So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood Read Online Free PDF

neighbourhood café that stayed open very late at night. The bright light, the hubbub of noise, the comings and goings, the conversations in which he deluded himself he was participating, all this helped him overcome his momentary flagging after a short while. But for some time, he had no longer needed to resort to this expedient. It was enough for him to look out of his study window at the tree planted in the courtyard of the adjoining building, which retained its leaves much later than the others, until November. He had been told that it was a hornbeam, or an aspen, he was not sure. He regretted all the lost years when he had not paid sufficient attention to either the trees or the flowers. He, who no longer read any books other than Buffon’s
Histoire naturelle
, suddenly recalled a passage from the memoirs of a French philosopher. She had been shocked by what a woman had said during the war: “After all, the war doesn’t alter my relationship with a blade of grass.” She probably reckoned that this woman was frivolous or indifferent. But for him, Daragane, the phrase had another meaning: in periods of disaster or mental anxiety, all you need do is look for a fixed point in order to keep your balance and not topple overboard. Your gaze alights on a blade of grass, a tree, the petals of a flower, as though you were clinging on to a buoy. This hornbeam—or this aspen—on the other side of his windowpane reassured him. And even though it was almost eleven o’clock at night, he felt comforted by its silent presence. Therefore, he might as well be done with it straight away and read the typed pages. He had to face the facts: Gilles Ottolini’s voice and physique had at first glance struck him as those of a blackmailer. He had wanted to overcome this prejudice. But had he really managed to do so?
    He removed the paperclip that held the sheets together. The photocopying paper was not the same as the originals. He remembered when Chantal Grippay was doing the photocopying how flimsy and transparent the pages were. They had reminded him of “airmail” notepaper. But that was not entirely correct. It was rather that they had the same transparency as the onionskin paper used for police interrogations. And besides, Chantal Grippay had told him: “Gilles was able to obtain information from the police . . .”
    He cast a last glance at the foliage of the tree, in front of him, before beginning his reading.
    The print was tiny, as though it had been typed on one of those portable machines that no longer exist nowadays. Daragane felt as though he was diving into a thick, indigestible broth. Occasionally, he would skip a line and would then have to go back again, with the help of his index finger. Rather than a coherent report, it consisted of some very brief notes, placed end to end in the greatest possible muddle, concerning the murder of a certain Colette Laurent.
    The notes retraced her career path. Arrival in Paris when very young from provincial France. Job in a nightclub in rue de Ponthieu. Room in a hotel in the Odéon district. She goes around with students from the École des Beaux-Arts. List of people questioned and whom she may have met in the night club, list of students at the Beaux-Arts. Body found in a hotel bedroom, 15th arrondissement. Interrogation of the owner of the hotel.
    So was this the news item that interested Ottolini? He broke off from his reading. Colette Laurent. This apparently anodyne name aroused an echo in him, but too muted for him to be able to describe it. He seemed to have read the date: 1951, but he did not feel like verifying this among the words that were all huddled together and made you feel as if you were suffocating.
    1951. More than half a century had gone by since then, and the witnesses to this news item, and even the murderer himself, were no longer alive. Gilles Ottolini had got there too late. This shit-stirrer would be left