Out of the Dark

by Patrick Modiano

  ‘I think I might leave this house as it is and move in here permanently….’

  He bit into his sandwich. I thought of the cellophane-wrapped suit. The one he was wearing now was badly rumpled. There was a button missing from the coat as well, and his shoes were spattered with mud. Despite his maniacal attention to cleanliness and his tireless battle against germs, some days he gave the impression that he was giving up the fight, and that little by little he was going to become a derelict.

  He finished gulping down his sandwich. He stretched out on the cot. He reached over and rummaged in his black briefcase, which he’d set on the floor next to the bed. He pulled out a key ring and removed one of the keys.

  ‘Here… Take it…. And wake me in an hour. You can go for a walk in Regent’s Park.’

  He rolled onto his side, facing the wall, and let out a long sigh.

  ‘I recommend a visit to the zoo. It’s quite close.’

  I stood motionless at the window for a moment, in a patch of sunlight, before I noticed that he’d fallen asleep.

  Chapter 20

  One night as Jacqueline and I were coming back to Chepstows Villas, there was a ray of light shining from under Linda’s door. The Jamaican music played once again until very late, and the odor of marijuana invaded the apartment, as it had in our first days here.

  Peter Rachman used to throw parties in his bachelor apartment on Dolphin Square, a block of buildings by the Thames, and Linda brought us along. There we saw Michael Savoundra, who had been out of town, meeting with producers in Paris. Pierre Roustang had read the script and found it interesting. Pierre Roustang. Another faceless name floating in my memory, but whose syllables have kept a certain resonance, like all the names you hear when you’re twenty years old.

  There were many different kinds of people at Rachman’s parties. In a few months, a fresh wind would blow over London, with new music and bright clothes. And I believe that on Dolphin Square I met a few of the people who were soon to become important personalities in a city suddenly grown young.

  I never wrote in the morning anymore, only from midnight on. I wasn’t trying to take advantage of the tranquillity and silence. I was only putting off the moment when I would have to begin work. And I managed to overcome my laziness every time. I had another reason for choosing that hour to write: I was terrified that the panic I had so often felt those first few days we were in London would come back.

  Jacqueline undoubtedly had the same fear, but she needed people and noise around her.

  At midnight, she would leave the apartment with Linda. They would go to Rachman’s parties or to out-of-the-way spots around Notting Hill. At Rachman’s you could meet great numbers of people who would invite you to their parties as well. For the first time in London – said Savoundra – you didn’t feel that you were out in the provinces. There was electricity in the air, they said.

  I remember our last walks together. I accompanied her to Rachman’s house on Dolphin Square. I didn’t want to go in and find myself among all those people. The idea of returning to the apartment frightened me a little. I would have to start putting the sentences down on the white page again, but I had no choice.

  Those evenings, we’d ask the taxi driver to stop at Victoria Station. And from there we would walk to the Thames through the streets of Pimlico. It was July. The heat was suffocating, but whenever we walked along the iron fences of a park, a breeze washed over us, smelling of privet or linden.

  We would say goodnight under the portico. The clusters of apartment buildings on Dolphin Square stood out against the moonlight. The shadows of the trees were cast onto the sidewalk, and the leaves stood motionless. There was not a breath of air. Across the quai, beside the Thames, there was a neon sign advertising a restaurant on a barge, and the doorman stood at the edge of the gangplank. But apparently no one ever went into that restaurant. I used to watch the man standing still for hours in his uniform. There were no more cars driving along the quai at that hour, and I had finally arrived at the tranquil, desolate heart of the summer.

  Back in Chepstows Villas I wrote, stretched out on the bed. Then I turned off the light and waited in the dark.

  She would come in about three o’clock in the morning, always alone. Linda had disappeared again, sometime before.

  She would softly open the door. I pretended to be sleeping.

  And then, after a few days, I would stay awake until dawn, but I never again heard her footsteps in the stairway.

