It was strange to see him in that room, in his elegant gray suit and dark silk tie. The girl looked around her and didn’t seem very enthusiastic about the décor.
“So, you’re a writer? How’s it working out?”
He leaned over the bridge table and looked at the sheets of paper that I labored to fill, day after day.
“You write with a Bic?”
He smiled.
“Does the place have heat?”
“No.”
“But you’re getting by?”
What could I tell him? That I didn’t know how I was going to find five hundred francs to pay the rent this month? Of course we’d known each other a long time, but that was no reason to unburden myself on him.
“I’m getting by,” I said.
“Doesn’t seem like it.”
For a moment, we faced each other in the window frame. Even though they called him “the Tall Man with the Jaguar,” I was now a little taller than he was. He covered me with a look that was affectionate and naïve, the same as in the days of Rue du Docteur-Dordaine. He rolled his tongue between his lips, and I remember that he’d done that at the house, too, when he was thinking. That way of rolling his tongue between his lips and being lost in thought is something I later discovered in someone else — the writer Emmanuel Berl — and it moved me.
He kept silent. So did I. His girlfriend was still sitting in the wicker chair and leafing through a magazine that she’d grabbed off the bed. All things considered, it was better that the girl was there, otherwise we would have started talking, Jean D. and I. It hadn’t been easy: I could read it in his eyes. At the first words, we would have collapsed like those puppets in shooting galleries when the pellet hits the mark. Annie, Little Hélène, and Roger Vincent had certainly wound up in jail. I had lost my brother. The thread had snapped — a gossamer strand. There was nothing left of all that …
He turned to his girlfriend and said:
“There’s a nice view from here … It’s just like the Côte d’Azur.”
The window looked out on narrow Rue Puget, where no one ever walked. A shabby bar on the corner, a former Coal and Spirits shop in front of which a solitary streetwalker stood waiting. Always the same. And for nothing.
“Nice view, eh?”
Jean D. inspected the room, the bed, the bridge table at which I wrote every day. I saw him from the back. His friend leaned her forehead against the window and contemplated Rue Puget below.
They left, wishing me good luck. A few moments later, I discovered on the bridge table four five hundred — franc bills, neatly folded. I tried to find the address of his office on Faubourg Saint-Honoré. In vain. And I never again saw the Tall Man with the Jaguar.
On Thursdays and Saturdays when Snow White wasn’t there, Annie would take my brother and me to Paris in her 4CV. She always followed the same route and, with some effort of memory, I was able to reconstruct it. We took the western highway and drove through the Saint-Cloud tunnel. We crossed a bridge over the Seine, then went along the river through Boulogne and Neuilly. I remember large houses near the banks, protected by fences and foliage. Also barges and floating houses that one reached via wooden stairs: at the foot of those stairs were mailboxes, each with a name on it.
“I’m going to buy a barge here and we’ll all live on it,” said Annie.
We arrived at the Porte Maillot. I was able to locate that stop in our itinerary because of the little train in the Jardin d’Acclimatation. Annie had taken us on it one afternoon. And we reached the endpoint of our journey, in that zone where Neuilly, Levallois, and Paris all blended together.
It was a street lined with trees, their leaves forming a vault. No dwellings, only warehouses and garages. We stopped in front of the largest and newest garage, with a tan pedimented façade.
Inside, a room was blocked off by glass-paneled walls. A man was waiting for us, with curly blond hair, sitting on a leather chair at a metal desk. He was Annie’s age. They spoke familiarly. He was dressed, like Jean D., in a plaid shirt, a suede windbreaker, a Canadienne in winter, and crepe-soled shoes. Privately, my brother and I used to call him “Buck Danny,” because I thought he looked like a character in an illustrated children’s book I was reading at the time.
What could Annie and Buck Danny have had to talk about? What could they have been up to when the office door was locked from the inside and an orange canvas shade came down over the windows? My brother and I would wander around the garage, which was even more mysterious than the great hall of the chateau abandoned by Eliot Salter, the marquis de Caussade. One by one we pondered the cars that were missing a fender, a hood, a rubber tire on a wheel. A man in overalls was lying under a convertible and repairing something with a monkey wrench; another, hose in hand, was filling the gas tank of a truck that had come to a halt with a terrible snorting of its engine. One day, we recognized Roger Vincent’s American car, its hood open, and we concluded that Buck Danny and Roger Vincent were friends.
Sometimes we’d go to meet Buck Danny at his home, in an apartment building on the boulevard, which I now think was Boulevard Berthier. We’d wait for Annie on the sidewalk. She came out with Buck Danny. We’d leave the 4CV parked in front of the building and walk, the four of us, to the garage, down narrow streets lined with trees and warehouses.
It was cool in the garage, and the smell of gasoline was stronger than the smell of cut grass or water when we sat by the mill wheel. The same kind of shadow floated over certain corners, where neglected cars slumbered. Their bodies shone dimly in that half-light, and I couldn’t stop looking at a metal plaque affixed to the wall, a yellow plaque on which I read a seven-letter name in black letters, the design and sound of which still move me even today: CASTROL.
One Thursday she took me alone in her 4CV. My brother had gone shopping with Little Hélène in Versailles. We parked in front of the apartment building where Buck Danny lived. But this time, she came back out without him.
At the garage, he wasn’t in his office. We got back into the 4CV and drove through the narrow streets of the quarter. We lost our way. We turned round and round in those streets that all looked alike, with their trees and their warehouses.
She finally stopped in front of a brick building, which I now suspect might have been the old Neuilly tollhouse. But what’s the use of trying to find the place? She turned around and stretched her arm toward the back seat, reaching for a Paris map and another object that she showed me and whose purpose I didn’t know: a brown crocodile-skin cigarette case.
“Here, Patoche, this is for you … It’ll come in handy later on.”
I contemplated the crocodile-skin case. It had a metal lining inside and contained two sweet-smelling cigarettes made of blond tobacco. I took them out of the case and, as I was about to thank her for the present and hand her back the two cigarettes, I saw her face, in profile. She was staring straight in front of her. A tear was falling down her cheek. I didn’t dare make a sound, and Frede’s nephew’s statement echoed in my head: “Annie cried all night long at Carroll’s.”
I fondled the cigarette case. I waited. She turned toward me and smiled.
“Do you like it?”
And, with an abrupt movement, she started up. She always made abrupt movements. She always wore men’s jackets and pants. Except at night. Her blond hair was very short. But there was such feminine softness about her, and such frailty … On the road back, I thought about her serious expression, when she sat with Jean D. in the 4CV under the rain.
I returned to that neighborhood, about twenty years ago, more or less around the time when I’d seen Jean D. again. For the month of July and the month of August, I lived in a tiny room beneath the eaves in Square de Graisivaudan. The sink touched the bed. The foot of the latter was just a few inches from the door and, to enter the room, you had to let yourself topple onto it. I was trying to finish my first book. I walked around the fringes of the sixteenth arrondissement, Neuilly, and Levallois, where Annie used to bring my brother and me on our days off from school. That whole ill-defined zone, which might or might not have still been Paris, and all those streets were wiped off the map when they built the périphérique, taking with them all their garages and their secrets.