Suspended Sentences (10 page)

And I would add:

“We know that you’re the king of Armagnac.”

Still, there was one detail that worried me: the moment when the marquis Eliot Salter de Caussade turned his face toward us. My father had told us that his face had been burned during an aerial battle in the First World War, and that he concealed this burn by covering his skin with ochre-colored makeup. In that entrance hall, in the light
of the candles and the wood fire, that face must have been terrifying. But at least I would finally see what I tried to see behind Annie’s smile and bright eyes: a hothead.

We had crept down the stairs on tiptoe, our shoes in our hands. The kitchen clock said eleven-twenty-five. We had gently closed the front door to the house and the small metal gate that opened onto Rue du Docteur-Dordaine. Sitting on the curb, we laced up our shoes. The rumble of the train was approaching. It would be in the station in a few minutes and would leave only a single passenger on the platform: Eliot Salter, the marquis de Caussade and the king of Armagnac.

We chose nights when the sky was clear, when the stars shone around a sliver of moon. Our shoes tied, the flashlight hidden between my sweater and my pajama top, we now had to walk to the chateau. The empty street in the moonlight, the silence, and the feeling that came over us of having left home for good gradually made us slow our steps. After about fifty yards, we turned back.

Now we unlaced our shoes and gently closed the front door to the house. The alarm clock in the kitchen said twenty minutes to midnight. I put the flashlight back in the cupboard and we tiptoed back up the stairs.

Huddled in our twin beds, we felt a certain relief. We spoke in low whispers about the marquis, and each of us came up with a new detail. It was past midnight, and over there, in the great hall, Grosclaude was serving him his supper. The next time, before turning back, we’d go a bit farther down Rue du Docteur-Dordaine than we had this time. We’d go as far as the convent. And the next time after that, even farther, up to the farm and the barbershop. And the time after that, farther still. A new milestone every night. Then there would only be a few dozen yards to go before we reached the chateau fence. The next time … We ended up falling asleep.

I had noticed that Annie and Little Hélène occasionally received visits at the house from people as mysterious and worthy of interest as Eliot Salter, the marquis de Caussade.

Was it Annie who kept up the friendships? Or Little Hélène? Both, I think. For her part, Mathilde maintained a certain reserve in their presence, and often she went to her room. Perhaps those people intimidated her, or maybe she just didn’t like them.

I’m trying today to count all the faces I saw on the front porch or in the living room—without being able to identify most of them. No matter. If I could put names to those ten or so faces parading through my memory, it would prove embarrassing for some people who are still alive. They’d remember that they used to keep bad company.

The ones whose images remain the clearest are Roger Vincent, Jean D., and Andrée K., who they said was “the wife of a big-shot doctor.” They came to the house two or three times a week. They went to have lunch at the Robin des Bois inn with Annie and Little Hélène, and afterward they’d sit around a while longer in the living room. Or else they stayed for dinner at the house.

Sometimes Jean D. came alone. Annie would bring him from Paris in her 4CV. He was the one who seemed closest to Annie and who had probably introduced her to the two others. Jean D. and Annie were the same age. When Jean D. came to visit with Roger Vincent, it was always in Roger Vincent’s American convertible. Sometimes Andrée K. came with them, and she would sit in the front seat of the American car, next to Roger Vincent; Jean D. was in back. Roger Vincent must have been around forty-five at the time, and Andrée K. thirty-five.

I remember the first time we saw Roger Vincent’s American car parked in front of the house. It was the end of the morning, after class. I hadn’t yet been expelled from the Jeanne d’Arc school. From a distance, that huge convertible, with its tan body and red leather seats gleaming in the sun, had surprised my brother and me as much as if we’d turned a corner in the road and suddenly found ourselves face to face with the marquis de Caussade. Moreover, we’d had the same thought at the same moment, as we later confided to each other: the car belonged to the marquis de Caussade, who was back in the village after all his adventures and had been invited over by my father.

I said to Snow White:

“Whose car is that?”

“A friend of your godmother’s.”

She always called Annie my “godmother,” and it was in fact the case that we’d been baptized one year earlier at the church of Saint-Martin de Biarritz and that my mother had asked Annie to act as my godmother.

