The Black Notebook

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by Patrick Modiano


  One Sunday afternoon, I was alone with Dannie at the lower end of Rue d’Odessa. Rain was beginning to fall, and we took cover in the lobby of Le Montparnasse cinema. We found seats way in back. It was intermission and we didn’t know what film was playing. That huge, dilapidated movie palace had caused me the same malaise as the neighboring streets. A smell of ozone floated over everything, as when you walk past a metro grating. In the audience were a few soldiers on leave; when night fell, they would take trains toward Brest or Lorient. And casual couples hid in dark corners, not watching the film. As it played, you could hear their moans and sighs, and beneath them the creaking of the seats, growing louder . . . I asked Dannie if she planned to stay in this neighborhood much longer. No, not for long. She would have preferred a large room in the sixteenth arrondissement. It was quiet and anonymous out there. No one could find you.

  “Why? Are you hiding from someone?”

  “No, of course not. What about you, do you like this neighborhood?”

  She seemed determined to avoid an awkward question. As for me, what could I say? Whether or not I liked this neighborhood was irrelevant. Today it seems to me that I was living another life, inside my daily life. Or rather, that this other life was connected to my drab everyday existence and lent it a phosphorescence and mystery that it didn’t really have. Just as familiar places that you revisit many years later in dreams take on a strange aura, like mournful Rue d’Odessa, or that Montparnasse cinema that smelled like the metro.

  That Sunday, I walked her back to the Unic Hôtel. She was supposed to meet Aghamouri.

  “Do you know his wife?” I asked.

  She seemed surprised that I should know of her existence.

  “No,” she said. “He almost never sees her. They’re pretty much separated.”

  It is through no skill of mine that I can reproduce that sentence exactly, since it figures at the bottom of a page in my notebook, after the name Aghamouri. On the same page are other notes that have nothing to do with that sorry Montparnasse neighborhood, Dannie, Paul Chastagnier, or Aghamouri, but rather concern the poet Tristan Corbière, as well as Jeanne Duval, the mistress of Baudelaire. I must have unearthed their addresses, since I’d written: “Corbière, 10 Rue Frochot, Jeanne Duval, 17 Rue Sauffroy ca. 1878.” Farther on, entire pages are devoted to them, which suggests that they were more important to me than most of the living individuals I mixed with at the time.

  That evening, I left her at the hotel entrance. I noticed Aghamouri standing in the middle of the lobby, waiting for her. He was wearing a camel-colored overcoat. That, too, I had recorded in my notebook: “Aghamouri: camel coat.” No doubt to have a reference point later—as many small details as possible concerning this short, turbulent period of my life. “Do you know his wife?” “No, he almost never sees her. They’re pretty much separated.” The kind of sentence you overhear when walking past two people in the street. And you will never know what they were talking about. A train rushes by a station too fast for you to read the name of the town. And so, with your forehead pressed against the window, you note down other details: a passing river, the village bell tower, a black cow ruminating beneath a tree, removed from the herd. You hope that at the next station you’ll be able to read the name and find out what region you’re in. I never again saw any of the people who flit through the pages of this black notebook. Their presence was fleeting, and I could easily have forgotten their names. Simple encounters, perhaps accidental, perhaps not. There is a time in one’s life for that, a crossroads where one can still choose from several paths. The age of encounters, as it said on the cover of a book I once found on the quays. And indeed, that same Sunday evening when I left Dannie with Aghamouri, I went walking—I’m not sure why—along the Quai Saint-Michel. I walked up the boulevard, which was just as lugubrious as Montparnasse, perhaps because the weekday crowds were absent and the storefronts dark. Farther up, where the street opened onto Rue Monsieur-le-Prince, after the steps and the metal railing, was a large, brightly lit window, the back of a café whose front looked out on the fence surrounding the Jardin du Luxembourg. The interior of the café was dark, except for this one pane of glass, behind which patrons clustered around a semicircular bar until late into the night. Among them that evening were two people I recognized in passing: Aghamouri, because of his camel overcoat, and, seated next to him on a barstool, Dannie.

