The Red Notebook

by Antoine Laurain

It was remarkable how, in situations like this, all the tiny details that had seemed totally insignificant an hour before suddenly seemed to conspire against you.

He had not touched a handbag without explicit prior authorisation, more like a command that was only valid for a very limited time. If Laurent couldn’t find the keys or the tissues in less than ten seconds and began to rummage about in the bag, it was immediately reclaimed by its owner. The action was accompanied by an irritated little exclamation, always in the imperative, ‘Give that to me!’ And the keys or tissues would magically appear. He gently pulled the zip

Laurent was fascinated by her reflections which followed on one from the other, random, touching, zany, sensual. He had opened a door into the soul of the woman with the mauve bag and even though he felt what he was doing was inappropriate, he couldn’t stop himself from reading on. A quote from Sacha Guitry came to mind: ‘Watching someone sleep is like reading a letter that’s not addressed to you.’ The bottle of wine was half empty and the hachis Parmentier forgotten on the kitchen counter.

Laurent turned the page back and read the two lines written in pen beneath the title: ‘For Laure, in memory of our meeting in the rain. Patrick Modiano.’ The writing blurred before his eyes. Modiano, the most elusive of French authors. Who hadn’t done any book signings for years and only rarely gave interviews.

As he combed his hair in front of the mirror, he reflected that he could easily have left all the items on the floor and explained the story to Dominique. But he hadn’t wanted to. Dominique would have been jealous and suspicious, and Laurent did not want to share his discovery. For the moment, Modiano’s Laure was a mystery he would keep to himself.

Their eyes had met for that fraction of a second during which, without saying a word, a man and a woman who don’t know each other signal that the night is not yet over.

But in fact the two men had little in common now. Their family situation was the same though; they were both divorced. But apart from that, everything that had bound them together had been left behind in the past. Messing about together in class, fantasising about supposedly inaccessible girls, giggling and shared secrets, beers in the bar, then university degrees all seemed light years away from the adults they had become. They had kept their relationship going like two poker players who continue late into the night, shuffling their cards and emptying their glasses long after the others have left the table and gone to bed.

And when you squeezed lemon juice over the membrane of an oyster, it shrank back. That shows it’s fresh, her father used to say.

That embarrassed, hesitant voice with a note of fear in it. The tone of voice that told Laure that her life was about to collapse. Like those ice sheets weighing several tons which break off icebergs with the first thaw and slide into the frozen waters of the Antarctic.

If there was one thing that defined adolescence it was hysterical laughter. You never laughed like that again. In adolescence the brutal realisation that the world and life were completely absurd made you laugh until you couldn’t catch your breath, whereas in later life it would only result in a weary sigh.

Only Patrick Modiano could tell you he didn’t remember the woman he had met in the street then immediately go on to give you a description that would have delighted any police force in the country. ‘Thank you,’ said Laurent in a low voice.

He was like one of those passionate ornithologists who will watch a rare bird through their binoculars without even taking a photograph of it because the very sight of the creature is recompense enough for long days, or even long weeks of waiting.

Their complicity during these fleeting exchanges seemed faked – it was a far cry from the look that had passed between them on the evening of the event at Le Cahier Rouge. That look in which they had promised each other, almost by telepathy, that nothing would stop them ending the night together. That had been a little over a year ago, which was a cotton anniversary, according to the wood anniversary couple. Would they celebrate the next anniversary together? As the dinner progressed, Laurent doubted it. Ephemeral relationships like that just happen, programmed from the outset to die after a brief period – but you only realise that as they are about to end.

restaurant. There, it was over. How was it so easy to disappear from someone else’s life? Perhaps it was with the same ease that you enter it. A chance meeting, a few words exchanged, and a relationship begins. A chance falling out, a few words exchanged and that same relationship is over.

How many things do we feel obliged to do for the sake of it, or for appearances, or because we are trained to do them, but which weigh us down and don’t in fact achieve anything?

‘Profession?’ asked the doctor. ‘Gilder,’ replied William. Baulieu looked up. ‘Applying gold leaf to wood, metal or plaster,’ William elaborated. ‘Anything from an old picture frame to the dome of Les Invalides.’

How many gold leaves does it take to do the dome of Les Invalides?’ asked the doctor without looking up from his notes. ‘Five hundred and fifty-five thousand.’

