Villa Triste

by Patrick Modiano

  Wherever she may be — very far away, I imagine — does she vaguely remember the plans and dreams I laid out for her in our room at the Hermitage while we were making the dog’s dinner? Does she remember America?

  Because if we spent days and nights in delicious prostration, that didn’t stop me from pondering our future, which I envisioned with greater and greater precision.

  I had, in fact, given some serious thought to the marriage of Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller, a marriage between a real American girl, sprung from the depths of America, and a Jew. We would have a destiny more or less like theirs, Yvonne and I. She, a little French girl from the country who a few years from now would be a movie star. And I, who would end up as a Jewish writer and wear thick horn-rimmed spectacles.

  But France suddenly seemed to me too narrow a territory, where I wouldn’t be able to show my true capabilities. What could I hope for in this little country? An antiques business? A rare book dealership? A career as a long-winded, chilly man of letters? None of those professions stirred my enthusiasm. I had to go away and take Yvonne with me.

  I wouldn’t leave anything behind because I had no ties to anything anywhere, and Yvonne had broken all of hers. We’d have a new life.

  Was I inspired by the example of Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller? I thought of America immediately. Once we got there, Yvonne would dedicate herself to the cinema. And I’d devote my energies to literature. We’d get married in the big synagogue in Brooklyn. We’d encounter various difficulties. Maybe they’d break us definitively, but if we overcame them, our dream would then take shape. Arthur and Marilyn. Yvonne and Victor.

  I foresaw a return to Europe at a much later date. We’d retire to some mountainous region — Ticino or the Engadin. We’d live in an immense chalet, surrounded by a park. A set of shelves would hold Yvonne’s Oscars and my honorary doctorate diplomas from Yale and the University of Mexico. We’d have ten Great Danes tasked with mutilating potential visitors, and we’d never see anybody. We’d spend entire days lounging around in our room, as in the days of the Hermitage and Villa Triste.

  My inspiration for this second period of our life together was drawn from Paulette Goddard and Erich Maria Remarque.

  Or then again, we might stay in America. We’d find a big house in the country. I had been impressed by the title of a book I saw in Meinthe’s living room: Green Grass of Wyoming. I’ve never read it, but just repeating “Green Grass of Wyoming” gives me a twinge in my heart. When all was said and done, it was in that nonexistent country, in the midst of that tall, translucent green grass, that I would have liked to live with Yvonne.

  I reflected for several days on my plan to leave for America before speaking to her about it. There was a chance she wouldn’t take me seriously. First of all, I had to settle the practical details. No improvisations. I’d put together the money for the journey. Of the 800,000 francs I’d swindled the Genevois bibliophile out of, I still had about half, but I was counting on another resource: an extremely rare butterfly, pinned to the bottom of a little glass box I’d been carrying around in my luggage for several months. An expert had assured me that the insect was worth “at a minimum” 400,000 francs. It was, therefore, worth twice that, and I could get triple the amount if I sold the butterfly to a collector. I myself would purchase our tickets at the French Line offices, and we’d stay at the Algonquin hotel in New York.

  After that, I was counting on my cousin Bella Darvi, who’d made herself a career over there, to introduce us into the film world. And that was it. That was, in broad outline, my plan.

  I counted to three and sat on one of the steps of the grand staircase. Looking down through the balusters, I could see the reception desk and the porter, who was talking with a bald individual in a dinner jacket. Surprised, she turned around. She was wearing her green muslin dress and a scarf of the same color.

  “So what do you say we go to America?”

  I shouted that question for fear it would stick in my throat or turn into a stomach rumble. I took a big, deep breath and repeated, as loudly as before: “What do you say we go to America?”

  She came and sat down next to me on the stair and squeezed my arm. “Is something wrong?” she asked me.

  “No, not at all. It’s very simple … It’s very simple, very simple … We’re going to America …”

  She examined her high-heeled shoes, kissed me on the cheek, and told me I could explain what I meant later. It was past nine o’clock, and Meinthe was waiting for us at the Resserre in Veyrier-du-Lac.

