Suspended Sentences

by Patrick Modiano

  “Tomorrow is another day … Have some dessert.”

  She didn’t seem to register the gravity of the situation. A tall blond fellow wearing a glen plaid suit came into the San Cristobal and headed for our table.

  “Hiya, Tony.”

  “Hi.”

  She seemed delighted to see him. Her face lit up. He sat down next to us.

  “Let me introduce you to a friend who was all alone this evening,” she said, pointing to me. “So I decided to take him to dinner.”

  “Well done.”

  He smiled at me.

  “Does the young gentleman work in music?”

  “No, no …” she said. “He ran away from school.”

  He knitted his brow.

  “That’s a bit awkward … Doesn’t he have any parents?”

  “They’re traveling,” I stammered.

  “Tony is going to call your school,” said the Danish girl. “He’ll tell them he’s your father and that you’re safely back home.”

  “You really think that’s a good idea?” asked Tony.

  He gently rolled the end of his cigarette along the edge of the ashtray.

  “Go do it, Tony.”

  She had taken an imperious tone and was threatening him with a wagging index finger.

  “Okay …”

  It was she who called information for the school’s telephone number, which she jotted down on a scrap of paper.

  “Your turn now, Tony …”

  “If you insist.”

  He stood up and, with a casual gait, walked toward the phone booth.

  “You’ll see … Tony will fix everything …”

  After a moment, he reappeared at our table.

  “Uh, well … They said my son had been expelled and that I have to go pick up his things before the end of the week …”

  He shrugged, looking apologetic. I must suddenly have turned very pale. He laid his hand on my shoulder.

  “Don’t worry … They can’t bother you anymore … I told them you were home safe and sound.”

  The three of us found ourselves on Rue Caulaincourt.

  “I won’t be able to come to the movies with you,” the Danish girl said to me. “I have to spend a little time with Tony …”

  She had planned to take me to the Gaumont-Palace to see Solomon and Sheba. She dug into her pocket and handed me a ten-franc bill.

  “You’ll go to the Gaumont on your own, like a grown-up … And afterward, you’ll take the metro and come back to sleep at my house … Take the line that goes to Porte Dauphine and change at Etoile … Then the line to Nation and get off at Trocadéro.”

  She gave me a smile. He shook my hand. The two of them got into his blue car, which disappeared around the first corner.

  I didn’t go to the movies that evening. I walked around the neighborhood. Heading up Rue Junot, I came to the Château des Brouillards. I was sure that one day I would live around there.

  I remember a car ride, five years later, from Pigalle to the Champs-Elysées. I had gone to see Claude Bernard in his bookstore on Avenue de Clichy and he offered to take me to the movies to see Lola or Adieu Philippine, which I remember fondly … It seems to me that the clouds, sun, and shadows of my twentieth year miraculously live on in those films. Normally we only spoke about books and movies, but that evening I alluded to my father and his misadventures under the Occupation: the warehouse on the Quai de la Gare, Pagnon, the Rue Lauriston gang … He looked over at me.

  “A former sentinel from Rue Lauriston is now a doorman at a nightclub.”

  How did he know that? I didn’t have the presence of mind to ask.

  “Would you like to see him?”

  We followed Boulevard de Clichy and stopped in Place Pigalle, next to the fountain. It was around nine in the evening.

  “That’s him …”

  He pointed out a man in a navy blue suit standing post in front of Les Naturistes.

  At around midnight, we were walking up Rue Arsène-Houssaye, at the top of the Champs-Elysées, where Claude Bernard had parked his car. And we saw him again. He was still wearing his navy blue suit. And sunglasses. He stood immobile on the sidewalk, in the space between two neighboring cabarets, so that one couldn’t exactly tell which one he worked for.

  I would have liked to ask him about Pagnon, but I felt awkward as soon as we passed in front of him. Later, I looked up his name among the other members of the gang. Two young men had served as lookouts on Rue Lauriston: a certain Jacques Labussière and a certain Jean-Damien Lascaux. Labussière, at the time, had lived on Rue de la Ronce in Ville-d’Avray and Lascaux somewhere near Villemomble. They had both been handed life sentences. Which one was he? I didn’t recognize him from the blurry photos that had appeared in the newspapers at the time of the trials.

