Read Online Honeymoon by Patrick Modiano - Free Book Online Page B

Rigaud looked after the speedboat and the water skis. The American woman and Monsieur Bailby would find them intact, if they weren't both too old to use them again after the war. Yes, the war would end. It couldn't go on and on. Everything would come back to normal. That's the law of nature. But they had to stay alive until then. Alive. And not attract attention. Be as inconspicuous as possible. They had definitively given up walking in the deserted streets of Juan-les-Pins. When they bathed, they didn't swim out more than fifty metres from the landing stage, so as not to be seen from the shore.
    Ingrid had time to devour all Pierre Benoit's novels, whose red morocco volumes occupied a whole shelf. Each one had an affectionate dedication to the American woman on its flyleaf. Then she tackled the complete works of Alexandre Dumas, bound in emerald green. She read passages from them to Rigaud, who was repainting the veranda with the last tins of Ripolin found on the black market.
    In the evenings they switched on the big wireless in the salon. Every day, at the same time, an announcer with a metallic voice gave the war news in the form of an editorial. Listening to him, Rigaud was convinced that the war would soon be over. This voice had no future, you could tell that from its increasingly metallic tones. It was already a voice from beyond the grave. They would still hear it a little longer, so long as the war lasted, and then it would fade away from one day to the next.
    One winter evening, while they were listening in the semidarkness of the salon, Rigaud asked Ingrid:
    "Doesn't that remind you of something?"
    "No."
    "It's the voice of the redheaded chap in the dark suit we met last year in the restaurant ... I'm sure it's him ..." "Do you think so?"
    As the war moved gradually towards its denouement, the announcer hammered out his phrases more and more emphatically and kept on repeating them. The record was getting stuck in a groove. The voice grew fainter, it got muffled by interference, came back clearly for a few seconds, and then died away again. On the evening of the American landing, a few dozen kilometres from the villa, Ingrid and Rigaud could still just make out the metallic tones of the announcer, lost in the hiss of atmospherics. The voice tried in vain to fight against this storm that was covering it. One last time, before becoming submerged, it broke loose in a hammered-out phrase that was like a cry of hate or an appeal for help.
    •
    They listened to the announcer at their dinner time, and the voice had lost all reality for them. Now it was no more than a background noise mingled with the music of the orchestras and chansons of those times.
    The days, the months, the seasons, the years, went monotonously by, in a kind of eternity. Ingrid and Rigaud barely remembered that they were waiting for something, which must be the end of the war.
    Sometimes it forced itself on their attention, and disturbed what Rigaud called their honeymoon. One November evening, some Bersaglieri advanced at the double and took over Juan-les-Pins. A few months later it was the Germans. They built fortifications along the coast and came prowling round the villa. Ingrid and Rigaud had to put out the lights and pretend to be dead.

ONCE AGAIN I went to look at the elephants. You never tire of them. A slight breeze attenuated the heat. I walked to the perimeter of the zoo, which ran along one of the avenues in the Bois de Vincennes on the Saint-Mandé side, and sat down on a bench. There were tall trees, whose foliage protects you. And an umbrella pine.
    After a bit I lay down on the bench. And I wondered whether I would get up of my own accord when the zoo closed, or whether I'd wait until the keeper requested me to move on. I was tempted never to go back to my room in the Dodds Hotel and to let myself slide down the slope which was perhaps my lot, after all: to become a tramp. I felt fine. Now and then I heard an elephant trumpeting. I