“Think it’s going to come to blows?” Jansen asked me.
We walked up to where he was standing and he blocked our way, hopping from foot to foot like a boxer about to throw a punch. I shoved him aside. His left hand landed on my cheek as if by reflex.
“Come along,” Jansen said to me.
And he led me away by the arm. The other man turned toward Jansen:
“Hey, you! Shutterbug! What’s your hurry?”
His voice had the metallic timbre and overly stressed diction of certain members of the Comédie Française. Nicole had told me he was also an actor and that he’d recorded himself on the soundtrack to his show, the last excerpt: a long passage from Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi. He was quite attached to it — apparently, it was the purple passage and crowning touch of his act.
We kept walking toward Place Denfert-Rochereau. I looked back. In the distance, beneath the sun, I could make out only his black suit and brown hair. Was it because of the graveyard’s proximity? There was something lugubrious about his silhouette.
“Is he following us?” Jansen asked.
“Yes.”
Then he told me that twenty years earlier, on the day when he was caught in a police roundup coming out of the George-V metro stop, he’d been sitting in the subway across from a brown-haired man in a dark suit. At first he’d taken him for a regular passenger but, a few minutes later, the man was among the team of plainclothesmen who were bringing them in to the lockup, he and about ten others. He had vaguely sensed the man following him in the subway corridors. Gil the Mime, with his black suit, reminded him of that plainclothesman.
He was still following us, hands in his pockets. I heard him whistling a tune that used to terrify me when I was a child: “There Was a Little Ship.”
We took a sidewalk table at the café where I’d first met Jansen. The other man stopped when he caught up to us and folded his arms. Jansen pointed at him for me.
“He’s as clingy as that cop from twenty years ago,” he said. “For all we know, maybe it’s him.”
The sun was blinding. In the harsh, shimmering light, a black spot was floating in front of us. It came closer. Now Gil the Mime stood out against the glare. Was he going to perform one of his shadow pantomimes for us, to a poem by Tristan Corbière?
He stood there, next to our table. Then he shrugged his shoulders and with an arrogant air strode off toward the Denfert-Rochereau metro stop.
“It’s time for me to leave Paris,” Jansen said. “This is all getting too tiresome and absurd.”
The more I remember these details, the more I adopt Jansen’s point of view. In the few weeks when I knew him, he considered people and things from a great distance, and all that remained for him were vague reference points and hazy silhouettes. And, through a kind of reciprocity, those people and things lost their consistency on contact with him. Could Gil the Mime and his wife still be alive somewhere? Try as I might to convince myself and imagine the following situation, I can’t really believe in it: thirty years later, I run into them in Paris; the three of us have grown older; we sit at a sidewalk café table and calmly share our memories of Jansen and the spring of 1964. Everything that seemed so mysterious to me becomes clear and even ordinary.
Such as the evening when Jansen had gotten together with several friends in the studio, just before leaving for Mexico — a “farewell party,” he said with a laugh …
Remembering that evening, I feel a need to latch onto those elusive silhouettes and capture them as if in a photograph. But after so many years, outlines become blurred, and a creeping, insidious doubt corrodes the faces. So many proofs and witnesses can disappear in thirty years. And besides, I had felt even at the time that the contact between Jansen and his friends had already loosened. He would never see them again and he didn’t seem to mind. They were probably surprised Jansen had invited them at all, after not having heard from him in so long. Conversations started and almost immediately died. And Jansen seemed so absent, he who should have been the point in common for all those people … It was as if they’d found themselves by chance in the same waiting room. The small number of them only accentuated the malaise: four, sitting very far apart from one another. Jansen had set up a buffet, which added to the strangeness of the evening. Now and then, someone stood up and walked to the buffet to get a glass of whiskey or a cracker, and the others’ silence enshrouded the event in an exceptional solemnity.
Among the guests at the “farewell party” were the Meyendorffs, a couple in their fifties whom Jansen had known for a long time: I’d catalogued a photo in which they figured in a garden with Colette Laurent. The man was dark, slim, with fine features, and wearing tinted glasses. He spoke in a very soft voice and was nice to me, even asking what I planned to do in life. He had been a doctor, but I don’t believe he still practiced. His wife, a small brunette, with hair pulled back in a bun and high cheekbones, had the strict air of a former ballet instructor and a slight American accent. The other two guests were Jacques Besse and Eugène Deckers, whom I’d spoken to on the telephone several times in Jansen’s absence.
Jacques Besse had been a talented musician as a young man. Eugène Deckers devoted his leisure time to painting and had renovated a huge loft on the Ile Saint-Louis.1 Belgian by birth, he made a living playing supporting roles in English B movies, since he was bilingual. But I knew nothing of that at the time. That evening, I was content just to watch them without asking too many questions. I was at an age where one often finds oneself in strange company; all things considered, these people were no stranger than anyone else.
Toward the end of the evening, the atmosphere relaxed. It was still light out and Eugène Deckers, trying to liven things up a bit, proposed that we all go have a drink outside, on the bench opposite the studio. We went out, leaving the door open. There were no more cars on Rue Froidevaux. We could hear the leaves trembling and the faraway rumble of traffic near Denfert-Rochereau.
Deckers was carrying a tray laden with aperitifs. Behind him, Jansen was dragging one of the studio armchairs, which he set in the middle of the sidewalk. He gestured for Mme de Meyendorff to have a seat. He was suddenly the Jansen of old, the one who had spent his evenings with Robert Capa. Deckers played the maître d’, balancing the tray on his hand. With his dark, curly hair and pirate’s face, one could easily imagine him taking part in those boisterous evenings Jansen had told me about, when Capa would cart him around in his green Ford. The awkwardness from earlier had lifted. Dr. de Meyendorff was seated on the bench next to Jacques Besse and was talking to him in his soft voice. Standing on the sidewalk, holding their glasses as if at a cocktail party, Mme de Meyendorff, Jansen, and Deckers were having a conversation. Mme de Meyendorff ended up sitting in the armchair, in the open air. Jansen turned to Jacques Besse:
“Will you sing us ‘Cambriole’?”
The song, written when he was twenty-two, had once made Jacques Besse’s reputation. He had even been held up as leader of a new generation of musicians.
“No, I don’t feel like it …”
He gave a sad smile. He had stopped writing music long ago.
Their voices now blended in the silence of the street: Dr. de Meyendorff’s, very soft and very slow; his wife’s, deeper; Deckers’s, punctuated by great bursts of laughter. Only Jacques Besse, a smile on his lips, remained silent on the bench, listening to de Meyendorff. I stood a bit apart, watching the entrance to the street that cut through the cemetery: maybe Gil the Mime would show up and keep his distance, arms crossed, thinking Nicole was coming to join us. But no.
At a certain moment, Jansen came up to me and said, “So? Happy? It’s beautiful out this evening … Life is just starting for you …”