When we went inside the house, the living room door was open and Roger Vincent was sitting on the couch, next to the bow window.

“Come say hello,” said Little Hélène.

She had just poured out three glasses and was stopping up one of the liquor decanters with the enamel tags. Annie was on the telephone.

Roger Vincent stood up. He seemed very tall. He was wearing a glen plaid suit. His hair was white, well groomed, and brushed back, but he didn’t seem old. He leaned toward us and smiled.

“Hello, children …”

He shook our hands in turn. I had put down my schoolbag to shake his. I was wearing my gray smock.

“Are you just getting home from school?”

“Yes,” I said.

“School going well?”

“Yes.”

Annie had hung up the phone and joined us; Little Hélène set the liquor tray on the coffee table in front of the couch. She handed Roger Vincent a glass.

“Patoche and his brother live here,” Annie said.

“Well, then, to the health of Patoche and his brother,” said Roger Vincent, raising his glass with a wide smile.

In my memory, that smile remains Roger Vincent’s main attribute: it was always playing about his lips. Roger Vincent bathed in that smile, which was distant and dreamy rather than jovial, and which enveloped him like a very light mist. There was something muffled about that smile, as about his voice and bearing. Roger Vincent never made any noise. You never heard him coming, and when you turned around, there he was behind you. From the window of our room, we sometimes saw him arrive at the wheel of his American car. It stopped in front of the house like a speedboat with its motor cut off, carried in by the tide to berth silently on the shore. Roger Vincent stepped out of the car, his movements slow, his smile on his lips. He never slammed the door, but rather closed it gently.

That day, they were still in the living room when we finished our lunch with Snow White in the kitchen. Mathilde was tending the rose bush she had planted on the first terrace of the garden, near the grave of Doctor Guillotin.

I was holding my satchel, and Snow White was going to take me
back to the Jeanne d’Arc school for afternoon classes, when Annie, who had appeared in the doorway to the living room, said to me:

“Study well, Patoche …”

Behind her, I saw Little Hélène and Roger Vincent smiling his immutable smile. No doubt they were about to leave the house to go have lunch at the Robin des Bois inn.

“Are you walking to school?” asked Roger Vincent.

“Yes.”

Even when he talked, he smiled.

“I can take you in the car, if you like …”

“Did you see Roger Vincent’s car?” Annie asked me.

“Yes.”

She always called him “Roger Vincent,” with respectful affection, as if his first and last names were inseparable. I sometimes heard her on the telephone: “Hello, Roger Vincent … How are you, Roger Vincent …” She used the formal
vous
. She and Jean D. had great admiration for him. Jean D. called him “Roger Vincent” as well. When Annie and Jean D. talked about him, they seemed to be telling “Roger Vincent stories,” as if they were recounting ancient legends. Andrée K., “the wife of the big-shot doctor,” called him just Roger, and she said
tu
.

“Would you like it if I took you to school in my car?” asked Roger Vincent.

He had guessed what we wanted, my brother and I. We both climbed into the front seat next to him.

He backed majestically up the gentle slope of the avenue, and the car followed Rue du Docteur-Dordaine.

We glided on slack water. I couldn’t hear the sound of the motor. It was the first time my brother and I had ridden in a convertible. And that car was so big that it covered the entire width of the street.

“Here’s my school …”

He stopped the car and, stretching out his arm, opened the passenger door so that I could get out.

“Good luck, Patoche.”

I was proud to hear him call me Patoche, as if he’d known me for a long time. My brother was now all alone next to him, and he looked even smaller on that huge red leather seat. I turned around before going into the courtyard of the Jeanne d’Arc school. Roger Vincent waved at me. He was smiling.

Jean D. didn’t have an American convertible, but he had a fat wristwatch on whose face we could read the seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, and years. He explained the complicated mechanism of that watch with its many buttons. He was much more at ease with us than Roger Vincent. And younger.

