Suspended Sentences (21 page)

“Hello? … Who’s calling, please?”

Then, turning to my father, she whispered the name. And she added:

“Should I tell him you’re here, Albert?”

“No. I’m not here for anyone …”

And that’s how the afternoons passed. Empty. Simone Cordier typed letters. My father and I often went to the movies on the Champs-Elysées. He took me to see revivals of films he’d enjoyed. One of them featured the German actress Dita Parlo. After the
movie, we walked down the avenue. He had told me in a confiding tone, which was unusual for him:

“Simone was a friend of Dita Parlo’s … I met the two of them at the same time.”

Then he’d fallen silent, and the silence between us lasted until Place de la Concorde, where he’d asked me about my studies.

Ten years later, I was looking for someone to type up my first novel for me. I had found Simone Cordier’s address. I called her. She seemed surprised I should still remember her after all that time, but she made an appointment to see me at her home on Rue de Belloy.

I entered the apartment, my manuscript under my arm. First she asked me for news of my father and I didn’t know what to answer, as I didn’t have any.

“So, you’re writing novels?”

I answered yes in a halting voice. She showed me into a space that must have been the living room, but it no longer had any furniture. The tan paint on the walls was peeling in spots.

“Let’s go to the bar,” she said.

And with an abrupt movement she pointed to a small white bar at the back of the room. The gesture had struck me at the time as rather offhanded, but now I realize how much shame and confusion it masked. She went to stand behind the bar. I put my manuscript down on it.

“Shall I pour you a whiskey?” she asked.

I didn’t dare say no. We were both standing, on opposite sides of the bar, in the dim light of a wall lamp. She poured herself a whiskey as well.

“Do you take it the same as me? Neat?”

“Sure.”

I hadn’t had whiskey since the Danish girl had given me some at Chez Malafosse, so long before …

She downed a large gulp.

“So you want me to type all that for you?”

She pointed to the manuscript.

“You know, I haven’t been a typist in a long time …”

She hadn’t aged. The same green eyes. The beautiful architecture of her face had remained intact: her forehead, the arch of her eyebrows, her straight nose. Only her skin had gone a bit florid.

“I’ll have to get back into the swing of it … I’ve gotten kind of rusty.”

I suddenly wondered where she could possibly type anything in that empty room. Standing, with the typewriter resting on the bar?

“If it’s a problem,” I said, “we can forget it …”

“No, no, it’s no problem …”

She poured herself another whiskey.

“I’ll get back into the swing of it … I’ll rent a typewriter.”

She slapped the flat of her hand down on the bar.

“You leave me three pages and come back in two weeks … Then you can bring me three more pages … And so on and so forth … Sound all right to you?”

“Sure.”

“Another whiskey?”

After leaving Simone Cordier’s apartment, I didn’t immediately take the metro at Boissière. Night had fallen and I wandered aimlessly around the quarter.

I had left her three pages of my manuscript, without harboring much hope that she’d type them. She had shrugged her shoulders when I’d said I hadn’t heard from my father in five years. Apparently, nothing could surprise her about “Albert,” not even his disappearance.

It had rained. A smell of gasoline and wet leaves hovered in the air. Suddenly, I thought of Pacheco. I imagined him walking on the same sidewalk. I had gotten as far as the Hôtel Baltimore. I knew that one evening he’d gone to meet someone at that hotel and I
wondered what sort of person he might have seen there. Perhaps Angel Maquignon.

The only information I’d ever gleaned about Pacheco had come by chance, in the course of a conversation, at Claude Bernard’s house on the Ile des Loups. We were having dinner with an antiques dealer from Brussels whom he’d introduced as his associate. By what circuitous path had we come, that man and I, to speak of the duc de Bellune, then of Philippe de Bellune, alias de Pacheco? The name rang a bell with him. When he was very young, he had known, on a beach in Belgium, at Heist near Zee-brugge, a certain Felipe de Pacheco. The latter lived with his grandparents, in a dilapidated villa on the dike. He claimed to be Peruvian.

Felipe de Pacheco frequented the Hôtel du Phare, where the owner, who had been a diva at the Liège Opera, sometimes gave recitals for the evening clientele. He was in love with her daughter, a very pretty blonde named Lydia. He spent his nights drinking beer with his friends from Brussels. He slept until noon. He had abandoned his studies and was living by his wits. His grandparents were too old to keep an eye on him.

