Patrick Modiano: Young Once

“The same as what you took to Axter, more or less. This time, I insist you take a commission, old boy. We’ll discuss it again in Geneva. Yes, yes, I insist… On the bus, you’ll need to be discreet about hiding the money. This looks a little fancy, doesn’t it,” he said, indicating the briefcase.

“Don’t worry,” Louis said.

“I have to take a quick trip to Brussels. Arrange some things there. That’ll burn the last bridge. Then, Argentina.”

He rubbed his palms as though playing the cymbals.

“Why Argentina?” Louis asked.

“I have family there, on my mother’s side. And Nicole can spend time with her horses… Oh, I just thought of something. If you need to reach me tomorrow, call the Métropole in Brussels. Ask for Monsieur Chantain.”

He wrote “Chantain” down on the envelope containing the train tickets.

“It’s part of my name. Chantain de Bejardy is my name, you see.”

Odile and Louis exchanged a look, and Louis was about to show Bejardy the old newspaper clipping. He had it in his hand, in the inside pocket of his jacket, but he changed his mind.

Bejardy’s face looked pasty under the light coming through the wall of glass. It was as if he were growing older before their eyes.

“It’s strange,” he said. “I lived in this neighborhood by Gare du Nord, after I got out of prison.”

“You were in prison?”

“I’m joking, old boy. But I did live in this neighborhood for a long time. Boulevard Magenta. It doesn’t look like much, but the neighborhood grows on you once you get to know it.”

He considered the empty room around him.

“Back then, I used to come here a lot to have dinner with a girl. A blonde. She lived in the neighborhood too. Her name was Geneviève…”

Bejardy’s face took on a tired, confused expression. Maybe because there was nothing left of this Geneviève but a deserted dining room.

“And you? What do you plan to do in the future?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Louis said. “Take a vacation.”

“How old are you two, exactly?”

“I’ll be twenty in three days,” Odile said.

“And you, Louis?”

“I’ll be twenty in a month and a half.”

Bejardy raised his cup, with a pensive look. “Well, here’s to your twentieth birthdays!” He gulped down his coffee.

“All right. I have to leave you now. No, no, stay here. I hate goodbyes on train platforms. The day after tomorrow, at the Richmond, ten o’clock on the dot. Goodbye, Madame Memling.”

Louis walked him to the brasserie exit anyway, briefcase in hand.

“Don’t get caught on the bus to Geneva… It’ll be easy. You look so nice, my dear Louis. I wonder if I looked nice like that, when I was your age. Do you think I did?”

“I don’t know,” Louis said.

He crossed the street to Gare du Nord and waved his arm without turning back. This slow, vague movement of his arm surprised Louis, and stayed in his memory as a gesture of benediction.

•

It was still light out, and they wandered at random through the neighborhood where there once had lived Roland Chantain de Bejardy and a blonde named Geneviève. Louis carried the briefcase under his arm. They walked to Gare de l’Est and then turned back near Gare du Nord. It was a part of town that trains left from, with heavy façades, small shops, dusty lawyer’s offices, diamond dealers, and brasseries giving off the beery smell of Alsace and Belgium.

They did not know that this was their last walk through Paris. They did not yet exist as individuals at all; they were blended together with the façades and the sidewalks. In macadam roads, the stones, patched together like an old cloth, have dates written on them to indicate when the successive layers of tar have been poured, but perhaps also recording births, encounters, deaths. Later, when they remembered this period in their life, they would see these intersections and building entryways again. They had registered every last ray of light coming off of them, every reflection. They themselves had been nothing but bubbles, iridescent with the city’s colors: gray and black.

Place Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, with its square and its church, was as silent and empty as the familiar places you move through in a dream. They went back to the large boulevards via rue d’Hauteville and lost themselves in the crowd by Café Brébant.

•

Odile fell asleep. He slipped out of bed and tiptoed over to the window. It was raining in Annecy. In the park down below, children were chasing each other under the watchful eye of someone who stayed still; all you could see of him or her was the convex surface of a black umbrella.

Louis had chosen this hotel because it was near the station. Back in boarding school, when he spent his days off in Annecy, he had been curious about its ocher façade. He could still picture in his mind the blond man meandering around the Promenade du Pâquier one Saturday. He was known as “Carlton,” from the name of the hotel where he had been a groom in the old days; according to legend, he carried at all times a Browning in a gray buckskin holster against his heart.

Annecy hadn’t changed in three years. It was raining, just as on the Sundays when they had to be back at school by seven. There had been nothing to do on those Sundays except take shelter under the arcades of La Taverne or under the awning of the Casino. Or hug the walls and the windows on rue Royale. Later, in Saint-Lô, it was still raining, and you had to step over puddles, and, if you think about it, between the boarding school and the barracks there were nine years of rain and squat toilets you could count on the fingers of one hand.

Louis could see the station from the hotel window. The bus to Geneva would leave from a bright building to the left. One day, he had taken that bus with the friend of his father’s who was serving as Louis’s tutor. They went through Cruseilles and Saint-Julien. Two customs posts to get through.

On the other side of the station, on Sunday evenings, he would wait for the bus that stopped a hundred yards from the boarding school. It was always full and you had to stay standing the whole ride. At the bend in the road at Veyrier-du-Lac, the castle of Menthon-Saint-Bernard would appear on the mountaintop like a phantom ship on the crest of a wave. Farther on, at the edge of the road, the little cemetery in Alex…

The briefcase was on the night table. He picked it up and went to sit by the window. He could hear Odile’s regular breathing. It was four o’clock. The bus to Geneva left at 5:22.

He opened the briefcase. Rolls of 500-franc bills. New. He looked out at the station across the street.

One Sunday, he had let the bus leave without him and gone back to his “tutor,” telling him he had missed it. The “tutor” had driven him back to the boarding school himself, in his Citroën.

But now the years of gray and rain were coming to an end, and to him they seemed so far away already that he could remember them fondly. He started to count the rolls of bills. Yes. The decision had been made.

He woke up Odile. That same night, they took a train to Nice. Connection in Lyon. Ten minutes wait.

•

They spent two weeks in Nice. They had rented a big American convertible, with which, in the months to follow, they would explore the Côte d’Azur.

One morning, driving along the Corniche between Nice and Villefranche-sur-Mer, Louis felt a curious sensation of both stupor and lightness, and he was curious if Odile felt it too.

Something — he wondered later if it was simply his youth — something that had weighed upon him until that moment broke off him, the way a piece of rock slides slowly into the sea and disappears in a spray of foam.