Patrick Modiano: Paris Nocturne

*

I thought that, with a little luck, the car would turn up again, parked somewhere in the neighbourhood. I walked up to the big garage on the quay and asked the petrol-pump assistant if, among his customers, he knew of a blonde woman who had recently been in a car accident and had injuries to her face. She drove a sea-green Fiat. He thought about it for a moment. No, he couldn’t help me. There was so much traffic on the quay…You’d think it was a motorway. He didn’t even notice his customers’ faces anymore. Far too many customers. And Fiats. And so many blonde women… Then I ended up further down the quay, in the Trocadéro Gardens. I thought it was the first time I’d walked in the gardens, but in front of the aquarium building, a vague childhood memory came back to me. I bought a ticket and went in. I stayed a long time watching the fish behind the glass. Their phosphorescent colours reminded me of something. Someone had brought me here, but I couldn’t say exactly when. Before Biarritz? Between Biarritz and Jouy-en-Josas? Or was it shortly after I returned to Paris, just before I had quite reached the age of reason?

I thought it was around the same time as when I was hit by the van outside the school. And then, contemplating the fish in silence, I remembered the café boss’s reply when I asked him who exactly the man named Solière was: ‘He’s no choirboy.’ I had been a choirboy, at one point in my life. It was not something I ever thought about, and the memory of it came back to me suddenly. It was at midnight mass in a village church. Although I searched through my memory, it could only have been Fossombronne-la-Forêt, where the school and the convent were, as well as a certain Dr Divoire, who directory enquiries had told me was no longer in the phone book. She was the only one who could have taken me to midnight mass and to the Trocadéro aquarium. Under the van’s tarpaulin, she held my hand and leaned over me.

The memory was far more distinct in this silent space, illuminated by the light of the tanks. Returning from midnight mass, along a small street, up to the front door of the house, someone was holding my hand. It was the same person. And I had come here during the same period, I had contemplated the same multicoloured fish gliding by behind the glass in silence. I wouldn’t have been surprised to hear footsteps behind me and to see her coming towards me when I turned around, as if all those years amounted to nothing. What’s more, we made the journey from Fossombronne-la-Forêt to Paris in the same car as the one that hit me on Place des Pyramides, a sea-green car. It had never stopped driving around the streets of Paris at night, looking for me.

When I left the aquarium, I was overwhelmed by the cold. Along the paths and lawns of the gardens, there were little piles of snow. The sky was a limpid blue. I felt I could see clearly for the first time in my life. This blue, against which the Palais de Chaillot was sharply silhouetted, this bracing cold after years and years of torpor…The accident the other night had come at the right time. I needed a shock to wake me out of my lethargy. I couldn’t carry on walking around in fog. And it happened a few months before I turned twenty-one. What a strange coincidence. I’d been saved just in time. That accident would probably be one of the most defining events of my life. A return to order.

The school and the van with a tarpaulin: it was the first time I revisited the past. It was triggered by the shock of the accident the other night. Until that point I had lived from one day to the next. I’d been driving on a road covered with black ice in what could have been described as zero-visibility conditions. I’d had to avoid looking back. Perhaps I’d turned onto a bridge that was too narrow. It was impossible to turn around. One glance in the rear-view mirror and I would have been consumed by vertigo. But now I could look back over those unfortunate years without fear. It was as though someone other than myself had a bird’s eye view of my life, or that I was looking at my own X-ray against a backlit screen. Everything was so clear, the lines so precise and pure…Only the essential elements were left: the van, the face leaning over me under the tarpaulin, ether, midnight mass and the walk home up to the front gate of the house where her room was on the first floor, at the end of the corridor.

I FOUND A hotel past the Pont de Bir-Hakeim on a small avenue that ran onto the quay. After three days, I no longer wanted to go back to my room in Porte d’Orléans, so I took a room at the Hôtel Fremiet, and wondered who the other guests were. It was a more comfortable room than the one on Rue de la Voie-Verte, with a telephone and even its own bathroom. But I could afford this luxury thanks to the money the man named Solière had given me, which he had turned down when I tried to give it back. That was his bad luck. It was foolish of me to have any scruples about it. After all, he was no choirboy.

At night, in my room, I decided never to return to Rue de la Voie-Verte. I had taken some clothes and the navy-blue cardboard box in which I kept my old papers. I had to face the facts: there was no trace of me left there. Far from making me sad, the thought gave me courage for the future. A weight had been lifted.

I used to get back late to the hotel. I’d eat dinner in a large restaurant, past the steps from the bridge and the entrance to the metro station. I still remember the name: La Closerie de Passy. It wasn’t very busy. Some nights I would find myself alone with the manager, a woman with short brown hair, and the waiter, who wore a white naval jacket. Every time I went, I hoped Jacqueline Beausergent would come in and walk over to the bar like the two or three people who sat and talked with the manager. I always chose the closest table to the entrance. I would stand up and walk towards her. I had already decided what I would say to her: ‘We were both in an accident at Place des Pyramides…’ Seeing me walk would be enough. The split moccasin, the bandage… At the Hôtel Fremiet, the man at reception had looked me over with a frown. The bloodstain on my old sheepskin jacket was still there. He didn’t seem to trust me. I paid a fortnight’s rent in advance.

But the manager of La Closerie de Passy wasn’t fazed by my bandage and the bloodstain on my old sheepskin jacket. Apparently she had seen it all before, in neighbourhoods that weren’t as quiet as this one. Next to the bar was a parrot in a large yellow cage. Decades later, I was leafing through a magazine from the time and, on the last page, there were advertisements for restaurants. One of them jumped out at me: ‘La Closerie de Passy and its parrot, Pépère. Open seven days a week.’ A seemingly harmless phrase, but it made my heart race. One night, I was feeling so lonely that I went to sit at the bar with the others and I sensed that the manager took pity on me because of my stained sheepskin jacket, my bandage, and because I was so thin. She advised me to drink some Viandox. When I asked her a question about the parrot she said, ‘You can teach him a sentence if you like.’ So I thought about it and ended up saying as clearly as possible, ‘ I’m looking for a sea-green Fiat car .’ It didn’t take long to teach it to him. His way of saying it was more concise and efficient: ‘ sea-green Fiat ’, and his voice was more shrill and imperious than mine.

La Closerie de Passy isn’t there anymore and one night last summer when I was going along Boulevard Delessert in a taxi, it looked as if there was a bank in its place. But parrots live to a very old age. Perhaps this one, after thirty years, is still repeating my phrase in another neighbourhood of Paris and in the commotion of another café, without anyone understanding it or really paying any attention. Nowadays only parrots remain faithful to the past.