by Susan Daitch
“According to Louis the police take many forms. Anyone can be an enemy. His apartment is full of old newspapers. He never throws anything away. He’s been trying to dovetail parts of newspaper stories together as if they’re all sections of a grand conspiracy. Everything is connected, everything is contaminated. The dirty air outside his door has been exhaled by someone else somewhere, sometime. He has all these crackpot theories. He’s talked about Dreyfus, the spy. He was part of a plot I couldn’t follow.”
This Notelle was a man of no words other than those that evaporated into air. His friend Louis had nothing but words, threads of logic that served to prove the existence of the terror outside his door.
“In an effort to get him out of the house I was finally able to convince him that lightning wouldn’t strike the same place twice. I mean they’d gotten me already, and if the photographer worked for the police what were the odds she’d get him too within a matter of days? To my surprise this made some kind of sense to him, and he put on his shoes.”
Fabien shoved his hands into his pockets and looked into a shop window for a clock. He had to get back to Montreuil.
“There’s a reason I’m telling you this. With myself along, Louis took a few steps outside his door. For the first time in years he walked through the courtyard, opened an outer door, and crossed the threshold. No one was there to notice the event, who would care, right? Looking behind him, one hand on a wall as if for balance, the other shading his eyes, he made his way down the deserted street. We were going to buy something at that newsstand. I don’t remember what anymore.” Antoine took a few long steps hand on the wall, constantly looking behind himself, imitating the fearful Louis.
“I considered this a great victory until suddenly a camera flashed in his face. Louis hadn’t even gone into the shop; he had only looked in the window. He began to scream, and again I chased the photographer who disappeared behind a door on the other side of the street. The door locked behind her.”
“So she lives in the building.”
“I don’t know. She may not live there at all. She ran out a back way for all I know. An old woman who sits by the window day after day claims not to have seen anything. I took Louis back to his rooms, but he’ll never go out again. Others have to bring him his meals. He would starve otherwise, but he won’t eat the food I bring because he no longer trusts me. I stand outside his door with soup in my hands but he won’t see me.” Hands cupped, he appeared sincerely distressed. Although they weren’t near Louis’s address Fabien looked up at a building whose garlanded lunettes looked as if they’d been squeezed from a pastry tube and imagined Antoine standing in front of a door, food falling from his hands.
Fabien shuttered the windows against a storm and tried on a pair of rubber feet with large hammer toes, putting his feet up on his desk, singing to himself and flapping the feet back and forth. Drawings of the degradation scene were scattered on the floor. He could no longer look at them. He still didn’t understand why Georges wanted to shoot this actualité. The verdict couldn’t be changed. There was no point to the project. Fabien felt so mired in the hopeless story with scene after scene of humiliation and degradation, and so sick of the gray objects around him that he gave up, and in giving up, he flipped the drawings facedown, turning instead to the ridiculous. The oversized feet had their own logic and gravity. Georges spoke of film as a form of agitation, political agitation, in some ways not unlike the pictures taken in front of Lazares’. Fabien had nodded, and his agreement was more than acquiescence, but as he slapped the rubber feet together he considered why he had given up on newspapers, no longer even inquisitive about headlines and smeared pictures. Like the unknown Louis, he was sure every external feature of the world, from his own corridor to the islands of Micronesia, combined to form a gluttonous polyglot beast that sooner or later would devour him whole. If a man or woman could be found to bring food to Fabien’s door, the only actualities he would recognize as he sat with a view of an angled wall would be of his own invention or memory. His days searching the city for plates and uniforms were the antithesis of those that occupied the man locked in his room, but Fabien had no choice. No one would bring him food, pleasure, or entertainment. He was always outside, even in the rain, looking at his reflection in an ashtray. He couldn’t escape.
The ironmonger who played Dreyfus walked past, leaned against a winch, and lit a cigarette. Bluette rarely came to the studio during the shooting of this actualité. He addressed one of the trial postcards to her and was about to throw it away when two men suddenly appeared in the doorway.
