On Avenue Junot, Annie kissed him. She called him “Roger Vincent” and used the formal vous, but she kissed him.
“Someday I’ll have you up to my place,” Roger Vincent said to me. “I live here.”
And he pointed to the cast-iron front door of the small white building.
The three of us strolled along the sidewalk. His American car wasn’t parked in front of his building and I asked him why.
“I keep it in the garage across the way.”
We walked past the Hôtel Alsina, near the flight of steps. One time, Annie said:
“That’s where I lived, at first, with Little Hélène and Mathilde … You should have seen the face Mathilde used to make …”
Roger Vincent smiled. And I, without realizing it, absorbed everything they said and their words were etched in my memory.
Much later, I married and lived in that neighborhood for a few years. Almost every day I walked up Avenue Junot. One afternoon, something just came over me: I pushed open the glass-paneled door of the white building. I rang at the concierge’s lodge. A red-haired man stuck his head through the opening.
“Can I help you?”
“I’m looking for someone who lived in this building, about twenty years ago …”
“Oh, well, I wasn’t here then, Monsieur.”
“You wouldn’t happen to know how I might get some information about him?”
“Go ask at the garage across the street. They used to know everybody.”
But I didn’t go ask at the garage across the street. I had spent so many years looking for garages in Paris that I no longer believed in them.
In summer the days grew longer, and Annie, who wasn’t as strict as Snow White, let us play in the evening in the gently sloping avenue in front of the house. On those evenings we didn’t wear our bathrobes. After dinner, Annie walked us to the door and gave me her wristwatch:
“You can play until nine-thirty. At nine-thirty, you’re to come in. Keep an eye on the time, Patoche — I’m counting on you.”
When Jean D. was there, he would lend me his huge watch. He set it so that at precisely nine-thirty, a little bell — like on an alarm clock — would tell us it was time to go back inside.
The two of us walked down the avenue to the main road where the occasional car was still passing by. A hundred yards away to the right was the train station, a small, weather-beaten, half-timbered structure that looked like a seaside villa. In front of it, a deserted esplanade bordered by trees and the Café de la Gare.
One Thursday, my father didn’t come by car with a friend but by train. At the end of the afternoon, the two of us accompanied him to the station. And since we were early, he took us to the terrace of the Café de la Gare. My brother and I had Coca-Colas, and he a brandy.
He had paid the bill and stood up to go catch his train. Before leaving us, he said:
“Don’t forget … If by chance you see the marquis de Caussade at the chateau, be sure to tell him Albert says hello.”
At the corner of the main road and the avenue, protected by a clump of privet hedges, we spied on the station. From time to time, a group of travelers emerged and fanned out toward the town, the water mill on the Bièvre, the Food Hamlet. The travelers grew increasingly scarce. Soon, only one person was left in the esplanade. The marquis de Caussade? That night, for sure, we’d have our big adventure and go up to the chateau. But we knew perfectly well that the plan would always be put off until tomorrow.
We stood still for a long time in front of the hedges that protected the Robin des Bois inn. We eavesdropped on the conversations of diners seated at the tables in the garden. The hedges concealed them, but their voices were very near. We could hear the tinkling of silverware, the waiters’ steps crunching on the gravel. The aroma of certain dishes mixed with the scent of privet. But the latter was stronger. The entire avenue smelled like privet.
Up ahead, a light went on in the bow window of the living room. Roger Vincent’s American car was parked in front of the house. That evening, he’d come with Andrée K., “the wife of the big-shot doctor,” the one who’d been part of the Rue Lauriston gang and who used tu with Roger Vincent. It wasn’t nine-thirty yet, but Annie emerged from the house, her light blue dress belted at the waist. We crossed the avenue again, as fast as possible, crouching low, and hid behind the bushes of the wooded area next to the Protestant temple. Annie came closer. Her blond hair formed a stain on the twilight. We could hear her footsteps. She was trying to find us. It was a game we played. Each time, we hid in a different spot, in the abandoned lot that the trees and vegetation had taken over. She always ended up finding our hiding place, because we would break out in hysterical laughter when she got too close. The three of us went back to the house. She was a child, like us.
Some sentences remain etched in your mind forever. One afternoon there was a kind of fair in the yard of the Protestant temple, across from the house. From our bedroom window, we had a plunging view of the little stalls around which children crowded with their parents. At lunch, Mathilde had said to me:
“How would you like to go to the festival at the temple, blissful idiot?”
She took us. We bought a lottery ticket and won two packets of nougat. On the way back, Mathilde said:
“They let you in because I’m a Protestant, blissful idiot!”
She was stern as ever, wearing her cameo and black dress.
“And let’s get one thing straight: Protestants see everything! There’s nothing you can hide from them! They don’t only have two eyes — they also have one in the back of their heads! You got that?”
She pointed to her bun.
“You got that, blissful idiot? An eye in the back of our heads!”
From then on, my brother and I felt nervous in her presence, especially when we were passing behind her back. It took me a long time to realize that Protestants were just like anyone else and not to cross the street when I saw one coming.
Never will another sentence have the same resonance for us. It was like Roger Vincent’s smile: I’ve never met one like it. Even in Roger Vincent’s absence, that smile floated in the air. I also remember a sentence that Jean D. said. One morning, he had taken me on his motorcycle up to the Versailles road. He wasn’t going too fast, and I held on to his Canadienne. On the way back, we stopped at the Robin des Bois inn to buy some cigarettes. The manageress was alone at the bar, a very pretty young blonde who wasn’t the one my father had known, back when he’d frequented the inn with Eliot Salter, the marquis de Caussade, and perhaps with Eddy Pagnon.
“A pack of Baltos,” Jean D. said.
The manageress handed him the pack of cigarettes, flashing both of us a smile. When we left the inn, Jean D. said to me in a serious voice:
“You know, old man … Women … They seem great from a distance, but up close, you’ve got to watch yourself.”
He suddenly looked very sad.
One Thursday we were playing on the knoll near the chateau. Little Hélène was watching us, sitting on the bench where Snow White normally sat. We climbed up the branches of the pine trees. I had climbed too high and, while moving from one branch to the next, I nearly fell. When I climbed down from the tree, Little Hélène was pale as a ghost. That day she was wearing her riding breeches and her mother-of-pearl bolero jacket.
“That wasn’t smart … You could have been killed!”
I had never heard her use such a harsh tone.
“Don’t ever do that again!”
I was so unused to seeing her angry that I felt like crying.
“I had to give up my career because of a stupid stunt like that.”
She took me by the shoulder and yanked me to the stone bench under the trees. She made me sit down. She took a crocodile-skin wallet from the inside pocket of her bolero jacket — the same color as the cigarette case Annie had given me, presumably from the same store. And from that wallet, she extracted a piece of paper and handed it to me.