In the Café of Lost Youth

by Patrick Modiano

  Jean-Pierre Choureau would eventually grow weary. I would answer his telephone calls a few more times, feeding him vague information—all false, of course. Paris is big and it’s quite easy to lose someone in it. Once I got the feeling that I had set him on the wrong track, I would stop taking his calls. Jacqueline could count on me. I would give her the time to put herself out of reach for good.

  At this moment, she too was walking somewhere in this city. Or maybe she was sitting at a table, at the Condé. But she had nothing to fear. I would no longer be at our rendezvous.

  WHEN I was fifteen years old, you would have thought I was nineteen, even twenty. My name wasn’t Louki then, it was Jacqueline. I was even younger than fifteen the first time I took advantage of my mother’s absence to go out. She went to work around nine o’clock in the evening and she didn’t come back before two in the morning. That first time, I had prepared a lie in case the concierge caught me in the stairwell. I was going to tell him that I needed to purchase some medicine from the pharmacy at place Blanche.

  I hadn’t been back to the neighborhood until the night Roland took me, by taxi, to the home of one of Guy de Vere’s friends. We were going there to meet everyone who regularly attended the lectures. We had only recently met at that point, Roland and I, and I wasn’t comfortable saying something when he had the taxi stop at place Blanche. He wanted us to walk a ways. Perhaps he didn’t notice how tightly I held on to his arm. I was overcome by dizziness. I had the feeling that if I crossed the square, I would faint dead away. I was afraid. The way he always talked about the Eternal Return, I’m sure he would have understood. Yes, everything was beginning over again for me. It was as if meeting up with these people was only a pretext, as if Roland had been entrusted with bringing me gently back into the fold.

  I had been relieved when we didn’t go past the Moulin Rouge. And yet my mother had already been dead four years at that point and I had nothing left to worry about. Each time that I would slip out of the apartment at night, in her absence, I walked on the other side of the boulevard, the side that lay in the ninth arrondissement. There wasn’t a single streetlight on that sidewalk. The lightless building that was the Lycée Jules-Ferry, then the façades of apartment buildings, their windows dim, and a restaurant, although it always seemed as if its dining room was kept in perpetual darkness. And, each time, I was unable to stop myself from looking at the Moulin Rouge that lay on the other side of the median. When I had drawn even with the Café des Palmiers and came out onto place Blanche, I still wasn’t terribly reassured. All of those bright lights, once again. One night as I passed the pharmacy, I had seen my mother through the window with some other customers. I had realized that she had finished work earlier than usual and would soon be heading back to the apartment. If I ran, I could make it back before her. I had stationed myself at the corner of rue de Bruxelles to find out which route she would take. But she had crossed the square and had returned to the Moulin Rouge.

  I was often frightened, and to reassure myself I would have gladly gone to see my mother, but I would have been disturbing her at work. Thinking back, I’m certain she wouldn’t have scolded me, because the night she came to pick me up at the Grandes-Carrières police station, she hadn’t offered the least reproach, no threats, no discipline whatsoever. We walked in silence. Halfway across the Caulaincourt bridge, I heard her say, in a detached voice, “My poor little darling,” but I wasn’t sure if she was speaking to me or talking to herself. She waited for me to undress and climb into bed before she came into my room. She sat down at the foot of the bed and remained silent. As did I. Eventually she started smiling. “We’re not very talkative, are we?” she said, and she looked me straight in the eye. It was the first time her gaze had lingered on me so long, and the first time I noticed how light her eyes were, gray, or a washed-out blue. Blue-gray. She leaned down and kissed me on the cheek, or rather I very briefly felt her lips. And still that stare fixed on me, those clear and distant eyes. She turned out the light, and before she closed the door, she told me, “Let’s try not to have any more of that.” I think that’s the only time we ever really connected, and it was so fleeting, so awkward, and yet so strong that I regret it didn’t propel me towards her during the months that followed that night in a way that might have brought about that contact again. But neither of us was a very demonstrative person. Perhaps as far as I was concerned, she had adopted that seemingly indifferent attitude because she had no illusions whatsoever when it came to me. She likely figured there wasn’t much use in getting her hopes up considering how alike we were.

