Paris Nocturne

by Patrick Modiano

  She realised that I’d seen her scar and she held her hand pressed flat against her knee to hide it. I wanted to talk to her about innocuous things. Was she still studying or had she already found a job? She explained that she had been working as a typist in an office called Opéra Intérim. All of a sudden she spoke naturally and without any of the affectation she had when we talked about the doctor. I ended up convincing myself that, before coming across him, she had been a perfectly simple girl. And I regretted not having met her then.

  I asked her how long she had been going to the meetings. Almost a year. At first, it was difficult, she didn’t understand a lot of it. She knew nothing about philosophy. She had left school before the baccalauréat, at fifteen. She felt that she wasn’t good enough and this feeling threw her into a ‘crisis of despair’. Perhaps those words were a way of making me understand why she had the scar on her wrist. Dr Bouvière had helped her overcome this lack of confidence. It had been painful, but, thanks to him, she had managed to get through it. She was truly grateful to him for helping her get to a level that, alone, she would never have been able to reach.

  Where had she met him? Oh, in a café. She was eating a sandwich before going back to work at the office. He was preparing one of his classes that he gave at the Hautes Études. When he found out she was a typist, he asked her to type up a text for him. I was about to tell her that I had met Bouvière for the first time in a café as well. But I was afraid of bringing up a painful topic. Perhaps she knew of the existence of the woman with the fur-lined raincoat, the one who said: ‘Next time, you won’t forget my refills, will you.’ What if this woman was the cause of the scar on her wrist? Or was it just Bouvière, whose love life at first seemed rather strange to me…

  I wanted to know what stop she was getting off at. Petits-Champs—Danielle Casanova. My ticket was for Gare du Luxembourg, but that didn’t matter. I had decided to stay with her until she got off. She was heading for Opéra Intérim, but soon, she said, she would be leaving that job. The doctor had promised her ‘full-time work’: typing up his class notes and articles, arranging his meetings, and preparing notifications and memos to send out to the different groups. She was happy to have a real job that finally gave her life some meaning.

  ‘So you’re going to devote yourself entirely to the doctor?’ The question slipped out, and I immediately regretted it. She stared at me, a certain steeliness in her pale-blue eyes. I wanted to make up for my tactlessness with a more general remark: ‘You know, gurus don’t always realise how much power they hold over their followers.’ She softened her gaze. I got the impression she was no longer focused on me and was lost in her thoughts.

  ‘You think so?’ she asked. I was moved by how much confusion and candour there was in her question. A real job that would finally give her life some meaning…In any case, she had wanted to end it, her life, judging by the scar on her wrist. I would have loved her to confide in me. I dreamed, for a moment, that on the bus she brought her face close to mine and spoke at length up close to my ear so that no one else could hear.

  Once more, she looked at me suspiciously. ‘I don’t agree with you,’ she said abruptly. ‘Personally, I need a guru…’ I nodded. I had no response to give her. We had arrived at the Palais-Royal. The bus passed in front of the Ruc-Univers where I had often sat with my father, out on the terrace. He never said anything either, and we parted without breaking the silence. A lot of congestion. The bus lurched along. I should have taken the opportunity to ask her questions quickly and to learn more about this girl, Geneviève Dalame, but she seemed preoccupied. All the way to Petits-Champs—Danielle-Casanova, we didn’t exchange a single word. And then we got off the bus. On the pavement, she shook my hand distractedly, with her left hand, the one with the watch and the scar. ‘See you at the next meeting,’ I said. But at the meetings after that, she always ignored my presence. She walked up Avenue Opéra and I quickly lost sight of her. There were far too many people about at that hour.

