Villa Triste

by Patrick Modiano

  We were floating. Our gestures were infinitely slow, and when we moved, it was inch by inch. Snail’s pace. Any abrupt movement would have broken the charm. We spoke in low voices. The evening invaded the room by way of the veranda, and I could see motes of dust languishing in the air. A cyclist passed. I continued to hear the whirring of his bike for several minutes. He too was advancing inch by inch. He was floating. Everything around us was floating. We wouldn’t even turn on the lights as the dark came on. The nearest streetlamp, on Avenue Jean-Charcot, cast a snowy brightness. Never to step out of that villa. Never to leave that room. To stay where we were, lying on the sofa or perhaps on the floor, as we did more and more often. I was surprised to discover in Yvonne such an aptitude for abandon. With me, that corresponded to a horror of movement, an anxiety about everything that won’t stand still, everything that passes and changes, the desire to stop walking on shifting sands, to come to rest somewhere, to petrify if necessary. But with her? I think she was simply lazy. Like algae.

  Sometimes we even lay down in the hall and stayed there all night long. One evening we crawled into a closet under the stairs leading to the upper floor and found ourselves wedged among indistinct masses that I identified as wicker trunks. No, I’m not dreaming; we did a lot of crawling around. We’d start at opposite ends of the house and crawl toward each other in the dark. You had to creep as silently and slowly as possible to take the other person by surprise.

  Once Meinthe didn’t return until the following evening. We hadn’t budged from the villa. We stayed on the floor, lying alongside the veranda. The dog was asleep in the middle of the sofa. It was a peaceful, sunny afternoon. The leaves were swaying gently on the trees. Far off, some military music. From time to time, a cyclist passed along the avenue with a sound like rustling wings. Soon we couldn’t hear any more sounds. They were muffled by a very soft cotton-wool cocoon. Had Meinthe not arrived, I don’t think we would have moved for days and days, we would have let ourselves die from hunger and thirst rather than leave the villa. I’ve never again known moments so full and so slow as those. Opium, it’s said, can provide them. I doubt it.

  The telephone always rang after midnight, in the old-style, quavering way. A thin, used-up ring. But it was enough to lodge a menace in the air and rend the veil. Yvonne didn’t want me to get the phone. “Don’t answer it,” she’d whisper. I’d crawl down the corridor, groping my way along, I couldn’t find the bedroom door, I’d bang my head against the wall. And having got past the door, I still had to crawl to the telephone with no visible points of reference to help me find it. Before I picked up the receiver, I had a feeling of panic. That voice — it was always the same — terrified me, hard as it was, and yet muffled for one reason or another. Distance? Weather? (Sometimes it sounded like an old recording.) The beginning was invariable: “Hello, Henri Kustiker here … Can you hear me?”

  I’d reply, “Yes.”

  A pause.

  “You will please tell the doctor that we’ll expect him at nine o’clock tomorrow evening at the Bellevue in Geneva. Do you understand?”

  I’d emit a “yes” fainter than the first one. He’d hang up. When he didn’t schedule a meeting, he’d leave messages: “Henri Kustiker here …” (A pause.) “You will please tell the doctor that Captain Max and Guérin have arrived. We shall come and see him tomorrow evening … tomorrow evening …”

  I wouldn’t have the strength to answer him. Anyway, he’d already hung up. “Henri Kustiker” — we asked Meinthe about him several times but never got a reply — became for us a dangerous character; at night we’d hear him prowling around the villa. We had no idea what he looked like, and therefore he became for us more and more of an obsession. I amused myself by terrorizing Yvonne: I’d move away from her in the darkness and announce in my most lugubrious voice, “Henri Kustiker here … Henri Kustiker here …”

  She’d scream. And by contagion, fear would seize me too. We’d await with pounding hearts the quavering ring of the telephone. We’d curl up under the camp bed. The phone rang one night, but I didn’t manage to pick it up until after several minutes had passed, as in one of those bad dreams where every move you make is as heavy as lead.

  “Hello, Henri Kustiker here …”

  I couldn’t utter a single syllable.

  “Hello … Can you hear me …? Can you hear me …?”

  We held our breath.