  The place reminded me of the inns on the banks of the Marne. The tables were set up on a floating platform, fenced around its perimeter with latticework and tubs of plants and shrubs. Customers dined by candlelight. René had chosen one of the tables closest to the water.

  He was wearing his beige shantung suit and waving an arm at us. He had a companion with him, a young man he introduced to us, but I’ve forgotten his name. We sat across from them.

  “It’s very pleasant here,” I declared, by way of launching the conversation.

  “Yes, in a way,” René said. “This hotel is more or less a bordello …”

  “Since when?” Yvonne asked.

  “Since forever, my dear.”

  She looked back at me and burst out laughing. And then: “Do you know what Victor’s proposing? He wants to take me off to America.”

  “To America?”

  He visibly failed to understand.

  “Weird idea.”

  “Yes,” I said. “To America.”

  He gave me a skeptical smile. As far as he was concerned, that notion was just words in the air. He turned to his friend and said, “So are you feeling better?”

  The other nodded in reply.

  “You have to eat something now.”

  He spoke to him as though to a child, but the boy must have been a bit older than me. He had blond hair, cut short, an angelic face, and a wrestler’s shoulders.

  René explained to us that his friend had competed that afternoon for the title of “France’s Handsomest Athlete.” The contest had taken place at the Casino. He’d been awarded only third place in the “juniors.” The boy ran his hand through his hair and addressed me: “I didn’t have any luck, none at all.”

  I was hearing him speak for the first time, and for the first time, I noticed his lavender-blue irises. Still today, I can remember the childish distress in his eyes. Meinthe filled the boy’s plate with crudités. He continued to address his remarks to me, and also to Yvonne. He was feeling confident.

  “The judges, those bastards … I should have got the top score in free-form posing …”

  “Shut up and eat,” Meinthe said affectionately.

  From our table, you could see the lights of the town in the distance, and if you turned your head slightly, another light, this one very bright, would draw your attention to the other side of the lake, just opposite us: the Sainte-Rose. That night spotlights were sweeping the façades of the Casino and the Sporting Club, and their beams reached the shores of the lake. The water was tinted red and green. I heard a voice, excessively amplified by a loudspeaker, but we were too far away to understand the words. It was a son et lumière show. I’d read in the local papers that the show would feature an actor from the Comédie-Française, Marchat, I believe, reciting Alphonse de Lamartine’s poem “Le Lac.” I’m sure it was his voice whose reverberations we could hear.

  “We should have stayed in town for it,” Meinthe said. “I adore son et lumière shows. How about you?”

  He was addressing his friend.

  “Dunno,” the friend replied. He looked even more desperate than he’d looked the moment before.

  “We could stop in later,” Yvonne suggested with a smile.

  “No,” Meinthe said. “I have to go to Geneva tonight.”

  And what was he going to do there? Who would he meet at the Bellevue or the Pavillon Arosa, places Kustiker had mentioned on the telephone? One day he wouldn’t co
me back alive. Geneva, a city sterile in appearance but sordid underneath. A slippery city. A transit point.

  “I’m going to stay three or four days,” Meinthe said. “I’ll call you when I get back.”

  “But Victor and I will be on our way to America by then,” Yvonne declared.

  And she laughed. I couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t take my plan seriously. I felt a dull fury growing inside me.

  “The thing is, I’m sick to death of France,” I said in a peremptory tone.

  “So am I,” Meinthe’s friend said, in a brutal fashion that contrasted with the timidity and sadness he’d displayed until then.

  And that remark lightened the mood.

  Meinthe had ordered after-dinner drinks, and we were the only diners left on the floating restaurant. The loudspeakers in the distance were blaring out music that reached us only in snatches.

  “There,” Meinthe said. “That’s the municipal band. They play at all the son et lumière shows.” He turned to us. “What are you two doing tonight?”

  “Packing our bags for America,” I declared curtly.

  “He’s sticking to his America story,” Meinthe said. “So you’re going to leave me here all alone?”

