In the Café of Lost Youth

by Patrick Modiano

  I could still hear what de Vere had said to me about Louki, “I never understood why . . . When we really love someone, we’ve got to accept their role in the mystery.”

  What mystery? I had been certain that we were so alike, she and I, because we could often read each other’s minds. We were on the same wavelength. Born the same year and the same month. And yet, believe it or not, there must have been a fundamental difference between us.

  No, I can’t understand it either. Especially when I remember those final weeks. The month of November, the days growing shorter, the autumn rain, none of it managed to shake our morale. We were even making travel plans. On top of that, a joyful ambiance filled the Condé. I can no longer recall who had introduced Bob Storms among the regular customers, a man who claimed to be a poet and a stage director from Antwerp. Perhaps Adamov? Or Maurice Raphaël? He really made us laugh, that Bob Storms. He had a soft spot for Louki and me. He wanted us to spend the summer in his villa in Majorca. Apparently, he had nothing in the way of financial concerns. Rumor was he collected paintings. You know how people talk. And then people just vanish one day and you realize you didn’t know the first thing about them, not even who they really were.

  Why is the imposing shadow of Bob Storms suddenly looming so prominently in my mind? In life’s most tragic moments, there is often a light note that sounds out of tune with the rest, a court jester, a Bob Storms who passes through and who might have been able to ward off any impending misfortune. He always stood at the bar, as if the wooden chairs might collapse beneath his weight. He was so big that his corpulence wasn’t even visible. Always wearing a kind of velvet doublet, the black of which contrasted with his red beard and hair. And a cloak of the same color. The evening we first noticed him, he made his way to our table and looked us over from top to bottom, Louki and I. Then he smiled, and leaning toward us, he whispered, “Companions in unpleasant times, I wish you the best of nights.” When he learned that I could recite a good many poems, he had insisted that we have a contest. The winner would be the one who had the last word. He would recite a line of verse, I would reply with another, and so on. It went on for quite some time. I didn’t really deserve any of it. I was more or less illiterate, lacking much in the way of general culture, I just happened to have retained some poetry, not unlike those people who can play any piece of music on the piano and yet don’t know the first thing about music theory. Bob Storms had one advantage over me: He also knew the entire repertoire of English, Spanish, and Flemish poetry. Standing at the bar, he defiantly sent forth his challenge:

  Et que le cheval fit un écart en arrière.

  “Donne-lui tout de même à boire,” dit mon père.

  or:

  Como todos los muertos que se olvidan

  En un montón de perros apagados

  or again:

  De burgemeester heeft ons iets misdaan,

  Wij leerden, door zijn schuld, het leven haten.

  Sometimes I found him a bit tiresome, but he was a good guy, quite a bit older than we were. I would have loved to hear him talk of his past lives. He always answered my questions evasively. When he felt that too much curiosity was being directed his way, his exuberance melted away immediately, as if he had something to hide or wanted to cover his tracks. He wouldn’t respond, and then would finally break the silence with a burst of laughter.

  •

  One night Bob Storms hosted a soirée at his place. He invited Louki and me, along with the others: Annet, Don Carlos, Bowing, Zacharias, Mireille, La Houpa, Ali Cherif, and the guy we had convinced to quit the École des Mines. Other guests as well, but I didn’t know them. He lived on the Quai d’Anjou in an apartment whose upper floor was an enormous studio. He invited us there for a reading of Hop Signor!, a play he wanted to direct. The two of us arrived before the rest, and I was blown away by the candelabra that lit the studio, the Sicilian and Flemish marionettes hung from the crossbeams, the Renaissance mirrors and furniture. Bob Storms was wearing his black velvet doublet. A giant bay window gave onto the Seine. He protectively encircled Louki’s shoulders and my own, and he spoke his customary words:

  “Companions in unpleasant times

  I wish you the best of nights.”

  Then he took an envelope from his pocket and held it out to me. He explained to us that it contained the keys to his house in Majorca, and that we ought to head there as soon as we were able. And stay until September. He thought we were looking a bit unhealthy. What a strange night. The play was only one act long and the actors read it rather quickly. We were seated around them in a circle. Once in a while, during the reading, on a cue from Bob Storms, we all had to cry out “Hop Signor!” in unison, as if we were part of a chorus. The alcohol flowed freely. As well as other intoxicants. A buffet had been set up in the middle of the large parlor on the lower floor. Bob Storms himself served drinks in elaborate goblets and crystal stemware. More and more people. At one point, Storms had introduced me to a man of about his age, although much smaller than he was, an American writer named James Jones whom he described as “his next-door neighbor.” Eventually Louki and I began to wonder what we were doing there among all of those people we didn’t know. All of those people who had in some way been mixed up with our early years, people who would never be aware of it and whom we wouldn’t even recognize later on.

  We slowly slipped towards the exit. We were sure that no one had noticed our departure amidst all the chaos. Yet we had hardly passed the door to the parlor when Bob Storms appeared before us.

  “Well then, are you trying to ditch me, children?”

  He wore his usual smile, a broad smile that, along with his beard and towering stature, brought to mind a character from the Renaissance or the seventeenth century, Rubens or Buckingham. All the same, a flash of worry was visible in his gaze.

  “You weren’t too bored, I hope?”

  “Of course not,” I told him. “Hop Signor! was really great.”

  He once again wrapped his arms around our shoulders, both Louki’s and mine, just as he had done in the studio.

  “Well then, I hope I’ll be seeing you tomorrow.”

  He led us to the door, still holding us by the shoulders.

  “And don’t forget, head for Majorca as soon as you’re able, to get some fresh air. You need it. I’ve given you the keys to the house.”

