I was able to identify the members of this board of directors—starting with Tesson, in September 1972, when a telegram from Tangier was mistakenly delivered to me instead of my father: 1194 TANGIER 34601 URGENT SETTLE RENT BERGERE—STOP—MY SECRETARY LAID UP—STOP. REPLY URGENT TESSON. This Tesson was a financier in Tangier. As for Melenotte of the Kaffir Trust, he had been a member of the multinational administration of free zones.
In the years 1963 and 1964, I also met a third man from the board of directors, Charles Ruschewey. My father, hoping to dissuade me from pursuing an overly “liberal” education, pointed as an example of failure to this Charles Ruschewey, who had been in the prestigious khâgne program at Louis-le-Grand with Roger Vailland and Robert Brasillach, and who had never amounted to anything. Physically, he was like a clergyman in civvies, a dirty-minded, beer-swilling Swiss with steel-rimmed glasses and fleshy lips, the type who’d secretly frequent the “slags” of Geneva. In his fifties and divorced, he was living with a plump, shorthaired woman younger than he, in a windowless ground-floor room in the 16th arrondissement. He must have served as my father’s factotum and “sidekick.” He looked like someone who would compromise his principles at the drop of a hat, which didn’t stop him from lecturing me with a pedantry worthy of Tartuffe. In 1976, I would run into him on the stairs at Quai de Conti, aged and puffy-faced and looking like a derelict, shopping bag dangling from a sleepwalker’s arm. And I noticed he was living in the fourth-floor apartment that my father had recently abandoned for Switzerland, though it contained not a stick of furniture and the heat, water, and electricity had all been cut off. He was squatting there with his wife. She sent him out to do the shopping—no doubt a few cans of food. She had become a real harpy: I could hear her screeching every time the poor man walked in the door. I don’t imagine he was living off his director’s fees from the Compagnie Mocupia anymore. In 1976, again in error, I received a report from that finance company, according to which “our corporate lawyer in Bogotá was instructed to file a claim for compensation in the Colombian courts. For reference, we inform you that Albert Modiano, the president of your board of directors, is a director of the South American Timber Company and represents our firm in this subsidiary.” But life is cruel and unfair, and it shatters the fondest dreams: the president of the board of directors would never receive any compensation from Bogotá.
Christmas 1962. I don’t remember whether there really was any snow that Christmas. In any case, in my mind I see it falling at night in heavy flakes on the road and the stables. I was met at the stud farm in Saint-Lô by Josée and Henri B.—Josée, the girl who used to look after me from ages eleven to fourteen, in my mother’s absence. Henri, her husband, was the farm veterinarian. They were my last resort.
Over the following years, I’d often return to their place in Saint-Lô. The city they called “capital of the ruins” had been flattened by bombardments during the Normandy invasion, and many survivors had lost all trace or proof of their identity. They were still rebuilding Saint-Lô into the 1950s. Near the stud farm, there was a zone of temporary workers’ huts. I would go to the Café du Balcon and the town library; sometimes Henri would take me to the neighboring farms, where he treated animals on call, even at night. And at night, thinking of all those horses standing guard around me or sleeping in their stalls, I was relieved that they, at least, would not be taken to the slaughterhouse, like the line of horses I had seen one morning at the Porte Brancion.
I made a few girlfriends in Saint-Lô. One lived at the power plant. Another, at eighteen, wanted to go to Paris and enroll in the Conservatory. She told me of her plans in a café near the train station. In the provinces, in Annecy, in Saint-Lô, it was still a time when every dream and nighttime stroll ended up at the station, where the train left for Paris.
I read Balzac’s Lost Illusions that Christmas of 1962. I was still living in the same room on the top floor of the house. Its window looked out onto the main road. I remember that every Sunday, at midnight, an Algerian walked up that road toward the workers’ huts, talking softly to himself. And this evening, forty years later, Saint-Lô reminds me of the lit window in The Crimson Curtain—as if I’d forgotten to turn off the light in my old room or in my youth. Barbey d’Aurevilly was born around there. I had once visited his former house.
Nineteen sixty-three. Nineteen sixty-four. The years blend together. Days of indolence, days of rain … Still, I sometimes entered a trancelike state in which I escaped the drabness, a mixture of giddiness and lethargy, like when you walk the streets in springtime after being up all night.
