Paris Nocturne

by Patrick Modiano

  I was limping a little and held the banister as I went down the long staircase. In the entrance hall, I was about to leave through the glass doors, one side of which stood open, when I noticed the huge brown-haired man. He was sitting on a bench. He waved to me and got up. He was wearing the same coat as the other night. He took me over to the reception desk. They asked for my name. He stood next to me, as if to better monitor my movements, but I was planning on giving him the slip. As quickly as possible. There in the entrance hall rather than out in the street. The woman at reception gave me a sealed envelope with my name written on it.

  Then she gave me a discharge form to sign and handed me another envelope, this time with the clinic’s letterhead on it. I asked her if I had to pay anything, but she told me that the bill had been taken care of. By whom? In any case, I wouldn’t have had enough money. As I was about to cross the hall towards the exit, the huge brown-haired man asked me to sit with him on the bench. He gave me a vague smile and I decided that the fellow probably meant me no harm. He presented me with two sheets of onionskin paper on which some text had been typed. The report—I still remember the word he had used—yes, the report of the accident. I had to sign my name again, on the bottom of the page. He took a pen out of his coat pocket and even removed the lid for me. He said I could read the text before I signed, but I was in too much of a hurry to get out into the open air. I signed the first sheet. I didn’t have to bother with the second; it was a copy for me to keep. I folded it, stuffed it into the pocket of my sheepskin jacket, and got up.

  He followed hard on my heels. Perhaps he wanted to put me back in a police van, and there she’d be again, sitting in the same place as the other night? Outside, in the little street that ran down to the quay, there was just one parked car. A man was sitting in the driver’s seat. I tried to find the words to take my leave. If I walked off suddenly, he might find my behaviour suspicious and there was a good chance I’d have him on my back again. So I asked him who the woman from the other night was. He shrugged his shoulders and told me that I was bound to see in the report, but that it would be better for me and for everyone else if I forgot about the accident. As far as he was concerned the ‘case was closed’ and he sincerely hoped I thought so, too. He stopped alongside the car and asked, in a cold tone, if I was all right to walk, and if I’d like to be ‘dropped off’ somewhere. No, I was fine, really. So, without saying goodbye, he got in next to the driver, slammed the door rather savagely and the car moved off towards the quay.

  *

  The weather was mild, a sunny winter’s day. I no longer had any notion of time. It must have been early afternoon. My left leg was hurting a bit. Dead leaves on the pavement. I dreamed that I would come out onto a forest path. I was no longer thinking about the word Engadin, but an even sweeter one, more remote—Sologne. I opened the envelope. Inside was a wad of banknotes. No message or explanation. Why all this money? Perhaps she’d noticed the sorry state of my sheepskin jacket and of my one shoe. Before the split moccasins, I had a pair of big lace-up shoes with crepe rubber soles that I wore even in summer. And it would have been at least the third winter I had worn the old sheepskin jacket. I took the form I had signed out of my pocket. A report or rather a summary of the accident. There was no letterhead from any police branch, nor did it look like a standard administrative form. ‘Night-time…a sea-green Fiat automobile…licence plate…coming from the direction of Carrousel Garden and heading into Place des Pyramides…Both taken to the lobby of the Hôtel Régina…Hôtel-Dieu casualty department… Dressings applied to the leg and arm…’ There was no mention of the Mirabeau Clinic and I wondered when and how they had transported me there. My surname and my first name were in the summary, as well as my date of birth and my old address. They must have found all this information from my old passport. Her name and surname were also there: Jacqueline Beausergent, and her address: Square de l’Alboni, but they had forgotten to add the street number.

  I had never held such a large sum of money in my hands. I would have preferred a note from her, but she was probably not in a state to write after the accident. I assumed that the huge brown-haired guy had taken care of everything. Her husband, perhaps. I tried to remember at what point he had appeared. She was alone in the car. Later on he had walked towards us in the hotel lobby, while we were waiting, sitting next to each other on the sofa. They probably wanted to compensate me for my injuries and felt guilty at the idea of how much worse the accident could have been. I would have liked to reassure them. No, they shouldn’t worry on my account. The envelope with the clinic’s letterhead contained a prescription signed by a Doctor Besson instructing me to change my dressings regularly. I counted the banknotes again. No more financial worries for a long time. I recalled those last meetings with my father, when I was about seventeen years old, when I never dared to ask him for any money. Life had already drawn us apart and we met up in cafés early in the morning, while it was still dark. The lapels of his suits became increasingly threadbare and each time the cafés were further from the city centre. I tried to remember if I had met up with him in the neighbourhood where I was walking.

