Patrick Modiano - Little Jewel

‘Did you have a nice walk?’ she asked.

Once again, she looked like those cold, mysterious blondes who glide through old American movies. Then Monsieur Valadier came out. He was also very calm. He was wearing an elegant black suit and there were big scratches down one of his cheeks, most likely from fingernails. Véra Valadier’s fingernails? She kept hers rather long. The two of them were standing next to each other in the doorway, with their smooth faces of murderers who would remain unpunished, for lack of evidence. It looked as if they were posing for a photo, not for an official identity shot but for the cameras at the beginning of a soirée, as the guests arrive.

‘Did mademoiselle explain about the dog?’ asked Véra Valadier. Her tone was distant, not at all like the voices you hear around Rue de Douai, where she’d told me she was born. With another first name.

‘Dogs are sweet,’ she said. ‘But they’re very dirty.’

‘Your maman is right,’ Michel Valadier added, in the same tone as his wife. ‘It would really not be a good idea to have a dog in the house.’

‘When you’re a big girl, you’ll be able to have all the dogs you like…But not here and not now.’

Véra Valadier’s voice had changed. She sounded bitter. Perhaps she was imagining a time in the future — time passes so quickly — when her daughter would be grown up and when she, Véra, would roam the corridors of the metro forever and ever, in a yellow coat.

The little girl didn’t say a thing. She merely stared, wide-eyed.

‘You see, with dogs you get diseases,’ Monsieur Valadier said. ‘And, well, they bite, too.’

Now he had a shifty look and an odd way of speaking, like an illegal street peddler keeping an eye out for the police.

I was finding it hard to remain quiet. I would gladly have stood up for the little girl, but I didn’t want the conversation to get poisonous and for her then to get scared. Nevertheless, I couldn’t stop myself from looking Michel Valadier straight in the eye. ‘Did you hurt yourself, sir?’

I touched my finger to my cheek, the same spot where the long scratches ran down his cheek.

‘No…Why?’ he muttered.

‘You really should put some disinfectant on that. It’s like a dog bite. You can catch rabies.’

This time, I could tell he was out of his depth. And Véra Valadier was, too. They were looking at me warily. Under the glare of the chandelier, thrown off course, they were nothing but a suspicious couple who had just been rounded up in a raid.

‘I think we’re late,’ she said, turning to her husband.

She had recovered her cold voice. Michel Valadier checked his bracelet watch.

‘Yes, we must go,’ he agreed, also feigning indifference.

‘There’s a slice of ham for you in the fridge,’ she said to the little girl. ‘I think we’ll be home late tonight…’

The little girl drew nearer to me and took my hand, squeezing it like someone who wanted to be guided through the darkness.

‘It would be better if you left,’ Madame Valadier said. ‘She has to get used to being by herself.’ She took the little girl by the hand and pulled her away. ‘Mademoiselle is going to leave now. You’re to have dinner and put yourself to bed.’

The little girl looked at me once more, her eyes wide, as if she would never again be astonished by anything. Michel Valadier had moved in closer, and the little girl was now standing motionless between her parents.

‘See you tomorrow,’ I said to her.

‘See you tomorrow.’

But she didn’t seem very sure about it.

Outside, I sat down on a bench beside the path that runs along the Jardin d’Acclimatation. I had no idea what I was waiting for. After a while, I saw Madame and Monsieur Valadier leave the house. She was wearing a fur coat; he had on his navy-blue coat. They didn’t walk close together. When they reached the black car, she got in the back seat and he took the wheel, as if he were her chauffeur. The car headed off towards Avenue de Madrid, and I realised that I would never know anything about these people, neither their real first names nor their real surnames, nor why a troubled look sometimes came over Madame Valadier, nor why there were no chairs in Monsieur Valadier’s study, nor why the address on his business card was different from that of his office at home. And the little girl? She, at least, was not a mystery to me. I intuited what she might have been feeling. I had been, more or less, the same sort of child.

A light came on in her room on the second floor. I was tempted to go and keep her company. I thought I saw her shadow at the window. But I didn’t ring the doorbell. I was feeling so miserable around that time that I scarcely felt up to helping someone else. What’s more, the business with the dog had reminded me of an incident in my own childhood.

I walked to the Porte Maillot, relieved to get out of the Bois de Boulogne. During the day, when I was with the little girl at the edge of the skaters’ lake, I could just about bear it. But, now that it was night, I felt a sensation of emptiness which was far more horrific than the vertigo that overwhelmed me on the pavement in Rue Coustou, outside Zone Out.

On my right, the first trees marked the entrance to the Bois de Boulogne. One November evening, a dog went missing in that park; it was something I would be haunted by for the rest of my life, at times when I least expected it. During sleepless nights and lonely days, and even during summer. I should have explained to the little girl how dangerous it was, this business of having a dog.

When I entered the schoolyard earlier and saw her sitting on the bench, I thought back to another schoolyard. I was the same age as the little girl and there were older boarders in that schoolyard, too. They took care of us. Every morning, they helped us to get dressed and, in the evening, to get ready for bed. They mended our clothes. My ‘big girl’ was called Thérèse, like me. She had dark hair and blue eyes, and a tattoo on her arm. As I recall, she looked a bit like the pharmacist. The other boarders, and even the nuns, were wary of her, but she was always kind to me. She stole chocolate from the kitchen and sneaked it to me at night in the dormitory. During the day, she sometimes took me to a studio, not far from the chapel, where the big girls were learning how to iron.

One day, my mother came to collect me. She told me to get in the car and I sat on the front bench seat, next to her. I think she told me that I was never going back to that boarding school. There was a dog on the back seat. And the car was parked almost at the same spot where I’d been knocked down by the truck, not long before. The boarding school can’t have been far from the Gare de Lyon. I remember, when Jean Borand used to wait for me outside the boarding school on Sundays, we would walk to his garage. And the day my mother took me away in the car with the dog, we went past the Gare de Lyon. In those days, the streets were deserted and I had the impression that the two of us in the car were the only people in Paris.

That was the day I went with her, for the first time, to the huge apartment near the Bois de Boulogne, the day she showed me MY ROOM. Before then, the few times Jean Borand took me to see her, we went by metro to the Place de l’Étoile, where she was still living in a hotel. Her room was smaller than my room in Rue Coustou. In the metal box, I found a telegram addressed to her at that hotel and in her real name: Suzanne Cardères, Hôtel San Remo, 8 Rue d’Armaillé. I was relieved every time I discovered the actual address of those places I only vaguely remembered, but which appeared in my nightmares over and over again. If I knew their exact location and studied their façades, I was convinced they would become less threatening.