Mister Memory Read online

  Petit pulls a notebook from his pocket. ‘Why not start the last time you saw Ondine, before the evening, I mean? When was that?’

  ‘At the cabaret. Around seven o’clock.’

  ‘Very well then,’ Morel says. ‘Begin.’

  Marcel speaks. Within moments, Petit realises the scale of what is about to happen. Even Morel is surprised at the level of detail that Marcel not only remembers but which he finds it necessary, in some way vital, to relate. After half an hour has passed, Marcel has only managed to explain what happened in the first five minutes of being at work that day. For the purposes of brevity, all Petit notes down is that Marcel had been out in the city, and met Ondine backstage as usual around 6 p.m., when everyone was getting ready for the show, just as they always did. Petit could have written so much more. Marcel also told them about the rough marks on the wooden floorboards just behind the stage door where a new piano had been dragged into the theatre. These marks were new, Marcel noted, and later he saw the new piano, well, it wasn’t shop new, it was second hand but new to the cabaret. Marcel saw that it was German and had seen better days, that the cover to the sounding board was shiny with the scuff of toes on the pedals, and that some of the felt was missing from the back. Marcel spent ten minutes describing a strange smell coming from the small kitchen, something rather like artichoke but somewhat earthier than that, and it reminded him a little of a tart his mother used to make. As he came in through the stage door of the cabaret, he told them, he was by coincidence already remembering something else from his childhood: a moment when his father had been angry. Marcel didn’t know why then, he still doesn’t know why, he never found out and yet he remembers that his father was very angry, so angry that he threw a plate and it smashed on the wall of the kitchen, and the funny thing was that his mother didn’t even react. She hung her head in her hands and then she shooed Marcel out of the room and up into bed, where he lay listening to his parents fighting about something in voices just low enough not to be overheard.

  Petit realises that Marcel is now lost in a memory within a memory. As he did all those weeks ago when he first met Morel, he has the most awful feeling of standing at the edge of some abyss. The feeling is so strong that in his mind he turns away from the horrible void, leaving him with a nagging sensation in the backs of his legs, as if he were about to step uncontrollably into that yawning chasm behind him. A memory of a memory. An infinite memory from inside another infinite memory. The potential endlessness of it all makes him reel with panic. He suppresses the desire to whimper, or even scream, and is about to urge Marcel to stick to the point when Morel taps his shoulder with his bony forefinger. The old doctor gives Petit a slight shake of the head and Petit knows what he means. If we’re going to do this, we’re going to do this. We’re going to let Marcel say everything that is in his mind, no matter now how long it takes. And Petit knows better than to argue.

  But time is against them. That first evening, Marcel has, with many subsidiary discursions and irrelevant distractions into his past, only managed to explain what happened in the first ten minutes after six o’clock that fatal night.

  Petit returns home and after climbing up to his rooms, collapses on the bed, his head full of someone else’s memory, of someone else’s distress.

  He closes his eyes and is asleep in moments.

  IN THE CHAMBERS

  It is two days before Petit gets the chance to return to Morel, and when he does, they use the next three hours allowing Marcel to explain what happened up to the point where he and Ondine parted. All Petit notes is that Ondine reported that she was feeling unwell and had decided to tell Chardon that she was going home sick, and that Marcel stayed in order to do his act as normal. Put like that it seems so simple, and yet it takes Marcel hours to explain everything he saw, said, heard, smelled, felt and thought during this time.

  Petit leaves, and returns the following day, wondering why he is bothering, where it will all lead, what he is trying to prove anyway. He also finds that he is becoming paranoid: all this sneaking around in his free time has given him a bad case of nerves. He compares himself with the man he once was, the young man in the army in Africa, and he envies that former self. Not a moment’s doubt or fear or duplicitous thought ever entered his head in those days, largely because, he now realises, very little actual thought ever passed through his mind, and of self-awareness there was nothing at all.

