The Black Notebook Read Free Page A

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.