Suspended Sentences

AFTERIMAGE

I met Francis Jansen when I was nineteen, in the spring of 1964, and today I want to relate the little I know about him.

It was early morning, in a café on Place Denfert-Rochereau. I was there in the company of a girl my age, and Jansen was at a table facing ours. He was watching us and smiling. Then, from a bag placed next to him on the imitation leather bench, he pulled out a Rolleiflex. I barely realized he’d trained his lens on us — that’s how quick and casual his movements were. He used a Rolleiflex, but I couldn’t say much about Jansen’s technique or the papers he printed on, which infused all his photos with their particular light.

On the morning we met, I remember asking him, out of politeness, what he considered the best kind of camera. He shrugged his shoulders and admitted that, all things considered, he preferred those small black plastic cameras you can buy in toy stores, the kind that squirt water when you press the trigger.

He treated us to coffee and asked us to be his models again, but this time out in the street. An American magazine had hired him to illustrate an article on Paris youth, and he’d chosen the two of us, simple as that: it was easier and would go faster. And even if they weren’t satisfied back in the States, it didn’t matter: he just wanted to get this bread-and-butter assignment over with. We left the café and walked in the sun, and I heard him mutter with his slight accent:

“Goddamn spring.”

A reflection he must have repeated many times that season.

He had us sit on a bench, then he posed us in front of a wall shaded by a row of trees, on Avenue Denfert-Rochereau. I’ve kept one of those shots. My girlfriend and I are sitting on the bench. To me it’s as if they were other people, not us, because of the years that have passed, or maybe because of what Jansen saw through his lens, which we wouldn’t have seen in a mirror at the time: two anonymous teenagers lost in Paris.

We went with him to his studio on Rue Froidevaux, a few steps away. I sensed he was apprehensive about being alone.

The studio was on the ground floor of an apartment building, and you entered it directly from the street. A large room with white walls, at the back of which a small flight of stairs led up to a loft. A bed took up the entire space of the loft. The only furnishings were a gray sofa and two armchairs of matching color. Next to the brick fireplace, three brown leather suitcases stacked one on top of the other. Nothing on the walls. Except two photos. The larger one was of a woman, a certain Colette Laurent, as I would learn. On the other, two men — one of whom was Jansen, younger — were sitting side by side in a shattered bathtub, among some ruins. Despite my shyness, I couldn’t help asking Jansen about them. He’d answered that it was he, with his friend Robert Capa, in Berlin, in August 1945.

Until that day, I’d never heard of Jansen. But I knew who Robert Capa was, having seen his photos of the Spanish Civil War and read an article about his death in Indochina.

Years have passed. Rather than clouding the image of Capa and Jansen, they’ve had the opposite effect: the picture is much sharper in my memory now than it was that spring.

On the photo, Jansen looked sort of like Capa’s double, or rather, like a little brother that the latter had taken under his wing. As much as Capa — with his dark brown hair, dark gaze, and the cigarette dangling from the corner of his lips — exuded brashness and joie de vivre, so Jansen — blond, skinny, light eyes, timid, melancholic smile — looked ill at ease. And Capa’s arm resting on Jansen’s shoulder was not merely friendly. It was as if he were holding him up.

We sat on the armchairs and Jansen offered us whiskey. He went to the back of the room and opened a door that led to a former kitchen, which he’d turned into a darkroom. Then he came back toward us.

“I’m awfully sorry, there isn’t any more whiskey.”

He sat a bit stiffly, legs crossed, at the very end of the sofa, as if he were only visiting. My girlfriend and I didn’t try to break the silence. The room, with its white walls, was very light. The two chairs and the sofa were placed too far from each other, creating a feeling of emptiness. It was as if Jansen had already stopped living there. The three suitcases, whose leather reflected the sunlight, suggested imminent departure.

“If you’re interested,” he said, “I’ll show you the photos when they’re developed.”

I had jotted down his phone number on a cigarette pack. Besides, he’d added, he was in the book. Jansen, 9 Rue Froidevaux. DANton 75–21.

At times, it seems, our memories act much like Polaroids. In nearly thirty years, I hardly ever thought about Jansen. We’d known each other over a very short period of time. He left France in June of 1964, and I’m writing this in April 1992. I never received word from him and I don’t know if he’s dead or alive. The memory of him had remained dormant, but now it has suddenly come flooding back this early spring of 1992. Is it because I came across the picture of my girlfriend and me, on the back of which a blue stamp says Photo by Jansen. All rights reserved? Or for the simple reason that every spring looks the same?

Today the air was light, the buds had burst on the trees in the gardens of the Observatoire, and the month of April 1992 merged by an effect of superimposition with the month of April 1964. The memory of Jansen pursued me all afternoon and would follow me forever: Jansen would remain someone I’d barely had time to know.

Who can tell? Someone else will write a book about him, illustrated with the pictures he’ll find. There’s a series of small black paperbacks devoted to famous photographers: why not one about him? He deserves it. In the meantime, it would make me glad if these pages rescued him from oblivion — though that oblivion is his own doing, deliberately sought.

I think I should set down the few biographical facts I’ve managed to piece together: He was born in 1920 in Antwerp and he barely knew his father. He and his mother were of Italian nationality. In 1938, after several years spent studying in Brussels, he left Belgium for Paris. There, he worked as an assistant to several photographers. He met Robert Capa, who in January 1939 brought him to Barcelona and Figueras, where they followed the exodus of Spanish refugees toward the French border. In July of that same year, he covered the Tour de France with Capa. When war was declared, Capa offered to take him to the United States and obtained two visas. At the last moment, Jansen decided to stay in France. He spent the first two years of the Occupation in Paris. Thanks to an Italian journalist, he worked for the photo services of the magazine Tempo. But despite this, he was picked up during a raid and interned as a Jew at the Drancy transit camp. He stayed there until the day the Italian consulate managed to have its citizens freed. Then he took refuge in the Haute-Savoie and waited out the rest of the war. Back in Paris, he was reunited with Capa and accompanied him to Berlin. During the following years, he worked for Magnum. After Capa’s death and that of Colette Laurent — the woman friend whose portrait I’d seen on the wall of his studio — he withdrew further and further into himself.

I feel somewhat awkward giving these details, and I can imagine how embarrassed Jansen would be if he saw them set down here in black and white. He was a man of few words. He did everything he could to be forgotten, including leaving for Mexico in June 1964 and completely dropping out of sight. He often told me, “When I get there, I’ll send a postcard so you have my address.” I waited for it in vain. I doubt he’ll ever come across these pages. If he were to, then I’d receive that postcard, from Cuernavaca or somewhere else, with just these words: “Be quiet.”

But no, I wouldn’t receive a thing. I only have to look at his photos to rediscover the quality he possessed in art as in life, which is so precious but so hard to acquire: keeping silent. One afternoon I’d paid him a visit and he’d given me the picture of my girlfriend and me on the bench. He’d asked what I was planning to do with my future, and I’d answered, “Write.”

