Young Once

by Patrick Modiano

  The waiter pointed at the girl collapsed on the table. After hesitating a moment, he went over and shook her shoulder. She slowly looked up.

  “We’re closing!”

  She blinked and squinted, not understanding. Louis was struck by how pale she was. She rummaged around in her pocket and took out some coins, which she put on the table. The waiter counted them.

  “You’re three francs short.”

  She rummaged in her pocket again, with a hunted look, but couldn’t find anything. Louis stood up and put a five-franc bill on the table.

  “Thank you.”

  The concourse was deserted. Louis followed her. She was walking slower and slower, and he was afraid she might fall.

  •

  Finally, she sat down on a bench, next to the ticket windows.

  “Are you all right?” Louis said.

  “I don’t feel so good . . . I’m afraid I might faint.”

  He sat down next to her.

  “Do you want some help?”

  “Thanks. Just sit here a minute. It’ll pass . . .”

  At the far end of the station, at the tables outside the large restaurant, a group of soldiers on leave were singing, every verse interrupted by shouts or bursts of laughter. A few people were heading toward the departure platforms with the slowness of sleepwalkers. Louis thought back to the crowd that had just been there, when he had accompanied Brossier to the train. After the tide ebbed away, there was no one left in the gigantic empty hall but him, this girl, and the soldiers back there, beached like clumps of seaweed.

  He helped her stand up and supported her by the arm. Going downstairs, he felt the pressure of her hand. She was even paler than in the concourse, perhaps because of the fluorescent light. He led her to the taxi stand. Luckily there was no line.

  She murmured her address so softly that it was he who had to tell the driver: “Porte Champerret.”

  •

  She could barely make it up the stairs and he held her arm as they walked down the hallway. She pointed to the door to her room and gave him the key, which he had a hard time turning because you had to put it into the lock only halfway. She fell onto her bed.

  “Do you want something to eat?” Louis said.

  “No, thank you.”

  Her face was so pale that he wondered if he should call a doctor.

  “I’m feeling better . . .” She gave him a weak smile. “Can you stay here with me a while? Just until I’m better.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Odile.”

  He sat down on the edge of the bed. She closed her eyes and opened them again at longer and longer intervals. Soon she was asleep.

  Should he go look for something for her to eat or drink? The cafés were surely still open around Porte Champerret. But he risked having her wake up while he was gone. He realized that Brossier had forgotten to give him any money. All he had left were two five-franc notes.

  She was sleeping, her left cheek pressed against the pillow. He took off her boots, which had zippers on the side. The room was tiny. You could just barely stand between the sink and the bed. He saw the photos of the singers on the wall and a tear-off calendar above the sink, with January 4 showing. Mechanically, he tore off the pages. It was January 12.

  Why was the window wide open? He shut it. The radiator was on much too high and he looked in vain for the crank to adjust it. Aha, he understood and reopened the window.

  He was hungry. How would ten francs last for five days? He lay down next to her and turned off the bedside lamp.

  •

  Odile looked in all her pockets and pulled together three ten-franc bills and two francs eighty-five cents in coins.

  Toward the end of the afternoon, Louis went around the block and bought a liter of milk, some bread, and slices of ham. He called Hotel Muguet, and they told him that Brossier would not be back until next week.

  So that they wouldn’t suffer too much from hunger, they slept and rested in bed for as long as they could. They lost all notion of time, and if Brossier hadn’t come back they would never have left that room, not even the bed, where they listened to music and little by little drifted off. The last thing they saw from the outside world were the snowflakes falling all day on the sill of the open window.

  LOUIS introduced Odile to Brossier, waiting at a table at the Royal Champerret.

  “What do you do?” Brossier asked.

  “I’m putting out a record.”

  “A record? Must be a lot of competition these days.”

  He turned to Louis: “As for him, we’re trying to get him a good position. I have hopes that he’ll really go far.”

