In the Café of Lost Youth

by Patrick Modiano

  When I reached rue Cels, I decided to be clear in my mind about things. A calm and gray street, it reminded me not only of a village or a suburb but of those mysterious regions they call “the borderlands.” I went straight to the front desk. No one. I waited about ten minutes, hoping that she wouldn’t appear. A door opened and a woman with short dark hair, dressed all in black, came to the reception desk. I said in a pleasant voice: “This is regarding Jacqueline Delanque.”

  I figured she had registered here under her maiden name.

  She smiled at me and took an envelope from one of the pigeonholes behind her.

  “Are you Monsieur Roland?”

  Now who was this? Just in case, I gave a vague nod of the head. She handed me the envelope, on which was written in blue ink: “For Roland.” The envelope wasn’t sealed. On a large sheet of paper, I read:

  Roland, come and meet me after five o’clock at the Condé. If you can’t, call me at AUTEUIL 15-28 and leave me a message.

  It was signed “Louki.” A pet name for Jacqueline?

  I folded the sheet up and slid it into the envelope, handing it back to the brunette.

  “Excuse me. There’s been a mix-up. This isn’t for me.”

  She didn’t react at all but mechanically replaced the letter in the pigeonhole.

  “Has Jacqueline Delanque lived here a long time?”

  She hesitated a moment and then replied affably, “For about a month.”

  “Alone?”

  “Yes.”

  She seemed indifferent to me and ready to answer all of my questions. She gave me a weary look.

  “Thank you very much,” I said to her.

  “You’re welcome.”

  I didn’t want to linger, as this Roland could arrive at any time. I went back out onto avenue du Maine and followed it in the direction from which I’d come. At Au Chien Qui Fume, I ordered another cognac. I looked up the Condé’s address in the directory. It was in the Quartier de l’Odéon. Four o’clock in the afternoon, I had a bit of time to kill, so I placed a call to AUTEUIL 15-28. A terse voice that reminded me of a speaking clock: “La Fontaine Garage, how can I help you?” I asked for Jacqueline Delanque. “She’s stepped out a moment. Can I take a message?” I was tempted to hang up, but I forced myself to reply. “No, no message. Thank you.”

  Above all, it’s necessary to determine people’s itineraries with as much precision as possible in order to understand them better. I repeated to myself, in a low voice: “Hotel rue Cels. La Fontaine Garage. Café Condé. Louki.” And then, that part of Neuilly between the Bois de Boulogne and the Seine, where that fellow had asked me to meet him to talk about his wife, the aforementioned Jacqueline Choureau, née Delanque.

  •

  I can’t remember who recommended that he talk to me. It doesn’t really matter. He probably found my address in the directory. I had taken the Métro well before the appointed time. It was a direct line. I got off at Sablons and walked around for nearly half an hour. I had a habit of getting to know the lay of the land before jumping straight into the thick of things. In the past, Blémant criticized me for it and thought that I was wasting my time. Dive in, he told me, rather than running in circles around the edge of the pool. Personally, I felt the opposite way. No sudden movements, but instead a passivity and slowness that allow you to be softly penetrated by the spirit of the place.

  The scents of autumn and the country were in the air. I followed the avenue that ran along the Jardin d’Acclimatation, only I stuck to the other side next to the Bois de Boulogne and the bridle path. I would have loved it if it were just a casual stroll.

  This Jean-Pierre Choureau had called me to set up a meeting, his voice devoid of expression. All he let me know was that it was about his wife. As I approached his home, I saw him walking along the bridle path, as I was, passing the amusement rides of the Jardin d’Acclimatation. How old was he? The timbre of his voice had seemed youthful to me, but voices can often be misleading.

