Suspended Sentences (8 page)

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.

SUSPENDED SENTENCES

For Dominique

There is scarce a family that can count four generations but lays a claim to some dormant title or some castle and estate: a claim not prosecutable in any court of law, but flattering to the fancy and a great alleviation of idle hours. A man’s claim to his own past is yet less valid.

—Robert Louis Stevenson,

“A Chapter on Dreams”

It was in the days when theater companies toured not just France, Switzerland, and Belgium, but also North Africa. I was ten years old. My mother had gone on the road for a play, and my brother and I were living with friends of hers, in a small town just outside of Paris.

A two-story house with an ivy-covered façade. One of the windows—the kind they call bow windows—extended from the living room. Behind the house, a terraced garden. Hidden at the back of the first terrace, under a clematis, was the grave of Doctor Guillotin. Had he lived in that house? Was it where he’d perfected his device for severing heads? At the very top of the garden were two apple trees and a pear tree.

Small enamel tags hanging from silver chains around the liquor decanters bore names like Izarra, Sherry, Curaçao. Honeysuckle invaded the sloping roof of the well, in the middle of the courtyard just before the garden. The telephone sat on a pedestal table next to one of the living room windows.

A fence protected the front of the house, which stood back slightly from Rue du Docteur-Dordaine. One day they’d repainted the fence after coating it with red lead. Was it really red lead, that sickly orange coating that remains so vivid in my memory? Rue du Docteur-Dordaine looked like a village street, especially at the far end: a nuns’ convent, then a farm where we went to get milk, and beyond that, the chateau. If you walked down the street on the right-hand sidewalk, you went past the post office; across the street, on the left, you could make out behind a fence the nursery of the florist whose son sat next to me in class. A little farther on, on the same side as the post office,
the wall of the Jeanne d’Arc school, tucked away behind the leaves of the plane trees.

Opposite our house was a gently sloping avenue. It was bordered on the right by the Protestant temple and by a small wooded area, in the thickets of which we’d found a German soldier’s helmet; on the left, by a long, white house with pediments, which had a large garden and a weeping willow. Farther down, adjacent to the garden, was the Robin des Bois inn.

At the bottom of the avenue, and perpendicular to it, was the main road. Toward the right, the perpetually deserted square in front of the train station, where we learned how to ride bikes. In the other direction, you skirted the town park. On the left-hand sidewalk was a kind of concrete mall that housed, all in a row, the news dealer’s, the movie theater, and the drugstore. The druggist’s son was one of my schoolmates and, one night, his father hanged himself from a rope that he’d attached to the mall balcony. It seems people hang themselves in summer. In the other seasons, they prefer drowning in rivers. That’s what the mayor had told the news dealer.

After that, an empty lot where they held the market every Friday. Sometimes the big top of a traveling circus set up there, or the stalls of a fairground.

You then came to the town hall and the grade crossing. After passing over the latter, you followed the high road that went up to the church square and the monument to the dead. For one Christmas Mass, my brother and I had been choirboys in that church.

There were only women in the house where the two of us lived.

Little Hélène was a brunette of about forty, with a wide forehead and prominent cheekbones. Her very short stature made her seem more like us. She had a slight limp from an accident on the job. She had been a circus rider, then an acrobat, and that gave her a certain cachet in our eyes. The circus—as my brother and I had discovered one afternoon at the Médrano—was a world we wanted to join. She told us she’d stopped plying her trade a long time ago and she showed us a photo album with pictures of her in her rider’s and acrobat’s costumes, and pages from music hall programs that mentioned her name: Hélène Toch. I often asked her to lend me the album so I could look through it in bed, before going to sleep.

They formed a curious trio: she, Annie, and Annie’s mother, Mathilde F. Annie had short blond hair, a straight nose, a soft, delicate face, and light-colored eyes. But there was a toughness about her that clashed with the softness of her face, perhaps due to the old brown leather jacket—a man’s jacket—that she wore over very tight black trousers during the day. In the evening, she often wore a light blue dress cinched at the waist by a wide black belt, and I liked her better that way.

