Pedigree (7 page)

My father came only once to visit me in that institution. The headmaster gave me permission to wait for him on the entrance porch. That headmaster had a lovely name: Adonis Delfosse. The silhouette of my father, there, on the porch—but I can't make out his face, as if his presence in those medieval monastic surroundings seemed unreal. The silhouette of a tall man with no head. I don't remember if there was a parlor. I think we spoke in a room on the first floor, the library or perhaps the social hall. We were alone, sitting at a table, opposite each other. I accompanied him back down to the porch. He walked away across Place du Panthéon. He'd once told me that he, too, had hung around that part of town when he was eighteen. He had just enough money to buy himself a café
au lait and a couple of croissants at the Dupont-Latin, in lieu of a proper meal. In those days, he had a shadow on his lung. I close my eyes and imagine him walking up Boulevard Saint-Michel, among the well-behaved
lycée
pupils and the students belonging to Action Française.
His
Latin Quarter was the one of Violette Nozière. He must have run across her many times on the boulevard. Violette, “the pretty schoolgirl from the Lycée Fénelon who raised bats in her desk.”

My father married the ersatz Mylène Demongeot. They lived on the fourth floor, right above my mother. The two floors formed a single apartment, from the time when my parents lived together. In 1962, the two apartments hadn't yet been separated. Behind a boarded-up doorway, there was still the interior staircase that my father had built in 1947, when he'd begun renting the third floor. The ersatz Mylène Demongeot was not keen on me being a day pupil or continuing to see my father. After I'd spent two months as a boarder, he sent me this letter: “
ALBERT RODOLPHE MODIANO 15 QUAI
DE CONTI
Paris VI. You came up this morning at 9:15 to inform me that you had decided not to return to school as long as I did not reverse my decision to keep you there as a boarder. At around 12:30, you again confirmed the above. Your behavior is beyond disgraceful. If you think that such pathetic attempts at blackmail will win me over, you've got another think coming. Therefore I strongly advise you, for your own sake, to go back to school tomorrow morning, with a note for your headmaster excusing your absence due to a cold. I must warn you in no uncertain terms that if you do not, you will regret it. You are seventeen, you are still a minor, I am your father, and I'm responsible for your education. I intend to have a word with your headmaster. Albert Modiano.”

My mother had no money and no theatrical engagements that October of 1962. And my father was threatening to discontinue my child support unless I moved back into the dormitory. Thinking about it today, I can't imagine I cost him very much: just modest room and board.
But I remember seeing him in the late 1950s, so utterly “broke” that he had to borrow the few francs my grandfather sometimes sent me from Belgium out of his retirement pension. I felt closer to him than to my own parents.

I continued to be “on strike” from the boarding school. One afternoon, my mother and I were walking in the Tuileries; we didn't have a cent. As a last resort, she decided to ask her friend Suzanne Flon for help. We went to Suzanne Flon's on foot, having not even enough change for two metro tickets. Suzanne Flon welcomed us into her apartment on Avenue George-V with its superposed balconies. It was like being on a cruise ship. We stayed for dinner. In melodramatic tones, my mother laid out our “misfortunes,” her feet planted firmly, with theatrical and peremptory gestures. Suzanne Flon listened indulgently, deploring our situation. She offered to write my father a letter. She gave my mother some money.

Over the following months, my father had to resign himself to my finally leaving the dormitories
where I'd lived since age eleven. He made appointments to see me in cafés. And he trotted out his standard grievances against my mother and against me. I could never establish a bond between us. At each meeting, I was reduced to begging him for a fifty-franc bill, which he would give me very grudgingly and which I'd bring home to my mother. On certain days, I brought nothing home, which provoked furious outbursts from her. Soon—around the time I turned eighteen and in the years following—I started trying to find her, on my own, some of those miserable fifty-franc bills bearing the likeness of Jean Racine. But nothing softened the coldness and hostility she had always shown me. I was never able to confide in her or ask her for help of any kind. Sometimes, like a mutt with no pedigree that has too often been left on its own, I feel the childish urge to set down in black and white just what she put me through, with her insensitivity and heartlessness. I keep it to myself. And I forgive her. It's all so distant now … I remember copying out these words by Léon Bloy
at school: “Man has places in his heart which do not yet exist, and into them enters suffering, in order that they may have existence.” But in this case it was suffering for nothing, the kind from which you can't even fashion a poem.

Our poverty should have brought us closer. One year—1963—they had to “reconnect” the gas mains in the apartment. Work needed to be done, and my mother didn't have the money to pay for it. Neither did I. We cooked our meals on an alcohol burner. We never put on the heat in the winter. That lack of money would haunt us for a long time. One afternoon in January 1970, we were so hard up that she dragged me to the pawnbroker's on Rue Pierre-Charron, where I hocked a fountain pen “made of gold with a diamond nib” that Maurice Chevalier had presented to me at a literary awards ceremony. They gave me only two hundred francs for it, which my mother pocketed, steely-eyed.

During all those years, we dreaded due dates. Rents on those old apartments, dilapidated since before the war, weren't very high at first. Then
they started rising around 1966 as the neighborhood changed, along with its shops and residents. Please don't hold such details against me: they caused me some anxiety at the time. But it soon evaporated, as I believed in miracles and would lose myself in Balzacian dreams of wealth.

After those dismal meetings with my father, we never entered the building together. He would go in first, and I, per his instructions, would have to cool my heels for a while, pacing around the block. He concealed our meetings from the ersatz Mylène Demongeot. Usually I saw him alone. One time, we had lunch with the marquis Philippe de D. and the meal was split between two restaurants, one on the Quai du Louvre and the other on the Quai des Grands-Augustins. My father told me that Philippe de D. was in the habit of lunching at several restaurants at a time, where he kept appointments with different people … He ordered his appetizer in one, his main course in another, and changed restaurants yet again for dessert.

The day when we followed Philippe de D. from the Quai du Louvre to the Quai des Grands-Augustins, he was wearing a kind of military tunic. He claimed to have been a member of the Normandie-Niémen escadrille during the war. My father often spent the weekend at D.'s chateau in the Loire-Atlantique. He even went on duckshoots there, which wasn't exactly his style. I remember the few days in 1959 that we spent in Sologne, at the home of Paul Bertholle, his wife, and the comte de Nalèche, where I'd been afraid my father would abandon me and those killers would drag me into their blood sport. Just as he'd been “in business” with Paul Bertholle, he was now “in business” with Philippe de D. According to my father, D., in his youth, had been a juvenile delinquent and had even spent time in jail. He later showed me a photo clipped from a back issue of
Détective
that pictured D. in handcuffs. But D. had recently come into a large inheritance from his grandmother (née de W.) and I imagine my father needed him as an investor. Since the end of the
1950s, he had been pursuing a dream: to buy up shares in a business concern in Colombia. And he was surely counting on Philippe de D. to help him achieve his goal.

D. would marry a female racing driver and end his days ruined: as manager of a nightclub in Hammamet, then as garage owner in Bordeaux. For his part, my father would stay true to his Colombian dream for a few more years. In 1976, a friend sent me a document bearing this information: “Compagnie Financière Mocupia. Head office: 22 Rue Bergère, Paris 9. Tel. 770-76-94. French corporation. Board of Directors: President: Albert Rodolphe Modiano. Board: Charles Ruschewey, Léon-Michel Tesson … Kaffir Trust (Raoul Melenotte).”

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.

N
ineteen 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.