  “Henri Kustiker here, can you hear me …?”

  The voice grew fainter and fainter.

  “Kustiker … Henri Kustiker … Can you hear me …?”

  Who was he? Where might he be calling from? Another soft murmur: “… tiker … hear …”

  Then nothing. The last thread connecting us to the outside world had just broken. We let ourselves slip back into depths where no one — I hoped — would come to disturb us.

  12.

  He’s on his third “light port.” He’s not taking his eyes off the big photograph of Hendrickx hanging above the rows of bottles. Hendrickx in his glory days, twenty years before the summer when I got angry watching him dance with Yvonne, on the night of the Cup. Hendrickx young and slim and romantic — a combination of Jean Mermoz and the Duke of Reichstadt. The girl who used to run the refreshment stall at the Sporting Club had shown me that old picture one day when I was asking her some questions about my “rival.” Since it was taken, he’d put on a lot of weight.

  I imagine Meinthe looking at that historical document for a while and then smiling his unexpected smile, which was never an expression of good humor but rather a nerve discharge. Did he think about the evening when the three of us went to the Sainte-Rose, after the Cup? He must have counted the years: five, ten, twelve … He was obsessed with counting years and days. “In a year and thirty-three days, I’ll turn twenty-seven … It’s been seven years and five days since Yvonne and I first met …”

  The other customer had left, walking unsteadily. He’d paid for his dry martinis but refused to cover the price of the telephone calls and insisted he’d never asked for “Chambéry 233.” As the discussion threatened to continue until dawn, Meinthe had told him he’d pay for the calls himself. After all, he explained, it was him, Meinthe, who had asked for Chambéry 233. Him and him alone.

  Close to midnight. Meinthe casts a final glance at Hendrickx’s photograph and heads for the door of the Cintra. Just as he’s about to step out, two men come in, shoving past him with hardly a word of apology. Then three more. Then five. There are more and more of them, and new ones keep arriving. Each of them wears, pinned to the lapel of his coat, a little rectangle of cardboard with INTER-TOURING printed on it. They talk very loud, laugh very hard, give one another heavy slaps on the back. They’re attendees at the “convention” the barmaid talked about a little while ago. One of them, more surrounded than the others, is smoking a pipe. They twirl around him and call to him: “President … President … President …” Meinthe tries in vain to make his way through them. They’ve driven him back almost to the bar. They form compact groups. Meinthe circles around them, looks for an opening, squeezes into it, but once again runs into pressure and loses ground. He’s sweating. One of the conventioneers puts a hand on his shoulder, no doubt thinking him a “colleague,” and Meinthe is at once absorbed into a group: the “president’s.” They’re pressed together like people in the Chaussée d’Antin métro station at rush hour. The president, who’s shorter than the others, protects his pipe by cupping it in the palm of his hand. Meinthe manages to extract himself from this scrum, lowers his shoulder, throws his elbows about, and finally flings himself at the door. He cracks it open and slips into the street. Someone comes out behind him and addresses him: “Where are you going? Are you with Inter-Touring?”

  Meinthe doesn’t answer.

  “You ought to stay. The president’s springing for drinks … Come on, stay awhile …”

  Meinthe quickens his pace. The other goes on in a pleading voice: “Come on, stay …”

  Meinth
e walks faster and faster. The other man starts hollering: “The president’s going to notice that a guy from Inter-Touring is missing … Come back … Come back …”

  His voice rings out in the deserted street.

  Now Meinthe finds himself in front of the Casino fountain. In the winter, the jet of water doesn’t change color or climb anywhere near as high as it does during the “season.” He gazes at it for a moment, then crosses the street and goes up Avenue d’Albigny on the left-hand sidewalk. He walks slowly, zigzagging a little. He looks to be ambling along. From time to time, he gives the bark of a plane tree a little tap. He passes the prefecture. Then, of course, he takes the first street on the left, which is called — if memory serves — Avenue Mac-Croskey. Twelve years ago, that row of new apartment buildings didn’t exist. Instead there was a neglected park, in the middle of which stood a big, unoccupied house in Anglo-Norman style. He reaches Carrefour Pelliot. We — Yvonne and I — often used to sit on one of the benches there. He takes Avenue Pierre-Forsans, on the right. I could follow his route with my eyes closed. The neighborhood hasn’t changed much. For mysterious reasons, it’s been spared. The same villas surrounded by their gardens and their little hedges, the same trees lining each side of the avenues. But the foliage is missing. Winter gives the whole setting a desolate character.

