Paris Twilight (27 page)

“Saturday,” he said.

Inside the package, along with another translation, was a note.
Away, back midweek.
XOX
, Cor
.

Cor?
XOX
? I felt another light go out. Was I to be punished for one day of liberty with Sahran? The thought inflicted its own reprisal: no, I realized, because Corie would not have minded my absence the way I minded hers. But, anyway, this note was from two days ago. And then the delayed alarm finally seeped through the cotton of self-pity: Saturday? Who, then, just last night had turned off the light in the window?

Jeko arrived with my customary pastry and lingered conspicuously until I met his eye. “Jersey,” he said meaningfully, and cast a conspiratorial nod through the window, as though a snowstorm blanketing half a continent was just a little secret
entre nous
. I paid him no mind, as I paid no mind to the war news in the newspaper or the blazing of wing guns from the far side of the room or the smoke from the Gitanes wafting from the zinc or, frankly, to the taste of famous pastry. I was at home in Portbou; I no longer noticed it. “He and this room enjoyed quite a history,” Passim had said of Saxe the day I first stepped through the door, and now I marveled how quickly in a place of basic, daily routines history could establish itself. His favorite table was already mine, the place where my customary was brought to me, and where any novelty trespassed. Some clever historian applying the lost-wax method might already derive my shape (
quelle horreur
) from the routines I followed here.

That's what set me up to be so startled by Café Portbou on this day. I'd assumed that anyplace where I'd made myself so comfortable must be as thoroughly known to me as I to it, an assumption, it turns out, that was easy to refute. The refutation was hiding in plain sight. It confronted me when I'd finished my espresso and was contemplating ordering a second one to aid my deliberations over whether to read the new letter. To help me deliberate, in turn, over whether to order the espresso, I decided to visit the lavatory.

Sometimes a trip to the restroom advances one's deliberations and sometimes not, but it always nicely postpones the moment of decision, so off I went, and I was returning down the stub of a hallway, shouldering one wall to avoid being strafed from the other, when I saw it. Saw it without seeing it, from the corner of my attention. I'd passed it fully before the snare drew tight, just as I had passed it more than a dozen times on previous deliberative visits without being seized, without noticing anything at all, but this time I stopped. I didn't turn, not right away. Coincidence had ambushed me too often in recent days for me to feel that time and chance were on my side. Whatever was approaching, I wanted a stance to handle it, especially if what I'd just glimpsed turned out to be true. But what sort of stance protects you against a photograph?

I took a step backward and turned to face the image, the image formerly known to me as “Consul Landers with La Pasionaria in Barcelona Last spring,” though this print had no caption or credit and was, like all the other photos on the photo wall, in a simple black wooden frame. I stared at it a long while before I sensed Passim's shadow.

“Would you like some light?” he asked.

“That would be nice,” I said, and wherever the switch was hidden, the switch was thrown. The effect of Passim's Prometheanism was like drawing aside the drapes and exposing the world, or like turning on the light behind an x-ray panel. There were maybe thirty photographs. Together, they offered a time-lapse vision of an era and place and peoples, those being the peoples of Paris and northern Spain in the era before the big war. The prints bore no insincere autographs, and the faces here weren't those of petty starlets of the sort I had expected—Brigitte Bardot–wannabe types—save for one grand and unmistakable starlet, Ernest Hemingway. He was standing with a clutch of other men, all dressed for the heat in sandals and light shirts, short scarves knotted around their necks and a couple of them carrying guns, at the brink of a bomb crater in the middle of a city street. The party stood in a line facing the camera, somewhat proudly, as though they'd gone out crater hunting and had bagged themselves a big one.

That identification loosed a host of others, as I have since returned to study those photos with a more ambitious eye. Over the weeks, I dislodged photographer after writer after writer after photographer after poet (Tina Modotti, Arthur Koestler, André Gide, and Gerda Taro with her arm around Pablo Neruda), a Who's Who
des artistes du moment
, but on this day and at first glance, I spotted only
vedette
Hemingway and (writer) André Malraux, Malraux conspiring with a group of pals at a table littered with a day's worth of uncleared espresso cups and wineglasses and cigarettes stubbed out in overflowing saucers.

