Honeymoon (5 page)

"No, no … My darling … Don't be afraid … No one's going to come and disturb us …"

"Are you sure? Anyone could leave the terrace and come in here … Especially Cavanaugh …"

"No, no … Cavanaugh won't come … I locked the door …"

From the gentle, protective tones of Annette's first words, I could tell that she wasn't with Cavanaugh. Then I recognized the muffled voice of Ben Smidane, a young man we had elected to the Explorers' Club at the beginning of the year, with Cavanaugh and me as sponsors, a young man who wanted to dedicate himself to searching for the wrecks of boats that had gone down in the Indian Ocean and the Pacific, and who Annette had said had "the face of a Greek shepherd".

•

The light went out in the bedroom, and Annette said in a hoarse voice:

"Don't be afraid, my darling …
"

Then I shut the door gently and switched on the light in my study. I searched the drawers until I found an old darkgreen cardboard folder. I put it under my arm and left the room, abandoning my widow and Ben Smidane to their amours.

I stood still for a moment in the middle of the corridor, listening to the hum of the conversation. I thought of Cavanaugh up there, a glass of champagne in his hand, standing at the ship's rail. With the other guests he would be gazing at the Place Blanche which looked like a little fishing port they were about to put into. Unless he had noticed Annette's prolonged absence and was wondering where on earth my widow could have got to.

I saw myself again, twenty years earlier, with Ingrid and Rigaud, in the semi-darkness outside the bungalow. Around us, shouts and bursts of laughter similar to those now reaching me from the terrace. I was now about the same age as Ingrid and Rigaud were then, and whereas their attitude had seemed to me so strange then, I shared it this evening. I remembered what Ingrid had said: "We'll pretend to be dead."

I went down the secret stairway, behind the Moulin Rouge, and found myself back on the boulevard. I crossed the Place Blanche and raised my head in the direction of our terrace. Up there, there was no danger of them spotting me among the crowds of tourists being disgorged from the coaches, and the people out for a stroll on the fourteenth of July. Did they still spare just a little thought for me? Deep down I was very fond of them: my widow, Cavanaugh, Ben Smidane and the other guests. One day I'll come back to you. I don't yet know the precise date of my resurrection. I shall have to have the strength and the inclination. But this evening I'm going to take the métro to the Porte Dorée. Light. So detached from everything.

WHEN I GOT BACK, around midnight, the fountains in the
square were still illuminated and a few groups, among which I noticed some children, were making their way towards the entrance to the zoo. It had stayed open for the fourteenth of July, and no doubt the animals would remain in their cages and enclosures, half asleep. Why shouldn't I too pay them a nocturnal visit, and thus have the illusion of making our old dream come true: letting ourselves be locked in the zoo overnight?

But I preferred to go back to the Dodds Hotel and lie down on the little cherry-wood bed in my room. I reread the pages contained in the dark-green folder. Notes, and even short chapters, that I'd written ten years ago, the rough draft of a project cherished at the time: to write Ingrid's biography.

It was September, in Paris, and for the first time I had begun to have doubts about my life and profession. From then on I would have to share Annette, my wife, with Cavanaugh, my best friend. The public had lost interest in the documentaries we were bringing back from the antipodes. All those journeys, those countries where they had monsoons, earthquakes, amoebas and virgin forests, had lost their charm for me. Had they ever had any?

Days of doubt and depression. I had five weeks' respite before dragging myself across Asia on the route followed by the
1931
car expedition across central Asia. I cursed the members of that expedition, whose tyre tracks I was obliged to discover. Never had Paris, the
quais
along the Seine, and the Place Blanche seemed so attractive. How stupid to leave all that once again …

The memory of Ingrid was obsessing me, and I had spent the days before my departure in noting down everything I knew about her, which is to say not much … After the war, Rigaud and Ingrid had lived in the Midi for five or six years, but I had no information about that period. Then Ingrid had gone to America, without Rigaud. She had gone with a film producer. This producer had wanted her to be an extra in a few unimportant films. Rigaud had joined her, she had abandoned the producer and the cinema. She had again separated from Rigaud, who went back to France, and she had spent more years in America – years about which I knew nothing. Then she had returned to France, and Paris. And some time later, to Rigaud. And we were coming to the time when I had met them on the Saint-Raphaël road.

