Patrick Modiano: Paris Nocturne

I often found myself, sometime later, making the same journey in reverse. At around nine o’clock at night, I would leave the Right Bank, cross the Seine at Pont des Arts, and find myself at the Corona café. But this time, I was alone at one of the tables in the back room and I no longer needed to find something to say to the shifty-looking guy in the navy-blue overcoat. I began to feel a sense of relief. On the other side of the river I left behind a marshy zone where I was starting to flounder. I had set foot on solid ground. The lights were brighter here. I could hear the neon buzz. Soon I would be walking in the open air, through the arcades, up to Place de la Concorde. The night would be clear and still. The future opened out before me. I was alone at Place de la Concorde and could hear the Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois clock strike the quarter hours. I couldn’t help thinking about Bouvière’s disciples and the few meetings I had attended those past weeks. They were always held in cafés around Denfert-Rochereau. Apart from one evening, further south, Rue d’Alésia, at the Terminus, where I had sometimes met up with my father. That night, I had imagined him and Bouvière meeting. Two very different worlds. Bouvière, a bit pompous, with a whole string of diplomas and protected by his status of doctor and guru. My father, more reckless and whose only education was the street. Both of them crooks, each in his own way.

At the last meeting, Bouvière brought roneos and I learned from the young man with the hawkish face that he gave the same lectures at some university or school of advanced studies whose name I can no longer recall. They all attended the lectures, but I really couldn’t bear to sit in a row on those school benches with the others. Boarding school and the barracks were enough for me. On the night that the hawk distributed notes while Bouvière was getting settled on the moleskin banquette, I gestured to him discreetly that I didn’t need one. The hawk gave me a disapproving look. I didn’t want to upset him, so I took one. Later on I tried to read it in my room but I couldn’t follow it beyond the first page. It was as if I could still hear Bouvière’s voice. It was neither feminine nor masculine; there was something smooth about it, something cold and smooth, which had no effect on me, but it must have gradually sneaked up on the others, inducing a kind of paralysis that left them under his spell.

Yesterday afternoon his features came back to me with photographic precision: cheekbones, small, pale eyes set deep in their sockets. A skull. Fleshy lips, oddly contoured. And that voice, so cold and smooth…I remember at that time, there were other skulls like his, a few gurus and sages, and sects in which people my age searched for a political doctrine, a strict dogma, or some great helmsman to whom they could devote themselves body and soul. I don’t know why I managed to escape these dangers. I was just as vulnerable as the rest. Nothing really distinguished me from all the other disorientated listeners who congregated around Bouvière. I, too, needed some certainties. How on earth had I avoided his trap? Thank goodness for my laziness and indifference. And perhaps I also owe it to my matter-of-fact nature, my connection to concrete details. That man wore a pink tie. And this woman’s perfume smelled like tuberose. Avenue Carnot is on an incline. Have you noticed that on certain streets in the late afternoon, the sun is in your eyes? They took me for a fool.

*

They would have been really disappointed if I had admitted to one of the reasons I attended their meetings. Among them I had noticed someone who seemed more intriguing than the others, a certain Hélène Navachine. A brunette with blue eyes. She was the only one who didn’t take notes. The blonde girl who was always in Bouvière’s shadow regarded her with suspicion, as if she might be a rival, and yet Bouvière never paid her any attention. This Hélène Navachine didn’t seem to know any other members of the group and didn’t speak to anyone. At the end of the meetings I watched her leave alone, cross the square and disappear into the entrance of the metro. One evening, she had a music theory exercise book on her lap. After the meeting, I asked her if she was a musician, and we walked together, side by side. She earned her living by giving piano lessons, but she hoped to get into the Conservatorium.

That evening I took the metro with her. She told me she lived near Gare de Lyon. So that I could accompany her all the way, I invented a meeting in the neighbourhood. Years later, when I was on the same above-ground metro line, between Denfert-Rochereau and Place d’Italie, I wished for a moment that time would dissolve so that I might find myself sitting, once again, on the seat beside Hélène Navachine. A strong feeling of emptiness then swept over me. For reassurance, I told myself it was because the metro was running above the boulevard and rows of buildings. Once the line went underground again, I would no longer feel that sensation of vertigo and loss anymore. Everything would fall back into place, into the reassuring day-after-day monotony.

That evening, we were almost the only people in the carriage. It was well after rush hour. I asked her why she went to Bouvière’s meetings. Without knowing who he was, she had read an article of his on Hindu music that she found enlightening, but the man himself had disappointed her a little and his ‘teachings’ were not up to the standard of the article. She would give it to me to read if I wanted.

What had led me to the groups around Denfert-Rochereau? Just curiosity. I was intrigued by Dr Bouvière. I wanted to know more about him. What was that Dr Bouvière’s life like? She smiled. She had asked herself the same question. First appearances would have it that he had never been married, that he took a liking to particular students of his. But did he really like them? They were always the same type: pale, blonde, severe looking, like young Christian girls bordering on mysticism. It had bothered her at first. She felt as if some girls in the meetings looked down on her, as if she wasn’t quite in tune with them. We’re bound to get on, I said to her. I’d never felt in tune with anything either. I thought she must have been like me, a bit lost in Paris, no family ties, trying to find some axis by which to direct our lives and sometimes coming across Dr Bouvière types.

There was one episode with Bouvière that had taken us both by surprise. At one of the meetings the week before, his face was bruised and swollen, as if he had been beaten up: he had a black eye and bruises on his nose and around his neck. He made no mention of what had happened and, to allay suspicion, he was even more brilliant than usual. He engaged with his listeners and kept asking if we understood everything he was saying. The secretary with the hawkish face and the blonde girl with transparent skin watched him with concerned expressions throughout the lecture. At the end, the blonde girl held a compress to his face and, with a smile, he let himself be nursed. No one dared ask him anything about it. ‘Don’t you think it’s a bit odd?’ asked Hélène Navachine, in the calm, jaded tone of those for whom, since childhood, nothing comes as a shock. I almost told her about the woman I had seen in Pigalle with Bouvière, but I couldn’t really imagine her having given him such a beating. Nor any other woman for that matter. No, it must have been something more brutal and disturbing. There was a shady side to Dr Bouvière’s life, perhaps a secret he was ashamed of. I shrugged my shoulders and said to Hélène Navachine that it was just another one of the mysteries of Paris.

She lived in one of the big apartment blocks opposite Gare de Lyon. I said I had an hour to wait until my meeting. She said she would gladly have invited me in so I wouldn’t have to wait outside, but her mother wouldn’t have allowed her to bring someone unannounced to their small apartment at 5 Rue Émile-Gilbert.