Free Suspended Sentences by Patrick Modiano Page A

idiot.”
    And I’d said:
    “Good morning, Madame.”
    And after all these years, I can still hear her answer in her cutting voice with its Nîmes accent:
    “‘Madame’? You can call me Mathilde, blissful idiot.”
    Little Hélène, beneath her kindness, must have been tough as nails.
    I learned later that she’d met Annie when the latter was nineteen. She wielded such influence over Annie and her mother, Mathilde F., that the two women had gone off with her, abandoning Mr. F.
    One day, no doubt, the circus Little Hélène worked in had stopped in the provincial backwater where Annie and her mother lived. Annie had sat near the orchestra, and the trumpets announced the arrival of Little Hélène, who was riding a black stallion with a silver caparison. Or else I imagine her way up high, on the trapeze, getting ready for the perilous triple flip.
    And Annie goes to see her after the show, in the trailer that Little Hélène shares with the snake lady.

A friend of Annie F.’s often came to the house. Her name was Frede. Today, from my adult perspective, she’s nothing more than a woman who, in the 1950s, owned a nightclub on Rue Ponthieu. At the time, she seemed to be the same age as Annie, but she was actually a bit older, around thirty-five. A short-haired brunette, with a sylphlike body and pale skin. She wore men’s jackets, cinched at the waist, which I took to be riding jackets.
    The other day, at a bookstall, I was leafing through an old back issue of La Semaine à Paris from July 1939, which had the movie, theater, music hall, and cabaret listings. I was surprised to come across a tiny photo of Frede: when she was twenty, she was already master of ceremonies in a nightclub. I bought this program, the way you buy a piece of evidence, some tangible proof that it wasn’t all in your head.
    It reads:
THE SILHOUETTE
58, Rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette
Montmartre, TRI 64-72
FREDE presents
from 10 p.m. til dawn
her all-female Dance-Cabaret
Back from Switzerland
DON MARYO and his famous Orchestra
Guitarist Isidore Langlois
Betty and the Nice Boys
    And, fleetingly, I recall the image my brother and I had of Frede whenever we saw her in the garden, as we were returning home from school: a woman who belonged to the world of the circus, like Little Hélène, and whom this world haloed in mystery. We were absolutely certain that Frede operated a circus in Paris, a smaller one than the Médrano, a circus beneath a white canvas big top with red stripes that was called “Carroll’s.” This name was frequently heard in Annie’s and Frede’s mouths: Carroll’s was a nightclub on Rue de Ponthieu, but I imagined the white-and-red big top and the circus animals, of which Frede, with her svelte silhouette and cinched jackets, was the tamer.
    Sometimes on Thursdays, when we didn’t have school, she brought her nephew to the house, a boy our age. And the three of us would spend the afternoon playing together. He knew much more than we did about Carroll’s. I remember a sibylline statement he’d made to us, which still resonates with me:
    “Annie cried all night long at Carroll’s …”
    Perhaps he’d heard that sentence from his aunt, without knowing what it meant. When she didn’t bring him, my brother and I would go meet him at the train station, in the early afternoon. We never called him by his name, which we didn’t know. We just called him “Frede’s nephew.”

They hired a girl to come pick me up at school and look after us. She lived in the house, in the room next to ours. She wore her black hair in a very strict bun, and her eyes were of such light green that her gaze seemed transparent. She almost never spoke. Her silence and transparent eyes intimidated my brother and me. For us, Little Hélène, Frede, and even Annie belonged to the world of the circus, but that silent young girl with her black bun and pale eyes was a creature from a fairy tale. We called her Snow White.
    I still remember dinners when we were