In the Café of Lost Youth

by Patrick Modiano

  •

  I’d just as soon take a walk down the Champs-Élysées some spring evening. They don’t really exist anymore, but, at night, they still maintain the illusion. Perhaps along the Champs-Élysées I might hear your voice call to me by name. The day you sold the fur coat and the cabochon emerald, I still had about two thousand francs left from the money I had received from Béraud-Bedoin. We were rich. The future was ours. That evening, you were kind enough to come and join me up by Étoile. It was summertime, the same summer we met on the quays, you and me and Crossbones, the afternoon I saw the two of you walking towards me. We went to the restaurant on the corner of rue François-1er and rue Marbeuf. They had put tables out on the sidewalk. It was still daytime. The traffic had thinned and we could hear the murmur of voices and the sound of footsteps. Around ten o’clock, as we made our way down the Champs-Élysées, I asked myself if night would ever fall, if we might be experiencing the midnight sun they get in Russia and the northernmost countries. We walked without any specific destination, we had the whole night ahead of us. There were still patches of sunlight under the arches of rue de Rivoli. It was the beginning of summer, we were going to be leaving soon. Where to? We didn’t know yet. Maybe Majorca or Mexico. Maybe London or Rome. The places no longer mattered in the least, they had all blended together into one. The lone goal of our journey was to go to the heart of summer, that place where time stops and the hands of the clock permanently show the same hour: twelve noon.

  By the time we reached the Palais-Royal, night had fallen. We spent a little while on the patio of the Ruc-Univers before continuing on our way. A dog followed us all the way from rue de Rivoli to Saint-Paul. Then he entered the church. We weren’t feeling at all tired, and Louki told me that she felt like she could walk all night. We were crossing a neutral zone just before Arsenal, a few deserted streets that made us wonder if they were uninhabited. On the second floor of a building, we noticed two large illuminated windows. We sat down on a bench opposite them, and we couldn’t help but stare at those windows. It was the red-shaded lamp at the very back of the room that cast that muted light. We could make out a gilt-framed mirror on the left wall. The other walls were bare. I watched for a silhouette to pass behind the windows, but no, there was seemingly no one in that room. We couldn’t tell if it was a living room or a bedroom.

  “We should ring the doorbell,” Louki said to me. “I’m sure someone is expecting us.”

  The bench was in the center of a kind of island formed by the intersection of two streets. Years later, I was in a taxi heading past Arsenal towards the quays. I asked the driver to stop. I wanted to find that bench and that building. I hoped that the two second-floor windows would still be illuminated after all that time. But I very nearly got lost among the numerous small streets that surrounded the walls of the Célestins barracks. That night, I had told her there was no point in ringing the doorbell. No one would be home. And plus, we were just fine there on that bench. I could even hear a fountain gurgling somewhere nearby.

  “Are you sure?” Louki had said. “I don’t hear anything.”

  We were the ones who lived in that apartment. We had forgotten to turn out the light. And we had misplaced the key. The dog from earlier must have been waiting for us. He had fallen asleep in our bedroom and he would remain there, waiting for us until the end of time.

  Later that night, we were walking northward, and so as not to drift too far, we had set a goal: place de la République, although we weren’t certain we were going the right direction. It didn’t really matter, we could always take the Métro back to Argentine if we ended up getting lost. Louki told me she had spent a lot of time in that area when she was younger. Her mother’s friend Guy Lavigne had had a garage nearby. Yes, somewhere near République. We kept stopping at every garage, but it was never the right one. She could no longer find her way. The next time she paid a visit to Guy Lavigne out in Auteuil, she would have to ask him the exact address of his old garage, before he too disappeared. It didn’t seem important, but it was. Otherwise, it was possible to end up without a single reference point in your life. She remembered that her mother and Guy Lavigne used to take her to the Foire du Trône carnival on the Saturday that followed Easter. They walked there, down a never-ending boulevard that looked much like the one we were following. It had to be the same one. But then we must have been moving away from place de la République. On those Saturdays, she walked with her mother and Guy Lavigne all the way to the edge of the Bois de Vincennes.

  It was nearly midnight, and it would be strange to find ourselves at the gates of the zoo. We would be able to make out the elephants in the darkness. But there ahead of us sprawled a brightly lit open space in the middle of which stood a statue. Place de la République. As we drew nearer, music grew louder and louder. A ball? I asked Louki if it was the fourteenth of July. She didn’t know any more than I did. For the last while, the days and nights had all been running one into the next for the both of us. The music was coming from a café a little ways from where the boulevard met rue du Grand-Prieuré. A few customers seated on the terrace.

  It was too late to catch the last Métro. Just beyond the café, a hotel, its door open. A bare lightbulb illuminated a very steep stairwell with black wooden steps. The night clerk didn’t even ask our names. He simply gave us the number of a room on the second floor. “Maybe we could just live here from now on,” I said to Louki.

