Patrick Modiano - Suspended Sentences

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 the 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.

We’d gone out together and had barely taken a few steps when I recognized the silhouette stationed at the corner of the walled street that bisects the graveyard: Gil the Mime. He was wearing a black jacket and black trousers, with an open-necked white shirt whose wide collar covered his lapels.

“Well, well … There’s a familiar face,” Jansen muttered to me.

He waited for us to walk by him, arms folded. We continued down the opposite sidewalk and pretended not to notice him. He crossed the street and planted himself right in our path, legs slightly parted. He crossed his arms again.

“Think it’s going to come to blows?” Jansen asked me.

We walked up to where he was standing and he blocked our way, hopping from foot to foot like a boxer about to throw a punch. I shoved him aside. His left hand landed on my cheek as if by reflex.

“Come along,” Jansen said to me.

And he led me away by the arm. The other man turned toward Jansen:

“Hey, you! Shutterbug! What’s your hurry?”

His voice had the metallic timbre and overly stressed diction of certain members of the Comédie Française. Nicole had told me he was also an actor and that he’d recorded himself on the soundtrack to his show, the last excerpt: a long passage from Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi . He was quite attached to it — apparently, it was the purple passage and crowning touch of his act.

We kept walking toward Place Denfert-Rochereau. I looked back. In the distance, beneath the sun, I could make out only his black suit and brown hair. Was it because of the graveyard’s proximity? There was something lugubrious about his silhouette.