Patrick Modiano - Pedigree - A Memoir

A few hours of liberty once a month, and then the Sunday evening bus would take me back to school. I waited for it at the foot of the large tree, near the town hall of Veyrier-du-Lac. I often had to make the trip standing, because of all the farmers returning home after a Sunday in town. Night was falling. We drove past the chateau of Menthon-Saint-Bernard, the small cemetery of Alex and the one where the Resistance heroes of the Glières Plateau were buried. Those Sunday evening buses and the trains between Annecy and Paris were as packed as during the Occupation. Moreover, they were basically the same buses and trains.

The Generals’ Putsch in Algiers, which I followed in the dorm on my little transistor radio, thinking I should take advantage of the widespread panic to break out of school. But order was restored in France by the following Sunday evening.

The nightlights in the dormitory. Returning to the dormitory after the holidays. The first night was the worst. You would wake up and not know where you were. The nightlights brought it all back brutally. Lights out at 9 P.M. The bed was too small. The sheets weren’t washed for months and smelled bad. So did our clothes. Up in the morning at 6:15. Cursory wash, in cold water, at sinks that were ten yards long: troughs topped with a row of spigots. Study. Breakfast. Unsweetened coffee in a metal bowl. No butter. During morning recess, in the covered playground, we huddled together to read a copy of the newspaper L’Echo Liberté. A slice of dry bread and a square of dark chocolate handed out at 4 P.M. Polenta for dinner. I was starving. I felt dizzy. One day, some schoolmates and I yelled at the bursar, Father Bron, telling him there wasn’t enough to eat. Class walks around Thônes on Thursday afternoons. I took the opportunity to buy Les Lettres françaises, Arts , and Les Nouvelles littéraires at the village newsstand. I read them cover to cover. All these weeklies piled up on my nightstand. Recess after lunch, when I listened to the radio. In the distance, behind the trees, the monotonous whine of the sawmill. Endless rainy days under the playground roof. The row of stand-up toilets with doors that didn’t stay shut. Evening Benediction in the chapel before returning to the dormitory, in line. Six months of snow. I’ve always felt there was something touching and benevolent about that snow. And a song that year, on the transistor radio: Non je ne me souviens plus du nom du bal perdu …

During the school year, I occasionally received a letter from my mother, from Andalusia. Most of her letters were sent care of the Gérins in Veyrier-du-Lac, except for two or three that went to my school. Letters sent and received had to be unsealed, and Janin, the canon, deemed it odd, this husbandless mother in Andalusia. She wrote to me from Seville: “You should start reading Montherlant. I think you could learn a lot from him. My boy, take this to heart. Please, do it, read Montherlant. You’ll find him full of good advice. How a young man should act around women, for instance. Really, you could learn a lot by reading Montherlant’s The Girls. ” Her vehemence surprised me — my mother had never read a word of Montherlant in her life. It was a friend of hers, the journalist Jean Cau, who had prompted her to give me that advice, which I still find puzzling: did he really think Montherlant should be my guide in sexual matters? In any event, I innocently began reading The Girls. Personally, I prefer his Le Fichier parisien. In 1961, my mother inadvertently sent me another letter that raised the canon’s eyebrows. This one contained press clippings about a comedy, Le Signe de Kikota , in which she was touring with Fernand Gravey.

Christmas 1960, in Rome with my father and his new girlfriend, a high-strung Italian, twenty years his junior, hair the color of straw and face like a poor man’s Mylène Demongeot. A photo taken on New Year’s Eve in a nightclub near the Via Veneto perfectly captures the visit. I look pensive and, forty years later, I wonder what I was doing there. To cheer myself up, I pretend the photo is a composite. The ersatz Mylène Demongeot wanted to get a religious annulment of her first marriage. One afternoon, I accompanied her to the Vatican to see a Monsignor Pendola. Despite his cassock and the inscribed picture of the pope on his desk, he looked just like the hucksters my father used to meet at the Claridge. My father seemed startled, that Christmas, by the severe chilblains on my hands.

Back to boarding school, until summer vacation. At the beginning of July, my mother returned from Spain. I went to meet her at Geneva Airport. She had dyed her hair brown. She moved in with the Gérins in Veyrier-du-Lac. She didn’t have a cent. Barely a pair of shoes to her name. The stay in Spain had not been successful, and yet she had lost none of her arrogance. She told us, with chin raised, “sublime” stories of Andalusia and bullfighters. But beneath the theatricality and fantasy, she had a heart of stone.