  “Of course not,” I said.

  We drank a toast then, all four of us, just like that, not for any reason, but because Meinthe proposed it. His friend ventured a pale half smile, and a furtive flash of gaiety briefly lit up his blue eyes. Yvonne held my hand. The waiters were already starting to clear the tables.

  Those are all my memories of that last dinner.

  She was listening to me, frowning studiously, lying on the bed in her old dressing gown, the black one with the red dots. I was explaining my plan: the French Line, the Algonquin hotel, and my cousin Bella Darvi … America, in short, the Promised Land we’d set sail for in a few days. And the more I talked, the closer it seemed, until it was almost within reach of my hand. Couldn’t we see its lights already, over there, on the other side of the lake?

  She interrupted me two or three times to ask questions: “What will we do in America?” “How will we get visas?” “What will we live on?” And so carried away was I by my subject that I barely noticed how much thicker her voice was becoming. Her eyes were half shut, or maybe even closed, and then suddenly she opened them wide and gaped at me with a horrified expression on her face.

  No, we couldn’t stay in France, in this stifling little country, among these red-faced wine “connoisseurs,” these bicycle racers, these gaga gastronomes who could distinguish among various kinds of pears. I was choking with rage. We couldn’t stay one more minute in a country where people rode to hounds. Over and out. Never again. The suitcases. Quick.

  She’d fallen asleep. Her head had slid down the bars of the headboard. She looked five years younger, with her slightly swollen cheeks, her almost imperceptible smile. She’d fallen asleep the way she used to do while I read her the History of England, but even faster this time than when listening to Maurois.

  I sat on the windowsill and looked at her. Someone set off a firework somewhere.

  I started packing our bags. So as not to wake her up, I’d turned off all the lights in the room, except for the night-light on her bedside table. I took her things and mine from the closets as I went along.

  I lined up the suitcases on the floor of the “living room.” She owned six, of various sizes. With mine added in, we had eleven, not counting the wardrobe trunk. I gathered together my old newspapers and my clothes, but her things were more difficult to organize, and every time I thought I’d finally finished, I discovered a new dress, a bottle of perfume, or a pile of scarves. The dog sat on the sofa, following my comings and goings with an attentive eye.

  I didn’t have enough strength left to close the suitcases, and I collapsed on a chair. The dog put his chin on the edge of the sofa and gazed up at me. We stared into the whites of each other’s eyes for a good long time.

  Dawn was breaking when a faint memory visited me. When had I lived through a moment like this before? I saw the furnished apartments in the sixteenth or seventeenth arrondissement — Rue du Colonel-Moll, Square Villaret-de-Joyeuse, Avenue du Général-Balfourier — where the walls were covered with the same wallpaper as in the rooms at the Hermitage, where the chairs and the beds cast the same pall of desolation over the heart. Drab rooms, precarious stopping places you must always evacuate before the Germans arrive, abodes where you leave no trace.

  I slept until she woke me. She was staring at the bulging suitcases. “What’d you do this for?”

  She sat on the largest case, the one in dark red leather. She looked exhausted, as if she’d helped me pack our bags all night long. The beach robe she had on was open over her breasts.

  So then, keeping my voice low, I talked to her about America again. To my surprise, I heard myself declaiming the sentences rhythmically, and they became a monotonous chant.

  When I ran out of arguments, I told her that Maurois himself, the writer she admired, had gone to America in 1940. Maurois.

  Maurois.

  She nodded and smiled amiably at me. She agreed completely. We would leave as quickly as possible. She didn’t want to upset me. But I needed to rest. She stroked my forehead.

  I still had so many little details to consider. For example, the dog’s visa.

  She smiled as she listened to me and never flinched. I spoke for hours and hours, and the same words kept coming back: Algonquin, Brooklyn, the French Line, Zukor, Goldwyn, Warner Bros., Bella Darvi … Yvonne had a lot of patience.

  “You ought to get some sleep,” she repeated from time to time.