And several years later, in Paris, my interlocutor had again met this boy in a drama class, where he was calling himself Philippe de Bellune. He was taking the course in the company of a girl with light brown hair. He was a dark young man with a spot on one eye. One day, this Philippe de Bellune announced that he’d just found a well-paying job through the want ads.

They had never been seen again. Neither Philippe de Bellune nor the girl with light brown hair. It must have been the winter of 1942.

I scoured the job offers placed in the newspapers that winter:

Several young persons needed for lucrative work, immediate payment, no special qualifications required. Write to Delbarre or Etève, Hôtel Baltimore, 88-bis Avenue Kléber, 16th. Or come to that address after 7 p.m.

I recall a Hôtel de Belgique on Boulevard Magenta, not far from the Gare du Nord. It’s the area where my father spent his childhood. And my mother arrived in Paris for the first time at the Gare du Nord.

Today, I felt like going back to that neighborhood, but the Gare du Nord seemed so far away to me that I gave up. Hôtel de Belgique … I was sixteen years old when my mother and I washed up one summer in Knokke-le-Zoute, like two drifters. Some friends of hers were kind enough to take us in.

One evening, the two of us were walking along the large dike at Albert-Plage. We had left behind the casino and an area of dunes past which began the dike of Heist-sur-Mer. Did we pass by the Hôtel du Phare? On our way back, via Avenue Elisabeth, I had noticed several abandoned villas, one of which might have belonged to Felipe de Pacheco’s grandparents.

Last night, I accompanied my daughter to the neighborhood around Les Gobelins. Heading back, the taxi took Rue de la Santé, where a café of the type that used to carry a sign saying
WOOD COAL SPIRITS
was bathed in green light. On Boulevard Arago, I couldn’t keep my eyes off the dark and interminable wall of La Santé prison. It was there that they used to set up the guillotine, back when. Once again I thought of my father, his release from the warehouse on the Quai de la Gare, and of Pagnon, who no doubt had come to fetch him that night. I knew that Pagnon himself had been imprisoned at La Santé in 1941, before being freed by “Henri,” the head of the Rue Lauriston gang.

The taxi had reached Denfert-Rochereau and taken the avenue that runs past Saint-Vincent-de-Paul hospital, the Observatoire, and the Bureau des Longitudes. It headed for the Seine. In my dreams, I often take this route: I emerge from a place of detention that might be La Santé or the warehouse on the Quai de la Gare. It’s night. Someone is waiting for me, in a large automobile with leather seats. We leave this neighborhood of hospitals, convents, wine markets, leather markets, and prisons, and head for the Seine. The instant we touch the Right Bank, after crossing the Pont du Carrousel and the grand archways of the Louvre, I breathe a sigh of relief. I have nothing more to fear. We’ve left the danger zone behind us. I’m perfectly aware it’s only a respite. Later on, I’ll be called to account. I feel a certain guilt, the reason for which remains vague: a crime to which I was an accomplice or witness, I couldn’t really say. And I hope this ambiguity will spare me from punishment. What does this dream correspond to in
real life? To the memory of my father who, under the Occupation, had also experienced an ambiguous situation: arrested in a roundup by French detectives without knowing what he was guilty of, and freed by a member of the Rue Lauriston gang? The latter used several deluxe automobiles that their former owners had abandoned in the exodus of June 1940. “Henri” drove a white Bentley that had belonged to the duc de Cadaval, and Pagnon a Lancia that the German writer Erich Maria Remarque, departing for America, had left with a garage mechanic on Rue La Boétie. And it was no doubt in Remarque’s purloined Lancia that Pagnon had come for my father. How strange it must have been to walk out of the “hole”—as my father called it—and find yourself in one of those automobiles that smelled of leather, slowly crossing Paris toward the Right Bank after curfew … But sooner or later, everyone is called to account.