  On the landing, he took a good, long look at both of us. Then he recited, for my benefit:

  “The sky is like the torn midway tent of a poor circus in a fishing village in Flanders.”

  We made our way down the stairs, Louki and I, and he lingered, leaning over the banister. He was waiting for me to recite a verse in response to his, as we were in the habit of doing. But I drew a blank.

  I feel as if I’m starting to mix up the seasons. A few days after that soirée, I accompanied Louki as she went out to Auteuil. I seem to remember it being summer, or at least one of those winter mornings that are so clear and cold, with sunshine and blue skies. She wanted to pay a visit to Guy Lavigne, the man who had been a friend of her mother’s. I had decided that I would prefer to wait for her. We had arranged to meet in an hour, on the corner down the street from his garage. I think we were intending to leave Paris because of the house keys Bob Storms had given us. Sometimes the heart aches at the very thought of things that might have been and never were, but to this very day, I tell myself that the villa in Majorca is still sitting there empty, waiting for us. I was happy that morning. I felt as light as air, a sensation of intoxication. The horizon lay straight out ahead of us, way out there, towards infinity. A garage at the end of a quiet street. I regretted not having gone with Louki to meet this Lavigne. Maybe he would have lent us a car for our trip south.

  I saw her exit through the small door of the garage. She waved at me, exactly the same way she had that other time, when I was waiting for her and Jeannette Gaul that summer day on the quays. She’s coming towards me with that nonchalant walk of hers, and it’s as if she’s
reduced her speed even more, as if time no longer mattered. She takes me by the arm and we wander the neighborhood. We will live here one day. In fact, this is where we’ve always lived. We walk down the quaint streets, we cross the deserted roundabout. The village of Auteuil very gently breaks away from Paris. The ocher or beige-colored buildings could easily be on the Côte d’Azur, and those walls, who knows whether they conceal a garden or the edge of a forest. We reached the place de l’Église, in front of the Métro station. And there, I can say it now that I no longer have anything left to lose: I felt, for the first time in my life, what the Eternal Return really was. Up until then, I had struggled to read books on the subject, with the determination proper to an autodidact. It was just before we went down the steps into the Métro at Église-d’Auteuil. Why there, of all places? I haven’t the slightest idea, and it doesn’t matter anyway. I stood still a moment and I held her arm tightly. We were there, together, in the same place, for all of eternity, and our stroll through Auteuil, we had already taken it during thousands and thousands of other lives. No need to look at my watch. I knew it was noon.

  •

  It happened in November. On a Saturday. That morning and afternoon I had stayed in rue d’Argentine to work on the neutral zones. I wanted to flesh out the four pages, to write at least thirty. It would snowball from there and I would be able to reach the hundred-page mark. I was to meet Louki at the Condé at five o’clock. I had decided to leave rue d’Argentine for good during the next few days. I felt that I was finally over the scars of my childhood and teenage years and that going forward, I no longer had any reason to remain hidden in a neutral zone.

  I walked as far as the Métro station at Étoile. That was the line we had taken so many times before, Louki and I, to go to Guy de Vere’s lectures, the line we had followed on foot that first night. As I crossed the Seine, I noticed that there were a lot of people out walking along the allée des Cygnes. Transfer at La Motte-Picquet-Grenelle.

  I got off at Mabillon, and I glanced toward La Pergola, as we always had. Mocellini wasn’t sitting in the window.

  When I entered the Condé, the hands of the round clock on the back wall showed exactly five o’clock. It was usually pretty dead at that time of day. The tables were empty, with the exception of the one next to the door, which was occupied by Zacharias, Annet, and Jean-Michel. All three of them were giving me strange looks. No one said a word. Zacharias’s and Annet’s faces were both very pale, likely from the light pouring in through the window. They didn’t respond when I said hello. They stared at me with those strange looks on their faces as if I had done something awful. Jean-Michel pursed his lips, and I felt that he wanted to tell me something. A fly landed on the back of Zacharias’s hand and he swatted it away with a nervous slap. Then he picked up his drink and downed the entire glass. He got up and walked over toward me. With a flat, expressionless voice, he said, “Louki. She threw herself out the window.”

  I was afraid I might lose my way. I took Raspail and then the road that cut through the cemetery. Once I reached its end, I no longer knew whether I should keep walking straight or if I needed to follow rue Froidevaux. I took rue Froidevaux. From that moment forward, there was an absence in my life, a blank space that not only gave me a feeling of emptiness but that I couldn’t bear to look at. All of that blank space blinded me with a bright and radiant light. And it will be like that until the very end.

  Quite a bit later, at Broussais Hospital, I sat in a waiting room. A man in his fifties with a gray brush cut and a herringbone coat was also waiting on a bench on the other side of the room. Other than the two of us, the room was empty. The nurse had come to tell me that she was dead. The man came over to us as if it concerned him. I thought he must have been Guy Lavigne, the friend of her mother’s whom she visited at his garage in Auteuil. I asked him.

  “Are you Guy Lavigne?”

  He shook his head.

  “No, my name is Pierre Caisley.”

  We left Broussais together. Night had fallen. We walked side by side down rue Didot.

  “And I suppose you must be Roland?”

  How could he know my name? I had difficulty walking. That blank space, that radiant light before me.

  “She didn’t leave a note?” I asked him.

  “No. Nothing.”

  He was the one who gave me all the details. She was in the room with a girl named Jeannette Gaul, whom some knew as Crossbones. But how did he know Jeannette’s nickname? She had gone out on the balcony. She had put one leg over the railing. The other girl had tried to hold her back by the shirttail of her dressing gown. But it was too late. She had time only to say a few words, as if to give herself courage:

  “That’s it. Just let yourself go.”