Patrick Modiano - Paris Nocturne

A cold rage came over me and I kneed the old woman sharply in the belly. Her grip loosened. I pushed her hard. Finally, I could breathe…I had taken her by surprise, she didn’t dare come near me again; she remained motionless, on the edge of the pavement, staring at me with her small, intense eyes. Now it was her turn to be on the defensive. She tried to smile at me, a horrible artificial smile that was at odds with the harshness of her expression. I crossed my arms. Then, seeing that the smile didn’t work on me, she pretended to wipe away a tear. At my age, how could I have been terrified of this ghost and believe for an instant that she still had the power to drag me down? That period of police stations was well and truly over.

She was no longer standing guard over the apartment building during the days that followed and, so far, she’s given no further sign of life. But later that night, I saw her again from the window. She didn’t seem the least bit affected by our fight. She paced up and down the median strip. She went back and forth over quite a short distance, but with a lively, almost military gait. Very erect, her chin high. Every now and again she would look over at the façade of the apartment building to check if she still had an audience. And then she would begin to limp. At first she was practising as if for a rehearsal. Gradually, she found her rhythm. I watched her move off limping and then disappear, but she overplayed the part of the old canteen cook searching for a routed army.

THREE YEARS AGO, roughly around the same time the old woman attacked me, but in June or July, I was walking along Quai de la Tournelle. A sunny Saturday afternoon. I was looking at books in the bouquinistes’ stalls. Suddenly my eyes fell upon three volumes prominently displayed and held together by a large red elastic band. The yellow cover, the author’s name and the title in black characters on the first volume gave me a pang of emotion: Screen Memories by Fred Bouvière. I removed the elastic band. Two more books by Bouvière: Drugs and Therapeutics and The Lie and the Confession. He had referred to them on several occasions during the meetings at Denfert-Rochereau. Three unobtainable books, which he said with a certain irony were his ‘early works’. Their publication dates were printed at the bottom of the covers with the name of the publisher: Au Sablier. Bouvière would have been very young then, barely twenty-two or twenty-three.

I bought the three volumes and discovered a dedication on the flyleaf of The Lie and the Confession : ‘For Geneviève Dalame. This book was written when I was her age, during curfew hours. Fred Bouvière.’ The other two didn’t have dedications but, like the first, they bore the name ‘Geneviève Dalame’ in blue ink on the title page, with an address: 4 Boulevard Jourdan. It all came back to me: the face of the blonde girl with very pale skin, who was always in Bouvière’s shadow and sat next to him on the front seat of his car at the end of the meetings; the guy with the hawkish face saying to me in a low voice: ‘Her name is Geneviève Dalame.’ I asked the bouquiniste where he had found the books. He shrugged — Oh, someone moving house… Remembering the way Geneviève Dalame contemplated Bouvière, with her blue-eyed gaze, and hung on his every word, I thought it was impossible that she would have got rid of these three books. Unless she wanted to make a sudden break with an entire period of her life. Or she had died. Four Boulevard Jourdan. It was just around the corner from me when I was staying in Hôtel de la Rue de la Voie-Verte. But I didn’t need to check; I knew the apartment block hadn’t been there for about fifteen years and that Rue de la Voie-Verte had changed name.

I remembered that, one day back then, I was waiting to catch the number 21 bus at Porte Gentilly and she came out of the little apartment block, but I didn’t dare approach her. She was waiting for the bus, too, and we were the only ones at the bus stop. She didn’t recognise me, which was entirely understandable: in the meetings she only had eyes for Bouvière and all the other members of the group were nothing but blurred faces in the glowing halo he projected around himself.

When the bus started moving, we were the only passengers, and I sat on the seat opposite her. I had a clear memory of the name that the hawk had whispered in my ear a few days before. Geneviève Dalame. She was absorbed in a book covered with glassine paper, perhaps the one that Bouvière had dedicated to her and written during curfew hours. I didn’t take my eyes off her. I had read, I can’t recall where, that if you stare at someone, even from behind, they will notice your presence. With her it took a long time. She didn’t even vaguely notice me until the bus was going along Rue Glacière.

‘I’ve seen you in Dr Bouvière’s meetings,’ I said. By uttering his name I thought I would gain her favour, but she gave me a guarded look. I tried to think of something to say to win her over. ‘It’s crazy…’ I said, ‘Dr Bouvière answers all of life’s questions.’ And I took on a preoccupied air, as if to merely pronounce the name Bouvière was enough to detach oneself from the everyday world and from the bus we were on. She seemed reassured. We had the same guru, we shared the same rituals and the same secrets.

‘Have you been going to the meetings for long?’ she asked.

‘A few weeks.’

‘Would you like to have more personal contact with him?’ She asked the question with a certain condescension, as if she was the sole possible intermediary between Bouvière and the mass of disciples.

‘Not just yet,’ I said, ‘I’d prefer to wait a little longer…’ My tone of voice was so solemn that she could no longer doubt my sincerity.

She smiled at me and I believe I even detected, in her big pale-blue eyes, a kind of tenderness. But I was under no illusion. I owed it all to Bouvière.

She wore a man’s watch, which contrasted with the slenderness of her wrist. The black leather strap wasn’t tight enough. Too roughly, she stuffed her book into her bag. The watch slipped and fell off. I leaned down to pick it up. It must have been an old watch of Bouvière’s, I thought. She had asked if she could wear it so that she would always have something of his with her. I wanted to help her tighten the strap around her wrist, but it was clearly too big for her. At the base of her wrist, close to the veins, I noticed a recent scar, still pink, a row of little blisters. At first I felt uneasy. The scar didn’t fit with this sunny winter’s day, sitting on a bus with a blonde, blue-eyed girl. I was just a simple fellow with a taste for happiness and formal French gardens. Dark ideas often crossed my mind, but they were involuntary. It was perhaps the same for her, too. Her smile and her gaze suggested that before meeting Dr Bouvière, she had a carefree nature. He was probably responsible for her losing her love of life.

She realised that I’d seen her scar and she held her hand pressed flat against her knee to hide it. I wanted to talk to her about innocuous things. Was she still studying or had she already found a job? She explained that she had been working as a typist in an office called Opéra Intérim. All of a sudden she spoke naturally and without any of the affectation she had when we talked about the doctor. I ended up convincing myself that, before coming across him, she had been a perfectly simple girl. And I regretted not having met her then.

I asked her how long she had been going to the meetings. Almost a year. At first, it was difficult, she didn’t understand a lot of it. She knew nothing about philosophy. She had left school before the baccalauréat, at fifteen. She felt that she wasn’t good enough and this feeling threw her into a ‘crisis of despair’. Perhaps those words were a way of making me understand why she had the scar on her wrist. Dr Bouvière had helped her overcome this lack of confidence. It had been painful, but, thanks to him, she had managed to get through it. She was truly grateful to him for helping her get to a level that, alone, she would never have been able to reach.