In the Café of Lost Youth

by Patrick Modiano

  I experienced a strange feeling that morning as I walked through Cambronne Square, because it had always been night when we had gone to see Guy de Vere. I pushed open the gate and told myself that there was no way I would run into him after all this time. No more Vega bookstore on boulevard Saint-Germain and no more Guy de Vere in Paris. And no more Louki. But there, running along the ground-floor window, was the ivy, just as it had been in my dream. That disturbed me. Had the other night really been a dream? I lingered a moment, standing motionless at the window. I was hoping I would hear Louki’s voice. She would call out my name once again. No. Nothing. Silence. Yet I had the impression that since those days at Guy de Vere’s, no time had passed. Instead it had stood still, frozen into some sort of eternity. I remembered the text I had been trying to write back when I knew Louki. I had called it On Neutral Zones. There was a series of transitional zones in Paris, no-man’s-lands where we were on the border of everything else, in transit, or even held suspended. Within, we benefited from a certain kind of immunity. I might have called them free zones, but neutral zones was more precise. One evening at the Condé, I had asked Maurice Raphaël his opinion, knowing that he was a writer. He shrugged his shoulders and shot me a sardonic smile. “That’s for you to figure out, my friend. I don’t really understand where you’re trying to go with this. I’d say stick with ‘neutral’ and leave it at that.” Cambronne Square, as well as the neighborhood that lay between Ségur and Dupleix, and all of those streets that led to the footbridges of the above-ground Métro, they all belonged to a neutral zone, and it wasn’t by chance that I had met Louki there.

  I’ve long since lost that text. Five pages that I had typed on a typewriter lent to me by Zacharias, a customer at the Condé. On the dedication page, I had written, “For Louki of the Neutral Zones.” I don’t know what she thought of my work. I don’t think she had read it all the way through. It was a somewhat off-putting text, a compiled list of the names of the streets, arrondissement by arrondissement, that demarcated the neutral zones. Sometimes a block of houses, sometimes a much larger area. Upon reading the dedication one afternoon at the Condé, she said to me, “You know, Roland, we could go and live a week in each one of these areas you’re talking about.”

  •

  Rue d’Argentine, where I rented a hotel room, was definitely in one of the neutral zones. Who would have been able to find me there? The people I saw there, few and far between, must have been considered dead as far as the state was concerned. One day while flipping through a newspaper, under the heading “Legal Notices,” I came across a short entry with the title “Declaration of Absence.” Someone named Tarride had never returned home and no one had heard from him in thirty years, so the district court had declared him an “absentee.” I had shown the article to Louki. We were in my room on rue d’Argentine. I told her that I was certain the guy lived on my street, along with dozens of others who had also been declared “absentees.” Incidentally, the buildings neighboring my hotel all bore the inscription “furnished apartments.” Ports of call where no one was asked for identification and where hiding out was easily done. That day, we celebrated La Houpa’s birthday with the others at the Condé. They poured us plenty to drink. Back in my room afterwards, we were a little tipsy. I opened the window. At the top of my lungs, I called out, “Tarride! Tarride! . . .” The street was deserted and the name resonated strangely. I even had the impression that it echoed around the neighborhood. Louki came and stood beside me, and she too yelled out, “Tarride! Tarride! . . .” A childish joke that made us laugh. But I ended up believing that this man would show himself and we would resurrect all of the absentees who haunted my street. After a while, the hotel’s night watchman came and knocked at our door. With a voice from beyond the grave, he said, “A little silence, if you please.” We heard him go back down the stairs with a heavy step. After that, I became convinced that he too was an absentee, just like Tarride, and that the two of them were hiding out in the furnished apartments of rue d’Argentine.

  I thought about it every time I went down the street on my way back to my room. Louki had told me that before she married, she had also lived in several different hotels in the area, the first a little farther north, on rue d’Armaillé, then on rue de l’Étoile. In those days, we must have passed on the street without ever noticing each other.

  •

  I remember the night she decided she wouldn’t go home to her husband anymore. At the Condé that day, she had introduced me to Adamov and Ali Cherif. I was hauling around the typewriter that Zacharias had lent me. I wanted to start On Neutral Zones.

  I placed the typewriter on the small pitch-pine table in my room. I already had the opening sentence in my mind: “Neutral zones have at least one advantage: They are only a starting point and we always leave them sooner or later.” I was aware that once I sat down in front of the typewriter, everything would be much less straightforward. I would likely end up crossing out that first sentence. And the following one. And yet I found myself full of courage and resolve.