  A single bed, but it wasn’t too narrow for the two of us. No curtains or shutters on the window. We left it open because of the heat. Below, the music had gone quiet, and we could hear peals of laughter. She whispered in my ear, “You’re right. We should just stay here forever.”

  I felt like we were far from Paris, in a small Mediterranean port. At the same time every morning, we followed the path down to the beach. I still remember the hotel’s address: 2, rue du Grand-Prieuré. Hôtel Hivernia. All throughout the bleak years that followed, whenever someone would ask me my address or telephone number, I would say, “You can always write to me at the Hôtel Hivernia, 2, rue Grand-Prieuré. It will be forwarded to me.” I really should go and pick up all the letters that have been waiting there for me for such a long time, letters that have gone unanswered. You were right, we should have stayed there forever.

  •

  I saw Guy de Vere one last time, quite a few years later. In the street that slopes down toward Odéon, a car came to a halt next to me and I heard someone call me by my former name. I recognized the voice even before I turned around. He leaned his head out the lowered car door window. He smiled at me. He hadn’t changed. Except for slightly shorter hair.

  It was in July, around five o’clock in the evening. It was hot out. We both took a seat on the hood of the car to talk. I didn’t have it in me to tell him that we were only a few yards away from the Condé and the door Louki had always used, the one hidden in the shadows. In any case, that door didn’t exist anymore. Facing the street, there was now a window displaying crocodile handbags, boots, even a saddle and riding crops. The Prince de Condé. A leather shop.

  “Well, Roland, what have you been doing with yourself?”

  It was still the same strong, clear voice, the one that had made the most abstruse texts accessible when he read them to us. I was touched that he remembered me and the name I had gone by in those days. So many people had attended those lectures at Lowendal Square. Some of them only came once, out of curiosity, while others attended religiously. Louki belonged to the latter group. As did I. And yet Guy de Vere hadn’t been in search of disciples. He didn’t in any way consider himself a guru or a mentor, and he had no interest in exerting any sort of control over others. They were the ones who came to him, without him soliciting them. Sometimes it had seemed to us that he would have preferred to be left alone to dream, but he couldn’t refuse those people anything, especially when it came to helping them see more clearly within themselves.

  “And how about you, are you back in Paris now?”

&n
bsp; De Vere smiled at me and shot me a wry look.

  “You haven’t changed a bit, Roland. You still answer a question with another question.”

  He hadn’t forgotten that, either. He had often teased me about it. He had told me that if I had been a boxer, I would have been a master of the feint and parry.

  “I haven’t lived in Paris for quite some time now, Roland. I’ve been living in Mexico. I ought to give you my address.”

  The day I had gone to verify whether or not there was ivy on the ground floor of his former building, I had asked the concierge for Guy de Vere’s new address, on the slim chance that she had it. She had simply replied, “Gone with no forwarding address.” I told him about that pilgrimage to Lowendal Square.

  “You’re incorrigible, Roland, you and your ivy. You were pretty young back when I knew you, weren’t you? How old would you have been?”

  “Twenty.”

  “Well, it seems to me that even at that age, you were off in search of lost ivy. Am I right?”

  His gaze never left me and a cloud of sadness passed across it. We were likely thinking the same thing, but I didn’t dare mention Louki’s name.

  “It’s strange,” I told him. “Back when we used to have our lectures, I went to this café quite often, although it isn’t a café anymore.”

  And I motioned to the leather shop a few yards away from us, The Prince de Condé.

  “Of course,” he said to me, “Paris has changed a lot over the last few years.”

  He studied me, his brows furrowed, as if he were trying to access a distant memory.

  “Are you still working on the neutral zones?”

  The question came out of nowhere and I didn’t understand what he was referring to at first.

  “It was pretty interesting, your text on neutral zones.”

  My God, what a memory. I had forgotten that I made him read that text. One evening after one of the lectures at his place, Louki and I had been the last to leave. I had asked him if he might have a book on the Eternal Return. We were in his office and he hunted through a few of the shelves in his library. He finally found a book with a black and white cover, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same, which he gave to me, and I spent the following several days reading it attentively. The few typed pages about the neutral zones had been in the pocket of my jacket. I wanted to give them to him in order to get his opinion, but I was hesitant. It was only as we were leaving, on the landing outside his door, that I abruptly made up my mind to hand him the envelope I had filled with the scant pages—all without saying a word.

  “You were also very interested in astronomy,” he said. “By dark matter, in particular.”

  I never would have dreamed that he would remember that. I was aware that he had always paid close attention to others, but when it was happening, you didn’t really notice.

  “It’s too bad,” I told him, “that there isn’t a lecture at Lowendal Square tonight, like there used to be . . .”

  My words seemed to surprise him. He smiled at me.

  “And there’s your old obsession with the Eternal Return.”

  By this point we were walking up and down that length of sidewalk, and each time, our path led us past the Prince de Condé leather shop.

  “Do you remember the night the power was out at your place and you gave your lecture in the dark?” I asked him.

  “No.”

  “I’ve got to admit something to you. I was inches away from having a crazy laughing fit that night.”