That activity struck him as “squaring the circle”—the exact phrase he’d used. Indeed, writing is done with words, whereas he was after silence. A photograph can express silence. But words? That he would have found interesting: managing to create silence with words. He had burst out laughing.

“So, are you going to try? I’m counting on you. But most of all, don’t lose any sleep over it …”

Of all the punctuation marks, he told me, ellipses were his favorite.

I asked him about the pictures he’d been taking for nearly twenty-five years. He pointed to the three leather suitcases, stacked one on top of the other.

“I put everything in there … If you’re interested …”

He stood up and nonchalantly opened the topmost suitcase. It was full to the brim and a few pictures fell out. He didn’t even bother picking them up. He rummaged around inside, and other photos spilled from the valise and lay scattered on the floor. He finally fished out a volume and handed it to me.

“Here … I did this when I was about your age. This must be the last remaining copy in the world. It’s yours …”

It was a copy of Sun and Snow, published in Geneva, Switzerland, by the publisher La Colombière in 1946.

I picked the prints up off the floor and put them back in the suitcase. I said it was a shame to leave them all helter-skelter like that, that someone should organize and catalogue the contents of the three suitcases. He looked at me in surprise.

“You won’t have time … I have to leave for Mexico next month.”

Still, I could try to finish by then. I had nothing else to do during the day, since I’d dropped out of school and had earned a little money — enough to live on for a year — from the sale of some furniture, paintings, carpets, and books from an abandoned apartment.

I’ll never know what Jansen thought of my initiative. I think he probably didn’t care. But he gave me the spare key to the studio so I could come work when he was out. I was often all alone in the large room with its white walls. And every time Jansen came home, he looked startled to see me. One evening as I was sorting the photos, he took a seat on the sofa and watched me without a word. Finally, he asked, “Why are you doing this?”

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.

“I was joking, kid … And you took me seriously …”

But I wasn’t joking. I had taken on this job because I refused to accept that people and things could disappear without a trace. How could anyone resign himself to that? After all, Jansen had shown the same concern. Reading over the index, which I still have, I notice that a lot of his pictures were scenes of Paris or portraits. On the backs of the earliest ones he had written down where they’d been taken; otherwise it would have been hard for me to identify most of them. They showed steps, curbs, gutters, benches, shredded posters on walls or barricades. No taste for the picturesque, but simply his own eye, an eye whose sad and attentive expression I can still recall.

Among the photos, on a sheet of letter paper, I had discovered some notes in Jansen’s hand, titled “Natural Light.” It was for an article that a film journal had requested, since he’d worked pro bono as a technical adviser to several young directors in the early sixties, teaching them how to use floodlights like American newsreel cameramen during the war. Why had those notes impressed me so deeply at the time? Since then, I’ve come to realize how hard it is to find what Jansen called “natural light.”

He had told me that he shredded street posters himself to uncover the ones hidden beneath the newer strata. He pulled the strips down layer by layer and photographed them meticulously, stage by stage, down to the last scraps of paper that remained on the billboard or stone wall.

I had numbered the photos in chronological order:

325. Fence on Rue des Envierges

326. Wall, Rue Gasnier-Guy

327. Steps on Rue Lauzin

328. Passerelle de la Mare

329. Garage on Rue Janssen

330. Site of the old cedar tree at the corner of Rue Alphonse-Daudet and Rue Leneveux

331. Slope of Rue Westermann

332. Colette, Rue de l’Aude

I drew up a list of individuals whose portraits Jansen had taken. He had approached them at random, in the street, in cafés, while taking a walk.

My walk, today, took me as far as the Orangerie in the Jardins du Luxembourg. I crossed the shaded area under the chestnut trees, near the tennis courts. I stopped at the bowling ground. Several men were playing a match. My attention was caught by the tallest of them, who was wearing a white shirt. One of Jansen’s pictures came to mind, on the back of which was written a caption that I’d copied onto my list: Michel L., Quai de Passy. Date unknown. A young man in a white shirt resting his elbow on a marble mantelpiece in very bright light.

Jansen clearly recalled the circumstances surrounding that photo. He was broke, and Robert Capa, who had connections, found him an easy, well-paying assignment. He had to go to an American woman’s home on the Quai de Passy, with all the necessary equipment for studio portraits.

Jansen had been surprised by the size and luxuriousness of the apartment, the multiple balconies. The American woman was around fifty, still dazzling, but old enough to be her young French companion’s mother. He was the one Jansen was there to photograph. The American woman wanted several photos of this “Michel L.,” in the style of Hollywood headshots. Jansen had set up the spotlights as if he were accustomed to this type of work. And for six months he’d lived off the money he’d earned from those photos of “Michel L.”

The more I watched the man preparing to toss his ball, the more I was sure I recognized “Michel L.” What had struck me about the picture were the eyes, close to the surface and slanted toward the temples, which gave “Michel L.” a strange look, as if he had compound eyes with an abnormally wide angle of vision. And the man before me had the same slanted eyes and profile as “Michel L.” The white shirt only accentuated the resemblance, despite his gray hair and pasty skin.

The playing ground was surrounded by a metal edging, and I didn’t dare cross that boundary and disturb the game. There was more than forty years’ distance between the “Michel L.” whom Jansen had photographed and the bowls player today.

He walked to the edging while one of his friends pitched the ball. He stood with his back to me.

“Pardon me …”

My voice was so blank that he didn’t hear.

“Pardon me … There’s something I’d like to ask you.”

This time I had spoken much more clearly, articulating each syllable. He turned around. I planted myself firmly in front of him.

“Did you ever know the photographer Francis Jansen?”

His strange eyes seemed to stare at something off on the horizon.

“How’s that?”

“I wanted to know if you ever had your picture taken by the photographer Francis Jansen.”

But a short distance away, an argument had broken out among the others. One of them came toward us.

“Lemoine, it’s up to you now.”

Suddenly it was as if he was looking past me, or right through me. Nonetheless, he said, “I’m sorry … I have to go bowl …”

He got into position and pitched the ball. The others cheered. They crowded around him. I didn’t understand how the game worked, but I think he’d won the match. In any case, he had completely forgotten about me.

These days, I regret not having kept any photos from the suitcases. Jansen wouldn’t even have noticed. Moreover, if I’d asked, I’m sure he would have given me as many as I wanted.

And besides, you never think at the time to ask the questions that will elicit confidences. And so, out of discretion, I avoided bringing up Colette Laurent. I regret that too.

The only photo I kept was in fact one of her. I hadn’t yet remembered that I’d met her a dozen years earlier, but her face must have reminded me of something.

