Authors: Patrick Modiano
“You should show him the rest of the house,” the uncle murmured.
His eyes were closed. Yvonne and I got up. The dog gave us a sly look, got up too, and followed us. We were in the entrance hall, at the foot of the stairs, when Big Ben struck again, but more incoherently and violently this time,
so that I imagined a mad pianist pounding the keyboard with his fists and forehead. The terrified dog dashed up the stairs and waited for us at the top. A lightbulb hanging from the ceiling threw a cold yellow light. Yvonne’s pink turban and lipstick made her face look even paler. And I, under that light — I felt I’d been submerged in leaden dust. On the right, a mirrored armoire. Yvonne opened the door in front of us. A room whose window overlooked the road, as I could tell from the muffled noise of several passing trucks.
She switched on the bedside lamp. The bed was very narrow. And all that was left of it was the box spring. There were shelves around it, and the ensemble formed a cozy nook. In the left-hand corner, a tiny washbasin with a mirror over it. Against the wall, a white wooden cupboard. She sat on the edge of the box spring and said, “This was my room.”
The dog had stationed himself in the middle of a carpet so worn you couldn’t make out its pattern anymore. After a moment, he got up and left the room. I scrutinized the walls and inspected the shelves, hoping to discover some vestige of Yvonne’s childhood. It was much hotter here than in the other rooms, and she took off her dress. Then she lay across the box spring. She was wearing garters, stockings, a brassiere — all the things women were still encumbering themselves with back then. I opened the white cupboard. Maybe there was something inside.
“What are you looking for?” she asked, propped up on her elbows.
She squinted. I spotted a little schoolbag in the back of the cupboard. I took it out and sat down on the floor with
my back against the box spring. She rested her chin in the hollow of my shoulder and breathed on my neck. I opened the schoolbag, slipped a hand inside, and pulled out half of an old pencil with a grayish eraser. A nauseating smell of leather and wax — or so it seemed to me — rose from inside the bag. On the eve of the summer holidays one year, Yvonne had closed it for good.
She turned off the light. By what coincidences and what detours had I come to lie beside her on this box spring, in this small, disused room?
How long did we stay there? Big Ben couldn’t be trusted; its chiming grew crazier and crazier, it struck midnight three times in the course of several minutes. I got up and in the semidarkness saw that Yvonne had turned to face the wall. Perhaps she wanted to sleep. The dog was on the landing, in his sphinx position, facing the armoire mirror. He was contemplating himself with bored disdain. When I passed, he didn’t flinch. His neck was very straight, his head slightly raised, his ears pricked. When I was halfway down the stairs, I heard him yawn. As before, the bulb shed a cold yellow light that numbed me. Through the half-open door of the dining room I could hear limpid, icy music, the kind you often hear on the radio at night, the kind that brings to mind a deserted airport. Yvonne’s uncle was listening to it, sitting in his armchair. When I came in, he turned his head toward me: “Everything all right?”
“How about you?”
“Me, I’m all right,” he answered. “And you?”
“Everything’s all right.”
“We can go on if you want … All right?”
He looked at me, his smile fixed, his eyes heavy, as if a photographer were about to take his picture.
He handed me the pack of Royales. I struck four matches, to no avail. Finally I got a flame, which I very carefully brought closer to the tip of my cigarette. And then I inhaled. I had the sensation that I was smoking for the first time. He was watching me closely and frowning.
“I see you’re not a manual worker,” he remarked gravely.
“I’m sorry about that.”
“Why be sorry, my young friend? You think it’s fun to tinker around with engines?”
He looked at his hands.
“It must give you some satisfaction sometimes,” I said.
“Oh, yes? Do you really think so?”
“In any case, it’s a fine invention, the automobile …”
But he wasn’t listening to me anymore. The music had stopped, and the announcer — his intonation was simultaneously English and Swiss, and I wondered what his nationality was — spoke some words I still occasionally repeat aloud, after so many years, when I’m walking by myself: “Ladies and gentlemen, Genève-Musique now ends its broadcast day. Until tomorrow, good night.” The uncle made no move to turn the radio off, and since I didn’t dare intervene, I heard a continuous crackle of static that eventually sounded like the rustling of the wind in the leaves. And the dining room was invaded by something fresh and green.