  LAST NIGHT, I dreamed for the first time about one of the saddest experiences of my life. When I was seventeen years old, in order to get rid of me, my father called the police one afternoon, and a police van was waiting for us in front of the apartment block. He handed me over to the superintendent, saying that I was a ‘thug’. I would rather forget this experience but, in my dream last night, a detail that had been erased with all the rest came back and rattled me, forty years on, like a time bomb. I’m sitting on a bench at the back of the police station, waiting, with no idea what they’re going to do with me. Every now and again I would fall into a half-sleep. From midnight onwards, I frequently hear the sound of a car engine and doors slamming. Police officers push a motley group into the room, some of them well dressed, others who look more like homeless people. A round-up. They give their names. Gradually they disappear into a room; I can only see the wide-open door. The last one to present herself to the fellow tapping at the typewriter is a young woman, with chestnut hair, dressed in a fur coat. Several times the police officer makes a mistake spelling her name, and she repeats wearily: JACQUELINE BEAUSERGENT.

  Before she goes into the room next door, our eyes meet.

  I WONDER IF, on the night when the car knocked me over, I hadn’t just accompanied Hélène Navachine to her train at Gare du Nord. Whole sections of our lives end up slipping into oblivion and, sometimes, tiny little sequences in between as well. And on this strip of old film, spots of mould cause shifts in time and give the impression that two events occurring months apart took place on the same day or even simultaneously. How can any sense of chronology be established as we watch these truncated images scroll past before us, overlapping chaotically in our memories, or following one after the other, sometimes slowly, sometimes jolting, in the middle of blanks. It leaves my mind reeling.

  It appears I must have been walking back from Gare du Nord that night. If not, why would I have found myself sitting on a bench so late at night, near Square de la Tour Saint Jacques, in front of the night bus station? A couple was also waiting at the station. The man started speaking to me in an aggressive tone. He wanted me to go with them, him and the woman, to a hotel. The woman said nothing and seemed embarrassed. He took me by the arm and tried to pull me along. He pushed me towards her. ‘She’s nice, isn’t she? And you haven’t seen everything yet.’ I tried to get away from him, but he wouldn’t let me go. Each time, he’d grab me by the arm. The woman smiled contemptuously. He must have been drunk; he thrust his face into mine when he spoke to me. He didn’t smell of alcohol, but of a strange eau de toilette, Aqua di selva. I shoved him away violently with my elbow. He turned to me, open-mouthed, crestfallen.

  I started down Rue de la Coutellerie, a small, deserted street that runs at an angle just before the Hôtel de Ville. Over the years since then—and even as recently as today—I have returned to this street to try to understand the uneasiness that it caused me the first time. The feeling of unease is still there. Or rather, the feeling of slipping into a parallel world, outside time. All I have to do is walk along this road to realise that the past is gone for good, without really knowing which present I exist in. It’s a simple through road that cars roar down at night. A forgotten street that no one has ever thought much about. That night, I noticed a red light on the left-hand side. The place was called Les Calanques. I went in. Light came from a paper lantern hanging from the ceiling. Four people were playing cards at one of the tables. A brown-haired man with whiskers stood up and came over to me. ‘For dinner, sir? On the first floor.’ I followed him up the stairs. Here, too, only one table was occupied, also by four people, two women and two men—close to the bay window. He showed me to the first table on the left, at the top of the stairs. The others took no notice of me at all. They were talking quietly, murmurs and occasional laughter. Gifts lay open on the table, as if they were celebrating one of their birthdays or Christmas or New Year’s Eve. On the red tablecloth was the menu. I read: Fish Waterzooi. The names of the other dishes w
ere written in tiny letters that I couldn’t make out under the bright, almost white light. Next to me, there were stifled bursts of laughter.

  FISH WATERZOOI. I wondered who the regulars of this place could be. Members of a brotherhood who passed on the address to one another in hushed voices or, as time had no meaning in this street, had these people lost their way and were now gathered around a table for eternity? I no longer knew how I ended up here. I was probably uneasy about Hélène Navachine leaving. And it was a Sunday night, and Sunday nights leave strange memories, like brief interludes of nothingness in our lives. You had to go back to school or to the barracks. You waited on the platform of a station whose name you can’t remember. A little later, you slept badly under the blue night-lights in a dormitory.