The photo is captioned Colette, 12 Hameau du Danube. When daylight lasts until 10 P.M. because of the time change, and the traffic noise has died down, I have the illusion that all I’d need do is return to those faraway neighborhoods to find the people I’ve lost, who had never left: Hameau du Danube, the Poterne des Peupliers, or Rue du Bois-des-Caures. Colette is leaning against the front door of a private townhouse, hands in the pockets of her raincoat. Every time I look at that picture, it hurts. It’s like in the morning when you try to recall your dream from the night before, but all that’s left are scraps that dissolve before you can put them together. I knew that woman in another life and I’m doing my best to remember. Maybe someday I’ll manage to break through that layer of silence and amnesia.

Jansen came to the studio less and less often. At around seven in the evening, he would call:

“Hello … Is that you, Scribe?”

That was the nickname he’d given me. He asked if anyone had come to the door and if he could stop by without fear of intruders. I reassured him. Just a phone call from the Meyendorffs this afternoon. No, no sign of Nicole.

“Okay, Scribe, then I’ll be right over. See you in a bit.”

Sometimes he’d call back half an hour later:

“Are you sure Nicole’s not around? Is it really safe to come over?”

I had stopped working and waited for him a little longer. But he never showed up. So then I left the studio. I walked down Rue Froidevaux, skirting the cemetery. That month, the trees had regrown their leaves and I was afraid Nicole was hiding behind one of them, lying in wait for Jansen to return home. If she saw me, she’d come up and ask where he was. She might also be lurking on the corner of one of the little streets that spilled onto the left-hand sidewalk and could follow me at a distance in hopes that I’d lead her to him. Back then, because of what Jansen said, I considered Nicole a threat.

One afternoon, she came to the studio when Jansen was out and on an impulse I answered the door. It bothered me, always having to tell her over the phone that Jansen wasn’t there.

When she saw me in the half-open doorway, an expression of startled anxiety flashed in her eyes. Perhaps she thought Jansen had left for good and a new tenant was now living there.

I quickly reassured her. Yes, I was the one who answered the phone. Yes, I was a friend of Francis’s.

I invited her in and we both took a seat, she on the sofa and I in an armchair. She had noticed the two notebooks, the large register, the open suitcases and piles of photographs. She asked if I was working for Francis.

“I’m trying to catalogue all the pictures he’s ever taken.”

“Ah, I see … You’re right, that’s a good idea.”

There was an awkward pause. She broke the silence.

“I don’t suppose you know where he is?”

She’d said it in a tone that was at once timid and rushed.

“No … He comes here less and less often …”

She took a cigarette case from her bag, opened it, then shut it again. She looked me in the eye.

“Couldn’t you speak to him on my behalf, ask him to see me one last time?”

She laughed briefly.

“Have you known him long?”

“Six months.”

I wanted to know more. Had she shared a life with Jansen?

She cast curious glances around her, as if she hadn’t been here in an eternity and wanted to see what had changed. She must have been around twenty-five. She had brown hair and very pale eyes, perhaps light green or gray.

“He’s a strange guy,” she said. “He can be very sweet and then, from one day to the next, he disappears … Has he done that with you, too?”

I answered that I often didn’t know where he was.

“For the last two weeks he’s refused to see me or even take my calls.”

“I don’t think he’s trying to be cruel,” I said.

“No … No … I know … It happens now and again. He has these absences … He goes into hiding … And then he resurfaces.”

She took a cigarette from her case and offered it to me. I didn’t want to tell her that I didn’t smoke. She took one as well. Then she lit mine with a lighter. I took a puff and coughed.

“How do you explain that?” she suddenly asked.

“What?”

“That strange need of his to go into hiding?”

I hesitated a moment, then said, “Maybe it’s because of events in his past …”

My gaze had fallen on the picture of Colette Laurent hanging on the wall. She was about twenty-five as well.

“I must be keeping you from your work …”

She was about to get up and leave. She would no doubt hold out her hand and give me another futile message for Jansen. I said:

“No, no … Stay a bit longer … You never know, he could be back any minute now.”

“And you think he’ll like finding me here?”

She gave me a smile. For the first time since she’d entered the studio, she was paying real attention to me. Until that moment, I’d been in Jansen’s shadow.

“Will you take responsibility for that?”

“I’ll take full responsibility,” I told her.

“In that case, he might be in for a nasty surprise.”

“No, not at all. I’m sure he’ll be very glad to see you. He has a tendency to withdraw into himself.”

I suddenly became talkative, to hide my shyness and embarrassment. She was staring at me with those pale eyes. I added:

“If someone doesn’t twist his arm, he could end up going into hiding for good.”

I closed the notebooks and register that were lying on the floor and stored the piles of photos in one of the suitcases.

“How did you meet him?” I asked her.

“Oh … By chance … Not far from here, in a café …”

Was it the same café on Denfert-Rochereau where my girlfriend and I had first met him?

She knit her eyebrows, which were brown and contrasted with her pale eyes.

“When I learned what he did for a living, I asked him to take some pictures of me. I needed them for work. He brought me here … And he took some beautiful shots of me.”

I hadn’t come across them yet. The most recent ones I’d catalogued were from 1954. Maybe he hadn’t kept anything after that year.

“So if I’ve got this straight, he hired you to be his secretary?”

She was still staring at me with her transparent eyes.

“Not at all,” I said. “He doesn’t need a secretary anymore. These days he barely has a business to run.”

The evening before, he’d invited me to dinner at a small restaurant near the studio. He was carrying his Rolleiflex. At the end of the meal, he had put it on the table and told me it was over, that he didn’t want to use it anymore. He was giving it to me. I told him that was a real shame.

“You have to know when to quit.”

He had drunk more than usual. During the meal, he had emptied a bottle of whiskey, but you could hardly tell: just a slight fog around the eyes and his speech was slower.

“If I keep at it, it will only give you more work for your catalogue. Don’t you think that’s enough as it is?”

I had walked with him to a hotel on Boulevard Raspail, where he’d taken a room. He didn’t want to go back to the studio. “That girl,” as he put it, might be waiting at the door; she was really wasting her time with “a guy like him.”

She was sitting there, in front of me, on the sofa. It was already 7 P.M. and daylight was fading.

“Do you think he’ll come today?” she asked.

I was sure he wouldn’t. He would go dine alone somewhere in the neighborhood, then head back to his hotel room on Boulevard Raspail. Then again, he might call at any moment for me to meet him at a restaurant. And if I told him Nicole was here, how would he react? He’d immediately assume she’d pick up the extension. And then he’d pretend to be calling from Brussels or Geneva and would even agree to talk to her. He’d tell her his stay there might last for quite a while.

But the telephone didn’t ring. We sat opposite each other in the silence.

“Can I wait for him some more?”

“As long as you like.”

The room was sinking into shadow and I got up to put on the light. When she saw me reach for the switch, she said, “No … Please, no lights.”