  He tries to rid himself of the notion that he is being followed to and from the hospital, but it is hard to shift. One day, for example, he doubles back on himself and so catches two men furtively turning away. Panicking, he hurries straight into the nearest café and orders coffee. He lurks in the back of the salon, sipping his drink slowly, keeping an eye on the window, convinced that there is a shadow just beyond his view. Eventually, he tells himself he was imagining the whole thing, and forces himself to leave. As he walks briskly out of the café, he stumbles straight into the two men. It’s all he can do not to run, and, this time, they don’t follow. Yet Petit is disturbed, even as he leaves them behind at the corner of the street, to find himself wondering why the men were speaking a foreign language. Russian, if his guess is right.

  Such little things trouble him, and he longs to immerse himself in his work at the hospital. Yet it is so achingly slow. He wants to punch Marcel on the nose, tell him to hurry up, to get to the point, but he always manages to prevent himself. After all, there is Morel, staring with those piercing yet watery eyes in that drooping face.

  Marcel’s story continues as the evenings pass. He relates how he decided not to stay at work when his act was over, but to go home before the end of the show and see Ondine, despite the fact that they were not on the best of terms at the time. Normally, although Marcel was finished at some point in the first half of the evening, depending on where Chardon had put him in the bill, he would stay on for the whole night to come home with Ondine, whose duties of course ran to the very last dance number.

  Petit is desperate to interject, but Morel has insisted that they allow Marcel to talk through the whole event once at least without interruption before returning to ask any questions the inspector might have. So be it. The trouble is that it’s taking not hours, but days.

  In fact, as things fall out, actual weeks begin to pass, partly because Petit is unable to get to the hospital every evening, being frequently wanted on police matters, but more because of the horrendous circularity of Marcel’s thinking. Increasingly Petit finds himself washing his hands when he gets home. He has developed a peculiar notion that he might catch this disease from Marcel, this disease of too much memory. He has enough memories of his own, he thinks. He wants no more, he certainly doesn’t want to become a prisoner in his own mind, and he fully sees that Morel was right about that.

  And in his appallingly circular way, Marcel does mention everything, in the end. Eventually, Petit has a better picture of his relationship with Ondine. They had been arguing, frequently, then making up and declaring love for each other once more. From everything Marcel says, Petit doesn’t like the sound of Ondine. He knows very well that he is no expert in what he terms the question of women, and he only has Marcel’s side of things to go on, but he senses a manipulative and controlling individual in Ondine. If anything, he almost gets the feeling that Marcel is too kind to his dead wife, given the things he is saying about her. It seems that she had been continuing to provoke jealousy in him, and as he hears, in bits and pieces that he has to assemble himself like a jigsaw puzzle without a picture to follow, the whole story about Marcel sleeping with Lucie, Petit’s eyes widen. Over the next few nights, Marcel tells how the situation with Lucie was only really resolved when Lucie left the cabaret and went to work elsewhere. He’s heard she went to find work in Lyon, which is a place he has always wanted to visit, because when he was a boy there were Bibles in the church in Étoges that had been printed there, and there was a tiny engraving of the Rhône meeting the Saône in the centre of the city and it looked rath
er wonderful, because—

  Petit bites his lip. He has vowed, if it kills him, never to interrupt, never to impose a question, not until Marcel has told the story at least once, in his own strange way. But it’s hard. It’s three whole days before Marcel returns to the matter of Ondine going home sick and Marcel heading home to find out how she was. Morel and Petit have learned that even that night they had had a row, because Ondine had been flirting with the American right in front of her husband. As he relates these matters, Marcel grows silent again. The evening’s séance ends, and Petit walks through the ever colder, ever darker streets to his apartment.