They were nice photos, friendly, well framed, most of them portraits but none of them posed beyond the moment of looking up from whatever battle was being fought or bottle emptied or table pounded in whatever café. I found the camaraderie of the subjects disorienting, as though it leaped from frame to frame, as though the individual photographs were discrete rooms in one great rolling party, as though the comfort of these people with one another extended to encompass me, and wasn't that table where Malraux malingered in some familiar spot? I cast a déjà vu behind me—no, the tables had been changed out, but yes, there was the very window, exactly as it was in its reflection on the wall. Malraux in Portbou! Passim's returning shadow was distinct this time, and doubled, its edges sharp.

“Do you know these people?” I asked him.

“Not really” was the answer. “If my father were here, he could tell you everyone,” he said, the father who had owned Portbou before him and who was, of course, dead. “No, no, he's still alive,” Passim protested, and explained that he was in retirement back in Algiers. He offered, with a wandering finger, “Somewhere here, your Papa Ernest.”

“And them?” I indicated the “Barcelona Last spring” portrait.

“She's famous too,” he said.

And the man? Passim shrugged. “Friend of Byron's.” He swept his arm to indicate the entire wall. “All friends of Byron's. I don't know what to do with them. I haven't had the heart to take them down.”

So that was it. The chronology I viewed was double-fold: a scattershot history of the people portrayed, and a somewhat more continuous one of the man who'd done the portraying, the faceless face behind the lens, and I was reminded of the invisible omnipresence that photographers share with other gods, the unseen composers of every scene. This particular deity was my humble Portbou predecessor, the man whose café seat I had made my own and whose apartment I now lived in but whose life and art, so visible so close by, I had remained resolutely oblivious to.

His life and art, and “all his friends.” Including Landers, whom I spotted in several other photos beyond the first one. Landers giving a raised-fist salute to a squad of marching militiamen; Landers at a diplomatic reception, a sash with medals draped across his tuxedo; Landers with a woman in a starched white smock and cap (La Compasionaria?) beside the hospital cot of a heavily bandaged smiling man, ranks of similarly bandaged, similarly cot-bound men diminishing into the background. And again, with the same woman lithe in a smart sleek dress, you can see she is dark-eyed and willowy, in a smart café by the sleek dark sea, both of them relaxed and elegant and young, and the two of them again at a Paris curbside, Landers toking on an evil-looking cheroot in the front seat of an open cabriolet driven by a man I didn't recognize at first until I discerned his eventual face through the mask of beauty and youth.

“Would you mind?” I asked Passim.

 

Chrysanthemums had given way to hothouse dahlias in the desk vase, but the familiar dry voices were still heavy at it, consumed in their pleasant, incessant, chiding quarrel, and when Madame Secretary disappeared down the hall, I stepped into the alcove to pay my respects. “I should have listened to you,” I whispered, sincere, but the trio burbled on unperturbed by flattery. I understood their urgent advice no better than before. Then we broke off, for Madame was returning. Rouchard dragged along in her wake. He was carrying the photograph.

“I'm complimented,” he said.

“I meant to come by earlier,” I apologized.

“That you recognized me, I mean.” The lawyer was as amiable as his finches were litigious. He invited me into his office down the hall, a burrow at the end of a book-lined tunnel whose conceit of red-leather luxury had been swamped by a mudslide of files and books and papers. Rouchard put down the photograph and hoisted a cardboard box to clear a chair for me—it must have been a while since a client had stuck around long enough to sit—and then resumed talking before he located anywhere to drop it. “Portbou, huh,” he said, holding the box. “You've enlisted!”

Back in the day, he explained, the café had been one of several Parisian bistros that served as nocturnal mustering stations for the volunteers arriving from Britain and elsewhere to fight with the International Brigades in the cause of Republican Spain. The young men and women—well, mostly young, and almost all men—had been given their marching orders there, before boarding trains for the south of France and making their night trek over the Pyrenees to get to Albacete. “A highly illegal undertaking,” Rouchard offered, over the box.

“They didn't accept me,” I joked.

“Good,” he said. “It wasn't a trip that everyone returned from.”

At that moment, my ankle experienced a startling sensory drenching, as though splashed by a warm, rough wave. “Oh!” I yelled, and kicked the air as involuntarily as though struck by a general practitioner.

