Patrick Modiano - In the Café of Lost Youth

“At one point, I was looking for work. I came across an ad. It was for a job as a temp secretary.”

Having reached the landing, we followed the allée des Cygnes. On either side, the Seine and the lights of the quays. I got the impression that I was on the promenade deck of a ship run aground in the dead of night.

“At the office, a man gave me work to do. He was nice to me. He was older… After a while, he wanted to get married.”

It seemed as if she was trying to justify herself to a childhood friend whom she hadn’t heard from in a long time and had run into in the street.

“What about you? Did you want to get married?”

She shrugged her shoulders, as if my question was absurd. All the while, I was waiting for her to say, “Now look, you know me well enough.”

After all, I must have known her in a previous life.

“He always told me he wanted what was best for me. It’s true… He does want what’s best for me. He kind of takes himself for my father.”

I got the feeling she was waiting for my opinion. She didn’t seem to be in the habit of confiding in people.

“And he never attends the lectures with you?”

“No. He has too much work to do.”

She had met de Vere through an old friend of her husband’s. This friend had brought de Vere with him to dinner at their place in Neuilly. She shared all of those details with me, her forehead creased, as if she was afraid to forget a single one, even the most trivial.

We had reached the end of the alleyway, opposite the Statue de la Liberté. A bench on the right. I can’t remember which one of us took the initiative to sit down, or perhaps we both had the idea at the same time. I asked her if she shouldn’t be getting home. This was the third or fourth time she had attended Guy de Vere’s lectures, and each time, towards eleven o’clock at night, she found herself at the foot of the stairs leading into Cambronne station. And each time, at the thought of returning to Neuilly, she felt a kind of discouragement. As it stood, she was doomed to keep taking the same line of the Métro home until the end of her days. Transfer at Étoile. Get off at Sablons.

I could feel her shoulder against mine. She told me that after the dinner at which she had met Guy de Vere for the first time, he had invited her to a talk he was giving in a small room over by Odéon. That day, the subject had been “the Great Noon” and “green light.” Upon leaving the room, she had wandered the neighborhood. She floated in the limpid green light Guy de Vere had discussed. Evening, five o’clock. There was a lot of traffic on the boulevard and, at Carrefour de l’Odéon, the crowd jostled her as she walked against the tide, not wanting to go down the stairs into the Métro with them. A deserted street led gently up towards the Jardin du Luxembourg. And there, at mid-slope, she had gone into a café below a building on the corner: the Condé. “Do you know the Condé?” She looked at me inquiringly, suddenly seeming more comfortable. No, I wasn’t familiar with the Condé. To be honest, I’m not very fond of the Latin Quarter and all of its schools. It reminded me of my childhood, of the dormitory at the boarding school from which I had been expelled, and of the school cafeteria on the corner of rue Dauphine where I ate my meals thanks to a fake student card. I was starving. Ever since that first time, she had often taken refuge at the Condé. It hadn’t taken her long to get to know most of the regulars, and in particular two writers: a fellow named Maurice Raphaël and an Arthur Adamov. Had I heard of them? Sure. I knew who Adamov was. I had even seen him around, over by Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre. A worried look. I would go so far as to say terrified. He walked around wearing sandals on his bare feet. She hadn’t read any of Adamov’s books. At the Condé, he would occasionally ask her to walk him back to his hotel because he was afraid to walk alone at night. Having become a regular at the Condé, the others had given her a nickname. Her real name was Jacqueline, but they called her Louki. If I wanted, she would introduce me to Adamov and the others. And to Jimmy Campbell, an English singer. And to a Tunisian friend of hers, Ali Cherif. We could meet up at the Condé during the day. She also sometimes went at night when her husband was out. He often returned from work quite late. She looked up at me, and after a moment’s hesitation, she told me that each time, she found it a little more difficult to go back to her husband in Neuilly. She seemed troubled and said no more.

Time for the last Métro. We were alone in the car. Before making the transfer at Étoile, she gave me her phone number.

•

Still to this day, some evenings I hear a voice calling me by name in the street. A somewhat husky voice. It drags a bit around certain syllables, and I recognize it immediately: It’s Louki’s voice. I turn around, but there’s nobody there. Not only in the evenings but during that sluggish part of those summer afternoons when you’re no longer even sure what year it is. All will be as it was before. The same days, the same nights, the same places, the same encounters. The Eternal Return.

I often hear that voice in my dreams. It’s all so precise — right down to the smallest detail — that I wonder, upon waking, how it could even be possible. The other night, I dreamed I was leaving Guy de Vere’s building, at the same time of night it had been when Louki and I left that first time. I looked at my watch. Eleven o’clock at night. There was ivy climbing along one of the ground-floor windows. I passed through the metal gate and I was crossing Cambronne Square towards the above-ground Métro when I heard Louki’s voice. She was calling to me: “Roland…” Twice. I could feel the irony in her voice. She had made fun of my name at first, a name that wasn’t even my real name. I had chosen it to simplify matters, an all-purpose, everyday name, one that could also serve as a last name. It was quite practical, Roland. And above all, so very French. My real name was too exotic. In those days, I was trying to avoid attracting attention. “Roland…” I turned around. No one. I was in the middle of the square, just like that first time when we hadn’t known what to say to each other. When I awoke, I decided to go to where Guy de Vere had lived to see if there really was ivy along the ground-floor window. I took the Métro to Cambronne. It was the line Louki had taken when she was still going home to her husband in Neuilly. I accompanied her, and we often got off at Argentine station, not far from the hotel where I was living. Those evenings, she might have stayed all night in my room, but she made a final effort and went home to Neuilly. And then finally, one night she did stay with me, near Argentine.

I experienced a strange feeling that morning as I walked through Cambronne Square, because it had always been night when we had gone to see Guy de Vere. I pushed open the gate and told myself that there was no way I would run into him after all this time. No more Vega bookstore on boulevard Saint-Germain and no more Guy de Vere in Paris. And no more Louki. But there, running along the ground-floor window, was the ivy, just as it had been in my dream. That disturbed me. Had the other night really been a dream? I lingered a moment, standing motionless at the window. I was hoping I would hear Louki’s voice. She would call out my name once again. No. Nothing. Silence. Yet I had the impression that since those days at Guy de Vere’s, no time had passed. Instead it had stood still, frozen into some sort of eternity. I remembered the text I had been trying to write back when I knew Louki. I had called it On Neutral Zones . There was a series of transitional zones in Paris, no-man’s-lands where we were on the border of everything else, in transit, or even held suspended. Within, we benefited from a certain kind of immunity. I might have called them free zones, but neutral zones was more precise. One evening at the Condé, I had asked Maurice Raphaël his opinion, knowing that he was a writer. He shrugged his shoulders and shot me a sardonic smile. “That’s for you to figure out, my friend. I don’t really understand where you’re trying to go with this. I’d say stick with ‘neutral’ and leave it at that.” Cambronne Square, as well as the neighborhood that lay between Ségur and Dupleix, and all of those streets that led to the footbridges of the above-ground Métro, they all belonged to a neutral zone, and it wasn’t by chance that I had met Louki there.