Honeymoon

Patrick Modiano, Barbara Wright

• Publisher: Verba Mundi
• Year: 1995
• eBook ISBN: 9781567925449
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature

Jean B., the narrator of Patrick Modiano's Honeymoon, is submerged in a world where day and night, past and present, have no demarcations. Having spent his adult life making documentary films about lost explorers, Jean suddenly decides to abandon his wife and career, and takes what seems to be a journey to nowhere. He pretends to fly to Rio to make another film, but instead returns to his own Parisian suburb to spend his solitary days recounting or imagining the lives of Ingrid and Rigaud, a refugee couple he had met twenty years before, and in whom he had recognized a spiritual anomie that seemed to reflect and justify his own. Little by little, their story takes on more reality than Jean's daily existence, as his excavation of the past slowly becomes an all-encompassing obsession.

There will be more summer days, but the heat will never again be as oppressive or the streets as empty as they were in Milan that Tuesday. It was the day after the fifteenth of August. I had put my suitcase in the left luggage, and outside the station I hesitated for a moment: no one could walk in the town in that blazing sun. Five in the afternoon. Four hours to wait for the Paris train. I had to find some refuge, and I was drawn to an hotel with an imposing façade in an avenue a few hundred metres from the station.

Its pale marble corridors protected you from the sun, and in the cool of the semi-darkness of the bar you were at the bottom of a well. Today, I see that bar as a well, and the hotel as a gigantic blockhouse, but at that moment I was content to drink a mixture of grenadine and orange juice through a straw. I listened to the barman, whose face I have completely forgotten. He was talking to another customer, and I would be quite incapable of describing that man’s appearance or dress. Just one thing about him remains in my memory: his way of punctuating the conversation with a “Mah”, which reverberated like the dismal bark of a dog.

A woman had committed suicide in one of the hotel rooms two days before, on the eve of the fifteenth of August. The barman was explaining that they had called an ambulance, but in vain. He had seen the woman in the afternoon. She had come into the bar. She was on her own. After the suicide, the police had questioned him. He hadn’t been able to give them many details. A brunette. The hotel manager had been rather relieved because the event had escaped notice as there were so few guests at this time of year. There had been a paragraph, this morning, in the Corriere della Sera. A Frenchwoman. What was she doing in Milan in August? They turned to me, as if they expected me to be able to tell them. Then the barman said to me in French:

“People shouldn’t come here in August. In Milan, everything’s closed in August.”

The other agreed, with his dismal “Mah!” And they both turned a reproachful eye on me, to make me fully realize that I had been guilty of an indiscretion, and even worse than an indiscretion, of a rather serious offence, in landing up in Milan in August.

“You can check,” the barman told me. “Not a single shop open in Milan today.”

I found myself in one of the yellow taxis waiting outside the hotel. Noticing that I was hesitating like a tourist, the driver offered to take me to the Piazza del Duomo.

There was no one in the avenues, and all the shops were shut. I wondered whether the woman they had been talking about just now had also crossed Milan in a yellow taxi before going back to the hotel and killing herself. I don’t believe I thought at the time that the sight of that deserted town could have induced her to come to her decision. On the contrary, if I try to find words to convey the impression Milan made on me on that sixteenth of August, the ones that immediately come to mind are: Open City. The city, it seemed to me, was allowing itself a respite, but the noise and bustle would start up again, of that I was sure.

In the Piazza del Duomo, tourists wearing caps were wandering around outside the cathedral, and a big bookshop was lit up at the entrance to the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele. I was the only customer, and I browsed through the books under the brilliant light. Had she come to this bookshop on the eve of the fifteenth of August? I wanted to ask the man sitting behind a desk at the back of the shop, by the art books. But I knew hardly anything about her except that she was a brunette, and French.

I walked down the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele. Every living being in Milan had taken refuge there to escape the sun’s deadly rays: children around an ice-cream seller, Japanese and Germans, Italians from the South, visiting the city for the first time. If I had been there three days before, we might perhaps have met in the gallery, that woman and I, and as we were both French we would have spoken to one another.

