The Black Notebook (2 page)

That Sunday evening, when we arrived at the Unic Hôtel, Aghamouri was waiting for Dannie, sitting in the lobby with Duwelz and Gérard Marciano. That was when I met those two. They wanted us to go and see the garden behind the hotel, where there were two tables with umbrellas. “The window of your room looks out on that side,” Aghamouri said, but that detail left Dannie cold. Duwelz. Marciano. I am concentrating, trying to endow them with some semblance of reality; I'm searching for something to bring them back to life before my eyes, something that might let me feel their presence after all this time. I don't know, perhaps a scent . . . Duwelz always affected great care in his appearance: blond mustache, tie, gray suit. And he smelled of a cologne whose name I discovered many years later, thanks to a bottle left behind in a hotel room: Pino Silvestre. For a few seconds, the scent of Pino Silvestre had called to mind a silhouette glimpsed from behind, walking down Rue du Montparnasse, a blond with a ponderous gait: Duwelz. Then, nothing, as in those dreams that linger on waking only as hazy reflections, fading as the day progresses. Gérard Marciano, for his part, was dark-haired and pale-skinned, short in stature, the type who looked at you but never really saw you. I was better acquainted with Aghamouri, whom I went to meet several times, at a café on Place Monge after his evening classes at Censier. Each time, I had the impression he wanted to confide something important, otherwise he wouldn't have asked me to meet him there, alone, away from the others. The café was quiet in the winter after dark, and we were by ourselves, sheltered at the back of the room. A black poodle would rest its chin on the bench and watch us, blinking. When I remember certain moments of my life, lines of poetry come to mind and I often try to recall the names of the authors. The café in Place Monge, on those evenings, is associated with the line: “A dog's sharp claws scraping the pavement at night . . .”

We would go to Montparnasse on foot. During these walks, Aghamouri divulged some rare personal information. At the Cité Universitaire, he had just been evicted from his room in the Moroccan Pavilion, though I never learned whether it was for political reasons or something else. He had a small apartment someone had lent him in the sixteenth arrondissement, near the Maison de la Radio. But he preferred his room at the Unic Hôtel, which he had obtained thanks to the manager, “a Moroccan friend.” So then, why keep the apartment in the sixteenth? “My wife lives there. That's right, I'm married.” And I had sensed he would tell me nothing more. Moreover, he never responded to questions. His disclosures to me—but can we really call them that?—were made on the way from Place Monge to Montparnasse, between long silences, as if walking encouraged him to talk.

Something puzzled me. Was he really a student? When I'd asked his age, he had said he was thirty. Then he seemed sorry he'd told me. Could one still be a student at thirty? I didn't dare probe for fear of offending him. And Dannie? Why did she want to be a student? Was it really that easy to enroll at Censier? When I observed the two of them at the Unic Hôtel, they didn't really look like students; and the university building over near Place Monge, standing half finished at the back of a no man's land, suddenly seemed to belong to another city, another country, another life. Was it because of Paul Chastagnier, Duwelz, Marciano, or the ones I'd seen at the hotel reception desk? But I never felt comfortable in that Montparnasse neighborhood. No, really nothing cheery about those streets. As I recall, it was often raining there, whereas in my dreams I always see other areas of Paris bathed in sunshine. I think Montparnasse had fizzled out since the war. Farther down the boulevard, the Coupole and the Select still shone a bit, but the neighborhood had lost its soul. It no longer had the heart, or the talent.

One Sunday afternoon, I was alone with Dannie at the lower end of Rue d'Odessa. Rain was beginning to fall, and we took cover in the lobby of Le Montparnasse cinema. We found seats way in back. It was intermission and we didn't know what film was playing. That huge, dilapidated movie palace had caused me the same malaise as the neighboring streets. A smell of ozone floated over everything, as when you walk past a metro grating. In the audience were a few soldiers on leave; when night fell, they would take trains toward Brest or Lorient. And casual couples hid in dark corners, not watching the film. As it played, you could hear their moans and sighs, and beneath them the creaking of the seats, growing louder . . . I asked Dannie if she planned to stay in this neighborhood much longer. No, not for long. She would have preferred a large room in the sixteenth arrondissement. It was quiet and anonymous out there. No one could find you.