Annie’s mother didn’t look anything like her. Was she really her mother? Annie called her Mathilde. Gray hair in a bun. A hard face. Always dressed in dark clothes. I was scared of her. To me she looked old, and yet she really wasn’t: Annie was twenty-six at the time and her mother about fifty. I remember the cameos she pinned to her blouse. She had a southern accent that I later heard in natives of Nîmes.
Annie didn’t sound like that herself; like my brother and me, she had a Paris accent.

Whenever Mathilde talked to me, she called me “blissful idiot.” One morning as I was coming down from my room for breakfast, she’d said as usual:

“Good morning, blissful idiot.”

And I’d said:

“Good morning, Madame.”

And after all these years, I can still hear her answer in her cutting voice with its Nîmes accent:

“‘Madame’? You can call me Mathilde, blissful idiot.”

Little Hélène, beneath her kindness, must have been tough as nails.

I learned later that she’d met Annie when the latter was nineteen. She wielded such influence over Annie and her mother, Mathilde F., that the two women had gone off with her, abandoning Mr. F.

One day, no doubt, the circus Little Hélène worked in had stopped in the provincial backwater where Annie and her mother lived. Annie had sat near the orchestra, and the trumpets announced the arrival of Little Hélène, who was riding a black stallion with a silver caparison. Or else I imagine her way up high, on the trapeze, getting ready for the perilous triple flip.

And Annie goes to see her after the show, in the trailer that Little Hélène shares with the snake lady.

A friend of Annie F.’s often came to the house. Her name was Frede. Today, from my adult perspective, she’s nothing more than a woman who, in the 1950s, owned a nightclub on Rue Ponthieu. At the time, she seemed to be the same age as Annie, but she was actually a bit older, around thirty-five. A short-haired brunette, with a sylphlike body and pale skin. She wore men’s jackets, cinched at the waist, which I took to be riding jackets.

The other day, at a bookstall, I was leafing through an old back issue of
La Semaine à Paris
from July 1939, which had the movie, theater, music hall, and cabaret listings. I was surprised to come across a tiny photo of Frede: when she was twenty, she was already master of ceremonies in a nightclub. I bought this program, the way you buy a piece of evidence, some tangible proof that it wasn’t all in your head.

It reads:

THE SILHOUETTE

58, Rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette

Montmartre, TRI 64-72

FREDE presents

from 10 p.m. til dawn

her all-female Dance-Cabaret

Back from Switzerland

DON MARYO and his famous Orchestra

Guitarist Isidore Langlois

Betty and the Nice Boys

And, fleetingly, I recall the image my brother and I had of Frede whenever we saw her in the garden, as we were returning home from school: a woman who belonged to the world of the circus, like Little Hélène, and whom this world haloed in mystery. We were absolutely certain that Frede operated a circus in Paris, a smaller one than the Médrano, a circus beneath a white canvas big top with red stripes that was called “Carroll’s.” This name was frequently heard in Annie’s and Frede’s mouths: Carroll’s was a nightclub on Rue de Ponthieu, but I imagined the white-and-red big top and the circus animals, of which Frede, with her svelte silhouette and cinched jackets, was the tamer.

Sometimes on Thursdays, when we didn’t have school, she brought her nephew to the house, a boy our age. And the three of us would spend the afternoon playing together. He knew much more than we did about Carroll’s. I remember a sibylline statement he’d made to us, which still resonates with me:

“Annie cried all night long at Carroll’s …”

Perhaps he’d heard that sentence from his aunt, without knowing what it meant. When she didn’t bring him, my brother and I would go meet him at the train station, in the early afternoon. We never called him by his name, which we didn’t know. We just called him “Frede’s nephew.”

