In the Café of Lost Youth by Patrick Modiano
“All it takes is a sloping street, a sunny sidewalk, or maybe a shady one. Or perhaps a downpour. And this leads you straight there, to the exact place you’re meant to wash up.”
In the Café of Lost Youth is the desolate story of Jacqueline Delanque, known as Louki to the patrons of the Conde, a bohemian café in Paris.
Four narrators share their accounts, a student who frequents the Conde, a private detective looking for her on behalf of her estranged husband, Louki herself, and her lover, Roland.
She first appears through the eyes of the student, but it’s later in Roland’s story that the case is made for neutral zones.
“Our having met, when I think about it now, seems like the meeting of two people who were completely without moorings in life. I think that we were both alone in the world.”
Roland’s theory of neutral zones involves temporal areas that people wander through. The idea is inspired by Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence, the infinite repetition of every moment — a concept with which Roland was obsessed.
Neutral zones are unfixed points and transient, temporary stays like cheap hotels and short-lived relationships. But they’re not just geographic; they are a state of mind. Everything is characterized by impermanence and repetition.
The sole comfort in neutral zones is the shared experience — seeking a bit of meaning in life but being repeatedly disappointed. For those trapped in neutral zones, without direction or fixed points, neutral zones are hollow, and there often awaits a bleak end.
“I had also forgotten the silence and calm of the avenue Rachel, which leads to the cemetery, although you never think of the cemetery, you tell yourself that at its end it must let out onto the countryside, or even, with a bit of luck, onto a seaside promenade.”
******
Louki is not invisible in the neutral zone; she’s seen and well-known for her soft, magnetic presence.
The student notices her as she slips through a discreet entrance at the Conde and stays alone in a corner. But after some time, she’s adopted by the regulars and is content to gently listen to the intellectual swagger around art, literature, and philosophy. They baptize her Louki, ceremonially giving her a new name and new life in that time and space.
Like all of us, the Conde patrons are wounded by the past. But there, they enter a place where all that matters is the warm and blurry present. And if someone from a more sordid time appears, there’s a perfunctory acknowledgment. An unspoken vow of silence.
But Louki’s past comes quietly looking for her.
******
The private detective hired by Louki’s husband, Jean-Pierre, sheds light on the situation she was fleeing. Jean-Pierre lives in a bare apartment, absent from anything homey; it’s lifeless and practically vacant.
The investigator does his due diligence and finds his way to the Conde but never runs into Louki. He manages to borrow a notebook kept by one of the regulars named Captain. The log details the Conde’s patrons, noting dates and times and who was present, an attempt to “fix” the occupants of a neutral zone.
He then does something interesting and conceals Louki’s whereabouts from Jean-Pierre. He’s not protecting her from physical abuse—there isn’t any noted — but he senses the dull and loveless relationship and seems to understand the nuances of her detached upbringing.
Maybe he realizes for someone like Louki, the marital home was a neutral zone simply disguised as a fixed point, making the empty existence all the more unbearable.
Whatever the investigator’s reasoning, and entirely unknown to Louki, he becomes her ally until the end.
******.
When Louki talks about herself, she reveals she’s an only child, often left alone while her single mom worked at the Moulin Rouge. Twice, she’s picked up for juvenile vagrancy, a poignant term considering the trajectory of her life.
She doesn’t have a single person in the world, and her desperation leads to nocturnal wanderings, a fearless search for any connection.
After a chance meeting at a pharmacy, Louki forms a bond with a young woman named Jeanette Gaul. The two find themselves drinking and having a little “snow” at the Canter, a seedy bar catering to the underworld. They immediately become fixtures there.
Jeanette and Louki remain friends throughout life, including Louki’s doomed marriage, but Jeanette only visits while her husband is away. She marvels at their separate bedrooms, knowing Louki is trying out something that will undoubtedly fail.
“So, does he come from a good family?” said Jeannette. And she burst out laughing.
Jeanette, of course, is right. Slowly, Louki abandons her marriage by frequenting the Conde, spending hours in a bookstore, and attending philosophy talks by Guy de Vere, where she meets her lover, Roland.
One night, Louki simply doesn’t go home.
******
When Louki and Roland plan to vacation in a villa in Majorca—when things are “looking up” — Louki comes wholly undone. And when the grim end arrives, Louki’s with Jeanette, who feverishly grasps at her nightgown as Louki throws herself out the window.
Perhaps feeling trapped or facing the eternal recurrence — infinite repetition, without alteration, of every moment — was simply too much for Louki to bear.
Her final words were, “That’s it. Just let yourself go.”
*** /// ***
When I first read In the Café of Lost Youth, I was newly separated and in a dark and confusing place. Unmoored, trying to remember who I was and who I wanted to be, I found myself in something like a neutral zone.
At the time, I watched a lot of movies at the Belcourt. One afternoon, I arrived early for a matinee and noticed a pub across the street with a patio. I had time for a pint and found myself in the pleasant sunshine with a cold beer.
At the next table, a woman scribbled in a notebook — she looked at me and smiled. I smiled in return and asked if she was a writer.
She was a writer and an artist who had just experienced a painful breakup with her boyfriend. We had a lot in common and ended up talking for hours — I missed the movie.
It was then that I found the courage to embark on my own nocturnal wanderings, washing up in warm and blurry bars with artists and writers, filmmakers and a few literary cons.
Of course, bars aren’t for everyone. And not to be preachy, but they’re no longer for me like they once were. I now attempt to greet the sun with eight hours of sleep, toss around a kettlebell, and get busy writing. (Boring, I know.)
But while there are legitimate perils, the wonder of bars is that they are an escape from loneliness’s fierce undertow.
Because for a brief time, maybe for just a single conversation, the walls come down, and there’s a lifeline. In these places, these neutral zones, strangers become ephemeral companions for the night.
As I read the book, it was easy to see myself in Louki — an only child, comfortable with being alone, yet terribly lonely. Hiding in the corners, drinking some courage, making fleeting connections with other solitary souls.
But thankfully — and I will never take this for granted — I still have fixed points. It took some time, but my friends and loved ones, and my own art, helped pull me out of a sticky neutral zone.
I wish Louki had had the same.
#paidlink
