So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood (9 page)

“And Bob Bugnand, does that mean anything to you?”

“No, nothing at all.”

She had drawn closer to him and was stroking his forehead. “What's going on inside that head of yours, Jean dear? Do you want to cross-question me?”

She looked him full in the eyes. No threat in this gaze. Just a slight anxiety. She stroked his forehead again.

“You know . . . I've got a bad memory . . .”

He recalled Perrin de Lara's words: “The only thing I can tell you is that she had been in prison.” If he were to repeat this to her, she would show huge surprise. She would shrug and she would reply to him, “He must be confusing me with someone else”, or else, “And you believed him, Jean dear?” And perhaps she would be genuine. In the end, we forget the details of our lives that embarrass us or are too painful. We just lie back and allow ourselves to float along calmly over the deep waters, with our eyes closed. No, it is not always a matter of deliberate forgetfulness, a doctor whom he had engaged in conversation had explained to him, in the café below the blocks of flats in square du Graisivaudan. This man had also inscribed a little book to him that he had written for Presses universitaires de France,
L'Oubli
.

“Do you want me to explain why I took you to have passport photos made?”

Daragane felt she was not embarking on this subject willingly. But dusk was closing in and, in this drawing room, the dim light could make revelations easier.

“It's very simple . . . In the absence of your parents, I wanted to take you with me to Italy . . . but for that, you needed a passport . . .”

In the yellow cardboard suitcase that he had humped around from room to room for some years, which contained exercise books, certificates, postcards sent to him when he was a child and the books that he was reading at that time—
Arbre, mon ami
,
Le Cargo du mystère
,
Le Cheval sans tête
,
Les Mille et Une Nuits
—there might be an old passport in his name, with the photograph, one of those navy-blue passports. But he never opened the suitcase. It was locked, and he had lost the key. Like the passport, no doubt.

“And then, I wasn't able to take you to Italy . . . I had to stay in France . . . We spent a few days on the Côte d'Azur . . . And afterwards, you went back home . . .”

His father had come to collect him from an empty house, and they had caught the train back to Paris. What exactly had she meant by “home”? However much he racked his memory, he had not the slightest recollection of what in present-day language is known as “a home of one's own”. The train had arrived, very early in the morning at the gare de Lyon. And after that, long, endless years of boarding school.

“When I read the passage in your book, I searched among my papers and I found the passport photos . . .”

Daragane would have to wait for over forty years to learn another detail of this affair: the passport photos of an “unidentified child” that had been confiscated during a search at the customs post at Ventimiglia. “All I know about this woman,” Perrin de Lara had said to him, “is that she had been in prison.” In that case, the passport photographs and other things removed during the search when she was released from prison had certainly been returned to her. But sitting beside her there, on this sofa, Daragane did not yet know these details. We discover, often too late to talk to them about it, an episode from their life that a loved one has concealed from you. Has he really hidden it from you? He has forgotten, or more likely, over time, he no longer thinks about it. Or, quite simply, he can't find the words.

“It's a pity we weren't able to go to Italy,” said Daragane with a big smile.

He sensed that she wanted to tell him something in confidence. But she shook her head gently, as though she were dismissing bad thoughts—or bad memories.

“So, you live in square du Graisivaudan?”

“Not really anymore. I found a room to let in another neighbourhood.”

The owner was not in Paris and so he had kept the key to the square du Graisivaudan room. So, he did go there illegally sometimes. The prospect of taking refuge in two different places put his mind at ease.

“Yes, a room near place Blanche . . .”

“At Blanche?”

This word seemed to conjure up a terrain that was familiar to her.

“Will you take me to your room one day?”

It was almost dark, and she switched on the standard lamp. They were both sitting in the middle of a halo of light, and the drawing room remained in the shade.

“I knew the place Blanche area well . . . Do you remember my brother Pierre? He had a garage over there.”

A young man with dark hair. At Saint-Leu-la-Forêt, he sometimes slept in the small bedroom, on the left, at the end of the corridor, the one with the window that gave onto the courtyard and the well. Daragane remembered his sheepskin jacket and his car, a Renault 4. One Sunday, this brother of Annie's—after all this time, he had forgotten his first name—had taken him to the Cirque Médrano. Afterwards, they had driven back in the Renault 4 to Saint-Leu-la-Forêt.

“I haven't seen Pierre since I've been living here . . .”

“Strange sort of place,” said Daragane.

And he looked around at the bay window—a large black screen behind which the leaves of the trees could no longer be seen.

“We're in the back of beyond here, Jean dear. Don't you think?”

He had been surprised earlier by the silence of the street and by the railings that created a dead end to the road. When night fell, you could imagine the building being on the edge of a forest.

“It's Roger Vincent who's rented this house since the war . . . It had been impounded . . . It belonged to people who must have left France . . . With Roger Vincent, you know, things are always a bit complicated . . .”

She called him “Roger Vincent”, and never simply “Roger”. Daragane, too, as a child, used to greet him with a “Good morning, Roger Vincent”.

“I'm not going to be able to stay here . . . They're going to let the house to an embassy, or knock it down . . . At night, sometimes, I'm frightened of finding myself all alone here . . . The ground floor and the second floor are unoccupied . . . And Roger Vincent is hardly ever there.”

She preferred to talk to him about the present, and Daragane understood this very well. He wondered whether this woman was the same person whom he had known, as a child, at Saint-Leu-la-Forêt. And as for himself, who was he? Forty years later, when the enlargement of the passport photograph would fall into his hands, he would no longer even know whether that child was himself.

Later on, she had wanted to take him to have dinner, close to where she lived, and they had ended up in a brasserie on Chaussée de la Muette. They were sitting, opposite one another, at the very back of the restaurant.