  He had adopted a fake paternal tone that neither of them liked, and they exchanged a look. Louis was sure she was thinking the same thing as him about Brossier. Meanwhile, Brossier was considering Odile with a look that he no doubt meant to be charming.

  “When I was young, I had dreams of a career in the arts too . . .”

  He smiled, about to indulge in a personal story.

  “Believe it or not, I met someone who encouraged me back then. A remarkable man. He enrolled me in an acting class . . . Unfortunately it didn’t work out. I looked too much like an actor named Roland Toutain.”

  He started breathing more slowly, to better impress upon them the importance of his words.

  “When it comes right down to it, that’s the only thing I really would have liked to do . . . Well, anyway. Are you two going to live together? It’s over there?”

  He gestured to the large apartment block across the street.

  “Yes. We’ll live together,” Louis said.

  “That’s great, at your age. You can live on air, hmm?”

  He took off his Tyrolean hat and put it on the table. This one was a darker green than the others, almost blue. He must have had a whole collection.

  “At your age, I didn’t have a care in the world either. I’ll tell you about it someday . . .”

  Odile, who had kept her face impassive until then, started showing signs of impatience. Maybe Brossier noticed. He raised his head abruptly.

  “Tell me, Louis. I made plans with my friend Bejardy. Thursday at three. His place . . .You’ll need to shave, old boy. You look like a bum.”

  •

  The apartment was on Quai Louis-Blériot, in a group of buildings with access from avenue de Versailles as well. When they got to the fourth floor, Louis noticed, next to the doorbell, a little marble plaque with gold engraved letters on it: “R. de B.”

  “What does that mean?” he asked Brossier.

  “Roland de Bejardy.”

  Brossier rang the bell. A man opened the door: brown hair, tall, around forty.

  “Roland, let me introduce Louis Memling . . . Roland de Bejardy.”

  “Nice to meet you.”

  He led them into the living room, a spacious room whose windows looked out over the Seine. After indicating a light blue velvet sofa for them, he sat down behind a Louis XV desk.

  “How old are you?”

  “He’s twenty,” Brossier said, without giving Louis a chance to answer.

  “That’s good.”

  Bejardy gave him a protective, patronizing look. There was no paper on the desk, nothing but a telephone. But there were piles of folders sitting on the sky-blue carpet.

  “Graduated high school?” Bejardy asked.

  “No.”

  “He just finished his military service,” Brossier said.

  “Anyway, a diploma . . .”

  And Bejardy swept the back of his hand across his desk. The way he sat there, with his energetic face, regular features, wavy brown hair, back held straight, broad chest in a Prince of Wales jacket, he seemed like a successful lawyer, and the words “star lawyer” came to Louis’s mind. Maybe because of the magnificent piece of furniture he was sitting behind, definitely because of his deep voice.

  “You’ve already told him about the kind of work I’d like to give him, yes?”


  “Not yet.”

  “All right. It’s not complicated. It’s a night watchman’s job, in a garage. Now when I say ‘night watchman,’ in fact, it’s more of a job as a . . . secretary . . . You’ll have to answer the phone, open the door for clients . . .”

  “What do you think, Louis?” Brossier asked.

  “I’ll take it.”

  “Good, you can start right away,” Bejardy said.

  So the man wasn’t a “star lawyer” after all, as appearances had led him to believe. The word “garage,” like a false note coming from his mouth, came as a shock to Louis. He had to make a mental effort to see this man as the manager of a garage.

  “You’ll start at . . . fifteen hundred francs a month,” Bejardy said.

  “All right with you, Louis?”

  “Yes.”

  “Of course there’ll be bonuses,” Bejardy said.

  He stood up and led the others over to the far end of the room. Brossier grabbed Louis’s arm and whispered to him, “You see his office, Louis? Purest Louis XV style . . . Look at those bronze moldings, stencil-cut, in the back there . . . acanthus leaves . . .”

