Suspended Sentences (17 page)

Until the late sixties, the neighborhood had remained unchanged. The events of May ’68, which it hosted, left only black-and-white news images, which at a quarter-century’s remove seem as distant as the ones filmed during the Liberation of Paris.

Boulevard Saint-Michel is engulfed in a December-like fog this Sunday evening, and the image of a street resurfaces in my memory, one of the few streets in the Latin Quarter—the only one, I think—that often figures in my dreams. I finally identified it. It slopes gently down to the boulevard, and the contagion of dreams into reality ensures that Rue Cujas will always remain frozen for me in the light of the early sixties, a soft, limpid light that I associate with two films from that time:
Lola
and
Adieu Philippine
.

Toward the bottom of the street, on the ground floor of a hotel, there used to be a movie theater, the Studio Cujas. One July afternoon I entered the cool and darkness of that theater, out of idleness, and I was the only spectator.

A bit farther up, on the Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève, I used to meet a girl I knew who acted in New Wave films—as we called them then.

I thought about her yesterday afternoon, when I crossed paths by the gates of the Jardins du Luxembourg with a man wearing a ratty Shetland pullover, whose brown hair and hawk nose seemed familiar. Yes, of course, I often used to see him in the café where that girl and I would meet. A certain François, nicknamed “the Philosopher,” probably because he gave private lessons in philosophy.

He didn’t recognize me. He was holding a book and he looked like an overripe student. I had returned to that neighborhood by chance, after a quarter of a century, and now here was that unchanged man, forever faithful to the sixties. I could have said something to him, but
the amount of time since our last meeting made him inaccessible, like someone I’d left on the beach of a faraway island. I had set sail.

I saw him again today, on the other side of the gardens, in the company of a young blonde. He lingered for a moment, talking to her at the entrance to the RER station that replaced the old Luxembourg stop. Then she went down the steps and left him on his own.

He walked with quick steps on the sidewalk of Boulevard Saint-Michel toward Port-Royal. He was still holding his book. I tried to follow him, keeping an eye on his Shetland pullover with its greenish stain, until I lost sight of it around Rue de l’Abbé-de-l’Epée.

I crossed through the gardens. Was it because of meeting that ghost? Or the alleys of the Luxembourg, where I hadn’t walked in ages? In the late-afternoon light, it seemed to me that the years had become conflated and time transparent. One day, I had accompanied that girl who acted in movies, in her convertible, from the Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève to the Saint-Maurice film studios. We followed the river to the outskirts of Paris and the plane trees formed a canopy of foliage. It was in the spring of 1963 or 1964.

The snow that turns into mud on the sidewalks, the railings around the Cluny thermal baths where unlicensed street hawkers had their stalls, the bare trees, all those tones of gray and black that I still recall put me in mind of Violette Nozière. She used to meet her dates in a hotel on Rue Victor-Cousin, near the Sorbonne, and at the Palais du Café on Boulevard Saint-Michel.

Violette was a pale-skinned brunette whom the tabloids of the time compared to a venomous flower and whom they nicknamed the “poison girl.” She struck up acquaintances at the Palais du Café with ersatz students wearing jackets that were too tight at the waist and tortoiseshell glasses. She convinced them she was expecting a large inheritance and promised them the moon: exotic trips, a Bugatti … She had probably crossed paths on the boulevard with the T. couple, who had just moved into their small apartment on Rue des Fossés-Saint-Jacques.

A bit farther down the street from the Palais du Café, on the opposite side, a twenty-year-old girl, Sylviane, played billiards upstairs at the Cluny. She wasn’t a pale brunette like Violette, but auburn-haired, with the kind of coloring you might call Irish. She wouldn’t remain long in the grayness of the Latin Quarter. Soon she would be spotted in the Faubourg Montmartre, at the Fantasio, and in the billiards parlors on Boulevard des Capucines. Then she’d frequent the Cercle Haussmann on Rue de la Michodière, where she’d meet some patrons. Gifts, jewelry, the easy life, the riding club in Neuilly … At the start of the Occupation, she would marry a penniless suitor who nonetheless bore the title marquis of the empire. She would spend
long sojourns in the Free Zone, on the Côte d’Azur, and the president of the Société des Bains de Mer in Monaco would count among her admirers. Her return to the Occupied Zone … Her meeting with a certain Eddy Pagnon in dubious circumstances … But, in that spring of 1933, she was still living with her mother, in Chelles, in the Seine-et-Marne region, and she commuted to Paris on a Meaux line train that dropped her off at the Gare de l’Est. According to a witness questioned by the detectives, one of the two women who brought the T. couple to Le Perreux had auburn hair and didn’t seem older than twenty. She lived in the eastern suburbs. But was her name Sylviane?

