Young Once

by Patrick Modiano

  •

  Louis started working again, as a watchman in the garage on rue Delaizement, mornings and afternoons. Or else he took letters to addresses in Paris and on the outskirts, the same as he’d done before leaving for England.

  He had refused his commission, despite Bejardy’s insistence, and when Bejardy told him, in a voice of feigned indifference, that the movers were coming to take the furniture and the files out of the garage, Louis could sense disaster in the air, but he didn’t dare ask any questions.

  “I’m liquidating the garage,” Bejardy told him.

  It was already empty. The American cars had disappeared, the Mercedes too. The only car left was an old gray Simca with flat tires, all the way in the back, but it had never once moved from its place.

  One afternoon, Louis helped Bejardy move the files down to where a brick chimney ran up the wall, next to the Simca. Bejardy put a couple of logs in the fireplace, opened the file folders, threw the pages into the fire one by one, and stirred the ashes with a long iron poker.

  “Fire purifies everything,” he said, lost in thought.

  “So, Brossier isn’t working with us anymore?” Louis asked.

  “How do you know?”

  “I saw him the other day.”

  Bejardy, sitting on the running board of the Simca, studied one of the files. He raised his head.

  “I think he’s in love. What can I do about that?”

  “He told me he’s known you a long time . . .”

  “Yes, we’re old friends, almost since childhood,” Bejardy said in an evasive tone.

  “You met each other right after the war, in a family pension in Neuilly?”

  A nervous look passed over Bejardy’s face.

  “What else did he tell you?”

  “Nothing. That you lived there with your mother.”

  “I see. He told you about my mother?”

  A hint of a smile. Then his face clouded over again.

  “I’ve spent my whole life dragging Brossier behind me. Slowing me down. It often happens that way, you know, things like that.”

  He stood up and went over to the fireplace to throw several pages in.

  “He told me he wants to try to live his own life now, Louis.” And he let out a short laugh, more like a cough. “The only problem is, he’s too old. One day he’ll come looking for me again, with his tail between his legs, I’m sure of it. But by then I’ll be gone . . .”

  Rays of sunlight shone through the windows in back, making a large patch of light on the floor. Louis and Bejardy stayed sitting in the middle of this patch, like hikers stopping for a moment in a clearing. The fire crackled.

  “I’m liquidating my affairs here,” Bejardy said. “But I need you to do one last thing for me, my dear Louis.”

  •

  He came out of a cross street onto Quai Louis-Blériot and walked into the building, the green shopping bag in his hand. Bejardy opened the door for him.

  “You’re sure you have all the rest of the files?”

  “Yes.”

  Bejardy quickly looked through the folders stuffed in the bag.

  “Give them here.”

  He walked ahead of Louis. From behind, with the shopping bag, he had a strange silhouette, like someone coming back from the market.

  In the living room, Louis saw that the furniture was gone. There was nothing left but the large sofa and two chairs. The bookshelves had been emptied out, too, and the books were stacked in piles against the wall.

  “I’m going to liquidate the apartment,” Bejardy said. “If you’re interested in any of these books . . .”

  They went over to the sofa. Nicole Haas, in riding pants, was lying there asleep. Her cheek was pressed against the arm of the sofa, and Louis was moved by the relaxed face, the slightly open mouth. Bejardy tapped her softly on the shoulder. She opened her eyes and sat up when she saw Louis.

  “Sorry . . .”

  “Nothing to worry about, darling.”

  The wind was billowing the gauze curtains through the open French windows, the same as on the day when Odile and Louis had met Nicole Haas for the first time.

  “You should make the most of the nice weather, Coco,” Bejardy said. “What are you doing this afternoon?”

  “I need to go see the horses.”

  “Louis can take you in the car. I need to stay here. I have some work to do.”

  The telephone rang and Bejardy went to the other end of the room to answer it. Louis sat down facing Nicole Haas. She didn’t say anything but she smiled at him, her face still a bit sleepy. And that smile, those bright eyes fixed on him, the dreamlike undulation of the curtains in the wind, the sound of a boat’s motor—it all made up one of the moments that remained in his memory.

