Villa Triste

by Patrick Modiano

  He gave me a look of such tenderness that I was moved.

  “All fire and flame,” he repeated, mezza voce.

  We stayed there, sitting at the garden table, very small in that gigantic hangar. The tubs of plants, the ivy, and the gravel constituted an unexpected oasis. They protected us from the surrounding desolation: the group of waiting automobiles (one of them missing a fender) and the decaying bus behind them. The light from the floodlights was cold but not yellow like the light in the hall Yvonne and I had crossed and on the stairs we’d climbed. No. This light had something gray-blue about it. An icy gray-blue.

  “Would you like some mint water? That’s all I’ve got here …”

  He went over to the workshop and returned with two glasses, a bottle of mint syrup, and a carafe of water. We clinked glasses.

  “There are days, my young friend, when I wonder what the hell I’m doing in this garage …”

  He definitely needed to confide in someone that evening.

  “It’s too big for me …” He swept his arm around, indicating the whole vast hangar.

  “First Albert left us … And then my wife … And now Yvonne’s gone …”

  “But she comes to see you often,” I proposed.

  “No. Mademoiselle wants to be in the movies … She thinks she’s Martine Carol …”

  “But she’ll be a new Martine Carol,” I said stoutly.

  “Come on … Don’t talk nonsense … She’s too lazy …”

  A mouthful of mint water had gone down the wrong way and choked him. He started to cough, couldn’t stop, and turned scarlet. He was definitely about to suffocate. I pounded him on the back, hard, until his coughing calmed down. He looked up at me, his eyes full of benevolence.

  His voice was more muted than ever. Completely worn-out. I understood only every other word, but that was enough for me to surmise the rest.

  “You’re a nice boy, you really are, my young friend … And polite …”

  The sound of a door being closed hard, a very distant sound, but carried by a reverberating echo. It bounced off the back of the hangar. The dining room door, about a hundred meters away from us. I recognized Yvonne’s silhouette, her red hair that hung down to the small of her back when she didn’t do it up. From where we were, she looked tiny, even Lilliputian. The dog came up to her chest. I’ll never forget the vision of that little girl and her giant hound walking toward us, gradually acquiring their true proportions.

  “Here she is,” her uncle observed. “You won’t tell her what I said, will you? That should remain between us.”

  “Of course I won’t …”

  We didn’t take our eyes off her as she came through the hangar. The dog, on scout duty, led the way.

  “She looks really small,” I remarked.

  “Yes, quite small,” the uncle said. “She’s a child … a problem child …”

  She spotted us and started waving her arms. She called out, “Victor … Victor …” and the echo of that name, which wasn’t mine, resounded from one end of the hangar to the other. She joined us and sat at the table, between her uncle and me. She was a little out of breath.

  “It’s nice of you to come and keep us company,” her uncle said. “Do you want some mint water? Cold? With ice?”

  He poured each of us another glass. Yvonne smiled at me, and as usual it made me feel a sort of vertigo.

  “What were you two talking about?”

  “Life,” said her uncle.

  He lit a Royale, and I knew he’d keep it stuck in the corner of his mouth until it burned his lips.

  “He’s nice, the count … and very well brought up.”

  “Oh, yes,” Yvonne said. “Victor’s a lovely guy.”

  “Say that again,” her uncle said.

  “Victor’s a lovely guy.”

  “Do you really think so?” I said, facing each of them in turn. I must have had a weird look on my face, because Yvonne pinched my cheek and said, as if to reassure me, “Yes you are, you’re lovely.”

  Her uncle, for his part, raised the bidding: “Lovely, my boy, lovely … You’re lovely …”

  “Well, then …”

  I stopped there, but I can still remember what I intended to say: “Well, then, may I have your niece’s hand in marriage?” It was the perfect moment, I still think so today, to ask to marry her. Yes. I didn’t finish my sentence. He went on, in an increasingly hoarse voice: “Lovely, my boy, lovely … lovely … lovely …”

  The dog thrust his head through the plants and gazed at us. A new life could have begun that very night. We would never have had to part. I felt so content with her and him, around the garden table, in that big hangar, which has surely been pulled down since.

  11.

