Patrick Modiano - Young Once

“You’ve broken with Bejardy completely?” Louis asked.

“Completely. I don’t ever want to see him again. I’m making a clean break with that whole period of my life. I’m an entirely different person now, Louis.”

Between the traveling salesman with the puffy face Louis had met in Saint-Lô and this man in his tracksuit jacket, with shining eyes and haggard cheeks, there was not the slightest family resemblance. Had he even kept his Tyrolean hats?

“I’m sorry I’m in such a funny outfit,” Brossier said. “I’ve just come from a gym I go to once a week.”

“And what about me?” Louis suddenly said. “I’m supposed to stay with Bejardy alone? You’re just going to drop me?”

“No, not at all. I hope you’ll follow my lead… Jacqueline won’t be long, her class runs a little later tonight.”

The square with its trees was like one in a country town. There were a few people at the edge of the sidewalk playing boule. Music from a jukebox came out of the café-tabac next door.

“I had to show you this neighborhood. You have the Jar-din des Plantes right nearby, and the Arènas de Lutèce, where Jacqueline takes me every now and then. When we don’t go to the U restaurant or the cafeteria, we have dinner in a little Mexican place next to the Arènas. Let’s all go together some night, if you want.”

His voice was no longer guttural, it was alive with excitement, clear and melodious. He had left his usual vocabulary behind, and the slang words that had always spiced up his conversation before — bones, sharp, zilch, brass nickel — would now have sounded all wrong coming from his mouth.

Jacqueline Boivin came and sat down at their table, and rested a student satchel on her knees. Louis was entranced by her Ethiopian grace.

“How was class?” Brossier asked, kissing her on the forehead.

“Good.”

She turned to Odile and Louis.

“It’s nice to see you again. Has Jean-Claude told you?” Her face sought their approval.

“I think he’s doing the right thing,” Louis said.

“Will you walk us to Cité?” Brossier suggested. “We can have a bite to eat there. I’ll carry your book bag, Jacqueline.”

They passed the Lycée Henri-IV, then the Sainte-Geneviève church, and came out on place du Panthéon, with Jacqueline Boivin on Brossier’s arm and he with the satchel in his hand.

“Do you know this area?” Brossier asked.

“No,” Odile said. “I’ve never been to college.”

“It’s never too late! Here’s proof.” He pointed to himself and then kissed Jacqueline on the neck.

“All you need to do is fill out the registration forms,” Louis said.

On rue Soufflot, by the outdoor tables of the Mahieu, there were groups of people in lively conversation drifting by from left to right. Brossier, not moving, pulled Jacqueline Boivin closer to him. Next to them, Odile and Louis let the clusters of people push past them and were almost carried away in the stream. Luckily, Brossier held them firmly by the hand.

“On the right,” he said, in a tour guide’s sententious voice, “on boulevard Saint-Michel, you have Capoulade… Then the Picart bookstore, where I often go with Jacqueline. And Chanteclair, the record store… Farther down, there’s Gibert, where I sometimes sell used books to get a little pocket money. And the Café de Cluny. There’s a pool table on the second floor…”

He sounded breathless, as though panicking at the thought that there wasn’t enough time to introduce them to all the many delights of the neighborhood. A whole life wouldn’t be enough time.

At the Gare du Luxembourg they waited on benches for the Sceaux line train to arrive.

“You need to follow my lead, Louis, and make a clean break with Roland. I’m sure you can influence him, Odile. He doesn’t need to work for Bejardy.”

In the train bringing them to Cité Universitaire, Brossier affectionately held Jacqueline Boivin against his shoulder.

“Let me speak frankly with you, Louis. Roland is a desperate man. Don’t stay on a sinking ship.”

“Have you known him a long time?” Louis asked.

He felt that now he could ask the questions Brossier had always answered vaguely before, and that this time, now that it was over between him and Bejardy, Brossier would explain everything, down to the last detail.

“I met Bejardy right after the war. Almost twenty years ago now…”

“That was when you ran a restaurant together, on a boat?” Louis said.

“Ah, yes. The Longchamp Schooner. Who told you about that? It was a real disaster. Roland wanted the waiters to wear Provençal cowboy outfits.”

He gave Jacqueline a mischievous kiss on the cheek.

“You’re not bored with these old war stories, are you, darling?”

Jacqueline kindly shrugged her shoulders and gave Odile a complicitous glance. They had reached the Denfert-Rochereau station.

“I met Roland when I was eighteen. He was five years older than me.”

He leaned toward Louis.

“Roland’s problem can be captured in a single sentence: ‘I want to, but I can’t.’ Let me put it more crudely, if you don’t mind: Roland always farted louder than his ass.”

Now this was the Brossier from Saint-Lô.

They got out at the Cité Universitaire station. A boy nearby was kicking a soccer ball and Brossier made a fake and managed to dribble the ball all the way to the stairs without the boy being able to get it back. He was over the moon at his accomplishment.

“Should we have a bite at the Turk’s place?” Brossier said. “It’s a little farther down.”

They walked down boulevard Jourdan toward Charléty Stadium. Pink and blue neon lit up a kind of glassed-in counter in the middle of the sidewalk, under the trees, with a few tables around it.

“Four club sandwiches and four pints of the blonde on tap,” Brossier ordered.

The wind carried the smells of Parc Montsouris over to them, and the night was bright enough for them to see the palace of the Bey of Tunis on the great lawn. Opposite them, on the other side of the empty street, was the Great Britain building, whose wood-paneled dining hall Brossier had said he liked. An empty bus appeared from time to time at the station a little farther up.

“What are you two doing for the holidays?” Brossier asked.

He and Jacqueline had decided to stay in Paris during July and August. In the mornings they would sunbathe on the Cité Universitaire lawns. In the afternoons, they’d play tourist — go visit Les Invalides, the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, Sainte-Chapelle. At night, they’d have dinner on a bateau mouche. Maybe they’d venture out as far as Versailles, on a tour bus for “organized visits,” and “catch a sound and light show” at the Bassin de Neptune fountain.

“I love doing that kind of thing as a vacation,” Jacqueline said. “You should come with us.”

“The main thing,” Brossier said, “is to always go on group tours. Everything completely taken care of. With guides. You understand, Louis. Guides.”

He insisted on that. For a long time, he had felt an urgent need for “organization,” for “guides.”

But Louis was set on finding out how Brossier had met Bejardy.

“To begin at the beginning,” Brossier said, “I met Roland right after the war, at a family pension in Neuilly called the Chestnut Trees. He was living there with his mother and his fiancée at the time, an Englishwoman.”

And he, Jean-Claude Brossier, a fat young man of nineteen, got off the boat in Normandy and enrolled in the art school in Paris, École Boulle. But he soon forgot about art school and joined in the rhythm of their lives. They took drives around the countryside, sometimes as far as Deauville; went to the races; played bridge at night with Bejardy’s mother in the little living room at the Chestnut Trees. Roland had earned a Médaille militaire in Germany and was going into business. And Hélène, Roland’s fiancée… She was so lazy. One day, when a bag of coffee turned up at the pension — something rare in that period of rationing — Hélène had let out a sigh at the prospect of having to grind the beans.