Nineteen sixty-four. I met a girl named Catherine in a café on Boulevard de la Gare, and she had the same grace and Parisian accent as Arletty. I remember the spring that year. The leaves on the chestnut trees along the elevated metro. Boulevard de la Gare, its squat houses not yet demolished.
My mother got a bit part in a play by François Billetdoux at the Théâtre de l’Ambigu: Comment va le monde, môssieu? Il tourne, môssieu … Boris Vian’s widow, Ursula Kübler, was also in the cast. She drove a red Morgan. Sometimes I went to visit her and her friend Hot d’Déé in Cité Véron. She showed me how she used to do the “bear dance” with Boris Vian. It moved me to see the complete set of Boris Vian’s records.
In July, I took refuge in Saint-Lô. Idle afternoons. I frequented the town library and met a blonde. She was spending her holidays in a villa in the hills of Trouville, with her kids and dogs. During the Occupation, when she was fourteen, she had lived at the Legion of Honor school in Saint-Denis. A “schoolgirl of old boarding-schools.” My mother wrote me: “If you’re happy there, it would be best if you stayed as long as possible. I’m living on practically nothing, and this way I can send the rest of the money I owe Galeries Lafayette.”
In September, in Saint-Lô, another letter from my mother: “I don’t think we’ll have any heating this winter, but we’ll manage. So I need you, my son, to send me all the money you have left.” At the time, I made a modest living by “brokering” used books. And in still another letter, a hopeful note: “The coming winter surely won’t be as harsh as the one we’ve been through …”
I received a phone call from my father. He had enrolled me, without asking, in advanced literature courses at the Lycée Michel-Montaigne in Bordeaux. He was, he said, “in charge of my schooling.” He made an appointment with me for the following day, at the cafeteria of the railway station in Caen. We took the first train for Paris. At Saint-Lazare, the ersatz Mylène Demongeot was waiting for us and drove us to the Gare d’Austerlitz. I realized that she was the one who had insisted on my exile, far from Paris. My father asked me to give the ersatz Mylène Demongeot, as a token of reconciliation, an amethyst ring I was wearing, a parting gift from my friend, the “schoolgirl of old boarding schools.” I refused.
At the Gare d’Austerlitz, my father and I caught the train to Bordeaux. I had no luggage, as if I were being kidnapped. I’d agreed to leave with him in hopes of talking things over between us: it was the first time in two years we’d been alone together, other than those furtive meetings in cafés.
We arrived in Bordeaux that evening. My father took a room for the two of us at the Hôtel Splendide. The following days, we went to the shops on Rue Sainte-Catherine to buy my necessities for the school year—of which the Lycée Michel-Montaigne had sent my father a list. I tried to convince him that all this was pointless, but he stuck to his guns.
One evening, in front of the Grand Théâtre, I started running to try to lose him. And then I felt sorry for him. Again I tried to talk things over. Why was he always so eager to get rid of me? Wouldn’t it be simpler if I just stayed in Paris? I was too old to be shut up in boarding schools … He didn’t want to hear it. So then I pretended to give in. As before, we went to the movies … The Sunday evening before school began, he brought me to the Lycée Michel-Montaigne in a taxi. He gave me 150 francs and made me sign a receipt. Why? He waited in the taxi until I had disappeared through t
he front door of the school. I went up to the dormitory with my suitcase. The boarders treated me as a “new kid” and forced me to read aloud a text in Greek. So I decided to run away. I left the school with my suitcase and went to have dinner at the restaurant Dubern, on Allée de Tourny, where my father had taken me on the previous days. Then I took a cab to the Gare Saint-Jean. And a night train to Paris. There was nothing left of the 150 francs. I was sorry not to have seen more of Bordeaux, the city of The Unknown Sea; not to have breathed in the scent of pines and their resin. The next day, in Paris, I ran into my father on the stairs in our building. He was stunned to see me. We would not speak to each other for a long time after that.
And the days and months passed. And the seasons. Sometimes I’d like to go back in time and relive those years better than I lived them then. But how?
I now took Rue Championnet at the hour of the afternoon when the sun is in your eyes. I spent my days in Montmartre in a kind of waking dream. I felt better there than anywhere else. The metro stop Lamarck-Caulaincourt, with its rising elevator and the San Cristobal midway up the steps. The café at the Terrass Hôtel. For brief moments, I was happy. Get-togethers at 7 P.M. at the Rêve. The icy handrail on Rue Berthe. And me, always short of breath.
