Patrick Modiano, age 24, Paris, 1969 - From Flowers of Ruin: "Back then, the gates of Paris where all in vanishing perspectives, the city gradually loosened its grip and faded into barren lots. And one could still believe that adventure lay right around every street corner."
Patrick Modiano’s prose is all about atmosphere, subtle moods, elusiveness of memory and poetry of feelings. In keeping with the author’s aesthetic of alighting upon specific remembrances as if returning again and again to a particular park bench on foggy Paris evenings, I will focus on Flowers of Ruin, the novella in this collection of three where the images have really stuck with me, repeatedly emerging in my memory, resurfacing, as if, as Ezra Pound put it in his short poem, “petals on a wet, black bough.”
We read of the narrator's first obsession noted in Flowers of Ruin, as related in 1986, age forty-seven, the year of his recounting this somber tale: "April 24, 1933. A young married couple commits suicide for no apparent reason. It's a very strange story that occurred that night in the building at number 26 Rue des Fossés-Saint-Jacques near the Pantheon, in the home of Mr. and Mme T." Indeed, the unnamed narrator retraces the steps of the couple along deserted Paris streets, consults police reports, scrutinizes isolated clues about how the couple met up with two women and then two men in their random zigzag across Montparnasse that evening, all in an attempt to piece together the actual events leading up to the what newspapers at the time labeled “the tragic orgy.”
Then, as if a dreamy nocturne for piano changing key, the narrator slides into another recollection: after running away from boarding school at age fourteen, he meets someone a bit older then himself in a café, standing at the bar, who offers help and makes a deep, abiding impression. As he puts it: "A pretty Danish girl with short blond hair and periwinkle eyes. She used slang words that clashed with her soft, childlike accent. Slang that was often outmoded. When she saw me come in, she said: ”What the fuck are you doing here, old top?” I confessed that I was playing hooky.” This reflection fades out, leaving us with the Danish girl’s short blond hair, her periwinkle eyes and her slang words, only to reemerge toward the end of the story with a touch more detail.
Sticking with the metaphor of changing musical key in a piano nocturne, the story takes additional shifts and slides until the narrator conveys how, when in his early twenties, he first encounters an older man in the vicinity of a university who looks like he could be anywhere between thirty-five and fifty and goes by the name of Pacheco, a man who comes to dominate much of his reflections: “Where did he really live? I imagine him walking straight ahead, up to the Porte de Versailles, and finally reaching that desolate boulevard that bore the name of his ancestor. He walked along it slowly, suitcase in hand, like a sleepwalker, and at that late hour he was the only pedestrian.”
Once again, the narrator takes on the role of amateur detective, using the two names this man gave him to sift through old newspapers to garner scraps of information. He comes up with a few family facts and confronts Pacheco the very next time he sees him at his usual haunt, a university café. Pacheco replies that he has no idea what he is talking about. Then Pacheco disappears for a time.
The narrator continues his investigation and unearths a few more details, including how Pacheco might be someone who was wanted by the government for colluding with the enemy during the war and might even be a survivor of the Dachau concentration camp. When Pacheco finally reappears, the narrator immediately confronts him with his findings. As readers we wonder why the narrator is so persistent with someone he barely knows. We are eventually given a clue: there exists much in common between Pacheco and the narrator’s father, a businessman whose disappearance and death during the Paris occupation left the narrator with many unanswered questions.
Other men and women, happening and events bloom in Modiano’s Flowers of Ruin, including the alluring Jacqueline and her luxurious fur coat, a young lady the narrator meets and eventually lives with when in Paris during his twenties. But the facts of the story are not exactly what makes Modiano’s writing so hypnotic; rather, it’s the narrator’s ability to draw a reader into the intimacy of his feeling tone, his created Parisian mood as he travels to times past, his very personal impressions as he paints with words as literary counterpoint to a painting by Maurice Utrillo, Gustave Caillebotte or Camille Pisssario.
Above all, for Patrick Modiano, it’s how our memories comes alive and then fade, almost as if they were like the marquis the story’s narrator observes from an upper floor window across a Paris street one rainy night: “Little by little, that man melted into the wall. Or else the rain, from failing on him so heavily, had dissolved him, the way water dilutes a fresco that hasn’t had time to dry properly. As hard as I pressed my head against the glass and peered at the dark gray wall, no trace of him remained.”
Comments
Post a Comment