“I remember that we sometimes used to go together to the restaurant, at Saint-Leu-la-Forêt,” Daragane said to her.

“Are you sure?”

“The restaurant was called Chalet de l'Ermitage.”

This name had struck him as a child because it was the same as that of the street.

She shrugged.

“I'm amazed . . . I would never have taken a child to a restaurant . . .”

She had said this in a stern voice that surprised Daragane.

“Did you stay much longer in the house at Saint-Leu-la-Forêt?”

“No . . . Roger Vincent sold it . . . That house belonged to Roger Vincent, you know.”

He had always believed that it was Annie Astrand's house. At the time, these two names seemed to him to be linked: Anniastrand.

“I spent about a year there, didn't I?”

He had asked the question that was on the tip of his tongue, as though he were afraid it might not be answered.

“Yes . . . one year . . . I'm not sure . . . your mother wanted you to have some country air . . . I had the impression that she was trying to get rid of you . . .”

“How did you come to know her?”

“Oh . . . through friends . . . I used to meet so many people in those days . . .”

Daragane realised that she was not going to tell him much about that time at Saint-Leu-la-Forêt. He would have to be satisfied with his own memories, memories that were sparse and few and which he was no longer even sure were accurate, since she had just told him that she would never have taken a child to a restaurant.

“Forgive me, Jean dear . . . I hardly ever think of the past . . .” She paused for a moment, and then:

“I had some difficulties at the time . . . I don't know whether you remember Colette?”

This name awoke a very vague recollection in him, as elusive as a reflection that flickers all too briefly on a wall.

“Colette . . . Colette Laurent . . . There was a portrait of her in my bedroom, at Saint-Leu-la-Forêt . . . she used to pose for artists . . . She was a friend from teenage days . . .”

He clearly remembered the painting between the two windows. A girl with her elbows on a table, her chin in the palm of her hand.

“She was murdered in a hotel in Paris . . . no-one ever knew who by . . . She often used to come to Saint-Leu-la-Forêt . . .”

When Annie returned from Paris, at about two o'clock in the morning, he had heard shrieks of laughter in the corridor on several occasions. That meant she was not alone. Then the bedroom door was closed and mutterings would reach him through the partitions. One morning, they had given this Colette Laurent a lift to Paris in Annie's car. She was sitting in the front, beside Annie, and he was alone on the back seat. They had walked with her in the Champs-Élysées gardens, where the postage stamp market was situated. They had stopped at one of the stalls, and Colette Laurent had given him a pack of stamps, a series of different colours bearing the image of the king of Egypt. From that day on, he had begun to collect stamps. The album in which he arranged them gradually in rows behind strips of transparent paper, this album may have been put away in the cardboard suitcase. He had not opened that suitcase for ten years. He could not part with it, but he was nevertheless relieved to have lost the key.

On another day, they had gone, with Colette Laurent, to a village on the other side of Montmorency forest. Annie had parked her car outside a sort of small château, and she had explained to him that this was the boarding school where she and Colette Laurent had met. They had visited the boarding school with him, shown round by the headmistress. The classrooms and the dormitories were deserted.

“So, you don't remember Colette?”

“Yes . . . of course,” said Daragane. “You knew each other at boarding school.”

She looked at him in surprise.

“How did you know?”

“One afternoon, you took me to visit your old boarding school.”

“Are you sure? I have no memory of it.”

“It was on the other side of Montmorency forest.”

“I never took you there with Colette . . .”

He did not want to contradict her. He might find explanations in the book that the doctor had inscribed to him, that little book with white covers about forgetfulness.

They were walking along the footpath, next to the Ranelagh gardens. Because of the night, the trees and the presence of Annie, who had taken his arm, Daragane had the impression that he was walking with her, as he used to do, in the Montmorency forest. She stopped the car at a crossroads in the forest, and they walked as far as the Fossombrone pond. He remembered some of the names: the Chêne aux Mouches crossroads. The La Pointe crossroads. One of these names made him feel frightened: the Prince de Condé's cross. At the little school at which Annie had enrolled him and from which she often came to collect him at half-past four, the teacher had talked about this prince whom they had discovered hanged in his bedroom at the château of Saint-Leu without anyone ever knowing the precise circumstances of his death. She called him “the last of the Condés”.

“What are you thinking about, Jean dear?”

She was leaning her head on his shoulder, and Daragane wanted to tell her that he was thinking about “the last of the Condés”, about school and about walks in the forest. But he was afraid she might reply: “No . . . You're wrong . . . I haven't any memory of it.” He, too, during these past fifteen years, had eventually forgotten everything.

“You must invite me to your room . . . I should like to go back to the place Blanche neighbourhood with you.”

Perhaps she remembered that they had spent a few days in this neighbourhood before leaving by train for the south of France. But, there again, he did not dare put the question to her.

“You would find the room too small . . .” said Daragane. “And besides, it's not heated . . .”

“That doesn't matter . . . you can't imagine how we used to freeze to death in this neighbourhood, in winter, when we were very young, my brother Pierre and I.”

And at least this memory was not painful to her, since she burst out laughing.

They had reached the end of the footpath, very close to the Porte de la Muette. He wondered whether this smell of autumn, of leaves and moist earth, did not come from the Bois de Boulogne. Or else, over time, from the Montmorency forest.

They had made a detour to rejoin what she called, with a touch of irony, her “place of residence”. As they walked along together, he felt himself overcome by a gentle amnesia. Eventually, he came to wonder how long he had been in the company of this stranger. Perhaps he had just met her, on the path by the gardens or outside one of these buildings without any windows at the front. And if he happened to notice a light, it was always at the window of a floor at the very top, as though somebody had left a long time ago and forgotten to switch off a lamp.