  And here we are on Rue Marlioz. The villa is on the corner, down there on the left. I see it. And I see you, walking even more slowly than a little while ago, and lowering your shoulder to push open the wooden gate. You sit on the sofa in the living room, and you haven’t turned on the lights. The streetlamp across the way casts its white brightness.

  “December 8 … A physician in A —, M. René Meinthe, 37, took his own life in his residence sometime between Friday night and Saturday morning. He had, in his despair, turned on the gas.”

  I was walking along — I no longer remember why — under the arcades in Rue de Castiglione when I read those few lines in an evening newspaper. Le Dauphiné, a regional daily, offered more details. Meinthe made the first page, under the headline “Suicide of a Physician in A —.” The reader was referred to page six, the page reserved for local news:

  December 8. Dr. René Meinthe took his own life last night in his villa at 5 Avenue Jean-Charcot. Mlle. B., the doctor’s maid, upon entering the house as she did every morning, was immediately alerted by a smell of gas. It was too late. Dr. Meinthe is said to have left a letter.

  He had been seen yesterday evening in the train station, at the moment when the Paris express arrived. According to a witness, he later spent some time at the Cintra on 23 Rue Sommeiller.

  Five years ago, after having practiced medicine in Geneva, Dr. René Meinthe returned to A —, the cradle of his family. He was known to have professional problems. Can they explain his desperate act?

  He was 37 years old. He was the son of Dr. Henri Meinthe, a hero and martyr of the Resistance, after whom a street in our town is named.

  I wandered around and my steps took me to the Place du Carrousel, which I crossed. I entered one of the two little gardens enclosed between the wings of the Louvre Palace, before the Cour Carrée. A mild winter sun was shining down, and children were playing on the sloping lawn beneath the statue of General Lafayette. Meinthe’s death would forever leave certain things in the dark. Thus I’d never know who Henri Kustiker was. I repeated the name aloud: Kus-ti-ker, Kus-ti-ker, a name now without meaning, except to me. And to Yvonne. But what had become of her? The words that make us feel another’s disappearance more keenly are the passwords that once existed between us and them and have suddenly become empty and useless.

  Kustiker … At the time, I formulated all kinds of hypotheses, each one more unlikely than the others, but the truth — I could feel it — had to be pretty bizarre itself. And disturbing. Meinthe would sometimes invite us to tea at the villa. One afternoon around five o’clock, we found ourselves in his living room. We were listening to René’s favorite tune, “The Café Mozart Waltz,” a record he played over and over again. The doorbell rang. He tried to repress a nervous tic. I saw — and so did Yvonne — two men outside, supporting a third man whose face was covered with blood. They crossed the hall quickly and headed for Meinthe’s room. I heard one of them say, “Give him a camphor shot. Otherwise this bitch is liable to croak on us …”

  Yes. Yvonne heard the same thing. René came back and asked us to leave at once. He said curtly, “I’ll explain later …”

  He didn’t explain, but a glimpse of the two men had sufficed for me to know that they were either “policemen” or individuals who had some kind of relationship with the police. Certain cross-checks and certain messages that Kustiker left confirmed this opinion. It was the time of the Algerian War, and Geneva, where Meinthe went to his appointments, functioned as a hub. Agents of every kind. Parallel police forces. Secret networks. I never understood any of it. What role did René play in that? On several occasions I could tell he would have loved to confide in me, but doubtless he considered me too young. Or maybe he was simply seized, just as he was about to unburden himself, by an immense weariness and preferred to keep his secrets to himself.

  One evening, however, when I kept asking him jokingly who was this “Henri Kustiker,” and Yvonne was teasing him by repeating the ritual phrase “Hello, Henri Kustiker here …” he looked more tense than usual. He declared hollowly, “If you only knew what those bastards make me do …” And then he added, his voice clipped, “as if I give a damn about their Algerian nonsense …” In the next minute, he’d regained his insouciance and his good humor and suggested that we all go to the Sainte-Rose.