She crops up again eleven years later, in the spring of 1944, in a small hotel on the Quai d’Austerlitz. She’s waiting for that Eddy Pagnon who, since the month of May, has been bootlegging wine from Bordeaux to Paris.

On evenings when he has to drive from Paris to Bordeaux, he stops the truck across from the hotel, on the sidewalk next to the river, in the shadow of two rows of plane trees. He goes to meet her in her room. Soon it will be curfew. The distant rumbling of the metro over the Pont de Bercy occasionally breaks the silence. Through the window of the hall that leads to her room, one can still see, in the twilight, the tracks of the Gare d’Austerlitz; but they’re deserted and one wonders if the station has been abandoned.

They have dinner downstairs, in the café. The door and windows have their curtains drawn because of the blackout. They are the only diners. They get served food from the black market, and the hotel manager, who was on the phone behind the counter, comes to sit with them. Pagnon makes his trips between Bordeaux and Paris on behalf of this man, who owns a warehouse nearby, on the Quai Saint-Bernard, at the Halle aux Vins, the central wine market. After dinner, the manager gives Pagnon a few final instructions. Sylviane then walks him to the truck on the Quai d’Austerlitz. The engine rumbles for a long while, then the truck disappears into the dark. She returns
to her hotel room and lies down on the unmade bed. A bed with brass bars. Walls covered in old wallpaper with pink roses. A pause. She has known hotel rooms like this, when she was much younger, on nights when she didn’t go home to Chelles to sleep in her mother’s minuscule cottage.

She will wait for him until the following evening. He’ll drive the truck to the warehouse in the Halle aux Vins so they can unload his cargo and then he’ll go on foot from the Quai Saint-Bernard to the hotel. In that fleabag, she reconnects with the décor of her youth. As for me, I recall a childhood memory: fat Lucien P. sprawled on one of the leather armchairs in my father’s office. I had heard them talking one day about a certain Sylviane with auburn hair. Was it Fat Lucien who introduced her to my father or the other way around? From what he confided to me, my father had also frequented the Latin Quarter in the early thirties, in the same period and at the same age as Violette Nozière and Sylviane. Perhaps he had first met her in the billiards room of the Café de Cluny.

A little past the Quai d’Austerlitz, near the Pont de Bercy, do the warehouses known as the Magasins Généraux still exist? In the winter of ’43, my father had been interned in that annex of the Drancy transit camp. One evening, someone came and had him released: was it Eddy Pagnon, who was then part of what they later called the Rue Lauriston gang? Too many coincidences make me think so: Sylviane, Fat Lucien … I tried to find the garage where Pagnon worked before the war and, among the new scraps of information that I’ve managed to gather on him, there is this: arrested by the Germans in November 1941 for having double-crossed them in a black market affair involving raincoats. Detained at La Santé. Freed by Chamberlin, alias “Henri.” Goes to work for him on Rue Lauriston. Leaves the Rue Lauriston gang three months before the Liberation. Retires to Barbizon with his mistress, the marquise d’A. He owned a racehorse and an automobile. Gets himself a job as driver of a truck transporting wines from Bordeaux to Paris.

When my father left the Magasins Généraux, I wonder what route he took in the blackout. He must have felt dumbfounded at having been spared.

Of all the neighborhoods on the Left Bank, the area that stretches from the Pont de Bercy to the fences around the Jardin des Plantes remains the most crepuscular for me. One arrives by night at the Gare d’Austerlitz. And night, around here, smells like wine and coal. I leave behind the train station and those dark masses along the Seine that were referred to as the “Port of Austerlitz warehouses.” The automobile headlights or the flashlight illuminate a few feet of the Quai Saint-Bernard, just in front. The smells of wine and coal now mix with the scent of leaves from the botanical gardens, and I hear the cry of a peacock and the roar of a jaguar and a tiger from the zoo. The plane trees and the silence of the Halle aux Vins. I am enveloped by a cellarlike chill. Somewhere someone is rolling a barrel, and that doleful sound slowly fades into the distance. It seems that in place of the old wine market they’ve now erected tall concrete buildings, but wide as I might open my eyes in the dark, I can’t see them.

To reach the south, one needed to go through tunnels: Tombe-Issoire, Glacière, Rue de la Santé, lit at intervals by a blue bulb. And one emerged onto the sundrenched avenues and fields of Montsouris.