On Thursday, April 8, 1965, judging from an old diary, my mother and I didn’t have a cent. She forced me to go ring at my father’s door and demand some money. I climbed the stairs with a leaden heart. I’d intended not to ring, but my mother was glaring up at me from the landing, eyes and chin tragic, foaming at the mouth. I rang. He slammed the door in my face. I rang again. The ersatz Mylène Demongeot screamed that she was going to call the police. I went back down to the third floor. The police came for me. My father was with them. They made both of us climb into the Black Maria parked in front of the building, under the dumbfounded eyes of the concierge. We sat on the bench, side by side. He didn’t say a word to me. This was the first time in my life I found myself in a police van, and as it happened, it was with my father. He had already been through this before, in February 1942 and in the winter of 1943, when he’d been picked up by the French inspectors of the Jewish Affairs police.
The Black Maria followed Rue des Saints-Pères, then Boulevard Saint-Germain. It stopped at a red light in front of the Deux Magots. We arrived at the police station on Rue de l’Abbaye. My father pressed charges with the superintendent. He called me a “hooligan” and said I’d come up to his place to “make trouble.” The superintendent declared that the “next time” he’d keep me there. I could tell my father would have been perfectly content to leave me at that police station once and for all. We returned together to the Quai de Conti. I asked why he’d let the ersatz Mylène Demongeot call the police and why he’d pressed charges. He said nothing.
That same year, 1965—or perhaps 1964—my father demolished the inner staircase connecting the two floors, and the apartments were separated for good. When I opened the door and stood in the small room filled with rubble, I found some of our childhood books, along with postcards addressed to my brother that had remained on the fourth floor, there among the debris, torn in pieces. May and June. Still in Montmartre. It was nice out. I was at a café on Rue des Abbesses, in the springtime.
July. Night train, standing in the corridor. Vienna. I spend a few nights in a seedy hotel near the Westbahnhof. Then I hole up in a room behind the Karlskirche. I meet all sorts of people at the Café Hawelka. One evening, I celebrate my twentieth birthday with them.
We sunbathed in the gardens of Potzleinsdorf, and also in a little shack in a working-class allotment near Heiligenstadt. The Café Rabe, a gloomy beer hall near the Graben, was always empty and you could listen to songs by Piaf. And still that slight giddiness mixed with lethargy, in the summer streets, as if after a sleepless night.
Sometimes we went up to the Czech and Hungarian borders. A large field. Watchtowers. If you walked in the field, they would fire at you.
I left Vienna at the beginning of September. Sag’ beim Abschied leise “Servus,” as the song goes. A passage by our Joseph Roth calls to mind the city I haven’t seen in forty years. Will I ever see it again? “You had to grab these shy, fleeting evenings before they disappeared, and what I liked best was to catch them in the parks, the Volksgarten or the Prater, and then to savor the last sweetest lingering of them in a café, where they seeped in, gentle and mild, like a fragrance …”
Night train in second class, at the Westbahnhof, Vienna to Geneva. I arrived in Geneva at the end of the afternoon. I caught the bus for Annecy. In Annecy, night had fallen. It was pouring. I was broke. I went into the Hôtel d’Angleterre on Rue Royale, with no idea how I’d pay for a room. I no longer recognized Annecy, which that evening was a ghost town in the rain. They had demolished the old hotel and derelict buildings near the station. The next day, I ran across some friends. Many had already left for military service. That evening, I thought I saw them pass by in the rain in uniform. As it turned out, I had fifty francs left. But the Hôtel d’Angleterre was expensive. During those few days, I had gone to the Collège Saint-Joseph in Thônes to visit my old literature teacher, Father Accambray. I had written him from Vienna, asking whether they might hire me as a proctor or assistant teacher for the coming year. I think I was trying to avoid Paris and my poor parents, who had given me no moral support whatsoever and had left me with my back to the wall. I’ve found two letters from Father Accambray: “I’d love it if the school year could start with you as a teacher in our house. I’ve spoken with the Superior. The teaching staff is full, but there could possibly be some movement before the end of August, which I hope will happen so that you can join us.” In the second, dated September 7, 1965, he writes: “The teaching schedule on which I’ve been working these past few days clearly shows, alas, that we have more than enough staff for the 1965–66 school year. We simply can’t offer you any work, even part-time …”