I went to sit on the sofa. I felt as if she’d forgotten my presence. Then she looked up at me:

“I live with someone who’s very jealous and who’s liable to come rap at the door if he sees the lights on.”

I remained silent. I didn’t dare suggest that I could simply answer the door and tell this potential visitor that there was no one else at the studio.

As if she had read my thoughts, she said:

“He’d probably just barge past you to see if I’m here … He might even punch you out.”

“Is he your husband?”

“Yes.”

She told me that Jansen had taken her to a neighborhood restaurant one evening. Her husband had spotted them by chance. He’d stormed up to their table and backhanded her across the face. Two slaps that had made the corners of her mouth bleed. Then he’d run off before Jansen could intervene. He had waited for them outside. He walked a good distance behind them, following them down the street, bordered by trees and endless walls, that cuts through the Montparnasse cemetery. She had gone into the studio with Jansen and her husband had stood planted for almost an hour in front of the door.

Since that misadventure, she figured, Jansen was having second thoughts about seeing her. Given how calm and cavalier he tended to be, I could easily imagine his discomfort that evening.

She explained that her husband was ten years older than she. He was a mime and performed in what they used to call “Left Bank” clubs. I saw him two or three times after that, prowling around Rue Froidevaux in the afternoon to catch Nicole leaving the studio. He gave me an insolent stare. Dark and fairly tall, with a romantic allure. One day I went up to him.

“Are you waiting for someone?”

“I’m waiting for Nicole.”

Theatrical, slightly nasal voice. In his bearing and his gaze, he played on his slight resemblance to the actor Gérard Philippe. He was wearing a kind of black frock coat and a very long, unknotted scarf.

I’d said, “Which Nicole? There are so many Nicoles.”

He had given me a disdainful look, then made an about-face toward Place Denfert-Rochereau, with an affected gait as if he were walking offstage, scarf floating in the breeze.

She looked at her wristwatch in the semidarkness.

“It’s okay now, you can turn on the lights. It’s safe now. He has to start his act at the Ecole Buissonnière.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s a cabaret. He does two or three shows a night.”

He went by the stage name Gil the Mime and he performed against a soundtrack of poems by Jules Laforgue and Tristan Corbière. He had had Nicole record the poems, so that it was her voice you heard every night as he moved around the stage in simulated moonlight.

She told me her husband was a real tyrant. He kept telling her that when a woman lived with an “artist,” she should be devoted to him “body and soul.” He erupted in jealous scenes over the flimsiest of pretexts, and that jealousy had become even more pathological since she’d met Jansen.

At around ten o’clock, he’d leave the Ecole Buissonnière for the Vieille Grille on Rue du Puits-de-l’Ermite, suitcase in hand. It contained his only prop: the tape recorder and the tapes on which his poems were recorded.

And where was Jansen, did I think? I told her I really had no clue. For a moment, just to appear interesting, I thought of telling her about the hotel on Boulevard Raspail, but I kept it to myself. She asked if I would walk her home. It was better if she got back before her husband. She spoke of him some more. Naturally, she no longer felt any respect for him, she found his jealousy and “artistic” pretensions ridiculous, but I could tell she was afraid of him. He always came home at eleven-thirty to make sure she was there. Then he went out again, to the last cabaret he performed in, an establishment in the Contrescarpe neighborhood. He stayed there until two in the morning and forced Nicole to accompany him.

We walked beneath the trees down Avenue Denfert-Rochereau and she plied me with questions about Jansen. I answered evasively: yes, he traveled a lot because of his work and he never let me know where he was. Then he’d show up unexpectedly, only to disappear again the same day. A real fly-by-night. She stopped and looked up at me:

“Listen … If he shows up at the studio someday, could you give me a call on the QT? I’ll come right over … I’m sure he’ll let me in …”

She took a scrap of paper from her raincoat pocket and asked if I had a pen. She jotted down her telephone number.

“You can call me at any time of day or night to let me know.”

“What about your husband?”

“Oh … my husband …”

She shrugged. Apparently this didn’t strike her as an insurmountable obstacle.

She tried to put off what she called “returning to prison” and we strolled a bit more through streets that today make me think of a kind of scholastic subdistrict: Ulm, Rataud, Claude-Bernard, Pierre-et-Marie-Curie … We crossed Place du Panthéon, sinister in the moonlight, which I never would have dared cross alone. In retrospect, the quarter seems to have been deserted as if after a curfew. Moreover, that evening from almost thirty years ago recurs often in my dreams. I’m sitting on the sofa next to her, so distant that I feel like I’m with a statue. The long wait has clearly petrified her. An early evening summer light bathes the studio. The photos of Robert Capa and Colette Laurent have been taken down from the wall. Almost no one lives here. Jansen has left for Mexico. And we keep on waiting for nothing.

At the foot of the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, we entered a blind alley: Rue d’Ecosse. It had started to rain. She stopped in front of the last building. The entryway was wide open. She put a finger to her lips and pulled me into the foyer. She didn’t turn on the hallway light.

There was a sliver of light beneath the first door to the left off the hallway.

“He’s already here,” she whispered in my ear. “I’m going to get the crap beaten out of me.”

I was surprised to hear that word in her mouth. The rain fell harder and harder.

“I can’t even lend you an umbrella …”

I kept my eyes fixed on the sliver of light. I was terrified he’d come out.

“You should wait here in the hall until the storm ends. My husband doesn’t know who you are.”

She squeezed my hand.

“If Francis ever comes back, you’ll let me know right away — promise?”

She switched on the hall light and put her key in the lock. She glanced back at me one last time. She went in and I heard her call out in a shaky voice, “Hi, Gil.”

The other kept silent. The door shut behind her. Before the hall light went out, I just had time to notice their mailbox, hanging on the corridor wall among the others. On it, in ornate red letters, were the words:

Nicole

and

Gil

Mime Poet

The sound of furniture falling over. Someone slammed against the door. Nicole’s voice:

“Leave me alone …”

It sounded as if she was struggling. The other was still silent. She let out a muffled cry, as if he was strangling her. I thought of intervening, but instead I stood frozen in the dark, under the entryway. The rain had already formed a puddle on the sidewalk in front of me.

She cried out, “Leave me alone!” louder this time. I was about to knock on the door when the sliver of light went out. After a moment, the creaking of bedsprings. Then sighs and Nicole’s husky voice saying again, “Leave me alone …”

It kept raining while she emitted staccato whimpers and I heard the creak of the bedsprings. Later, the rain was no more than a kind of spittle.

I was about to walk out the entrance door when the hall light went on behind me. They were both in the hallway and he was carrying his suitcase in his hand. His left arm was around Nicole’s shoulder. They walked by and she pretended not to know me. But at the corner she looked back and gave me a brief wave.

One sunny afternoon in May, Jansen had surprised me at my labors. I’d told him about Nicole and he’d listened, looking distracted.