“She’s a nice girl, Yvonne …”
He blew a fairly successful smoke ring.
“She’s a lot more than a nice girl,” I answered.
He looked me straight in the eye, with interest, as if I’d just said something of major import.
“What do you say we go for a little walk?” he suggested. “I’ve got pins and needles in my legs.”
He stood up and opened the French window.
“You’re not scared?”
He pointed to the hangar, whose contours were shrouded in darkness. At regular intervals, you could make out a bulb, a small point of light.
“This way you’ll be able to see the garage.”
I’d barely set foot on the edge of that cavernous black space before I inhaled a smell of gasoline, a smell that has always excited me — for reasons I’ve never been able to identify precisely — a smell as sweet as the smell of ether, or of the silver paper that chocolate bars come in. He took my arm, and we plunged toward the garage’s darkest regions.
“Yes … Yvonne’s a funny girl …”
He wanted to initiate a conversation. He was circling around a subject close to his heart, one he certainly hadn’t discussed with many people. Maybe, in fact, he was bringing it up for the first time.
“Funny, but very lovable,” I said.
And in my effort to articulate an intelligible sentence, I produced a very high-pitched voice, an incredibly affected falsetto.
“You see …” He hesitated one final time before he opened up, squeezing my arm. “She’s a lot like her father … My brother was so reckless …”
We were walking straight ahead. I gradually got used to the darkness, which was pierced, every twenty meters or so, by a dim lightbulb.
“She’s caused me a lot of worry, Yvonne has …”
He lit a cigarette. Suddenly I couldn’t see him anymore, and since he’d let go of my arm, I followed the glowing tip of his cigarette. He started to walk faster, and I was afraid I’d lose him altogether.
“I’m telling you all this because you seem to be a gentleman …”
I coughed. I didn’t know how to answer him.
“It’s obvious you’ve been brought up well …”
“Oh, no,” I said.
He was walking ahead of me, and I tried to keep my eyes on the red tip of his cigarette. There was no lightbulb in this part of the hangar. I stretched my arms out in front of me to keep from banging into a wall.
“This must be the first time Yvonne’s met a young man from a good family …” A brief laugh. Then, in a muted voice: “Right, my boy?”
He squeezed my arm very hard, around the biceps. He stood facing me. I could see the phosphorescent tip of his cigarette. We didn’t move.
“She’s already done so many foolish things …” He sighed. “And now, there’s this movie business …”
I couldn’t see him, but I’d seldom sensed in anyone so much weariness and resignation.
“It’s no use trying to reason with her … She’s like her father … Like Albert …”
He pulled me by the arm and we walked on. His hold on my biceps was getting tighter and tighter.
“I’m talking to you about all this because I think you’re a nice young man … and well brought up.”
The sound of our footsteps echoed throughout that vast space. I couldn’t understand how he managed to get his bearings in the dark. If he left me behind, I’d have no chance of finding my way.
“Shall we go back?” I said.
“You see, Yvonne has always wanted to live beyond her means … And it’s dangerous … very dangerous …”
He’d released his grip on my arm, but to keep from losing him, I was clutching the bottom of his jacket. He didn’t mind.
“When she was sixteen, she figured out some way of buying beauty products by the kilo …”
He accelerated his pace, but I kept hold of his jacket.
“She wasn’t interested in spending any time with people from around here … She preferred the summer holidaymakers at the Sporting Club … Like her father …”
Three lightbulbs, all in a row above our heads, dazzled me. He forked left and started stroking the wall with his fingertips. The sharp click of a light switch. Very bright light, all around us. The entire hangar was lit up by floodlights fixed in the roof. The place looked even vaster than before.
“I apologize, my boy, but the only place I can switch on the ‘floods’ is here …”
We were at the back of the hangar. There were some American cars parked one beside the other, and an old Chausson
bus whose tires were all flat. I noticed, to our left, a glassed-in workshop that looked like a greenhouse, and beside it some tubs of green plants arranged in a square. The floor in that space was gravel, and ivy was growing up the wall. There was even an arbor, a garden table, and some garden chairs.