That dream I often have of a car ride from the Left Bank to the Right, in unsettled circumstances, is something that I, too, experienced, when I ran away from school in January 1960, age fourteen and a half. The bus I’d taken at La Croix de Berny dropped me off at the Porte d’Orléans, in front of the Café de la Rotonde, which occupied the ground floor of one of the buildings massed along the periphery. On the rare occasions when we were let out for a day, we had to assemble on Monday morning at seven in front of the Café de la Rotonde and wait for the bus that would bring us back to school. It was a kind of luxuriously appointed correctional facility for delinquents, castoffs from rich families, illegitimate children born to women they used to call “tarts,” or children abandoned during a trip to Paris like unwanted luggage: such as my bunkmate, the Brazilian Mello Rodrigues, who hadn’t heard from his parents in over a year … In order to teach us the discipline that our “families” hadn’t instilled in us, the administration practiced a military academy–style rigor: parade marches, morning flag salutes, corporal punishment, standing at attention, evening inspections of the dormitories, countless laps around the fitness trail on Thursday afternoons …

That Monday, January 18, 1960, I followed the reverse path: from the Café de la Rotonde—so lugubrious on Monday mornings in winter, when we went back to the “hole” via Montrouge and Malakoff—I took the metro to Saint-Germain-des-Prés. At Chez Malafosse, the Danish girl said:

“A whiskey for Old Top here …”

The waiter, behind the bar, smiled and said:

“We don’t serve alcohol to minors, Mademoiselle.”

She let me take a sip from her glass. The whiskey had a particularly acrid taste, but it gave me the courage to confess that I couldn’t go home, as my parents were both away until the following month.

“So you just have to go back to your school,” said the one wearing dark glasses and smoking yellow cigarettes.

I explained that that was impossible: if a student ran away, the punishment was always immediate expulsion. They’d refuse to keep me.

“And there’s nobody home at all?”

“Nobody.”

“And can’t we get hold of your parents?”

“No.”

“Don’t you have the key to your house?”

“No.”

“I’ll take care of Old Top,” said the Danish girl.

She rested her hand on my shoulder. We took our leave of the others and walked out of Chez Malafosse. Her car was parked a little farther on, along the river, past the Ecole des Beaux-Arts: a navy blue Peugeot 203 with red leather seats. I knew that car. I’d seen it in the neighborhood several times, in front of the Louisiane and Montana hotels.

I was sitting next to her on the front seat. She peeled away from the curb.

“Someone is going to have to look after you,” she said in a calm voice.

We followed the quays and crossed the Seine via the Pont de la Concorde. On the Right Bank, I felt better, as if the Seine were a border that protected me from a savage hinterland. We were far from the Café de la Rotonde, La Croix de Berny, and the school … But I couldn’t help thinking of the future with anxiety, as I felt I’d done something irreparable.

“Do you think it’s serious?” I asked her.

“What’s serious?”

She turned to me.

“No, of course not, old top … It’ll work out …”

Her Danish accent reassured me. We drove alongside the Cours la Reine, and I told myself I could at least rely on her.

“They’ll tell the police.”

“Are you afraid of the police?”

She smiled and her periwinkle eyes rested on me.

“Don’t you worry, old top …”

The soft, husky rustle of her voice dissipated my anxiety. We had arrived at Place de l’Alma and were driving along the avenue that leads to Trocadéro. It was the route the 63 bus followed when we took it, my brother and I, to go to the Bois de Boulogne. When it was nice out, we stood on the platform.

She did not turn right, onto the tree-shaded avenue that the number 63 took. She parked the car in front of the large modern buildings at the end of Avenue Paul-Doumer.

“This is where I live.”

On the ground floor, we took a long hallway lit by neons. A silhouette in a raincoat was waiting at her door. A tall, dark man with a fine mustache. A cigarette was hanging from the corner of his mouth. He, too, was someone I’d seen around the streets of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

“I didn’t have the key,” he said.

He smiled at me, looking mildly surprised.

“He’s a pal of mine,” she said, pointing to me.

“Nice to meet you.”

He shook my hand. She said to me:

“Go take a walk, old top … Come back in an hour … This evening, I’ll take you to a restaurant and afterward we’ll go to the movies …”

She opened her door and the two of them went in. Then she poked her head through the doorway.

“Don’t forget the number of the room when you come back. It’s 23 …”

With her finger she showed me the figure 23, in gilded metal on the pale wood.

“Come back in an hour … This evening, we’ll go have a good tuck-in in Montmartre, at the San Cristobal …”