Patrick Modiano - In the Café of Lost Youth

Black holes. As well as details that randomly pop into my head, details as precise as they are insignificant. He lived in the hotel upstairs and he often traveled to Belgium. The other evening, I repeated that stupid sentence over and over as if it were the refrain of a lullaby that you might sing softly in the dark to calm yourself. And why did Mocellini call Jeannette “Crossbones”? Details that conceal other details, much more painful ones. I remember the afternoon a few years later that Jeannette came to visit me in Neuilly. It was a couple of weeks after I married Jean-Pierre Choureau. I never learned to call him anything but Jean-Pierre Choureau, likely because he was older than I was and because he too addressed me so formally. She rang three times as I had requested. For a brief moment, I had the impulse not to answer the door, but that was idiotic, she knew my phone number and address. She came in, sliding through the crack of the half-opened door, and you would have thought she was creeping stealthily into the apartment to commit a burglary. Once we were in the living room, she took a look around, the white walls, the coffee table, the stack of magazines, the red-shaded lamp, the portrait of Jean-Pierre Choureau’s mother above the sofa. She didn’t say a word. She shook her head. She wanted to take a look around. She seemed stunned when she saw that Jean-Pierre Choureau and I slept in separate rooms. We stretched out on the bed in my bedroom.

“So does he come from a good family?” said Jeannette. And she burst out laughing.

I hadn’t seen her since the hotel on rue d’Armaillé. Her laughter made me feel uncomfortable. I was worried she would drag me backwards, back to the days of the Canter. Still, when she had come to visit me in rue d’Armaillé the year before, she had informed me that she no longer had anything to do with the others.

“Such a little girl’s room.”

Atop the chest of drawers, a picture of Jean-Pierre Choureau in a wine-red leather frame.

“He’s pretty handsome. So what’s with the separate rooms?”

She once again stretched out on the bed beside me. Then I told her I would prefer to see her anywhere but there. I was worried that she would feel awkward around Jean-Pierre Choureau. And also, we wouldn’t be able to speak freely, just the two of us.

“Are you worried I’ll bring the others when I come to see you?”

She laughed, but her laughter was less frank than earlier. She was right, I was afraid, even in Neuilly, to run into Accad. I was amazed he hadn’t caught wind of me when I was living in the hotels on rue d’Armaillé and then rue de l’Étoile.

“Don’t worry. They left Paris a long time ago. They’re in Morocco.”

She was softly stroking my forehead, as if she wanted to soothe me.

“I’d imagine you haven’t told your husband about the parties at Cabassud.”

There was no sarcasm in her tone as she spoke. On the contrary, I was touched by the sadness in her voice. It had been her friend Mario Bay, the guy with the tinted glasses and the pianist’s hands, who had referred to them as “parties,” those nights when he and Accad took us to spend the night at Cabassud, a country home not far from Paris.

“It’s so calm here. It’s nothing like it was at Cabassud. You remember those nights?”

Details that made me want to squeeze my eyes shut, like a light that was too bright. And yet, the other night, when we had parted company with Guy de Vere’s friends and I was returning from Montmartre with Roland, I kept my eyes wide open. Everything was more distinct, crisp, and clear, an intense light dazzled me and I gradually grew used to it. One night at the Canter, I found myself engulfed by that same light as I sat at a table with Jeannette, by the entrance. Everyone had left except for Mocellini and the others, who were playing cards in the room at the back, behind the gate. My mother would have arrived home hours ago. I wondered if she was worried by my absence. I almost missed the night she had come to pick me up at the Grandes-Carrières police station. It dawned on me that from that point on, she would no longer be able to come and find me. I was too far away. I tried to withstand a wave of anxiety that swept over me, preventing me from being able to breathe. Jeannette brought her face up to mine.

“You’re really pale. Aren’t you feeling well?”

I wanted to give her a smile to reassure her, but I felt myself grimace instead.

“No. It’s nothing.”

Ever since I began sneaking out of the apartment at night, I had brief panic attacks, or rather “low blood pressure,” as the pharmacist at place Blanche had put it one night when I tried to explain to him what I had been experiencing. But each time a word came out, it seemed either false or meaningless. Better to keep quiet. A feeling of emptiness would come over me in the street. The first time it was in front of the tobacconist’s, just past the Cyrano. The street was full of people but that didn’t reassure me. I felt as if I were going to faint right there on the spot, and they would just keep on walking straight ahead without paying me any mind at all. Low blood pressure. A power outage. I had to make an internal effort to reset the breaker. That night, I had gone into the tobacconist’s and asked for stamps, postcards, a ballpoint pen, and a pack of cigarettes. I sat down at the counter. I took out a postcard and began to write. “Have a little patience. I think things are going to get better.” I lit a cigarette and affixed a stamp to the card. But to whom should I address it? I would have liked to write a few words on each one of the cards, reassuring words: “The weather here is beautiful, my vacation is going great. I hope all is well with you too. See you soon. Hugs and kisses.” I’m sitting on the patio of a café overlooking the sea, very early in the morning. And I’m writing postcards to all my friends.

“How are you feeling? Any better?” Jeannette asked me. Her face was even closer to mine. “You want to go out and get some fresh air?”

The street had never seemed that deserted and silent. It was lit by streetlights left over from another era. And to think that climbing the slope was all it would take to rejoin the Saturday-night crowds a few hundred yards farther up, the neon signs promising “The Most Beautiful Nudes in the World,” the tourist buses parked in front of the Moulin Rouge. I was scared of all that agitation. I said to Jeannette, “We could stay at mid-slope.”

We walked as far as where the lights began, the intersection at the end of rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette. But there we made a U-turn and descended the hill the same way we had come. I felt more and more relieved as I walked back down the shady side of the slope. I just needed to let myself go. Jeannette held me tightly by the arm. We had nearly arrived at the bottom of the slope, where the street met rue de la Tour-des-Dames. She said to me, “What would you say to us having a little snow?”

I didn’t really understand what she meant by that, but the word “snow” caught me off guard. I got the feeling that it would start to fall at any moment and would render the silence that surrounded us even more intense. We would hear nothing but the crunching of our steps in the snow. A clock sounded out somewhere nearby, and, I’m not sure why, I thought it was signaling the start of midnight mass. Jeannette was guiding me. I let myself be carried along. We were following rue d’Aumale, whose every building was shrouded in darkness. It was almost as if they formed a single black wall on either side that spanned from one end of the street to the other.

“Come on into my flat, we’ll have ourselves a little snow.”

Once we arrived, I would ask her what she meant by “having a little snow.” It seemed even colder because of the dark façades. Was I only dreaming when I heard our footsteps echo so distinctly?