Paris Nocturne by Patrick Modiano Read Free Book Online Page A

she tried to scratch my face. I tried to free myself, but she was really heavy. I felt my childhood terrors gradually return. For over thirty years, I had made sure that my life was as well ordered as a formal French garden. With its wide walkways,lawns and hedges, the garden had covered over a swamp where I had almost gone under long ago. Thirty years of striving. All of it just for this Medusa figure to stand in wait for me one night on the street and pounce on me…This old woman was going to suffocate me. She was as heavy as my childhood memories. I was being smothered in a shroud and it was useless to fight. No one could help me. A little further down, on the square, there was a police station, with some officers on guard duty out the front. It would all end up in a paddy wagon and a police station. It had been inevitable for a long time. Besides, at the age of seventeen, when my father had me arrested because he wanted to get rid of me, it happened around here, near the church. More than thirty years of futile striving just to come right back to where it started, in neighbourhood police stations. How sad…They looked like two drunks fighting in the street, one of the policemen would say. They would sit us on a bench, the old woman and me, like everyone who’d been caught in night round-ups, and I would have to state my name and address. They would ask me if I knew her. ‘She’s trying to pass herself off as your mother,’ the superintendent would say, ‘but according to her papers, you’re not related. And besides, your mother’s identity is unknown. You’re free to go,sir.’ It was the same superintendent my father had handed me over to when I was seventeen. Dr Bouvière was right: life is an eternal return.
    A cold rage came over me and I kneed the old woman sharply in the belly. Her grip loosened. I pushed her hard. Finally, I could breathe…I had taken her by surprise, she didn’t dare come near me again; she remained motionless, on the edge of the pavement, staring at me with her small, intense eyes. Now it was her turn to be on the defensive. She tried to smile at me, a horrible artificial smile that was at odds with the harshness of her expression. I crossed my arms. Then, seeing that the smile didn’t work on me, she pretended to wipe away a tear. At my age, how could I have been terrified of this ghost and believe for an instant that she still had the power to drag me down? That period of police stations was well and truly over.
    She was no longer standing guard over the apartment building during the days that followed and, so far, she’s given no further sign of life. But later that night, I saw her again from the window. She didn’t seem the least bit affected by our fight. She paced up and down the median strip. She went back and forth over quite a short distance, but with a lively, almost military gait. Very erect, her chin high. Everynow and again she would look over at the façade of the apartment building to check if she still had an audience. And then she would begin to limp. At first she was practising as if for a rehearsal. Gradually, she found her rhythm. I watched her move off limping and then disappear, but she overplayed the part of the old canteen cook searching for a routed army.

THREE YEARS AGO, roughly around the same time the old woman attacked me, but in June or July, I was walking along Quai de la Tournelle. A sunny Saturday afternoon. I was looking at books in the bouquinistes’ stalls. Suddenly my eyes fell upon three volumes prominently displayed and held together by a large red elastic band. The yellow cover, the author’s name and the title in black characters on the first volume gave me a pang of emotion:
Screen Memories
by Fred Bouvière. I removed the elastic band. Two more books by Bouvière:
Drugs and Therapeutics
and
The Lie and the Confession.
He had referred to them on several occasions during the