“Daisy!” Rouchard scolded, and I looked down at the pink nose of the culprit—Daisy, evidently—the dog beneath my chair.

“Hi, Daisy,” I said, and propped both feet out of licking range. “And you?” I said to Rouchard. I was done with the small talk, but I wanted to know.

He'd never once been in Portbou, he said, “because I was never in the Brigades, you see. I wasn't a Communist. I was just a little, lost, dreamy anarcho-syndicalist who found himself in Spain.”

“Why didn't you tell me you knew Byron Saxe?” I said.

In honor of the gravity of the question, Rouchard seemed resolved to jettison his cardboard burden. He looked about him and, absent other options, set the box in his own leather chair and came back around to perch on the edge of his desk. “Because I didn't know him well enough to offer you any insight, anything pertinent to his will,” he said, picking up the photograph again. “I knew him well enough for him to take my picture, apparently, but that was about it. Saxe was, as you say, a friend of a friend.”

“Carlos Landers.”

“Ah, you know the name,” he said. “Yes, Carlos, to be sure.” And so began his account of an association that had started when he and Landers were students together in Sciences Po and that blossomed later as they both became active in politics, unfortunately on what would be the losing side in the coming era, though decidedly “on the right side of history.” For a few glittering years, until Generalissimo Francisco Franco kicked off a decade-long European war for Aryan racial supremacy by invading white and Catholic Spain with Moorish legions of his Army of Africa, airlifted out of Spanish Morocco by Adolf Hitler's planes, and before leftist fratricide had turned Barcelona into a Russian nesting doll of civil war within civil war, the politics had remained exciting, fruitful, optimistic, even glamorous in an intellectual sort of way, and the glamorous Parisian apogee had been the group that gathered around the wealthy and revolutionary Landers couple. That was the community and family into which young Byron Saxe had parachuted one day in April of 1933.

“I don't remember him all that well, but even so I can tell you precisely when he arrived,” Rouchard said. “Right after the Reichstag fire” in Berlin, when a Jewish merchant from Franconia decided it was time to get his son out of Germany and to safety in Paris and had arranged to purchase a pied-à-terre from Landers.

“Carlos's apartment, you see, it was just around the corner from you, and I must tell you that it was very grand, ostentatious, really, I always thought.” It had been built as the Paris home-away-from-home for a Budapest goods trader eager to be taken for an Austro-Hungarian count, but afterward it belonged to the Landers family, and Herr Saxe knew them somehow and he and the family reached an agreement, “and they basically turned one of the maids' quarters into a separate little apartment, do you see? It was rustic, but it was only for the time being.”

I saw well enough, because I'd seen more than he knew.

Rouchard remembered Saxe as barely more than a teenager when he arrived, in his midtwenties, maybe, and immediately he became part of the set and was adopted as a brother by Carlos and Alba. “Carlos, in particular. I think they were very close.” The two resembled each other: same build, same vitality. Byron was often mistaken for Carlos's younger brother. “And maybe Carlos mistook him for that himself.” He bought the boy a camera, “this beautiful art-deco Rolleicord,” and wherever Carlos and Alba traveled, Byron traveled with them, the Rollei draped around his neck on a harness-leather strap. “And I think it was one of those things—they were friends from the start and the boy lived in his room and made his photographs,” and then the war came, and when they saw it coming (“And of course it was impossible to miss, unless you were running England”),they sealed up Byron's room to serve as a sort of hideaway.

“A sensible caution,” Rouchard said. Carlos was prominent, and the apartment's grandeur was renowned. “There was no telling what devil might stop in, and did.” The Hôtel Lutetia, only blocks away, which before the war had been a favorite refuge for Jewish visitors, became a headquarters of the Nazi intelligence services, convenient to the prison on rue du Cherche-Midi. “In '42,” he said (meaning after Carlos's death—the evasion was obvious), the apartment was requisitioned by the occupiers. “Some high Nazi lived there. I'm sure it was destroyed. I wasn't here, by the way,” because Rouchard by then had found himself in Gurs, a detention camp in southern France, and later, along with a lot of other Republican fighters, in Mauthausen, where most of them succumbed to starvation or typhus or exhaustion or lead but where he survived to greet the liberation.