Patrick Modiano: After the Circus

We skirted the Bois de Boulogne, by the same route we’d taken on Saturday to go have lunch in Ansart’s restaurant. I held onto his registration card. We turned onto Rue des Belles-Feuilles. The restaurant was closed. They had nailed wooden panels onto the façade, with peeling green paint that surely dated from the time when the Belles Feuilles was, as Ansart had said, a working-class café.

Now she seemed concerned. There must have been a connection between Ansart’s sudden disappearance and the incident in Neuilly the day before, in which we had been more than just bystanders.

“Do you think Jacques de Bavière has also taken off?” I asked.

She shrugged. I recalled Martine’s face, the way she had waved to us as we walked across the courtyard the other night.

“What about Martine? Can we reach her somewhere?”

She knew almost nothing about Martine, other than that she had been living with Ansart for several years. The only thing she remembered was her name: Martine Gaul.

We ended up in a café on Rue Spontini, where we ordered two sandwiches and two glasses of orange juice. She took a small address book from her bag and asked me to call Rue Washington to see whether Jacques de Bavière was still there.

“Hello … Who’s this?”

A woman with a deep voice. The one who had greeted us on Saturday evening?

“I’d like to speak with Jacques de Bavière, please …”

“Who are you?”

Her tone was sharp, the tone of someone on the alert.

“We’re friends of Jacques. We came over on Saturday …”

“Jacques has left for Belgium.”

“Will he be gone long?”

“I couldn’t say.”

“Did Mister Ansart go with him?”

There was a moment’s pause. I even thought the line had gone dead.

“I don’t know the person you mean. I’m very sorry, but I have to go now.”

She hung up.

So they had both gone. With Martine, no doubt. To Belgium, or somewhere else. How could we find out?

“Are you sure his name is de Bavière?” I asked Gisèle.

“Yes, de Bavière.”

What good would that do us? He surely wasn’t in the phone book, or in the social register, as his name might imply.

She said she wanted to try somewhere else, where we might stand a better chance of finding out news of Ansart. We followed the major boulevards. She didn’t offer any explanations. When we arrived at Place de la République, we took Boulevard du Temple, then stopped in a street that ran parallel to it, slightly downhill. In front of us was the Winter Circus.

She pointed out a café farther down the road, about fifty yards away.

“Go in and ask the guy behind the bar if he has any news of Mister Ansart …”

Why wasn’t she coming with me?

I walked down the street, turning around to make sure she was still there. I thought she might wait for me to enter the café, then vanish like all the others.

The café didn’t display any name, but an ad for Belgian beer was stickered on the façade. I went in. At the back of a small room were a few tables where patrons were having lunch.

Behind the bar stood a tall, dark-haired man with a slightly squashed nose wearing a dark blue suit; he was on the phone. I waited. A waiter in a burgundy jacket came up to me.

“A bottle of Vittel.”

The phone conversation dragged on. The man listened to his correspondent and occasionally answered, “Yes … yes … all right …” or gave a brief grunt of assent. He had jammed the receiver between his shoulder and cheek to light a cigarette and his eyes met mine, but I don’t know if he really saw me. He hung up.

I asked him in a timid voice:

“Do you have any news of Mister Ansart?”

He smiled at me. But I could tell this smile was just a façade, a way of establishing distance between us.

“You know Mister Ansart?”

His voice had a childlike timbre that reminded me of the actor Jean Marais. He came around the bar to join me on the other side and leaned on it with his elbow.

“Yes, I know him, and I also know Martine Gaul.”

Why had I added that detail? To make him trust me?

“I went by Rue Raffet this morning and they were gone.”

He looked me over with a benevolent eye, still with that smile. The elegant cut of his suit and his voice clashed with the surroundings. Was he really the owner of this café?

“They’re gone, but they will certainly be back. That’s all I can tell you.”

He smile widened, and the look in his eyes made it clear that, indeed, he wouldn’t say any more.

I went to pay for the bottle of Vittel, but he waved his hand.

“No … Forget it …”

He opened the door for me himself and gave me a brief nod of farewell. He was still smiling.

In the car, Gisèle asked:

“What did he say?”

She must have known that man with his immutable smile. She had no doubt met him with Ansart and Jacques de Bavière.

“He said they would certainly be back, but he didn’t seem to want to provide any details.”

“It doesn’t matter. In any case, we’ll never see them again. We’ll be in Rome.”

We followed the boulevard up to Place de la Bastille. We weren’t far from Dell’Aversano’s shop. I suggested that we stop in to finalize our travel arrangements.

“Had you been in that café before?” I asked Gisèle.

“Yes. Lots of times.”

She paused, then said, as if reluctantly:

“It was when my husband worked at the Winter Circus.”

She fell silent. I thought of the man in the dark blue suit. His smile had impressed me and I still remembered it ten years later, when one afternoon I happened to find myself near the Winter Circus. I hadn’t been able to resist going into that café. It was around 1973.

He was standing behind the bar, less elegant than the first time, features drawn and hair gone gray. A number of photos were glued to the wall, some of them signed, depicting performers from the Winter Circus who patronized the café.

One of the photos, larger than the others, had caught my eye. It showed a whole group of people standing at the bar, around a blonde woman wearing a rider’s jacket. And among them, I recognized Gisèle.

I had ordered a bottle of Vittel, like the first time.

At that hour of the afternoon, he and I were the only ones there. I asked him point blank:

“Did you know that girl?”

I joined him behind the bar and pointed out Gisèle in the photo. He didn’t seem the least bit surprised by my actions.

He leaned closer to the picture.

“Oh, sure, I knew her … She was really young … She used to spend her evenings here … Her husband worked for the circus … She would wait for him … She always looked bored … That must be a good ten years ago …”

“But what did her husband do, exactly?”

“He must have been part of the circus staff. He was older than her.”

I sensed that he’d answer any question I asked. I was still young at the time and had a shy, polite air about me. And he, no doubt, wanted nothing better than to chat away the empty hours of that early summer afternoon.

He seemed much more accessible than he had ten years earlier. He had lost his mystery, or rather the mystery I’d lent him. The slim man in the dark blue suit was nothing more today than a café proprietor on Rue Amelot, practically your basic barkeep.

“Did you know Pierre Ansart?”

He cast me a surprised glance and once again I saw on his face the disingenuous smile from before.

“How come? Did you know Pierre?”

“That girl introduced me to him about ten years ago.”

He knitted his brow.

“The girl in the photo? … Pierre must have met her here … He often came to see me …”