  But none of that ever crossed my mind at the time. I was living in the present without much in the way of soul-searching. All of that changed the night Roland made me return to the old neighborhood I had been avoiding. I hadn’t set foot in it since my mother’s death. The taxi had turned onto rue de la Chaussée-d’Antin and, way down at the end, I could see the dark bulk of the Église de la Sainte-Trinité, like a gigantic eagle standing guard. I felt ill. We were getting close to the boundary. I told myself there was still a chance. Maybe we were going to turn right. But no. We drove straight on ahead, we passed the Square de la Trinité, we climbed the hill. At the red light before we arrived at place de Clichy, I very nearly threw open my car door to escape. But I couldn’t do that to him.

  It was a while later, as we walked along rue des Abbesses towards the building that was our destination, that I regained my composure. Fortunately, Roland hadn’t noticed a thing. Since then, I’ve been disappointed that the two of us didn’t spend more time walking in that neighborhood. I would have liked to show him around, to take him to see the place I lived in not quite six years ago, although it seems so long ago now, like it was in another life. After my mother died, only one link remained to tie me to that period, Guy Lavigne, a friend of my mother’s. My understanding was that he was the one who had paid our rent. I still see him from time to time. He works in a garage in Auteuil. But we rarely speak about the past. He’s about as talkative as my mother. When they picked me up and took me to the police station, they asked me a number of questions I was required to answer, but at first I did it with such reluctance that they said to me, “Well now, you aren’t very talkative, are you?,” just like they would have to my mother or Guy Lavigne had either of them ever been in their clutches. I wasn’t used to people asking me questions. I was actually astonished that they had any interest in me in the first place. The second time, at the Grandes-Carrières police station, I had lucked into a nicer cop than the first one and I felt more comfortable with the way he asked me questions. For once, it was possible to confide in someone, to talk about myself, and someone sitting across from me was interested in my story. I was so unaccustomed to such a situation that I couldn’t find the words to answer. Other than very specific questions. For example, “Where did you go to school?” The Daughters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul on rue Caulaincourt, and the École Communale on rue Antoinette. I was ashamed to tell him that I hadn’t been accepted to Lycée Jules-Ferry, but I took a deep breath and made the admission. He leaned toward me, and in a soft voice, he said, “That’s Lycée Jules-Ferry’s bad luck now, isn’t it?” And that surprised me so greatly that at first I felt like laughing. He was smiling at me and looking me right in the eye, a gaze as clear as my mother’s, but more tender, more attentive. He also asked me about my family situation. I began to trust him and I managed to give him a few scant details: My mother came from a village in Sologne, where a Mr. Foucret, the manager of the Moulin Rouge, owned an estate. That was how she, at a very young age, had secured a job at that establishment. I didn’t know who my father was. I had been born there, in Sologne, but we had never gone back. That’s why my mother had always told me, “There’s nothing left of our home there, not even the foundations.” He listened to me and took the occasional note. For me, it was a completely new sensation; as I gave him all of those meager details, it was as if a weight was lifted from me. None of it concerned me any l
onger, I was talking about someone else, and I was relieved to see that he was taking notes. If everything was written in black and white, that meant that it was over, the same way names and dates are inscribed on headstones. And I spoke more and more quickly, the words came tumbling out: the Moulin Rouge, my mother, Guy Lavigne, the Lycée Jules-Ferry, Sologne. I had never been able to talk to anybody. What a relief I felt as all those words came rushing from my mouth. A segment of my life was drawing to a close, a life that had been imposed on me. From then on, I would be the one to decide my lot in life. Everything would begin anew as of today, and in order to set things in motion, I would have preferred it if he had crossed out everything he had just written. I was ready to give him other details and other names, to tell him about an imaginary family, the sort of family I might have had in my dreams.

