The Black Notebook Read Free

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.
    â€œWhy? Are you hiding from someone?”
    â€œNo, 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.
    â€œDo you know his wife?” I asked.
    She seemed surprised that I should know of her existence.
    â€œNo,” 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