  I took the report I had signed out of my pocket. So she lived on Square de l’Alboni. I knew the area, as I often got off at the metro station close by. It didn’t matter that the number was missing. I’d work it out with her name, Jacqueline Beausergent. Square de l’Alboni was a little further south, next to the Seine. I was in her neighbourhood. That was why they had moved me to the Mirabeau Clinic. She probably knew. Yes, it must have been her idea to have me taken there. Perhaps someone she knew had come to collect us at the Hôtel-Dieu. In an ambulance? I said to myself that at the next phone box I would look her up in the phone directory by street name or I would call directory enquiries. But there was no rush. I had all the time in the world to find her exact address and pay her a visit. It was perfectly justifiable on my part and she surely wouldn’t take offence. I had never called at the house of someone I didn’t know, but in this case, there were certain details that needed to be clarified, not to mention the wad of banknotes in an envelope, no accompanying message, like a handout thrown to a beggar. You knock someone down in a car at night, and arrange for money to be delivered to him in case he’s been crippled. For a start, I didn’t want the money. I had never depended on anyone and I was convinced, at that time, that I didn’t need anyone. My parents had been of no help at all and the occasional meetings in cafés with my father always ended the same way: we would get up and shake hands. And not once did I have the courage to beg him for money. Especially towards the end, around Porte d’Orléans, when he had lost all the energy and charm that he had on the Champs-Élysées. One morning, I noticed buttons were missing from his navy-blue overcoat.

  I was tempted to follow the quay as far as Square de l’Alboni. At each apartment block, I would ask the concierge which floor Jacqueline Beausergent lived on. There couldn’t be that many numbers. I recalled her wry smile and how she had squeezed my wrist, as if there were some kind of complicity between us. It would be best to telephone first. Not to rush things. I remembered the strange impression I had in the police van all the way to the Hôtel-Dieu, that I had already seen her face somewhere else. Before finding out her phone number, perhaps I would make an effort to remember. Things were still simple at that time; I didn’t have most of my life behind me. Going back a few years would be enough. Who knows? I had already crossed paths with a certain Jacqueline Beausergent, or the same person going by a different name. I had read that only a small number of encounters are the product of chance. The same circumstances, the same faces keep coming back, like the pieces of coloured glass in a kaleidoscope, with the play of mirrors giving the illusion that the combinations are infinitely variable. But in fact the combinations are rather limited. Yes, I must have read that somewhere, or perhaps Dr Bouvière explained it to us one evening in a café. But it was difficult for me to concentrate on these questions for any length of time; I never felt I had a
head for philosophy. All of a sudden, I didn’t want to cross Pont de Grenelle and find myself south of the river and return, by metro or by bus, to my room on Rue de la Voie-Verte. I thought I’d walk around the neighbourhood a bit more. Besides, I had to get used to walking with the dressing on my leg. I felt good there, in Jacqueline Beausergent’s neighbourhood. It even felt as if the air was lighter to breathe.

  BEFORE THE ACCIDENT, I’d been living for almost a year in Hôtel de la Rue de la Voie-Verte, near Porte d’Orléans. For a long time, I wanted to forget this period of my life, or else remember only the seemingly insignificant details. There was, for example, a man I often passed at around six o’clock in the evening. He was probably returning home from work. All I remember about him is that he carried a black suitcase and walked slowly. One evening, in the large café opposite the Cité Universitaire, I struck up a conversation with a young man sitting next to me who I thought must have been a student. But he worked in a travel agency. He was Madagascan and later I came across his name and a telephone number on a card, among a pile of old papers I was throwing out. His name was Katz-Kreutzer. I know nothing about him. There were other details… They were always to do with people I’d come across, barely glimpsed, and who would remain as mysteries in my mind. Places too…A little restaurant I would occasionally go to with my father, near the top of Avenue Foch, on the left. I searched in vain for it sometime later when I happened to be passing though the neighbourhood. Or had I dreamed it? Along with country houses belonging to people whose names I could no longer recall, near villages I would not be able to point out on a map, a certain Évelyne I had known one night on a train. I even started compiling a list, with approximate dates, of all these lost faces and places, of all those abandoned projects, like the time I decided to enrol at the faculty of medicine, but I didn’t see it through. My attempts to catalogue all those plans which never saw the light of day and which remained forever on hold, a way of searching for a breach, for vanishing points. Because I’m reaching the age at which, little by little, life begins to close in on itself.

  I’m trying to recall the colours and the mood of the period when I lived near Porte d’Orléans. Shades of grey and black, a mood that seems stifling in retrospect, perpetual autumns and winters. Was it just a coincidence that I ended up in the area where I had met my father for the last time? Seven o’clock sharp in the morning at La Rotonde café, at the bottom of one of those tall blocks of brick buildings that mark the edge of Paris. Beyond lay Montrouge and a section of the ring road that had just been completed. We didn’t have much to say and I knew then that we wouldn’t see each other again. We got up and, without shaking hands, left La Rotonde. I was taken aback as I watched him wander off in his navy-blue overcoat towards the ring road. I still wonder which distant suburb he was heading for. Yes, this coincidence is striking now: to have lived for a period in the neighbourhood where our last meetings took place. But at the time, I didn’t give it a second thought. I had other things on my mind.

  DR BOUVIÈRE IS another one of those fugitive faces from this period. I wonder if he’s still alive. Perhaps under another name, in some provincial town, he has found new disciples. Last night, the memory of this man brought on a nervous laugh which I struggled to contain. Had he really existed? Was he not a mirage provoked by lack of sleep, a habit of skipping meals and taking bad drugs? Not at all. There were too many details, too many connections that proved well and truly that a Dr Bouvière, during that time, conducted his meetings from cafés in the fourteenth arrondissement.

