Invisible Ink by Patrick Modiano

Author:Patrick Modiano
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2020-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

I wish I could follow chronological order and set down the moments in those many years when Noëlle Lefebvre again crossed my mind, specifying the date and hour of each instance. But it’s impossible to draw up that sort of calendar after such a long time. I think it’s better to let the writing flow. Yes, memories occur as the pen flies. You shouldn’t force them, but just write, crossing out as little as possible. And in the uninterrupted flood of words and sentences, a few details, which you’ve forgotten or buried at the bottom of your memory, who knows why, will slowly rise to the surface. Above all, don’t break momentum, but rather keep in mind the image of a skier gliding for all eternity down a steep trail, like the pen on a blank page. There will be time enough later for crossouts.

A skier gliding for all eternity. Today, those words evoke for me the Haute-Savoie, where I spent several years of my adolescence. Annecy, Veyrier-du-Lac, Megève, Mont d’Arbois . . .

One July afternoon at Richelieu-Drouot, in the same year that I found Mourade’s photo in the cinema yearbook, I ran into a friend from none other than Annecy, a certain Jacques B., whom we’d nicknamed “the Marquis.” And just then, I remembered that Noëlle Lefebvre was born in “a village near Annecy.” I hadn’t ascribed too much importance to this detail on Hutte’s fact sheet. That sheet was so fragmentary, riddled with so many inaccuracies, that I wondered whether Hutte himself hadn’t made up the “village near Annecy” to give Noëlle Lefebvre a place of birth and have done with a “case” that didn’t interest him.

I hadn’t seen Jacques B. in ten years, as with everyone else I’d known in Haute-Savoie.

He told me he was working for a newspaper down the street, and we found ourselves sitting across a table in the Café Cardinal.

The room was empty. Because of the Marquis’s presence, it felt as if we were back under the arcades of the Taverne, in Annecy, in the middle of a summer afternoon.

I let the Marquis tell me about his “journey,”as he called it, since the good old days of Annecy. A stint in the Foreign Legion. Discharged after several months. Minor jobs in Lyon before catching a train to Paris. And he’d ended up becoming a journalist, covering human interest stories. For the past two years.

“Why the Foreign Legion?” I asked.

He had seemed so casual, so carefree back then, on the beach and in the streets of Annecy, that I would never have foreseen his enlistment.

“Just because,” he said with a shrug. “I didn’t have much choice . . .”

And I chided myself for not having sensed his malaise back then.

“In Annecy, did you ever know someone named Lefebvre?”

“With or without a b?”

I recognized his sarcastic smile, a smile that, in my memory, never left his lips.

“With a b.”

“Lefebvre . . .”

He pronounced the name, stressing the letter b.

“But of course . . . Sancho Lefebvre.

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