“Hello? My good friend who knows the stars of the movie business?”
It was the stupidest line he had ever heard. Fabien never imagined he would see Notelle again, and hadn’t wanted to renew the acquaintance in any case, but the man knocked and stepped inside without waiting to be asked, only saying he and a friend had come all the way from Paris to speak to him. The second man was even thinner than Antoine, but well dressed and confident. He wore a velvet coat, soft felt hat; he’d spent a lot of time deciding what to wear to this meeting at Star Films. Antoine, stepping around the open jars of paint that lay on the floor, introduced him as Renard, a writer or dramatist of some kind. This introduction could only have consisted of what Renard told him to recite. Words written in verse looked like rows of marching ticks to Antoine. Renard must have trusted Antoine, or perhaps hardly knew him.
“Listen to this,” Antoine said, still standing. “This is an important man.” He pointed to Renard who pulled up a chair without offering to find one for his master of ceremonies.
“I don’t object to being photographed for any reason if the result means my appearance on the front page of anything that resembles print. What is humiliation or so-called humiliation? The attention will make the temporary indignity of appearing in an asswipe paper worth enduring.”
Antoine nodded. It was suddenly as if the studio was deserted. Fabien realized that no one would rescue him from these two. There was no point in telling them to go away. They could see he had work to do. It made no difference.
Renard looked Fabien in the eye and described how he spent his days parading or loitering indiscriminately from the Theatre Ambigu-Comique to the Louvre, following celebrities, trying to crash their parties. While Antoine, a man who Fabien imagined felt uncomfortable in his own skin, traveled from place to place reflecting the personality of whatever quarter he found himself in at any particular moment in order to lift wallets and merchandise, his friend Renard behaved in exactly the opposite fashion. He spoke breathlessly without a break. He wanted his picture taken everywhere with everyone.
“Why are you telling me this? If you want to be in a film speak to Georges.”
“I don’t want to be in a film.”
“Listen to him,” Antoine leaned against a wall.
“After Antoine and his friend had their pictures taken, I hung around shops.”
“Which ones?”
“I haunted shops that trafficked in stolen firearms, new shops with big windows, shops that sold pornography under the table, but I was always wrong. My picture wasn’t taken. Now that you’ve pointed out to Antoine which businesses were targeted, I realize I was stabbing in the dark.” He stopped speaking for a moment and picked at one of the rubber hammer toes still fitted over Fabien’s feet, which he still had propped on his desk. Fabien jerked away and put his feet back on the floor.
“If you want to find the photographer for La Libre Parole I offer my services.”
“Why?” Fabien asked. He imagined that in spite of whatever assurances Antoine might have given Renard, Notelle would jump the photographer and smash her camera without a second thought. Renard’s picture wouldn’t appear on the cover of anything. Antoine smiled and fiddled with a rubber chicken, as if he was a frequent visitor to the studio and could make himself at home. Then he left the room. How much of Star Films could he steal in twenty minutes? Not much if all he had were his pockets.
> Fabien grew bored listening to Renard’s desires to advertise himself and while half listening sketched Dreyfus’ degradation, the scene in which he was stripped of his medals before the troops in the yard of Les Invalides. He had grown more obsessed with this scene than any of the others.
“Humiliation,” Renard said, “is temporary, means nothing.”
“I can interpret that absence of shame in two ways,” Fabien said without looking up from his drawing. “Either you ignore feelings of shame as soon as they rub up against you, or more likely, shame is a daily and acute circumstance so one way or another you manage to live with it and carry on.”
He himself had felt it when he leaned over a bridge or looked out a train window. In this buffered cosmos mortification and disgrace were reduced to the snap of a cardboard sword. Could the actor, unaccustomed to the use of arms, break a real sword across his knee? If not, one could be made out of something else, like a thin strip of wood, a material that might render the effect of snapping in the silent universe of black and white film.
