Villa Triste

by Patrick Modiano

  The company turned toward him.

  “Ladies … gentlemen,” Meinthe murmured, bowing slightly. Then he walked over to me, stiffened, and said, “We’ll be waiting for you. You can have your baggage brought down.”

  Madame Buffaz asked me sharply, “Are you leaving us?”

  I lowered my eyes.

  “It had to happen sooner or later, Madame,” Meinthe answered, in a tone that brooked no opposition.

  “But he could at least have given us some advance notice.”

  I realized the woman was suddenly filled with hatred for me and wouldn’t have hesitated to turn me over to the police on the slightest pretext. The thought made me sad.

  “Madame,” Meinthe replied to her, “there’s nothing this young man can do, he’s just received orders signed by the Queen of the Belgians.” They all stared at us aghast, clutching their cards in their hands. My usual neighbors in the dining room examined me with an air of simultaneous surprise and disgust, as if they’d just noticed that I didn’t belong to the human race.

  The allusion to the Queen of the Belgians had been received with a general murmur, and when Meinthe — no doubt wishing to stand up to Madame Buffaz, who was facing him with her arms crossed — repeated what he’d said, coming down hard on every syllable: “Do you understand me, Madame? THE QUEEN OF THE BELGIANS,” the murmur swelled and gave me a twinge in my heart. Then Meinthe stamped his heel on the floor, thrust his chin forward, and blurted out very rapidly, rushing the words: “I haven’t told you everything, Madame … I am THE QUEEN OF THE BELGIANS …”

  There were cries and gestures of indignation. Most of the boarders got to their feet and formed a hostile group in front of us. Madame Buffaz took a step forward, and I was afraid she’d slap Meinthe, or she’d slap me. I found this last possibility quite natural; I was, I felt, the only person responsible.

  I would have liked to apologize to those people, or to wave a magic wand and make them forget what had just happened. All my efforts to pass unnoticed and hide in a safe place had been reduced to futility in a few seconds. I didn’t even cast a last glance around the lounge, where the after-dinner gatherings had been so soothing for a troubled heart like mine. And I blamed Meinthe, for a brief moment. Why cause such consternation among these small-time pensioners, these canasta players? They were reassuring to me. In their company I risked nothing.

  Madame Buffaz would have happily spat venom in our faces. Her lips got thinner and thinner. I forgive her. I’d betrayed her, in a sense. I’d shaken up the precious clockwork that was the Lindens. If she’s reading this (which I doubt, and anyway, the Lindens no longer exists), I’d like her to know that I wasn’t a bad boy at heart.

  We had to bring down my “baggage,” which I’d packed that afternoon. It consisted of a wardrobe trunk and three big suitcases. They contained a few clothes, all my books, my old telephone directories, and issues of Match, Cinémonde, Music-hall, Détective, and Noir et blanc from the past several years. It was all very heavy. When Meinthe tried to move the wardrobe trunk, it nearly crushed him. By dint of incredible efforts, we managed to tip it over and lay it on its side. After that, we spent twenty minutes dragging it down the hall to the landing. We were bent in half, Meinthe in the front, me behind, both gasping for air. Meinthe lay down at full length on the floor, arms flung out, eyes closed. I went back to my room and as best I could, staggering all the way, I carried the three suitcases to the top of the stairs.

  The light went out. I groped for the switch, but flicking it was useless; the hall remained as dark as before. On the floor below, some vague brightness filtered through the partly open door of the lounge. I could see a head poking through the opening: Madame Buffaz’s head, I was almost sure. I realized immediately she must have removed one of the fuses so that we’d have to get the bags downstairs in the dark. And that realization made me start giggling nervously.

  We pushed the wardrobe trunk until half of it hung out over the lower stairs and it was balanced precariously on the landing. Clutching the banister, Meinthe gave the trunk a furious kick, whereupon it slid down the stairs, bouncing off every one and making a frightful racket. You would have thought the staircase was about to collapse. Madame Buffaz’s head was once again silhouetted in the crack of the lounge door, surrounded by two or three others. I heard her shriek, “Will you look at these bastards …” Someone was repeatedly hissing the word “Police.” I picked up a suitcase in each hand and started down the stairs. I couldn’t see a thing. Besides, I preferred to close my eyes and count under my breath to get my courage up. One, two, three. One, two, three … If I tripped, the suitcases would drag me all the way down and the impact would knock me out. There could be no stopping or resting. My collarbone was about to crack. And that horrible giggling took hold of me again.