“Why? Are you hiding from someone?”

“No, of course not. What about you, do you like this neighborhood?”

She seemed determined to avoid an awkward question. As for me, what could I say? Whether or not I liked this neighborhood was irrelevant. Today it seems to me that I was living another life, inside my daily life. Or rather, that this other life was connected to my drab everyday existence and lent it a phosphorescence and mystery that it didn't really have. Just as familiar places that you revisit many years later in dreams take on a strange aura, like mournful Rue d'Odessa, or that Montparnasse cinema that smelled like the metro.

That Sunday, I walked her back to the Unic Hôtel. She was supposed to meet Aghamouri.

“Do you know his wife?” I asked.

She seemed surprised that I should know of her existence.

“No,” she said. “He almost never sees her. They're pretty much separated.”

It is through no skill of mine that I can reproduce that sentence exactly, since it figures at the bottom of a page in my notebook, after the name Aghamouri. On the same page are other notes that have nothing to do with that sorry Montparnasse neighborhood, Dannie, Paul Chastagnier, or Aghamouri, but rather concern the poet Tristan Corbière, as well as Jeanne Duval, the mistress of Baudelaire. I must have unearthed their addresses, since I'd written: “Corbière, 10 Rue Frochot, Jeanne Duval, 17 Rue Sauffroy ca. 1878.” Farther on, entire pages are devoted to them, which suggests that they were more important to me than most of the living individuals I mixed with at the time.

That evening, I left her at the hotel entrance. I noticed Aghamouri standing in the middle of the lobby, waiting for her. He was wearing a camel-colored overcoat. That, too, I had recorded in my notebook: “Aghamouri: camel coat.” No doubt to have a reference point later—as many small details as possible concerning this short, turbulent period of my life. “Do you know his wife?” “No, he almost never sees her. They're pretty much separated.” The kind of sentence you overhear when walking past two people in the street. And you will never know what they were talking about. A train rushes by a station too fast for you to read the name of the town. And so, with your forehead pressed against the window, you note down other details: a passing river, the village bell tower, a black cow ruminating beneath a tree, removed from the herd. You hope that at the next station you'll be able to read the name and find out what region you're in. I never again saw any of the people who flit through the pages of this black notebook. Their presence was fleeting, and I could easily have forgotten their names. Simple encounters, perhaps accidental, perhaps not. There is a time in one's life for that, a crossroads where one can still choose from several paths. The age of encounters, as it said on the cover of a book I once found on the quays. And indeed, that same Sunday evening when I left Dannie with Aghamouri, I went walking—I'm not sure why—along the Quai Saint-Michel. I walked up the boulevard, which was just as lugubrious as Montparnasse, perhaps because the weekday crowds were absent and the storefronts dark. Farther up, where the street opened onto Rue Monsieur-le-Prince, after the steps and the metal railing, was a large, brightly lit window, the back of a café whose front looked out on the fence surrounding the Jardin du Luxembourg. The interior of the café was dark, except for this one pane of glass, behind which patrons clustered around a semicircular bar until late into the night. Among them that evening were two people I recognized in passing: Aghamouri, because of his camel overcoat, and, seated next to him on a barstool, Dannie.

I went nearer. I could have pushed open the glass door and joined them. But I was afraid I'd be intruding and held back. Didn't I always keep to the background at the time, like a spectator—I'd even say, like the man they called the “nocturnal spectator,” that eighteenth-century writer whose work I loved and whose name appears several times, with glosses, in the pages of my black notebook? Paul Chastagnier, when we were together in the Falguière or Favorites neighborhood, had said to me one day, “It's odd . . . You listen to people very attentively . . . but your mind seems elsewhere.” Behind the glass, under the overbright fluorescent lights, Dannie's hair appeared not light brown but blond, and her skin even paler than normal, milky, with freckles. She was the only one seated on a stool. Three or four other customers were standing behind her and Aghamouri, glasses in hand. Aghamouri leaned toward her and said something in her ear. He kissed her neck. She laughed and took a sip of a drink that I recognized by its color and because she ordered it whenever we were together: Cointreau.

