‘And is there any sign of a Madame Solière?’ I asked. ‘Or a Jacqueline Beausergent? Not in the register, in any case. A blonde woman, with injuries on her face? You’ve never seen her around the neighbourhood?’
He shrugged his shoulders. ‘I’m always in the office, you know. Apart from when I go home, to Vanves. Are you sure she was driving?’
I was sure. That night, we’d sat next to each other for a long time on the sofa in the hotel lobby, before the man named Solière had walked towards us and we’d got in the police van. I could go and check at the hotel on Place des Pyramides. There must have been a witness. But I didn’t need a witness. All I needed was to find this woman to clear things up with her, that was all.
‘Go and see at Avenue-Albert-de-Mun,’ he said. ‘If they happen to bring the Fiat back, I’ll let you know. Where can I reach you?’ I gave him the address of the Hôtel Fremiet. After all, he didn’t mean me any harm.
It was around midnight and I walked to the Trocadéro Gardens. Solière. I repeated the name…I had kept an old address book of my father’s, which should be in the navy-blue cardboard box. I would check under the letter S.
I walked along the pathway to the aquarium. Yes, Avenue Albert-de-Mun ran down towards the Seine and along the Trocadéro Gardens. Number 4 was one of two apartment buildings before the quay. It stood on the corner of a small street and there was a terrace on the top floor. No light at any of the windows. The building looked abandoned. From time to time a car went past on the quay. I walked up to the glass doorway, but I didn’t dare go in. Any concierge, seeing me dressed as I was, and at that hour, would be sure to call the police. Was there a concierge? And what floor did this Solière live on? I remained standing on the pavement, next to the gardens, without taking my eyes off the façade. It was in there, on one of the floors, that I was to learn something important about my life. It seemed to me that one afternoon in my childhood, after leaving the aquarium, I had walked down this road, alongside the gardens. Four Avenue Albert-de-Mun. Still, I would check in my father’s old notebook to see if the address appeared on any of the pages, preceded by a name, Solière or another name. Perhaps the village of Fossombronne-la-Forêt was mentioned. Sooner or later, I would find out what connected the two places. I must have made numerous journeys between Fossombronne-la-Forêt and Paris in the sea-green Fiat or in another older car that this Jacqueline Beausergent drove. The longer I contemplated the white façade, the more I felt that I had seen it before — a fleeting sensation like the fragments of a dream that slip away as you wake up, or light from the moon. In my room at Porte d’Orléans, I would never have imagined that this neighbourhood and the Avenue Albert-de-Mun would become a magnetic zone for me. Up until then, I lived on the fringes, in the suburbs of life, waiting for something. Even now in my dreams, I find myself back in these neighbourhoods where I’m lost among all the tall apartment buildings on the outskirts of Paris. I search in vain for my old room, the one from before the accident.
I walked down to the quay. No sea-green Fiat there either. I walked around the apartment block. Perhaps she was away. And how would I find Solière’s phone number? Considering his demeanour in the café the other day, he didn’t seem the type you’d find in the phone book.
*
The pharmacist on Rue Raynouard was kind enough to change my dressings a few times. He disinfected the cut with Mercurochrome and advised me not to walk so much and to find a more appropriate shoe than the split moccasin for my left foot. Each time I went, I promised to follow his advice. But I knew very well that I wouldn’t change my shoes until I found the sea-green Fiat.
I tried to walk less than the previous days and I spent long afternoons in the Hôtel Fremiet. I thought about the past and the present. I had made a note of the names of the people living at 4 Avenue Albert-de-Mun who were in the phone book.
Boscher (J.): PASSY 13 51
Trocadéro Finance and Real Estate Co: PASSY 48 00
Destombe (J.): PASSY 03 97
Dupont (A.): PASSY 24 35
Goodwin (Mme C.): PASSY 41 48
Grunberg (A.): PASSY 05 00
McLachlan (G. V.): PASSY 04 38
No Solière. I called each of the numbers and asked to speak to a Monsieur Solière or a Mademoiselle Jacqueline Beausergent, but neither of the names seemed to ring a bell for any of the people I spoke to. There was no answer from the Trocadéro Finance and Real Estate Company. So perhaps that was the right number.
My father’s address book was there in the navy-blue cardboard box. He’d forgotten it on the table at a café one night and I’d slipped it into my pocket. He never mentioned it during our subsequent meetings. Losing it was evidently not a problem for him, or perhaps he couldn’t imagine that I would take it. During the few months before he disappeared into the fog around Montrouge I don’t think any of those names were of much use to him any longer. No Solière under the letter S. And no mention of Fossombronne-la-Forêt among the addresses.
Some nights, I wondered if this search was meaningless and I questioned why I had embarked upon it. Was it naïve of me? Very early on, perhaps even before adolescence, I had the feeling that I came from nothing. I remembered a rainy afternoon in the Latin Quarter, a fellow with a jawline beard in a grey trench coat was handing out leaflets. It was a questionnaire for a study about young people. The questions seemed strange to me: What family structure did you grow up in? I answered: none. Do you have a strong image of your mother and father? I answered: nebulous. Do you think you are a good son (or daughter)? I answered: I have never been a son. In the studies you have undertaken, have you endeavoured to keep your parents’ respect and to conform to your social group? No studies. No parents. No social group. Would you prefer to be part of the revolution or contemplate a beautiful landscape? Contemplate a beautiful landscape. Which do you prefer? The depth of torment or the lightness of happiness? The lightness of happiness. Do you want to change your life or rediscover a lost harmony? Rediscover a lost harmony. These two words were the stuff of dreams, but what could a lost harmony really consist of? In the room at the Hôtel Fremiet, I asked myself if I wasn’t trying to discover, despite the obscurity of my origins and the chaos of my childhood, a fixed point, something reassuring, a landscape even, that would help me to regain my footing. There was perhaps a whole section of my life that I didn’t know about, a solid foundation beneath the shifting sands. And I was relying on the sea-green Fiat and its driver to help me discover it.
*
I was having trouble sleeping. I was tempted to go and ask the pharmacist for one of the midnight-blue vials of ether I knew so well. But I stopped myself in time. It wasn’t the moment to give in. I had to remain as lucid as possible. During those sleepless nights, what I regretted most was having left all my books in my room on Rue de la Voie-Verte. There weren’t many bookshops in the area. I walked towards l’Étoile to find one. I bought some detective novels and an old secondhand book, the title of which intrigued me: The Wonders of the Heavens. To my great surprise, I couldn’t bring myself to read detective novels anymore. But hardly had I opened The Wonders of the Heavens, which bore on its first page the words ‘Night reading’, than I realised just how much this book was going to mean to me. Nebula. The Milky Way. The Sidereal World. The Northern Constellations. The Zodiac, Distant Universes…As I read through the chapters, I no longer even knew why I was lying on that bed in that hotel room. I had forgotten where I was, which country, which city, and none of it mattered anymore. No drug, not ether or morphine or opium, could have given me that sense of calm, which gradually engulfed me. All I had to do was turn the pages. This ‘night reading’ should have been recommended to me a long time ago. It would have spared me much pointless suffering and many restless nights. The Milky Way. The Sidereal World. Finally, the horizon stretched out infinitely before me and I felt utterly content looking at stars from afar and trying to make out all the variable, temporary, extinguished or faded stars. I was nothing in this infinity, but I could finally breathe.