“That used to be my studio. Can you believe it?”
There was something about him, although they couldn’t quite put their finger on what, that contradicted the big, brutal features of his face.
“You have to admit, sometimes very strange coincidences happen in life…”
“Are you a painter?” Odile asked, continuing to pet the dog.
“I was, yes. When I lived in the studio. I drew covers for music-hall programs. But I’m not going to tell you my life story. By the way, did you keep the bar and the fan?”
“Yes,” Louis said.
“The Chinese drawings are mine.”
He looked at Odile and Louis with his sensitive eyes, head raised, a slightly ironic smile on his lips.
“I haven’t introduced myself. Bauer. Let me invite you over to my place for a plum schnaps, to celebrate this strange coincidence. It’s right nearby.”
His voice was so commanding that they truly had no choice but to accept.
On avenue Junot, they walked through the entrance arch of one those little buildings built in the thirties, with bay windows and arcades. Bauer and the dog preceded them.
“Would you mind keeping as quiet as you can?” he said in his deep voice. “My mother is sleeping.”
They walked down the hall on tiptoe and into an enormous room, either a living room or dining room. Bauer quietly shut the door behind them.
“Now we can talk. My mother won’t hear anything while we’re in here.”
The room was furnished with a sideboard, a table, and rustic-style walnut-colored chairs. A Tyrolean pendulum clock on the wall between the two windows, an armchair upholstered in cream-colored silk, and some roses in a vase on the shelf of the sideboard made the decor a little more cheerful. Louis noticed a photograph, taken into the light, of a man leaning against the mast of a sailboat, his silhouette sharp against the background of a glittering sea.
“Alain Gerbault… I knew him well when I was seventeen,” Bauer said.
That photo gave a nostalgic charm to the room, like a breath of fresh air from the open sea or the sound of a Hawaiian ukelele.
“Have a seat. Please, sit down.”
The table was covered with an oilskin cloth. The dog climbed up onto a chair next to Odile and stayed there, alert, not letting Bauer out of his sight while he poured some plum schnaps into champagne flutes for them.
“Your dog looks like he wants some too!” Odile said.
Bauer laughed. “All right. Why not? A glass for the dog.”
He filled another flute right to the rim and pushed it toward the suspicious dog. Then he took a large green leather album out of one of the sideboard drawers.
“Here you go. Souvenirs from back when I lived in the studio. Where you live now.”
Louis had opened the album and Bauer stayed standing behind him and Odile and the dog. The first two pages had a single photograph each, protected by a sheet of clear plastic. Two men with regular features, one dark and the other blond. The photos were from the thirties.
“Pierre Meyer and van Duren. Two music-hall artists,” Bauer said. “The two men I admired more than anyone else in my life.”
“Why?” Odile asked.
“Because they were beautiful,” Bauer said in a peremptory tone. “They committed suicide, both of them. Alain Gerbault too, in a way.”
Louis turned the album’s pages. There were covers of various music-hall programs signed “Bauer” in a large, slashing hand.
“You didn’t know my mother, by any chance, did you?” Louis asked. “She worked at the Tabarin.”
“Your mother? No, my boy. I didn’t know anyone at the Tabarin. I usually worked for Mistinguett.”
There were photos on the following pages of young people, with their names and dates getting closer and closer to the present. The generations passed, one after the other, and in the middle of all these young people, each more dazzling than the last, was an older man with an ordinary, fat face, sinuous lips, and wrinkles around his eyes.
“That’s Tonton, from Liberty’s.”
The harsh light from the hanging lamp was reflected as gleams from the sheets of plastic covering all the mementos. The dog seemed interested in the album, too: He sniffed and snorted from time to time, and his breath clouded up the photographs whenever Louis didn’t turn the page in time. Odile leaned her head on Louis’s shoulder to see better.
“They’re fascinating, your photos,” she said. “Do you look at them often?”
“No. They depress me.”
“Why?”
“It’s sad to think about all those beautiful boys, all old now, or dead. And I’m still here, like a rotting old hulk that has seen them all come and go. Nothing’s left but their photos. I wanted to make another album, of all the dogs I’ve had in my life, but I don’t have the strength.”
His voice was hoarse. He let himself sink into a chair and took Odile’s hand.
“You’re still too young to understand, my dear. But when I look through this album and see them, one after the other, I have a feeling of waves, approaching and breaking, then another, then another…”
Louis was stunned. He couldn’t believe his eyes. Under the shining plastic sheet was a photo of Brossier and Bejardy, next to each other, Brossier’s face round and still partly a child’s, Bejardy barely twenty-five, with wavy black hair and the face and smile of a charmer.
“Did you know them?” Louis asked, wiping off the condensation that the dog’s breath had left on the plastic.
Bauer pulled the album onto his lap for a look.
“Yes, yes… The short one, there, who looks like Roland Toutain, I told him to go take an acting class.” His finger was pointing to Brossier. “Nothing came of it. I even got him a job working with me at an antique shop. Later, I think he became a flight attendant. Air Brazzaville. The other one, that’s different. He tried to sell me paintings… He turned out badly. He went on trial for killing an American. Acquitted. I kept the articles from the papers, if you’re interested… He ended up running a restaurant on a boat, in Neuilly. Even wanted me to do the decorations, something ‘pirate-themed.’ Do you want the press clippings about him?”
“Sure, thank you,” Louis said, pretending it didn’t much matter to him.
Slipping a hand under the photograph, Bauer pulled out an envelope and handed it to Louis, who slipped it into his pocket right away, as though it were a bag of cocaine.
“I’m so glad these things of the past still interest you,” Bauer said.
“Where did you meet them?” Odile asked, stunned.
“Meet them? I don’t know anymore. At Tonton’s place, maybe. I’m losing my memory… All right, children, that’s enough for now.”
He abruptly closed the album and put it back in the sideboard drawer.
“If you’re good, I’ll give you that album someday.”
Louis stood up, in a state of great confusion. He stood stock-still, dazed by his discovery.
“Allow me,” Bauer said, making a sign for him to sit back down.
He had a camera in his hand and was attaching a tiny flash.
“I just bought it. You can get a color photo instantly… Move closer, you two. Guy, you too.”
Louis turned around, and Bauer smiled.
“Guy is my dog.”
Guy pressed his muzzle into Odile’s wrist. Bauer looked through the viewfinder.
“Very nice. I’ll get all three of you.”
The flash made Louis blink. He thought about Bejardy and Brossier. But he also repeated in his mind Bauer’s little phrase: “waves, approaching and breaking, then another, then another…” No doubt Bauer would stick their photo in his album, with the date, and then Odile and he and the dog would have been nothing but one wave coming after all the others.