  Our paths had crossed a few months before the accident. And I must admit that at the Hôtel-Dieu, as they put the black muzzle over my face to administer ether and send me to sleep, I had thought of Bouvière because of his doctor title. I don’t know what the title meant, whether it was one of his university ranks or if he was recognised as having completed medical studies. I think Bouvière played on this ambiguity to suggest that his ‘learning’ covered vast spheres, medicine included.

  The first time I saw him, it was not in Montparnasse at one of his meetings, but on the other side of Paris, on the Right Bank, right on the corner of Rue Pigalle and Rue de Douai, in a café called Le Sans Souci. I have to point out what I was doing there, even if I have to come back to it again in more detail one day. Following the example of a French writer known as the ‘nocturnal spectator’, I frequented certain neighbourhoods in Paris. In the streets at night, I had the impression I was living another life, a more captivating one, or quite simply, that I was dreaming another life.

  It was around eight o’clock in the evening, in winter, and there were not many people in the café. My attention was drawn to a couple sitting at one of the tables: he had short silver hair, was around forty, with a bony face and pale eyes. He’d kept his overcoat on. She was a blonde woman of about the same age. Her complexion was translucent, but her features were severe. She spoke to him in a deep, almost masculine voice, and the words I heard sounded like they were being read out, so clear was her articulation. But there was something about her that fitted perfectly with the Pigalle district at that time. Indeed, at first I thought they were the proprietors of one of the nightclubs in the area. Or probably just her, I thought. The man would have stayed behind the scenes. He listened to her as she spoke. He took out a cigarette holder and I was struck by his affectation, a slight movement of the chin, as he put it in his mouth. After a while, the woman stood up and in her smooth voice, articulating each syllable, she said to him, ‘Next time, you won’t forget my refills, will you,’ and this phrase intrigued me. She said it in a dry, almost contemptuous tone and he nodded his head docilely. Then, with an air of confidence, she strode out of the café, without turning back, leaving him looking annoyed.

  I watched her leave. She wore a fur-lined raincoat. She walked down Rue Victor-Massé on the left-hand side of the street and I wondered if she would go into the Tabarin. But she didn’t. She disappeared. Perhaps into the hotel, further down the street? After all, she was just as likely to be the proprietor of a hotel as of a cabaret or a perfumery. He remained sitting at the table, his head lowered, pensive, the cigarette holder dangling from the corner of his mouth, as if he’d just taken a punch. Under the neon light, his face was veiled in a film of sweat and a kind of grey grease that I’ve noticed on the faces of men made to suffer by women. Then he got up, too. He was tall, his back slightly stooped. Through the glass, I saw him walk down Rue Pigalle, moving like a sleepwalker.

  That was my first encounter with Dr Bouvière. The second was about a fortnight later, in another café, near Denfert-Rochereau. Paris is a big city, but I think you can meet the same person several times and often in places where it would seem most unlikely: in the metro, on the boulevards…Once, twice, three times, you could almost say that fate—or chance—had a hand in it, and was willing a certain meeting or steering your life in a new direction, but you seldom heed its call. You let the face go, and it remains forever unknown, and you feel relief, but also remorse.

  I went into the café to buy cigarettes and there was a queue at the counter. The clock on the far wall was showing seven o’clock in the evening. At a table beneath it, in the middle of the red moleskin banquette, I recognised Bouvière. There were a few people with him, but they were sitting on chairs. Bouvière was sitting on the banquette by himself, as if the more comfortable spot was his by right. The grey grease and sweat had disappeared from his face, and the cigarette holder was no longer dangling from the corner of his mouth. He was barely the same man. This time he was talking; he even seemed to be delivering a lecture while the others listened in rapture. One of them was scribbling in a large school exercise book. Girls as well as boys. I don’t know why I was so curious, perhaps that evening it was the need to answer the question I was asking myself: how could a man transform so dramatically depending on whether he’s in Pigalle or Denfert-Rochereau? I had always been very sensitive to the mysteries of Paris.

  I sat on the banquette at the ta
ble next to theirs, so I could be close to Bouvière. I noticed that they were all drinking coffee, so I ordered one, too. None of them paid me any attention. Bouvière didn’t even pause when I knocked the table. I had stumbled over the foot of the table and fallen next to him on the banquette. I listened attentively, but didn’t fully understand what he was saying. Certain words didn’t have the same meaning when he used them as they do in normal life. I was amazed at how gripped his audience was. They lapped up his words and the fellow with the exercise book didn’t pause for a moment from his shorthand scribbling. Bouvière made them laugh from time to time with obscure references that he must have often uttered, like code words. If I have the strength, I will try to remember some of the most characteristic phrases from his lectures. I wasn’t receptive to the words he used. They had no resonance, no glimmer of meaning for me. In my memory they are like thin, bleak notes played on an old harpsichord. And besides, without Bouvière’s voice to animate them, all that is left are the empty words, whose meaning I can’t quite capture. I think Bouvière took them, more or less, from psychoanalysis and far eastern philosophy, but I am reluctant to venture into territory I know little about.