Suspended Sentences (7 page)

In the doorway, he shook my hand and said in a solemn tone:

“Thank you for everything.”

He stared at me with a slightly clouded gaze. He closed the door before I had a chance to say that the dog had slipped into the studio behind him.

The next morning, I phoned at around eleven but there was no answer. I had used our prearranged signal: three rings, hang up, ring again. I decided to go over there to finish putting away the photos.

As usual, I opened the door with my spare key. The three suitcases had disappeared, along with the picture of Colette Laurent and the one of Jansen with Robert Capa that had been hanging on the wall. On the coffee table, a roll of film to be developed. I took it that afternoon to the shop on Rue Delambre. When I went back to get it a few days later, I discovered in the envelope all the photos Jansen had taken during our walk through Paris.

I knew that there was no longer any point in waiting for him.

I searched through the closets upstairs, but there was nothing in
them, not a single article of clothing, not even a sock. Someone had removed the sheets and bedclothes, and the mattress was bare. Not one cigarette butt in the ashtrays. No more glasses or bottles of whiskey. I felt like a police inspector looking through the apartment of a man who’d been wanted for a long time, and I told myself it was useless, since there was no proof the man had ever lived here, not even a fingerprint.

I waited until five o’clock, sitting on the sofa, looking through the red notebook and the index. Apparently, Jansen had taken the second copies of the notebooks. Perhaps Nicole would ring at the door and I’d have to tell her that from now on we’d probably be waiting for Jansen in vain and that centuries from now, an archeologist would find the two of us mummified on the sofa. Rue Froidevaux would become an excavation site. At the corner of the Montparnasse cemetery, they’d find Gil the Mime turned into a statue, and they’d hear his heart beating. And the tape recorder, behind him, would still be playing a poem that he’d recorded in his metallic voice:

Demons and marvels

Winds and tides
…

A question suddenly occurred to me: what had become of the pointer that had followed us the night before, the one that had slipped into the studio without Jansen realizing it? Had he taken it with him? Now that I think about it, I wonder whether the dog wasn’t simply his.

I went back to the studio later, when evening was falling. A final spot of sunlight lingered on the sofa. Between those walls, the heat was stifling. I opened the bay window. I could hear the rustling of the trees and the footfalls of people walking in the street. I was amazed that the roar of traffic had stopped farther over toward Denfert-Rochereau, as if the feeling of absence and emptiness that Jansen left was spreading in concentric circles and Paris was gradually clearing out.

I wondered why he hadn’t told me he was leaving. But those few
signs were indicative of an imminent departure: the photo he’d taken of the hotel on Boulevard Raspail and the detour up to Faubourg Saint-Honoré to show me Magnum’s old headquarters and the café he used to frequent with Robert Capa and Colette Laurent. Yes, he had made, in my company, a final pilgrimage to the places of his youth. At the back of the studio, the darkroom door was ajar. The afternoon when Jansen had developed the pictures of my girlfriend and me, the small light bulb had shone red in the dark. He stood in front of the developing tray with rubber gloves on. He had handed me the negatives. When we went back into the studio, the light of the sun had blinded me.

I didn’t hold it against him. I even understood him so well … I had noticed in him certain ways of acting and certain character traits that had become familiar. He’d said to me, “Don’t let it faze you, kid. I’ve fallen into my share of black holes too …” I couldn’t predict the future, but thirty years later, when I’d become the same age as Jansen, I wouldn’t answer the telephone either, and I would disappear, as he had, one June evening, in the company of a phantom dog.

Three years later, on a June evening that strangely enough was the anniversary of his departure, Jansen was very much on my mind. Not because of that anniversary, but because a publisher had just accepted my first book, and in the inner pocket of my jacket I had a letter announcing the news.

I remembered that at one point on the last evening we’d spent together, Jansen had expressed concern about my future. And today, they’d assured me that my book would soon be published. I had finally emerged from that period of vagueness and uncertainty during which I lived as a fraud. I would have liked it if Jansen had been around to share my relief. I was sitting at a café near Rue Froidevaux, and for an instant I was tempted to go call at the studio, as if Jansen were still there.