My father came to spend a few days in the area, accompanied by the marquis Philippe de D., with whom he had business dealings. A large, blustery blond with a mustache, trailed by his brunette mistress. He borrowed my father’s passport to go to Switzerland. They were of similar build, with the same mustache and the same corpulence, and D. had lost his papers when he’d fled Tunisia following the military action in Bizerte. I can still see myself with my father, Philippe de D., and the brunette mistress at a sidewalk table at Père Bise in Talloires, and once again I wonder what I was doing there. In August, my mother and I left for Knokke-le-Zoute, where a family she’d been friends with before the war took us into their small villa. It was kind of them; otherwise we would have had to sleep under the stars or at the Salvation Army. Spoiled, boorish teenagers hung out at the go-kart track. Industrialists from Ghent with the casual manners of yachtsmen greeted each other in their deep voices, in a French to which they labored to give English inflections. A friend from my mother’s youth, who looked like an overripe delinquent, ran a nightclub behind the dunes, near Ostend. Then I returned alone to the Haute-Savoie. My mother went back to Paris. Another school year began for me at the Collège Saint-Joseph.

Break for All Saints’ Day, 1961. Rue Royale, Annecy, in the rain and melting snow. In the bookstore window, Moravia’s novel Boredom , with its belly band: “And Its Relief: Eros.” During those gray holidays, I read Crime and Punishment , and it was my sole comfort. I came down with scabies. I went to see a doctor, whose name I’d found in the Annecy phone book. She was shocked at my weakened state. She asked, “Don’t you have parents?” At her solicitude and maternal kindness, I had to force myself not to break down in sobs.

In January 1962, a letter from my mother that, luckily, did not fall into the hands of Father Janin: “I didn’t call you this week, I wasn’t home. Friday night I was at a cocktail party that Litvak threw on the set of his film. I was also at the premiere of Truffaut’s film Jules and Jim , and this evening I’m going to see the Calderón play at TNP…. I’m thinking of you and know how hard you work. Be brave, my dearest boy. I’m still not sorry I turned down the play with Bourvil. I’d have been too miserable playing such a vulgar role. I hope to find something else. My son, don’t think I’ve forgotten you but I have so little time to send care packages.”

In February 1962, I took advantage of the Shrove Tuesday break and hopped the crowded train to Paris, running a high fever. I was hoping my parents, seeing me so ill, would let me stay in Paris for a while. My mother had moved into the third-floor apartment, where the only remaining furniture was a sagging couch. My father was living on the fourth floor with the ersatz Mylène Demongeot. At my mother’s, I saw the journalist Jean Cau, who had a bodyguard because of the OAS assassination plots. Sartre’s former secretary was an odd duck, with his lynxlike face and his obsession with bullfighters. When I was fourteen, I’d convinced him that the son of Alexandre Stavisky, under a false name, was at school with me and had told me his father was still alive somewhere in South America. Cau had arrived at my school in his 4 CV, desperate to meet “Stavisky’s son” and come away with a scoop. That winter, I also saw Jean Normand (alias Jean Duval), a friend of my mother’s who had recommended pulp novels to me when I was eleven. At the time, 1956, I couldn’t have known that he’d just got out of prison. There was also Mireille Ourousov. She slept in the living room on the old couch. A brunette of twenty-eight or thirty. My mother had met her in Andalusia. She was married to a Russian, Eddy Ourousov, nicknamed “the Consul” because he drank as much as the hero of Malcolm Lowry’s novel — cuba libres. The two of them ran a small hotel-bar in Torremolinos. She was French. She told me that when she was seventeen, on the morning she was scheduled to take the baccalaureate exams, her alarm didn’t go off and she slept until noon. It was somewhere around the Landes. At night my mother would be out, and I stayed home with Mireille Ourousov. She couldn’t sleep on that small, sagging couch. And I had a large bed … One morning, I was with her in Place de l’Odéon. A gypsy read our palms, under the arcades of the Cour du Commerce Saint-André. Mireille Ourousov said she’d be curious to know me in ten years.