  What drama or marital hell would he drag me into? I felt assailed by discouragement, and I wasn’t completely sure I wanted to go to this meeting. I headed across the Bois towards the Mare Saint-James and the small lake the ice skaters frequented during the winter. I was the only one walking there and I got the impression that I was far from Paris, maybe somewhere in Sologne. Once again, I managed to overcome the discouragement. A vague professional curiosity made me interrupt my stroll through the woods and return towards the outskirts of Neuilly. Sologne. Neuilly. I imagined long rainy afternoons in Neuilly for the Choureaus. And over there, in Sologne, you could hear the horns of the hunt at dusk. Did his wife ride sidesaddle? I burst out laughing as I remembered Blémant’s remark: “Caisley, you go way too far, way too fast. You ought to have been a novelist.”

  •

  He lived at the far end, by the Porte de Madrid, in a modern building with a large windowed entrance. He had told me to go to the end of the hall and then to turn left. I would see his name on the door. “It’s an apartment on the ground floor.” I had been surprised by the sadness with which he had said “ground floor.” Then there was a long silence, as if he regretted the admission.

  “And the exact address?” I had asked him.

  “Eleven, avenue de Bretteville. Have you got that? Eleven. At four o’clock, would that work for you?”

  His voice had grown steadier, taking on an almost conversational tone.

  The small golden plaque on the door read “Jean-Pierre Choureau,” over which I noticed a peephole. I rang. I waited. There, in that deserted and silent hallway, I told myself that I had come too late. He had committed suicide. I felt ashamed by such a thought and, once again, I had a strong desire to drop the whole thing, to leave that hall, to return to my walk in the fresh air, in Sologne. I rang again, this time in three short bursts. The door opened straight away, as if he had been stationed behind it, observing me through the peephole.

  A man of some forty years, with short-cropped brown hair, well above average height. He wore a navy blue suit and a sky blue shirt, the collar open. He led me wordlessly towards what one might have referred to as the living room. He motioned to a sofa behind a coffee table, and we sat down side by side. He struggled to speak. To put him at ease, I said to him, in the softest voice possible, “So this is about your wife?”

  He tried to take on a detached tone, shooting me a lifeless smile. Yes, his wife had disappeared two months ago after an unspectacular argument. Could I be the first person that he had spoken to since her disappearance? The iron shutter of one of the bay windows was lowered, and I wondered if this man had cloistered himself in his apartment for the past two months. But other than the shutter, there was no trace of disorder or sloppiness in the living room. As for him, after wavering for a moment, he regained a certain self-composure.

  “I would like this situation to be cleared up rather quickly,” he finally told me.

  I took a closer look at him. Very light-colored eyes below black brows, high cheekbones, unremarkable features. In his appearance and his way of moving, there was an athletic vigor that was accentuated by his short hair. You could have easily imagined him on a sailboat, shirtless, a solitary navigator. And in spite of such apparent vitality and charm, his wife had left him.

  I wanted to know whether during all that time he had made any attempts to find her. No. She had telephoned him three or four times, letting him know that she would not be coming back. She had strongly advised against his trying to get in touch with her and gave him no explanation. Her voice had changed. This was no longer even the same person. A very calm voice, very confident, a change that he had found quite disconcerting. He and his wife were almost fifteen years apart in age. She, twenty-two. He, thirty-six. As he gave me those details, I felt about him a certain distance, even a coldness, clearly the fruit of what one would call a proper education. And now I needed to ask him questions that were increasingly specific and I no longer knew if it was worth the trouble. What exactly was it t
hat he wanted? For his wife to return? Or was he simply seeking to understand why she had left him? Perhaps this would be enough for him. With the exception of the sofa and coffee table, there was no furniture in the living room. The bay windows gave on to the avenue where cars passed by only occasionally, so infrequently that the ground-floor level of the apartment wasn’t a concern. Night was falling. He lit the red-shaded tripod lamp that stood next to the sofa on my right. The light made me blink my eyes, a white light that made the silence even more profound. I think he was waiting for my questions. He had crossed his legs. To buy some time, I took my spiral-bound notebook and my ballpoint pen from the inside pocket of my coat and made a few notes. “Him, 36 yrs old. Her, 22. Neuilly. First-floor apartment. No furniture. Bay windows looking onto avenue de Bretteville. No traffic. A few magazines on the coffee table.” He waited without saying a thing as if I were a doctor writing a prescription.