  And now, there I was at Les Calanques sitting at a table covered with a red tablecloth, and fish waterzooi was on the menu. Over by the window, there were stifled bursts of laughter. One of the two men had put on a black astrakhan hat. His glasses and thin French face contrasted with the Russian or Polish lancer’s hat. A shapka. Yes, it was called a shapka. He leaned over to the blonde woman sitting next to him to kiss her on the shoulder, but she didn’t let him. The others laughed. With the best will in the world I would not have been able to join in their laughter. If I’d gone over to their table, I don’t believe they would have seen me and, if I’d spoken to them, they wouldn’t even have heard the sound of my voice. I tried to hold on to concrete details. Les Calanques, 4 Rue de la Coutellerie. Perhaps my uneasiness came from the topographical position of the street. It led down to the large buildings of the police headquarters on the banks of the Seine. There was no light in any of the windows of those buildings. I stayed sitting at the table, to delay the moment when I’d end up alone again in that area. Even the thought of the lights of Place du Châtelet gave me no comfort. Nor the thought of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois further along the deserted quays. The other man had taken off his shapka and was mopping his brow. No one came to take my order. But I would have been incapable of swallowing a thing. Fish Waterzooi in a restaurant called Les Calanques…There was something unsettling about this combination. I was less and less sure that I could overcome the distress of Sunday nights.

  *

  Outside, I wondered if I ought to go and wait for the night bus again. But I was overcome with panic at the prospect of going back to my hotel room alone. The Porte d’Orléans neighbourhood suddenly seemed bleak, perhaps because it reminded me of a recent past: the silhouette of my father walking away towards Montrouge as if to meet a firing squad, and of all our missed meetings at the Zeyer, the Rotonde and the Terminus in this hinterland…That was the time of evening I would have most needed Hélène Navachine’s company. I would have found it reassuring to go back to my room with her and we could even have made the journey on foot through the dead Sunday-night streets. We would have laughed harder than the fellow in the shapka and his friends earlier at Les Calanques.

  I tried to muster some courage by telling myself that not everything was that gloomy in the Porte d’Orléans neighbourhood. On summer days there, the great bronze lion would sit under the foliage and each time I looked at him from a distance, his presence on the horizon reassured me. He kept watch over the past, but also over the future. That night, the lion would be a landmark for me. I trusted this sentinel.

  I quickened my pace as far as Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois. When I reached the arcades of Rue de Rivoli, it was as if I had suddenly been woken up. Les Calanques… The guy in the shapka who tried to kiss the blonde woman… Walking the length of the arcades, I felt as though I had reached open air again. To the left was the Palais du Louvre and, just up ahead, the Tuileries Gardens of my childhood. As I made my way towards Place de la Concorde, I would try to picture what was on the other side of the railings in the darkness: the first ornamental lake, the open-air theatre, the merry-go-round, the second ornamental lake…Just a few more steps and I would breathe in the sea air. Straight ahead. And the lion at the end, seated, keeping watch, in the middle of the crossroad…That night, the city was more mysterious than usual. I had never experienced such a profound silence around me. Not a single car. A moment later, I would cross Place de la Concorde without a thought about green or red lights, just as one would cross a prairie. I was in a dream again, but a more peaceful one than earlier at Les Calanques. The car appeared just as I reached Place des Pyramides and the pain in my leg told me I was about to wake up.

  IN THE ROOM at the Mirabeau Clinic, after the accident, I had time to think things over. First of all, I remembered the dog that had been run over one afternoon when I was a child; then an episode from the same period came back to me little by little. I think I’d avoided dwelling on it until then. Only the smell of ether would bring it back to me occasionally, that monochromatic smell that carries you to a fragile tipping point between life and death. Coolness and the impression of finally breathing in the open air, but also, sometimes, the weight of a shroud. The previous night, at the Hôtel-Dieu, when the fellow put a muzzle over my face to send me to sleep, I remembered that I had gone through it all before. The same night, the same accident, the same smell of ether.