  Time has shrouded all those things in a mist of changing colors: sometimes a pale green, sometimes a slightly pink blue. A mist? No, an indestructible veil that smothers all sound and through which I can see Yvonne and Meinthe but not hear them. I’m afraid their silhouettes may blur and fade in the end, and so, to preserve a little of their reality …

  Although Meinthe was some years older than Yvonne, they were both quite young when they met. What brought them together was their shared boredom with small-town life and their plans for the future. They were waiting for the first opportunity to get out of this “hole” (one of Meinthe’s expressions), which came alive only in the summer, during the “season.” In fact, Meinthe had just become involved with a Belgian baron, a millionaire, who was staying at the Grand Hôtel in Menthon. The baron had fallen in love with him at once, and that doesn’t surprise me, because at the age of twenty, Meinthe had a certain physical charm and a talent for amusing people. The Belgian couldn’t do without him. Meinthe introduced Yvonne to him as his “little sister.”

  It was the baron who got them out of their “hole,” and they always spoke of him to me with practically filial affection. He owned a big villa in Cap Ferrat and had a suite permanently reserved for him at the Hôtel du Palais in Biarritz, and another at the Beau Rivage in Geneva. A little court, made up of parasites of both sexes, revolved around him and followed him in all his travels.

  Meinthe often imitated, for my benefit, the baron’s gait. He was nearly six and a half feet tall and walked very fast, with a pronounced stoop. He had some strange habits: for example, in the summer, he wouldn’t expose himself to the sun and spent the entire day in his suite at the Hôtel du Palais or in the living room of his villa in Cap Ferrat. The shutters and curtains were closed, the lights were turned on, and he’d oblige some of his ephebes to keep him company. They wound up losing their beautiful suntans.

  He was subject to mood swings and wouldn’t tolerate contradiction. Suddenly he’d be curt, and the next minute very gentle. He’d say to Meinthe, with a sigh, “At heart, I’m Queen Elisabeth of Belgium … poor, POOR Queen Elisabeth, you know … And I think you understand her tragedy …” From spending time with him, Meinthe learned the names of all the members of the Belgian royal family, and he was capable of scribbling their family tree on the corner of a paper tablecloth in a matter of seconds. He did so several times in my presence, because he knew it amused me.

  And thence came his devotion to Queen Astrid.

  At that time, the baron was a man of fifty. He had traveled a great deal and knew many interesting and refined people. He often visited his Cap Ferrat neighbor and close friend, the English writer Somerset Maugham. Meinthe remembered a dinner with the baron and Maugham. An unknown, as far as Meinthe was concerned.

  Other people, less illustrious but “amusing,” assiduously frequented the baron, attracted by his lavish whims. A “gang” had formed, and its members’ lives were one eternal holiday. In those days, they used to drive down from the villa in Cap Ferrat, packed into five or six convertibles. They’d go dancing in Juan-les-Pins, or to the Toros de Fuego in Saint-Jean-de-Luz. Only Jacques Fath’s or Wladimir Rachewski’s “gangs” could rival the baron’s.

  Yvonne and Meinthe were the y
oungest members. She was barely sixteen years old, and he was twenty. They were great favorites. I asked them to show me some photos, but neither of them — or so they claimed — had kept any. Furthermore, they didn’t much like talking about that time in their lives.

  The baron had died in mysterious circumstances. Suicide? Automobile accident? Meinthe had rented an apartment in Geneva. Yvonne lived there. Later she began to work as a model for a Milanese fashion house, but she didn’t offer many details in that regard. Had Meinthe gone to medical school in the meantime? He often told me that he “practiced medicine in Geneva,” and each time I felt like asking him, “What kind of medicine?” Yvonne was flitting between Rome, Milan, and Switzerland. She was what was called a “flying mannequin.” At least, that’s what she told me. Had she met Madeja in Rome or in Milan, or in the days of the baron’s gang? When I asked her how they’d met, and by what chance he’d chosen her to play a role in Liebesbriefe auf der Berg, she dodged my question.

  Neither she nor Meinthe ever told me their life story in detail; they dropped vague and contradictory hints instead.