  They sat down on a different light blue velvet sofa. A plate of appetizers had been set in the middle of the low table, which was black lacquer, with short, turned legs, maybe Chinese.

  “Whiskey? Port?”

  Bejardy offered them glasses. Louis took a look around. A library covered the wall to the right, with books in massive, flamboyant bindings arranged on the shelves, most of them in slipcases. Across from the library, on the marble mantelpiece, was a photograph of a beautiful young brunette in a silver frame. Bejardy’s wife? Was this guy really a garage owner? Louis didn’t dare ask him.

  Through the French window, he could see the quays and the white Citroën factory across the Seine. A crane rose up from the blocks of stone. What did it mean that here was this extremely luxurious apartment of Bejardy’s, and there, on the other bank, that landscape of factories, docks, and warehouses under a gray sky? No, Bejardy didn’t live here by chance, and he must have felt the contrast between the book bindings and overly heavy carpet in the living room, and the sad little houses in Javel.

  “Is your name really Memling?” Bejardy asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Are you related, by any chance, to Memling the bicycle racer? The one who married a dancer at the Bal Tabarin?”

  Louis hesitated a moment.

  “Yes. We’re related.”

  •

  Curious about the place where his mother had worked, he looked up the Bal Tabarin’s address, but at its number on rue Victor-Massé he found himself in front of a blind façade. They must have turned the old music hall into a dance hall or a garage. It was the same feeling as the one he’d had the night he walked down boulevard de Grenelle for the first time to contemplate the Vel’ d’Hiv, in memory of his father.

  So neither of the two places that had been the center of gravity of his parents’ life existed anymore. A feeling of anxiety rooted him to the spot. Sections of walls were falling on his mother and father, in slow motion, and their interminable collapse raised clouds of dust that smothered him.

  That night, he dreamed that Paris was a black cross with only two places lit up: the Vel’ d’Hiv and the Bal Tabarin. Panic-stricken moths flew for a moment around the lights before falling into the hole. Little by little they formed a thick layer, on which Louis walked, sinking up to his knees. And soon, turned into a moth himself, he was siphoned up with the rest.

  •

  Children played in the courtyard at noon. He heard their shouts and cries through a half sleep. Odile had already left, busy working on her record. He had breakfast across the street at the Royal Champerret, where Odile would come meet him. Later, he would go with her to her appointments. First she was going to the record company behind the Gaumont Palace, to meet with Dauvenne or Wohlfsohn, as Bellune had advised her to. It was Wohlfsohn who met her there.

  He listened to the end to the flexi-disc and told her, in a very gentle voice, that “it wasn’t right for their list” but that he would give her a list of impresarios, club managers, radio people, and other record company executives who might be interested in “this project.” He drew up the list in front of her, occasionally consulting a phone book to check an address or phone number. Then he folded the sheet of paper and put it in an envelope.

  “Here you go. I’ll also give you my business card. Say that I sent you.”

  He stood up and walked her to the door of the office. He shook her hand, and said, in a suddenly emotional voice, “Did you know Georges Bellune well?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s really terrible. Such a good person . . .”

  He was still standing in front of her.

  “I knew him in Vienna . . . before the Flood.”

  She didn’t know what he was trying to say. Before the Flood?

  “Good luck to you.”

  He stuck his head out the door and said again, “Good luck.”

  •

  Sometimes, before her appointments, they would sit in the waiting room together. The interview usually didn’t last long, and she would come back out looking discouraged, her flexi-disc in her hand.

  In the places where he waited alone while she presented her songs, he would flip through the magazines piled on the low tables, like in a dentist’s office. There were articles on the new records, the hits du jour, full of names most of which would disappear next season. Busy people opened doors, letting out bursts of music.

  One evening, when he was waiting outside, in the middle of a hallway, for her to finish playing her record for someone, Odile’s voice came to him, smothered by the clacking of typewriters, the hum of conversations, and the ringing of telephones, and he wondered if there was any point to all this.