  The light came back on and blinded me. I found myself on the ground floor, in a daze but still on my feet, between the two suitcases and the trunk. Meinthe followed me with the third suitcase in his hand (it was lighter than the others because it contained only my toilet things), and I would have really liked to know what had given me the strength to get that far alive. Madame Buffaz handed me the bill, which I paid with averted eyes. Then she went into the lounge and slammed the door behind her. Meinthe leaned against the wardrobe trunk, rolled-up handkerchief in hand, patting his forehead with the precise little gestures of a woman powdering her face.

  “We must go on, my boy,” he said, pointing at my baggage. “Must go on …”

  We hauled the wardrobe trunk to the steps outside. The Dodge was parked near the Lindens’s gate, and I could make out what looked like Yvonne’s silhouette in the front seat. She was smoking a cigarette, and then she waved at us. Somehow or another we managed to hoist the trunk onto the backseat. Meinthe collapsed against the steering wheel while I went to fetch the three suitcases from the entrance hall of the hotel.

  Someone was standing stiffly at the reception desk: the man with the spaniel face. He took a few steps toward me and stopped. I knew he wanted to say something, but the words wouldn’t come out. I thought he was going to resort to that baying sound he made, the soft, prolonged moaning I was doubtless the sole person to hear (the other pensioners at the Lindens would go on with their canasta game or their chitchat). He remained where he was, frowning, his mouth half open, making increasingly violent efforts to speak. Or was he nauseated and heaving, unable to vomit? He bent forward, practically choking. After a few minutes, he regained his composure and said in a hollow voice, “You’re leaving just in time. Goodbye, Monsieur.”

  He held out his hand. He was wearing a rough tweed jacket and cuffed beige linen trousers. I admired his shoes: grayish suede, with very, very thick crepe soles. I was certain I’d met this man before I ever lodged at the Lindens, it must have been about ten years before. And suddenly … Yes, yes, they were the same shoes, and the man holding out his hand to me was the same one who’d so fascinated me as a child. He used to come to the Tuileries every Thursday and Sunday with a miniature boat (a faithful reproduction of the Kon-Tiki) and watch it float across the pond, changing his observation post, using a stick to push the boat away when it ran aground on the stone rim of the pond, checking the condition of a mast or a sail. Sometimes a group of children and even a few grown-ups gathered to observe this activity, and he’d glance at them furtively as though mistrusting their reactions. When someone asked him about the boat, his mumbled reply was yes, it was a very long, very complicated piece of work, building a Kon-Tiki, and as he spoke, he’d caress his toy. Around seven in the evening, he’d pick up his boat and sit on a bench to dry it with a terry cloth towel. Then he’d walk away in the direction of Rue de Rivoli, his Kon-Tiki under his arm. Later I must often have thought about that silhouette, moving off into the twilight.

  Should I remind him of our meetings? But he’d surely lost his boat. I said, “Goodbye, Monsieur,” in my turn, took hold of the first two suitcases, and slowly crossed the garden. He walked beside me in
silence. Yvonne was sitting on the Dodge’s front fender. Meinthe was at the wheel with his head resting on the back of the seat and his eyes closed. I loaded the two suitcases into the trunk. The spaniel-faced man watched all my movements with avid interest. When I crossed the garden again, he went ahead of me, turning around from time to time to make sure I was still there. He snatched up the last suitcase and said, “Allow me.”

  It was the heaviest of the three, the one with the phone books. He put it down every five meters to catch his breath. Every time I made a move to pick it up myself, he said, “Please, Monsieur …”

  He was adamant about wrestling it onto the backseat by himself. He succeeded with difficulty, and then he just stayed there. His arms were hanging limply, his face a little flushed. He paid no attention to Yvonne and Meinthe. He was looking more and more like a spaniel.

  “Well then, Monsieur …” he murmured. “I wish you good luck.”

  Meinthe drove off slowly. Before the car reached the first curve, I turned around and looked back. He was standing in the middle of the road, very close to a streetlight that lit up his rough tweed jacket and his cuffed beige pants. All he was missing, in short, was the Kon-Tiki under his arm. There are some mysterious persons — always the same ones — who stand like sentinels at every crossroads in your life.