Fabien nodded toward Renard, inking a drawing of a close-up shot of military medals that lay scattered on the ground. He left Dreyfus’s face blank, focusing downward. Telling an actor how to look wasn’t his job. He glanced at his notes: leg irons. Dreyfus, the ironmonger, might be willing to make his own. After his brother leaked a false story to a Welsh paper that Dreyfus had escaped Devil’s Island, he had been put in irons and strapped to his bed. His brother had intended only to draw attention to the case because he felt it was slowly being forgotten. The scheme had backfired badly. Immobility, enforced paralysis, leg irons rubbing into skin, wasn’t the kind of humiliation one could absorb like a daily cup of lousy coffee.
“What do you think it would be like to be strapped into a bed so that you couldn’t move?”
“I’d be afraid of a fire.”
Renard returned to the subject of his writing, quoting Henri Murger. I am on the path to the path.
“It’s important to be recognized, and deleterious to work at anything not connected toward this end: recognition.” Like Antoine, he was a noctambule who slept until late in the afternoon and wandered around the city until morning. He had no money but managed to scrape together a job from time to time.
“I worked as part of a mill of feuilleton producers, penning episodic fiction which suited my working style of fits and starts. I sent characters to the guillotine one week only to have them rescued at the last minute by another writer a week later. Then I would pick up the story again and engineer the details of the escape. Their two faces were very similar, so it was possible to walk out past the guards.” He moved his head back and forth like an Indo-Chinese dancer. “No one looked twice.”
“That’s been written about before, one man going to the guillotine in place of another,” Fabien told him.
“Borrowing is the point,” Renard looked at Fabien as if he were an idiot. “On the other hand I don’t like to corrupt my own identity too often because this kind of subversion creates potholes in the road leading to notoriety.”
“So you wouldn’t become a ghostwriter?”
“Yes, in desperation I’ve composed banquet speeches for the tongue-tied, proposing colonial expansion in Algiers or New Caledonia one night and revolution in the colonies the next, all obviously written under another name. As much as I would do anything, I decided finally to draw the line at writing for hire. Next, I collected information for an emigré, a count, a man with an accent and scarred face, who treated me like his servant. Use the back door, please. I was hired to watch who came out of which doorways, note who spent time in royalist restaurants and who was seen leaving the former Chinese Shadow Theater in the middle of the night. I gave up one set of notes when I quit but kept another copy for myself.”
The flood of Renard’s memoir was getting on Fabien’s nerves. The interloper engulfed in a cloud of self-importance as he walked around the city thinking of himself in the past tense, reliving and rewriting.
“There was no mistake, when I walked into the café all eyes were on me, and it was obvious as soon as I entered, even if some pretended to be indifferent.” While Fabien was removing his rubber feet, Renard picked up the postcard addressed to Bluette and put it in his pocket.
“You might ask who are my characters, who do I write about?” Pushing aside the prison plates and rubber chicken on Fabien’s desk as if clearing a surface for his own production, Renard explained.
“Recently I’ve gotten work inventing alternative identities for people in trouble. False papers are easy to acquire, but fictional histories to match them in case one is questioned — complex, detailed, rare, and more desirable — these can’t be found on any street corner. Antoine, for example, was the former Monsieur Meuble from Amiens.” He leaned close to Fabien’s ear and whispered the alliterative m’s, although Antoine was no longer in the room. He was awash in language while Antoine groped in the dark with a smile on his face and a knife in his pocket.
“Monsieur Meuble,” Renard repeated.
Fabien didn’t believe him. That name, too, had a made-up ring to it. Renard claimed to have performed the same service for so many other citizens that perhaps no one in the city was really who he or she claimed to be. They were all his inventions. He tapped his chest and misquoted Apollinaire, The city is full of Columbuses like me, who, in order to survive, must discover a new continent every morning. Fabien kept his doubts to himself. The photographer from La Libre Parole would put him on the path to the path.