How would he have greeted that first book? I hadn’t respected the instructions of silence he’d given me the day we’d spoken about literature. No doubt he would have deemed it much too indiscreet.

When he was the same age as I, he was already the author of several hundred photos, some of which composed
Sun and Snow
.

That evening, I flipped through
Sun and Snow
. Jansen had told me he wasn’t responsible for the namby-pamby title, which the Swiss publisher had chosen himself, without asking his opinion.

As I turned the pages, I felt more and more what Jansen had been trying to communicate, and what he’d gently challenged me to suggest with the word
silence
. The first two images in the book bore the same caption:
At number 140
. They depicted one of those clusters of
buildings on the outskirts of Paris on a summer’s day. Nobody in the courtyard or in the doorways to the stairs. Not one silhouette in the windows. Jansen had told me that a friend his age had lived there, someone he’d known in the Drancy transit camp. When the Italian consulate had Jansen released, the friend had asked him to go to that address to let his relatives and girlfriend know how he was doing. Jansen had gone to number 140, but he’d found none of the people his friend had mentioned. He’d gone back again after the Liberation, in the spring of 1945. In vain.

And so, feeling helpless, he’d taken those photos so that the place where his friend and his friend’s loved ones had lived would at least be preserved on film. But the courtyard, the square, and the deserted buildings under the sun made their absence even more irremediable.

The next images in the book dated from before the ones of number 140, since they’d been taken when Jansen was a refugee in the Haute-Savoie: expanses of snow, its whiteness contrasting with the blue of the sky. On the slopes were black dots that must have been skiers, a toy-sized ski lift, and the sun beating down on all of it, the same sun as for “number 140,” an indifferent sun. Through that snow and that sun showed an emptiness, an absence.

Sometimes, Jansen took objects from very close up: plants, a spider’s web, snail shells, flowers, blades of grass with ants bustling among them. One felt that he trained his gaze on something very specific to avoid thinking about anything else. I remembered when we’d sat on the bench, in the gardens of the Champs-Elysées, and he’d photographed his shoes.

And once again, mountain slopes of an eternal whiteness beneath the sun, the narrow streets and deserted squares of the South of France, several photos all with the same caption:
Paris in July
—my birth month, when the city seemed abandoned. But Jansen, in order to fight against the impression of emptiness and neglect, had tried to capture an entirely rural aspect of Paris: curtains of trees, canal,
cobblestones in the shade of plane trees, the clock tower of Saint-Germain de Charonne, the steps on Rue des Cascades … He was seeking a lost innocence and settings made for enjoyment and ease, but where one could never be happy again.

He thought a photographer was nothing, that he should blend into the surroundings and become invisible, the better to work and capture—as he said—natural light. One shouldn’t even hear the click of the Rolleiflex. He would have liked to conceal his camera. The death of his friend Robert Capa could in fact be explained, as he saw it, by this desire, the giddiness of blending into the surroundings once and for all.

Yesterday was Easter Monday. I was walking along the portion of Boulevard Saint-Michel that stretches from the old Luxembourg station to Port-Royal. Strollers were crowded around the entrance gates to the gardens, but where I was walking there was practically no one. One afternoon, on that same stretch of sidewalk, Jansen had pointed out the bookstore at the corner of the boulevard and tiny Rue Royer-Collard. In it, just before the war, he had seen an exhibit of photographs by the painter Wols. He’d gotten to know the artist and admired him as much as he did Capa. He’d gone to visit him in Cassis, where Wols had taken refuge at the start of the Occupation. It was Wols who had taught him to photograph his shoes.

That day, Jansen had drawn my attention to the façade of the Ecole des Mines, an entire section of which, at eye level, was riddled with bullet holes. A plaque, cracked and slightly worn around the edges, noted that a certain Jean Monvallier Boulogne, age twenty, had been killed at that spot on the day Paris was liberated.

I’d remembered that name because of its sonority, which conjured up images of rowing a boat in the Bois de Boulogne with a blonde, a country picnic on the riverbank, a small valley with that same blonde
and some friends—all of it cut short one afternoon in August, in front of this wall.

