy wasn’t fazed by my bandage and the bloodstain on my old sheepskin jacket. Apparently she had seen it all before, in neighbourhoods that weren’t as quiet as this one. Next to the bar was a parrot in a large yellow cage. Decades later, I was leafing through a magazine from the time and, on the last page, there were advertisements for restaurants. One of them jumped out at me: ‘La Closerie de Passy and its parrot, Pépère. Open seven days a week.’ A seemingly harmless phrase, but it made my heart race. One night, I was feeling so lonely that I went to sit at the bar with the others and I sensed that the manager took pity on me because of my stained sheepskin jacket, my bandage, and because I was so thin. She advised me to drink some Viandox. When I asked her a question about the parrot she said, ‘You can teach him a sentence if you like.’ So I thought about it and ended up saying as clearly as possible, ‘I’m looking for a sea-green Fiat car.’ It didn’t take long to teach it to him. His way of saying it was more concise and efficient: ‘sea-green Fiat’, and his voice was more shrill and imperious than mine.
La Closerie de Passy isn’t there anymore and one night last summer when I was going along Boulevard Delessert in a taxi, it looked as if there was a bank in its place. But parrots live to a very old age. Perhaps this one, after thirty years, is still repeating my phrase in another neighbourhood of Paris and in the commotion of another café, without anyone understanding it or really paying any attention. Nowadays only parrots remain faithful to the past.
*
I used to prolong my dinner at La Closerie de Passy as long as possible. At around ten o’clock the manager and her friends would sit at a table at the back, near the bar and near Pépère’s yellow cage. They would begin playing cards. She even invited me to join them one night. But it was time for me to continue my search. SEA-GREEN FIAT.
I thought that by walking around the streets of the neighbourhood towards midnight, I might be lucky enough to come across the car parked somewhere. Jacqueline Beausergent would surely be home at that time. It seemed more likely that I would eventually find THESEA-GREEN FIAT at night rather than during the day.
The streets were silent, the cold went straight through me. Of course, now and again, I was frightened that a police van doing its rounds would stop alongside me and ask to see my papers. My bloodstained sheepskin jacket and the bandage visible through my split moccasin must have made me look like a prowler. And I was still a few months shy of twenty-one. But, luckily, on those particular nights no police van stopped to drive me to the nearest police station or to the large, dingy buildings of the juvenile police department on the banks of the Seine.
I started at Square de l’Alboni. No sea-green Fiat among the cars parked there, on either side of the road. I was convinced that she could never find a spot out the front of her apartment, that she would drive around for ages in the neighbourhood looking for somewhere to park. No doubt she ended up quite far away. Unless her car was in a garage. There was one near her place, on Boulevard Delessert. I went in one night. There was a man at the back, in a sort of glass-walled office. He saw me from afar. As I pushed the door open, he stood up and I got the feeling that he was on the defensive. At that moment I regretted not wearing a new coat. As soon as I started talking, he relaxed. A car had knocked me over the other night and I was almost certain that the driver lived in the area. I hadn’t heard anything from the driver and I wanted to get in contact. Incidentally, it was a female driver. Yes, Square de l’Alboni. A sea-green Fiat. The woman had some injuries on her face and the Fiat was a bit damaged.
He consulted a large register that was already lying open on his desk. He put his index finger to his lower lip and slowly turned the pages. It was a gesture my father often made while examining mysterious files at the Corona or the Ruc-Univers. ‘You did say a sea-green Fiat?’ He held his index finger in the middle of the page, pointing at something. My heart was pounding. Actually there was a sea-green Fiat, licence plate…He lifted his head and considered me with the solemnity of a doctor in a consultation.
‘The car belongs to a certain Solière,’ he said. ‘I have his address.’
‘Does he live on Square de l’Alboni?’
‘No, not at all.’ He frowned as if thinking twice about giving me his address.
‘You said it was a woman. Are you sure it’s the same car?’ So I took him back through the events of that night: she and I going in the police van with Solière, the Hôtel-Dieu, the Mirabeau Clinic, and Solière again, waiting for me in the foyer when I left the clinic. I didn’t want to tell him about my last encounter with him in the café, when he pretended not to recognise me.
‘He lives at 4 Avenue Albert-de-Mun,’ he said. ‘But he’s not one of our regular clients. It was the first time he’s been here.’ I asked him where Avenue Albert-de-Mun was. Over that way. It runs along Trocadéro Gardens. Near the aquarium? A bit further on. An avenue that runs down towards the quay. The windscreen and one of the headlights had been replaced, but someone had come to collect the car before the repairs were finished. Solière himself? He couldn’t tell me, he was away that day. He would ask his business partner. From time to time he glanced at my split moccasin and bandage. ‘You’ve pressed charges, haven’t you?’ His tone was reprimanding but almost affectionate, like the pharmacist’s the other day. Against whom? The only charges I could press were against myself. Up until then my life had been chaotic. The accident was going to bring an end to all the years of confusion and uncertainty. It was time.