  I ran into him again, around 1970, on the sidewalk of Rue Arsène-Houssaye, still standing at the same place, with the same blue suit and the same sunglasses. A sentinel for all Eternity. And I wondered whether he wore those sunglasses because after thirty years his eyes had worn out from seeing so many people go into so many sleazy places …

  Several days later, Claude Bernard had rummaged in a closet at the back of his bookstore and taken out this letter that he gave me, which dated from the Occupation. I’ve kept it all these years. Was it addressed to him?

  My dearest love, my adored man, it is one in the afternoon; I’ve woken up very tired. Business not so good. I hooked up with a German officer at the Café de la Paix, brought him to the Chantilly, did two bottles: 140 francs. At midnight he was tired. I told him I lived a long ways away, so he rented me a room. He took one for himself. I got a kickback on both and he gave me 300 francs. That got me my 25 louis. He’d made a date with me for last night in the lobby of the Grand Hôtel, but at seven, when we were supposed to meet, he showed up all apologetic and showed me his orders to ship out to Brest. After my failed date, I said to myself, “I’ll go to Montparnasse to the Café de la Marine and see if Angel Maquignon is there.” I went. No Angel. I was about to take the subway home when two German officers picked me up and asked me to go with them, but I could see they were idiots so gave them the brush. I went back to Café de la Paix. Nothing doing. When Café de la Paix closed, I went to the lobby of the Grand Hôtel. Nada. I went to the bar at the Claridge. Bunch of officers having a staff meeting with their general. Nothing. I returned to Pigalle on foot. On the way, nothing. It was about one in the morning. I went into Pigalle’s, after checking in at the Royal and at the Monico, where there wasn’t anything. Nothing at Pigalle’s either. Heading back out, I ran into two hepcats who took me with them, we sank two bottles at Pigalle’s, so 140 francs, then we went to Barbarina, where I got another 140 francs. This morning at six-thirty I staggered home to bed, completely worn out, with 280 francs. I ran into Nicole at Barbarina, you should have seen her get-up … If you could have been there, my poor Jeannot, you’d have been ill …

  Jacqueline

  Who was that Angel Maquignon, whom this Jacqueline was going to meet at Café de la Marine? In the same café, a witness claimed to have seen Gisèle and Urbain T., that night in April when they’d mixed with bad company in Montparnasse.

  The Champs-Elysées … It’s like that pond a British novelist talks about, at the bottom of which, in layered deposits, lie the echoes of the voices of every passerby who has daydreamed on its banks. The shimmering water preserves those echoes forever and, on quiet evenings, they all blend together … One evening in 1942, near the Biarritz cinema, my father was picked up by Inspector Schweblin and Permilleux’s stooges. Much later, toward the end of my childhood, I accompanied him to his meetings in the lobby of the Claridge and the two of us went to have dinner at the Chinese restaurant nearby, whose dining room was upstairs. Did he occasionally glance at the sidewalk across the avenue, where years earlier the Black Maria had been waiting to take him to the holding cell? I remember his office, in the ochre building with large bay windows at 1 Rue Lord-Byron. By following
endless corridors, one could exit onto the Champs-Elysées. I suspect he had chosen that office for its double exit. He was always alone up there with a very pretty blonde, Simone Cordier. The telephone would ring. She’d pick up:

  “Hello? … Who’s calling, please?”

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

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

  “No. I’m not here for anyone …”

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

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

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

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

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

  “So, you’re writing novels?”

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

  “Let’s go to the bar,” she said.

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

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

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

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

  “Sure.”

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

  She downed a large gulp.

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

  She pointed to the manuscript.

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

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

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

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

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

  “No, no, it’s no problem …”

  She poured herself another whiskey.

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

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

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

  “Sure.”

  “Another whiskey?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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