Still two hours to go before the Paris train. Once again I got into one of the yellow taxis at the rank in the Piazza del Duomo, and gave the driver the name of the hotel. Night was falling. Today, the avenues, the gardens, the trams of that foreign city and the heat that isolates you even more, are for me all linked to that woman’s suicide. But at the time, in the taxi, I told myself that it was just an unfortunate coincidence.

The barman was alone. He gave me another grenadine and orange juice.

“Well, satisfied? . . . The shops are shut in Milan . . .”

I asked him whether the woman had been at the hotel long, the one who, as he rather deferentially put it, “had taken her own life.”

“No, no . . . Three days before she took her own life . . .”

“Where was she from?”

“From Paris. She was going to join some friends on holiday in the South. In Capri . . . That’s what the police said . . . Someone is supposed to be coming from Capri tomorrow to sort out all the problems . . .”

To sort out all the problems! What did these lugubrious words have in common with the azure, the sea grottoes, the summer gaiety that Capri conjured up?

“A very pretty woman . . . She was sitting there . . .”

He pointed to a table, right at the back.

“I gave her the same drink as you . . .”

Time for my train. It was dark outside, but the heat was as stifling as it had been in the middle of the afternoon. I crossed the avenue, my gaze fixed on the monumental façade of the station. In the enormous left-luggage hall I searched all my pockets for the ticket that would enable me to regain possession of my suitcase.

I had bought the Corriere della Sera. I wanted to read the paragraph about that woman. She had no doubt arrived from Paris at the platform where I now was, and I was going to make the journey in reverse, five days later . . . What a strange idea to come and commit suicide here, when friends are waiting for you in Capri . . . What had caused her to do it I might never know.

I was back in Milan again last week, but I didn’t leave the airport. It wasn’t as it had been eighteen years earlier. Yes: eighteen years, I counted them on my fingers. This time I didn’t take a yellow taxi to drive me to the Piazza del Duomo and the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele. It was raining, heavy June rain. Barely an hour’s wait, and I would board a plane to take me back to Paris.

I was in transit, sitting in a big glazed lounge in Linate. I thought about that day eighteen years before, and for the first time in all those years, the woman who “took her own life” – as the barman had put it – really began to preoccupy me.

I had bought the return air ticket for Milan at random the day before, in a travel agency in the Rue Jouffroy. When I got home I had hidden it at the bottom of one of my suitcases because of Annette, my wife. Milan. I had chosen that destination at random, out of three others: Vienna, Athens, Lisbon. It didn’t matter which city. The only problem was to choose a plane leaving at the same time as the one I was supposed to be taking for Rio de Janeiro.

They had come with me to the airport: Annette, Wetzel and Cavanaugh. They were showing signs of the artificial gaiety I had often observed at the start of our expeditions. Personally, I have never liked going away, and that day I liked it even less than usual. I wanted to tell them that we were too old for the profession that can only be described by the antiquated name of “explorer”. How much longer would we go on showing our documentary films in the Salle Pleyel or in the provincial cinemas that were becoming fewer all the time? When we were very young we had wanted to follow the example of our elders, but it was already too late for us. There was no more virgin territory to explore.

“Be sure and phone us as soon as you get to Rio . . .” Wetzel had said.

It was to have been a routine expedition: a new documentary I was to make which was to be called, like so many others: In the footsteps of Colonel Fawcett, an excuse to film a few villages bordering the Mato Grosso plateau. This time I had decided that I wouldn’t be seen in Brazil, but I didn’t dare confess it to Annette and the others. They wouldn’t have understood. And anyway, Annette was waiting for me to leave, so as to be alone with Cavanaugh.

“Remember us to the crew in Brazil,” Cavanaugh said.