He wore a suede windbreaker, sporty turtleneck sweaters, and shoes with crepe soles. He, too, was tall and thin. Dark hair and a face with regular features. When his brown eyes rested on us, they were lit by a mix of mischief and sadness. His eyes were always widening, as if everything astonished him. I envied him his haircut: a long brush cut, whereas in my case, every two weeks the barber gave me a crew cut so short that the hairs pinched when I ran my hand over my scalp and above my ears. But there was nothing I could say. The barber simply picked up his clippers without asking my opinion.

Jean D. came to the house more often than the others. Annie always brought him in her 4CV. He had lunch with us and always sat next to Annie, at the large dining room table. Mathilde called him “my little Jean,” and she didn’t show the same reserve with him as she did with the other visitors. He called Little Hélène “Linou”—the same as Mathilde did. He always said, “How’s it going, Linou?”—and he called me “Patoche,” like Annie.

He lent my brother and me his watch. We were able to wear it, taking turns, for a whole week. The leather strap was too big, so he made another hole in it to keep it tight around our wrists. I wore that watch to the Jeanne d’Arc school and showed it off to the schoolmates
huddled around me in the playground that day. Maybe the principal noticed that huge watch on my wrist, and saw me from her window getting out of Roger Vincent’s American car … Then she thought that was quite enough of that and that my place was not at the Jeanne d’Arc school.

“What sort of books do you read?” Jean D. asked me one day.

They were all having coffee in the living room after lunch: Annie, Mathilde, Little Hélène, and Snow White. It was a Thursday. We were waiting for Frede, who was supposed to arrive with her nephew. We had decided, my brother and I, to venture into the great hall of the chateau that afternoon, as we’d already done with my father. The presence of Frede’s nephew at our sides would bolster our courage.

“Patoche reads a ton,” answered Annie. “Isn’t that so, Snow White?”

“He reads way too much for his age,” said Snow White.

My brother and I had dipped a lump of sugar into Annie’s coffee cup and crunched it, as our ceremony required. Afterward, when they’d finished their coffee, Mathilde would read their future in the empty cups—“in the dregs,” as she said.

“So what do you read?” asked Jean D.

I told him adventure stories: Jules Verne,
The Last of the Mohicans
… but I preferred
The Three Musketeers
because of the fleur de lys on Milady’s shoulder.

“You should read pulps,” said Jean D.

“Jean, you’re crazy,” said Annie, laughing. “Patoche is way too young for pulps …”

“He’s got plenty of time ahead of him to read pulps,” said Little Hélène.

Apparently, neither Mathilde nor Snow White knew what “pulps” were. They kept silent.

A few days later, he returned to the house in Annie’s 4CV. It was raining that late afternoon, and Jean D. was wearing a fur-lined coat
called a “Canadienne.” My brother and I were listening to the radio, both seated at the dining room table, and when we saw him come in with Annie, we got up to greet him.

“Here,” said Jean D., “I brought you a pulp …”

He took a black-and-yellow-covered book from the pocket of his jacket and handed it to me.

“Pay no attention, Patoche,” said Annie. “He’s just joking. That’s not a book for you …”

Jean D. looked at me with his slightly widened eyes, his sad, tender gaze. At certain moments, I had the sense that he was a child, like us. Annie often spoke to him in the same tone she used with us.

“No, seriously …” said Jean D. “I’m sure you’ll like this book.”

I took it so as not to hurt his feelings. Still today, whenever I come across one of the black-and-yellow covers of the Série Noire, a deep, slightly drawling voice echoes in my head, the voice of Jean D., who that evening repeated to me and my brother the title written on the book he’d given us:
Don’t Touch the Loot
.

Was it the same day? It was raining. We had accompanied Snow White to the news dealer’s because she wanted to buy some stationery. When we left the house, Annie and Jean D. were both sitting in the 4CV, parked in front of the door. They were talking and were so absorbed in their conversation that they didn’t see us, even though I waved at them. Jean D. had pulled the collar of his Canadienne up around his neck. When we returned, they were still in the 4CV. I leaned toward them, but they didn’t even look. They were talking and they both had serious faces.

Little Hélène was playing solitaire on the dining room table and listening to the radio. Mathilde must have been in her bedroom. My brother and I went up to ours. Through the window, I watched the 4CV in the rain. They stayed in it, talking, all the way to dinnertime. What secrets could they have been sharing?