  She was expected back in Neuilly for dinner, but at eight o’clock she was still stretched out on the bed. She didn’t even switch on the bedside lamp. Eventually I let her know it was time.

  “Time to what?”

  From the tone of her voice, I understood that she would never again take the Métro out to Sablons. A long silence passed between us. I sat down in front of the typewriter and tapped my fingers lightly on the keys.

  “We could go to the movies,” she said to me. “That would kill some time.”

  All we needed to do was cross to the other side of avenue de la Grande-Armée and the Studio Obligado cinema was right there. That evening, I don’t think either of us paid the least bit of attention to the film. I don’t remember there being many spectators in the theater. The odd person that a district court had declared “absentee”? And what about us? Who were we? I turned and looked at her now and again. She wasn’t watching the screen, her head was down and she seemed lost in thought. I was worried she would get up and go back to Neuilly. But no, she stayed until the end of the film.

  Once we had left Studio Obligado, she seemed relieved. She told me that it was already too late for her to go back to her husband’s place. He had invited a few of his friends out for dinner. There, end of story. There wouldn’t be any more dinners in Neuilly, not ever again.

  We didn’t go back to my room right away. We spent a long time wandering around that neutral zone where we had both taken refuge at different times. She wanted to show me the hotels where she had lived, on rue d’Armaillé and rue de l’Étoile. I’m trying to recall what she said to me that night. It was all rather confused. Nothing but snippets. And it’s too late to find the details I’m missing now, or those that I’ve somehow forgotten. Quite young, she had left her mother and the neighborhood they lived in together. Her mother was dead. She still had a friend from those days that she saw from time to time, a girl named Jeannette Gaul. On two or three occasions we had dinner with Jeannette Gaul on rue d’Argentine, in the run-down restaurant next to my hotel. A blonde with green eyes. Louki told me that people called her Crossbones because of her gaunt face, which stood out in contrast to her generous curves. Later on, Jeannette Gaul would visit her at the hotel on rue Cels, and I ought to have raised an eyebrow the day I walked in on them in her room and the pungent smell of ether was in the air. And then one breezy, sunny day on the quays, across from Notre-Dame, I was browsing through the books in the used-book stalls as I waited for the two of them. Jeannette Gaul had said that she needed to meet someone on rue des Grands-Degrés, someone who was bringing her “a little snow.” The word “snow” made her grin, considering it was the middle of July. In one of the booksellers’ green bins, I came across a pocket book entitled The Beautiful Summer. Yes, it was a beautiful summer, because to me it seemed endless. And I spotted them, all of a sudden, on the quay’s other sidewalk, coming from the direction of rue des Grands-Degrés. Louki waved at me
. They were walking towards me through the sunshine and the silence. I often see them that way in my dreams, the two of them, down by Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre. I think I was happy that afternoon.

  I didn’t understand why they called Jeannette Gaul “Crossbones.” Because of her high cheekbones and slanted eyes? And yet nothing about her face evoked death. In those days, she was still in that period of her life when youth is more resilient than all else. Nothing—not nights of insomnia, not snow, as she put it—left the slightest mark on her. But for how long? I should have been more wary of her. Louki didn’t take her along to the Condé, nor to Guy de Vere’s lectures, as if that girl was her dark little secret. I only ever heard them speak of their mutual past in my presence one time, and only cryptically. I got the feeling they had a number of shared secrets. One day as Louki and I stepped out of the Métro at Mabillon—a November day, around six o’clock in the evening, night had already fallen—she recognized someone seated at a table in the large front window of La Pergola. She cringed slightly. A man of about fifty with a stern face and slicked brown hair. He was nearly facing our direction and could have easily seen us as well. But I think he was talking to someone beside him. She took me by the arm and led me to the other side of rue du Four. She told me that she had known the guy a few years earlier, through Jeannette Gaul, and that he ran a restaurant in the ninth arrondissement. She hadn’t ever expected to run into him here on the Rive Gauche. She seemed quite anxious. She had used the words “Rive Gauche” as if the Seine were a dividing line separating two different cities, some sort of iron curtain. And the man at La Pergola had somehow managed to cross over that boundary. His presence there, right in front of Mabillon station, really concerned her. I asked her his name. Mocellini. And why was she avoiding him? She didn’t give me a clear answer. Quite simply, the guy dredged up unpleasant memories. When she severed ties with people, it was for good, they were dead to her. If this man was still alive and there was a chance she might run into him, then it might be best to move to another neighborhood.

