Suspended Sentences: Three Novellas
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Suspended Sentences: Three Novellas
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Overview
Although originally published separately, Modiano’s three novellas form a single, compelling whole, haunted by the same gauzy sense of place and characters. Modiano draws on his own experiences, blended with the real or invented stories of others, to present a dreamlike autobiography that is also the biography of a place. Orphaned children, mysterious parents, forgotten friends, enigmatic strangers—each appears in this three-part love song to a Paris that no longer exists.
Shadowed by the dark period of the Nazi Occupation, these novellas reveal Modiano’s fascination with the lost, obscure, or mysterious: a young person’s confusion over adult behavior; the repercussions of a chance encounter; the search for a missing father; the aftershock of a fatal affair. To read Modiano’s trilogy is to enter his world of uncertainties and the almost accidental way in which people find their fates.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780300213379 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Yale University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/11/2014 |
| Series: | Margellos World Republic of Letters |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 232 |
| Sales rank: | 343,881 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Suspended Sentences
Three Novellas
By Patrick Modiano, MARK POLIZZOTTI
Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1993 Editions du SeuilAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-21337-9
CHAPTER 1
AFTERIMAGE
For Dominique
Doorbells, dangling limbs, no one comes this far, Doorbells, swinging gates, a rage to disappear No dog has his day When the master's gone away —Paul Eluard
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 twentyfive 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.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Suspended Sentences by Patrick Modiano, MARK POLIZZOTTI. Copyright © 1993 Editions du Seuil. Excerpted by permission of Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction: Missing, by Mark Polizzotti, vii,Afterimage, 1,
Suspended Sentences, 61,
Flowers of Ruin, 131,