  •

  On rue de la Ferme, in Neuilly, she told him to stop in front of a low building with a bar that filled the whole ground floor: the Lauby. Wood walls. Semidarkness. Photographs of horses and riders. Stirrups. Whips. The smell of leather.

  A man at one of the tables stood up and came over to kiss Nicole Haas’s hand. He was in riding clothes too: a small man, very stiff, with black hair and a black mustache, looking a bit like a wax dummy. The words got scrambled in his mouth—this syllable delayed, that one swallowed, the next stammered—and he imitated the halting pronunciation of certain Anglo-Saxons so perfectly that you ended up wondering if he was even speaking French. Nicole Haas told Louis that this man was a marquis, and that during a long stay in America he had married a movie actress and become her “manager.” On returning to France, he had taken over the stables across the street from the Lauby. The only thing he had brought back from America was the title of “manager,” which now appeared on his calling cards and which he valued more than his title of nobility.

  “So, you’re leaving your horses for a while again, Nicole?”

  “Yes. Another month.”

  “And then Argentina? It’s decided? Tell me.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You must tell me before you go. I have very good friends there. Dodero, Gracida . . . Pierre Eyzaguirre . . . No, he’s Chilean. One can never tell them apart, all those gauchos.”

  The marquis’s voice had taken on a very shrill tone when he said his friends’ names.

  “Something to drink? Would you like one? Scotch? Coffee? Tea? Tell me.”

  He twirled his hands in strange circles, as though his shirt cuffs were bothering him.

  “Do you ride?”

  “No,” Louis said.

  “Why not?”

  “He hasn’t had free time to learn yet,” Nicole Haas said.

  “You simply must start,” the marquis said gravely.

  They left the Lauby and walked through the stable gates.

  “I will leave you here,” the marquis said. “I have to give a riding lesson to Robert de Unzue’s daughter. See you very soon, Nicole. And be sure to tell me about Argentina, yes? I also need to know so I can take care of the horses . . .”

  The marquis waved goodbye with an abrupt movement of his hand, and they crossed the sand-covered courtyard to the stables. Nicole Haas wanted to show Louis her horses. She had two, a dappled gray and a bay. They stuck their heads out of their stalls and she stroked their heads.

  Above the stables there was a kind of dovecote covered with ivy.

  “I have a room up there. Do you want to see it?”

  They climbed a tiny spiral staircase. Nicole Haas opened the door to a little room wallpapered with toile de Jouy, with a narrow bed covered with pale blue velvet.

  “I come here a lot. It’s the only place where I feel good. I’m near the horses.”

  She opened the window halfway, then lay down on the bed.

  “I always wondered why you work with Roland.”

  “Just one of those things,” Louis said.

  He sat down on the floor with his back against the side of the bed.

  “And what are you going to do when he leaves?”
<
br />   “I don’t know,” Louis said. “What about you?”

  “Whether it’s him or someone else, what matters is that I find someone who will let me feed my horses.”

  She pressed her kind and stubborn face into the hollow of Louis’s shoulder.

  “He wants to take me to Argentina. What am I supposed to do in Argentina?”

  He felt her breath on his neck.

  “Did you know that Roland is a murderer? That’s right, a murderer . . . There were articles in the paper. Why am I going to Argentina with a murderer? You don’t seem to understand what I’m saying, Louis. Me, all alone down there with that killer . . .”

  How long did they stay there in that room, on the narrow bed? She had a scar on her shoulder, in the shape of a star, that Louis couldn’t help but run his lips over. A souvenir of a fall from a horse. It got dark. They could hear the clattering of hooves, a whinny, and the high-pitched voice of the marquis giving orders at more and more distant intervals, like a motif on a flute, clear and desolate, returning again and again.

