Patrick Modiano: Young Once

“You’ve already recorded them?”

“Yes. There was someone… Georges… Georges Bellune, who recorded them for me.”

“Bellune? The one who—”

A phone call interrupted him.

“No. Don’t put anyone through.”

He hung up.

“It’s sad, Bellune’s story. I think he maybe worked here for a while. Did you know him well?”

“Yes.”

He had taken the flexi-disc and put it on a record player next to his desk. Then he took her over to a large gray sofa.

“We’ll be more comfortable here, while we listen…”

Before sitting down next to her, he went over to the leather-padded door and bolted it shut.

The disc had been played so many times that the songs sounded worse and worse to Odile. Her voice was almost inaudible. Bellune had told her once that flexi-discs get worn out fast if you play them too much. Like life, he had added.

She dreaded the moment when the record would stop. She would have to stand up and say goodbye, as usual. She felt that she was worn out too. She let herself sink into the silence and the comfort of this pale-colored office: gray carpet, light wood, gauze curtains reaching the bottom of the bay windows, blue lampshade.

“They’re nice, your songs. Very nice. Of course it will be a little hard to make a record right away…”

He put his hand on her shoulder and she didn’t move. Fine fingers, surely with manicured nails.

“But you could sing them at a club. After that, we’ll see. I’ll try to set something up tomorrow. That’s a promise. After tomorrow…”

He unbuttoned her blouse and she didn’t resist. Then she lay on her stomach and he slipped off her skirt and panties and massaged her thighs. She felt disgusted when she remembered his overly well-groomed fingers. She stared straight ahead, her chin on the arm of the sofa. The lights of the avenue looked blurred through the gauze curtains like the contours of the furniture and the things in the room. It was raining outside. Here, at least, she was sheltered from the storm. All she had to do was not move and, as Bellune used to say, in an expression that she particularly liked, melt into the scenery.

Well, if this guy could help her… He smelled of a kind of eau de toilette whose scent remained in her memory, and much later, when she thought back to this time in her life, the smell came back to her along with the memories of her waits in the lobbies of record companies, the subways at rush hour, the station hall at Gare Saint-Lazare, the rain, and the radiator in her room that gave off too much heat because the crank to adjust it was broken off.

•

The tree-lined street that the garage was on stretched out before Louis like a country lane leading to a château or the edge of a forest. According to Bejardy, no one knew whether the street was in the seventeenth arrondissement, in Neuilly, or in Levallois, and Bejardy liked this lack of clarity.

Louis ate dinner with Odile in a restaurant at Porte de Villiers. Its sign read: À LA MARTINIQUE. Along the walls, on the faience tiles, sparkled a landscape of palm trees, sand, and emerald-colored ocean. Around nine o’clock, he left for his job.

It was not really a garage but a hangar, with an ocher-colored structure rising up beside it, its ground floor accessible directly from the hangar through an iron door. A cement staircase led up to a room on the second floor, narrow but very long. There were rows of glass cabinets along the walls, with files in them, and a magisterial desk presided over the middle of the room. Louis, looking through its drawers, which were mostly empty, had found a few sheets of stationery with the letterhead Paris Automobile Transport Company, rue Delaizement, 9 bis, and an old business card for Roland de Bejardy, 3, avenue Alphand, Paris, 16th arr., KLÉ-08-63. There were two leather armchairs and a sofa, and a telephone on the desk — the old kind, black, on a round base.

What did his work consist of? Opening the hangar doors whenever he heard the bell ring. This required no great physical effort since the doors slid open easily. Someone would drive one of the cars out of the hangar, or else bring back another. On some nights, no one rang the bell at all; on others, there were a lot of comings and goings for him to note down. Always the same faces: a man with brown hair and a mustache; two blond men, one of them with curly hair, a chubby face; a man older than the others, with a crew cut and round steel-rimmed glasses. Others whom Louis paid no attention to. He closed the doors again after they had come or gone. At the desk, he answered the phone, and the voices — maybe they belonged to the men who rang the bell at night — told him on what day and at what time he should expect which car, and Louis wrote the information down in a datebook that he showed to Bejardy later.

At first he was curious and asked questions. Bejardy explained that the business rented out “chauffeured vehicles,” but that his other “activities” did not leave him time to manage this one. Louis had noticed that, along with the large American cars, there were often Mercedes of all kinds, and no sooner had someone parked them in the hangar than someone else came to take them out.

As he got used to the routine, he stopped asking questions. It was a night watchman’s job and he had to keep himself busy until morning. Bejardy had shown him, in one of the cabinets, some large volumes bound in red leather: a complete collection of issues of a sports magazine. And Louis, leafing through them, had discovered photographs of his father competing in six-day races or sprints. Bejardy had given him permission to cut out the photos. So Louis bought an album to glue the pictures into, in chronological order, as well as every article with the least mention of his father, down to lists of racers in which his name appeared.

Odile would spend the night on the sofa with him, and often they would not answer the phone when it rang. She would bring him something to eat — a sandwich or a bar of chocolate. They made plans for the future. If she ever succeeded in recording an album, or if she got a job in a nightclub, then he wouldn’t need to work here anymore. But for now, his night watchman salary was their only source of income.

When he was alone, he cut out photographs and articles, glued them into his album, and wrote down each one’s date with a red ballpoint pen. He avoided looking through the magazines from the year in which his father and mother had been killed in a car crash, but he had looked right away at the issue published the week he was born. That night, at the Vel’ d’Hiv, after a raucous toot on a horn, the announcer had said that one of the racers, Memling, had just become a father, of a baby boy, and that they were offering a bonus prize of thirty thousand francs in the new baby’s name.

•

She had hardly any time to sing between the Caucasian knife-thrower’s act and the entertainer who imitated every kind of birdcall. Vietti — the man with the manicured fingernails — was there the first night. He had told the manager of the Auteuil cabaret-restaurant about her, then taken her back to Porte Champerret at around one in the morning and told her he would record her songs soon, but first she had to “learn the ropes” a little.

Onstage she wore a very large satin skirt and a bolero studded with black beads of jet, a costume she’d borrowed from the manager.

Brossier had told Bejardy about Odile, after Bejardy had questioned Louis one morning, in the garage, on the topic of his “fiancée.” And when he heard that Odile was singing in a nightclub, he seemed amused, and decided that they absolutely must go and hear her. He reserved a table for three: himself, Brossier, and Louis.

Bejardy knew the establishment from the old days. According to him, the decor had not changed since then. There were the same dark velvet curtains and the same eighteenth-century-style paintings on all the walls: courtly portraits and amorous scenes.