  It was outside a school. The playground looked out onto an avenue on a slight incline, lined with trees and houses, but I no longer knew if they were mansions, country houses or detached suburban houses. Throughout my childhood, I had stayed in so many different places that I ended up getting them confused in my mind. My memory of this avenue had perhaps become mixed up with that of an avenue in Biarritz or of a sloping road in Jouy-en-Josas. During the same period, I had lived in both places, and I think the dog was run over on Rue Docteur-Kurzenne, in Jouy-en-Josas.

  I was leaving class at the end of the afternoon. It must have been winter. It was dark. I was waiting on the pavement for someone to come and collect me. Soon there was no one else left. The school gate was closed. There was no light at the windows. I didn’t know the way home. I tried to cross the avenue, but as soon as I stepped off the pavement a van braked suddenly and knocked me down. My ankle was injured. They laid me down in the back of the van under the tarpaulin. One of the two men from the van was with me. As the engine started up, a woman got in. I knew her. We lived in the same house. I can still see her face. She was young, about twenty-five, blonde or light brown hair, a scar on her cheek. She leaned over me and held my hand. She was out of breath, as if she had been running. She was explaining to the man next to us that she was late because her car had broken down. She said to him that she came from Paris. The van stopped alongside the railings of a garden. One of the men carried me and we crossed the garden. She kept hold of my hand. We went into the house. I was laid down on a bed. A room with white walls. Two nuns leaned over me, their faces taut in their white wimples. They put the same black muzzle over my nose as the one at the Hôtel-Dieu. And before falling asleep, I smelled the monochromatic odour of ether.

  *

  That afternoon, once I’d left the clinic, I followed the quay towards Pont de Grenelle. I was trying to remember what had happened back then, when I woke up at the convent. After all, the white-walled room where I had been taken looked like the one at the Mirabeau Clinic. And the smell of ether was the same as at the Hôtel-Dieu. That could help me get to the bottom of it. They say that smells bring back the past best, and the smell of ether always had a curious effect on me. It seemed to be the very essence of my childhood, but as it was bound up with sleep and the numbing of pain, the images that it unveiled clouded over again almost simultaneously. It was surely because of this that my childhood memories were so confused. Ether made me both remember and forget.

  Outside school, the van with the tarpaulin, the convent…I searched for other details. I could see myself next to the woman in a car: she opened a door, the car went down a driveway…She had a room on the first floor of the house, the last one at the end of the corridor. But these fragments of memory were so vague that I couldn’t hold on to them. Only her face was clear,
with the scar on her cheek, and I was truly convinced that it was the same face as the one from the other night, at the Hôtel-Dieu.

  Going along the quay, I came to the corner of Rue de l’Alboni, at the spot where the overground metro intersects the road. The square was a little further on, at right angles to the road. I stopped, on a whim, in front of a huge building with a black wrought-iron glass door. I was tempted to go through the porte-cochère, to ask the concierge for Jacqueline Beausergent’s floor, and if she did indeed live there, to ring at her door. But it really wasn’t like me to show up unannounced at people’s houses. I had never asked for help or requested anything from anyone.

  How much time had passed between the accident outside the school and the one the other night at Place des Pyramides? Fifteen years, if that. Both the woman from the police van and the one at the Hôtel-Dieu seemed young. We don’t change much in fifteen years. I climbed the steps up to Passy metro station. Waiting for the train on the platform of the little station, I searched for clues that could tell me if this woman from Square de l’Alboni was the same as the one fifteen years ago. And I would have to put a name to the place with the school, the convent and the house where I must have lived for a while, where she had her room at the end of the corridor. It was during the time when we went to stay in Biarritz and Jouy-en-Josas. Before? In between the two? In chronological order, first it was Biarritz then Jouy-en-Josas. And after Jouy-en-Josas, back to Paris and memories that became clearer and clearer, because I had reached what they call the age of reason, around seven years old. Only my father would have been able to give me some vague details, but he had vanished without a trace. So it was up to me to work it out, and that seemed perfectly natural to me anyway. The metro crossed the Seine towards the Left Bank. It passed alongside façades whose every lit window seemed an enigma to me.