  WE WERE slipping toward summer. Bejardy had less and less work for Louis, who spent most of his days with Odile. They met Brossier and Jacqueline Boivin at Cité Universitaire sometimes, and picnicked on the great lawn or strolled to Parc Montsouris. More often, Mary came to Montmartre. She had discovered a little place, “lease for sale,” for her “Couture Fashion” boutique.

  At night, they walked slowly along the median to place Blanche and Pigalle. They went to see Jordan, who had managed to get a gig in a cabaret on rue des Martyrs and who always wore the stage dress Odile and Mary had made. Or else they simply went up rue Caulaincourt to avenue Junot and then back the way they had come. The lights were on all night in the entrance to the Hotel Rome on rue Caulaincourt, like a lookout post.

  On avenue Junot, they saw a big man walking an Irish setter on a leash, and nodded a greeting. The dog seemed to feel a spontaneous affection for Odile and Louis.

  That night, on the terrace of the Dream, this same man was sitting at a table next to theirs and his Irish setter had put its chin on Odile’s knee.

  “My dog isn’t bothering you, is he, mademoiselle? If he is, please don’t hesitate to tell him.”

  He hardly moved his lips, but his bass voice carried far.

  “No, he’s not bothering me at all,” Odile said, petting the dog.

  “Do you live in the neighborhood?”

  “Yes,” Louis said. “A little farther down, on this street.”

  “What building?”

  “Eighteen bis.”

  “Which floor?”

  Louis hesitated a moment before answering. “The sixth.”

  “No, impossible! In the studio?”

  “Yes.”

  “May I?”

  He moved over to join Odile and Louis, clearly deeply moved. His short gray hair, his puffy face, his powerful brow, and his build, emphasized by his velvet courduroy jacket, made him look like a former boxer. He gave off a smell of old leather and cold ashes.

  “That used to be my studio. Can you believe it?”

  There was something about him, although they couldn’t quite put their finger on what, that contradicted the big, brutal features of his face.

  “You have to admit, sometimes very strange coincidences happen in life . . .”

  “Are you a painter?” Odile asked, continuing to pet the dog.

  “I was, yes. When I lived in the studio. I drew covers for music-hall programs. But I’m not going to tell you my life story. By the way, did you keep the bar and the fan?”

  “Yes,” Louis said.

  “The Chinese drawings are mine.”

  He looked at Odile and Louis with his sensitive eyes, head raised, a slightly ironic smile on his lips.

  “I haven’t introduced myself. Bauer. Let me invite you over to my place for a plum schnaps, to celebrate this strange coincidence. It’s right nearby.”

  His voice was so commanding that they truly had no choice but to accept.

  On avenue Junot, they walked through the entrance arch of one those little buildings built in the thirties, with bay windows and arcades. Bauer and the dog preceded them.

  “Would you mind keeping as quiet as you can?” he said in his deep voice. “My mother is sleeping.”

  They walked down the hall on tiptoe and into an enormous room, either a living room or dining room. Bauer quietly shut the door behind them.

  “Now we can talk. My mother won’t hear anything while we’re in here.”

  The room was furnished with a sideboard, a table, and rustic-style walnut-colored chairs. A Tyrolean pendulum clock on the wall between the two windows, an armchair upholstered in cream-colored silk, and some roses in a vase on the shelf of the sideboard made the decor a little more cheerful. Louis noticed a photograph, taken into the light, of a man leaning against the mast of a sailboat, his silhouette sharp against the background of a glittering sea.

  “Alain Gerbault . . . I knew him well when I was seventeen,” Bauer said.

  That photo gave a nostalgic charm to the room, like a breath of fresh air from the open sea or the sound of a Hawaiian ukelele.

  “Have a seat. Please, sit down.”

  The table was covered with an oilskin cloth. The dog climbed up onto a chair next to Odile and stayed there, alert, not letting Bauer out of his sight while he poured some plum schnaps into champagne flutes for them.

  “Your dog looks like he wants some too!” Odile said.

  Bauer laughed. “All right. Why not? A glass for the dog.”

  He filled another flute right to the rim and pushed it toward the suspicious dog. Then he took a large green leather album out of one of the sideboard drawers.