“She’s a nice girl,” he’d said, “but I’m old enough to be her father …”

He didn’t entirely get what it was her husband did for a living and, remembering the evening when he’d seen him slap Nicole in the restaurant, he again expressed surprise that a mime could be so violent. Personally, he imagined mimes as having very slow, gentle movements.

We’d gone out together and had barely taken a few steps when I recognized the silhouette stationed at the corner of the walled street that bisects the graveyard: Gil the Mime. He was wearing a black jacket and black trousers, with an open-necked white shirt whose wide collar covered his lapels.

“Well, well … There’s a familiar face,” Jansen muttered to me.

He waited for us to walk by him, arms folded. We continued down the opposite sidewalk and pretended not to notice him. He crossed the street and planted himself right in our path, legs slightly parted. He crossed his arms again.

“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 …”

And it was true: I still had all those long years ahead of me.

Jansen had spoken to me several times of the Meyendorffs. He had seen a lot of them after the deaths of Robert Capa and Colette Laurent. Mme de Meyendorff was a believer in the occult sciences and spiritualism. Dr. de Meyendorff — I’ve come across the calling card he gave me at the “farewell party”: Doctor Henri de Meyendorff, 12 Rue Ribéra, Paris XVI, Auteuil 28–15, and Le Moulin, Fossombrone (Seine-et-Marne) — occupied his leisure time studying Ancient Greece and had written a short book on the myth of Orpheus.²

For several months Jansen had attended séances organized by Mme de Meyendorff. Their goal was to make the dead talk. I feel an ingrained distrust and skepticism toward this sort of activity, but I can understand why Jansen would turn to it in his time of affliction. One would like to make the dead talk; one would especially like them to come back for real, and not merely in our dreams where they stand beside us, but so far away and so absent …

From what he’d confided, he had known the Meyendorffs long before the time when they’d figured in the photo, in the garden with Colette Laurent. He’d met them when he was nineteen. Then the war had broken out. Since Mme de Meyendorff was American, she and her husband had set sail for the United States, leaving Jansen the keys to their Paris apartment and their country house, where he had spent the first two years of the Occupation.

I’ve often thought that the Meyendorffs would have been the people most likely to provide information about Jansen. When he left Paris, I had finished my work: all the materials I’d gathered about him were in the red notebook, the alphabetical index, and the album Snow and Sun, which he’d been kind enough to give me. Yes, if I had wanted to write a book about Jansen, I’d have had to go see the Meyendorffs and take notes on what they said.

Some fifteen years ago, I was leafing through the red Clairefontaine notebook and, discovering Dr. de Meyendorff’s calling card in its pages, I dialed his phone number, but it was “no longer in service.” The doctor wasn’t listed in that year’s phone book. To settle the matter once and for all, I went to 12 Rue Ribéra, where the concierge told me she didn’t know anyone by that name in the building.

That Saturday in June, so close to summer vacation season, it was very warm at around two in the afternoon. I was alone in Paris, with the prospect of a long, idle day ahead of me. I decided to go to the other address on the doctor’s card, in the Seine-et-Marne region. Naturally, I could have tried information to find out if a Meyendorff still lived in Fossombrone, and if so call him on the phone, but I decided I’d rather see for myself, on site.

I took the metro to the Gare de Lyon, then bought a ticket for Fossombrone at the window for the commuter trains. I had to change at Melun. The compartment I entered was empty, and I was practically giddy at the thought of having found a purpose to my day.

It was while waiting on the platform of Melun station for the branch line to Fossombrone that my mood shifted. The early afternoon sun, the few travelers, and the thought of visiting people whom I’d only seen once, fifteen years before, and who had probably either died or forgotten me, suddenly made everything seem unreal.

There were two of us in the small local train: a woman in her sixties, carrying a shopping bag, had sat down opposite me.

“Good lord, this heat …”

I was reassured at hearing her voice, but surprised that it was so clear, with a slight echo. The leather of the seats was burning hot. There wasn’t a single area in the shade.

“Will we arrive in Fossombrone soon?” I asked her.

“It’s the third stop.”

She rummaged through her shopping bag and finally found what she was looking for: a black wallet. She kept silent.

I wished I could have broken the silence.

She got off at the second stop. The local started up again and I was gripped by panic. I was alone now. I was afraid the train would take me on an endless journey, gradually gathering more and more speed. But it slowed down and stopped at a small station with tan walls on which I read FOSSOMBRONE in dark red letters. Inside the station, next to the ticket windows, a newspaper stand. I bought a daily after making sure of the date and skimmed the headlines.

I asked the news dealer if he knew a house named Le Moulin. He told me to follow the main road out of the village and continue straight on to the edge of the forest.

The shutters of the houses on the main road were closed to ward off the sun. No one was outdoors, and perhaps I should have worried about being alone in the middle of this unfamiliar village. The main road now turned into a wide path lined with plane trees, whose leaves barely let the sun’s rays filter through. The silence, the stillness of the leaves, the dapples of sunlight I walked on brought back the sensation of being in a dream. I again checked the date and the headlines on the newspaper I was holding, to keep me tied to the outside world.

On the left, just at the edge of the forest, stood a low surrounding wall and green wooden gate on which LE MOULIN was written in white paint. I stepped back from the wall and went across the path to get a better view of the house. It seemed to be composed of several farm buildings cobbled together, with nothing rustic about them: the balcony, the large windows, and the ivy climbing up the façade made them look like bungalows. The neglected garden was now just a clearing.

The surrounding wall made a right angle and continued for another hundred or so yards along a pathway that skirted the forest and led to several other properties. The one next to Le Moulin was a white villa shaped like a bunker with bay windows. It was separated from the pathway by a white fence and privet hedges. A woman in a straw hat was mowing the lawn and I was relieved to hear the hum of a motor break the silence.

I waited until she was near the entrance gate. When she saw me, she shut off the lawnmower. She took off her straw hat. A blonde. She came over and opened the gate.

“Does Doctor de Meyendorff still live at Le Moulin?”

I’d had trouble pronouncing those syllables. They sounded weird.

The blonde looked at me in surprise. My voice, my awkwardness, the sound of “Meyendorff” had something incongruous and formal about them.

“Le Moulin hasn’t been lived in for a long time,” she said. “At least not since I’ve been in this house.”

“Is it possible to go inside?”

“You’d have to ask the caretaker. He comes three times a week. He lives in Chailly-en-Bière.”

“You wouldn’t know where the owners are, by any chance?”

“I think they live in the States.”

In which case, there was a good chance it was still the Meyendorffs.

“Are you interested in the house? I’m sure it’s for sale.”

She had invited me into her garden and closed the gate behind me.

“I’m writing a book on someone who used to live here and I just wanted to see what the place was like.”

Once again I felt as if I’d used too formal a tone.

