Suspended Sentences

by Patrick Modiano

  This time I had spoken much more clearly, articulating each syllable. He turned around. I planted myself firmly in front of him.

  “Did you ever know the photographer Francis Jansen?”

  His strange eyes seemed to stare at something off on the horizon.

  “How’s that?”

  “I wanted to know if you ever had your picture taken by the photographer Francis Jansen.”

  But a short distance away, an argument had broken out among the others. One of them came toward us.

  “Lemoine, it’s up to you now.”

  Suddenly it was as if he was looking past me, or right through me. Nonetheless, he said, “I’m sorry … I have to go bowl …”

  He got into position and pitched the ball. The others cheered. They crowded around him. I didn’t understand how the game worked, but I think he’d won the match. In any case, he had completely forgotten about me.

  These days, I regret not having kept any photos from the suitcases. Jansen wouldn’t even have noticed. Moreover, if I’d asked, I’m sure he would have given me as many as I wanted.

  And besides, you never think at the time to ask the questions that will elicit confidences. And so, out of discretion, I avoided bringing up Colette Laurent. I regret that too.

  The only photo I kept was in fact one of her. I hadn’t yet remembered that I’d met her a dozen years earlier, but her face must have reminded me of something.

  The photo is captioned Colette, 12 Hameau du Danube. When daylight lasts until 10 P.M. because of the time change, and the traffic noise has died down, I have the illusion that all I’d need do is return to those faraway neighborhoods to find the people I’ve lost, who had never left: Hameau du Danube, the Poterne des Peupliers, or Rue du Bois-des-Caures. Colette is leaning against the front door of a private townhouse, hands in the pockets of her raincoat. Every time I look at that picture, it hurts. It’s like in the morning when you try to recall your dream from the night before, but all that’s left are scraps that dissolve before you can put them together. I knew that woman in another life and I’m doing my best to remember. Maybe someday I’ll manage to break through that layer of silence and amnesia.

  Jansen came to the studio less and less often. At around seven in the evening, he would call:

  “Hello … Is that you, Scribe?”

  That was the nickname he’d given me. He asked if anyone had come to the door and if he could stop by without fear of intruders. I reassured him. Just a phone call from the Meyendorffs this afternoon. No, no sign of Nicole.

  “Okay, Scribe, then I’ll be right over. See you in a bit.”

  Sometimes he’d call back half an hour later:

  “Are you sure Nicole’s not around? Is it really safe to come over?”

  I had stopped working and waited for him a little longer. But he never showed up. So then I left the studio. I walked down Rue Froidevaux, skirting the cemetery. That month, the trees had regrown their leaves and I was afraid Nicole was hiding behind one of them, lying in wait for Jansen to return home. If she saw me, she’d come up and ask where he was. She might also be lurking on the corner of one of the little streets that spilled onto the left-hand sidewalk and could follow me at a distance in hopes that I’d lead her to him. Back then, because of what Jansen said, I considered Nicole a threat.

  One afternoon, she came to the studio when Jansen was out and on an impulse I answered the door. It bothered me, always having to tell her over the phone that Jansen wasn’t there.

  When she saw me in the half-open doorway, an expression of startled anxiety flashed in her eyes. Perhaps she thought Jansen had left for good and a new tenant was now living there.

  I quickly reassured her. Yes, I was the one who answered the phone. Yes, I was a friend of Francis’s.

  I invited her in and we both took a seat, she on the sofa and I in an armchair. She had noticed the two notebooks, the large register, the open suitcases and piles of photographs. She asked if I was working for Francis.

  “I’m trying to catalogue all the pictures he’s ever taken.”

  “Ah, I see … You’re right, that’s a good idea.”

  There was an awkward pause. She broke the silence.

  “I don’t suppose you know where he is?”

  She’d said it in a tone that was at once timid and rushed.

  “No … He comes here less and less often …”

  She took a cigarette case from her bag, opened it, then shut it again. She looked me in the eye.

