Patrick Modiano: In the Café of Lost Youth

It was pointless for me to visit the other rooms of the apartment. Empty rooms. Empty closets. And silence, barely disturbed by the passing of a car on avenue de Bretteville. The evenings must have been long.

“Did she take a key with her?”

He shook his head no. Not even the hope of one night hearing the sound of the key in the lock that would announce her return. And he didn’t think it likely that she would ever call again.

“How did you two meet?”

She had been hired at Zannetacci to fill in for an employee. Temporary secretarial work. He had dictated a few client letters to her and that’s how they had gotten to know each other. They had seen each other outside of the office. She told him that she was a student at the École des Langues Orientales, where she took classes twice a week, but he never found out exactly which language she had been studying. Asian languages, she said. And, after two months, they were married one Saturday morning at the city hall in Neuilly, with two colleagues from Zannetacci as witnesses. No one else attended what was for him a simple formality. They had gone to lunch with the witnesses right near his place, just outside the Bois de Boulogne, at a restaurant often frequented by customers from the neighboring amusement park.

He shot me an embarrassed look. Apparently he had wanted to give me a more detailed account of their marriage. I smiled at him. I didn’t need an explanation. Making an effort he took the plunge: “It’s all about trying to create ties, you see.”

Well, sure, I understood. In this life that sometimes seems to be a vast, ill-defined landscape without signposts, amid all of the vanishing lines and the lost horizons, we hope to find reference points, to draw up some sort of land registry so as to shake the impression that we are navigating by chance. So we forge ties, we try to find stability in chance encounters. I kept quiet, my gaze fixed on the stack of magazines. In the middle of the coffee table sat a large yellow ashtray that bore the inscription “Cinzano.” And a paperback book entitled Fare Thee Well, Focolara. Zannetacci. Jean-Pierre Choureau. Cinzano. Jacqueline Delanque. Neuilly City Hall. Focolara. As if we were supposed to find some sense in all of this.

“And of course she was terribly charming. I fell head over heels for her.”

As soon as he had made this admission in a low voice, he seemed to regret it. In the days leading up to her disappearance, had he noticed anything different about her? Well sure, she complained to him more and more about their daily lives. This wasn’t what it was supposed to be like, she said, real life. And when he asked her what it really consisted of, this “real life,” she shrugged her shoulders without answering, as if she knew that he wouldn’t understand her explanation. And then she found her smile once again, and her kindness, and she was almost apologetic for her bad mood. With a look of resignation, she told him that in the end it wasn’t so bad. One day, maybe, he would understand what “real life” was.

“You really don’t have a single photograph of her?”

One afternoon, they were walking along the Seine. He had planned on taking the Métro to Châtelet to get to the office. On the boulevard du Palais, they passed a little photo-booth kiosk. She needed photos for a new passport. He waited for her on the sidewalk. When she came out, she had handed him the photos, telling him that she was afraid she would lose them. Once back at the office, he had put the photos in an envelope and had forgotten to bring them back to Neuilly. After his wife’s disappearance, he had noticed that the envelope was still there, on his desk, among the administrative documents.

“Would you excuse me a moment?”

He left me alone on the sofa. It was dark out. I looked at my watch and I was surprised that the hands only showed a quarter to six. It felt like I had been there much longer.

Two pictures in a gray envelope, on the left of which was printed: “Zannetacci Real Estate, 20, rue de la Paix, Paris 1st.” One shot head on, one in profile, the kind they still insisted on for foreigners at the police headquarters. Her family name, Delanque, and her first name, Jacqueline, were very French all the same. Two pictures that I held between thumb and index finger as I contemplated them in silence. Brown hair, pale-colored eyes, and one of those profiles so unsullied that it gave off charm even in an anthropometric photo. And those two pictures had all the dinginess and all the coldness common to anthropometric photos.

“Lend them to me for a while?” I asked him.

“Of course.”

I stuffed the envelope into a jacket pocket.

There comes a time when you have to stop listening to other people. What did he, Jean-Pierre Choureau, really know about Jacqueline Delanque? Not much. They had lived together for barely a year in this street-level apartment in Neuilly. They had sat side by side on this sofa, they had eaten across from each other, and once in a while they had dined with old friends from business school and from the Lycée Jean-Baptiste Say. Is that enough to guess the entirety of what goes on in someone’s head? Did she still see any family relations? I made one final effort to ask him this question.

“No, she didn’t have any family left.”

I got up. He gave me an anxious look. He remained seated on the sofa.

“It’s time I get going,” I told him. “It’s late.”

I smiled at him, but he seemed surprised that I wanted to take my leave of him.

“I’ll call you as soon as possible,” I told him. “I hope to be able to give you some news before too long.”

He got up in turn, with the same trancelike movements he had used to guide me to the living room earlier. One final question came to mind.

“Did she have any money when she left?”

“No.”

“And when she called you, once she had left, did she give you any indication as to how she was getting by?”

“No.”

He walked towards the front door with his stiff gait. Would he still be able to answer my questions? I opened the door. He stood behind me, frozen. I don’t know what it was that came over me, what disequilibrium or rush of bitterness, but I said to him in an aggressive tone: “I’d imagine you had hoped you would grow old together?”

Was this to wake him from his torpor and depression? His eyes widened and he stared at me with fear. I stood in the doorframe. I stepped closer to him and put my hand on his shoulder.

“Don’t hesitate to call me. Any time of day.”

His face relaxed. He managed a smile. Before closing the door, he waved goodbye. I remained a long moment on the landing, and the automatic lighting went out. I imagined him sitting alone on the sofa, in the position he had occupied earlier. Absentmindedly picking up a magazine from the stack on the coffee table.

•

It was dark outside. I couldn’t pull my thoughts away from this man in his ground-floor apartment, sitting under the stark light of the lamp. Would he have something to eat before he went to bed? I wondered if he had a kitchen in there. I should have invited him for dinner. Perhaps, without me asking him questions, he might have said something, an admission that would have put me on the trail of Jacqueline Delanque more quickly. Blémant often told me that there comes a time for each individual, even the most stubborn, when he “spills the beans.” That was his motto. It was for us to await this moment with the utmost patience, while trying, of course, to provoke it, but in an almost imperceptible manner, as Blémant said, “with delicate little pinpricks.” The fellow must feel as if he is before a confessor. It’s tricky. That’s the job. I had reached the Porte-Maillot and I felt like walking for a while yet in the mildness of the evening. Unfortunately, my new shoes were really hurting my insteps. And so, back on the avenue, I went into the first café and selected one of the tables nearest the bay windows. I untied my shoes and removed the left one, the one that was causing me the most pain. When the waiter came, I didn’t even try to resist a brief moment of forgetfulness and relaxation, and I asked for an Izarra Verte.