Patrick Modiano: In the Café of Lost Youth

I took the envelope from my pocket and I pored over the pictures for a long while. Where was she now? In a café, like me, sitting alone at a table? Doubtless the phrase he had spoken earlier had given me this idea: “It’s all about trying to create ties.” Encounters in the street, in a Métro station at rush hour. We ought to shackle ourselves to each other at that moment. What connection can resist the tide as it carries you away and diverts your course? An anonymous office where you dictate a letter to a temp typist, a ground-floor apartment in Neuilly whose white, empty walls evoke what some would call a “showroom apartment,” where there would be no trace left of your stay. Two photo-booth snapshots, one facing the camera, one in profile. And that’s what we’re supposed to forge links with? There was someone who would be able to help me with my search: Bernolle. I hadn’t seen him since my Blémant days, except for one afternoon about three years ago. I was on my way to the Métro and I was crossing the square in front of Notre-Dame. A tramp came out of the Hôtel-Dieu and our paths crossed. He was wearing a raincoat with torn sleeves, pants that stopped above the ankles, and his bare feet were wedged into a pair of old sandals. He was unshaven and his dark hair was too long. And yet I recognized him. Bernolle. I followed him with the intention of speaking to him. But he was walking too quickly. He went in the front door of the police headquarters. I hesitated a moment. It was too late to catch him, so I decided to wait right there on the sidewalk. After all, we had grown up together.

He came back out of the same door in a navy blue coat, flannel pants, and black lace-up shoes. It was no longer the same man. He seemed nervous when I approached him. He was freshly shaven. We walked the length of the quay without saying a word. Once we had taken a seat at a table a bit farther down, at the Soleil d’Or, he confided in me. He was still employed digging up information, oh, nothing big, some work as an informant and a mole where he played the part of a tramp to better see and hear what went on around him: staking out building fronts, the various flea markets, Pigalle, around the train stations, and even in the Latin Quarter. He had a sad smile. He lived in a studio in the sixteenth arrondissement. He gave me his telephone number. Not for a moment did we speak of the past. He had placed his travel bag on the bench next to him. He would have been rather surprised if I had told him what it contained: an old raincoat, pants that were too short, a pair of sandals.

•

The very evening I returned from the meeting in Neuilly, I telephoned him. Ever since we had reconnected, I occasionally turned to him for information I required. I asked him to find me some details concerning one Jacqueline Delanque, married name Choureau. I didn’t have much else to tell him about this person, other than her date of birth and that of her marriage to a certain Choureau, Jean-Pierre, of 11, avenue de Bretteville in Neuilly, an active partner with Zannetacci. He took notes. “That’s all?” He seemed disappointed. “And nothing on either of them in the criminal records, I suppose,” he said in a disdainful voice. “No rap sheets?” Criminal records. Rap sheets. I tried to picture the Choureaus’ bedroom in Neuilly, the bedroom I ought to have taken a look at out of professional conscientiousness.

A bedroom empty forevermore, a bare mattress stripped of its sheets.

•

Over the course of the following weeks, Choureau telephoned me several times. He always spoke in an expressionless voice and it was always seven o’clock in the evening. Perhaps at that particular hour, alone in his ground-floor apartment, he felt the need to talk to someone. I told him to be patient. I got the feeling that he had given up and that he would slowly begin to accept his wife’s disappearance. I received a letter from Bernolle:

My dear Caisley,

No jacket on file in the criminal records. Neither under Choureau nor Delanque.

But chance is a strange mistress. A tedious statistical assignment that I’ve been working on within the police station logs of the 9th and 18th arrondissements led me to find you a bit of information.

On two separate occasions, I came across “Delanque, Jacqueline, 15 years old.” The first time, in the logs of the Quartier Saint-Georges police station, from seven years ago, and a second time, several months later, in that of Grandes-Carrières. Grounds: Juvenile Vagrancy.

I asked at Leoni if there might be something concerning hotels. Two years ago, Delanque, Jacqueline, lived at the Hôtel San Remo, 8, rue d’Armaillé (17th) and the Hôtel Métropole, 13, rue de l’Étoile (17th). In the logs from Saint-Georges and from Grandes-Carrières, it indicates that she lived with her mother at 10, avenue Rachel (18th arrondissement).

She currently lives at the Hôtel Savoie, 8, rue Cels, in the 14th arrondissement. Her mother passed away four years ago. On her birth certificate from the city hall in Fontaines-en-Sologne (Loir-et-Cher), of which I am sending you a copy, it indicates that she was born to an unknown father. Her mother was employed as an usher at the Moulin Rouge and had a friend, a Guy Lavigne, who worked at the La Fontaine Garage (16th) and who helped her out financially. Jacqueline Delanque doesn’t seem to have steady employment.

There, my dear Caisley, you have everything that I have gathered for you. I hope to see you soon, but on the condition that it isn’t in my work attire. Blémant would have laughed heartily at that tramp disguise. You, a little less, I suppose. And me, not a bit.

Take care,

Bernolle

All that remained was for me to telephone Jean-Pierre Choureau and tell him that the mystery was cleared up. I’m trying to remember at which exact moment I decided not to do anything about it. I had dialed the first digits of his number when I hung up abruptly. I was overwhelmed at the thought of going back to that ground-floor apartment in Neuilly during the late afternoon as I had before, of waiting with him under the red-shaded lamp for night to fall. I unfolded the old Taride map of Paris that I always keep on my desk, within arm’s reach. Through my years of consulting it, I have often torn it at the edges, and each time, I stuck Scotch tape over the tear, as if I were dressing a wound. The Condé. Neuilly. Quartier de l’Étoile. Avenue Rachel. For the first time in my professional life, I felt the need to go against the tide while conducting my investigation. Yes, I was traveling the road that Jacqueline Delanque had followed, but in the opposite direction. Jean-Pierre Choureau no longer mattered. He had only been a bit part and I saw him receding into the distance forever, a black briefcase in his hand, towards the Zannetacci offices. In the end, the only interesting person was Jacqueline Delanque. There had been many Jacquelines in my life. She would be the last. I took the Métro, the north-south line, as they call it, the one that connected avenue Rachel to the Condé. As the stations passed by, I traveled back in time. I got off at Pigalle. Once there, I walked along the boulevard’s wide median with a spring in my step. A sunny autumn afternoon where it would have been nice to work on new projects and where life could have started over from scratch. After all, it was in this area that her life had begun, this Jacqueline Delanque. It seemed as if she and I had an appointment. Coming up on place Blanche, my heart was racing a bit and I felt nervous and even intimidated. I hadn’t felt this way in a long time. I continued on down the median, my pace growing quicker. I could have walked this familiar district with my eyes closed: the Moulin Rouge, Le Sanglier Bleu. Who knows? Maybe I had crossed paths with this Jacqueline Delanque a long time ago, on the right-hand sidewalk as she went to meet her mother at the Moulin Rouge, or on the opposite side as school let out from the Lycée Jules-Ferry. There, I had arrived. I had forgotten about the cinema on the corner of the avenue. It was called the Mexico, and it wasn’t by chance that it had such a name. It gave you the desire to travel, to run away, to disappear. I had also forgotten the silence and calm of avenue Rachel, which leads to the cemetery, although you never think of the cemetery, you tell yourself that at its end it must let out onto the countryside, or even, with a bit of luck, onto a seaside promenade.