  “Couldn’t you speak to him on my behalf, ask him to see me one last time?”

  She laughed briefly.

  “Have you known him long?”

  “Six months.”

  I wanted to know more. Had she shared a life with Jansen?

  She cast curious glances around her, as if she hadn’t been here in an eternity and wanted to see what had changed. She must have been around twenty-five. She had brown hair and very pale eyes, perhaps light green or gray.

  “He’s a strange guy,” she said. “He can be very sweet and then, from one day to the next, he disappears … Has he done that with you, too?”

  I answered that I often didn’t know where he was.

  “For the last two weeks he’s refused to see me or even take my calls.”

  “I don’t think he’s trying to be cruel,” I said.

  “No … No … I know … It happens now and again. He has these absences … He goes into hiding … And then he resurfaces.”

  She took a cigarette from her case and offered it to me. I didn’t want to tell her that I didn’t smoke. She took one as well. Then she lit mine with a lighter. I took a puff and coughed.

  “How do you explain that?” she suddenly asked.

  “What?”

  “That strange need of his to go into hiding?”

  I hesitated a moment, then said, “Maybe it’s because of events in his past …”

  My gaze had fallen on the picture of Colette Laurent hanging on the wall. She was about twenty-five as well.

  “I must be keeping you from your work …”

  She was about to get up and leave. She would no doubt hold out her hand and give me another futile message for Jansen. I said:

  “No, no … Stay a bit longer … You never know, he could be back any minute now.”

  “And you think he’ll like finding me here?”

  She gave me a smile. For the first time since she’d entered the studio, she was paying real attention to me. Until that moment, I’d been in Jansen’s shadow.

  “Will you take responsibility for that?”

  “I’ll take full responsibility,” I told her.

  “In that case, he might be in for a nasty surprise.”

  “No, not at all. I’m sure he’ll be very glad to see you. He has a tendency to withdraw into himself.”

  I suddenly became talkative, to hide my shyness and embarrassment. She was staring at me with those pale eyes. I added:

  “If someone doesn’t twist his arm, he could end up going into hiding for good.”

  I closed the notebooks and register that were lying on the floor and stored the piles of photos in one of the suitcases.

  “How did you meet him?” I asked her.

  “Oh … By chance … Not far from here, in a café …”

  Was it the same café on Denfert-Rochereau where my girlfriend and I had first met him?

  She knit her eyebrows, which were brown and contrasted with her pale eyes.

  “When I learned what he did for a living, I asked him to take some pictures of me. I needed them for work. He brought me here … And he took some beautiful shots of me.”

  I hadn’t come across them yet. The most recent ones I’d catalogued were from 1954. Maybe he hadn’t kept anything after that year.

  “So if I’ve got this straight, he hired you to be his secretary?”

  She was still staring at me with her transparent eyes.

  “Not at all,” I said. “He doesn’t need
a secretary anymore. These days he barely has a business to run.”

  The evening before, he’d invited me to dinner at a small restaurant near the studio. He was carrying his Rolleiflex. At the end of the meal, he had put it on the table and told me it was over, that he didn’t want to use it anymore. He was giving it to me. I told him that was a real shame.

  “You have to know when to quit.”

  He had drunk more than usual. During the meal, he had emptied a bottle of whiskey, but you could hardly tell: just a slight fog around the eyes and his speech was slower.

  “If I keep at it, it will only give you more work for your catalogue. Don’t you think that’s enough as it is?”

  I had walked with him to a hotel on Boulevard Raspail, where he’d taken a room. He didn’t want to go back to the studio. “That girl,” as he put it, might be waiting at the door; she was really wasting her time with “a guy like him.”

  She was sitting there, in front of me, on the sofa. It was already 7 P.M. and daylight was fading.

  “Do you think he’ll come today?” she asked.