William’s eye was drawn to a white marble head mounted on a plinth on the doctor’s desk. ‘That’s a Cycladic head on your desk.’ ‘Yes,’ Baulieu replied, keeping his head down. ‘Is it linked to your work?’ ‘Follow that thought,’ the doctor said softly. ‘It has no eyes, because your patients can’t see. No mouth, because they can’t talk. Just the nose to breathe through.’ The doctor looked

Belphégor had happily adopted his evening visitor. He ate up his duck-flavoured cat food, then settled unhesitatingly on Laurent’s lap, immobilising him on the sofa. It’s an honour that cats bestow on you, as he was all too aware, his daughter’s cat Putin never having deigned to sit on anyone – the most you could hope for was an intense stare that was vaguely reminiscent of his namesake in the Kremlin.

The impression of ‘reading a letter that’s not addressed to you’, as Guitry put it, was even stronger than when he had opened the bag. The apartment was itself like a sort of giant bag with thousands of nooks and crannies, each one containing a tiny portion of its occupant’s life.

Grappling with such mystical questions in the middle of a Métro carriage planted two spine-tingling words in William’s head: guardian angel. After all, it was while he was in the grip of the cat-feeding dilemma, with no one to stand in for him during his trip to Berlin, that the doorbell had rung.

‘Do you have La Nostalgie du Possible?’ ‘Yes.’ Laurent stared hard at the man, who gave him an embarrassed smile. ‘Sorry,’ said Laurent. ‘I’ll go and get it for you.’ Antonio Tabucchi’s text on Pessoa. But it wasn’t the title that he had heard but an actual question, ‘Are you nostalgic

for what could have been?’ posed by a stranger. A question he had answered truthfully: ‘Yes.’ And when this random customer had departed with his book, Laurent wondered whether the man had come in purely to put into words the feeling he was living with. Can you experience nostalgia for something that hasn’t happened? We talk of ‘regrets’ about the course of our lives, when we are almost certain we have taken the wrong decision; but one can also be enveloped in a sweet and mysterious euphoria, a sort of nostalgia for what might have been.

That was exactly what Tabucchi was suggesting in his title – that we can pass right by something very important: love, a job, moving to another city or another country. Or another life. ‘Pass by’ and at the same time be ‘so close’ that sometimes, while in that state of melancholy that is akin to hypnosis, we can, in spite of everything, manage to grab little fragments of what might have been. Like catching snatches of a far-off radio frequency. The message is obscure, yet by listening carefully you can still catch snippets of the soundtrack of the life that never was. You hear sentences that were never actually said, you hear footsteps echoing in places you’ve never been to, you can make out the surf on a beach whose sand you have never touched. You hear the laughter and loving words of a woman though nothing ever happened between you. The idea of an affair with her had crossed your mind. Perhaps she would have liked that – probably in fact – but nothing ever happened. For some unknown reason, we never gave in to the exquisite vertigo that you feel when you move those few centimetres towards the face of the other for the first kiss. We passed by, we passed so close that something of the experience remains.

To quote Patrick Modiano, whom you seem to like, in Villa Triste, ‘There are mysterious beings, always the same, who watch over us at each crossroads in our lives.’ Let’s just say that, unintentionally, I have been one of those beings.

The only one who could remember him being there was the cat, who had watched him coming and going but refused to say a word about it. Laurent,

And now there was a man in the city who knew almost all there was to know about her. A man whom she had never met yet who was familiar with the decor of her home, had studied her belongings at leisure and stroked her cat, knew exactly what was inside her bag, what she liked to read, what her bedroom looked like. Other men besides Xavier had been allowed access to her body, but no one else had really stepped inside her mind. It was not for want of trying: Laure simply refused to open up. It was more than she was capable of.

She leant close to Laure and closed her eyes: yes, definitely Habanita. There was no doubt, here she was, the woman with the mauve handbag. Chloé opened her eyes just as Laure was preparing to place a new leaf. ‘His name is Laurent Letellier,’ she murmured. ‘He’s the owner of Le Cahier Rouge.’ Laure’s hand stopped in mid-air, the gold leaf lost its static and fell twisting to the ground.

I think I held on to them as ‘evidence’ of some kind. They helped me to find my place in the world and, in a broader sense, to prove to myself that I really existed. I suppose I must have decided at some point that I no longer needed to do that, because I gave up writing a diary, stopped telling

I’ve always liked men who can go from looking serious to warm in the space of a few seconds. That was true of Xavier, and my father.

As with most men who are attractive without being conventionally handsome, Laurent is clearly oblivious of his charms. The woman