Suspended Sentences Read Online Free PDF Page B

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 knowwhere 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