Patrick Modiano - In the Café of Lost Youth

I stopped in front of number 10 and, after a moment of hesitation, I went into the building. I went to knock on the concierge’s glass door, but I stopped myself. What good would that do? On a little sign glued to one of the door’s panes were listed the names of the tenants and the floor number of each one. I took my notebook and my ballpoint pen from the inside pocket of my jacket and made note of the names:

Deyrlord (Christiane)

Dix (Gisèle)

Dupuy (Marthe)

Esnault (Yvette)

Gravier (Alice)

Manoury (Albine)

Mariska

Van Bosterhaudt (Huguette)

Zazani (Odette)

The name Delanque (Geneviève) was crossed out and replaced by Van Bosterhaudt (Huguette). The mother and daughter had lived on the fifth floor. Yet as I closed my notebook I knew that none of these details would do me any good.

Outside, by the building’s entrance, a man stood on the doorstep of a fabric shop whose sign read La Licorne. As I was looking up towards the fifth floor, I heard him say to me in a reedy voice, “Can I help you find something, sir?”

I ought to have asked him about Geneviève and Jacqueline Delanque, but I knew how he would have responded, nothing but very superficial little “surface” details, as Blémant used to say, without ever getting to the heart of the matter. All it took was to hear his reedy voice, to notice his weaselly face and the severity of his stare: No, there was nothing to hope for from him, except for the “information” that you could get from any old informant. Or else he would tell me that he didn’t know Geneviève or Jacqueline Delanque. A cold rage swept over me, directed at this weasel-faced fellow. Perhaps he suddenly took the place of all the so-called witnesses I had interrogated during my investigations, people who had never understood a thing of what they had seen, be it out of stupidity, spite, or sheer indifference. I walked with a heavy step and planted myself in front of him. I was some eight inches taller than him and weighed twice what he did.

“Is it against the law to look at a building?”

He stared at me with severe and timorous eyes. I would have liked to scare him even more.

And then, to calm myself, I sat down on a bench on the median, up by the entrance to the avenue, across from the Cinéma Mexico. I took off my left shoe.

Sunshine. I was lost in my thoughts. Jacqueline Delanque could count on my discretion, Choureau would never learn anything of the Hôtel Savoie, the Condé, La Fontaine Garage, or this person named Roland, doubtless the brown-haired guy in the suede jacket mentioned in the notebook. “Louki. Monday, February 12th, 11 p.m. Louki, April 28th, 2 p.m. Louki with the brown-haired guy in the suede jacket.” Throughout the pages of the notebook, I had underlined her name each time in blue pencil and recopied all the notes that concerned her on loose sheets. With the dates. And the times. But she had no reason to worry. I wouldn’t go back to the Condé. Really, I had been fortunate, the two or three times I had waited for her at one of the tables in the café, that she hadn’t come on those days. I would have been embarrassed to spy on her without her knowing, yes, I would have been ashamed of my role. By what right do we intrude, forcing our way in like common crooks, and by what presumptuousness do we delve into their heads and their hearts — and ask them to account for themselves? By what authority? I had taken off my shoe and was massaging my instep. The pain died down. Night fell. Before, I suppose this would have been about the time Geneviève Delanque left for work at the Moulin Rouge. Her daughter stayed home alone, on the fifth floor. Towards thirteen, fourteen years old, one evening, once her mother had gone, she had left the building, careful not to be noticed by the concierge. Outside, she hadn’t gone past the street corner. She had been happy, the first several times, with the ten o’clock show at the Cinéma Mexico. Then the return trip to the building, climbing the stairs without setting off the automatic lights, the door shut as softly as possible. One night, when the cinema let out, she had walked a little farther, as far as place Blanche. And each night, a little bit farther. Juvenile Vagrancy, it had been written in the police logs of the Quartier Saint-Georges and in those of Grandes-Carrières, and those two words evoked for me a meadow beneath the moon, beyond the Caulaincourt bridge all the way back there, behind the cemetery, a meadow where at last you could breathe in the fresh air. Her mother had come to pick her up at the police station. Unfortunately, things had already been set in motion and no one could hold her back any longer. Nocturnal wandering towards the west, if I was correctly reading the few clues that Bernolle had gathered. At first, the Quartier de l’Étoile, and then still farther west, Neuilly and the Bois de Boulogne. But why, then, had she married Choureau? And once again flight, but this time towards the Rive Gauche, as if crossing the river would protect her from some imminent danger. And yet hadn’t this marriage also been a kind of protection? If she’d had the patience to stay in Neuilly, it would have eventually been forgotten that beneath a Madame Jean-Pierre Choureau hid a Jacqueline Delanque whose name appeared in the police logs on two occasions.

Evidently I was once again a prisoner of my old professional conditioning, habits that made my colleagues believe that, even as I slept, I carried out my investigations. Blémant compared me to the postwar gangster they called “the Man Who Smokes in His Sleep.” He always kept an ashtray on the edge of his night table upon which he rested a lit cigarette. He slept in fits and starts, and each time he was briefly awake, he stretched an arm over to the ashtray and inhaled a puff of cigarette. Then, as if in a trance, he would light another one. And yet in the morning, he had no recollection of any of it and was convinced he had slept deeply. On that bench, I too, now that night had fallen, had the impression of being in a dream in which I continued to follow Jacqueline Delanque’s trail.

Or to be more precise, I felt her presence on this boulevard, its lights shining like signals without my being able to decipher them very well. They spoke to me from the depths of the years, but I didn’t know which ones. And these lights, they seemed even more vivid to me from the dimness of the median. Vivid and distant at the same time.

I had slipped my sock back on, and once again stuffed my foot into my left shoe, getting up from the bench where I would gladly have spent the whole night. And I walked along the wide median as she had, at fifteen, before she had been picked up. Where and at which moment had she attracted attention?

Jean-Pierre Choureau would eventually grow weary. I would answer his telephone calls a few more times, feeding him vague information — all false, of course. Paris is big and it’s quite easy to lose someone in it. Once I got the feeling that I had set him on the wrong track, I would stop taking his calls. Jacqueline could count on me. I would give her the time to put herself out of reach for good.

At this moment, she too was walking somewhere in this city. Or maybe she was sitting at a table, at the Condé. But she had nothing to fear. I would no longer be at our rendezvous.

WHEN I was fifteen years old, you would have thought I was nineteen, even twenty. My name wasn’t Louki then, it was Jacqueline. I was even younger than fifteen the first time I took advantage of my mother’s absence to go out. She went to work around nine o’clock in the evening and she didn’t come back before two in the morning. That first time, I had prepared a lie in case the concierge caught me in the stairwell. I was going to tell him that I needed to purchase some medicine from the pharmacy at place Blanche.