  “Here you go. Souvenirs from back when I lived in the studio. Where you live now.”

  Louis had opened the album and Bauer stayed standing behind him and Odile and the dog. The first two pages had a single photograph each, protected by a sheet of clear plastic. Two men with regular features, one dark and the other blond. The photos were from the thirties.

  “Pierre Meyer and van Duren. Two music-hall artists,” Bauer said. “The two men I admired more than anyone else in my life.”

  “Why?” Odile asked.

  “Because they were beautiful,” Bauer said in a peremptory tone. “They committed suicide, both of them. Alain Gerbault too, in a way.”

  Louis turned the album’s pages. There were covers of various music-hall programs signed “Bauer” in a large, slashing hand.

  “You didn’t know my mother, by any chance, did you?” Louis asked. “She worked at the Tabarin.”

  “Your mother? No, my boy. I didn’t know anyone at the Tabarin. I usually worked for Mistinguett.”

  There were photos on the following pages of young people, with their names and dates getting closer and closer to the present. The generations passed, one after the other, and in the middle of all these young people, each more dazzling than the last, was an older man with an ordinary, fat face, sinuous lips, and wrinkles around his eyes.

  “That’s Tonton, from Liberty’s.”

  The harsh light from the hanging lamp was reflected as gleams from the sheets of plastic covering all the mementos. The dog seemed interested in the album, too: He sniffed and snorted from time to time, and his breath clouded up the photographs whenever Louis didn’t turn the page in time. Odile leaned her head on Louis’s shoulder to see better.

  “They’re fascinating, your photos,” she said. “Do you look at them often?”

  “No. They depress me.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s sad to think about all those beautiful boys, all old now, or dead. And I’m still here, like a rotting old hulk that has seen them all come and go. Nothing’s left but their photos. I wanted to make another album, of all the dogs I’ve had in my life, but I don’t have the strength.”

  His voice was hoarse. He let himself sink into a chair and took Odile’s hand.

  “You’re
still too young to understand, my dear. But when I look through this album and see them, one after the other, I have a feeling of waves, approaching and breaking, then another, then another . . .”

  Louis was stunned. He couldn’t believe his eyes. Under the shining plastic sheet was a photo of Brossier and Bejardy, next to each other, Brossier’s face round and still partly a child’s, Bejardy barely twenty-five, with wavy black hair and the face and smile of a charmer.

  “Did you know them?” Louis asked, wiping off the condensation that the dog’s breath had left on the plastic.

  Bauer pulled the album onto his lap for a look.

  “Yes, yes . . . The short one, there, who looks like Roland Toutain, I told him to go take an acting class.” His finger was pointing to Brossier. “Nothing came of it. I even got him a job working with me at an antique shop. Later, I think he became a flight attendant. Air Brazzaville. The other one, that’s different. He tried to sell me paintings . . . He turned out badly. He went on trial for killing an American. Acquitted. I kept the articles from the papers, if you’re interested . . . He ended up running a restaurant on a boat, in Neuilly. Even wanted me to do the decorations, something ‘pirate-themed.’ Do you want the press clippings about him?”

  “Sure, thank you,” Louis said, pretending it didn’t much matter to him.

  Slipping a hand under the photograph, Bauer pulled out an envelope and handed it to Louis, who slipped it into his pocket right away, as though it were a bag of cocaine.

  “I’m so glad these things of the past still interest you,” Bauer said.

  “Where did you meet them?” Odile asked, stunned.

  “Meet them? I don’t know anymore. At Tonton’s place, maybe. I’m losing my memory . . . All right, children, that’s enough for now.”

  He abruptly closed the album and put it back in the sideboard drawer.

  “If you’re good, I’ll give you that album someday.”

  Louis stood up, in a state of great confusion. He stood stock-still, dazed by his discovery.

  “Allow me,” Bauer said, making a sign for him to sit back down.

  He had a camera in his hand and was attaching a tiny flash.

  “I just bought it. You can get a color photo instantly . . . Move closer, you two. Guy, you too.”