Free Honeymoon by Patrick Modiano

didn't take my eyes off the dark-green foliage of the umbrella pine, which stood out against the sky. Juan-les-Pins. I too had been there, a long time before, in the summer when I was twenty-one. But I didn't then know that Ingrid and Rigaud had lived there. I'd met them the previous summer, and as I hadn't seen them since then, I had forgotten them.
    It was Cavanaugh who had persuaded me to go to Juan-les-Pins, for a jazz festival. We were not yet fully aware of our vocations as explorers. Cavanaugh was in love with the sister of a negro pianist, and he had got a job as chauffeur to another musician whose name alone was enough to mitigate my depression: Dodo Marmarosa.
    I wanted that umbrella pine, between the zoo and SaintMandé, to be my mediator and to transmit to me something of the feeling of Juan-les-Pins that summer, when without knowing it I was walking in the tracks of Ingrid and Rigaud. We too went bathing below the casino. And from there, we could see the enormous façade of the Provençal appear at dawn. We weren't staying there but at another, more modest, hotel in a very noisy street.
    We lived only at night. I have not the slightest recollection of Juan-les-Pins in the daytime. Except at the fleeting moment when the sun rose. There were so many faces around us that they have all become merged, and I can't make out which one belonged to Dodo Marmarosa. The orchestras played in the pine forest, and that same summer I met Annette. In those days, I thought I was happy.

SO I HAD PLANNED to change hotels every week, and to choose them in the outlying districts of Paris that I had frequented in the old days. From the Dodds, at the Porte Dorée, I had thought of moving to the Fieve Hotel, in the Avenue Simon-Bolivar. I had intended to leave this evening, but I haven't asked for my bill. I, who have travelled so many kilometres over the various continents, I was scared at the thought of taking the métro from the Porte Dorée to the Buttes-Chaumont. After a week at the Porte Dorée, I was afraid of feeling out of my element there. Maybe I'll get up the courage to leave tomorrow morning. But really, I dreaded arriving at the Avenue Simon-Bolivar at dusk, and a too sudden break with the habits I'd got into here at the Porte Dorée.
    So I went and had dinner, as I had the previous days, at the café in the Boulevard Soult. Before returning to the hotel, I walked along the perimeter of the zoo as far as the umbrella pine.
    I've left the window wide open, I've put out the light and I'm lying on the bed with my arms crossed behind my head. I've become attached to this room, and that's why I'm reluctant to leave. But I'm considering another solution: to make all excursion every day to a different suburb. Then to come back here. If need be, to sleep somewhere else from time to time, with no other luggage than my notes on Ingrid's life. One night at the Fieve, in the Avenue Simon-Bolivar. One night at the Gouin Hotel near the Porte de Clichy … But knowing that the Dodds remains my fixed abode, and that this Porte Dorée district is from now on my base. I'd have to pay for my room for several weeks in advance. In that way I'd reassure the proprietor of the Dodds, who must be suspicious of me – I can sense it when we meet in the lobby – because I don't look like an ordinary tourist.
    Yes, from time to time spend a night in another district, to dream of the one you've left. In the Fieve Hotel, for instance, I shall lie down on the bed in my room, as I am doing now, and believe I can hear, from a distance, the elephants trumpeting in the zoo. No one will ever be able to find me in any of these places.
    •
    I was wrong. Yesterday, at the beginning of the afternoon, I had decided to visit the former Colonial Museum. All you have to do when you leave the hotel is cross the square with the fountains, and you come to the low, wrought-iron gate, and the monumental steps leading up to the museum. As I was buying my ticket at the