I wondered whether I would tell her the next day that I had seen her with Aghamouri at the Café Luxembourg. I didn't yet know the exact nature of their relationship. In any event, they occupied separate rooms at the Unic Hôtel. I had tried to puzzle out what held that little band together. Apparently, Gérard Marciano was an old friend of Aghamouri's, and Aghamouri had introduced him to Dannie when they both lived at the Cité Universitaire. Paul Chastagnier and Marciano used the familiar
tu
with each other, despite their age difference, and the same for Duwelz. But neither Chastagnier nor Duwelz had met Dannie before she moved to the Unic Hôtel. Finally, Aghamouri maintained fairly close ties with the hotel manager, the aforementioned Lakhdar, who every other day came to the office behind the reception desk. He was often accompanied by a man named Davin. Those two seemed to have known Paul Chastagnier, Marciano, and Duwelz for a long time. All this I recorded in my black notebook one afternoon while waiting for Dannie, as one might do crossword puzzles or doodle, to pass the time.

Later on, they questioned me about them. I had received a summons from a certain Langlais. I arrived at ten and spent a long time waiting in an office at police headquarters on the Quai de Gesvres. Through the window, I gazed at the flower market and the black façade of the Hôtel-Dieu. A sunlit autumn morning on the quays. Langlais entered the office: brown hair, average height. Despite his large blue eyes, his manner was cold. Without so much as a hello, he began asking questions in a gruff voice. I think that because I kept my calm, his tone eventually softened and he realized that I wasn't really mixed up in all this. It occurred to me that there, in his office, I might have been sitting in the exact spot where Gérard de Nerval had hanged himself. If we looked around the cellar of this building, we would find a section of the former Rue de la Vieille-Lanterne. I wasn't able to answer Langlais's questions very precisely. He cited the names of Paul Chastagnier, Gérard Marciano, Duwelz, and Aghamouri, and wanted me to talk about my relations with them. That was when I realized how small a part they had played in my life. Walk-ons. I thought about Nerval and Rue de la Vieille-Lanterne, on which they had erected the building we were in now. Did Langlais know? I almost asked him. Several times during the interrogation, he brought up the name of one Mireille Sampierry, who allegedly “frequented” the Unic Hôtel, but I didn't know her. “Are you quite sure you never met?” The name meant nothing to me. He must have seen I wasn't lying and let it drop. I jotted down “Mireille Sampierry” in my notebook that evening, and at the bottom of the same page, I wrote, “14 Quai de Gesvres. Langlais. Nerval. Rue de la Vieille-Lanterne.” I was surprised he never mentioned Dannie. It was as if she had left no trace in their files. As the expression went, she had slipped through the cracks and vanished into thin air. So much the better for her. The night when I'd discovered her with Aghamouri at the bar of the Café Luxembourg, after a while I couldn't make out her face in the glaring neon. She was no more than a spot of light, without relief, as in an overexposed photograph. A blank. I thought maybe she had eluded this Langlais's investigations by the same phenomenon. But I was mistaken. During a second interrogation the following week, I discovered that he knew plenty about her.

One night when she still lived at the Cité Universitaire, I had accompanied her to the Luxembourg metro stop. She didn't want to go home alone to the American Pavilion, and she had asked me to take the metro with her. Just as we were heading down to the platform, the last train departed. We could have walked, but the prospect of following endless Rue de la Santé at that hour and skirting the high walls of the prison, then of Sainte-Anne Hospital, made my blood go cold. She pulled me toward the start of Rue Monsieur-le-Prince and we found ourselves at the semicircular bar, in the same spot she and Aghamouri had occupied a few nights before. She sat on a stool, while I remained standing. We were pressed together because of the crowd at the bar. The light was so harsh it made me squint, and we couldn't hear ourselves talk in the hubbub around us. Then, one by one, everyone left. There remained only a single customer at the back, sprawled over the bar, and we couldn't tell whether he was dead drunk or merely asleep. The light was just as bright, just as strong, but it felt as if its scope had narrowed and only a single spotlight was trained on us. When we emerged into the open air, by contrast, everything was pitch black, and I felt relieved, like a moth that has escaped the attraction and searing heat of the lamp.