She led me to the back of her garden. A fence marked the boundary with the neglected grounds of Le Moulin. There was a large hole in the fence and she pointed to it.

“It’s easy to get to the other side …”

I couldn’t believe it. Her voice was so gentle, her eyes so clear, she was being so thoughtful … She had moved closer to me and I suddenly wondered if I was doing the right thing prowling around an abandoned house, on “the other side,” as she said, instead of staying with her and getting to know her better.

“While you’re over there, would you mind lending me your paper?”

“With pleasure.”

“I wanted to see what’s on television.”

I handed her the paper. She said:

“Take your time. And don’t worry — I’ll keep a lookout.”

I slid through the hole in the fence and emerged into the clearing. I walked toward the house. As I moved forward, the clearing gave way to an unkempt lawn bisected by a gravel path. Up close Le Moulin looked as much like a bungalow as it had from the entrance gate. To the left, the main house extended into a chapel, on which the door had been removed and which was now just a storage shed.

The shutters on the ground floor were closed, as were the two green panels of a French window. Two tall plane trees stood about ten yards apart, and their intermeshed foliage formed a roof of greenery that reminded me of a mall in a southern town. The sun was beating down, and it felt noticeably cooler in the shade.

It was definitely here that Jansen had taken the picture of Colette Laurent and the Meyendorffs. I recognized the plane trees and, to the right, the ivy-covered well with its coping. In the red notebook, I had written, “Photo of the Meyendorffs and Colette Laurent in Fossombrone. Shadows. Spring or summer. Well. Date unknown.” I had asked Jansen what year the photo was taken, but he’d only shrugged.

The house jutted out on the right and the shutters to one of the ground floor windows were open. I pressed my forehead against the glass. The sun’s rays projected a dappled light onto the back wall. A painting was hanging there: Mme de Meyendorff’s portrait. In a corner of the room, a mahogany desk behind which I could make out a leather armchair. Two similar armchairs near the window. Bookshelves on the right-hand wall, above a green velvet couch.

I wanted to break into that room, where bit by bit the dust of time had settled. Jansen must have sat on those armchairs often and I could imagine him, on some late afternoon, reading a book from the library. He had come here with Colette Laurent. And, later, it was no doubt in this office that Mme de Meyendorff had called upon the dead.

Next door, on the lawn, the blonde had gone back to work, and I heard the peaceful, reassuring hum of the motor.

I never went back to Fossombrone. And today, fifteen years later, I suppose Le Moulin has been sold and the Meyendorffs are finishing out their days somewhere in America. I haven’t had any recent news of the other people Jansen had invited to his “farewell party.” One afternoon in May 1974 I ran across Jacques Besse on Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle, near the Théâtre du Gymnase. I’d held out my hand, but he hadn’t noticed and had walked away stiffly, without recognizing me, his eyes vacant, wearing a dark gray turtleneck and several days’ beard.

One night a few months ago, very late, I had turned on the television, which was showing an English detective program adapted from Leslie Charteris’s The Saint, and I was surprised to see Eugène Deckers. The scene had been filmed in London in the 1960s, possibly the same year and same week that Deckers had come to the “farewell party.” There, onscreen, he was crossing a hotel corridor, and I thought it really strange that one could pass from a world in which everything ended to another, freed from the laws of gravity, in which you were suspended for all eternity: from that evening on Rue Froidevaux, of which nothing remained except the fading echoes in my memory, to those several seconds captured on film, in which Deckers would cross a hotel corridor until the end of time.

That night, I had dreamed I was in Jansen’s studio, sitting on the sofa as in the past. I was looking at the photos on the wall, and suddenly I was struck by the resemblance between Colette Laurent and my girlfriend at the time, with whom I’d first met Jansen — someone else of whom I’d long had no news. I convinced myself that she and Colette Laurent were one and the same person. The distance of years had confused matters. They both had chestnut hair and gray eyes. And the same first name.

I left the studio. It was already dark out and that surprised me. I remembered that it was October or November. I walked toward Denfert-Rochereau. I was supposed to meet up with Colette and a few others in a house near the Parc Montsouris. We got together there every Sunday evening. And, in my dream, I was certain I’d find among the guests that evening Jacques Besse, Eugène Deckers, and Dr. and Mme. de Meyendorff.

Rue Froidevaux seemed to go on forever, as if the distances stretched to infinity. I was afraid of arriving late. Would they wait for me? The sidewalk was matted with dead leaves and I skirted the wall and the grassy embankment of the Montsouris reservoir, behind which I pictured the still water. A thought stuck with me, vague at first, then becoming clearer: my name was Francis Jansen.

The day before Jansen left Paris, I had arrived at the studio at noon to put away the photos in the suitcases. I had no reason to expect his sudden departure. He’d told me he wasn’t going anywhere until the end of July. A few days earlier, I’d given him the second copies of the notebook and the inventory of images. At first he’d been hesitant to take them.

“Do you really think I need this right now?”

Then he had leafed through the index. He lingered on a page and sometimes uttered a name aloud, as if trying to recall the face that went with it.

“That’s enough for today …”

He had snapped the index shut.

“You’ve done a fine job as a scribe. Congratulations …”

That last day, when he came into the studio and caught me putting away the photos, he congratulated me again:

“A true archivist … They should hire you at a museum.”

We went for lunch at a local restaurant. He was carrying his Rolleiflex. After lunch, we walked along Boulevard Raspail, and he stopped in front of the hotel on the corner of Rue Boissanade, the one that stands alone next to the wall and trees of the American Center.

He stepped back to the curb and took several shots of the hotel façade.

“That’s where I lived when I first came to Paris …”

He recounted that he’d become ill on his first evening here and had kept to his room for a good ten days. He’d been treated by an Austrian refugee who was living in the hotel with his wife, a certain Dr. Tennent.

“I took a photo of him at the time.”

I checked it out that same evening. As I’d indexed the photos in chronological order in the red Clairefontaine notebook, this one was mentioned at the top of the list:

1. Doctor Tennent and his wife. Jardins du Luxembourg. April 1938.

“But I didn’t yet have a photo of the hotel … You can add it to your list.”

He asked me to walk with him to the Right Bank, where he had to go pick up “something.” At first he planned to take the metro at Raspail station, but, after seeing on the map that there were too many transfers to get to Opéra, he decided we’d take a taxi.

Jansen asked the driver to stop on Boulevard des Italiens, in front of the Café de la Paix, and he pointed to the sidewalk tables, saying:

“Wait for me here. I won’t be long.”

He headed toward Rue Auber. I paced up and down the boulevard. I hadn’t been in the Café de la Paix since my father used to take me on Sunday afternoons. Out of curiosity, I went in to see whether the automatic scale on which we weighed ourselves back then was still in its place, just before the entrance to the Grand Hôtel. Yes, it was still there. And so I couldn’t resist stepping onto it, sliding a coin in the slot, and waiting for a pink ticket to drop.