  6.

  At the Hermitage, she had not only a bedroom but also a living room, whose furniture included three armchairs covered with some printed fabric, a round mahogany table, and a sofa. The wallpaper in the living room and bedroom reproduced Toile de Jouy patterns. I had my wardrobe trunk placed in a corner of the room, standing upright so that the things in the drawers were within easy reach. Sweaters or old newspapers. I myself pushed the suitcases to the far end of the bathroom. I didn’t open them, because you have to be ready to leave at a moment’s notice and should consider any room you wind up in a temporary refuge.

  Besides, where could I have put my clothes, my books, and my telephone directories? Her dresses and shoes filled every closet, and some were lying around on the chairs and sofa in the living room. The mahogany table was cluttered with beauty products. A film actress’s hotel room, I thought. The kind of disorder journalists described in Ciné Mondial and Stars. Reading all those magazines had made a strong impression on me. And I was dreaming. I therefore avoided making overly abrupt movements and asking overly precise questions so that I wouldn’t have to wake up.

  It was on the very first evening, I think, that she asked me to read the script of the Rolf Madeja film she’d just played a part in. I was very touched. The movie, Liebesbriefe auf der Berg (Love Letters from the Mountain), is the story of a ski instructor named Kurt Weiss. In the winter, he gives skiing lessons to rich foreign women, guests at an elegant holiday resort in the Austrian state of Vorarlberg. Thanks to his tanned skin and his great physical beauty, he seduces them all. But eventually he falls madly in love with one of them, Lena, the wife of a Hungarian industrialist, and she requites his feelings. They go dancing until two in the morning at the resort’s very “chic” bar, before the other women’s envious eyes. Then Kurtie and Lena end the night in the Bauhaus Hotel. They swear eternal love and talk about their future life in an isolated mountain cabin. She must go back to Budapest, but she promises to return as soon as possible. “Now the screen fills with images of snow falling, followed by singing waterfalls and trees covered with young leaves. It’s spring, and soon summer will come.” Kurt Weiss is practicing his real profession — he’s a bricklayer — and it’s hard to recognize in him the handsome, bronzed ski instructor of the previous winter. Every afternoon he writes a letter to Lena and waits in vain for a reply. A local girl visits him from time to time. They take long walks together. She loves him, but he never stops thinking of Lena. After various twists and turns I’ve forgotten, the memory of Lena gradually fades, to be replaced in Kurtie’s heart by the young girl (this was the role Yvonne played), as he comes to realize that no one has the right to ignore such tender devotion. In the final scene, they kiss against a background of mountains at sunset.

  The portrait of a winter sports resort, of its habitués and their lifestyle, struck me as very well “painted.” As for the young woman played by Yvonne, it was “an excellent part for a beginner.”

  I told her my opinion. She listened to me with great attention. That made me proud. I asked her when the film would be in the theaters. Not before September, but in two weeks Madeja would no doubt have a preliminary projection in Rome “to run through the rushes.” In that case, she’d take me with her, because she really wanted to know what I thought of her “interpretation.”

  Yes, when I try to recall the first period of our “life together,” I can hear, as though on a worn-out tape, our conversations regarding her “career.” I want her to find me interesting. I flatter her … “This film of Madeja’s is very important for you, but now you’re going to have to find someone who really knows how to showcase your talents … Some boy genius … A Jew, for instance …” She listens more and more attentively. “You think so?” “Yes, yes, I’m sure of it.”

  The innocence in her face astonishes me, and I’m all of eighteen, myself. “You really think so?” she asks again. And all around us, the room grows more and more disorderly. I don’t believe we went out for two days.

  Where did she come from? I quickly determined she didn’t live in Paris. She talked about it like a city she barely knew. She’d stayed two or three times, all of them brief, at the Windsor-Reynolds, a hotel on Rue Beaujon I remembered well. It was where my father, before his strange disappearance, used to meet me (there’s a blank spot in my memory: was it in the lobby of the Windsor-Reynolds or in the lobby of the Lutetia that I saw him for the last time?). Apart from the Windsor-Reynolds, all she remembered of Paris was Rue du Colonel-Moll and Boulevard Beauséjour, where she had some “friends” (I didn’t dare ask what sort). By contrast, Geneva and Milan often came up in her conversation. She’d worked in Milan, and in Geneva too. But what kind of work?

