Missing Person (Verba Mundi International Literature Series)

by Patrick Modiano

I AM NOTHING.

There, under the embankment trees, I had the unpleasant sensation that I was dreaming. I had already lived my life and was just a ghost hovering in the tepid air of a Saturday evening.

I believe that the entrance-halls of buildings still retain the echo of footsteps of those who used to cross them and who have since vanished. Something continues to vibrate after they have gone, fading waves, but which can still be picked up if one listens carefully. Perhaps, after all, I never was this Pedro McEvoy, I was nothing, but waves passed through me, sometimes faint, sometimes stronger, and all these scattered echoes afloat in the air crystallized and there I was.

Until now everything has seemed so chaotic, so fragmented . . . Scraps, shreds have come to light as a result of my searches . . . But then that is perhaps what a life amounts to . . .

Is it really my life I’m tracking down? Or someone else’s into which I have somehow infiltrated myself?

A little girl is returning from the beach, at dusk, with her mother. She is crying for no reason at all, because she would have liked to continue playing. She moves off into the distance. She has already turned the corner of the street, and do not our lives dissolve into the evening as quickly as this grief of childhood?