  I was sure he wouldn’t. He would go dine alone somewhere in the neighborhood, then head back to his hotel room on Boulevard Raspail. Then again, he might call at any moment for me to meet him at a restaurant. And if I told him Nicole was here, how would he react? He’d immediately assume she’d pick up the extension. And then he’d pretend to be calling from Brussels or Geneva and would even agree to talk to her. He’d tell her his stay there might last for quite a while.

  But the telephone didn’t ring. We sat opposite each other in the silence.

  “Can I wait for him some more?”

  “As long as you like.”

  The room was sinking into shadow and I got up to put on the light. When she saw me reach for the switch, she said, “No … Please, no lights.”

  I went to sit on the sofa. I felt as if she’d forgotten my presence. Then she looked up at me:

  “I live with someone who’s very jealous and who’s liable to come rap at the door if he sees the lights on.”

  I remained silent. I didn’t dare suggest that I could simply answer the door and tell this potential visitor that there was no one else at the studio.

  As if she had read my thoughts, she said:

  “He’d probably just barge past you to see if I’m here … He might even punch you out.”

  “Is he your husband?”

  “Yes.”

  She told me that Jansen had taken her to a neighborhood restaurant one evening. Her husband had spotted them by chance. He’d stormed up to their table and backhanded her across the face. Two slaps that had made the corners of her mouth bleed. Then he’d run off before Jansen could intervene. He had waited for them outside. He walked a good distance behind them, following them down the street, bordered by trees and endless walls, that cuts through the Montparnasse cemetery. She had gone into the studio with Jansen and her husband had stood planted for almost an hour in front of the door.

  Since that misadventure, she figured, Jansen was having second thoughts about seeing her. Given how calm and cavalier he tended to be, I could easily imagine his discomfort that evening.

  She explained that her husband was ten years older than she. He was a mime and performed in what they used to call “Left Bank” clubs. I saw him two or three times after that, prowling around Rue Froidevaux in the afternoon to catch Nicole leaving the studio. He gave me an insolent stare. Dark and fairly tall, with a romantic allure. One day I went up to him.

  “Are you waiting for someone?”

  “I’m waiting for Nicole.”

  Theatrical, slightly nasal voice. In his bearing and his gaze, he played on his slight resemblance to the actor Gérard Philippe. He was wearing a kind of black frock coat and a very long, unknotted scarf.

  I’d said, “Which Nicole? There are so many Nicoles.”

  He had given me a disdainful look, then made an about-face toward Place Denfert-Rochereau, with an affected gait as if he were walking offstage, scarf floating in the breeze.

  She looked at her wristwatch in the semidarkness.

  “It’s okay now, you can turn on the lights. It’s safe now. He has to start his act at the Ecole Buissonnière.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a cabaret. He does two or three shows a night.”

  He went by the stage name Gil the Mime and he performed against a soundtrack of poems by Jules Laforgue and Tristan Corbière. He had had Nicole record the poems, so that it was her voice you heard every night as he moved around the stage in simulated moonlight.

  She told me her husband was a real tyrant. He kept telling her that when a woman lived with an “artist,” she should be devoted to him “body and soul.” He erupted in jealous scenes over the flimsiest of pretexts, and that jealousy had become even more pathological since she’d met Jansen.

  At around ten o’clock, he’d leave the Ecole Buissonnière for the Vieille Grille on Rue du Puits-de-l’Ermite, suitcase in hand. It contained his only prop: the tape recorder and the tapes on which his poems were recorded.

  And where was Jansen, did I think? I told her I really had no clue. For a moment, just to appear interesting, I thought of telling her about the hotel on Boulevard Raspail, but I kept it to myself. She asked if I would walk her home. It was better if she got back before her husband. She spoke of him some more. Naturally, she no longer felt any respect for him, she found his jealousy and “artistic” pretensions ridiculous, but I could tell she was afraid of him. He always came home at eleven-thirty to make sure she was there. Then he went out again, to the last cabaret he performed in, an establishment in the Contrescarpe neighborhood. He stayed there until two in the morning and forced Nicole to accompany him.