  “Your wife’s maiden name?”

  “Delanque. Jacqueline Delanque.”

  I asked him the date and place of birth of this Jacqueline Delanque. The date, also, of their marriage. Did she have a driver’s license? A steady job? No. Did she have any family left? In Paris? In the provinces? A checkbook? As he answered me in a sad voice, I jotted down all of those details that are often the sole things that bear witness to the passage of a human being on Earth. Provided that one day someone finds the spiral-bound notebook in which they were recorded in a tiny, difficult-to-read script such as my own.

  Now it was necessary for me to move on to more delicate questions, the ones that grant access to a man’s private life without first having to ask his permission. What gives us the right?

  “You have friends?”

  Yes, a few people that he saw regularly enough. He knew them from business school. A few had also been classmates at the Lycée Jean-Baptiste Say.

  He had even tried to open a firm with three of them before going to work for the Zannetacci Real Estate Company as an active partner.

  “Are you still working?”

  “Yes. At 20, rue de la Paix.”

  What means of transportation did he use when he went to the office? Every detail, no matter how trivial it may seem, is telling. By automobile. He traveled for Zannetacci from time to time. Lyon. Bordeaux. The Côte d’Azur. Geneva. And Jacqueline Choureau, née Delanque, did she stay behind on her own in Neuilly? He had taken her along on these trips a few times, they had gone to the Côte d’Azur. And when she was on her own, what did she do with her free time? There truly wasn’t anyone who might be able to give him information concerning the disappearance of Jacqueline, married name Choureau, born Delanque, to give him the slightest clue? “I don’t know, a secret she might have told you one day when she was feeling blue?” “No. She would never have confided in anyone.” Often, she reproached him for his friends’ total lack of imagination. It was important to keep in mind, as well, that she was nearly fifteen years younger than they were.

  I had now arrived at a question that already bothered me a great deal, but one that it was necessary to ask: “Do you think she had a lover?”

  The tone of my voice struck me as a bit brutal and a bit stupid. But that’s how it was. He frowned.

  “No.”

  He hesitated, he looked me right in the eye as if he was waiting for encouragement from me or as if he was searching for the right words. One evening, one of his old business-school friends had come to their place for dinner and had brought along someone called Guy de Vere, a man older than the rest of them. This Guy de Vere was very well versed in the occult sciences and had offered to bring them a few works on the subject. His wife had attended several gatherings and even some sort of conference given regularly by this Guy de Vere. He hadn’t been able to accompany her due to a backlog of work at Zannetacci. His wife developed an interest in these gatherings and spoke of them often, without him really understanding what they were all about. She had borrowed one of the books that Guy de Vere had suggested to her, the one that had seemed the easiest to read. It was called Lost Horizon. Had he been in contact with Guy de Vere after his wife’s disappearance? Yes, he had telephoned him several times, but de Vere didn’t know anything. “Are you positive about that?” He shrugged his shoulders and fixed me with a weary look. This Guy de Vere had been very evasive and it had been clear that he would get no information from him. The exact name and address of this man? He didn’t know his address, it wasn’t in the directory.

  I tried to think of other questions to ask him. A moment of silence passed between us, but it didn’t appear to bother him. Seated side by side on that sofa, it was as if we were in a dentist’s or a doctor’s waiting room. White, bare walls. A woman’s portrait hung over the sofa. I nearly picked up one of the magazines from the coffee table. A sense of emptiness came over me. I must admit that at that moment I felt the absence of Jacqueline Choureau née Delanque to the point that it felt definitive to me. But there was no reason to be a pessimist right from the start. And further, wouldn’t this living room have had the same feeling of emptiness even if the woman had been present? Did they dine there? If so, it must have been on a card table that was folded up and put away afterwards. I wanted to know if she had left on the spur of the moment, without bothering to take all of her belongings. No. She had taken her clothing and the few books Guy de Vere had lent her, all of it in a dark red leather suitcase. There wasn’t the slightest trace of her. Even the pictures with her in them—a few vacation photos—had disappeared. Evenings, alone in the apartment, he wondered if he had ever been married to Jacqueline Delanque. The sole remaining proof was the family record book given to them after they had married. Family record book. He repeated these words as if he didn’t understand their meaning.