  Séances, thinks Petit as the nights go by, that’s the word. They have the feeling of such supernatural nonsense; these nights cramped in a darkened chamber, the old doctor looking on like a desperate widow, and Marcel, his eyes often looking into places far from the room, places and times far away, unseeing eyes yet ones that, at any moment, might make contact with the voice that Petit wants to hear, the voice that will finally relate exactly what happened in the studio of Marcel and Ondine Després and shed light on what took place there back in July. As if supernaturally.

  For Petit knows, when Marcel gets to these matters, that he will not lie. What he hears from Marcel will be no mere perpetrator’s alibi, nor witness’s unintended falsehoods, no matter how well meant. As the days pass, Petit is ever more sure that Marcel cannot lie, that it would not be possible to lie, given all these details and facts that are already overwhelming his mind. Where, in any such mind, would be the extra mental capacity required for untruths?

  Finally, Marcel reaches the stairwell of their apartment in the Cour du Commerce.

  ‘It was almost ten o’clock and I came in through the entrance in the Rue Saint-André-des-Arts. The cobbles were damp, which wasn’t from rain, because you remember how dry it was in July? Such a hot month. When it’s hot in the city it’s never like how it was hot when I was a boy, because the vineyards always made it cooler. All those leaves and the shade of the vines. I would lie there on hot days and if the workers came too close I would roll under the canopy to the next row and hide myself. My father told me about veraison. You know about veraison? It’s when the grapes ripen and change colour. He spoke to me about it as if it were something you could see happen. Well, I was a child, I thought I would be able to see it happen, so I used to lie under the bunches of grapes and watch, waiting for them to change colour before my eyes. They never did! But I used to love lying there and listening to the sound of the harvest. By then, of course, the grapes had changed colour; I used to think they must wait until I was asleep and then all change at once, because I never saw it happen. But I did see lots of other things in the vineyards. I saw two people once, with only some of their clothes on, rolling around. Of course I know what they were doing now, but I didn’t at the time, so I asked my mother and she didn’t say anything but I saw her look at my father and they smiled a little smile at each other and I knew they knew something I didn’t. And I saw mice. If you lay still you could see mice and other little creatures, worms and beetles. There were beetles just the same as those in the woodwork of the windows of the barber at the end of the cour. I was thinking about that too when I came into the alley that night. It was late but Jean, that’s the barber, was still sweeping up in his little shop and I nodded at him but I didn’t smile in case it wasn’t him but someone else working for him and he didn’t nod back so maybe he didn’t see me or maybe he was angry with me. I don’t know.

  ‘Le Procope was noisy but then Le Procope is always noisy, especially on a Saturday night. It was unusual for me to be home so early on a Saturday night but then again, there was no reason I had to stay at the cabaret, because I’ve seen the acts a thousand times before and most of them don’t bear watching once. Although I do think Monsieur Juron is funny, but he does repeat himself a lot. I mean he uses many of the same swearwords and although he changes his insults he is often just rearranging things he has said before. But anyway, he’s funny and I love the faces people pull when he’s being rude to them. Sometimes I think they are only pretending to be upset but sometimes they really must be because they storm out. And often when they do they seem to have forgotten that they haven’t paid their bill and then old Chardon will chase after them and start arguing with them, which some people find funny, but I don’t.

  ‘So I was thinking about all these things when I started to climb up the stairs to the sixth floor and there were sounds from all around. I heard someone arguing on the fourth floor and of course the noise from the café and the restaurant. And horses on the Boulevard Saint-Germain and just the general noise of the city and that’s when I saw the mouse droppings I told you about, on the stairs. I knew that the concierge would have something to say about that, though she hadn’t been in her little room when I’d come in which was good for me because she hates us all for coming back so late and even though I wasn’t as late as we usually are after work, it was still past the time that she considers respectable people return home. Anyway, she wasn’t there, so that was good.

  ‘And then I was opening the door to the studio and I heard another sound, and it’s a sound I know well but what troubled me was that I wasn’t the one making the sound happen, I mean the noise that Ondine made when we made love and she would cry out. I heard her crying out in that way and then I moved a little into the room and I saw her with Bishop, who has a mole on his right thigh about the size of a fingernail. I saw it once in the changing rooms at the club and some of the other men teased him for it because they said it looks like a penis.

