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There was a shady side to Dr Bouvière’s life, perhaps a secret he was ashamed of. I shrugged my shoulders and said to Hélène Navachine that it was just another one of the mysteries of Paris.
    She lived in one of the big apartment blocks opposite Gare de Lyon. I said I had an hour to wait until my meeting. She said she would gladly have invited me in so I wouldn’t have to wait outside, but her mother wouldn’t have allowed her to bring someone unannounced to their small apartment at 5 Rue Émile-Gilbert.
    *
    I saw Hélène Navachine at the next meeting. The bruising had almost disappeared from Dr Bouvière’s face and he wore just a small bandaid on his right cheek. We would never find out who had beaten him up. He would never let it slip. Even the young blonde woman who got in the car with him each week would be none the wiser, I was sure of it. Men die with their secrets.
    That evening I asked Hélène Navachine why she wasso interested in Hindu music. She said she listened to it because it relieved her of a pressure weighing down on her and it transported her to a place where, finally, she could breathe air that was weightless and clear. And really, it was a silent music. She needed air that was lighter and she needed silence. I understood what she meant. I went with her to her piano lessons. They were mostly in the seventh arrondissement. While I waited for her I went for a walk or, on snowy or rainy afternoons, I took shelter in the café nearest the apartment building she had gone into. The lessons were an hour long. There were three or four of them a day. So, during these breaks, I would walk by myself along the abandoned buildings of the
École militaire
. I was afraid I would lose my memory and get lost without daring to ask the way. There were not many passers-by and what directions exactly would I ask for?
    One afternoon, standing at the end of Avenue de Ségur, on the edge of the fifteenth arrondissement, I was seized by panic. I felt like I was melting into the sort of fog that signals snow. I wanted someone to take me by the arm and say soothing words to me: ‘No, no, it’s nothing, old boy… You must be tired…Let’s go and get you a cognac…You’ll be all right…’ I tried to cling to small concrete details. Shehad said that she tried to keep things simple for her piano lessons. She made all her students learn the same piece. It was called
Bolero
, by Hummel. She played it for me one night on a piano we found in the basement of a brasserie. It wouldn’t be long before I could ask her to whistle Hummel’s
Bolero
. A German who must have made a voyage to Spain. I’d be better off waiting for her in front of the building where she was giving a lesson. What a strange neighbourhood… a metaphysical neighbourhood, as Dr Bouvière might have said, in his voice that was so chilling and so smooth. How feeble of me to let myself get into such a state. All it took was a bit of fog with a hint of snow at the Ségur-Suffren crossroad for me to lose heart. Really, I was being pathetic. It could be the memory of snow falling that afternoon when Hélène Navachine came out of the building, but each time I think back to this period of my life, I can smell snow—or rather, a coolness that chills the lungs and ends up getting confused in my mind with the smell of ether.
    One afternoon, after her piano lesson, she slipped and fell on a patch of black ice and cut her hand. It was bleeding. We found a pharmacy a little further down the road. I asked for some cotton wool and, instead of 90 per cent alcohol, I asked for a vial of ether. I don’t think it was a deliberatemistake. We were sitting on a bench. She took the lid off the vial and, as she soaked the cotton wool to apply to her cut, I was hit by the smell of the ether, so strong and so familiar from my childhood. I put the blue vial in my pocket but the smell still