  Chapter 21

  Yesterday, Saturday the first of October 1994, 1 took the métro back to my apartment from the Place d’Italie. I had gone looking for videos in a shop that was supposed to have a better selection than the others. I hadn’t seen the Place d’Italie for a long time, and it seemed very different because of the skyscrapers.

  I stood near the doors in the métro car. A woman was sitting on the bench in the back of the car, on my left, and I’d noticed her because she was wearing sunglasses, a scarf tied under her chin, and an old beige raincoat. She looked like Jacqueline. The elevated métro followed along the Boulevard Auguste-Blanqui. Her face seemed thinner in the daylight. I could clearly make out the shape of her mouth and her nose. It was her, I gradually became convinced of it.

  She didn’t see me. Her eyes were hidden behind the sunglasses.

  She stood up at the Corvisart station and I followed her onto the platform. She was holding a shopping bag in her left hand and walking wearily, almost staggering, not at all the way she used to. I don’t know why, but I’d dreamt of her often lately: I saw her in a little fishing port on the Mediterranean, sitting on the ground, knitting endlessly in the sunlight. Next to her, a saucer where passers-by left coins.

  She crossed the Boulevard Auguste-Blanqui and turned onto the Rue Corvisart. I followed her along the street, downhill. She stepped into a grocery store. When she came out, I could tell by the way she was walking that her shopping bag was heavier.

  On the little square you come to before the park there was a café with the name Le Muscadet Junior. I watched her through the front window. She was standing at the bar, her shopping bag at her feet, and pouring herself a glass of beer. I didn’t want to speak to her, or follow her any farther and learn her address. After all these years, I was afraid she wouldn’t remember me.

  And today, the first Sunday of fall, I’m in the métro again, on the same line. The train passes above the trees on the Boulevard Saint-Jacques. Their leaves hang over the tracks. I feel as though I’m floating between heaven and earth, and escaping my current life. Nothing holds me to anything now. In a moment, as I walk out of the Corvisart station, with its glass canopy like the ones in provincial train stations, it will be as if I were slipping through a crack in time, and I will disappear once and for all. I will follow the street downhill, and maybe I will happen to run into her. She must live somewhere in this neighborhood.

  Fifteen years ago, I remember, I had this same feeling. One August afternoon, I had gone to the town hall of Boulogne-Billancourt to pick up a birth certificate. I had walked back by way of the Porte d’Auteuil and the avenues that run alongside the horse track and the Bois de Boulogne. For the moment, I was living in a hotel room near the quai, just beyond the Trocadéro gardens. I didn’t know whether I would stay on permanently in Paris or, to continue the book I had begun on ‘seaport poets and novelists,’ spend some time in Buenos Aires looking for the Argentine poet Hector Pedro Blomberg. I had been intrigued by a few lines of his verse:

  Schneider was killed last night

  In the Paraguayan woman’s bar

  He had blue eyes and a very pale face…

  A sunny late afternoon. Just before the Porte de la Muette, I’d sat down on a bench in a small park. This neighborhood brought back childhood memories. Bus 63, which I used to catch at Saint-Germain-des-Prés, stopped at the Porte de la Muette, and you had to wait for it about six o’clock at night after spending the day in the Bois de Boulogne. But there was no point in summ
oning up other more recent memories. They belonged to a previous life I wasn’t sure I’d ever lived.

  I had taken my birth certificate from my pocket. I was born during the summer of 1945, and one afternoon, about five o’clock, my father had gone to the town hall to sign the papers. I could see his signature on the photocopy they’d given me, an illegible signature. Then he had returned home on foot through the deserted streets of that summer, with the crystalline sound of bicycle bells in the silence. And it was the same season as today, the same sunny late afternoon.