  “You should have let it out,” he chided me. “Laughter is infectious. We all would have had a laugh in the dark.” He looked at his watch. “I’ve got to get going. I have to pack my suitcases. I’m leaving again tomorrow. And I haven’t even had time to find out what you’re doing with yourself these days.”

  He took a day planner from the inside pocket of his jacket and tore a page from it.

  “I’m giving you my address in Mexico. You really should come see me.”

  He had suddenly adopted a peremptory tone, as if he wanted to take me along with him and save me from myself. And from the present.

  “And what’s more, I’m still giving my lectures over there. Come. I’ll be expecting you.”

  He held out the sheet of paper to me.

  “You’ve got my phone number there as well. This time, let’s not lose touch.”

  Back in the car, he once again leaned his head out the window.

  “Tell me . . . I often think of Louki . . . I never understood why . . .”

  He was overwhelmed by emotion. This man who always spoke without hesitation, so clearly, he was at a loss for words.

  “What I just said is ridiculous. There’s nothing to understand. When we really love someone, we’ve got to accept their role in the mystery. And that’s why we love them. Isn’t it, Roland?”

  He drove off abruptly, most likely to cut short his emotions. And my own. He had time only to say, “See you soon, Roland!”

  I was left on my own in front of the Prince de Condé leather shop. I pressed my forehead to the window in an effort to see if any trace whatsoever remained of the café: a section of wall, the rear door that led to the telephone, the spiral staircase that led to Madame Chadly’s little apartment. Nothing. Everything was stark and featureless, covered with an orange fabric. And the whole neighborhood was like that. At least there was no longer any reason to worry about running into ghosts. The ghosts themselves were dead. No need for concern on the way out of the Métro at Mabillon. No more La Pergola and no more Mocellini lurking in the window.

  I walked with a spring in my step, as if I had arrived in a foreign town on some July evening. I began whistling a Mexican tune, but this fictitious carefree attitude was short-lived. I made my way along the wrought-iron fence that rings the Luxembourg, and the melody from “Ay Jalisco no te rajes” vanished from my lips. A notice was attached to the trunk of one of the great trees whose leaves offer shelter on the way to the entrance to the gardens further along at Saint-Michel. “DANGER. This tree will be cut down soon. It will be replaced by a new one this coming winter.” For a brief second, I thought I was having a bad dream. I stood there, frozen, reading and rereading that death warrant. Someone came over to me and said, “Are you all right, sir?,” then he continued on, likely thrown by my blank stare. In this world where I felt more and more like a holdover, the trees were on death row, too. I continued on my way, trying to think of other things, but it was easier said than done. The image of that notice and that tree, condemned to death, was burned into my brain. I tried to picture the faces of the jury and the executioner. I regained my composure. To comfort myself, I pictured Guy de Vere walking along beside me, repeating in his soft voice, “Of course not, Roland, it’s just a bad dream. People don’t murder trees.”

  I had passed the entrance gate that led to the gardens and was following the boulevard towards Port-Royal. One night, Louki and I had accompanied a boy of about our age along this stretch, someone we had gotten to know a bit at the Condé. He had pointed out the École des Mines buildings on our right, informing us in a sad voice, as if the admission had been weighing heavily on him, that he went to school there.

  “Do you think it’s worth the effort?”

  I had felt that he was seeking encouragement from us to pull the plug. I had told him, “Of course not, my friend, don’t bother with it. Time to get on with your life.”

  He had turned towards Louki. He was waiting for her advice as well. She had explained to him that ever since she had been refused admission to the Lycée Jules-Ferry, she hadn’t put much stock in schools. I think that had managed to convince him. The next day, back at the Condé, he had told us that he was finished with the École des Mines.

  She and I would often take that same route on our way back to her hotel. It was a bit of a detour, but we were in the habit of walking. Was it really out of our way? Well no, not when I think about it, it was more like a straight line heading inland.
At night, all the way down avenue Denfert-Rochereau, it felt as if we were in a provincial town because of the silence and the doors of the religious hospices that came one after another. The other day, I walked along the plane trees and high walls of the road that cuts Montparnasse Cemetery in two. It was also the way to her hotel. I remember that she preferred to avoid it, which is why we usually took Denfert-Rochereau. But towards the end of those days, we were no longer afraid of anything and found that the road that cut through the cemetery had a certain charm to it at night as we passed beneath its canopy of leaves. There were no cars at that hour, and we never saw a soul. I had forgotten to record it on the list of neutral zones. It was more of a boundary. When we reached the end, we entered a land where we were shielded from everything. Last week, it hadn’t been nighttime when I walked there, but rather late afternoon. I hadn’t been back since the days we used to walk down that road together, since I would take it on my way to meet you at the hotel. For a moment, I got the feeling that once I passed the cemetery you would be there. Once I arrived, it would be the Eternal Return. The same routine as always to get the key to your room from the front desk. The same steep stairwell. The same white door with its number: 11. The same anticipation. And then the same lips, the same scent, your hair cascading down the same way.