Patrick Modiano - In the Café of Lost Youth

I hadn’t been back to the neighborhood until the night Roland took me, by taxi, to the home of one of Guy de Vere’s friends. We were going there to meet everyone who regularly attended the lectures. We had only recently met at that point, Roland and I, and I wasn’t comfortable saying something when he had the taxi stop at place Blanche. He wanted us to walk a ways. Perhaps he didn’t notice how tightly I held on to his arm. I was overcome by dizziness. I had the feeling that if I crossed the square, I would faint dead away. I was afraid. The way he always talked about the Eternal Return, I’m sure he would have understood. Yes, everything was beginning over again for me. It was as if meeting up with these people was only a pretext, as if Roland had been entrusted with bringing me gently back into the fold.

I had been relieved when we didn’t go past the Moulin Rouge. And yet my mother had already been dead four years at that point and I had nothing left to worry about. Each time that I would slip out of the apartment at night, in her absence, I walked on the other side of the boulevard, the side that lay in the ninth arrondissement. There wasn’t a single streetlight on that sidewalk. The lightless building that was the Lycée Jules-Ferry, then the façades of apartment buildings, their windows dim, and a restaurant, although it always seemed as if its dining room was kept in perpetual darkness. And, each time, I was unable to stop myself from looking at the Moulin Rouge that lay on the other side of the median. When I had drawn even with the Café des Palmiers and came out onto place Blanche, I still wasn’t terribly reassured. All of those bright lights, once again. One night as I passed the pharmacy, I had seen my mother through the window with some other customers. I had realized that she had finished work earlier than usual and would soon be heading back to the apartment. If I ran, I could make it back before her. I had stationed myself at the corner of rue de Bruxelles to find out which route she would take. But she had crossed the square and had returned to the Moulin Rouge.

I was often frightened, and to reassure myself I would have gladly gone to see my mother, but I would have been disturbing her at work. Thinking back, I’m certain she wouldn’t have scolded me, because the night she came to pick me up at the Grandes-Carrières police station, she hadn’t offered the least reproach, no threats, no discipline whatsoever. We walked in silence. Halfway across the Caulaincourt bridge, I heard her say, in a detached voice, “My poor little darling,” but I wasn’t sure if she was speaking to me or talking to herself. She waited for me to undress and climb into bed before she came into my room. She sat down at the foot of the bed and remained silent. As did I. Eventually she started smiling. “We’re not very talkative, are we?” she said, and she looked me straight in the eye. It was the first time her gaze had lingered on me so long, and the first time I noticed how light her eyes were, gray, or a washed-out blue. Blue-gray. She leaned down and kissed me on the cheek, or rather I very briefly felt her lips. And still that stare fixed on me, those clear and distant eyes. She turned out the light, and before she closed the door, she told me, “Let’s try not to have any more of that.” I think that’s the only time we ever really connected, and it was so fleeting, so awkward, and yet so strong that I regret it didn’t propel me towards her during the months that followed that night in a way that might have brought about that contact again. But neither of us was a very demonstrative person. Perhaps as far as I was concerned, she had adopted that seemingly indifferent attitude because she had no illusions whatsoever when it came to me. She likely figured there wasn’t much use in getting her hopes up considering how alike we were.

But none of that ever crossed my mind at the time. I was living in the present without much in the way of soul-searching. All of that changed the night Roland made me return to the old neighborhood I had been avoiding. I hadn’t set foot in it since my mother’s death. The taxi had turned onto rue de la Chaussée-d’Antin and, way down at the end, I could see the dark bulk of the Église de la Sainte-Trinité, like a gigantic eagle standing guard. I felt ill. We were getting close to the boundary. I told myself there was still a chance. Maybe we were going to turn right. But no. We drove straight on ahead, we passed the Square de la Trinité, we climbed the hill. At the red light before we arrived at place de Clichy, I very nearly threw open my car door to escape. But I couldn’t do that to him.

It was a while later, as we walked along rue des Abbesses towards the building that was our destination, that I regained my composure. Fortunately, Roland hadn’t noticed a thing. Since then, I’ve been disappointed that the two of us didn’t spend more time walking in that neighborhood. I would have liked to show him around, to take him to see the place I lived in not quite six years ago, although it seems so long ago now, like it was in another life. After my mother died, only one link remained to tie me to that period, Guy Lavigne, a friend of my mother’s. My understanding was that he was the one who had paid our rent. I still see him from time to time. He works in a garage in Auteuil. But we rarely speak about the past. He’s about as talkative as my mother. When they picked me up and took me to the police station, they asked me a number of questions I was required to answer, but at first I did it with such reluctance that they said to me, “Well now, you aren’t very talkative, are you?” just like they would have to my mother or Guy Lavigne had either of them ever been in their clutches. I wasn’t used to people asking me questions. I was actually astonished that they had any interest in me in the first place. The second time, at the Grandes-Carrières police station, I had lucked into a nicer cop than the first one and I felt more comfortable with the way he asked me questions. For once, it was possible to confide in someone, to talk about myself, and someone sitting across from me was interested in my story. I was so unaccustomed to such a situation that I couldn’t find the words to answer. Other than very specific questions. For example, “Where did you go to school?” The Daughters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul on rue Caulaincourt, and the École Communale on rue Antoinette. I was ashamed to tell him that I hadn’t been accepted to Lycée Jules-Ferry, but I took a deep breath and made the admission. He leaned toward me, and in a soft voice, he said, “That’s Lycée Jules-Ferry’s bad luck now, isn’t it?” And that surprised me so greatly that at first I felt like laughing. He was smiling at me and looking me right in the eye, a gaze as clear as my mother’s, but more tender, more attentive. He also asked me about my family situation. I began to trust him and I managed to give him a few scant details: My mother came from a village in Sologne, where a Mr. Foucret, the manager of the Moulin Rouge, owned an estate. That was how she, at a very young age, had secured a job at that establishment. I didn’t know who my father was. I had been born there, in Sologne, but we had never gone back. That’s why my mother had always told me, “There’s nothing left of our home there, not even the foundations.” He listened to me and took the occasional note. For me, it was a completely new sensation; as I gave him all of those meager details, it was as if a weight was lifted from me. None of it concerned me any longer, I was talking about someone else, and I was relieved to see that he was taking notes. If everything was written in black and white, that meant that it was over, the same way names and dates are inscribed on headstones. And I spoke more and more quickly, the words came tumbling out: the Moulin Rouge, my mother, Guy Lavigne, the Lycée Jules-Ferry, Sologne. I had never been able to talk to anybody. What a relief I felt as all those words came rushing from my mouth. A segment of my life was drawing to a close, a life that had been imposed on me. From then on, I would be the one to decide my lot in life. Everything would begin anew as of today, and in order to set things in motion, I would have preferred it if he had crossed out everything he had just written. I was ready to give him other details and other names, to tell him about an imaginary family, the sort of family I might have had in my dreams.