But life continued with no clear sense of why at a given moment you found yourself with certain individuals rather than others, in certain places rather than others, and whether the film was in the original language or dubbed. These days, all that remain in my memory are brief sequences. I enrolled in the Faculty of Literature to prolong my military deferment. I never went to classes and was a phantom student. Jean Normand (alias Jean Duval) came to live at Quai de Conti for several months, in the small room that had once contained the inner staircase connecting the third and fourth floors. He worked in a real estate office but was persona non grata in Paris. That’s something I would learn later. My mother had met him around 1955. Normand was twenty-seven then and had just served time in prison for burglary. As it happened, he had committed some of those burglaries, while still very young, with Suzanne Bouquerau, the woman my brother and I lived with in Jouy-en-Josas. He must have gone back to jail since then, as he was in Poissy prison in 1959. He made some basic restorations to the dilapidated room and I’m sure he gave my mother money. I was very fond of this Normand (alias Duval). One evening, he quietly left a hundred-franc bill on the mantelpiece of my room, which I discovered only after he’d gone. He drove a Jaguar, and the following year, at the time of the Ben Barka Affair, I read in the papers that they’d nicknamed him “the tall man with the Jaguar.”
An incident, from 1965 or ’66: It’s ten o’clock at night and I’m alone in the apartment. I hear heavy footsteps upstairs, at my father’s, and the crash of furniture being knocked over and windows being smashed. Then silence. I open the door to the landing. Coming from the fourth floor, two stocky fellows who look like thugs or plainclothes cops hurtle down the stairs. I ask them what’s going on. One of them makes an authoritarian gesture and tells me sharply to “go back inside.” I hear footfalls in my father’s apartment. So he was there … I’m tempted to phone him, but we haven’t seen each other since our trip to Bordeaux, and I’m certain he’ll hang up. Two years later, I ask him what happened that night. He claims not to know what I’m talking about. I believe that man could ha
ve worn down ten examining magistrates.
That autumn of 1965, on evenings when I had a few five-franc bills bearing the likeness of Victor Hugo, I patronized a restaurant near the Lutèce theater. And I hid out in a room on Avenue Félix-Faure in the 15th arrondissement, where a friend was storing a ten-year collection of Paris-Turf: he used them to make arcane statistical calculations for his bets at Auteuil and Longchamp. Pie in the sky. And yet I remember finding my bearings in that Grenelle neighborhood, thanks to those razor-straight backstreets that flowed down to the Seine. Sometimes I’d take a taxi very late at night. The ride cost five francs. At the edge of the 15th arrondissement, the police often checked for minors. I had altered the birthdate on my passport to give myself legal age, transforming 1945 into 1943.
Raymond Queneau was kind enough to receive me on Saturdays. Often, at the beginning of the afternoon, we’d return from Neuilly along the Left Bank. He told me of a walk he had taken with Boris Vian to a dead-end street that almost no one knew, at the far end of the 13th arrondissement, between the Quai de la Gare and the Austerlitz train tracks: Rue de la Croix-Jarry. He recommended I go there. I’ve read that the times Queneau was happiest were when he wandered around in the afternoon, thinking up his articles about Paris for L’Intransigeant. I wonder whether those dead years that I’m invoking here are worth it. Like Queneau, I was really myself only when I could be alone in the streets, seeking out curiosities like the Asnières dog cemetery. I had two dogs at the time. Their names were Jacques and Paul. In Jouy-en-Josas, in 1952, my brother and I had a dog called Peggy, who got run over one afternoon on Rue du Docteur-Kurzenne. Queneau was very fond of dogs.
He told me of a western that depicted a fierce battle between the Indians and the Basques. The presence of Basques had struck him as very odd and very funny. I finally tracked down the film: it’s called Thunder in the Sun. The synopsis indeed says that it’s about Indians versus Basques. I’d like to see this film in memory of Queneau, in a revival house they’ve forgotten to tear down, in some obscure corner of the city. Queneau’s laugh. Part geyser, part rattle. But I have no talent for metaphor. It was simply Queneau’s laugh.
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