So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood by Patrick Modiano Page B

Photomaton booth, on the boulevard du Palais. He does not understand why she pushes him into the booth. She tells him to stare into the screen and not to move his head. She draws the black curtain. He is sitting on the stool. A flash blinds him and he closes his eyes. She draws the black curtain again, and he leaves the booth. They wait for the photos to fall from the slot. And he has to do it all over again because his eyes are shut in the photos. Afterwards, she had taken him to have a grenadine at the nearby café. That was what had happened. He had described the scene precisely and he knew that this passage did not fit with the rest of the novel. It was a fragment of reality that he had smuggled in, one of those private messages that people put in small ads in newspapers and that can only be deciphered by one person.
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    TOWARDS THE END OF THE AFTERNOON, HE WAS surprised not to have received a phone call from Chantal Grippay. Yet she must have noticed that she had forgotten her black dress. He rang her mobile number, but there was no answer. After the signal, there was silence. You had reached the edge of a cliff beyond which there was nothing but empty space. He wondered whether the number was still functioning or whether Chantal Grippay might have lost her mobile. Or whether she was still alive.
    As if by contagion, a doubt arose in his mind concerning Gilles Ottolini. He typed out on the keyboard of his computer: “Agence Sweerts, Paris”. No Sweerts agency in Paris, neither in the gare Saint-Lazare area nor in any other district. The supposed author of
Le Flâneur hippique
was merely a bogus employee of an imaginary agency.
    He wanted to know if an Ottolini was listed in square du Graisivaudan, but among the names that featured at the eight numbers of the square, not a single Ottolini. In any case, the black dress was there, on the back of the sofa, proof that he had not been dreaming. He typed out, on the off-chance, “Silvy-Rosa. Fashion design. Rue Estelle. Marseille”, but all he obtained was: “Rosa Alterations, 18 rue du Sauvage, 68100 Mulhouse”. For the past few years, he hardly ever used this computer on which most of his research came to nothing. The rare people whom he would have liked to trace had succeeded in escaping the vigilance of this machine. They had slipped through the net because they belonged to another age and because they were not exactly saints. He remembered his father whom he hardly knew and who used to say to him in a soft voice: “I’d be a tough case for dozens of examining magistrates.” No trace of his father on the computer. Any more than of Torstel or Perrin de Lara whose names he had typed out on the keyboard the previous day, before Chantal Grippay arrived. In the case of Perrin de Lara, the usual phenomenon had occurred: a great many Perrins were displayed on the screen, and the night was not long enough to go through the entire list. Those whom he would have liked to hear from were often hidden among a crowd of anonymous people, or else behind a famous character who bore the same name. And when he typed out a direct question on the keyboard: “Is Jacques Perrin de Lara still alive? If so, give me his address”, the computer seemed incapable of replying and you could sense a certain hesitation and a certain embarrassment passing through the multiple wires that connected the machine to electrical sockets. Sometimes, you were dragged off on false trails: “Astrand” produced results in Sweden, and several people of this name were grouped together in the city of Gothenburg.
    The weather was hot and this Indian summer would probably extend into November. He decided to go out instead of waiting in his study until sunset, as he usually did. Later on, when he returned, he would try to decipher with the aid of a magnifying glass the photocopies that he had read through too quickly the previous day. Perhaps in this way he would have