Paris Noir - Aurelien Masson [35]
In the silence of the early hours I look for the iron. It hasn’t moved. In the hall closet. Nothing has moved. I wonder if I really left, if it’s not the morning after a rocky night of drinking that made me think I’d disappeared for ten years. My only suit has to be ironed. Keep up appearances. Patrick’s parents have money. They rented a big room in a restaurant in the Bois de Vincennes that has a little garden. We don’t have the money for that. So we keep up appearances. A family tradition. Like the soup. But I don’t hold it against her: Mom did what she could when my father died. A perfectly pressed suit. A wedding in September when the days are getting shorter, what an idea. I put it in my room on the bed and I close the door so the cat won’t come in and sleep on it.
Mom’s up now. She’s surprised. She forgot I was here. Yet it’s the first time I’ve been here in ten years.
“Did you sleep well?” “Yes! You left the room just like it used to be.” “What did you expect me to do with it?” “I don’t know.” She grabs a cup and helps herself and takes a sip. “Your coffee is very strong.” “That’s the only way I like it.” She adds a little water. “I ironed my suit for the wedding.” “I could have done it for you.” “I’m used to it. We did everything ourselves in the subs.” “So it’s not like it used to be.” She smiles sadly and adds: “Are you okay?” What can I answer? I lie: “Sure! Work, life … everything’s okay.” She finishes her cup. I tell her I’m going out for a walk. “Do you need something?” “No! I feel like taking a walk.” “You’ll see, there’ve been some changes.” “I’ll bet.”
I walk downstairs. Fifth floor. Fifty-seven steps. I still remember the jerky tempo of the descent. Back in the day, the light used to go on the fritz a lot and you had to keep count of the steps in your head so as not to fall. Outside. A kind of square where two buildings face each other. Ours and Olivier’s. Olivier was a friend of my father’s. Anyway he doesn’t live there anymore. The air is cool. A strange feeling that this new old world is much smaller than the one I left. A few shouts in the distance, and the background noise that never goes away. A mix of all the activities of the city. Never have I heard silence around here. I go up rue de Fécamp, cross boulevard Daumesnil, and I take rue de Picpus to reach the little park where I used to hang out a lot. The place where I smoked my first cigarettes with Marco and the other guys. The mix of new and old apartment buildings gives a rhythm to what I see. Nothing has really changed, but everything is different. Ten years is an eternity. After the little park I walk up to Place de la Nation. I leave the neighborhood. Our neighborhood our universe where we thought we dominated the city and the world. What a laugh. We were just fragile little insects running around in a space that was too vast and noisy for us.
And the back streets around there, like little islands, where life was organized around a café. That’s where we would meet, in those cafés. We rarely went any further away. Rarely to the other neighborhoods—for us that was elsewhere, too far away. I gulp down a cup of coffee in one of those cafés. I don’t know if the sign has changed. It’s a little blurry in my memory. A few old guys are talking over a beer. They were already there in the same spot ten years ago, a hundred years ago.
Store after store, like everywhere else. The same signs, the same colors. Standardization settling in and taking over. Just shadows. Buildings, cars, men, women, these people. Just shadows I ignore.
I walk back toward Daumesnil,