“So what do you think of my open-air café here, eh, my boy?”
We pulled two of the garden chairs up to the table and sat facing each other. He put both his elbows on the table and his chin in the palms of his hands. He looked exhausted.
“This is where I take a break when I’m sick of tinkering around with engines … It’s my bower …”
He pointed at the American cars and the Chausson bus behind them. “You see that traveling junkyard?” He made an exasperated gesture, as if shooing away a fly. “It’s a terrible thing when you don’t love your work anymore …”
I grimaced, or smiled, incredulously. “But surely —”
“How about you? Do you still love your work?”
“Yes,” I said, without any notion of what work we were talking about.
“A young man your age is all fire and flame …”
He gave me a look of such tenderness that I was moved.
“All fire and flame,” he repeated, mezza voce.
We stayed there, sitting at the garden table, very small in that gigantic hangar. The tubs of plants, the ivy, and the gravel constituted an unexpected oasis. They protected us from the surrounding desolation: the group of waiting automobiles (one of them missing a fender) and the decaying bus behind them. The light from the floodlights was cold but not yellow like the light in the hall Yvonne and I
had crossed and on the stairs we’d climbed. No. This light had something gray-blue about it. An icy gray-blue.
“Would you like some mint water? That’s all I’ve got here …”
He went over to the workshop and returned with two glasses, a bottle of mint syrup, and a carafe of water. We clinked glasses.
“There are days, my young friend, when I wonder what the hell I’m doing in this garage …”
He definitely needed to confide in someone that evening.
“It’s too big for me …” He swept his arm around, indicating the whole vast hangar.
“First Albert left us … And then my wife … And now Yvonne’s gone …”
“But she comes to see you often,” I proposed.
“No. Mademoiselle wants to be in the movies … She thinks she’s Martine Carol …”
“But she’ll be a new Martine Carol,” I said stoutly.
“Come on … Don’t talk nonsense … She’s too lazy …”
A mouthful of mint water had gone down the wrong way and choked him. He started to cough, couldn’t stop, and turned scarlet. He was definitely about to suffocate. I pounded him on the back, hard, until his coughing calmed down. He looked up at me, his eyes full of benevolence.
His voice was more muted than ever. Completely worn-out. I understood only every other word, but that was enough for me to surmise the rest.
“You’re a nice boy, you really are, my young friend … And polite …”
The sound of a door being closed hard, a very distant sound, but carried by a reverberating echo. It bounced off the back of the hangar. The dining room door, about a hundred meters away from us. I recognized Yvonne’s silhouette, her red hair that hung down to the small of her back when she didn’t do it up. From where we were, she looked tiny, even Lilliputian. The dog came up to her chest. I’ll never forget the vision of that little girl and her giant hound walking toward us, gradually acquiring their true proportions.
“Here she is,” her uncle observed. “You won’t tell her what I said, will you? That should remain between us.”
“Of course I won’t …”
We didn’t take our eyes off her as she came through the hangar. The dog, on scout duty, led the way.
“She looks really small,” I remarked.
“Yes, quite small,” the uncle said. “She’s a child … a problem child …”
She spotted us and started waving her arms. She called out, “Victor … Victor …” and the echo of that name, which wasn’t mine, resounded from one end of the hangar to the other. She joined us and sat at the table, between her uncle and me. She was a little out of breath.
“It’s nice of you to come and keep us company,” her uncle said. “Do you want some mint water? Cold? With ice?”
He poured each of us another glass. Yvonne smiled at me, and as usual it made me feel a sort of vertigo.
“What were you two talking about?”
“Life,” said her uncle.
He lit a Royale, and I knew he’d keep it stuck in the corner of his mouth until it burned his lips.
“He’s nice, the count … and very well brought up.”
“Oh, yes,” Yvonne said. “Victor’s a lovely guy.”
“Say that again,” her uncle said.
“Victor’s a lovely guy.”
“Do you really think so?” I said, facing each of them in turn. I must have had a weird look on my face, because Yvonne pinched my cheek and said, as if to reassure me, “Yes you are, you’re lovely.”
Her uncle, for his part, raised the bidding: “Lovely, my boy, lovely … You’re lovely …”