  •

  They had been sitting in a large lobby for a long time, and they could see through half-open doors the empty offices that their occupants must have just left, leaving behind polluted air and a smell of cigarettes. The clock on the wall across from them said eight o’clock.

  “I’ll wait for you outside,” Louis told her. “I’ll be at the café across the street.”

  Ten past eight. She couldn’t take her eyes off the clock, its dazzling glass and steel. The silence in the room was so deep that she could hear the faint crackling of the fluorescent bulbs. She stood up and walked over to one of the windows. Night. Outside, a stream of cars flowed down avenue de la Grande-Armée and the double windows muffled the sound of their engines. On the other side of the avenue was the café where Louis was waiting for her. Would she have the strength to go back to him? It was raining.

  “Monsieur Vietti will see you now.”

  She followed the secretary down a white-walled corridor harshly lit by fluorescent lights, like the waiting room. The secretary pushed open a leather-padded door and let her in.

  Two men were in the room, on either side of a semicircular wooden desk. One of them stood up. Tanned skin, fringed suede jacket. He headed to the door. Odile, who had recognized him, greeted him shyly. He answered with a smile.

  “Goodbye, Frank,” said the man who had stayed behind the desk.

  “Bye.”

  After he had left the room, the other waved Odile over to the desk.

  “Hello.”

  “Hello,” said Odile, her voice filled with nervous excitement.

  “Yes, that was Frank Alamo,” the man said, as though answering a question she was about to ask. “I like his work very much. Especially ‘Allô Mademoiselle.’ ”

  Brown hair, very young, tan like Frank Alamo, whom he resembled a little; dressed in a navy blue pinstripe suit, even a tiepin. On his desk, which was covered by a sheet of glass, were lots of folders and two telephones.

  “Wohlfsohn sent you?”

  His soft voice surprised her. Usually the people who occupied offices like his spoke in a domineering voice.

  “Would you lik
e to play me your songs? Of course, I’d be delighted to hear them.”

  He was almost whispering. She took one of the flexi-discs out of her bag.

  “You’ve already recorded them?”

  “Yes. There was someone . . . Georges . . . Georges Bellune, who recorded them for me.”

  “Bellune? The one who—”

  A phone call interrupted him.

  “No. Don’t put anyone through.”

  He hung up.

  “It’s sad, Bellune’s story. I think he maybe worked here for a while. Did you know him well?”

  “Yes.”

  He had taken the flexi-disc and put it on a record player next to his desk. Then he took her over to a large gray sofa.

  “We’ll be more comfortable here, while we listen . . .”

  Before sitting down next to her, he went over to the leather-padded door and bolted it shut.

  The disc had been played so many times that the songs sounded worse and worse to Odile. Her voice was almost inaudible. Bellune had told her once that flexi-discs get worn out fast if you play them too much. Like life, he had added.

  She dreaded the moment when the record would stop. She would have to stand up and say goodbye, as usual. She felt that she was worn out too. She let herself sink into the silence and the comfort of this pale-colored office: gray carpet, light wood, gauze curtains reaching the bottom of the bay windows, blue lampshade.

  “They’re nice, your songs. Very nice. Of course it will be a little hard to make a record right away . . .”

  He put his hand on her shoulder and she didn’t move. Fine fingers, surely with manicured nails.

  “But you could sing them at a club. After that, we’ll see. I’ll try to set something up tomorrow. That’s a promise. After tomorrow . . .”

  He unbuttoned her blouse and she didn’t resist. Then she lay on her stomach and he slipped off her skirt and panties and massaged her thighs. She felt disgusted when she remembered his overly well-groomed fingers. She stared straight ahead, her chin on the arm of the sofa. The lights of the avenue looked blurred through the gauze curtains like the contours of the furniture and the things in the room. It was raining outside. Here, at least, she was sheltered from the storm. All she had to do was not move and, as Bellune used to say, in an expression that she particularly liked, melt into the scenery.