Patrick Modiano: After the Circus

There was something homey and reassuring about the sound of the word “Tomate.”

“If you want …”

Naturally, I wasn’t expecting any moral support from Grabley. He had something in common with my father: they both wore suits, ties, and shoes like everyone else. They spoke unaccented French, smoked cigarettes, drank espresso, and ate oysters. But when in their company, you were seized by doubt and you felt like touching them, the way you rub cloth between your fingers, to make sure they really existed.

“Do you think he can do anything for us?” she asked.

“Who knows?”

It was too early to go meet him. We still had two hours to kill. On the left, just nearby, on the avenue, I noticed the lit façade of the Maillot Palace cinema, and I suggested we go see the film they were showing: Cattle Queen of Montana. The usherette didn’t say a word about the dog.

Once we’d settled into the red velvet seats, my uneasiness dissipated.

Rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette was dark and the sidewalks deserted. At that hour, people were finishing their dinner and going to bed early. Tomorrow would be another day of school and work. Up above, the Tomate’s neon sign shone to no purpose in a dead street. Who would be there to watch the Sunday night show? A sailor on shore leave, before heading back to the Gare Saint-Lazare to catch the Cherbourg train?

The usherette pointed the way backstage. The dressing rooms were in the basement. We went down a flight of stairs leading to a small lounge, its walls decorated with old posters from the place.

Grabley was standing by one of the dressing room doors, wearing a glen plaid suit and a suede tie. He looked worried.

“What a nice surprise … It was good of you to come …”

But he confided to us that Sylvette was in a very bad mood. She was in her dressing room, changing. We’d made the right choice coming when we did, as there would be no ten-thirty performance. He suggested we go find our seats. I answered that we were happier staying there with him. Besides, they wouldn’t let us in the auditorium with the dog.

“Too bad for you.”

He was visibly offended by our lack of enthusiasm for the show.

The dressing room door opened and Sylvette appeared. She was wearing a black domino and leopard-skin basque. She greeted us curtly. Then, turning to Grabley, she told him he was under no obligation to hang around the wings waiting for her. She was mortified enough being in this show, but having someone hovering around her all the time, even in her dressing room, only made it worse … The discussion got heated. Yes, any man with half a brain would have understood it was humiliating for a dancer to demean herself like this, but she had to make a living, and it wasn’t like anybody was going to help her. Then she chided him for bringing us here. She hadn’t entirely turned into a circus animal or some beast you go visit in the zoo on Sundays. Grabley lowered his eyes. She ditched us there and headed to the staircase, which she started to climb in her high heels, and the swaying of her hips immediately reminded me of something. Of course! The naked girl with her hair tied back in a ponytail, in one of the magazines in the office — that was she.

Grabley gazed after her until she was gone. The first bars of a Mexican tune blared out from trumpets. No doubt she had just gone onstage.

“She can be so hard,” he said, “so hard …”

Gisèle and I exchanged a look and could barely keep from laughing. Fortunately, he wasn’t paying us any attention. He was staring at the top of the stairs, looking numb, as if she had left for good.

After a while, we weren’t sure whether we should stay or not. And I didn’t feel like laughing anymore. Was it because of the yellow light in the lounge, the old posters on the walls indicating that this had once been a proper cabaret, the Mexican trumpets, this man dressed in his glen plaid suit and suede tie who had just been snapped at? A diffuse melancholy floated over us.

Once more, I thought of my father. I imagined him in the same situation, wearing his navy blue coat and waiting at the dressing room door in a place very much like this: some “Kit Cat” or “Carrousel” in Geneva or Lausanne. I remembered the last Christmas we spent together. I was fifteen. He had come to collect me in a boarding school in the Haute-Savoie where they couldn’t keep me over the holidays.

A woman was waiting for him in Geneva, twenty years younger than he, an Italian with straw-blond hair, and the three of us took the plane for Rome. From that trip, there remains a photograph that I rediscovered thirty years later, at the bottom of a trunk full of papers. It has captured forever the image of a New Year’s Eve celebration in a nightclub near the Via Veneto, where the Italian woman had dragged us after making a scene with my father: you could hear the shouting in the hotel corridor.

We are sitting before a champagne bucket. Several couples are dancing behind us. Around the table, a man with dark hair, slicked back; his face wears an expression of forced gaiety. Next to him, a woman of about thirty, lots of foundation, very frizzy straw-blond hair tied in a bun. And a teenager with a rented tux that is too big for him and a blank look on his face, like all children who find themselves in bad company because they don’t have any say and can’t yet live their lives. If I wanted to return to Rome, it was to erase that past.

“Want to go?” Gisèle asked me.

The dog was getting restless. He had climbed the stairs, then, realizing we weren’t following, had come back down and settled at the foot of the staircase.

Grabley suddenly emerged from his dejection:

“You aren’t leaving, are you? Sylvette will be so disappointed … And she’ll give me an even harder time …”

But I felt no pity for him. He reminded me of my father, the woman’s straw-blond hair, and that New Year’s Eve. These days I was free to come and go as I pleased.

“We can’t stay, old man,” I said. “I have to take Gisèle home to Saint-Leu-la-Forêt.”

“You really don’t want to have a late supper with us?”

He was wearing the same anxious expression as my father had had on that sidewalk on the Via Veneto. In front of us, a group of revelers were tooting little party horns. The woman with the straw-blond hair seemed to be sulking. Suddenly she started walking quickly, then running, as if she wanted to lose us. My father said to me:

“Quick … Catch her … be nice to her … Tell her how much we love her … that we need her … Give her this …”

And he slipped me a small box wrapped in silver paper.

I had run. I was too young at the time. And now I felt a kind of sadness mixed with indifference for that still recent past. None of it mattered anymore. Not my father, not Grabley, not that fellow they had taken away in the car earlier. They could all go to hell.

On the sidewalk, I felt lighter, removed from everything. I wished she could have shared my state of mind. I put my arm around her shoulder and we walked to the car.

The dog went ahead of us. I suggested we leave for Rome right away. But she had left her money in one of the suitcases.

All we had to do was stop by Quai de Conti and stash the suitcases in the trunk of the car.

“Up to you,” she said.

She had become carefree again, like me.

But a thought brought me back to reality. I was underage and I had to get hold of an authorization form to travel abroad, at the bottom of which I’d forge my father’s signature. I didn’t dare tell her.

“Actually, we can’t leave this evening,” I said. “First that Italian has to give me all the information.”

The theater on Rue Fontaine was closed. A few scattered lights toward the top of the building. After following the neighborhood streets haphazardly, we stopped in front of a restaurant, the Gavarny.