Honeymoon

by Patrick Modiano

  Among my notes was another document that I'd thought necessary to Ingrid's biography: a photo of the American producer, discovered by chance during my researches. This photo had been taken during a gala evening in a Florida casino. Some gymnasts were performing on a stage in the middle of the room, and all of a sudden the producer, wanting to impress Ingrid, had got up from the table and taken off his dinner jacket, bow tie and shirt. Stripped to the waist, he had climbed up on to the stage and, in from of the flabbergasted gymnasts, grabbed hold of the trapeze. The photo showed him hanging from the trapeze, his chest thrust out, his stomach held in, his legs at right angles. He was very short, and he wore a moustache that followed the line of his lip, which reminded me of distant childhood memories. His jaws clenched, his chest triumphant, his legs at right angles …

  This man was trying to prove to a woman who could have been his daughter that you can possess eternal youth. When she told me this anecdote, Ingrid laughed just as hard as I did, until the tears came into her eyes. I wonder whether those tears were not due to the thought of all the time she had wasted in futile evenings like that one.

  I tore the photograph of the Avenue des Champs-Élysées and the one of the producer into tiny pieces, which I jumbled up and then scattered in the wastepaper basket. The page on Alexandre d'Arc suffered the same fate; ten years ago his phoney name and the fact that he was a pimp by profession had struck me as so romantic that I had considered the fellow worthy of figuring in a biography of Ingrid. I felt a vague twinge of remorse: has a biographer the right to suppress certain details under the pretext that he considers them superfluous? Or do they all have their importance, and must he present them one after the other, impartially, so that not a single one is left put, as in the inventory of a distraint?

  Unless the line of a life, once it has reached its term, purges itself of all its useless and decorative elements. In which case, all that remains is the essential: the blanks, the silences and the pauses. I finally fell asleep, turning all these serious questions over in my mind.

  •

  The next morning, in the café on the corner of the square and the Boulevard Soult, a girl and boy who weren't much over twenty were sitting at the table next to mine, and they smiled at me. I felt an urge to talk to them. I thought them well suited to each other; he was dark and she was fair. Perhaps that was how Annette and I had looked at the same age. I found their presence reassuring, and they communicated something of their mysterious power and freshness to me, because I was in good spirits for the rest of the day.

  That boy and girl made me reflect on my first meeting with Ingrid and Rigaud on the Saint-Raphaël road. I wondered why they'd stopped their car and invited me to their place so very naturally. It was as if they'd always known me. I'd spent a sleepless night in the train, of course, and my fatigue gave me the impression that everything was possible and that life had lost all its rough edges: all you had to do was let yourself slide down a gentle slope, raise your arm, and a car would stop and people would help you without even asking you any questions. You fell asleep under the pine trees, and when you woke up two pale blue eyes were gazing at you. When I walked down the Rue de la Citadelle arm in arm with Ingrid, it was with the certainty that for the first time in my life I was under someone's protection.

  But I hadn't forgotten the way Rigaud limped, as slightly as possible, as if he was trying to hide an injury, or the words Ingrid had whispered in the dark: We'll pretend to be dead. They must already have felt, both of them, that they were coming to the end of the road. At least Ingrid must have. Perhaps my presence had been a distraction for them and a passing comfort. Perhaps, fleetingly, I had conjured up a memory of youth for them. For in fact it was at my age that they had found themselves on the Côte d'Azur. They were very much on their own. And orphans. That must have been why Ingrid had wanted to know whether I had parents.

  I DIDN'T NEED to consult my notes that evening in my room in the Dodds Hotel. I remembered everything as if it had been yesterday … They had arrived on the Côte d'Azur in the spring of 1942. She was sixteen, and he was twenty-one. They didn't get off the train at Saint-Raphaël, as I had done, but at Juan-les-Pins. They had come from Paris, and had crossed the demarcation line illegally. Ingrid had a false identity card in the name of Ingrid Teyrsen, married name Rigaud, which aged her by three years. Rigaud had hidden several hundreds of thousands of francs in the linings of his jackets and at the bottom of his suit-case.

  They were the only passengers at Juan-les-Pins that morning. A cab was waiting outside the station, a black cab with a white horse. They decided to take it, because of their suitcases. The horse started off at a walk, and they crossed the deserted square in the pine forest. The cabdriver's head was leaning over to the right. From behind, it looked as if he had fallen asleep. At the bend in the road leading to the Cape, the sea appeared. The cab turned into a steep alleyway. The driver cracked his whip, and the horse broke into a trot. Then it jerked to a halt outside the enormous white mass of the Hôtel Provençal.

  "We must tell them we're on honeymoon," Rigaud had said.

  •

  Only one floor of the hotel was still in use, and the rare guests seemed to be living there in hiding. Before reaching it, the lift slowly passed whole floors of shadow and silence, where it would never stop again. Anyone who wanted to use the stairs needed a torch. The big dining room was closed, its chandelier enveloped in a white sheet. The bar wasn't in use, either. So the guests gathered in a corner of the lobby.

