Patrick Modiano: Paris Nocturne

I tried to walk less than the previous days and I spent long afternoons in the Hôtel Fremiet. I thought about the past and the present. I had made a note of the names of the people living at 4 Avenue Albert-de-Mun who were in the phone book.

Boscher (J.): PASSY 13 51

Trocadéro Finance and Real Estate Co: PASSY 48 00

Destombe (J.): PASSY 03 97

Dupont (A.): PASSY 24 35

Goodwin (Mme C.): PASSY 41 48

Grunberg (A.): PASSY 05 00

McLachlan (G. V.): PASSY 04 38

No Solière. I called each of the numbers and asked to speak to a Monsieur Solière or a Mademoiselle Jacqueline Beausergent, but neither of the names seemed to ring a bell for any of the people I spoke to. There was no answer from the Trocadéro Finance and Real Estate Company. So perhaps that was the right number.

My father’s address book was there in the navy-blue cardboard box. He’d forgotten it on the table at a café one night and I’d slipped it into my pocket. He never mentioned it during our subsequent meetings. Losing it was evidently not a problem for him, or perhaps he couldn’t imagine that I would take it. During the few months before he disappeared into the fog around Montrouge I don’t think any of those names were of much use to him any longer. No Solière under the letter S. And no mention of Fossombronne-la-Forêt among the addresses.

Some nights, I wondered if this search was meaningless and I questioned why I had embarked upon it. Was it naïve of me? Very early on, perhaps even before adolescence, I had the feeling that I came from nothing. I remembered a rainy afternoon in the Latin Quarter, a fellow with a jawline beard in a grey trench coat was handing out leaflets. It was a questionnaire for a study about young people. The questions seemed strange to me: What family structure did you grow up in? I answered: none. Do you have a strong image of your mother and father? I answered: nebulous. Do you think you are a good son (or daughter)? I answered: I have never been a son. In the studies you have undertaken, have you endeavoured to keep your parents’ respect and to conform to your social group? No studies. No parents. No social group. Would you prefer to be part of the revolution or contemplate a beautiful landscape? Contemplate a beautiful landscape. Which do you prefer? The depth of torment or the lightness of happiness? The lightness of happiness. Do you want to change your life or rediscover a lost harmony? Rediscover a lost harmony. These two words were the stuff of dreams, but what could a lost harmony really consist of? In the room at the Hôtel Fremiet, I asked myself if I wasn’t trying to discover, despite the obscurity of my origins and the chaos of my childhood, a fixed point, something reassuring, a landscape even, that would help me to regain my footing. There was perhaps a whole section of my life that I didn’t know about, a solid foundation beneath the shifting sands. And I was relying on the sea-green Fiat and its driver to help me discover it.

*

I was having trouble sleeping. I was tempted to go and ask the pharmacist for one of the midnight-blue vials of ether I knew so well. But I stopped myself in time. It wasn’t the moment to give in. I had to remain as lucid as possible. During those sleepless nights, what I regretted most was having left all my books in my room on Rue de la Voie-Verte. There weren’t many bookshops in the area. I walked towards l’Étoile to find one. I bought some detective novels and an old secondhand book, the title of which intrigued me: The Wonders of the Heavens . To my great surprise, I couldn’t bring myself to read detective novels anymore. But hardly had I opened The Wonders of the Heavens , which bore on its first page the words ‘Night reading’, than I realised just how much this book was going to mean to me. Nebula. The Milky Way. The Sidereal World. The Northern Constellations. The Zodiac, Distant Universes…As I read through the chapters, I no longer even knew why I was lying on that bed in that hotel room. I had forgotten where I was, which country, which city, and none of it mattered anymore. No drug, not ether or morphine or opium, could have given me that sense of calm, which gradually engulfed me. All I had to do was turn the pages. This ‘night reading’ should have been recommended to me a long time ago. It would have spared me much pointless suffering and many restless nights. The Milky Way. The Sidereal World. Finally, the horizon stretched out infinitely before me and I felt utterly content looking at stars from afar and trying to make out all the variable, temporary, extinguished or faded stars. I was nothing in this infinity, but I could finally breathe.

Was it the influence of my reading? When I walked around the neighbourhood at night, I continued to feel a sense of fulfilment. All my anxiety was gone. I had been freed from some kind of suffocating restraint. My leg didn’t hurt anymore. The bandage had come undone and was dangling from my shoe. The wound was healing. The neighbourhood took on an aspect that was different from when I first arrived. For a few nights the sky was so clear that I could see more stars than ever before. Or perhaps I hadn’t noticed them until then. But now I had read The Wonders of the Heavens .

My walks often led to the Trocadéro esplanade. At least one could breathe the ocean air there. This zone now seemed to be crisscrossed by large avenues that one could reach from the Seine via gardens, sequences of stairways and walkways that looked like country paths. The light from the streetlamps was more and more dazzling. I was surprised that there were no cars parked along the kerb. Every avenue was deserted, and it would be easy for me to spot the sea-green Fiat from a distance. Perhaps parking in the area had been prohibited for the past few nights. They had decided that from then on the neighbourhood would be what they called a ‘blue zone’. And I was the only pedestrian. Had a curfew been brought in which forbade people from going out after eleven o’clock at night? But I didn’t care: it was as if I had a special pass in the pocket of my sheepskin jacket, which exempted me from police checks.

One night, a dog followed me from Pont de l’Alma to the Trocadéro esplanade. It was the same black colouring and the same breed as the one that had been hit by a car in my childhood. I walked up the avenue on the right-hand side. At first, the dog stayed about ten metres behind me and then gradually it came closer. By the time we reached the railings of the Galliera Gardens, we were walking side by side. I don’t know where I’d read — perhaps in a footnote in The Wonders of the Heavens —that at certain hours of the night, you can slip into a parallel world: an empty apartment where the light wasn’t switched off, even a small dead-end street. It’s where you find objects lost long ago: a lucky charm, a letter, an umbrella, a key, and cats, dogs and horses that were lost over the course of your life. I thought that dog was the one from Rue du Docteur-Kurzenne.

It wore a red leather collar with a metal tag and, when I bent down, I saw a phone number engraved on it. With a collar, you’d think twice about taking it to the pound. As for me, I still kept an old, out-of-date passport in the inside pocket of my sheepskin jacket. I had fudged the date of birth to make myself older, and so it looked like I was twenty-one. For the past few nights, however, I no longer feared police checks. Reading The Wonders of the Heavens had lifted my spirits. From then on, I considered things from high above.

The dog walked in front of me. At first, it looked around to check that I was following, and then it walked at a steady pace, certain I would follow. I walked at the same slow pace as the dog. Nothing interrupted the silence. Grass seemed to be growing in between the cobblestones. Time had ceased. It must have been what Bouvière called the ‘eternal return’. The façades of buildings, the trees, the glimmer of the streetlamps took on an intensity that I had never seen in them before.