  Eventually I was able to identify the Belgian baron who got them out of the provinces and took them to the Côte d’Azur and Biarritz. (They refused to tell me his name. Out of modesty? A wish to muddy the waters?) One day I’ll look up all the people who were part of the baron’s “gang,” and maybe I’ll find one who remembers Yvonne … I’ll go to Geneva, to Milan. Will I succeed in finding some pieces of the unfinished puzzle they left me?

  When I met them, it was the first summer they’d spent in their birthplace in quite a long time, and after all those years of absence, interrupted by brief visits, they felt like strangers there. Yvonne confided to me how surprised she would have been at sixteen had she known that one day she’d be living in the Hermitage and feeling like a stranger in an unfamiliar resort. In the beginning, I was outraged by such talk. As someone who dreamed of having been born in a little provincial town, I couldn’t comprehend how you could renounce the scene of your childhood, the streets, the squares, and the houses that made up your native landscape. Your foundation. And how your heart wouldn’t beat faster whenever you returned there. I solemnly explained my point of view as a stateless person to Yvonne. She wasn’t listening to me. She was lying on the bed in her silk dressing gown, the one with the holes, and smoking Muratti cigarettes. (Because of their name, Muratti, which she found very chic, exotic, and mysterious. That same Italian-Egyptian name made me yawn with boredom, as it resembled my own.) I spoke to her about Route Nationale 201, about Saint-Christophe church, about her uncle’s garage. And the Splendid cinema? And Rue Royale, which she must have walked along when she was sixteen, stopping in front of each shop window? And so many other places I didn’t know, places that were surely linked in her mind with memories? The train station, for example, or the Casino gardens. She shrugged her shoulders. No. None of that meant anything to her anymore.

  However, she did take me several times to a sort of large tearoom. We’d go there at around two o’clock in the afternoon, when the summer vacationers were at the beach or having a siesta. You had to follow the arcades, pass the Taverne, cross a street, follow the arcades again; actually, they ran around two large residential blocks, built at the same time as the Casino, that reminded me of the 1930s apartment buildings on the periphery of the seventeenth arrondissement, along Boulevards Gouvion-Saint-Cyr, Dixmude, de l’Yser, and de la Somme. The place was called the Réganne, and the arcade shaded it from the sun. No terrace, as at the Taverne. You got the feeling that this establishment had had its hour of glory and that the Taverne had supplanted it. We sat at a table in the back. The girl at the cash register, a short-haired brunette named Claude, was a friend of Yvonne’s. She came over and joined us. Yvonne asked her for news of people I’d heard her talk about with Meinthe. Yes, Rosy was running the hotel in La Clusaz in place of her father, and Paulo Hervieu worked in antiques. Pimpin Lavorel still drove like a madman. He’d just bought himself a Jaguar. Claude Brun was in Algeria. “Yéyette” had disappeared …

  “And how about you? Everything going well in Geneva?” Claude asked her.

  “Oh, well, you know … not bad … not bad,” answered Yvonne, thinking about something else.

  “Are you living at home?”

  “No. At the Hermitage.”

  “At the Hermitage?” She gave a wry smile.

  “You’ll have to come and see my room,” Yvonne proposed. “It’s so funny …”

  “Oh, yes, I’d love to see it … One evening …”

  She had a drink with us. The big room in La Réganne was empty. The sun drew a pattern like wire mesh on the wall. Behind the dark wooden counter was a fresco depicting the lake and the Aravis mountain range.

  “There’s never anybody here anymore,” Yvonne observed.

  “Just old people,” Claude said. She laughed uneasily.

  “A change from the old days, huh?”

  Yvonne forced a laugh of her own. Then they both fell silent. Claude considered her fingernails, which were trimmed very short and painted orange. The two of them had nothing more to say to each other. I would have liked to ask them some questions. Who was Rosy? And Paulo Hervieu? How long had they known each other? What was Yvonne like when she was sixteen? And the Réganne, before it was turned into a tearoom? But none of that really interested either of them anymore. As a matter of fact, the only person who cared about their past, the story of two French princesses, was me.