  Around two in the morning, my mother came to fetch me. He told her that it wasn’t terribly serious. He was still fixing me with his attentive stare. Juvenile Vagrancy, that’s what had been written in their logbook. A taxi was waiting for us outside. When he had questioned me about my schooling, I had forgotten to tell him that, for a couple of months, I had attended a school a little further down the very sidewalk that led past the police station. I would wait at the canteen until my mother came to pick me up towards the end of the afternoon. Sometimes she would turn up late, and I would wait, sitting on a bench on the median. It was while waiting there one day that I had first noticed the street had a different name on either side of the intersection. She had come to pick me up near the school that night as well, except this time at the police station. An odd little street, that one, with its two names, always seeming to want to play a role in my life.

  My mother shot an anxious look at the taxi meter from time to time. She instructed the taxi driver to stop at the corner of rue Caulaincourt, and when she dug the coins out of her change purse, I understood that she had just enough to cover the fare. We did the rest of the trek on foot. I walked faster than her and was leaving her behind. Then I stopped so that she could catch up. From the bridge that overlooked the cemetery, we could see our apartment building down below us. We stopped there for a long while, and I got the impression she was catching her breath. “You walk too fast,” she told me. I have since had a realization. Perhaps I was trying to incite her to go a bit beyond the sheltered life she led. If she hadn’t died, I think I might have succeeded in helping her expand her horizons.

  In the three or four years that followed, it was the same itineraries, the same streets, although I continued to go farther and farther. Those first few times, I hadn’t even walked as far as place Blanche. I hardly even went all the way around the block. First that tiny cinema on the corner of the boulevard, a little ways down from our apartment building. The late show began at ten o’clock. Other than on Saturdays, it was empty. The films were set in far-off lands like Mexico and Arizona. I paid no attention to the plot, only the scenery interested me. Once I was back outside, I was left with a curious amalgam of Arizona and the boulevard de Clichy in my head. The coloring of the illuminated signs and the neon were the same as that in the film—orange, emerald green, midnight blue, sandy yellow—colors that were too violent and gave me the feeling I was still in the movie or in a dream. A dream or a nightmare, it depended on the evening. A nightmare at first, because I was afraid and I wasn’t bold enough to go much farther. And that wasn’t because of my mother. If she had caught me all alone on the boulevard at midnight, it’s likely she wouldn’t have chastised me. She would have told me to go back to the apartment, her voice calm, as if she wasn’t the least bit surprised to see me outside at such a late hour. I think I usually walked on the opposite sidewalk, the one that lay hidden in the shadows, because I felt that my mother could no longer do anything for me.

  The first time they picked me up was in the ninth arrondissement, in the all-night bakery at the foot of rue de Douai. It was already one in the morning. I was standing at one of the tall tables eating a croissant. At that time of night, there are always some strange people in that bakery, and they often come over from the café across the street, the Sans-Souci. Two plainclothes cops came in to do an ID check. I didn’t have any identification and they wanted to know how old I was. I decided to tell them the truth. They made me get into the police van alongside a tall blond guy wearing a sheepskin jacket. He seemed to know the cops. Perhaps he was one himself. At one point, he offered me a cigarette, but one of the plainclothes cops stopped him, saying, “She’s too young. They’re bad for your health.” They seemed pretty familiar with each other.

