By Kohinoor Dasgupta
This post should be read ideally by people who have read the book, otherwise you will deprive yourself of the experience of helplessly flailing in the quicksand of the plot!
“I am nothing,” warns Guy Roland right away. True, the café terrace is more real than he is.
Why is he nothing? This question will be answered for us, if not for Roland, by the end of the book. In fact, even before he reaches Bora Bora, 35 pages before Roland lands in Papeete (I hang onto the page numbers, because they don’t change after every reading), there’s a clue of a sort. Rubirosa, the shadowy diplomat, Roland is “reminded”, used to play two songs on his guitar, in the winter of 1940. (Both the songs, El Reloj and Tu me acostumbraste, incidentally, were written in the 1950s, and it wasn’t just André Wildmer’s memory playing tricks with him, because someone was whistling Tu me acostumbraste at Vichy, presumably in February 1943). El Reloj has the line: Yo sin su amor no soy nada, “without your love, I am nothing”. As, I said, it is a clue of a sort. Roland doesn't remember loving anyone.
French Nobel Laureate Patrick Modiano published this book, Rue des Boutiques Obscures, in 1978 and won the Prix Goncourt, France’s biggest literary award. It was translated into English by Daniel Weissbort, as Missing Person (1980).
Occupied Paris, reconstructed bit by bit in Roland’s reluctant memory, is a void from which stateless and adrift people call out to distant, warm and life-sustaining planets. Portugal, Suriname, Mauritius, the Dominican Republic, and other places with yachts, palm trees and couturier-summers.
By and by, a quartet, comprising of two men and two women, steps out of the dark corners of other people’s memories, and photographs kept in cake boxes and biscuit tins.
Freddie, b. 1912
Pedro, b. 1912
Mara "Gay” Orlov, b. 1914
Denise, b. December 1917
Three made it out of Megève.
Paris, in 1965, starts looking vaguely familiar to Roland, who has been living in the city for the past ten years without having a clue to his identity:
“Last night, wandering through these streets, I knew they were the same ones and I did not recognize them. The buildings had not changed, or the width of the pavements, but in that earlier time the light was different and there was something else in the air…”
He is thinking, here, of the years before the Occupation.
While human “memories” may be repressed or altered for various reasons, places, if only we could ask them, may recall truthfully. Roland, stumbling on through a dark road lit up by flashes, lets us into his mind for a moment:
“I believe the entrance-halls of buildings still retain the echo of footsteps of those who used to cross them and who have since vanished. Something continues to vibrate after they have gone, fading waves, but which can still be picked up if one listens carefully.”
The bar room pianist, an American, opens his night gig with Sur les quais du vieux Paris.
“Tous les vieux ponts nous connaissent
Témoins des folles promesses…”
(All the old bridges know us
Witnesses to our mad promises).
In Roland’s returning memory, which organizes itself into an ominously clear storytelling at the end, Denise’s hair is sometimes rather short, while sometimes it “tumbled in coils to her hips”. The old photographs give back a blonde, and Denise’s model friend recalls her as one, yet Roland remembers her “chestnut hair with copper tints in it”. Roland recalls selling a clip and a diamond bracelet to a nervous middle-aged woman near Place Malesherbes. He also recalls a young man who had disposed of a sapphire and two brooches. This buyer, however, in 1965, a middle-aged dad, recalls selling a clip and two diamond bracelets.
The information that Roland uncovers about his possible identity brings a new dread. He does not ask even when-where questions about Rubirosa’s accident. Neither does he ask Wildmer why Gay and Freddie ended up the way they did. Maybe he means to ask Freddie in person.
Riding Modiano’s carousel of fake identities and fake memories, old ones and newly manufactured, we become confused and suspicious. We reread, frequently turn back pages to reference a passing comment. The laughing man in a gray striped suit attending the Ninth-Day Divine Service of Marie de Rosen! Could he be de Wrédé? Was de Wrédé the Blue Rider? Why wasn't the "Special Envoy and Plenipotentiary" of the Dominican Republic listed by name? Whose jewels was Roland selling to "escape from France" with Denise? He knew, back in Hotel Castille in Paris, in the winter of 1942-43, "how to get into Portugal ... through Switzerland"?
Even the prose changes, spare in the beginning, wistful, yet mirroring the purity of Roland's scrubbed-clean past, then more and more self-assured and mundane. "The black hole of French memory”, the days of the Paris Occupation, evidently took away much more from "Roland” than his right to live freely as a Greek Jew from Via delle Botteghe Oscure, Rome.
Maybe, at a corner between memory and forgetting, Roland brushed past Truth when, early on in his investigation, he requested the American bar pianist to play Que reste-t-il de nos amours.
“Un p’tit village, un vieux clocher
Un paysage si bien cache
Et dans un nuage le cher visage
De mon passé.”
(A small village, an old bell tower
A countryside so well hidden
And in a cloud, the dear face
Of my past.)
Missing Person by Patrick Modiano
Translated from the French by Daniel Weissbort
Cover photo: Special Photographers / Photonica
Cover Design: Lucinda Hitchcock
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