The Porte d’Italie marked the eastern border of that territory. Boulevard Kellermann led west, up to the Poterne des Peupliers. To the right, the
SNECMA
plant looked like a huge cargo ship run aground on the edge of the boulevard, especially on nights when the moon was reflected in its windows. A bit farther on, to the left, was the Charléty stadium. Weeds grew through cracks in the concrete.

I went to that neighborhood for the first time on a Sunday, because of a friend who had dragged me to Charléty. Despite being only seventeen, he had snagged a low-level job on a sports newspaper. They sent him to cover a footrace, and he wanted me to help him write his article.

There weren’t many of us in the stands. I remember the name of one of the runners: Piquemal. We asked him a few questions at the end of the race to flesh out the article. At around five, we waited for the number 21 bus, but it never showed. We then decided to walk to the center of Paris. The streets were empty in the bright sun. I could pinpoint the exact date: at the first newsstand we came across—not really a newsstand, more like one of those green canvas stalls that crop up on Sundays—I saw the photo and large headlines announcing the death of Marilyn Monroe.

After Charléty, the Cité Universitaire, and to the left, the Parc Montsouris. At the beginning of the street that skirted the park was
an apartment building with large picture windows, where the aviator Jean Mermoz had lived. The shadows of Mermoz and
SNECMA
—a factory that made airplane engines—have linked that neighborhood in my mind with Orly airport, right nearby, and with the airfields of Villacoublay, Buc, and Toussus-le-Noble.

Restaurants that were almost rustic. Opposite the building where Mermoz would come home between two airmail runs was the Chalet du Lac. Its terrace opened onto the Parc Montsouris. And lower down, at the corner of Avenue Reille, a small restaurant whose garden was covered in gravel. In the summer, they set out tables and one could dine beneath the arbor.

For me, with the passage of time, that entire neighborhood has become gently detached from Paris. In one of the two cafés at the end of Rue de l’Amiral-Mouchez, near the Charléty stadium, a jukebox played Italian songs. The owner was a swarthy woman with a Roman profile. Summer light bathes Boulevard Kellermann and Boulevard Jourdan, deserted in midday. In my dreams, I see shadows on the sidewalks and the ochre façades of buildings that hide slivers of countryside, and from now on they belong to the outskirts of Rome. I walk the length of the Parc Montsouris. The foliage protects me from the sun. Farther on is the Cité Universitaire metro stop. I’ll reenter the coolness of the small station. Trains come at regular intervals and carry us to the beaches at Ostia.

Jacqueline had rented a room in one of those clusters of buildings on Boulevard Kellermann, built before the war on the site of the old fortifications. Thanks to fake student IDs, we could take our meals, for a mere five francs, at the Cité Universitaire cafeteria: it occupied the vast paneled foyer of a structure that called to mind the hotels of Saint-Moritz or Cimiez.

It often happened that we spent entire days and nights on the lawns or in the foyers of the various pavilions. There was even a movie house and an auditorium in the Cité.

A holiday spa, or one of those international concessions like they had in Shanghai. That neutral zone, at the very edge of Paris, gave its residents diplomatic immunity. When we crossed the border with our fake identity cards, we were safe from all harm.

I met Pacheco at the Cité Universitaire. I had already noticed him a few months earlier. In January of that year, there had been a lot of snow, and the Cité looked like a winter resort. On several occasions I had crossed paths, on Boulevard Jourdan, with a man of about fifty wearing a faded brown coat whose sleeves were too long, black corduroy trousers, and snow boots. His brown hair was brushed back and his cheeks bore several days’ stubble. He walked cautiously, as if with every step he were afraid of skidding on the snow.

By the following June, he was no longer the same. His tan linen suit, sky-blue shirt, and buckskin shoes seemed brand new. His shorter hair and smooth-shaven cheeks made him look younger. Did we strike up a conversation in the Cité Universitaire cafeteria, whose
windows looked out on Boulevard Jourdan? Or across the street, at the Brasserie Babel? My sense is at the cafeteria, because of that airportlike ambiance that for me is indissociable from Pacheco: a décor of plastic and metal, the comings and goings of people speaking a multitude of languages, as if in transit. Moreover, that day Pacheco was carrying a black leather suitcase. And he told me he worked for Air France, without my quite understanding whether he was an airline steward or whether he had a desk at Orly. He lived in a room in the Pavillon des Provinces Françaises. And as I expressed surprise that he could be living at the Cité Universitaire at his age, he showed me a card saying he was enrolled in the Faculty of Sciences, on the site of the old Halle aux Vins.