Homonym

One evening, I had walked with him to his hotel on Boulevard Raspail, for it was less and less often that he slept in the studio. He’d pointed out that the hotel was only a hundred yards away from the one he’d lived in when he first came to Paris and that it had taken him almost thirty years to travel that short distance.

If I had a nickel for every time I’ve quoted from Suspended Sentences the day after an episode from Runaway Horses, blah blah, two nickels, etc.

His face darkened and I could sense he wanted to tell me something. Finally he made up his mind to talk, but with such reticence that his statements were muddled, as if he had trouble expressing himself in French. From what I could understand, he had gone to the Belgian and Italian consulates to get a copy of his birth certificate and other documents he needed in anticipation of his departure. There had been some confusion. From Antwerp, his birthplace, they had sent the Italian consulate the records for a different Francis Jansen, and that one was dead.

Across their work, Mishima and Modiano give us two of the most stridently beautiful and austere accounts of life under outside tyranny to come out of WWII, though of course Runaway Horses takes place in 1932 and Suspended Sentences after the war has already ended. Come to think of it, Lacombe, Lucien is sort of Louis Malle’s Mishima moment…

I suppose he’d called from the studio to get further information about this homonym, since I found the following words on the flyleaf of the notebook in which I’d indexed his photos, scrawled in his near illegible handwriting, in Italian, as if they had been dictated to him: “Jansen Francis, nato a Herenthals in Belgio il 25 aprile 1917. Arrestato a Roma. Detenuto a Roma, Fossoli campo. Deportato da Fossolo il 26 giugno 1944. Deceduto in luogo e data ignoti.”