They hired a girl to come pick me up at school and look after us. She lived in the house, in the room next to ours. She wore her black hair in a very strict bun, and her eyes were of such light green that her gaze seemed transparent. She almost never spoke. Her silence and transparent eyes intimidated my brother and me. For us, Little Hélène, Frede, and even Annie belonged to the world of the circus, but that silent young girl with her black bun and pale eyes was a creature from a fairy tale. We called her Snow White.

I still remember dinners when we were all together in the room that served as dining room, which was separated from the living room by the entrance hall. Snow White was sitting at the end of the table, my brother to her right, and I to her left. Annie was next to me, Little Hélène opposite, and Mathilde at the other end of the table. One evening, because the electricity was out, the room was lit by an oil lamp set on the mantelpiece, which left areas of shadow around us.

The others called her Snow White, like us, and sometimes “my lamb.” They used the familiar
tu
with her. And soon a certain intimacy grew among them, since Snow White also addressed them familiarly.

I suppose they had rented the house. Unless Little Hélène owned it, as the village merchants seemed to know her. Or maybe the house belonged to Frede. I remember that Frede received a lot of mail at Rue du Docteur-Dordaine. I was the one who fetched the letters from the box, every morning before school.

Almost every day, Annie went to Paris in her tan Peugeot 4CV. She would come home very late, and sometimes she stayed out until the next day. Often Little Hélène went with her. Mathilde never left the house, except to do the shopping. She’d buy a magazine called
Noir et Blanc
, old copies of which lay around the dining room. I’d leaf through them on Thursday afternoons, when it was raining and we were listening to a children’s program on the radio. Mathilde ripped
Noir et Blanc
out of my hands.

“That’s not for you, blissful idiot! You’re not old enough …”

Snow White waited for me when class got out, with my brother, who was still too little to start school. Annie had enrolled me in the Jeanne d’Arc school, at the very end of Rue du Docteur-Dordaine. The principal had asked if she was my mother and she’d said yes.

We were both sitting outside the principal’s office. Annie was wearing her old leather jacket and a pair of faded blue denim pants that a friend of hers who sometimes came to the house—Zina Rachevsky—had brought her back from America: blue jeans. You didn’t see them very often in France at the time. The principal looked at us suspiciously:

“Your son will have to wear a gray smock in class,” she said. “Like all his other little schoolmates.”

On the way back, all along Rue du Docteur-Dordaine, Annie walked next to me with her hand on my shoulder.

“I told her I was your mother because it was too complicated to explain the situation. That okay with you, Patoche?”

As for me, I was wondering about that gray smock I’d have to wear, like all my other little schoolmates.

I didn’t remain a pupil at the Jeanne d’Arc school for long. The schoolyard was black because it was paved with coal slag. And that black went perfectly with the bark and leaves of the plane trees.

One morning, during recess, the principal came up to me and said:

“I wish to see your mother. Tell her to come this afternoon, as soon as class resumes.”

As always, she spoke to me in cutting tones. She didn’t like me. What had I ever done to her?

When I left school at lunchtime, Snow White and my brother were waiting.

“
You’re
making a face,” said Snow White. “Something the matter?”

I asked if Annie was home. My one fear was that she hadn’t come back from Paris the night before.

As luck would have it, she had come home, but very late. She was still asleep in her room at the end of the hall, the one whose windows opened onto the garden.

“Go wake her up,” said Little Hélène, after I’d related that the school principal wanted to see my mother.

I knocked on the door to her room. She didn’t answer. The mysterious sentence we’d heard from Frede’s nephew crossed my mind: “Annie cried all night long at Carroll’s.” Yes, she was still asleep at noon because she’d spent all night crying at Carroll’s.

I turned the knob and pushed the door open, slowly. It was light in the room. Annie hadn’t drawn the curtains. She was stretched out on the large bed, all the way at the edge, and she could have fallen off at any moment. Why didn’t she lie in the middle of the bed? She was sleeping, her arm folded up on her shoulder, as if she were cold, and yet she was fully dressed. She hadn’t even removed her shoes or
her old leather jacket. I gently shook her shoulder. She opened her eyes and looked at me, knitting her brow: