That evening, he suddenly seemed intrigued by my activities. I’d answered that these pictures had documentary value, since they bore witness to people and things that no longer existed. He had shrugged.
“I can’t stand to look at them anymore …”
His voice took on a serious tone I’d never heard him use.
“You understand, kid, it’s like every one of those pictures was a kind of guilty conscience for me … It’s better to start from scratch …”
When he used an expression like “squaring the circle” or “start from scratch,” his accent became more pronounced.
He was forty-four years old at the time and today I understand better his state of mind. He would have liked to forget “all that,” come down with amnesia. But he hadn’t always felt this way. Indeed, on the back of every photo, he had written a detailed caption with the date he’d taken it, the place, the name of the person depicted, and even a few additional remarks. I pointed this out.
“I must have been as obsessive as you back then … But I’ve changed a lot since …”
The telephone rang, and he said what he always did:
“Tell whoever it is I’m not here.”
A woman’s voice. She had already called several times. A certain Nicole.
I was always the one who answered. Jansen didn’t even want to know who’d called. And I pictured him there alone, sitting at the far end of the sofa, listening to the rings as they followed each other in the silence.
Sometimes the doorbell rang. Jansen had asked me never to answer, because “people” —he used that vague term — might come in and wait for him in the studio. Every time it rang, I hid behind the sofa so that I couldn’t be seen through the picture window from the street. It suddenly felt as if I’d entered the studio illegally and I was afraid the people ringing, spotting a suspicious presence inside, would go report it to the nearest precinct.
The “last square”—his term — was coming to hound him. And in fact, I’d noticed it was always the same people who phoned. That woman Nicole, and also “the Meyendorffs,” as Jansen referred to them: the man or woman asked that he “call them back right away.” I jotted down the names on a piece of paper and gave him the messages, despite his complete lack of interest. I recently found, among other souvenirs, one of those pieces of paper bearing the names of Nicole and the Meyendorffs, along with the two other people who often rang up: Jacques Besse and Eugène Deckers.
Jansen called them the “last square” because the scope of his relations had gradually narrowed over the preceding years. I finally realized that Robert Capa’s death, and Colette Laurent’s not long afterward, had opened a void in his life.
I didn’t know much about Colette Laurent. She figured in a number of Jansen’s photos, but he only spoke of her indirectly.
Twenty years later, I discovered that I’d met this woman in my childhood and that I could have told Jansen something about her myself. But I hadn’t recognized her in the photos. All I had kept of her was an impression, a scent, dark brown hair, and a gentle voice asking me if I studied hard in school. Certain coincidences risk passing unnoticed; certain people have appeared in our lives on several occasions without our realizing it.
One spring, even earlier than the one when I met Jansen, when I was about ten years old, I was walking with my mother and we met a woman at the corner of Rue Saint-Guillaume and Boulevard Saint-Germain. We strolled together for a while, and she and my mother talked. What they said is lost in the mists of time, but I remembered the sundrenched sidewalk and her name: Colette. Later, I heard she’d died in dubious circumstances during a trip abroad, and it had struck me. I had to wait several decades for a link to emerge between those two moments of my life: the afternoon on the corner of Rue Saint-Guillaume and my visits to Jansen’s studio on Rue Froidevaux. Just half an hour on foot from one point to the other, but such a long distance in time … And the link was Colette Laurent, about whom I know almost nothing, except that she’d been very important to Jansen and that she’d lived a turbulent life. She had come to Paris when she was very young, from a distant province.
Not long ago I tried to imagine her first day in the capital and I felt sure it was much like today, with long stretches of clear sky alternating with sudden showers. Wind from the Atlantic shakes the tree branches and turns umbrellas inside out. Pedestrians huddle in doorways. You can hear the seagulls crying. Sunlight glistens on wet sidewalks near the Quai d’Austerlitz and on the walls around the Jardin des Plantes. She walked for the first time through a city sluiced out and laden with promise. She had just arrived at the Gare de Lyon.
Here’s another memory of Colette Laurent, from my childhood. In the summer, my parents would rent a tiny cottage in Deauville, near Avenue de la République. Colette Laurent had shown up unexpectedly one day. She looked very tired. She shut herself in the small living room and slept for two days straight. My mother and I spoke in whispers so as not to disturb her.
On the morning when she finally woke up, she offered to take me to the beach. I walked next to her beneath the arcades. When we reached the Clément Marot bookstore, we crossed the street. She put her hand on my shoulder. Instead of continuing straight on to the beach, she dragged me to the Hôtel Royal. At the entrance, she said, “Go ask the man at the front desk if he has a letter for Colette.”
I walked into the lobby and, stammering, asked the concierge if he had “a letter for Colette.” He didn’t seem surprised by the question. He handed me a very large, very thick brown envelope on which someone had written her name in blue ink: COLETTE.
I exit the hotel and hand her the envelope. She opens it and looks inside. Still today I wonder what it contained.
Then she walks with me to the beach. We sit on deckchairs, near the Soleil bar. At that time of day, there’s no one there but us.
I had bought two red Clairefontaine notebooks, one for me, the other for Jansen, so that I could catalogue his photos in duplicate. I was afraid he’d misplace the fruit of my labors en route to Mexico, out of indifference or carelessness, so I decided to keep a copy. Today it makes me feel odd when I leaf through the pages: it’s like reading a very detailed catalogue of images that don’t exist. What became of them, when we’re not even sure what became of their maker? Did Jansen bring the three suitcases with him, or did he destroy it all before leaving? I had asked him what he was planning to do with those suitcases and he’d said that they were weighing him down, and that he especially didn’t want any “excess baggage.” But he didn’t offer to leave them with me in Paris. At best, they’ve now more or less rotted away in some suburb of Mexico City.
One evening when I’d stayed in the studio later than usual, he came home just as I was copying over in the second notebook what I’d already written in the first. He had leaned over my shoulder:
“That’s painstaking work, kid … Aren’t you tired?”
I sensed a touch of sarcasm in his voice.
“If I were you, I’d go further … I wouldn’t stop at just two notebooks … I’d make an alphabetical index of every person and place that appears in those photos …”
He smiled. I was disconcerted. I felt he was laughing at me. The next day, I started compiling an alphabetical index in a large register. I was sitting on the sofa, among the piles of photos that I took from the suitcases a few at a time, and I wrote by turns in the two notebooks and in the register. This time, Jansen’s smile froze and he looked at me in amazement.