  Their room was at the back of the hotel and looked out on to a road that sloped gently down to the beach. Their balcony overlooked the pine forest, and they often saw the cab going round the bend in the road to the Cape. In the evenings, the silence was so deep that the clicking sound of the horse's hooves took a very long time to die away. Ingrid and Rigaud played a game to see which of them had such sharp ears as to be the last to hear the horse's hooves.

  •

  At Juan-les-Pins, people behaved as if the war didn't exist. The men wore beach trousers and the women light-coloured pareus. All these people were some twenty years older than Ingrid and Rigaud, but this was barely noticeable. Owing to their suntanned skin and their athletic gait, they still looked young and falsely carefree. They didn't know the way things would go when the summer was over. At aperitif time, they exchanged addresses. W auld they be able to get rooms in Megève this winter? Some preferred the Val-d'Isère, and were already getting ready to book accommodation at the Col de I'Iseran. Others had no intention of leaving the Côte d'Azur. It was possible that they were going to reopen the Altitude 43 in Saint-Tropez, that white hotel which looks like a liner grounded among the pines above the Plage de Ia Bouillabaisse. They would be safe there. Fleeting signs of anguish could be read on their faces under the suntan: to think that they were going to have to be permanently on the move, searching for a place that the war had spared, and that these oases were going to become rarer all the time … Rationing was beginning on the Côte. You mustn't think about anything, so as not to undermine your morale. These idle days sometimes gave you the feeling of being under house arrest. You had to create a vacuum in your head. Let yourself be gently numbed by the sun and the swaying of the palm trees in the breeze … Shut your eyes. Ingrid and Rigaud lived the same sort of life as these people who were forgetting the war, but they kept out of their way and avoided speaking to them. At first, everyone had been astonished by their youth. Were they waiting for their parents? Were they on holiday? Rigaud had replied that Ingrid and he "were on honeymoon", quite simply. And this reply, far from surprising them, had reassured the guests at the Provençal. If young people still went on honeymoon, it meant that the situation wasn't so tragic as all that and that the earth was still going round.

  In the mornings they went down to the beach which stretched below the pine forest between the Casino and the beginning of the road to the Cape. The hotel's private beach, with its pergola and its bathing huts wasn't functioning now "as i
t did in peacetime", as the hall porter put it. A few deck chairs and sunshades were still at the guests' disposal. But they weren't allowed to use the bathing huts until the end of the war. Newcomers wondered whether they weren't committing an offence when they used this beach. They were even a little ashamed of sunbathing. In the first days, Rigaud had to reassure Ingrid, who was always afraid that someone would come and ask them what they were doing there, because she was still suffering from the after-effects of the precarious life she had lived in Paris. He had bought her a pale green swimming costume in a boutique in Juan-les-Pins. And also a pareu, with pastel-coloured printed designs, like the other women wore. They would lie on a pontoon, and as soon as the sun had dried their skin they dived into the sea again. They would swim out, and then return to the beach side by side, swimming on their backs. At the beginning of the afternoon, when the sun was too hot, they would cross the deserted road and walk up the path lined with pines and palm trees that led to the entrance to the Provençal. Often, the hall porter was not at the reception desk. But Rigaud kept their key in his bath-robe pocket. Then there would be the slow ascent in the lift, the dark landings going by, leaving them to imagine the silent, interminable corridors, the rooms which probably contained no more than their bed-frames. As the lift rose, the air became lighter, and they were enveloped in the coolness of the half light. On the fifth floor, the big wrought-iron gate would bang behind them, and then nothing else would break the silence.

  From their balcony they gazed down at the pine forest, and under its dark-green fringe they could make out the white patch of the casino. And along the wall round the hotel, the steep street where nobody went by. Then they closed their shutters – pale-green shutters, the same colour as Ingrid's swimming costume.

  •

  In the evenings, they would cross the square in the pine forest and go and have dinner at the only restaurant in Juan-les-Pins that ignored the restrictions. Customers came there from Nice and Cannes. At the beginning, Ingrid felt ill at ease there.

  The habitués greeted each other from table to table, the men tied their sweaters casually over their shoulders, the women showed their tanned backs and swathed their hair in creole foulards. You could overhear conversations in English. The war was so far away … The restaurant was in a wing of a building near the casino and its tables spilled over on to the pavement. It was said that the patronne – a certain Mademoiselle Cotillon – had had a brush with the law, but that these days she enjoyed "protection". She was very pleasant, and in Juan-les-Pins she was known as the Princesse de Bourbon.

  •

  They went back to the hotel, and on moonless nights a feeling of anxiety descended on them both. Not a single street lamp, not a single lighted window. The Princess de Bourbon's restaurant was still aglow, as if she was the last to dare to defy the curfew. But after a few steps this light disappeared, and they were walking in the dark. The murmur of conversation faded, too. All those people whose presence at the tables reassured them, and whom they saw on the beach during the day, now seemed unreal: walkers-on from a touring company who had got stuck in Juan-les-Pins because of the war and were compelled to play their parts of phoney holidaymakers on the beach and in the restaurant run by a phoney Princesse de Bourbon. The Provençal itself, whose white mass could just be made our in the shadows in the background, was a gigantic pasteboard set.