I found it distasteful to read all my notes ten years later; it was as if someone else had written them. For instance, the chapter entitled "The American Years". Was I definitely sure that they had loomed so large in her existence?

With time, this episode took on a trivial and almost ridiculous aspect. But when I wrote these notes I was more susceptible to irrelevances and glitter, and I didn't go straight to the nub. How childish it was of me to have cut out from a
1951
magazine a colour photo of the Champs-
Élysées
at night, in summer, under the pretext that it was in the summer of
1951
,
on one of the terraces in the A venue, that Ingrid had made the acquaintance of the American producer … I had attached this document to my notes, to give a better feeling of the atmosphere in which Ingrid lived when she was twenty-five. The sun umbrellas and the cane chairs on the terraces, the
look of a seaside resort that the Avenue des Champs-
Élysées
still had then, the softness of the Paris evenings that suited her youth so well … And the name I had noted: Alexandre d'Arc, an old Frenchman from Hollywood, the man who, that evening, had introduced Ingrid to the producer, because he accompanied him on all his trips to Europe and was given the job of seeing that he met what in those days they called young persons …

Among my notes was another document that I'd thought necessary to Ingrid's biography: a photo of the American producer, discovered by chance during my researches. This photo had been taken during a gala evening in a Florida casino. Some gymnasts were performing on a stage in the middle of the room, and all of a sudden the producer, wanting to impress Ingrid, had got up from the table and taken off his dinner jacket, bow tie and shirt. Stripped to the waist, he had climbed up on to the stage and, in from of the flabbergasted gymnasts, grabbed hold of the trapeze. The photo showed him hanging from the trapeze, his chest thrust out, his stomach held in, his legs at right angles. He was very short, and he wore a moustache that followed the line of his lip, which reminded me of distant childhood memories. His jaws clenched, his chest triumphant, his legs at right angles …

This man was trying to prove to a woman who could have been his daughter that you can possess eternal youth. When she told me this anecdote, Ingrid laughed just as hard as I did, until the tears came into her eyes. I wonder whether those tears were not due to the thought of all the time she had wasted in futile evenings like that one.

I tore the photograph of the Avenue des Champs-
Élysées
and the one of the producer into tiny pieces, which I jumbled up and then scattered in the wastepaper basket. The page on Alexandre d'Arc suffered the same fate; ten years ago his phoney name and the fact that he was a pimp by profession
had struck me as so romantic that I had considered the fellow worthy of figuring in a biography of Ingrid. I felt a vague twinge of remorse: has a biographer the right to suppress certain details under the pretext that he considers them superfluous? Or do they all have their importance, and must he present them one after the other, impartially, so that not a single one is left put, as in the inventory of a distraint?

Unless the line of a life, once it has reached its term, purges itself of all its useless and decorative elements. In which case, all that remains is the essential: the blanks, the silences and the pauses. I finally fell asleep, turning all these serious questions over in my mind.

•

The next morning, in the café on the corner of the square and the Boulevard Soult, a girl and boy who weren't much over twenty were sitting at the table next to mine, and they smiled at me. I felt an urge to talk to them. I thought them well suited to each other; he was dark and she was fair. Perhaps that was how Annette and I had looked at the same age. I found their presence reassuring, and they communicated something of their mysterious power and freshness to me, because I was in good spirits for the rest of the day.

That boy and girl made me reflect on my first meeting with Ingrid and Rigaud on the Saint-Raphaël road. I wondered why they'd stopped their car and invited me to their place so very naturally. It was as if they'd always known me. I'd spent a sleepless night in the train, of course, and my fatigue gave me the impression that everything was possible and that life had lost all its rough edges: all you had to do was let yourself slide down a gentle slope, raise your arm, and a car would stop and people would help you without even asking you any questions. You fell asleep under the pine trees, and when you woke up two pale blue eyes were gazing at you. When I
walked down the Rue de la Citadelle arm in arm with Ingrid, it was with the certainty that for the first time in my life I was under someone's protection.