“How did you first meet Antoine?”
“He needed someone to sign his name for him, since he cannot do so himself.”
“Did it become a habit? A kind of arrangement in which you are always the one who signs his name?”
“Yes, I think so. He trusts me. He told me he stabbed a man, disposed of the body, and was never caught or even suspected. Soon it was if the man had never existed. I think the fight had been over something unimportant, but there are occasions when, out of pedagogical necessity or otherwise, homicide seems an appropriate option.”
He used grand words in place of simple phrases. Teach him a lesson might do just as well as pedagogical necessity.
“Why are you telling me this story?” Fabien asked Renard. “A murder, covered up and perhaps forgotten, isn’t the kind of story you should repeat to someone you hardly know.”
“I’m suggesting Antoine might go to town here, and we should be careful. His picture has been published because of her. Someone might remember him, someone might have seen him from a window the night of the knifing. Someone he hadn’t counted on might have seen him hiding.” Fabien translated: go to town equals murder.
Fabien imagined Antoine as a spinning top, impossible to arrest. “If that’s the case there isn’t much that can be done to stop him.” Confiding in Renard, spiller of beans, was clearly a mistake, but Fabien was curious enough to set all the pieces in motion. Antoine returned to the room, and Renard stopped talking for a moment.
“I know your cameraman,” Antoine said. “Interesting side business with nudies. We’ve been talking.”
Fabien slammed the gigantic feet back on his desk. He didn’t want any connection between the two intruders and his work at Star Films. He didn’t ever want to arrive at the studio and find them waiting for him. Antoine winked then pretended to take a bite out of the rubber chicken.
It was decided that the three of them would meet at Lazare’s and wait inside the store. The whole street, Fabien knew, was staked out frequently. Sooner or later the photographer would appear on the sidewalk, and Renard, posed as a shopper, would emerge on cue.
“At least let her take my picture before you jump her,” Renard looked in a mirror. “Don’t damage the camera, whatever happens, eh Antoine? I’m talking to you.”
Bernard Lazare had returned but wouldn’t tell Fabien where he’d been. While he made them coffee and spoke in his Russian-accented French, they sat in the back between stacks of chip
ped plates and rows of dusty glasses. They waited.
“Others,” Bernard said, “were photographed in front of the shop earlier in the month, and then the picture-taking stopped, but they’ll be back. She didn’t always wear a mask, you know. This is a woman with a big face. Sometimes she wore a lot of paint. I watched her from the shop window. I waved to annoy her. Her makeup was so theatrical and caked on, she looked like a caricature of a woman. She could scare customers away just by looking. Once I yelled out the door to her, ‘So why don’t you firebomb me and get it over with?’ My nephew pulled me back in.”
“I’m falling asleep.” Renard wasn’t used to being awake during the day. He kept dozing off and had to be caught from leaning against fragile objects. Antoine was bored and agitated.
“I’ll get you some coffee. I’ll go for a walk. No, I won’t do that. What if she arrives as soon as I’m gone.” Antoine had drunk double cups of coffee, which Renard claimed he didn’t need. He talked mostly to himself. “No, I’m not budging. I’m not going anywhere.”
Customers were few; they came and went undisturbed, none of them noticed the group, three lumps in black clothes, huddled in the back of the store. To pass time Fabien drew the scenes he had yet to build. Dreyfus returning from Devil’s Island for the trial at Rennes late at night, in the middle of a gale. Flashes of lightning would be drawn on the film by hand. The next scene was to be the assassination of Dreyfus’s lawyer, Labori, who would be played by Méliès. The assassin waited at night at the foot of a bridge. Fabien wanted to play the assassin, but Georges gave the part to someone else. He shut his eyes picturing the scene. As it darkened, Antoine could barely contain his disgust, and his impatience only served to make Renard agitated.