  I’d put the birth certificate back in my pocket. I was in a dream, and I had to wake up. The ties connecting me to the present were stretching. It would really have been too bad if I’d ended up on this bench in a sort of amnesia, progressively losing my identity, unable to give my address to passers-by. … Fortunately I had that birth certificate in my pocket, like dogs that become lost in Paris but carry their owner’s address and phone number on their collar. … And I tried to explain to myself why I was feeling so unfixed. I hadn’t seen anyone for several weeks. No one I had tried to call was back from vacation yet. And I was wrong to choose a hotel so far from the center of town. At the beginning of the summer I had only planned to stay there a very short time, and then to rent a small apartment or studio. Doubt had crept into my mind: Did I really have any desire to stay in Paris? As long as the summer lasted I would be able to feel as if I were only a tourist, but at the beginning of fall the streets, the people, and the things would revert to their everyday color: gray. And I wasn’t sure I still had the courage to fade into that color once again.

  It would seem that I had come to the end of a period of my life. It had lasted fifteen years, and now I was going through a slack time before beginning again. I tried to transport myself back fifteen years earlier. Then, too, something had come to an end. I was drifting away from my parents. My father used to meet me in back rooms of cafés, in hotel lobbies, or in train station buffets, as if he were choosing these transitory places to get rid of me and to run away with his secrets. We would sit silendy, facing each other. From time to time he would give me a sidelong glance. As for my mother, she spoke to me louder and louder. I could tell by the abrupt way her lips moved, because there was a pane of glass between us, muting her voice.

  And then the next fifteen years fell apart: a few blurry faces, a few vague memories, ashes. … I felt no sadness about this. On the contrary, I was relieved in a way. I would start again from zero. Of that whole grim succession of days, the only ones that still stood out were from when I knew Jacqueline and Van Bever. Why that episode rather than another? Maybe because it had remained unfinished.

  The bench I was sitting on was in the shade now. I crossed the little lawn and sat down in the sun. I felt light. I was responsible to no one, I had no need to mumble excuses or lies. I would become someone else, and my metamorphosis would be so complete that no one I’d met over the past fifteen years would be able to recognize me.

  I heard the sound of an engine behind me. Someone was parking a car at the corner of the park and the avenue. The engine shut off. The sound of a car door closing. A woman was walking past the iron fence that surrounded the park. She was wearing a yellow summer dress and sunglasses. She had light brown hair. I hadn’t quite made out her face, but I immediately recognized her walk, a lazy walk. She slowed down, as if unsure of which direction to take. And then she seemed to find her way. It was Jacqueline.

  I left the park and followed her. I didn’t dare catch up with her. Maybe she wouldn’t remember me clearly. Her hair was shorter than fifteen years before, but that walk couldn’t belong to anyone else.

  She went into one of the apartment buildings. It was too late to speak to her. And in any case, what would I have said? This avenue is so far from the Quai de la Tournelle and the Café Dante….

  I walked by the entryway to the apartment building and made a note of the number. Was this really where she lived? Or was she paying a call on some friends? I began to wonder if it was possible to recognize people from behind by the way they walk. I turned around and headed back toward the park. Her car was there. I was tempted to leave a note on the windshield with the telephone number of my hotel.

  At the garage on the Avenue de New-York, the car I had rented the day before was waiting for me. I had come up with this idea in my hotel room. The neighborhood seemed so empty this August in Paris, and I felt so alone when I went out on foot or in the métro that I found the idea of having a car at my disposal comforting. I would feel as though I could leave Paris at any moment, if I wanted to. For the past fifteen years I’d felt like a captive of others and myself, and all my dreams were the same: dreams of escape, of departing trains that, unfortunately, I always missed. I never made it to the station. I was lost in the corridors of the métro, and when I reached the platform the métro never came. I also dreamt of walking out my door and climbing into a big American car that glided through deserted streets toward the Bois de Boulogne, its engine running silently, and I felt a sensation of lightness and well-being.

  The attendant gave me the key, and I saw his surprise when I started out in reverse and nearly ran into one of the gasoline pumps. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to stop at the next red light. That was how it happened in my dreams: the brakes had given out, and I was running all the red lights and driving down one-way streets in the wrong direction.

