Driving Blind

Andre took the note the old man gave him and read:

Farewell.

“Farewell.” Tears leaked from Andre’s eyes. “Where’s she gone?”

“God knows. We never knew her real name or address. Come!”

Andre followed up through a labyrinth of stairs to the roof. There, swaying as if he might pitch headlong down, Monsieur Sault pointed across the twilight city.

“What do you see?”

“Paris. Thousands of buildings.”

“And?”

“Thousands of restaurants?”

“Do you truly know how many there are between here, the Tour Eiffel, and there, Notre-Dame? Twenty thousand restaurants. Twenty thousand hiding places for our nameless wonder. Would you find her? Search!”

“All twenty thousand restaurants?”

“Bring her and you’ll be my son and partner. Come without her and I will kill you. Escape!”

Andre escaped. He ran to climb the hill to the white splendor of Sacré-Coeur and looked out at the lights of Paris drowned in the blue and gold colors of a vanished sun.

“Twenty thousand hiding places,” he murmured.

And went down in search.

In the Latin Quarter across the Seine from Notre-Dame you could wander past forty restaurants in a single block, twenty on each side, some with windows where beauties might sit by candlelight, some with tables and laughing people in the open.

“No, no,” Andre muttered. “Too much!” And veered off down an alley that ended at the Boulevard St. Michel where brasseries, tabacs, and restaurants swarmed with tourists; where Renoir women spoke wine as they drank, spoke food as they ate, and ignored this strange, haunted, searching young man as he passed.

My God, Andre thought. Must I cross and recross Paris from the Trocadero to Montmartre to Montparnasse, to find a single small theater-café window where candlelight reveals a woman so beautiful that all appetites bud, all joys, culinary and amorous, conjoin?

Madness!

What if I miss that one window, that illumination, that face?

Insane! What if in my confusion I revisit alleys already searched! A map! I must cross out where I’ve been.

So each night at sundown with the shades of violet and purple and magenta flooding the narrow alleys he set out with bright maps that darkened as he left. Once on the Boulevard de Grenelle he shouted his taxi to a halt and leaped out, furious. The taxi had gone too fast; a dozen cafés had flashed by unseen.

Then suddenly, in despair, he said:

“Honfleur? Deuville? Lyon?”

“What if,” he continued, “she is not in Paris but has fled to Cannes or Bordeaux with their thousands of restaurants! My God!”

That night he woke at three a.m. as a list of names passed through his head. Elizabeth. Michelle. Arielle. Which name to speak if at last he found her? Celia? Helene? Diana? Beth?

Exhausted, he slept.

And so the weeks passed into months and in the fourth month he shouted at his mirror:

“Stop! If you haven’t found her special ‘theater’ this week, burn your maps! No more names or streets at midnight or dawn! Yes!”

His image, in silence, turned away.