  We walked beneath the trees down Avenue Denfert-Rochereau and she plied me with questions about Jansen. I answered evasively: yes, he traveled a lot because of his work and he never let me know where he was. Then he’d show up unexpectedly, only to disappear again the same day. A real fly-by-night. She stopped and looked up at me:

  “Listen … If he shows up at the studio someday, could you give me a call on the QT? I’ll come right over … I’m sure he’ll let me in …”

  She took a scrap of paper from her raincoat pocket and asked if I had a pen. She jotted down her telephone number.

  “You can call me at any time of day or night to let me know.”

  “What about your husband?”

  “Oh … my husband …”

  She shrugged. Apparently this didn’t strike her as an insurmountable obstacle.

  She tried to put off what she called “returning to prison” and we strolled a bit more through streets that today make me think of a kind of scholastic subdistrict: Ulm, Rataud, Claude-Bernard, Pierre-et-Marie-Curie … We crossed Place du Panthéon, sinister in the moonlight, which I never would have dared cross alone. In retrospect, the quarter seems to have been deserted as if after a curfew. Moreover, that evening from almost thirty years ago recurs often in my dreams. I’m sitting on the sofa next to her, so distant that I feel like I’m with a statue. The long wait has clearly petrified her. An early evening summer light bathes the studio. The photos of Robert Capa and Colette Laurent have been taken down from the wall. Almost no one lives here. Jansen has left for Mexico. And we keep on waiting for nothing.

  At the foot of the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, we entered a blind alley: Rue d’Ecosse. It had started to rain. She stopped in front of the last building. The entryway was wide open. She put a finger to her lips and pulled me into the foyer. She didn’t turn on the hallway light.

  There was a sliver of light beneath the first door to the left off the hallway.

  “He’s already here,” she whispered in my ear. “I’m going to get the crap beaten out of me.”

  I was surprised to hear that word in her mouth. The rain fell harder and harder.

  “I can’t even lend you an umbrella …”

  I kept my eyes fixed on th
e sliver of light. I was terrified he’d come out.

  “You should wait here in the hall until the storm ends. My husband doesn’t know who you are.”

  She squeezed my hand.

  “If Francis ever comes back, you’ll let me know right away—promise?”

  She switched on the hall light and put her key in the lock. She glanced back at me one last time. She went in and I heard her call out in a shaky voice, “Hi, Gil.”

  The other kept silent. The door shut behind her. Before the hall light went out, I just had time to notice their mailbox, hanging on the corridor wall among the others. On it, in ornate red letters, were the words:

  Nicole

  and

  Gil

  Mime Poet

  The sound of furniture falling over. Someone slammed against the door. Nicole’s voice:

  “Leave me alone …”

  It sounded as if she was struggling. The other was still silent. She let out a muffled cry, as if he was strangling her. I thought of intervening, but instead I stood frozen in the dark, under the entryway. The rain had already formed a puddle on the sidewalk in front of me.

  She cried out, “Leave me alone!” louder this time. I was about to knock on the door when the sliver of light went out. After a moment, the creaking of bedsprings. Then sighs and Nicole’s husky voice saying again, “Leave me alone …”

  It kept raining while she emitted staccato whimpers and I heard the creak of the bedsprings. Later, the rain was no more than a kind of spittle.

  I was about to walk out the entrance door when the hall light went on behind me. They were both in the hallway and he was carrying his suitcase in his hand. His left arm was around Nicole’s shoulder. They walked by and she pretended not to know me. But at the corner she looked back and gave me a brief wave.

  One sunny afternoon in May, Jansen had surprised me at my labors. I’d told him about Nicole and he’d listened, looking distracted.

  “She’s a nice girl,” he’d said, “but I’m old enough to be her father …”

  He didn’t entirely get what it was her husband did for a living and, remembering the evening when he’d seen him slap Nicole in the restaurant, he again expressed surprise that a mime could be so violent. Personally, he imagined mimes as having very slow, gentle movements.