Sometimes during the quieter moments of the day, on the way home from the office, and often in the solitude of Sunday evenings, a detail comes back to me. With the utmost concentration, I try to gather others like it and make note of them on the remaining blank pages at the back of Bowing’s notebook. I too have gone hunting for fixed points. It’s just a hobby, not unlike how others do crosswords or play solitaire. The names and the dates in Bowing’s notebook help me quite a lot, every now and then they remind me of some particular detail, some rainy day or sunny afternoon. I’ve always been very sensitive to the seasons. One evening, Louki came into the Condé, her hair soaking wet either from a downpour or rather one of those interminable rains that we get in November or the beginning of spring. Madame Chadly was behind the bar that day. She went up to the second floor, to her tiny apartment, and fetched a bath towel. As the notebook tells us, that night Zacharias, Annet, Don Carlos, Mireille, La Houpa, Fred, and Maurice Raphaël were all gathered at one table. Zacharias took the towel and dried Louki’s hair with it before knotting it around her head like a turban. She sat down at their table, they made her drink a hot toddy, and she stayed quite late with them, the turban on her head. On the way out of the Condé, around two in the morning, it was still raining. We were all standing in the doorway and Louki was still wearing her turban. Madame Chadly had turned off the café lights and gone up to bed. She opened her mezzanine window and suggested that we go up to her place to take shelter. But Maurice Raphaël gallantly told her: “Don’t worry yourself about it, madame. It is time we let you sleep.” He was a handsome, dark-haired man, older than us, a regular customer at the Condé whom Zacharias referred to as “the Jaguar” because of the way he walked and his cat-like mannerisms. Like Adamov and Larronde, he had published several books, but he never spoke of them to us. There was mystery surrounding him, and we even thought he may have had ties to the underworld. The rain had redoubled its efforts, a real monsoon, but it wasn’t a big deal for the others since they lived in the vicinity. Soon only Louki, Maurice Raphaël, and I remained under the porch. “Would you both like a ride back home?” offered Maurice Raphaël. We ran through the rain to the bottom of the street where he had parked his car, an old black Ford. Louki sat next to him, and I sat in the backseat. “Who am I dropping off first?” said Maurice Raphaël. Louki gave him her address, adding that it was up from Montparnasse Cemetery. “So you live in Limbo,” he said. And I think that neither she nor I understood what he meant by “Limbo.” I asked him to drop me off a little way past the gates of the Luxembourg, on the corner of Val-de-Grâce. I didn’t want him to know exactly where I lived for fear that he might ask questions.
I shook hands with Louki and then with Maurice Raphaël, realizing that neither of them knew my name. I was a very unassuming customer at the Condé and I kept my distance, happy just to listen to them all. And that was plenty for me. I felt good around them. For me, the Condé was a refuge from all the drabness I anticipated in life. There will one day be a part of me — the best part — that I will be forced to leave behind there.
“A smart decision, living in Val-de-Grâce,” Maurice Raphaël said to me.
He was smiling at me and his smile seemed to express both kindness and irony.
“See you soon,” Louki said.
I climbed out of the car, and before I turned back, I waited for it to disappear over by Port-Royal. Truth be told, I didn’t actually live in Val-de-Grâce, but a bit farther down in a building at 85, boulevard Saint-Michel, where I had miraculously found a room when I first arrived in Paris. From the window, I could see the dark façade of my school. That night, I couldn’t tear my eyes away from that monumental façade or from the great stone stairs of the entrance. What would they think if they found out I took those steps almost every day and was a student at the École Supérieure des Mines? Did Zacharias, La Houpa, Ali Cherif, or Don Carlos really know what the École des Mines was all about? It was necessary for me to keep this a secret or I risked them poking fun at me or distrusting me. What did the École des Mines represent to Adamov, Larronde, or Maurice Raphaël? Nothing, of course. They would suggest I stop going to such a place. If I spent a lot of time at the Condé, it was because I wanted them to give me such advice, once and for all. Louki and Maurice Raphaël would have already made it to the other side of Montparnasse Cemetery, over to the area that he called Limbo. And I remained, standing there in the dark, up against my window, contemplating that darkened façade. It could have passed for the abandoned train station of a provincial town. On the walls of the neighboring building, I had noticed bullet holes, like they had shot someone there. I quietly repeated those four words that seemed more and more foreign, “École Supérieure des Mines.”
~ ~ ~
I WAS FORTUNATE that particular young man was sitting next to me at the Condé and we struck up such a comfortable conversation. It was the first time I had been in that establishment, and I was old enough to be his father. The notebook in which he’d kept track of the Condé’s customers, day in and day out for the past three years, made my work easier. I feel bad for hiding the true reason I wanted to consult his document but I simply did so in hopes that he would be kind enough to lend it to me. And was I lying when I told him I was an art publisher?
I was pretty certain that he believed me. That’s the advantage of being twenty years older than someone: They don’t know your past. And even if they ask you a couple of distracted questions about what your life has been up until that point, you can make it up completely. A new life. They’re not going to go and check. As you tell of this imaginary life, great breaths of fresh air rush across a closed room in which you have been unable to breathe for a long time. A window abruptly opens, the shutters bang in the breeze. You have, once again, a future before you.
An art publisher. It came to me without even thinking. If I had been asked what I was going to be when I was older, some twenty years ago, I would have mumbled: an art publisher. And well, today I said it. Nothing has changed. All of those years are done and gone.
Except I haven’t quite wiped clean the slate of the past. There are still some witnesses, a few survivors among those who had been our contemporaries. One evening, at the Montana, I asked Dr. Vala when he was born. We were born the same year. And I reminded him that we had met in the olden days, in that very bar, when the area still shone as brightly as it once had. And moreover, it seemed to me that I had run into him well before, elsewhere in Paris, on the Rive Droite. I was even certain of it. Dryly, Vala had ordered a bottle of Vittel, cutting me off at the very moment it seemed as if I might bring up unpleasant memories. I shut up. We live at the mercy of certain silences. We have all known things about each other for a long time. So we try to avoid each other. It would be for the best, of course, if none of us were ever to see each other again.
What a strange coincidence… I came across Vala the very first afternoon I went into the Condé. He was sitting at a table at the back with two or three young people. He shot me the alarmed look of a bon vivant who finds himself in the presence of a ghost. I gave him a smile. I shook his hand without saying a thing. I felt that the least word on my part risked making him uncomfortable in front of his new friends. He seemed relieved by my silence and discretion as I sat down on an imitation-leather banquette at the other end of the room. From there I was able to watch him without his noticing my gaze. He spoke to them in a low voice, leaning toward them. Was he worried I would hear what he was saying? Then, to pass the time, I imagined all of the phrases I might have spoken in a feignedly urbane tone that would have made drops of sweat bead up on his forehead. “Are you still a doctor?” And then, after a long pause, “Say, are you still practicing at Quai Louis-Blériot? At least tell me you’ve kept your office on rue de Moscou. And that trip to Fresnes way back when, I hope there weren’t too many serious consequences.” I very nearly burst out laughing, all by myself in my corner. We never grow up. As the years go by, many people and many things end up seeming so humorous and so pathetic that all you can do is try to look at them through the eyes of a child.