They both spoke with a Nice accent. The one driving had turned on the radio, low. My wife was now holding the baby, showing her the fronts of the houses parading by outside the window.
The driver, a blond, had a wispy mustache. His friend was dark and stocky; his eyes, sunk deep in their sockets, made his face look like an ancient ram.
“Did you hear they’re going to knock down Greuze?”
“How come?”
“Ask Gabizon.”
The baby was playing with my wife’s necklace. She shook it and put it in her mouth. We followed Boulevard Victor-Hugo between rows of plane trees. Monday, December 1, 1975, at two in the afternoon. Sunny.
We turned left onto Rue Gounod and drove past the hotel of the same name, a white edifice whose revolving door was closed. I just had time to spot behind a fence a narrow garden that might have turned into a park, all the way in back. And suddenly, it seemed to me that in another life, one summer evening, I had passed through that revolving door, while music drifted from the garden. Yes, I had stayed in that hotel. I retained a vague recollection and the odd impression that in those days, I had a wife and a little girl, the same ones as today. How could I pick up the traces of that former life?
I would have had to consult the old registration cards of the Gounod Hotel. But what was my name back then? And where were the three of us coming from?
“Yes, yes, it’s Gabizon . . .”
“You surprised?”
“He pulled the same thing with the Porsche dealership.”
“Exactly.”
The dark-haired man with the ram’s head lit a cigarillo, dragging on it in nervous puffs. He turned toward us.
“Oh, forgive me . . . The baby . . .”
He pointed with a smile to the cigarillo, which he stubbed out in the ashtray.
“Smoke is bad for infants,” he said to us.
I was amazed by such delicacy and concluded that he, too, must have a child.
I don’t know why we took this detour, but we followed Boulevard du Parc-Impérial, leaving the Russian church behind us. There was probably an old man dozing in its shade who long ago had been one of the czarina’s pages. We arrived at the top of Boulevard de Cimiez and the baby looked out the window. It was the first time she’d gone through Nice in a car. Everything she was seeing was new to her, the green smudge of the trees, the automobile traffic, the pedestrians on the sidewalks.
“And your brother?”
“No sweat, he’s got it covered . . .”
“With the old Facel Vegas?”
“Of course, Patrick . . .”
So the dark-haired man with the ram’s head had the same name as me, a name that had been in vogue in 1945, perhaps because of the English-speaking soldiers, the jeeps, and the first American bars opening. The entire year 1945 was contained in the two syllables of “Patrick.” We, too, had once been infants.
“There’s not only the Facels . . .”
“Oh?”
“He also picked up more than a dozen Nashes.”
What was Nice like in 1945? Strains of jazz filtered through the windows of the Ruhl Hotel, commandeered by the American army. My poor sister Corinne, whom the French military police had arrested in Italy, was locked up right nearby, in Villa Saint-Anne, before being taken to prison, then to the Pasteur Hospital . . . And in Paris, the survivors of the camps waited in striped pajamas, beneath the chandeliers of the Hotel Lutétia.
I remember all of it. I peel away the bills posted in successive layers for the past fifty years until I reach the earliest scraps. We passed by what had been the Winter-Palace and I saw the young Englishwomen and young tubercular Russians in 1910. The taxi slowed down, came to a stop. We had arrived at the garden of the Arenas. The dark fellow with the ram’s head, the one named Patrick, got out and helped us remove the stroller, a very complicated model with six wheels, adjustable pivoting seat, collapsible canopy, and mobile steel handlebar, to which one could attach an umbrella. He waved to us as the taxi pulled away.
I had taken my daughter in my arms and she was asleep, her head resting on my shoulder. Nothing troubled her slumber.
She didn’t yet have any memory.
PATRICK MODIANO, winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature, was born in Boulogne-Billancourt, France, in 1945, and published his first novel, La Place de l’Etoile, in 1968. In 1978 he was awarded the Prix Goncourt for Rue des Boutiques Obscures (published in English as Missing Person), and in 1996 he received the Grand Prix National des Lettres for his body of work. Modiano’s other writings in English translation include Suspended Sentences, Pedigree: A Memoir, After the Circus, Paris Nocturne, Little Jewel, Sundays in August, Such Fine Boys, and Sleep of Memory (all published by Yale University Press), as well as the memoir Dora Bruder, the screenplay Lacombe, Lucien, and the novels So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighborhood, Young Once, In the Café of Lost Youth, and The Black Notebook.
MARK POLIZZOTTI has translated more than fifty books from the French, including works by Gustave Flaubert, Marguerite Duras, Jean Echenoz, Raymond Roussel, and eight other volumes by Patrick Modiano. A Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and the recipient of a 2016 American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature, he is the author of eleven books, including Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton, which was a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction; Luis Buñuel’s Los Olvidados; Bob Dylan: Highway 61 Revisited; and Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto. His essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the New Republic, the Wall Street Journal, ARTnews, the Nation, Parnassus, Bookforum, and elsewhere. He directs the publications program at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
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