  Twelve years later, I realized I didn’t know much about René Meinthe, and I reproached myself for my lack of curiosity at the time when I saw him every day. Since then, Meinthe’s features — and Yvonne’s as well — had grown cloudy, and I felt as though I couldn’t make them out anymore except through frosted glass.

  Sitting there on that bench in the square, with the newspaper announcing René’s death beside me, I saw again some brief sequences from that summer, but they were as blurry as usual. For example, the Saturday evening when we had dinner, Meinthe, Yvonne, and I, in a little eatery by the lake. Around midnight, a group of louts surrounded our table and started yelling at us. Meinthe, with great sangfroid, grabbed a bottle, broke it on the edge of the table, and brandished the jagged neck. “First one that gets close, I slice up his face …”

  He spoke those words in a tone of wicked glee that frightened me. And the others too. They backed off. On our way home, René whispered, “Just think, they were afraid of Queen Astrid …”

  He particularly admired that queen and always carried a photograph of her. He ended up persuading himself that in a previous life, he’d been the young, beautiful, and unfortunate Queen Astrid. Along with Astrid’s photo, he carried the one of the three of us on the evening of the Cup. I’ve got another, taken on Avenue d’Albigny, with Yvonne holding on to my arm. The dog’s beside us, looking very solemn. An engagement photograph, you’d think. And I’ve kept yet another, much older picture, which Yvonne gave me. It dates from the time of the baron and shows them, Meinthe and her, on a sunny afternoon, sitting on the terrace of the Basque bar in Saint-Jean-de-Luz.

  Those are the only clear images. A mist enshrouds all the rest. Lobby and room in the Hermitage. Gardens at the Windsor and the Hotel Alhambra. Villa Triste. The Sainte-Rose. Sporting Club. Casino. Houligant. And the shadows of Kustiker (but who was Kustiker?), of Yvonne Jacquet, and of a certain Count Chmara.

  13.

  That was right around the time when Marilyn Monroe left us. I’d read a great deal about her in the magazines, and I cited her as an example to Yvonne. She too could have a fine film career, if she wanted one. Frankly, she was as attractive as Marilyn Monroe. All she needed was to be as persevering.

  She listened to me without saying anything, lying on the bed. I told her about Marilyn Monroe’s initial difficulties, her first calendar photos,
her first small roles, the steps climbed up one by one. She, Yvonne Jacquet, shouldn’t stop along the way. “Flying mannequin.” Then her first part, in Rolf Madeja’s Liebesbriefe auf dem Berg. And she’d just won the Houligant Cup. Each stage had its importance. She must think ahead to the next one. Climb a little higher. A little higher.

  She never interrupted me when I was expounding my ideas about her “career.” Did she really listen to me? In the beginning, she must have been surprised by such a degree of interest on my part, and flattered when I spoke so ardently about her great future. Perhaps there were some sporadic occasions when she caught my enthusiasm and started dreaming too. But I imagine those didn’t last. She was older than me. The more I think about it, the more I tell myself she was living that moment of youth when everything’s going to be at the tipping point soon, when it’s going to be a little too late for everything. The boat’s still at the dock, all you have to do is walk up the gangway, you’ve got a few minutes left … A soft numbness overcomes you.

  Sometimes my little speeches made her laugh. I even saw her shrug when I told her that producers were surely going to notice her performance in Liebesbriefe auf dem Berg. No, she didn’t believe that. She didn’t have the sacred fire. But neither did Marilyn Monroe, in the beginning. Eventually it comes, the sacred fire.

  I often wonder where she may have ended up. She’s certainly not the same any longer, and I’m obliged to study the photographs in order to recall her face as it was then. I’ve tried for years without success to see Liebesbriefe auf dem Berg. The people I’ve asked have told me the film doesn’t exist. And Rolf Madeja’s name didn’t mean very much to them. I’m sorry about that. In the movie theater I would have rediscovered her voice, her gestures, and the look in her eyes, just as I knew them. And loved them.