It felt odd to be sitting alone on the sidewalk of the Café de la Paix, where customers were crowding around tables. Was it the June sun, the roar of traffic, the foliage on the trees whose green formed such a striking contrast with the black of the façades, those foreign voices I heard from the neighboring tables? It was as if I, too, were a tourist, lost in a city I didn’t know. I stared fixedly at the pink ticket as if it were the last object capable of attesting to and reassuring me of my identity, but the ticket only increased my malaise. It called to mind a part of my life so distant that I could barely relate it to the present. I ended up wondering if I was really the child who used to come here with his father. Numbness and amnesia gradually overcame me, like sleep on the day when I was hit by a van and they pressed an ether-soaked pad over my face. In another moment, I’d no longer even know who I was, and none of these strangers would be able to tell me. I tried to fight against the numbness, my eyes fixed on the pink ticket that said I weighed 168 lbs.

Someone tapped me on the shoulder. I looked up but the sun was in my eyes.

“You look pale …”

I saw Jansen only as a silhouette. He took a seat across from me.

“It’s because of the heat,” I stammered. “I think I was feeling faint …”

He ordered a glass of milk for me and a whiskey for himself.

“Drink that,” he said. “You’ll feel better afterward.”

I sipped the ice-cold milk. Yes, little by little, the world around me regained its shapes and colors, as if I were adjusting a pair of binoculars to bring them into focus. Jansen, in front of me, looked at me kindly.

“Don’t let it faze you, kid. I’ve fallen into my share of black holes too …”

A breeze was ruffling the leaves on the trees, and their shade felt cool as Jansen and I walked along the main boulevards. We had come to Place de la Concorde. We went into the gardens of the Champs-Elysées. Jansen took pictures with his Rolleiflex, but I scarcely noticed. He cast a furtive eye on the viewfinder, level with his waist. And yet I knew that each of his photos was perfectly framed. One day, when I’d expressed surprise at that feigned carelessness, he’d told me you had to “approach things gently and quietly or they pull away.”

We had sat on a bench and, still talking, he stood up now and then and pressed the shutter as a dog passed by, or a child, or a ray of sunlight appeared. He had stretched out and crossed his legs and his head was lolling as if he’d dozed off.

I asked what he was shooting.

“My shoes.”

Via Avenue Matignon, we entered Faubourg Saint-Honoré. He pointed out the building that housed the Magnum agency and suggested we have a drink in the café next door where he used to go with Robert Capa, back in the day.

We sat at a rear table, and again he ordered a glass of milk for me and a whiskey for himself.

“This is where I met Colette,” he said suddenly.

I wanted to ask questions, talk about the few photos of her I’d indexed in the red notebook:

Colette, 12 Hameau du Danube

Colette with an umbrella

Colette, beach at Pampelonne

Colette, steps on Rue des Cascades

I finally said, “It’s too bad I didn’t know all of you at the time …”

He smiled at me.

“But you were still in diapers …”

And he pointed to my glass of milk, which I was holding in my hand.

“Wait a second … Don’t move …”

He set the Rolleiflex on the table and pressed the shutter. I have that photo here next to me, with all the other ones he took that afternoon. My raised arm, my fingers clutching the glass, are sharply defined against the glare; in the background you can make out the open door of the café, the sidewalk, and the street bathed in summer light — the same light in which we walked, my mother and I, in my memory, alongside Colette Laurent.

After dinner, I walked him back to the studio. We made a long detour. He was more talkative than usual and for the first time he asked specific questions about my future. He was worried about what my living conditions would be. He mentioned the precariousness of his life in Paris when he was my age. Meeting Robert Capa had saved him; without that, he might not have had the courage to strike out in his field. Moreover, it was Capa who had taught it to him.

It was already past midnight and we were still chatting on a bench on Avenue du Maine. A pointer trotted alone down the sidewalk, rapidly, and came up to sniff us. It had no collar. It seemed to know Jansen. It followed us to Rue de Froidevaux, first at a distance, then it came up and walked alongside us. We arrived at the studio and Jansen felt in his pockets but he couldn’t find his key. He suddenly looked exhausted. I think he’d had too much to drink. I opened the door with the spare he’d given me.

In the doorway, he shook my hand and said in a solemn tone:

“Thank you for everything.”

He stared at me with a slightly clouded gaze. He closed the door before I had a chance to say that the dog had slipped into the studio behind him.

The next morning, I phoned at around eleven but there was no answer. I had used our prearranged signal: three rings, hang up, ring again. I decided to go over there to finish putting away the photos.

As usual, I opened the door with my spare key. The three suitcases had disappeared, along with the picture of Colette Laurent and the one of Jansen with Robert Capa that had been hanging on the wall. On the coffee table, a roll of film to be developed. I took it that afternoon to the shop on Rue Delambre. When I went back to get it a few days later, I discovered in the envelope all the photos Jansen had taken during our walk through Paris.

I knew that there was no longer any point in waiting for him.

I searched through the closets upstairs, but there was nothing in them, not a single article of clothing, not even a sock. Someone had removed the sheets and bedclothes, and the mattress was bare. Not one cigarette butt in the ashtrays. No more glasses or bottles of whiskey. I felt like a police inspector looking through the apartment of a man who’d been wanted for a long time, and I told myself it was useless, since there was no proof the man had ever lived here, not even a fingerprint.

I waited until five o’clock, sitting on the sofa, looking through the red notebook and the index. Apparently, Jansen had taken the second copies of the notebooks. Perhaps Nicole would ring at the door and I’d have to tell her that from now on we’d probably be waiting for Jansen in vain and that centuries from now, an archeologist would find the two of us mummified on the sofa. Rue Froidevaux would become an excavation site. At the corner of the Montparnasse cemetery, they’d find Gil the Mime turned into a statue, and they’d hear his heart beating. And the tape recorder, behind him, would still be playing a poem that he’d recorded in his metallic voice:

Demons and marvels

Winds and tides …

A question suddenly occurred to me: what had become of the pointer that had followed us the night before, the one that had slipped into the studio without Jansen realizing it? Had he taken it with him? Now that I think about it, I wonder whether the dog wasn’t simply his.

I went back to the studio later, when evening was falling. A final spot of sunlight lingered on the sofa. Between those walls, the heat was stifling. I opened the bay window. I could hear the rustling of the trees and the footfalls of people walking in the street. I was amazed that the roar of traffic had stopped farther over toward Denfert-Rochereau, as if the feeling of absence and emptiness that Jansen left was spreading in concentric circles and Paris was gradually clearing out.

