I was still running when the Place des Victoires came into sight, I saw suddenly in the horizon the connected façades of the private houses and the three-headed streetlamps lit in the beating rain, and, in the middle of the plaza, rearing, immense, the equestrian statue of Louis XIV, which looked as though it were fleeing the storm. My concern quickly turned into panic when I reached rue de la Vrillière and saw, in the night, police lights in front of Marie’s. I walked the last stretch on wobbly legs, soaked from head to foot, still moving forward, full of emotion, out of breath, my heart racing, but no longer running, walking slowly, graceless, as if holding back each step and yet advancing against my will, no longer wanting to go on, imagining the worst, an accident, a late-night assault, and, thinking then about Marie with worry and affection, I remembered that night when an alarm on rue de la Vrillière had startled us from our sleep. We didn’t get up immediately, certain it was just another car alarm set off for no reason in the middle of the night, bound to wake up the entire neighborhood before turning off just as mysteriously as it started, but this alarm was harsher, more disconcerting than the usual car alarm — I’d never heard one like this, as if it had been designed for unknown catastrophes, sounding in the night to warn inhabitants of some nuclear accident — and it only came to an end after forty minutes, during which Marie and I had time to get up and go over to the window, Marie struggling to stay awake, her cheeks hot, her eyelids heavy, dressed in one of those baggy and threadbare T-shirts she always wore to bed, I could smell the scent of her warm sleepy body standing beside me. Side by side at the window, we relished at length the complicit, tender intimacy of the moment, I’d put my arm around her waist and we stared in silence at the dark walls of the Banque de France, exchanging from time to time an amused look, observing what was going on without trying to make sense of it, all of this taking place in what seemed a suspended moment in time, dynamic and intense, a moment of pure nothing, an emptiness charged with an invisible energy ready to explode at any instant, a gap continually animated by little events, unrelated, trivial, small in scale, occurring at regular intervals so that right when we’d be ready to go back to bed the tension would flare up again and put us back on guard, the arrival of a police car in the night, for example, greeted by two or three security guards, who seemed to have cordoned off the bank, or, ten minutes later, the slow and partial opening of the bank’s heavy bronze gate, with nothing to follow, apart from a guard poking his head out briefly in the night, and nothing more before the heavy bronze gate was then closed, filling the street once again with a diffuse sense of imminent threat, rendered even more palpable by its very invisibility. I never did find out in the end what had actually happened, I leafed through the papers the following days but found no information regarding the incident, and of this night I’ve retained only the exquisitely sensual memory of my silent intimacy with Marie.
I was still about a hundred feet from the building, and I’d stopped running, I was walking briskly, picking up my pace and slowing it down at the same time, in the same contradictory movement, the same propelling force, the same conflicted stride. I came to an abrupt stop when I saw the flashing lights at Marie’s door and I was nearly frozen in my tracks, fear having paralyzed my legs, making my last steps impossibly heavy, resistant. I continued to move forward nonetheless, and I perceived a light through the ambulance’s wet windows, a yellow light in that intimate space where the injured are laid, then my attention was drawn to the door of Marie’s building opening in front of me. I discerned nothing at first but the arm, white, of a paramedic holding open the door, then I saw the other paramedics leave the building in turn, four or five of them total, in white tunics, and there was a human form on the stretcher, my heart began to pound when I saw that there was someone on the stretcher — this someone could have been Marie, I had no idea what had happened, Marie had told me nothing on the phone — but it wasn’t Marie, it was a man, I could see his socks sticking out from under the small blanket covering his body. I gleaned nothing but isolated details, focused, removed from their context, caught only in passing, his socks, dark, imposing, as if this man would henceforth be reduced to these, his wrist, horrid, to which the IV was attached, a livid wrist, yellow-hued, cadaverous, his face pale, on which I focused closely, scrutinizing its features to see who this was, but in vain, his face, completely covered by the oxygen mask, was perfectly invisible. This human form, shirtless, a black sports coat thrown over the top of the stretcher and a briefcase stuck in between two transversal poles at its base, was not moving. I was standing there motionless on the sidewalk when I felt the presence of someone watching the scene. I lifted my eyes and saw Marie at the window, chin resting in her palms on the second floor of the building, Marie, her eyes fixed on the stretcher, and I understood the whole situation right then and there. In a flash, I knew without a doubt the man being carried away on the stretcher had spent the night with Marie and that something had happened to him and not to Marie (Marie was safe and sound, nothing had happened to Marie). And it was at that moment that Marie saw me, our eyes met for an instant in the night, it had been more than two months since we’d last seen each other.
I opened the heavy door of the building and started up the stairs toward Marie’s apartment. Her apartment door was open on the landing, and I stepped inside, I made my way silently down the hallway. As I entered the room I noticed immediately the presence of a pair of shoes near the bed. It was the sole indication that the man had been in her room. Everything else of his had disappeared, nothing attested to his having been there, not the slightest trace of the medical attention he’d been given less than five minutes earlier, no stray medical equipment, bandages or tubes, left behind. I looked at this pair of shoes at the foot of the bed, abandoned carelessly (one was upright on its sole and the other was tipped over on its side), elegant Italian shoes, sharp and powerful and at the same time slender, of delicate material, rawhide or calf-hide leather, a classic pair of wingtips firm and smooth, certainly very comfortable, faithful to the reputed excellence of Italian shoes, the best of which truly fit like gloves over one’s feet, of an indefinable color, fawn or chamois, its laces extremely thin and sturdy like fishing line, with a velvety, almost fury upper, bordered by a multitude of tiny decorative perforations subtly underlining the topstitched line of the seams, and, traced in the lining — a new lining that likely retained a slight scent of fresh leather — a discreet and seemingly coded golden inscription. I looked at these empty shoes, abandoned at the foot of the bed, they were all that was left of the man. Of him, as in the fabled image of a lightning-struck man, nothing remained but his shoes.
Marie heard me come into the room but she didn’t turn around. She waited for me to join her at the window, and we stood there side by side in silence, watching the ambulance speed off in the night. It went off toward the Seine, the echo of its siren fading little by little before disappearing altogether. Then, slowly, Marie moved closer to me, gently, sleepily, she touched my shoulder without uttering a word as a tacit sign of appreciation for my being there for her.