Patrick Modiano - Suspended Sentences

“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.