  ‘And then I remembered that Bishop had left after his act that evening and that was no surprise because his act finishes before mine but I was still angry with them both because of what had happened in the cabaret earlier and I was so angry then that I came forward into the room and then I didn’t know what to do so I was about to leave when Ondine laughed at me and she called me all sorts of things that I don’t want to tell you and then I saw that the gun, our gun, was sitting on the countertop right in front of me and she told me that if I was a real man I would do something about it and she laughed again and I picked up the gun and then Bishop ducked out of the window on to the ledge but I didn’t care about him and then Ondine opened her legs and showed it to me and rubbed herself with four fingers and told me how good Bishop’s penis was and then I pulled the trigger five times and Ondine fell down and blood ran out across the floorboards and then Bishop was back in the window and came into the room again and I pointed the gun at him too but he shouted at me, “Run!” so I dropped the gun and ran out on to the landing and down into the street but by the time I got there I didn’t know what to do next and my head was full of so many things that I could barely walk and I remember them now because I remember everything and Ondine had told me lots of things about herself in the time we were together and I was thinking about those things and then I remembered the time I found a dead fox at the edge of the woods beyond the vineyards and there was lots of blood but it was black and sticky but the blood that Ondine let out was bright and thin and it ran and I ran but I stopped and my mind was just too full so it stopped too.’

  Marcel finishes so abruptly that Petit is startled. Morel gives a little jump and sits more upright in his chair. They both lean in towards Marcel and inspect him.

  ‘It was too much,’ whispers Morel. ‘It was too much to recall the moment. He has returned to his catatonia. There will be no more tonight, or for a while, I fear.’

  Petit rubs his head. ‘So, we got to the end at last. Now, Doctor, when I return I would like to ask him questions.’

  Morel nods solemnly. ‘You may. But don’t come tomorrow. I will need some time to coax him out of this state, I think. Give me a week and then return.’

  ‘A week?’ protests Petit, but then he relents. He has waited long enough to get to the end of the story, he can wait a little longer. He slopes off into the night, thinking about chambers, something he will think about frequent
ly until he is allowed to return to the hospital.

  Chambers. The little chamber he shares with Morel and Marcel. The chamber where Marcel shot Ondine. But most of all he is wondering about the chambers in the cylinder of the revolver. He knows, because he has taken notes of everything he considers to be important, that Marcel claimed he only shot Ondine once. And yet then he told them that he pulled the trigger five times. If Marcel does not lie then how can this be? There are only two explanations: first, that Marcel does indeed tell falsehoods or, second, that his memory is not infallible after all. He wonders if Morel wants to discuss this possibility, because he knows how set the old boy is on showing that Marcel’s memory is perfect. Leaving that aside, there is only one other possibility, one way in which those two apparently contradictory statements of Marcel’s can in fact not be a contradiction.

  Supposing most of the chambers of the gun were empty? Suppose there was only one live round in the cylinder? That way, Marcel could have indeed pulled the trigger five times, but the gun only fired once.

  When he returns a week later the matter of the gun is the first line of questioning he puts to Marcel. He wishes he could have seen the murder weapon, but he cannot risk asking questions at the police stores. He knows the gun was a St Etienne 8mm, something he remembers easily, that being the gun he wore on his hip in Africa. The St Etienne is a six-chambered weapon.

  Marcel seems composed again. He greets Petit with his usual wary nod until he infers who has come to see him, and then he relaxes a little. Morel has worked wonders on him in the week, and Marcel is as normal as he ever seems, so normal in fact that you would never guess the corridors of madness that lie just behind his eyes.

  ‘The gun,’ begins Petit. ‘Where did you get it?’

  ‘Fossard told me about a zonier who trades in ex-army weapons.’