Patrick Modiano: Paris Nocturne

BEFORE THE ACCIDENT, I’d been living for almost a year in Hôtel de la Rue de la Voie-Verte, near Porte d’Orléans. For a long time, I wanted to forget this period of my life, or else remember only the seemingly insignificant details. There was, for example, a man I often passed at around six o’clock in the evening. He was probably returning home from work. All I remember about him is that he carried a black suitcase and walked slowly. One evening, in the large café opposite the Cité Universitaire, I struck up a conversation with a young man sitting next to me who I thought must have been a student. But he worked in a travel agency. He was Madagascan and later I came across his name and a telephone number on a card, among a pile of old papers I was throwing out. His name was Katz-Kreutzer. I know nothing about him. There were other details… They were always to do with people I’d come across, barely glimpsed, and who would remain as mysteries in my mind. Places too…A little restaurant I would occasionally go to with my father, near the top of Avenue Foch, on the left. I searched in vain for it sometime later when I happened to be passing though the neighbourhood. Or had I dreamed it? Along with country houses belonging to people whose names I could no longer recall, near villages I would not be able to point out on a map, a certain Évelyne I had known one night on a train. I even started compiling a list, with approximate dates, of all these lost faces and places, of all those abandoned projects, like the time I decided to enrol at the faculty of medicine, but I didn’t see it through. My attempts to catalogue all those plans which never saw the light of day and which remained forever on hold, a way of searching for a breach, for vanishing points. Because I’m reaching the age at which, little by little, life begins to close in on itself.

I’m trying to recall the colours and the mood of the period when I lived near Porte d’Orléans. Shades of grey and black, a mood that seems stifling in retrospect, perpetual autumns and winters. Was it just a coincidence that I ended up in the area where I had met my father for the last time? Seven o’clock sharp in the morning at La Rotonde café, at the bottom of one of those tall blocks of brick buildings that mark the edge of Paris. Beyond lay Montrouge and a section of the ring road that had just been completed. We didn’t have much to say and I knew then that we wouldn’t see each other again. We got up and, without shaking hands, left La Rotonde. I was taken aback as I watched him wander off in his navy-blue overcoat towards the ring road. I still wonder which distant suburb he was heading for. Yes, this coincidence is striking now: to have lived for a period in the neighbourhood where our last meetings took place. But at the time, I didn’t give it a second thought. I had other things on my mind.

DR BOUVIÈRE IS another one of those fugitive faces from this period. I wonder if he’s still alive. Perhaps under another name, in some provincial town, he has found new disciples. Last night, the memory of this man brought on a nervous laugh which I struggled to contain. Had he really existed? Was he not a mirage provoked by lack of sleep, a habit of skipping meals and taking bad drugs? Not at all. There were too many details, too many connections that proved well and truly that a Dr Bouvière, during that time, conducted his meetings from cafés in the fourteenth arrondissement.

Our paths had crossed a few months before the accident. And I must admit that at the Hôtel-Dieu, as they put the black muzzle over my face to administer ether and send me to sleep, I had thought of Bouvière because of his doctor title. I don’t know what the title meant, whether it was one of his university ranks or if he was recognised as having completed medical studies. I think Bouvière played on this ambiguity to suggest that his ‘learning’ covered vast spheres, medicine included.

The first time I saw him, it was not in Montparnasse at one of his meetings, but on the other side of Paris, on the Right Bank, right on the corner of Rue Pigalle and Rue de Douai, in a café called Le Sans Souci. I have to point out what I was doing there, even if I have to come back to it again in more detail one day. Following the example of a French writer known as the ‘nocturnal spectator’, I frequented certain neighbourhoods in Paris. In the streets at night, I had the impression I was living another life, a more captivating one, or quite simply, that I was dreaming another life.

It was around eight o’clock in the evening, in winter, and there were not many people in the café. My attention was drawn to a couple sitting at one of the tables: he had short silver hair, was around forty, with a bony face and pale eyes. He’d kept his overcoat on. She was a blonde woman of about the same age. Her complexion was translucent, but her features were severe. She spoke to him in a deep, almost masculine voice, and the words I heard sounded like they were being read out, so clear was her articulation. But there was something about her that fitted perfectly with the Pigalle district at that time. Indeed, at first I thought they were the proprietors of one of the nightclubs in the area. Or probably just her, I thought. The man would have stayed behind the scenes. He listened to her as she spoke. He took out a cigarette holder and I was struck by his affectation, a slight movement of the chin, as he put it in his mouth. After a while, the woman stood up and in her smooth voice, articulating each syllable, she said to him, ‘Next time, you won’t forget my refills, will you,’ and this phrase intrigued me. She said it in a dry, almost contemptuous tone and he nodded his head docilely. Then, with an air of confidence, she strode out of the café, without turning back, leaving him looking annoyed.

I watched her leave. She wore a fur-lined raincoat. She walked down Rue Victor-Massé on the left-hand side of the street and I wondered if she would go into the Tabarin. But she didn’t. She disappeared. Perhaps into the hotel, further down the street? After all, she was just as likely to be the proprietor of a hotel as of a cabaret or a perfumery. He remained sitting at the table, his head lowered, pensive, the cigarette holder dangling from the corner of his mouth, as if he’d just taken a punch. Under the neon light, his face was veiled in a film of sweat and a kind of grey grease that I’ve noticed on the faces of men made to suffer by women. Then he got up, too. He was tall, his back slightly stooped. Through the glass, I saw him walk down Rue Pigalle, moving like a sleepwalker.

That was my first encounter with Dr Bouvière. The second was about a fortnight later, in another café, near Denfert-Rochereau. Paris is a big city, but I think you can meet the same person several times and often in places where it would seem most unlikely: in the metro, on the boulevards…Once, twice, three times, you could almost say that fate — or chance — had a hand in it, and was willing a certain meeting or steering your life in a new direction, but you seldom heed its call. You let the face go, and it remains forever unknown, and you feel relief, but also remorse.

I went into the café to buy cigarettes and there was a queue at the counter. The clock on the far wall was showing seven o’clock in the evening. At a table beneath it, in the middle of the red moleskin banquette, I recognised Bouvière. There were a few people with him, but they were sitting on chairs. Bouvière was sitting on the banquette by himself, as if the more comfortable spot was his by right. The grey grease and sweat had disappeared from his face, and the cigarette holder was no longer dangling from the corner of his mouth. He was barely the same man. This time he was talking; he even seemed to be delivering a lecture while the others listened in rapture. One of them was scribbling in a large school exercise book. Girls as well as boys. I don’t know why I was so curious, perhaps that evening it was the need to answer the question I was asking myself: how could a man transform so dramatically depending on whether he’s in Pigalle or Denfert-Rochereau? I had always been very sensitive to the mysteries of Paris.