  I tried to reassure her. La Pergola wasn’t like the other cafés in the area, and its rather shady clientele wasn’t at all in keeping with the neighborhood full of students and bohemians through which we were walking. She had told me that she had known this Mocellini in the ninth arrondissement? Well that was precisely it, La Pergola was pretty much an annex to Pigalle that just happened to be in Saint-Germain-des-Prés without anyone really knowing why. It would suffice to take the other sidewalk and avoid La Pergola. No need to move to another neighborhood.

  I ought to have insisted on her telling me more, but I knew more or less how she would respond, if she even responded at all. I had been around plenty of Mocellinis during my childhood and teenage years, more than enough of those people about whom, years later, we are left to wonder what kind of racket they were involved in. Hadn’t I seen my own father in the company of that sort of person often enough? I could look into this Mocellini character after all these years. But what good would come of it? I wouldn’t learn anything about Louki that I didn’t know or hadn’t already guessed. Can we really be held responsible for those questionable characters, not at all of our choosing, whose paths crossed ours as we were growing up? Am I responsible for my father and for all of those shadowy figures who spoke to him with hushed voices in hotel hallways or in the back rooms of cafés, who carried around suitcases whose contents I would never know? That evening, after our unpleasant encounter, we continued on down the boulevard Saint-Germain. When we entered the Vega bookstore, she seemed relieved. She had a list of a few titles Guy de Vere had recommended to her. I’ve held on to that list. He used to give it to everyone who attended his lectures. “There is no need to read them all at the same time,” he would say. “Instead, choose a single book and read a page of it each night before you go to sleep.”

  The Celestial Alter Ego

  The Friend of God from the Oberland

  The Hymn of the Pearl

  The Pillar of Dawn

  The Twelve Saviors of the Treasure of Light

  The Subtle Organs or Centers

  The Secret Rose Garden

  The Seventh Valley

  Small booklets with pale green covers. At first, in my room on rue d’Argentine, we would read them aloud, she and I taking turns. It was a kind of self-discipline, for when we weren’t feeling very motivated. I don’t believe we read those publications in the same fashion. She hoped to discover some meaning to life within them, whereas it was the sound of the words and the music of the sentences that captivated me. That evening, at the Vega bookstore, she seemed to have forgotten all about this Mocellini and the bad memories he conjured up. Thinking back, I realize that it wasn’t only a code of conduct that she sought by reading the pale green booklets and the biography of Louise of the Void. She wanted to escape, to run farther and farther away, to break violently with her everyday life, to finally be able to breathe. And then there were also the panic attacks, from time to time, at the thought that those shadowy figures you had left behind might find you and ask you to account for yourself. It was necessary to hide in order to avoid these blackmailers, hoping that one day you would be beyond their reach, once and for all. Way up there, in the fresh mountain air. Or the salty air of the sea. I understood those feelings all too well. I too still carried the bad memories and the nightmarish figures of my childhood around with me, and I hoped that one day I would finally be able to give the finger to the whole lot of them and move on.

  I told her that it was foolish to change sidewalks. I ended up convincing her. From then on, when we got off the Métro at Mabillon, we no longer avoided La Pergola. I even dragged her inside the café one night. We stood at the bar and we waited resolutely for Mocellini. And all the rest of the shadows of the past. When she was with me, she wasn’t afraid of anything. No better way to make ghosts dissipate than to look them right in the eye. I suspect she had begun to regain her self-confidence and I doubt that she would even have flinched if Mocellini had turned up. I suggested she use the line I had grown accustomed to using in such situations, saying as firmly as possible, “I’m afraid not, sir. That’s not me. I’m sorry, you must be mistaken.”

  We waited in vain for Mocellini that evening. And we never again saw him behind that window.

  •

  That February, the month she stopped going home to her husband, it snowed a great deal, and for us, on rue d’Argentine, it was almost as if we were stranded in a remote Alpine lodge. I was coming to realize that it could be difficult to live in a neutral zone. Honestly, it made sense to move closer to the center. The strangest thing about rue d’Argentine—although I had taken an inventory of several other streets in Paris that were quite similar—was that it didn’t correspond to the arrondissement where it was situated. It didn’t correspond to anything; it was completely disconnected. With that layer of snow, it opened onto the void on either side. I’ll have to try to find the list of streets within Paris that are not only neutral zones but also black holes. Or rather, patches of dark matter, which renders everything invisible and which even withstands ultraviolet light, infrared, and X-rays. Yes, in the long run, we will likely all be swallowed up by the dark matter anyway.