  And every time they crossed this dark pine forest, Ingrid was suddenly shaken by sobs.

  •

  But they went into the lobby. The glittering light of the chandelier made them blink. The porter was standing behind the reception desk in his uniform. He smiled, and gave them the key to their room. Things regained a little consistence and reality. They found themselves in a real hotel lobby with real walls and a real uniformed porter. Then they went up in the lift. And once again they became a prey to doubt and anxiety when they pressed the button for the fifth floor, as all the buttons for the other floors were covered with sticky tape to make it quite clear that they were not in use.

  At the end of their long ascent in the dark, they came to a landing and a corridor faintly lit by naked bulbs. That was the way it was. They went from light to shade and from shade to light. They had to get used to this world in which everything could fluctuate from one moment to the next.

  •

  In the mornings, when they opened the shutters, a harsh light flooded into the room. It was exactly like the summers of the past. The dark green of the pines, the blue sky, the scent of eucalyptus and oleanders from the Avenue Saramartel which goes down to the beach … In the heat haze, the Provençal's great white façade soared upwards for all eternity and you had the impression that this monument protected you, if you gazed at it from the pontoon, lying there after your swim.

  Just one very small detail was enough to blot this landscape: a dark patch Rigaud had noticed for the first time, late one afternoon, on a bench in one of the paths in the pine forest. Ingrid and he were coming back from a walk on the boulevard along the coast. A man in a city suit was sitting on the bench, reading a newspaper. And in contrast to the dark colour of his suit, his complexion was milky white, like that of someone who never exposes himself to the sun.

  The next morning they were both lying on the pontoon. And Rigaud again noticed this dark patch leaning on the balustrade of the terrace, to the left of the steps leading down to the beach. The man was watching the few people who were sunbathing. Rigaud was the only one who saw him, as the others had their backs to him. For a moment he had wanted to point him out to Ingrid, but he changed his mind. He got her into the sea, they swam even farther out than usual, and then returned to the pontoon, swimming on their backs. Ingrid preferred to stay on the beach, as the pontoon was scorching. Rigaud had gone to fetch her a deck chair from the veranda outside the bathing huts. He went back to Ingrid, who was standing at the edge of the water in her pale-green swimming costume, and looked up towards the balustrade. This time the man seemed to be spying on Ingrid, smoking a cigarette which remained glued to his lips. His face was still as milk white, in spite of the sun. And his suit appeared even darker in contrast with the white veranda and beach huts. Rigaud had spotted him once again at aperitif time, sitting at the far end of the lobby, staring at the guests coming out of the lift.

  •

  So far, he hadn't been able to see his features very clearly. But that same evening, in the Princesse de Bourbon's restaurant, he was able to do so at leisure. The man was sitting at a table near theirs, at the back of the room. A bony face. Blond hair with reddish glints, combed back. His milk-white skin seemed to be pitted over his cheekbones. He was wearing his city suit and casting a beady eye over the tables where the habitués were sitting. It was almost as if he wanted to take a census of them. Finally his gaze came to rest on Ingrid and Rigaud.

  "Are you on holiday?"

  He had tried to soften the metallic tone of his voice as if attempting to worm a shameful secret out of them. Ingrid turned her head towards him.

  "Not exactly," Rigaud said. "We're on honeymoon."

  "On honeymoon?"

  With a nod, he expressed feigned admiration. Then he took a cigarette holder out of his jacket packet, stuck a Caporal in it – he packer was on the table – lit it and took a long puff, which hollowed his cheeks.

  "You're lucky to be on honeymoon."

  "Lucky? Do you really think so?"

  Rigaud regretted the insolent manner m which he had replied. He had stared at the man with wide-open eyes, pretending to be astonished.

  "Given the circumstances, very few people your age can indulge in a honeymoon …"

  Once again that smooth tone. Ingrid remained silent. Rigaud guessed that she was embarrassed and would have liked to leave the restaurant.

  "Can you stand those cigarettes?" Rigaud asked the man, pointing to the packet of Caporal on the table.

  A sudden impulse. It was too late to go back on it now. The man was looking at him, screwing up his eyes. Rigaud hear
d himself say:

  "Don't they make your throat sore? I have some English ones, if you like."

  And he held out a packet of Craven A.

  "I don't smoke English cigarettes," said the man, with a twisted smile. "I can't afford them."

  Then he began to study the menu, and thereafter pretended to ignore Ingrid and Rigaud. He went on indefatigably looking from table to table, as if he wanted to engrave everyone's face in his memory and take notes later on.

  •

  When they were back at the hotel, Rigaud regretted his childishly provocative gesture. He had found the packet of Craven A, empty, in the drawer of the bedside table, left there by a guest from the palmy prewar days. Ingrid and he were leaning over the balcony. Below, the roof of the church and the umbrella pines were silhouetted in the moonlight. The terrace of the Princesse de Bourbon's restaurant was hidden under the foliage.

  "Who can that fellow be?" Ingrid asked.

  "I don't know."

  If he had been on his own, he wouldn't have been at all worried by the presence of that man. Since the beginning of the war he had never been afraid of anything, but he was afraid for Ingrid.