I smiled at her. Then she threw herself on me. With one hand she gripped my shoulder and with the other she tried to scratch my face. I tried to free myself, but she was really heavy. I felt my childhood terrors gradually return. For over thirty years, I had made sure that my life was as well ordered as a formal French garden. With its wide walkways, lawns and hedges, the garden had covered over a swamp where I had almost gone under long ago. Thirty years of striving. All of it just for this Medusa figure to stand in wait for me one night on the street and pounce on me…This old woman was going to suffocate me. She was as heavy as my childhood memories. I was being smothered in a shroud and it was useless to fight. No one could help me. A little further down, on the square, there was a police station, with some officers on guard duty out the front. It would all end up in a paddy wagon and a police station. It had been inevitable for a long time. Besides, at the age of seventeen, when my father had me arrested because he wanted to get rid of me, it happened around here, near the church. More than thirty years of futile striving just to come right back to where it started, in neighbourhood police stations. How sad…They looked like two drunks fighting in the street, one of the policemen would say. They would sit us on a bench, the old woman and me, like everyone who’d been caught in night round-ups, and I would have to state my name and address. They would ask me if I knew her. ‘She’s trying to pass herself off as your mother,’ the superintendent would say, ‘but according to her papers, you’re not related. And besides, your mother’s identity is unknown. You’re free to go, sir.’ It was the same superintendent my father had handed me over to when I was seventeen. Dr Bouvière was right: life is an eternal return.
A cold rage came over me and I kneed the old woman sharply in the belly. Her grip loosened. I pushed her hard. Finally, I could breathe…I had taken her by surprise, she didn’t dare come near me again; she remained motionless, on the edge of the pavement, staring at me with her small, intense eyes. Now it was her turn to be on the defensive. She tried to smile at me, a horrible artificial smile that was at odds with the harshness of her expression. I crossed my arms. Then, seeing that the smile didn’t work on me, she pretended to wipe away a tear. At my age, how could I have been terrified of this ghost and believe for an instant that she still had the power to drag me down? That period of police stations was well and truly over.
She was no longer standing guard over the apartment building during the days that followed and, so far, she’s given no further sign of life. But later that night, I saw her again from the window. She didn’t seem the least bit affected by our fight. She paced up and down the median strip. She went back and forth over quite a short distance, but with a lively, almost military gait. Very erect, her chin high. Every now and again she would look over at the façade of the apartment building to check if she still had an audience. And then she would begin to limp. At first she was practising as if for a rehearsal. Gradually, she found her rhythm. I watched her move off limping and then disappear, but she overplayed the part of the old canteen cook searching for a routed army.
~ ~ ~
THREE YEARS AGO, roughly around the same time the old woman attacked me, but in June or July, I was walking along Quai de la Tournelle. A sunny Saturday afternoon. I was looking at books in the bouquinistes’ stalls. Suddenly my eyes fell upon three volumes prominently displayed and held together by a large red elastic band. The yellow cover, the author’s name and the title in black characters on the first volume gave me a pang of emotion: Screen Memories by Fred Bouvière. I removed the elastic band. Two more books by Bouvière: Drugs and Therapeutics and The Lie and the Confession. He had referred to them on several occasions during the meetings at Denfert-Rochereau. Three unobtainable books, which he said with a certain irony were his ‘early works’. Their publication dates were printed at the bottom of the covers with the name of the publisher: Au Sablier. Bouvière would have been very young then, barely twenty-two or twenty-three.
I bought the three volumes and discovered a dedication on the flyleaf of The Lie and the Confession: ‘For Geneviève Dalame. This book was written when I was her age, during curfew hours. Fred Bouvière.’ The other two didn’t have dedications but, like the first, they bore the name ‘Geneviève Dalame’ in blue ink on the title page, with an address: 4 Boulevard Jourdan. It all came back to me: the face of the blonde girl with very pale skin, who was always in Bouvière’s shadow and sat next to him on the front seat of his car at the end of the meetings; the guy with the hawkish face saying to me in a low voice: ‘Her name is Geneviève Dalame.’ I asked the bouquiniste where he had found the books. He shrugged — Oh, someone moving house… Remembering the way Geneviève Dalame contemplated Bouvière, with her blue-eyed gaze, and hung on his every word, I thought it was impossible that she would have got rid of these three books. Unless she wanted to make a sudden break with an entire period of her life. Or she had died. Four Boulevard Jourdan. It was just around the corner from me when I was staying in Hôtel de la Rue de la Voie-Verte. But I didn’t need to check; I knew the apartment block hadn’t been there for about fifteen years and that Rue de la Voie-Verte had changed name.
I remembered that, one day back then, I was waiting to catch the number 21 bus at Porte Gentilly and she came out of the little apartment block, but I didn’t dare approach her. She was waiting for the bus, too, and we were the only ones at the bus stop. She didn’t recognise me, which was entirely understandable: in the meetings she only had eyes for Bouvière and all the other members of the group were nothing but blurred faces in the glowing halo he projected around himself.
When the bus started moving, we were the only passengers, and I sat on the seat opposite her. I had a clear memory of the name that the hawk had whispered in my ear a few days before. Geneviève Dalame. She was absorbed in a book covered with glassine paper, perhaps the one that Bouvière had dedicated to her and written during curfew hours. I didn’t take my eyes off her. I had read, I can’t recall where, that if you stare at someone, even from behind, they will notice your presence. With her it took a long time. She didn’t even vaguely notice me until the bus was going along Rue Glacière.
‘I’ve seen you in Dr Bouvière’s meetings,’ I said. By uttering his name I thought I would gain her favour, but she gave me a guarded look. I tried to think of something to say to win her over. ‘It’s crazy…’ I said, ‘Dr Bouvière answers all of life’s questions.’ And I took on a preoccupied air, as if to merely pronounce the name Bouvière was enough to detach oneself from the everyday world and from the bus we were on. She seemed reassured. We had the same guru, we shared the same rituals and the same secrets.