Patrick Modiano - Paris Nocturne

‘Then if I’ve understood correctly, Monsieur Solière arrived at the right moment?’

He had walked towards us slowly that night, in his dark coat. I even wonder if he had a cigarette at the corner of his mouth. And this girl had a meeting with him in the lobby of the hotel…I also had meetings with my father in hotel lobbies, which all looked the same and where the marble, the chandeliers, the wood engravings and the sofas were all fake. It’s the same precarious situation as being in a railway station waiting room between catching two trains, or in a police station before an interrogation.

‘It seems he’s no choirboy,’ I said.

‘Who?’

‘Solière.’

For the first time, she seemed embarrassed.

‘What does he do for a living?’

‘Business.’

She lowered her head as if I might be shocked by this response.

‘And you’re his secretary?’

‘Sort of, I suppose…But only part-time.’

There under the light of the wall lamp, she seemed younger than in the police van. It must have been the fur coat that made her seem older the other night. And besides, after the shock, I didn’t have my wits about me. That night, I thought she was blonde.

‘And the work isn’t too complicated?’

I really wanted to know everything. Time was running out. At that hour, they were perhaps about to close the restaurant.

‘When I came to Paris, I studied nursing,’ she said, and started speaking more and more quickly as if she was in a hurry to explain it all to me. ‘And then I started work… home nursing…I met Monsieur Solière…’

I wasn’t listening anymore. I asked her how old she was. Twenty-six. So she was a few years older than me. But it was unlikely that she was the woman from Fossombronne-la-Forêt. I tried to remember the face of the woman or girl who had climbed into the van and held my hand.

‘During my childhood, I had an accident that was similar to the one the other night. I was leaving school…’

As I told her the story, I spoke more and more quickly, too, the words tumbling out. We were like two people allowed a few minutes together in the visiting room of a prison and who wouldn’t have enough time to tell each other everything.

‘I thought the girl in the van was you.’

She burst out laughing.

‘But that’s impossible. I was twelve years old then.’

An entire episode of my life, the face of someone who must have loved me, a house, all of it tipped into oblivion, into the unknown, forever.

‘A place called Fossombronne-la-Forêt…A Dr Divoire.’ I thought I had said it under my breath, to myself.

‘I know that name,’ she said. ‘It’s in Sologne. I was born around there.’

I took the Michelin map of the Loir-et-Cher from the pocket of my sheepskin jacket, where I had kept it for several days. I unfolded it on the tablecloth. She seemed apprehensive.

‘Where were you born?’ I asked.

‘La Versanne.’

I leaned over the map. The light from the wall lamp wasn’t strong enough for me to make out all the names of the villages in such tiny print.

She craned her neck to look, too. Our foreheads were almost touching.

‘Try to find Blois,’ she said. ‘Slightly to the right you have Chambord. Below there’s the Boulogne forest. And Bracieux…and, to the right, La Versanne.’

It was easy to find my bearings with the forest marked in green. There it was. I’d found La Versanne.

‘Do you think it’s far from Fossombronne?’

‘About twenty kilometres.’

The first time I’d discovered it on the map, I should have underlined the name Fossombronne-la-Forêt in red ink. Now I’d lost it.

‘It’s on the road to Milançay,’ she said.

I looked for the road to Milançay. Now I was managing to read the names of the villages: Fontaines-en-Sologne, Montgiron, Marcheval…

‘If you really want to, I could show you around the area one day,’ she said, staring at me with a perplexed look.

I leaned over the map again.

‘We’d still have to find the route from La Versanne to Fossombronne.’

I buried myself in the map again, tracing departmental roads, heading from village to village at random: Le Plessis, Tréfontaine, Boizardiaire, La Viorne…At the end of a little winding road, I read: FOSSOMBRONNE-LA-FORÊT.

‘And what if we went there tonight?’

She thought about it for a moment, as if my suggestion seemed perfectly natural. ‘Not tonight, I’m too tired.’

I said that I was joking, but I wasn’t sure. I couldn’t tear my eyes from the names of all the hamlets, forests and little lakes. I wanted to merge with the landscape. Already at that time, I was convinced that a man without a landscape was thoroughly diminished. An invalid of sorts. I had become aware of it when I was very young, in Paris, when my dog died and I didn’t know where to bury him. No field. No village. No land of our own. Not even a garden. I folded up the map and stuffed it into my pocket.

‘Do you live with Solière?’

‘Not at all. I just take care of his offices and his apartment when he’s away from Paris. He travels a lot for business.’

It was funny; my father used to travel a lot for business as well and, despite all the meetings he arranged with me in increasingly distant hotel lobbies and cafés, I had never understood what line of business he was in. The same as Solière’s?

‘Do you come to this bar often?’ I asked.

‘No, not often. It’s the only place open late in the area.’

I remarked that there weren’t many customers, but she told me they came much later at night. A strange clientele, she said. And yet, in my memory, the place seems abandoned. It’s as if she and I had broken in that night. There we are opposite each other and I can hear some of that muffled music played after the curfew hour — music which you can dance to and live a few moments of stolen happiness.

‘Don’t you think that after the shock of our first encounter, we should get to know each other better?’

She said this in a soft voice, but with clear, precise enunciation. I had read that in Touraine that they spoke the purest French. But listening to her, I wondered if it wasn’t actually in Sologne, around La Versanne and Fossombronne-la-Forêt. She laid her hand on mine, my left hand where the cut was healing without a dressing.

*

Out in the street, a veil had been stripped away. The bonnet of the car was gleaming in the moonlight. I wondered if it was a mirage or the effect of the alcohol I’d drunk. I tapped on the car near the bonnet to make sure I wasn’t dreaming.

‘One day I’ll have to get all that repaired,’ she said, gesturing to the bumper and the damaged mudguard.

I confessed that it was at a garage that I’d been tipped off about her car.

‘You’ve given yourself a lot of trouble for nothing,’ she said. ‘It’s been parked in front of my place for the last three weeks. I live at 2 Square Léon-Guillot in the fifteenth arrondissement.’

So it turned out that we didn’t live that far from each other. Porte d’Orléans. Porte de Vanves. With a little luck we might have come across each other there, in that hinterland. That would have simplified things. We were both from the same world.

I sat on the bonnet.

‘Well, if you’re going back to the fifteenth, I’d be glad of a lift home…’

But no. She said that she had to sleep at Solière’s apartment that night, on Avenue Albert-de-Mun, and stay there for a while so that it wouldn’t be empty while he was away. Solière had gone to Geneva and Madrid on business.

‘If I understand correctly, you’re employed as a caretaker and night watcher?’

‘Sort of, I suppose.’

She opened the right-hand door for me to get into the car. After all those days and all these nights spent wandering around the neighbourhood, it seemed natural. I was even convinced that I had already lived that moment in a dream.