Ballerina, p.6
Ballerina, page 6
She threw a glance at the valise sitting on the floor, at the back of the studio. Yes, he’s right, she thought. From now on, I really have to put some order into all this.
I crossed Boulevard Raspail at the same place where I’d thought I’d seen Verzini, the week before, in this Paris that I no longer recognized. Many fewer people on the boulevard, but still some battalions of tourists, strange tourists come from who knows where, speaking who knows what language if you listened in. They dragged behind them their eternal rolling suitcases and wore the same baseball caps, the same shorts, the same T-shirts. And the same backpacks. What were they walking toward? Toward an army corps billeted in a specific part of Paris? I admit that none of it mattered to me and that I was in a hurry to reach the deserted café where Verzini and I had stopped off, that café that still seemed protected from the harshness of the present moment.
The day after our encounter, I had dialed the two numbers Verzini had given me, the one for his mobile and the one for his “land line,” as he said, but neither of them picked up. No point in trying again: I knew very well they would never answer. Was I entirely certain I’d met that ghost? Or was it a dream I’d had the night before meeting him, which I’d let persist into the next day so as to avoid the present?
What had become of the ballerina and Pierre, and the others I’d gotten to know in that same period? That was a question I’d often asked myself for nearly fifty years and that so far had remained unanswered. And suddenly, on that January 8, 2023, it seemed to me that this no longer mattered. Neither the ballerina nor Pierre belonged to the past, but to an eternal present.
I used to believe that the memory of them came to me the way light reaches you from a star that died a thousand years ago, as the poet said. But no. There was no past, no dead star, nor any lightyears that forever separate you from one another, but only this eternal present.
I’ve kept precise images of a Christmas night when the ballerina had taken us, Pierre and me, to midnight Mass at the church of Saint-Ferdinand des Ternes. She said it was our parish. We leave the church and start for home. The ballerina holds Pierre by the hand. It’s the first time I’ve seen them like that, and I think about Pierre’s arrival at the Gare d’Austerlitz, and about their awkwardness with one another on the platform. Then, suddenly, she starts doing a pas de deux with him on the wide sidewalk of Boulevard Pereire. Then another dance step whose name I’ve forgotten. Then another. And Pierre watches her, laughing. For my part, I imitate Kniaseff’s voice as I’ve heard it so many times at Studio Wacker. “And now, Ladies and Gentlemen, let us put some order into all this.” I keep giving orders to the ballerina in Kniaseff’s exaggerated accent: “Sorften the elbows … Sorften the elbows … Grrand jeté … Penché … Déboulé … Battement tendu … ”
Pierre laughs harder and harder. And the three of us resume our walk in the night, all the way to the depths of time.
PATRICK MODIANO, winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature, was born in Boulogne-Billancourt, France, in 1945, and published his first novel, La Place de l’Etoile, in 1968. In 1978 he was awarded the Prix Goncourt for Rue des Boutiques Obscures (published in English as Missing Person), and in 1996 he received the Grand Prix National des Lettres for his body of work. Modiano’s other writings in English translation include Suspended Sentences, Pedigree: A Memoir, Scene of the Crime, After the Circus, Invisible Ink, Paris Nocturne, Little Jewel, Sundays in August, Such Fine Boys, Sleep of Memory, and Family Record (all published by Yale University Press), as well as the memoir Dora Bruder, the screenplay Lacombe Lucien, and the novels So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighborhood, Young Once, In the Café of Lost Youth, and The Black Notebook.
MARK POLIZZOTTI has translated more than sixty books from the French, including works by Gustave Flaubert, Arthur Rimbaud, Scholastique Mukasonga, Patrick Modiano, Marguerite Duras, and André Breton. His translations have won the English PEN Award and been shortlisted for the National Book Award, the International Booker Prize, the NBCC/Gregg Barrios Prize, and the French-American Foundation Translation Prize. Polizzotti is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and the recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature. He is the author of twelve books, including Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton, Highway 61 Revisited, Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto, and Why Surrealism Matters. His essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the New Republic, the Wall Street Journal, Apollo, ARTnews, the Nation, Parnassus, Bookforum, and elsewhere.
Patrick Modiano, Ballerina