Now, that Monday, to my great surprise, the plaque had disappeared, and I was sorry that Jansen, on the afternoon when we were in that same spot together, hadn’t taken a picture of it and the bullet-pocked wall. I would have put it in the index. But now, suddenly, I was no longer sure Jean Monvallier Boulogne had ever existed, and moreover I was no longer sure of anything.

I entered the gardens, slicing through the people massed around the fence. Every bench and every chair was filled and the paths were crowded. Young people were sitting on the terrace rails and the steps leading down to the main fountain, so thick that you couldn’t get to that part of the garden. But none of it mattered. I was happy to lose myself in that crowd and—as Jansen would have said—to blend into the surroundings.

Enough space remained—about eight inches—for me to sit at the end of a bench. My neighbors didn’t even need to squeeze over. We were beneath chestnut trees that protected us from the sun, right near the white marble statue of Velléda. A woman behind me was chatting with a friend and their words lulled me: something about a certain Suzanne, who had been married to a certain Raymond. Raymond was a friend of Robert, and Robert the brother of one of the women. At first I tried to pay attention to what they were saying and gather some details that could act as reference points, so that the fates of Robert, Suzanne, and Raymond would gradually emerge from obscurity. Who knows? It’s possible that, by chance, whose infinite combinations will always remain a mystery, Suzanne, Robert, and Raymond might have crossed paths with Jansen one day in the street.

I was overcome by drowsiness. Words still reached me through a sundrenched fog: Raymond … Suzanne … Livry-Gargan … When you get down to it … Eye problems … Eze-sur-Mer, near Nice … The firehouse on Boulevard Diderot … The flow of passersby along the paths compounded this state of half-sleep. I recalled Jansen’s reflection,
“Don’t let it faze you, kid. I’ve fallen into my share of black holes too …” But this time, it wasn’t a black hole like the one I’d experienced at nineteen at the Café de la Paix. I was almost relieved at this progressive loss of identity. I could still make out a few words, as the women’s voices became softer, more distant. La Ferté-Alais … Skirt-chaser … Repaid in kind … Camper … Trip around the world …

I was going to disappear in this garden, amid the Easter Monday crowds. I was losing my memory and couldn’t understand French anymore, as the words of the women next to me had now become no more than onomatopoeias in my ear. The efforts I’d made for thirty years to have a trade, give my life some coherence, try to speak and write a language as best I could so as to be certain of my nationality—all that tension suddenly released. It was over. I was nothing now. Soon I would slip out of this park toward a metro stop, then a train station and a port. When the gates closed, all that would remain of me would be the raincoat I’d been wearing, rolled into a ball on a bench.

I remember that in the final days before he dropped out of sight, Jansen seemed at once absent and more preoccupied than usual. I’d say something to him and he wouldn’t answer. Or else, as if I’d interrupted his train of thought, he’d jump and politely ask me to repeat what I’d just said.

One evening, I had walked with him to his hotel on Boulevard Raspail, for it was less and less often that he slept in the studio. He’d pointed out that the hotel was only a hundred yards away from the one he’d lived in when he first came to Paris and that it had taken him almost thirty years to travel that short distance.

His face darkened and I could sense he wanted to tell me something. Finally he made up his mind to talk, but with such reticence that his statements were muddled, as if he had trouble expressing himself in French. From what I could understand, he had gone to the Belgian and Italian consulates to get a copy of his birth certificate and other documents he needed in anticipation of his departure. There had been some confusion. From Antwerp, his birthplace, they had sent the Italian consulate the records for a different Francis Jansen, and that one was dead.

I suppose he’d called from the studio to get further information about this homonym, since I found the following words on the flyleaf of the notebook in which I’d indexed his photos, scrawled in his near illegible handwriting, in Italian, as if they had been dictated to him: “Jansen Francis, nato a Herenthals in Belgio il 25 aprile 1917. Arrestato a Roma. Detenuto a Roma, Fossoli campo. Deportato da Fossoli il 26 giugno 1944. Deceduto in luogo e data ignoti.”