  She didn’t want to remain in a neighborhood that was so close to where her husband lived. Barely two Métro stations away. She was looking for a hotel on the Rive Gauche, in the vicinity of the Condé or near Guy de Vere’s apartment. That way she could make the journey on foot. Personally, I was afraid to return to the other side of the Seine, towards the sixth arrondissement of my youth. So many painful memories . . . But what good is there in talking about it, seeing that these days the sixth only exists for those who run the luxury shops that line its streets and the rich foreigners who have bought up its apartments. Back then, I could still find traces of my childhood there: the dilapidated hotels of rue Dauphine, the Sunday-school hall, the Café Odéon where the odd deserter from an American base did his shady dealings, the dark stairs lea
ding to Vert-Galant, and an inscription on the grimy wall of rue Mazarine that I read each time I made my way to school: WORK IS FOR SUCKERS.

  When she rented a room a little to the south of there, down towards Montparnasse, I stayed behind near Étoile. I wanted to avoid running into the ghosts on the Rive Gauche. Other than the Condé and the Vega bookstore, I preferred not to spend too much time in my old neighborhood.

  •

  And then there was the question of money. She had sold a fur coat that had most likely been a gift from her husband. All she was left with was a raincoat that was much too light to hold up against the winter. She read the want ads, just as she had done shortly before she was married. And once in a while, she went to see a mechanic in Auteuil, an old friend of her mother’s who would help her out. I’m embarrassed to admit the sort of work I did myself in those days. But why hide the truth?

  A fellow named Béraud-Bedoin lived in the block of houses in which my hotel was located. At 8, rue de Saïgon, to be exact. A furnished apartment. I ran into him quite often, and I can no longer recall when we first ended up having a conversation. A shifty fellow with wavy hair who was always dressed impeccably and gave off an air of world-weary indifference. One winter afternoon as the snow fell on Paris, I sat across from him at a table in the cafe-restaurant on rue d’Argentine. I admitted to him that I wanted to be a writer when he asked me the usual question: “So, what do you do?” As for Béraud-Bedoin, I never really understood what exactly it was that he did. That afternoon, I accompanied him to his “office”—“just around the way,” he told me. Our steps left footprints in the snow. We walked straight ahead until we hit rue Chalgrin. I’ve since consulted an old directory from that year to see exactly where Béraud-Bedoin “worked.” Sometimes you remember certain episodes of your life and you need proof that you haven’t dreamed them. Fourteen, rue Chalgrin. Commercial Publishers of France. That must be it. Right now I haven’t the courage to go down there and see if I recognize the building. I’m too old. He didn’t invite me up to his office that day, but we met the following day, same time, same café. He offered me some work. It consisted of writing several brochures about various companies or organizations for which he was in some capacity the promoter or the advertising agent, brochures that would then be printed by his publishing house. He would pay me five thousand francs. His name would appear on the texts. I was to act as his ghostwriter. He would supply all the information. And that is how I ended up working on a dozen short texts, The Hot Springs of La Bourboule, Tourism on Brittany’s Emerald Coast, The History of the Hotels and Casinos of Bagnoles-de-l’Orne, as well as monographs about the Jordaan, Seligmann, Mirabaud, and Demachy banks. Each time I sat down at my writing table, I was worried I would fall asleep out of sheer boredom. But it was simple enough, just a matter of reshaping Béraud-Bedoin’s notes. I had been surprised the first time he took me to the head office of Commercial Publishers of France: a single windowless ground-floor room. But at the age I was then, you don’t ask too many questions. You just trust in life. After two or three months, all contact with my publisher suddenly ceased. He had only given me half the agreed-upon sum, but it was more than enough for me. Maybe one day—why not tomorrow, if I’ve got the strength—I should go on a pilgrimage to rue de Saïgon and rue Chalgrin, a neutral zone from which both Béraud-Bedoin and Commercial Publishers of France had evaporated that winter along with the snow. But then again, now that I think about it, I haven’t really got the courage. I even wonder if those streets still exist, or if they haven’t finally been absorbed by the dark matter once and for all.