  I managed to park the car in front of the hotel and asked the concierge for a directory. I looked up her address, but there was no Jacqueline at that number. She’d probably got married in the past fifteen years. But whose wife was she?

  Delorme (P.)

  Dintillac

  Jones (E. Cecil)

  Lacoste (René)

  Walter (J.)

  Sanchez-Cirés

  Vidal

  I only had to call each of these names.

  In the phone booth I dialed the first number. It rang for a long time. Then someone answered. A man’s voice:

  ‘Yes… Hello?’

  ‘Could I speak to Jacqueline?’

  ‘You must be mistaken, monsieur.’

  I hung up. I no longer had the nerve to dial the other numbers.

  I waited for night to fall before leaving the hotel. I sat down behind the wheel and started the car. I knew Paris well, and I would have taken the most direct route to the Porte de la Muette if I’d been on foot, but in this car I was navigating blind. I hadn’t driven for a long time, and I didn’t know which streets were one-way. I decided to drive straight ahead.

  I went far out of my way along the Quai de Passy and the Avenue de Versailles. Then I turned onto the deserted Boulevard Murat. I could have run the red lights, but it pleased me to obey them. I drove slowly, unhurriedly, like someone cruising along a seaside parkway on a summer night. The stoplights were speaking only to me, with their mysterious and friendly signals.

  I stopped in front of the entrance to the apartment building, on the other side of the avenue, under the branches of the first trees in the Bois de Boulogne, where the streetlights created an area of semidarkness. The two swinging doors of the entryway, with their ironwork and glass, were lit up. So were the windows on the top floor. They were open wide, and I could make out a few silhouettes on one of the balconies. I heard music and the murmur of conversation. Several cars came and parked on the street in front of the building, and I was sure that the people getting out of them and stepping into the entryway were all headed for the top floor. At one point, someone leaned over the balcony and called out to two silhouettes walking toward the building. A woman’s voice. She was telling the other two the floor number. But it wasn’t Jacqueline’s voice, or at least I didn’t recognize it. I decided not to stay there any longer spying on them, and to go upstairs. If it was Jacqueline’s party, I didn’t know how she would react to the sight of someone she hadn’t heard from in fifteen years walking into her apartment unannounced. We’d only known each other for a short while: three or four months. Not much
compared to fifteen years. But surely she hadn’t forgotten those days. … Unless her present life had erased them, in the same way that the blinding beam from a spotlight throws everything outside its path into the deepest shadows.

  I waited for more guests to arrive. This time there were three of them. One of them waved toward the balconies on the top floor. I caught up with them just as they entered the building. Two men and a woman. I said hello. It seemed clear to them that I was also invited upstairs.

  We went up in the elevator. The two men spoke with an accent, but the woman was French. They were a little older than me.

  I forced myself to smile. I said to the woman:

  ‘It’s going to be a very nice time, up there.…’

  She smiled as well.

  ‘Are you a friend of Darius?’ she asked me.

  ‘No. I’m a friend of Jacqueline.’

  She-seemed not to understand.

  ‘I haven’t seen Jacqueline for a long time,’ I said. ‘Is she well?’

  The woman frowned.

  ‘I don’t know her.’

  Then she exchanged a few words in English with the two others. The elevator stopped.

  One of the men rang the doorbell. My hands were sweating. The door opened and from inside I heard a hum of conversation and music. A man with brown, swept-back hair and a dusky complexion was smiling at us. He was wearing a beige suit of heavy cotton.

  The woman kissed him on both cheeks.

  ‘Hello, Darius.’

  ‘Hello, my dear.’

  He had a deep voice and a slight accent. The two men also greeted him with a ‘Hello, Darius.’ I shook his hand without speaking, but he didn’t seem surprised by my presence.

  He led us through the entryway and into a living room with open bay windows. There were guests standing here and there in small groups. Darius and the three people I had come up with in the elevator were heading toward one of the balconies. I followed close behind them. They were stopped by a couple at the edge of the balcony, and a conversation started up.