Jacqueline
Who was that Angel Maquignon, whom this Jacqueline was going to meet at Café de la Marine? In the same café, a witness claimed to have seen Gisèle and Urbain T., that night in April when they’d mixed with bad company in Montparnasse.
The Champs-Elysées … It’s like that pond a British novelist talks about, at the bottom of which, in layered deposits, lie the echoes of the voices of every passerby who has daydreamed on its banks. The shimmering water preserves those echoes forever and, on quiet evenings, they all blend together … One evening in 1942, near the Biarritz cinema, my father was picked up by Inspector Schweblin and Permilleux’s stooges. Much later, toward the end of my childhood, I accompanied him to his meetings in the lobby of the Claridge and the two of us went to have dinner at the Chinese restaurant nearby, whose dining room was upstairs. Did he occasionally glance at the sidewalk across the avenue, where years earlier the Black Maria had been waiting to take him to the holding cell? I remember his office, in the ochre building with large bay windows at 1 Rue Lord-Byron. By following endless corridors, one could exit onto the Champs-Elysées. I suspect he had chosen that office for its double exit. He was always alone up there with a very pretty blonde, Simone Cordier. The telephone would ring. She’d pick up:
“Hello? … Who’s calling, please?”
Then, turning to my father, she whispered the name. And she added:
“Should I tell him you’re here, Albert?”
“No. I’m not here for anyone …”
And that’s how the afternoons passed. Empty. Simone Cordier typed letters. My father and I often went to the movies on the Champs-Elysées. He took me to see revivals of films he’d enjoyed. One of them featured the German actress Dita Parlo. After the movie, we walked down the avenue. He had told me in a confiding tone, which was unusual for him:
“Simone was a friend of Dita Parlo’s … I met the two of them at the same time.”
Then he’d fallen silent, and the silence between us lasted until Place de la Concorde, where he’d asked me about my studies.
Ten years later, I was looking for someone to type up my first novel for me. I had found Simone Cordier’s address. I called her. She seemed surprised I should still remember her after all that time, but she made an appointment to see me at her home on Rue de Belloy.
I entered the apartment, my manuscript under my arm. First she asked me for news of my father and I didn’t know what to answer, as I didn’t have any.
“So, you’re writing novels?”
I answered yes in a halting voice. She showed me into a space that must have been the living room, but it no longer had any furniture. The tan paint on the walls was peeling in spots.
“Let’s go to the bar,” she said.
And with an abrupt movement she pointed to a small white bar at the back of the room. The gesture had struck me at the time as rather offhanded, but now I realize how much shame and confusion it masked. She went to stand behind the bar. I put my manuscript down on it.
“Shall I pour you a whiskey?” she asked.
I didn’t dare say no. We were both standing, on opposite sides of the bar, in the dim light of a wall lamp. She poured herself a whiskey as well.
“Do you take it the same as me? Neat?”
“Sure.”
I hadn’t had whiskey since the Danish girl had given me some at Chez Malafosse, so long before …
She downed a large gulp.
“So you want me to type all that for you?”
She pointed to the manuscript.
“You know, I haven’t been a typist in a long time …”
She hadn’t aged. The same green eyes. The beautiful architecture of her face had remained intact: her forehead, the arch of her eyebrows, her straight nose. Only her skin had gone a bit florid.
“I’ll have to get back into the swing of it … I’ve gotten kind of rusty.”
I suddenly wondered where she could possibly type anything in that empty room. Standing, with the typewriter resting on the bar?
“If it’s a problem,” I said, “we can forget it …”
“No, no, it’s no problem …”
She poured herself another whiskey.
“I’ll get back into the swing of it … I’ll rent a typewriter.”
She slapped the flat of her hand down on the bar.
“You leave me three pages and come back in two weeks … Then you can bring me three more pages … And so on and so forth … Sound all right to you?”
“Sure.”
“Another whiskey?”
After leaving Simone Cordier’s apartment, I didn’t immediately take the metro at Boissière. Night had fallen and I wandered aimlessly around the quarter.
I had left her three pages of my manuscript, without harboring much hope that she’d type them. She had shrugged her shoulders when I’d said I hadn’t heard from my father in five years. Apparently, nothing could surprise her about “Albert,” not even his disappearance.
It had rained. A smell of gasoline and wet leaves hovered in the air. Suddenly, I thought of Pacheco. I imagined him walking on the same sidewalk. I had gotten as far as the Hôtel Baltimore. I knew that one evening he’d gone to meet someone at that hotel and I wondered what sort of person he might have seen there. Perhaps Angel Maquignon.
The only information I’d ever gleaned about Pacheco had come by chance, in the course of a conversation, at Claude Bernard’s house on the Ile des Loups. We were having dinner with an antiques dealer from Brussels whom he’d introduced as his associate. By what circuitous path had we come, that man and I, to speak of the duc de Bellune, then of Philippe de Bellune, alias de Pacheco? The name rang a bell with him. When he was very young, he had known, on a beach in Belgium, at Heist near Zee-brugge, a certain Felipe de Pacheco. The latter lived with his grandparents, in a dilapidated villa on the dike. He claimed to be Peruvian.
Felipe de Pacheco frequented the Hôtel du Phare, where the owner, who had been a diva at the Liège Opera, sometimes gave recitals for the evening clientele. He was in love with her daughter, a very pretty blonde named Lydia. He spent his nights drinking beer with his friends from Brussels. He slept until noon. He had abandoned his studies and was living by his wits. His grandparents were too old to keep an eye on him.
And several years later, in Paris, my interlocutor had again met this boy in a drama class, where he was calling himself Philippe de Bellune. He was taking the course in the company of a girl with light brown hair. He was a dark young man with a spot on one eye. One day, this Philippe de Bellune announced that he’d just found a well-paying job through the want ads.