  I went nearer. I could have pushed open the glass door and joined them. But I was afraid I’d be intruding and held back. Didn’t I always keep to the background at the time, like a spectator—I’d even say, like the man they called the “nocturnal spectator,” that eighteenth-century writer whose work I loved and whose name appears several times, with glosses, in the pages of my black notebook? Paul Chastagnier, when we were together in the Falguière or Favorites neighborhood, had said to me one day, “It’s odd . . . You listen to people very attentively . . . but your mind seems elsewhere.” Behind the glass, under the overbright fluorescent lights, Dannie’s hair appeared not light brown but blond, and her skin even paler than normal, milky, with freckles. She was the only one seated on a stool. Three or four other customers were standing behind her and Aghamouri, glasses in hand. Aghamouri leaned toward her and said something in her ear. He kissed her neck. She laughed and took a sip of a drink that I recognized by its color and because she ordered it whenever we were together: Cointreau.

  I wondered whether I would tell her the next day that I had seen her with Aghamouri at the Café Luxembourg. I didn’t yet know the exact nature of their relationship. In any event, they occupied separate rooms at the Unic Hôtel. I had tried to puzzle out what held that little band together. Apparently, Gérard Marciano was an old friend of Aghamouri’s, and Aghamouri had introduced him to Dannie when they both lived at the Cité Universitaire. Paul Chastagnier and Marciano used the familiar tu with each other, despite their age difference, and the same for Duwelz. But neither Chastagnier nor Duwelz had met Dannie before she moved to the Unic Hôtel. Finally, Aghamouri maintained fairly close ties with the hotel manager, the aforementioned Lakhdar, who every other day came to the office behind the reception desk. He was often accompanied by a man named Davin. Those two seemed to have known Paul Chastagnier, Marciano, and Duwelz for a long time. All this I recorded in my black notebook one afternoon while waiting for Dannie, as one might do crossword puzzles or doodle, to pass the time.

  Later on, they questioned me about them. I had received a summons from a certain Langlais. I arrived at ten and spent a long time waiting in an office at police headquarters on the Quai de Gesvres. Through the window, I gazed at the flower market and the black façade of the Hôtel-Dieu. A sunlit autumn morning on the quays. Langlais entered the office: brown hair, average height. Despite his large blue eyes, his manner was cold. Without so much as a hello, he began asking questions in a gruff voice. I think that because I kept my calm, his tone eventually softened and he realized that I wasn’t really mixed up in all this. It occurred to me that there, in his office, I might have been sitting in the exact spot where Gérard de Nerval had hanged himself. If we looked around the cellar of this building, we would find a section of the former Rue de la Vieille-Lanterne. I wasn’t able to answer Langlais’s questions very precisely. He cited the names of Paul Chastagnier, Gérard Marciano, Duwelz, and Aghamouri, and wanted me to talk about my relations with them. That was when I realized how small a part they had played in my life. Walk-ons. I thought about Nerval and Rue de la Vieille-Lanterne, on which they had erected the building we were in now. Did Langlais know? I almost asked him. Several times during the interrogation, he brought up the name of one Mireille Sampierry, who allegedly “frequented” the Unic Hôtel, but I didn’t know her. “Are you quite sure you never met?” The name meant nothing to me. He must have seen I wasn’t lying and let it drop. I jotted down “Mireille Sampierry” in my notebook that evening, and at the bottom of the same page, I wrote, “14 Quai de Gesvres. Langlais. Nerval. Rue de la Vieille-Lanterne.” I
was surprised he never mentioned Dannie. It was as if she had left no trace in their files. As the expression went, she had slipped through the cracks and vanished into thin air. So much the better for her. The night when I’d discovered her with Aghamouri at the bar of the Café Luxembourg, after a while I couldn’t make out her face in the glaring neon. She was no more than a spot of light, without relief, as in an overexposed photograph. A blank. I thought maybe she had eluded this Langlais’s investigations by the same phenomenon. But I was mistaken. During a second interrogation the following week, I discovered that he knew plenty about her.

