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.”
That evening, we had walked by his hotel and continued on toward the Carrefour Montparnasse. He no longer knew which man he was. He told me that after a certain number of years, we accept a truth that we’ve intuited but kept hidden from ourselves, out of carelessness or cowardice: a brother, a double died in our stead on an unknown date and in an unknown place, and his shadow ends up merging with us.
SUSPENDED SENTENCES
For Dominique
There is scarce a family that can count four generations but lays a claim to some dormant title or some castle and estate: a claim not prosecutable in any court of law, but flattering to the fancy and a great alleviation of idle hours. A man’s claim to his own past is yet less valid.
It was in the days when theater companies toured not just France, Switzerland, and Belgium, but also North Africa. I was ten years old. My mother had gone on the road for a play, and my brother and I were living with friends of hers, in a small town just outside of Paris.
A two-story house with an ivy-covered façade. One of the windows — the kind they call bow windows — extended from the living room. Behind the house, a terraced garden. Hidden at the back of the first terrace, under a clematis, was the grave of Doctor Guillotin. Had he lived in that house? Was it where he’d perfected his device for severing heads? At the very top of the garden were two apple trees and a pear tree.
Small enamel tags hanging from silver chains around the liquor decanters bore names like Izarra, Sherry, Curaçao. Honeysuckle invaded the sloping roof of the well, in the middle of the courtyard just before the garden. The telephone sat on a pedestal table next to one of the living room windows.
A fence protected the front of the house, which stood back slightly from Rue du Docteur-Dordaine. One day they’d repainted the fence after coating it with red lead. Was it really red lead, that sickly orange coating that remains so vivid in my memory? Rue du Docteur-Dordaine looked like a village street, especially at the far end: a nuns’ convent, then a farm where we went to get milk, and beyond that, the chateau. If you walked down the street on the right-hand sidewalk, you went past the post office; across the street, on the left, you could make out behind a fence the nursery of the florist whose son sat next to me in class. A little farther on, on the same side as the post office, the wall of the Jeanne d’Arc school, tucked away behind the leaves of the plane trees.
Opposite our house was a gently sloping avenue. It was bordered on the right by the Protestant temple and by a small wooded area, in the thickets of which we’d found a German soldier’s helmet; on the left, by a long, white house with pediments, which had a large garden and a weeping willow. Farther down, adjacent to the garden, was the Robin des Bois inn.
At the bottom of the avenue, and perpendicular to it, was the main road. Toward the right, the perpetually deserted square in front of the train station, where we learned how to ride bikes. In the other direction, you skirted the town park. On the left-hand sidewalk was a kind of concrete mall that housed, all in a row, the news dealer’s, the movie theater, and the drugstore. The druggist’s son was one of my schoolmates and, one night, his father hanged himself from a rope that he’d attached to the mall balcony. It seems people hang themselves in summer. In the other seasons, they prefer drowning in rivers. That’s what the mayor had told the news dealer.
After that, an empty lot where they held the market every Friday. Sometimes the big top of a traveling circus set up there, or the stalls of a fairground.
You then came to the town hall and the grade crossing. After passing over the latter, you followed the high road that went up to the church square and the monument to the dead. For one Christmas Mass, my brother and I had been choirboys in that church.
There were only women in the house where the two of us lived.
Little Hélène was a brunette of about forty, with a wide forehead and prominent cheekbones. Her very short stature made her seem more like us. She had a slight limp from an accident on the job. She had been a circus rider, then an acrobat, and that gave her a certain cachet in our eyes. The circus — as my brother and I had discovered one afternoon at the Médrano — was a world we wanted to join. She told us she’d stopped plying her trade a long time ago and she showed us a photo album with pictures of her in her rider’s and acrobat’s costumes, and pages from music hall programs that mentioned her name: Hélène Toch. I often asked her to lend me the album so I could look through it in bed, before going to sleep.