  I checked her passport on the sly. Nationality: French. Domicile: 6 bis, Place Dorcière, Geneva. Why? To my great amazement, she’d been born in Haute-Savoie, in the very town we were in. Coincidence? Or did she actually have roots in these parts? Did she still have family here? I ventured an indirect question on this subject, but she wanted to keep something hidden from me. She answered very vaguely, telling me she’d been raised abroad. I didn’t insist. In time, I thought, I would know everything.

  She questioned me too. Was I here on holiday? For how long? She’d guessed right away, she said, that I came from Paris. I declared that I was taking a rest for several months at the insistence of “my family” (and I felt a visceral delight when I said “my family”), on account of my precarious health. As I provided her with these explanations, I saw a group of about ten very serious persons sitting around a table in a paneled room: the “family council” that was going to make some decisions about me. The windows of the room overlooked Place Malesherbes, and I belonged to the old Jewish bourgeoisie that had settled in Plaine-Monceau around 1890. She asked me pointblank: “Chmara’s a Russian name — are you Russian?” Then other things came to mind: we lived, my grandmother and I, in a ground-floor apartment near the Étoile, on Rue Lord-Byron, to be exact, or Rue de Bassano (I need precise details). We survived by selling our “family jewels,” or by depositing them in a pawnshop on Rue Pierre-Charron. Yes, I was Russian, and my title was Count Chmara. She looked impressed.

  For a few days, I was no longer afraid of anything or anyone. And then the fear came back. The old shooting pain.

  The first afternoon we left the hotel, we took the boat, the Amiral-Guisand, which made the circuit of the lake. She was wearing big sunglasses with impenetrable silvered lenses. You could see your reflection in them as though in a mirror.

  The boat putted along lazily, and it took at least twenty minutes to cross the lake to Saint-Jorioz. The bright sun made me blink. I could hear the distant r
umble of motorboats, the shouts and laughter of bathers. A light airplane passed overhead, pretty high up, towing a streamer on which I read the following mysterious words: COUPE HOULIGANT. Houligant Cup …? After a very long maneuver, we landed — or rather, the Amiral-Guisard banged against the wharf. Three or four people came on board, among them a priest dressed in a bright red cassock, and the boat resumed its wheezy cruise. From Saint-Jorioz it went to a village named Voirens. Then there would be Port-Lusatz and, a little farther on, Switzerland. But the boat would turn in time and head for the other side of the lake.

  The wind was blowing strands of her hair across her forehead. She asked me would she be a countess if we got married. She spoke in a joking tone, but underneath it I could sense great curiosity. I told her she’d be called “Countess Yvonne Chmara.”

  “But is that really Russian, Chmara?”

  “Georgian,” I said. “Georgian …”

  When the boat stopped at Veyrier-du-Lac, I recognized, in the distance, Madeja’s white-and-pink villa. Yvonne was looking in the same direction. About ten young people took up positions on the deck beside us. Most of them were wearing tennis outfits, and the girls’ fat thighs showed under their pleated white skirts. They all talked with the toothy accent cultivated around Ranelagh and Avenue Bugeaud. And I wondered why those sons and daughters of French polite society had, on the one hand, mild cases of acne, and on the other, a few too many kilos. The cause was surely their diet.

  Two members of the group were debating the relative merits of Pancho Gonzales and Spalding tennis rackets. The more voluble of the two wore a goatee and a shirt decorated with a little green crocodile. Technical conversation. Incomprehensible words. A soft, soothing hum in the sunlight. One of the blond girls seemed not insensible to the charms of a dark-haired young man wearing moccasins and a blazer with a crest who was doing his best to shine in front of her. The other blonde declared that “the big party” was “not tomorrow night but the next,” and that her parents “would let them have the villa.” The sound of the water against the hull. The airplane came back over us, and I read the strange streamer again: COUPE HOULIGANT. They were all going (if I understood them correctly) to the tennis club in Menthon-Saint-Bernard. Their parents must own lakeside villas. And how about us, where were we going? And our parents, who were they? Did Yvonne come from a “good family,” like our neighbors? And me? In any case, my title of count was quite another thing than a little green crocodile, lost on a white shirt … “Will Count Victor Chmara please come to the telephone?” Yes, that made a fine sound, like a clash of cymbals.