I wondered why he hadn’t told me he was leaving. But those few signs were indicative of an imminent departure: the photo he’d taken of the hotel on Boulevard Raspail and the detour up to Faubourg Saint-Honoré to show me Magnum’s old headquarters and the café he used to frequent with Robert Capa and Colette Laurent. Yes, he had made, in my company, a final pilgrimage to the places of his youth. At the back of the studio, the darkroom door was ajar. The afternoon when Jansen had developed the pictures of my girlfriend and me, the small light bulb had shone red in the dark. He stood in front of the developing tray with rubber gloves on. He had handed me the negatives. When we went back into the studio, the light of the sun had blinded me.

I didn’t hold it against him. I even understood him so well … I had noticed in him certain ways of acting and certain character traits that had become familiar. He’d said to me, “Don’t let it faze you, kid. I’ve fallen into my share of black holes too …” I couldn’t predict the future, but thirty years later, when I’d become the same age as Jansen, I wouldn’t answer the telephone either, and I would disappear, as he had, one June evening, in the company of a phantom dog.

Three years later, on a June evening that strangely enough was the anniversary of his departure, Jansen was very much on my mind. Not because of that anniversary, but because a publisher had just accepted my first book, and in the inner pocket of my jacket I had a letter announcing the news.

I remembered that at one point on the last evening we’d spent together, Jansen had expressed concern about my future. And today, they’d assured me that my book would soon be published. I had finally emerged from that period of vagueness and uncertainty during which I lived as a fraud. I would have liked it if Jansen had been around to share my relief. I was sitting at a café near Rue Froidevaux, and for an instant I was tempted to go call at the studio, as if Jansen were still there.

How would he have greeted that first book? I hadn’t respected the instructions of silence he’d given me the day we’d spoken about literature. No doubt he would have deemed it much too indiscreet.

When he was the same age as I, he was already the author of several hundred photos, some of which composed Sun and Snow.

That evening, I flipped through Sun and Snow. Jansen had told me he wasn’t responsible for the namby-pamby title, which the Swiss publisher had chosen himself, without asking his opinion.

As I turned the pages, I felt more and more what Jansen had been trying to communicate, and what he’d gently challenged me to suggest with the word silence. The first two images in the book bore the same caption: At number 140. They depicted one of those clusters of buildings on the outskirts of Paris on a summer’s day. Nobody in the courtyard or in the doorways to the stairs. Not one silhouette in the windows. Jansen had told me that a friend his age had lived there, someone he’d known in the Drancy transit camp. When the Italian consulate had Jansen released, the friend had asked him to go to that address to let his relatives and girlfriend know how he was doing. Jansen had gone to number 140, but he’d found none of the people his friend had mentioned. He’d gone back again after the Liberation, in the spring of 1945. In vain.

And so, feeling helpless, he’d taken those photos so that the place where his friend and his friend’s loved ones had lived would at least be preserved on film. But the courtyard, the square, and the deserted buildings under the sun made their absence even more irremediable.

The next images in the book dated from before the ones of number 140, since they’d been taken when Jansen was a refugee in the Haute-Savoie: expanses of snow, its whiteness contrasting with the blue of the sky. On the slopes were black dots that must have been skiers, a toy-sized ski lift, and the sun beating down on all of it, the same sun as for “number 140,” an indifferent sun. Through that snow and that sun showed an emptiness, an absence.

Sometimes, Jansen took objects from very close up: plants, a spider’s web, snail shells, flowers, blades of grass with ants bustling among them. One felt that he trained his gaze on something very specific to avoid thinking about anything else. I remembered when we’d sat on the bench, in the gardens of the Champs-Elysées, and he’d photographed his shoes.

And once again, mountain slopes of an eternal whiteness beneath the sun, the narrow streets and deserted squares of the South of France, several photos all with the same caption: Paris in July—my birth month, when the city seemed abandoned. But Jansen, in order to fight against the impression of emptiness and neglect, had tried to capture an entirely rural aspect of Paris: curtains of trees, canal, cobblestones in the shade of plane trees, the clock tower of Saint-Germain de Charonne, the steps on Rue des Cascades … He was seeking a lost innocence and settings made for enjoyment and ease, but where one could never be happy again.

He thought a photographer was nothing, that he should blend into the surroundings and become invisible, the better to work and capture — as he said — natural light. One shouldn’t even hear the click of the Rolleiflex. He would have liked to conceal his camera. The death of his friend Robert Capa could in fact be explained, as he saw it, by this desire, the giddiness of blending into the surroundings once and for all.

Yesterday was Easter Monday. I was walking along the portion of Boulevard Saint-Michel that stretches from the old Luxembourg station to Port-Royal. Strollers were crowded around the entrance gates to the gardens, but where I was walking there was practically no one. One afternoon, on that same stretch of sidewalk, Jansen had pointed out the bookstore at the corner of the boulevard and tiny Rue Royer-Collard. In it, just before the war, he had seen an exhibit of photographs by the painter Wols. He’d gotten to know the artist and admired him as much as he did Capa. He’d gone to visit him in Cassis, where Wols had taken refuge at the start of the Occupation. It was Wols who had taught him to photograph his shoes.

That day, Jansen had drawn my attention to the façade of the Ecole des Mines, an entire section of which, at eye level, was riddled with bullet holes. A plaque, cracked and slightly worn around the edges, noted that a certain Jean Monvallier Boulogne, age twenty, had been killed at that spot on the day Paris was liberated.

I’d remembered that name because of its sonority, which conjured up images of rowing a boat in the Bois de Boulogne with a blonde, a country picnic on the riverbank, a small valley with that same blonde and some friends — all of it cut short one afternoon in August, in front of this wall.

Now, that Monday, to my great surprise, the plaque had disappeared, and I was sorry that Jansen, on the afternoon when we were in that same spot together, hadn’t taken a picture of it and the bullet-pocked wall. I would have put it in the index. But now, suddenly, I was no longer sure Jean Monvallier Boulogne had ever existed, and moreover I was no longer sure of anything.

I entered the gardens, slicing through the people massed around the fence. Every bench and every chair was filled and the paths were crowded. Young people were sitting on the terrace rails and the steps leading down to the main fountain, so thick that you couldn’t get to that part of the garden. But none of it mattered. I was happy to lose myself in that crowd and — as Jansen would have said — to blend into the surroundings.

Enough space remained — about eight inches — for me to sit at the end of a bench. My neighbors didn’t even need to squeeze over. We were beneath chestnut trees that protected us from the sun, right near the white marble statue of Velléda. A woman behind me was chatting with a friend and their words lulled me: something about a certain Suzanne, who had been married to a certain Raymond. Raymond was a friend of Robert, and Robert the brother of one of the women. At first I tried to pay attention to what they were saying and gather some details that could act as reference points, so that the fates of Robert, Suzanne, and Raymond would gradually emerge from obscurity. Who knows? It’s possible that, by chance, whose infinite combinations will always remain a mystery, Suzanne, Robert, and Raymond might have crossed paths with Jansen one day in the street.

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.