  In an office inside the police station, they asked me for my first and last name, my date of birth and address, and they made note of them in a logbook. I explained that my mother worked at the Moulin Rouge. “Well then, we’re going to have to give her a call,” said one of the two plainclothesmen. The one writing in the logbook gave him the telephone number for the Moulin Rouge. He dialed it, looking me straight in the eye. I felt very embarrassed. He said, “Could I please speak to Madame Geneviève Delanque?” He was still giving me a stern look and I lowered my eyes. And then I heard, “No. No need to disturb her.” He hung up. Now he was smiling at me. He had wanted to frighten me. “We’ll let it slide this time,” he told me, “but next time, I’ll have to notify your mother.” He got up and we left the police station. The blond fellow in the sheepskin jacket was waiting on the sidewalk. They made me get into the backseat of a car. “Hop in, I’ll give you a lift back home,” the plainclothes cop told me. Now he was being very casual with me as well. The blond guy in the sheepskin got out of the car at place Blanche, in front of the pharmacy. It felt quite strange to find myself in the backseat of a car driven by a cop. He came to a halt before the front door of our apartment. “Go get some sleep. And miss, no more of that, please.” His tone had grown official once again. I think I mumbled a “Thank you, sir.” I walked towards the coach entrance, and as I was about to open it, I turned around. He had killed the engine and didn’t take his eyes off me for a second, as if he wanted to make sure I actually went into the apartment building. I took a look out of my bedroom window. The car was still parked there. I waited, my forehead glued to the window, curious to see how long he would stay there. I heard the sound of the engine before the car turned the corner and disappeared. I once again experienced the feeling of anxiety that often overwhelmed me at night and was even more intense than fear—the sensation of being completely on my own, without anyone I could turn to. Not my mother, not anyone. I would have liked him to stay all night, on guard in front of the building, all night long and every night like a sentinel, or even better, watching over me like a guardian angel.

  Other nights, however, the anxiety dissipated, and I impatiently waited for my mother’s departure so I could go out. I went down the stairs with my heart pounding, as if I were going on a date. There was no longer any need to lie to the concierge, to come up with excuses, or to ask permission. To whom? And what for? I wasn’t even certain that I would come back to the apartment. Once outside, I didn’t take the sidewalk that lay hidden in the shadows, but instead the one that led right past the entrance to the Moulin Rouge. The lights seemed even more violent than those in the movies at the Mexico. A feeling of intoxication came over me, so subtle and light. I had experienced a similar sensation the night I drank a glass of champagne at the Sans-Souci. I had my whole life ahead of me. How had I turned into such a wallflower, curled up in a little ball? And what was I afraid of? I would meet people. I just had to go into any café.

  I knew a girl, a little older than me, named Jeannette Gaul. One night, in the grips of an awful migraine, I had gone into the place Blanche pharmacy to buy some aspirin and a vial of ether. As I went to pay, I realized that I hadn’t brought any money. A girl in a raincoat with short blond hair, whose eyes—green eyes—had met mine earlier, stepped forward toward the cash register and paid for me. I was embarrassed, I didn’t know how to thank her. I suggested she come back to the apartment w
ith me so I could pay her back. I always kept a little money in my night table. She said, “No, no, next time.” She also lived in the neighborhood, but a little farther down. She looked at me, her green eyes smiling. She invited me to go get a drink with her near where she lived, and we ended up in a café—or a bar, rather—on rue de La Rochefoucauld. Not at all the same ambiance as the Condé. The walls were paneled in light wood, as were the bar and the tables, and a sort of stained-glass window looked out onto the street. Subdued lighting. Behind the bar stood a blond woman in her forties that this Jeannette Gaul must have known pretty well judging by the way she casually called her Suzanne. She served us two Pimm’s Royales.

  “Cheers,” Jeannette Gaul said to me. She was still smiling at me and I got the impression her green eyes were probing me, trying to guess what was going on in my head. She asked me, “Do you live around here?”

  “Yes. A little farther up.”

  There were several different zones in the neighborhood, of which I knew all the boundaries, even if they were invisible. As I was intimidated and I didn’t really know what to say to her, I added, “Yeah, I live farther up. Here we’re only on the lower slopes.” She furrowed her brow.

  “The lower slopes?” Those two words intrigued her, although she hadn’t lost her smile. Was it the effect of the Pimm’s? My shyness melted away. I explained to her what I meant by “the lower slopes,” an expression I had learned along with all the other schoolchildren in the neighborhood. The lower slopes begin at the Square de la Trinité. They don’t stop climbing until you get to the Château des Brouillards and Saint-Vincent Cemetery, and then they dip back down towards the borderlands past Clignancourt, way up north.