The law had no doubt given up on finding Pacheco. I learned that after a certain time, a decree of amnesty had been issued for the crime of “conspiring with the enemy.” In all likelihood, it was at that moment that Pacheco, emerging from the shadows, had procured himself an identity card.
I imagined him shuffling along, a vagrant silhouette. On the barge at the Quai d’Austerlitz, Lombard had been his bunkmate, had stolen his identity card. Moreover, anything was possible in that neighborhood, between the train station and the botanical gardens: night there is so deep, with its odors of wine and coal and its growling beasts, that a tramp could easily fall from the side of a barge into the Seine, could drown, and no one would notice.
Had Lombard been aware of Pacheco’s past when he swiped his identity card? In any case, he knew that Philippe de Pacheco called himself Philippe de Bellune and that he was a descendant of Maréchal Victor. I could still hear him telling me in his muffled voice in the Cité Universitaire cafeteria: “When I was younger, I used to go by the name Philippe de Bellune, but I had no real right to the title.”
In the dormitory of the barge at Austerlitz, Pacheco had opened up to Lombard and told him of his life. Why, on the identity card, was he said to be living at 183 Rue Belliard, in the eighteenth arrondissement? Was his mother still alive? Where? So many questions, the answers to which were no doubt buried in a file stored among countless others at the Prefecture of Police. One would also find the reasons for his internment at Dachau and his indictment for “conspiring with the enemy.” But how to access that file?
And what if Pacheco had continued to seek asylum in the various Salvation Army shelters? The loss of his identity card had meant little to him. He had already been dead a long time, as far as everyone was concerned … Maybe he’d never left the barge on the Quai d’Austerlitz.
Afternoons, he would wander along the river, or else he’d visit the Jardin des Plantes, then finish his day by sitting in the main hall of the Austerlitz station, before going back to the barge to have dinner in the dining hall and collapse on his bunk in the dormitory. And night fell on the quarter where my father, several years earlier, had also looked like a vagrant. Except that the Magasins Généraux, where they had locked him up with hundreds of others, was not the Salvation Army.
In his befuddled memory floated a few scraps of the past: The private hotel on Rue Greuze. The dog his grandparents had given him for Christmas. Meeting up with a girl with light brown hair. They had gone to the movies together, on the Champs-Elysées. In those days, he called himself Philippe de Bellune. The Occupation had come, bringing a host of people who also wore strange names and fake noble titles. Sherrer, alias “The Admiral,” Draga, Mme von Seckendorff, Baron de Kermanor …
I sat at a sidewalk table of one of the cafés facing the Charléty stadium. I constructed all the hypotheses concerning Philippe de Pacheco, whose face I didn’t even know. I took notes. Without fully realizing it, I began writing my first book. It was neither a vocation nor a particular gift that pushed me to write, but quite simply the enigma posed by a man I had no chance of finding again, and by all those questions that would never have an answer.
Behind me, the jukebox was playing an Italian song. The stench of burned tires floated in the air. A girl was walking under the leaves of the trees along Boulevard Jourdan. Her blond bangs, cheekbones, and green dress were the only note of freshness on that early August afternoon. Why bother chasing ghosts and trying to solve insoluble mysteries, when life was there, in all its simplicity, beneath the sun?
When I was twenty, I would feel relieved when I passed from the Left Bank to the Right Bank of the Seine, crossing via the Pont des Arts. Night had already fallen. I turned back one last time to see the North Star shining above the dome of the Institut de France.
All the neighborhoods on the Left Bank were only provinces of Paris. The moment I reached the Right Bank, the air felt lighter.
Today I wonder what I could have been fleeing by crossing over the Pont des Arts. Perhaps the neighborhood I had known with my brother, which wasn’t the same without him: the school on Rue du Pont-de-Lodi; the town hall of the sixth arrondissement, where they handed out the scholastic prizes; the number 63 bus that we waited for in front of the Café de Flore, which took us to the Bois de Boulogne … For a long time, I felt uneasy walking on certain streets of the Left Bank. At this point, the area has become indifferent, as if it had been rebuilt stone by stone after a bombardment but had lost its soul. And yet, one summer afternoon, turning onto Rue Cardinale, I rediscovered in a flash something of the Saint-Germain-des-Prés of my childhood, which resembled the old city of Saint-Tropez, without the tourists. From the church square, Rue Bonaparte sloped down toward the sea.
Once across the Pont des Arts, I walked beneath the archway of the Louvre, another domain with which I’d long been familiar. Beneath that archway, a musty odor of mildew, urine, and rotten wood wafted from the left side of the passage, where we’d never dared venture. Light fell from a filthy, cobweb-covered window, leaving in half-shadow heaps of rubble, wooden beams, and old gardening implements. We were sure that rats were hiding in there, and we hastened our steps to emerge into the fresh air of the Louvre courtyard.
In the four corners of that courtyard, grass spurted between the loose cobblestones. There, too, were heaps of rubble, building stones, and rusty iron rods.
The Cour du Carrousel was lined with stone benches, at the foot of the palace wings that framed the two little squares. There was no one on those benches. Except for us. And sometimes a vagrant. In the middle of the first square, on a pedestal so high that you could barely make out the statue, General Lafayette vanished into the stratosphere. The pedestal was surrounded by a lawn that they never trimmed. We could play and lie around in the tall grass without a groundskeeper ever coming to reprimand us.
In the second square, among the copses, were two bronze statues side by side: Cain and Abel. The fence surrounding them dated from the Second Empire. Visitors crowded around the museum entrance, but we were the only children to frequent those abandoned squares.
The most mysterious zone stretched to the left of the Carrousel gardens along the southern wing that ends at the Pavillon de Flore. It was a wide alley, separated from the gardens by a fence and lined with streetlamps. As in the Louvre courtyard, weeds grew among the cobblestones, but most of the stones had disappeared, leaving bare patches of ground. Farther up, in the recess formed by the palace wing, was a clock. And behind that clock, the cell of the Prisoner of Zenda. No stroller in the Carrousel gardens ventured down that alley. We spent entire afternoons playing amid the broken birdbaths and statues, the stones and dead leaves. The hands of the clock never moved. They forever struck five-thirty. Those immobile hands enveloped us in a deep, soothing silence. We only had to stay in the alley and nothing would ever change.
There was a police station in the courtyard of the Louvre, on the right-hand side of the archway that led out to Rue de Rivoli. A Black Maria was parked nearby. Officers in uniform stood in front of the half-open door, through which filtered a yellow light. Under the archway, to the right, was the main entrance to the station. For me, that was the border post that truly marked the passage from the Left Bank to the Right, and I felt my pocket to make sure I was carrying my identity card.