  One night when she still lived at the Cité Universitaire, I had accompanied her to the Luxembourg metro stop. She didn’t want to go home alone to the American Pavilion, and she had asked me to take the metro with her. Just as we were heading down to the platform, the last train departed. We could have walked, but the prospect of following endless Rue de la Santé at that hour and skirting the high walls of the prison, then of Sainte-Anne Hospital, made my blood go cold. She pulled me toward the start of Rue Monsieur-le-Prince and we found ourselves at the semicircular bar, in the same spot she and Aghamouri had occupied a few nights before. She sat on a stool, while I remained standing. We were pressed together because of the crowd at the bar. The light was so harsh it made me squint, and we couldn’t hear ourselves talk in the hubbub around us. Then, one by one, everyone left. There remained only a single customer at the back, sprawled over the bar, and we couldn’t tell whether he was dead drunk or merely asleep. The light was just as bright, just as strong, but it felt as if its scope had narrowed and only a single spotlight was trained on us. When we emerged into the open air, by contrast, everything was pitch black, and I felt relieved, like a moth that has escaped the attraction and searing heat of the lamp.

  It was around two or three in the morning. She told me she often missed the last metro at Luxembourg, and that was why she’d noticed this café, which she called “the 66,” the only one in the area open all night. Sometime after being questioned by Langlais, I was walking, very late, toward the upper end of Boulevard Saint-Michel, and from a distance I saw a police van on the sidewalk, blocking the overly lit window of the 66. They were rounding up customers. Yes, it was just what I had felt standing at the bar with Dannie that night. Dazzled moths caught in the glare, before a police raid. I think I’d even uttered the word “raid” in her ear, and she’d smiled.

  In Paris at the time, at night, there were places that were too well lit, that acted as traps, and I did my best to avoid them. When I ended up in one of them, finding myself among odd customers, I was always on the alert, and cast about for the emergency exits. “You’re acting like you’re in Pigalle,” she said. I was amazed to hear the word “Pigalle” trip so familiarly off her tongue. Outside, we skirted the fence of the Jardin du Luxembourg. And I repeated the word “Pigalle” and burst out laughing. She did too. All around us was silence. Through the fence came the rustling of trees. The Luxembourg metro stop was closed, and we’d have to wait until six o’clock for the first train. Behind us, they had turned off the lights in the 66. We could go home on foot, and with her beside me I was ready to confront the long and sinister Rue de la Santé.

  On the way, we tried a shortcut and got lost in the narrow streets around the Val-de-Grâce Hospital. The silence was even deeper, and we could hear the sound of our footsteps. I wondered if we hadn’t strayed far outside Paris, to some provincial town: Angers, Vendôme, Saumur, the names of towns I didn’t know, whose quiet streets looked like Rue du Val-de-Grâce, at the end of which a tall fence protected a garden.

  She had taken my arm. In the distance we saw a light much duller than the one in the 66, on the ground floor of a building.

  A hotel. The glass door was open and the light came from the lobby, in the middle of which a dog lay asleep, its chin resting on the tile floor. Toward the back, behind the reception desk, the bald-headed night porter was leafing through a magazine. There on the sidewalk, I no longer had the courage to walk past the walls of the prison and the hospital and follow Rue de la Santé.

  I don’t remember which of us led the way. In the lobby, we stepped over the dog without waking it. Room 5 was available. I remember that number, 5, I who always forget room numbers, the colors of walls, furniture, and curtains, as if it were preferable that my life from that time should gradually fade away. And yet, the walls of room 5 have stuck in my memory, as have the curtains: wallpaper with light blue patterns, and those black drapes that I later learned dated from the war and let no light filter out, following the rules of what they used to call “passive defense.”

  Later that night, I sensed she wanted to confide in me, but she hesitated. Why the Cité Universitaire, the American Pavilion, when she was neither a student nor American? Anyway, the truest encounters take place between two people who ultimately know nothing about each other, even at night in a hotel room. “Those people at 66, earlier, they were a little strange,” I said to her. “Good thing there wasn’t a raid.” Yes, those people around us, who talked too loudly under those glaring white lights—how had they washed up in the provincial Latin Quarter at that late hour? “You ask so many questions,” she whispered to me. A clock chimed every quarter-hour. The dog barked. Once more, I felt as if I were far outside Paris. I even seemed to hear, just before daybreak, the fading sound of hooves. Saumur? Many years later, one afternoon when I was walking near the Val-de-Grâce, I tried to find that hotel. I hadn’t recorded its name or address in the black notebook, the way we tend not to write down the most intimate details of our lives, for fear that, once fixed on paper, they’ll no longer be ours.