  It was pointless for me to visit the other rooms of the apartment. Empty rooms. Empty closets. And silence, barely disturbed by the passing of a car on avenue de Bretteville. The evenings must have been long.

  “Did she take a key with her?”

  He shook his head no. Not even the hope of one night hearing the sound of the key in the lock that would announce her return. And he didn’t think it likely that she would ever call again.

  “How did you two meet?”

  She had been hired at Zannetacci to fill in for an employee. Temporary secretarial work. He had dictated a few client letters to her and that’s how they had gotten to know each other. They had seen each other outside of the office. She told him that she was a student at the École des Langues Orientales, where she took classes twice a week, but he never found out exactly which language she had been studying. Asian languages, she said. And, after two months, they were married one Saturday morning at the city hall in Neuilly, with two colleagues from Zannetacci as witnesses. No one else attended what was for him a simple formality. They had gone to lunch with the witnesses right near his place, just outside the Bois de Boulogne, at a restaurant often frequented by customers from the neighboring amusement park.

  He shot me an embarrassed look. Apparently he had wanted to give me a more detailed account of their marriage. I smiled at him. I didn’t need an explanation. Making an effort he took the plunge: “It’s all about trying to create ties, you see.”

  Well, sure, I understood. In this life that sometimes seems to be a vast, ill-defined landscape without signposts, amid all of the vanishing lines and the lost horizons, we hope to find reference points, to draw up some sort of land registry so as to shake the impression that we are navigating by chance. So we forge ties, we try to find stability in chance encounters. I kept quiet, my gaze fixed on the stack of magazines. In the middle of the coffee table sat a large yellow ashtray that bore the inscription “Cinzano.” And a paperback book entitled Fare Thee Well, Focolara. Zannetacci. Jean-Pierre Choureau. Cinzano. Jacqueline Delanque. Neuilly City Hall. Focolara. As if we were supposed to find some sense in all of this.

  “And of course she was terribly charming. I fell head over heels for her.”

  As soon as he had
made this admission in a low voice, he seemed to regret it. In the days leading up to her disappearance, had he noticed anything different about her? Well sure, she complained to him more and more about their daily lives. This wasn’t what it was supposed to be like, she said, real life. And when he asked her what it really consisted of, this “real life,” she shrugged her shoulders without answering, as if she knew that he wouldn’t understand her explanation. And then she found her smile once again, and her kindness, and she was almost apologetic for her bad mood. With a look of resignation, she told him that in the end it wasn’t so bad. One day, maybe, he would understand what “real life” was.

  “You really don’t have a single photograph of her?”

  One afternoon, they were walking along the Seine. He had planned on taking the Métro to Châtelet to get to the office. On the boulevard du Palais, they passed a little photo-booth kiosk. She needed photos for a new passport. He waited for her on the sidewalk. When she came out, she had handed him the photos, telling him that she was afraid she would lose them. Once back at the office, he had put the photos in an envelope and had forgotten to bring them back to Neuilly. After his wife’s disappearance, he had noticed that the envelope was still there, on his desk, among the administrative documents.

  “Would you excuse me a moment?”

  He left me alone on the sofa. It was dark out. I looked at my watch and I was surprised that the hands only showed a quarter to six. It felt like I had been there much longer.

  Two pictures in a gray envelope, on the left of which was printed: “Zannetacci Real Estate, 20, rue de la Paix, Paris 1st.” One shot head on, one in profile, the kind they still insisted on for foreigners at the police headquarters. Her family name, Delanque, and her first name, Jacqueline, were very French all the same. Two pictures that I held between thumb and index finger as I contemplated them in silence. Brown hair, pale-colored eyes, and one of those profiles so unsullied that it gave off charm even in an anthropometric photo. And those two pictures had all the dinginess and all the coldness common to anthropometric photos.