  I was waiting. And what could she be doing? She’d promised to meet me at the station a half hour before the arrival of the Paris express. That way, we wouldn’t run the risk of missing it. But it had just pulled out of the station. And I was still there on the platform, watching the rhythmic procession of the departing carriages. Behind me, around one of the benches, were my suitcases and my wardrobe trunk, arranged in a semicircle with the trunk standing upright. A harsh light threw shadows on the platform. And I had the empty, dazed feeling that comes over you after the passage of a train.

  Deep inside, I’d been expecting it. It would have been incredible had things happened otherwise. I gazed at my baggage again. Three or four hundred kilos I was still hauling around with me. Why? At the thought, an acid laugh shook my sides.

  The next train would arrive at six minutes past midnight. I had more than an hour ahead of me, and I walked out of the station, leaving my bags on the platform. Their contents could be of interest to no one. Besides, they were much too heavy to move very far.

  I went into the rotunda-shaped café next to the Hôtel Verdun. Was it called the Dials Café, or the Café of the Future? Chess players occupied the tables in the back. A brown wooden door led to a billiards room. The shivering pink light in the café came from neon tubes. I could hear the crack of billiard balls at very long intervals, and the continuous sizzle of the neon. Nothing else. Not a word. Not a sigh. When I ordered some linden-mint tea, I kept my voice low.

  America suddenly seemed very far away. Did Albert, Yvonne’s father, come here to play billiards? I would have liked to know. A torpor was overcoming me, and I felt in that café the calm I’d known at the Lindens, with Madame Buffaz. By some phenomenon of alternation or cyclothymia, one dream followed another: I no longer imagined myself with Yvonne in America, but in a little provincial town oddly like Bayonne. Yes, we were living on Rue Thiers, and on summer evenings we’d stroll beneath the theater arcades or along the Allées Boufflers. Yvonne would take my arm, and we could hear the plunk of tennis balls. On Sunday afternoons, we’d walk around the ramparts and sit on a bench in the public gardens, near the bust of Léon Bonnat. Bayonne, haven of sweetness and rest, after so many years of uncertainty. Maybe it wasn’t too late. Bayonne …

  I looked for her everywhere. I tried to find her at the Sainte-Rose, among the numerous diners and a
ll the people dancing. It was an evening party that figured in the program of the season’s festivities: the “Scintillating Soirée,” I believe. Yes, scintillating. Sporadic, brief showers of confetti covered the dancers’ hair and shoulders.

  At the same table they’d occupied on the night of the Cup, I recognized Fossorié, the Roland-Michels, the brunette, the president of the golf club, and the two suntanned blondes. Essentially, they hadn’t left their places for a month. Only Fossorié’s hairdo had changed: a first wave, glossy with brilliantine, formed a sort of diadem around his forehead. Behind that wave, a trough. And then another, very full wave rose well above his skull and broke in cascades on his neck. No, it’s no dream. They stand up and walk to the dance floor. The orchestra plays a pasodoble. They mingle with the other dancers out there, under the showers of confetti. And it all whirls and swirls, wheels and scatters in my memory. All dust.

  A hand on my shoulder. The manager of the place, the man named Pulli.

  “Are you looking for someone, Monsieur Chmara?”

  He speaks in a whisper, close to my ear.

  “Mademoiselle Jacquet … Yvonne Jacquet …”

  I say her name without much hope. He can’t know who she is. So many faces … A steady stream of customers, night after night. If I showed him a photograph, he’d surely recognize her. You should always carry photos of those you love.

  “Mademoiselle Jacquet? She just left in the company of Monsieur Daniel Hendrickx …”

  “Are you sure of that?”

  I must have made a funny face, puffing out my cheeks like a child about to cry, because he took me by the arm.

  “Yes. In the company of Monsieur Daniel Hendrickx.”

  He didn’t say “with,” but “in the company of,” and I recognized in this subtlety a refinement of language characteristic of high society in Cairo and Alexandria, when French was de rigueur there.

  “Shall we have a drink, you and I?”

  “No, I have a train to catch at six past midnight.”