But I hadn't forgotten the way Rigaud limped, as slightly as possible, as if he was trying to hide an injury, or the words Ingrid had whispered in the dark: We'll pretend to be dead. They must already have felt, both of them, that they were coming to the end of the road. At least Ingrid must have. Perhaps my presence had been a distraction for them and a passing comfort. Perhaps, fleetingly, I had conjured up a memory of youth for them. For in fact it was at my age that they had found themselves on the Côte d'Azur. They were very much on their own. And orphans. That must have been why Ingrid had wanted to know whether I had parents.

I DIDN'T NEED
to consult my notes that evening in my room in the Dodds Hotel. I remembered everything as if it had been yesterday … They had arrived on the Côte d'Azur in the spring of
1942
. She was sixteen, and he was twenty-one. They didn't get off the train at Saint-Raphaël, as I had done, but at Juan-les-Pins. They had come from Paris, and had crossed the demarcation line illegally. Ingrid had a false identity card in the name of Ingrid Teyrsen, married name Rigaud, which aged her by three years. Rigaud had hidden several hundreds of thousands of francs in the linings of his jackets and at the bottom of his suit-case.

They were the only passengers at Juan-les-Pins that morning. A cab was waiting outside the station, a black cab with a white horse. They decided to take it, because of their suitcases. The horse started off at a walk, and they crossed the deserted square in the pine forest. The cabdriver's head was leaning over to the right. From behind, it looked as if he had fallen asleep. At the bend in the road leading to the Cape, the sea appeared. The cab turned into a steep alleyway. The driver cracked his whip, and the horse broke into a trot. Then it jerked to a halt outside the enormous white mass of the Hôtel Provençal.

"We must tell them we're on honeymoon," Rigaud had said.

•

Only one floor of the hotel was still in use, and the rare guests seemed to be living there in hiding. Before reaching it, the lift slowly passed whole floors of shadow and silence, where it would never stop again. Anyone who wanted to use the stairs needed a torch. The big dining room was closed, its chandelier enveloped in a white sheet. The bar wasn't in use, either. So the guests gathered in a corner of the lobby.

Their room was at the back of the hotel and looked out on to a road that sloped gently down to the beach. Their balcony overlooked the pine forest, and they often saw the cab going round the bend in the road to the Cape. In the evenings, the silence was so deep that the clicking sound of the horse's hooves took a very long time to die away. Ingrid and Rigaud played a game to see which of them had such sharp ears as to be the last to hear the horse's hooves.

•

At Juan-les-Pins, people behaved as if the war didn't exist. The men wore beach trousers and the women light-coloured pareus. All these people were some twenty years older than Ingrid and Rigaud, but this was barely noticeable. Owing to their suntanned skin and their athletic gait, they still looked young and falsely carefree. They didn't know the way things would go when the summer was over. At aperitif time, they exchanged addresses. W auld they be able to get rooms in Megève this winter? Some preferred the Val-d'Isère, and were already getting ready to book accommodation at the Col de I'Iseran. Others had no intention of leaving the Côte d'Azur. It was possible that they were going to reopen the Altitude
43
in Saint-Tropez, that white hotel which looks like a liner grounded among the pines above the Plage de Ia Bouillabaisse. They would be safe there. Fleeting signs of anguish could be read on their faces under the suntan: to think that they were going to have to be permanently on the move, searching for
a place that the war had spared, and that these oases were going to become rarer all the time … Rationing was beginning on the Côte. You mustn't think about anything, so as not to undermine your morale. These idle days sometimes gave you the feeling of being under house arrest. You had to create a vacuum in your head. Let yourself be gently numbed by the sun and the swaying of the palm trees in the breeze … Shut your eyes. Ingrid and Rigaud lived the same sort of life as these people who were forgetting the war, but they kept out of their way and avoided speaking to them. At first, everyone had been astonished by their youth. Were they waiting for their parents? Were they on holiday? Rigaud had replied that Ingrid and he "were on honeymoon", quite simply. And this reply, far from surprising them, had reassured the guests at the Provençal. If young people still went on honeymoon, it meant that the situation wasn't so tragic as all that and that the earth was still going round.