When my father left the Magasins Généraux, I wonder what route he took in the blackout. He must have felt dumbfounded at having been spared.
Of all the neighborhoods on the Left Bank, the area that stretches from the Pont de Bercy to the fences around the Jardin des Plantes remains the most crepuscular for me. One arrives by night at the Gare d’Austerlitz. And night, around here, smells like wine and coal. I leave behind the train station and those dark masses along the Seine that were referred to as the “Port of Austerlitz warehouses.” The automobile headlights or the flashlight illuminate a few feet of the Quai Saint-Bernard, just in front. The smells of wine and coal now mix with the scent of leaves from the botanical gardens, and I hear the cry of a peacock and the roar of a jaguar and a tiger from the zoo. The plane trees and the silence of the Halle aux Vins. I am enveloped by a cellarlike chill. Somewhere someone is rolling a barrel, and that doleful sound slowly fades into the distance. It seems that in place of the old wine market they’ve now erected tall concrete buildings, but wide as I might open my eyes in the dark, I can’t see them.
To reach the south, one needed to go through tunnels: Tombe-Issoire, Glacière, Rue de la Santé, lit at intervals by a blue bulb. And one emerged onto the sundrenched avenues and fields of Montsouris.
The Porte d’Italie marked the eastern border of that territory. Boulevard Kellermann led west, up to the Poterne des Peupliers. To the right, the SNECMA plant looked like a huge cargo ship run aground on the edge of the boulevard, especially on nights when the moon was reflected in its windows. A bit farther on, to the left, was the Charléty stadium. Weeds grew through cracks in the concrete.
I went to that neighborhood for the first time on a Sunday, because of a friend who had dragged me to Charléty. Despite being only seventeen, he had snagged a low-level job on a sports newspaper. They sent him to cover a footrace, and he wanted me to help him write his article.
There weren’t many of us in the stands. I remember the name of one of the runners: Piquemal. We asked him a few questions at the end of the race to flesh out the article. At around five, we waited for the number 21 bus, but it never showed. We then decided to walk to the center of Paris. The streets were empty in the bright sun. I could pinpoint the exact date: at the first newsstand we came across — not really a newsstand, more like one of those green canvas stalls that crop up on Sundays — I saw the photo and large headlines announcing the death of Marilyn Monroe.
After Charléty, the Cité Universitaire, and to the left, the Parc Montsouris. At the beginning of the street that skirted the park was an apartment building with large picture windows, where the aviator Jean Mermoz had lived. The shadows of Mermoz and SNECMA — a factory that made airplane engines — have linked that neighborhood in my mind with Orly airport, right nearby, and with the airfields of Villacoublay, Buc, and Toussus-le-Noble.
Restaurants that were almost rustic. Opposite the building where Mermoz would come home between two airmail runs was the Chalet du Lac. Its terrace opened onto the Parc Montsouris. And lower down, at the corner of Avenue Reille, a small restaurant whose garden was covered in gravel. In the summer, they set out tables and one could dine beneath the arbor.
For me, with the passage of time, that entire neighborhood has become gently detached from Paris. In one of the two cafés at the end of Rue de l’Amiral-Mouchez, near the Charléty stadium, a jukebox played Italian songs. The owner was a swarthy woman with a Roman profile. Summer light bathes Boulevard Kellermann and Boulevard Jourdan, deserted in midday. In my dreams, I see shadows on the sidewalks and the ochre façades of buildings that hide slivers of countryside, and from now on they belong to the outskirts of Rome. I walk the length of the Parc Montsouris. The foliage protects me from the sun. Farther on is the Cité Universitaire metro stop. I’ll reenter the coolness of the small station. Trains come at regular intervals and carry us to the beaches at Ostia.
Jacqueline had rented a room in one of those clusters of buildings on Boulevard Kellermann, built before the war on the site of the old fortifications. Thanks to fake student IDs, we could take our meals, for a mere five francs, at the Cité Universitaire cafeteria: it occupied the vast paneled foyer of a structure that called to mind the hotels of Saint-Moritz or Cimiez.
It often happened that we spent entire days and nights on the lawns or in the foyers of the various pavilions. There was even a movie house and an auditorium in the Cité.
A holiday spa, or one of those international concessions like they had in Shanghai. That neutral zone, at the very edge of Paris, gave its residents diplomatic immunity. When we crossed the border with our fake identity cards, we were safe from all harm.
I met Pacheco at the Cité Universitaire. I had already noticed him a few months earlier. In January of that year, there had been a lot of snow, and the Cité looked like a winter resort. On several occasions I had crossed paths, on Boulevard Jourdan, with a man of about fifty wearing a faded brown coat whose sleeves were too long, black corduroy trousers, and snow boots. His brown hair was brushed back and his cheeks bore several days’ stubble. He walked cautiously, as if with every step he were afraid of skidding on the snow.
By the following June, he was no longer the same. His tan linen suit, sky-blue shirt, and buckskin shoes seemed brand new. His shorter hair and smooth-shaven cheeks made him look younger. Did we strike up a conversation in the Cité Universitaire cafeteria, whose windows looked out on Boulevard Jourdan? Or across the street, at the Brasserie Babel? My sense is at the cafeteria, because of that airportlike ambiance that for me is indissociable from Pacheco: a décor of plastic and metal, the comings and goings of people speaking a multitude of languages, as if in transit. Moreover, that day Pacheco was carrying a black leather suitcase. And he told me he worked for Air France, without my quite understanding whether he was an airline steward or whether he had a desk at Orly. He lived in a room in the Pavillon des Provinces Françaises. And as I expressed surprise that he could be living at the Cité Universitaire at his age, he showed me a card saying he was enrolled in the Faculty of Sciences, on the site of the old Halle aux Vins.
I didn’t dare tell him that I already knew him by sight. Had he noticed me as well, that winter? Was he waiting for me to ask him about it? Or had he convinced himself that I could hardly make a connection between the tramp in snow boots and the man sitting opposite me? His blue eyes gave away none of his thoughts.
The silhouette with the faded brown overcoat and halting steps had melted with that year’s snow. And no one had noticed. Except me.
From then on, we met him at the Cité cafeteria or in the small restaurant on Avenue Reille that featured “Oriental” specialties. Our conversations were anodyne: he explained that he couldn’t take a full course load at the Faculty of Sciences because of his job. But what exactly was his job?
“Oh … I work as a kind of steward. Sometimes on board planes, or in the offices at Orly … or in the terminal at Invalides … Three days a week …”
He had fallen silent. I hadn’t pushed. He hung out with Moroccan students who lived in the first pavilion as you entered the Cité, just after the Charléty stadium. The Moroccans were with some very blond Scandinavian girls and two Cubans. With this group, we would go see a film on Saturday evenings and, often, we would gather in the room that one of the Scandinavian girls occupied at the Fondation Deutsch-de-la-Meurthe, a village composed of small pavilions with brick walls and ivy. Pacheco invited us all to dinner beneath the arbor of the restaurant on Avenue Reille, and at dessert he handed out presents—“duty free” cigarettes, perfumes, lighters that he procured at Orly.