Patrick Modiano: Young Once

“You have to have a ‘ nègre blanc’ for dessert,” Brossier advised. “A nègre blanc .”

He’d had too much to drink. His face started to turn a scarlet color.

“Tell me, Louis. You wouldn’t be in the mood to…” He turned his head to look around him, then said, in a low voice, “I called for two Cherbourg girls to come, to celebrate your demob.”

Louis squinted in the too-bright light. He tried to remember the name of the song coming out of the loudspeaker, a tune you heard a lot of in those days, but he couldn’t. What was it called, what was it?

“Two nègres blancs !”

Brossier looked around again.

“You know, that’s what they’re like, Cherbourg girls…”

They were waiting in the lobby. Two brunettes, one with her hair in a ponytail. The car they had come in was hers, a Citroën DS-19 that had almost broken down near Valognes. That would have been no fun in this weather.

“The main thing,” Brossier proclaimed, “is that you’re here, my dears.”

He stroked the cheek of one of the brunettes, who smiled at him. Then he walked over to the reception desk. Louis stayed where he was, his bag in his hand, with the two girls.

“So, it looks like you’ve finished your military service?” asked the one with the ponytail.

“Yes. It’s over.”

“Are you going to stay here, in Saint-Lô?”

“Yes.”

“I think it would be better to be in the navy. Get to travel…”

The other girl had taken a compact out of her handbag and was putting on lipstick. Brossier came back.

“Let’s go! Room 119! Forward march!”

On the narrow staircase, Brossier kissed the girl with the ponytail and started to grope her. She had taken his feathered green hat off his head and put it on her head, askew. Louis, pressed up against the other girl, could only carry his bag in his arms.

A room with deep blue wallpaper, furnished with twin beds and a light wood dresser. A radio built into each of the night tables. Brossier turned the knob.

“Let’s get champagne! But first, they’ll show you one of their numbers! They have a nightclub act in Cherbourg.”

“What’s your name?” asked the girl who was still wearing Brossier’s feathered hat.

“Louis.”

Brossier had turned off the overhead lights. The only light was from one of the bedside lamps. Louis watched the rain come down outside the window, harder than before.

“Three cheers for demob! Three cheers for demob! Three cheers for demob!” Brossier sang.

“Three cheers for demob,” one of the brunettes softly repeated.

There was a huge parking lot in front of the hotel, like an airport runway. Two rows of streetlights gave off a garish light. Why all those streetlights? Louis noticed, in the middle of the empty lot, the two brunettes’ DS-19.

•

On the stairs, the vibrations from the drums and electric guitars always overwhelmed Georges Bellune. He sat on the leather bench on the second floor, his back straight, trying to gather his strength before crossing the Palladium’s threshold.

Light from the milky white platform area in the back, on the left, where a group of musicians were rocking and rolling, pierced the semidarkness. The singer was belting out an American hit in a voice even more confident than the original singer’s. Boys and girls, most of them not yet twenty, crowded around the stage. The band’s drummer, with his curly blond hair and fat cheeks, looked to Bellune like a prematurely aged army brat.

Bellune beat a path to the bar and ordered a drink. After the third glass, he was less sensitive to the noise. Every time he came to the Palladium, it took an hour for the bands and the singers to perform onstage, one after the other — teenagers from the neighborhood, mostly, or young working people. Their dream was so strong, their desire to escape with the music in which they had a presentiment of their lives was so powerful, that Bellune often thought the shrieking guitars and hoarse screaming voices he heard were like cries for help.

He was over fifty and worked for a record company. They sent him to the Palladium two or three times a week to scout out various amateur bands. Bellune set up appointments for them at the record company’s office, where they would audition. In those moments, he was nothing but a customs officer picking two or three people out of a mass of emigrants crowding in front of a ship and shoving them up the gangway.

He looked at his watch and decided that he had shown his face long enough. This time, he didn’t have the strength to pay attention to one more band or singer. To elbow his way up to the stage felt like a superhuman effort. No. Not tonight.

That was when he noticed her. He hadn’t seen her before, his back was turned. Chestnut-brown hair, unusually pale skin, pale eyes. Barely twenty. She was sitting at the bar but looking toward the stage in back, hypnotized. A stir went through the room, there was a rush, applause, screams. Someone climbed onstage: Vince Taylor. Why wasn’t she up there with the others? Her gaze, fixed on the only zone of light in the Palladium, called up in Bellune’s mind the image of a hesitant moth drawn to a lamp. On the platform, Vince Taylor was waiting for the applause and screams to die down. He adjusted the mic and started singing.

“And you, do you sing too?”

She jumped as though he had suddenly yanked her out of her dream, and turned to face him.

“Are you here because you’re interested in music?” Bellune asked again.

His gentle voice and serious air always inspired confidence. She nodded yes.

“That’s good timing,” Bellune said. “I work for a record company. I’d like to help you, if you want.”

She looked at him, taken aback. The people Bellune had always chosen for auditions, at random, had at least gotten up onstage and made some kind of noises with their drums and guitars; their faces had appeared in bright light for a moment. But tonight, Bellune chose someone who didn’t say anything, didn’t move, and seemed drowned in the sea of noise. A face barely different from the shadows.

•

He took her home in a taxi. Before leaving her there, he wrote his office’s address and phone number on a scrap of paper.

“You can call and come see me whenever you want. By the way, what’s your name?”

“Odile.”

“Odile, good. See you soon, I hope.”

She crossed the courtyard of her red brick apartment building at Porte Champerret. In the elevator, she pressed the button for the sixth floor, the highest it went, and when she got there she climbed another little flight of stairs and walked down a hallway.

It was an attic room with a sloping roof. You could just barely stand between the sink and the bed. Photographs of singers — a black woman, an American man — were stuck to the beige wall. The radiator, its size disproportionate to the cramped dimensions of the room, gave off too much heat.

She opened the window, from which you could see, at the horizon, the top of the Arc de Triomphe. She dropped onto the bed and took out of her raincoat pocket the piece of paper where he had scribbled:

Georges Bellune

21, rue de Berri, 3rd floor

ÉLYsées-0015

She would call him tomorrow. If she waited too long, she would lose courage.

The guy seemed serious. Maybe he would help her. She didn’t take her eyes off the scrap of paper; she wanted to convince herself that the name and address were really written there.

She had forgotten to buy anything to eat, but there was almost nothing left from her last paycheck anyway. Now that she no longer worked at the perfumery on rue Vignon, she spent almost all her time at the Palladium, like someone lingering in the bath.