  In his office on the Quai de Gesvres, Langlais had asked me, “You lived at the Unic Hôtel, right?” He had adopted a distracted tone, as if he already knew the answer and expected only a simple confirmation.

  “No.”

  “And you frequented the 66?”

  This time he looked me straight in the eye. I was surprised to hear him say “the 66.” Up until then, I had thought Dannie was the only one who called it that. I, too, had occasionally given cafés names other than their real ones, names from Paris’s past, and would say, for instance, “Let’s meet at Tortoni’s,” or, “Nine o’clock at the Rocher de Cancale.”

  “The 66?” I pretended to search my memory. I again heard Dannie saying in her hushed voice, “You’re acting like you’re in Pigalle.”

  “The 66 in Pigalle?” I said to Langlais, feigning puzzlement.

  “Not exactly . . . It’s a café in the Latin Quarter.”

  Maybe it would be better not to try to outsmart him.

  “Oh, right! . . . I must have gone there once or twice . . .”

  “At night?”

  I hesitated before answering. It would have been more prudent to say “in the daytime,” when the main room was open and most of the patrons gathered near the front windows facing out toward the Luxembourg fence. By day, the café was no different from any other. But why lie?

  “Yes, at night.”

  I remembered the room plunged in darkness around us, and that narrow shaft of light at the rear, like a secret refuge after closing time. And that name, the 66, one of those names that circulate in whispers, among initiates . . .

  “Were you alone?”

  “Yes, alone.”

  He read over a sheet on the desk, on which I could make out a list of names. I was hoping that Dannie’s wasn’t among them.

  “And you didn’t know any of the regulars at the 66?”

  “Not a one.”

  He kept his eyes glued to the sheet of paper. I would have liked him to read me the names of the “regulars at the 66” and explain who all those people were. Maybe Dannie had known some of them. Or Aghamouri. Apparently, neither Gérard Marciano nor Duwelz nor Paul Chastagnier frequented the 66. But I wasn’t certain of anything.

  “It must be a student café, like all the other ones in the Latin Quarter,” I said.

  “By day, y
es. But not at night.”

  He had adopted a sharp, almost threatening, tone.

  “You know,” I said, trying to sound as gentle and conciliatory as possible, “I was never a nighttime regular at the 66.”

  He looked at me with his large blue eyes, and there was nothing threatening about his gaze, which seemed weary and rather benign.

  “Anyway, you’re not on the list.”

  Twenty years later, in the file that came into my possession thanks to that same Langlais—he hadn’t forgotten me; so it is with sentinels who stand at every crossroads of your life—I found the list of “regulars at the 66,” topped by a certain “Willy of Les Gobelins.” I’ll copy it down when I have the time. And I’ll also copy a few pages from the file that confirm and complete what I’d recorded in my old black notebook. Just yesterday, I walked past the 66 to see if that part of the café still existed. I pushed open the glass door, the same one that Dannie and I had used and behind which I had watched her, sitting at the bar next to Aghamouri, under those lights that were too strong and too white. I sat at the bar. It was five in the afternoon and patrons filled the other part of the café, the part that looks out on the Luxembourg fence. The bartender seemed surprised that I should order a Cointreau, but I did it in memory of Dannie. And to drink to the health of that “Willy of Les Gobelins,” the first on the list, about whom I knew nothing.

  “Do you still stay open late?” I asked the waiter.

  He knitted his brow. He didn’t seem to understand the question. A young man of about twenty-five.

  “We close at nine every evening, sir.”

  “Is the café still called the 66?”

  I had pronounced those words in a sepulchral voice. He gave me a worried look.

  “The 66? No, sir, we’re called the Luxembourg.”

  I thought of the list of “regulars at the 66.” Yes, I’ll copy it down when I have time. But yesterday afternoon, I recalled some of the names on that list: Willy of Les Gobelins, Simone Langelé, Orfanoudakis, Dr. Lucaszek (alias “Doctor Jean”), Jacqueline Giloupe, and one Mireille Sampierry, whom Langlais had mentioned previously.

 

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