He was referring to the film crew who had already left, and were waiting for me on the other side of the Ocean at the Hotel Souza in Rio de Janeiro. Well, they’d have to wait a long time for me . . . After forty-eight hours they would begin to feel vaguely worried. They’d phone Paris. Annette would answer, Cavanaugh would pick up the earpiece. Disappeared, yes, I’d disappeared. Like Colonel Fawcett. But with this difference: I had vanished at the very start of the expedition, which would worry them even more, because they would discover that my seat in the Rio plane hadn’t been occupied.

I told them I’d rather they didn’t see me into the departure lounge, and I turned round towards their little group with the thought that I would never see them again in my whole life. Wetzel and Cavanaugh still looked very dashing, no doubt because of our profession which wasn’t really a profession, but simply a way of pursuing childhood dreams. How much longer would we go on being old young people? They waved goodbye to me. I was moved by Annette. She and I were exactly the same age, and she’d become one of those slightly faded Danish beauties who used to attract me when I was twenty. They were older than I was at that time, and I was grateful for their tender protection.

I waited until they left the building and then made my way towards the boarding gate for the Milan plane. I could have gone straight back to Paris on the sly. But I felt I had to put a distance between them and me first.

*

For a moment, in that transit lounge, I was tempted to leave the airport and follow the same itinerary through the streets of Milan as in the past. But that was pointless. She had come to die here by chance. It was in Paris that I had to pick up her traces.

During the return journey I let myself drift into a state of euphoria such as I hadn’t experienced since my first trip to the Pacific Islands when I was twenty-five. There had been many other journeys after that one. Was it the example of Stanley, or Savorgnan de Brazza, of Alain Gerbault, whose exploits I had read of in my childhood? Above all, it was the need to escape. I felt it in me, more violently than ever. There, in the plane taking me back to Paris, I had the impression of having escaped further even than if I had flown, as I should have, to Rio.

*

I know a lot of hotels in suburban Paris, and I had decided to switch regularly. The first in which I took a room was the Dodds Hotel, at the Porte Dorée. There I ran no risk of bumping into Annette. After I had left, Cavanaugh had certainly taken her to his flat in the Avenue Duquesne. Perhaps she hadn’t heard of my disappearance right away, because no one – not even Wetzel – knew that she was Cavanaugh’s mistress, and the phone must have rung in vain at our place, in the Cité Véron. And then, after a few days of their honeymoon, she would finally have gone back to the Cité Véron where a telegram – I suppose – would be waiting for her: “Rio crew very worried. Jean not on plane 18th. Phone Hotel Souza Rio urgently.” And Cavanaugh would have gone to join her at the Cité Véron, to share her distress.

Personally, I don’t feel the slightest bit distressed. But elated, highly elated. And I refuse to allow all this to be over-dramatized: I’m too old, now. As soon as I run out of cash I shall try to come to an understanding with Annette. A phone call to the Cité Véron wouldn’t be wise, because of Cavanaugh’s presence. But I shall easily find a way to make a secret date with Annette. And I shall ensure her silence. Up to her, from then on, to discourage anyone who might want to go and look for me. She’s clever enough to cover my tracks, and to cover them so successfully that it will be as if I had never existed.

*

It’s a fine day today, at the Porte Dorée. But the heat isn’t as oppressive and the streets are not as empty as in Milan that day eighteen years ago. Over there, on the other side of the Boulevard Soult and the square with the fountains, groups of tourists are crowding round the entrance to the zoo, and others are going up the steps to the former Colonial Museum. It has played a part in our lives, that museum, which Cavanaugh, Wetzel and I used to visit as children, and the zoo too. There we dreamed of far-off countries, and of expeditions from which there was no return.

And here I am, back at my point of departure. I too, in a few minutes, will buy a ticket to visit the zoo. A few weeks from now there’ll probably be a short article in some paper or other announcing the disappearance of Jean B. Annette will follow my instructions and get them to believe that I vanished into thin air during my last t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• About the Authors