  Claude accompanied us to the revolving door, and Yvonne kissed her goodbye and repeated her proposal: “Come to the Hermitage whenever you want … to see the room …”

  “All right, one evening I will …”

  But she never came.

  Except for her uncle and Claude, Yvonne didn’t seem to me to have left anything behind in that town, and I was amazed that you could sever your roots so quickly when you were lucky enough to have some somewhere.

  The rooms in “palaces” fool you at first, but pretty soon their dreary walls and furniture begin to exude the same sadness as the accommodations in shady hotels. Insipid luxury; sickly-sweet smell in the corridors, which I can’t identify but must be the very odor of anxiety, of instability, of exile, of phoniness. A smell that has always accompanied me. In the hotel lobbies where I used to meet my father, with their glass showcases, their mirrors, and their marble, and which are nothing more than waiting rooms. Waiting for what, exactly? The lingering scent of Nansen passports.

  But we didn’t spend every night at the Hermitage. Two or three times a week, Meinthe asked us to sleep at his place. Those were the evenings when he had to be away, and he charged me with answering his telephone and noting down names and “messages.” The first time, he’d made it clear that the telephone was liable to ring at any hour of the night but hadn’t offered any clues as to who the mysterious callers might be.

  He lived in the house that had belonged to his parents, in the middle of a residential area on the way to Carabacel. You followed Avenue d’Albigny and turned left just past the prefecture. A deserted neighborhood, its streets lined with trees whose branches formed an arch overhead. The houses were villas that varied in size and style according to the fortunes of the local middle-class families that owned them. The Meinthe family villa, at the corner of Avenue Jean-Charcot and Rue Marlioz, was fairly modest compared to the others. Its color was blue-gray, and it had a little veranda overlooking Avenue Jean-Charcot and a bow window on the street side. Two stories, the upper one with a mansard roof and dormer windows. A gravel garden. A wall of unkempt hedges. And on the peeling white wooden gate, Meinthe himself (as he confided to me) had clumsily inscribed, in black paint: VILLA TRISTE.

  In fact, the Meinthe villa didn’t exactly radiate good cheer. No. Nonetheless, at first I thought the adjective “triste” unsuited to the place. Eventually, though, I realized Meinthe had been right, provided you could detect something dulcet and crystalline in the sonority of the word. Upon cross
ing the villa’s threshold, you were pervaded by a limpid melancholy. You entered a zone of calm and silence. The air was lighter. You floated. The furniture had no doubt been scattered abroad. All that remained were a heavy leather sofa whose armrests, I noticed, bore claw marks, and to the left of the sofa, a glass-fronted bookcase. When you sat on the sofa, you were facing the veranda, about five or six meters away. The parquet floor was of light wood but poorly maintained. A ceramic lamp with a yellow shade stood on it, providing the only illumination in the spacious room. The telephone was in a neighboring room, which you reached by going along a corridor. The same lack of furniture. A red curtain hiding the window. The walls here were ocher in color, like those in the living room. Against the wall, on the right, a camp bed. Hanging at eye level on the opposite wall, a Taride map of French West Africa and a big aerial view of Dakar in a very thin frame. It looked as though it came from a tourist office. The photograph, which was turning brown, must have been about twenty years old. Meinthe told me that his father had worked for a time “in the colonies.” The telephone was at the foot of the bed. There was a little chandelier with fake candles and fake crystal droplets. Meinthe slept in that room, I think.

  We would open the French window that gave onto the veranda and lie on the sofa. It had a very particular smell of leather I’ve encountered only there and in the two armchairs that adorned my father’s office on Rue Lord-Byron. It was during the time of his trips to Brazzaville, the time of the mysterious and chimerical “African Enterprise Corporation,” which he created and which I don’t know much about. The smell of the sofa, the Taride map of French West Africa, and the aerial shot of Dakar made up a series of coincidences. In my mind, Meinthe’s house was indissolubly linked to the “African Enterprise Corporation,” three words that had lulled my childhood. I reentered the atmosphere of the office on Rue Lord-Byron and rediscovered the fragrance of leather, the half-light, my father’s interminable consultations with very elegant, silver-haired blacks … Was that the reason why, when Yvonne and I spent the night in the living room, I was sure that time had stopped for good?