Public Enemies (6 page)

Dear Michel,

Be careful with your “tapeworm.”

It’s what Céline calls Sartre in “À l’agité du bocal.”
^*

Using it again is a mistake in two ways. First, it does too much credit to the person you implicitly compare to Sartre and who, when these letters are published, will use it as an excuse to puff himself up. Moreover, you sell yourself short by contravening the healthy law of rhetorical and political diet (drawn up, incidentally, by Sartre himself in the preface to
The Wretched of the Earth
), according to which you should never characterize your opponents in animal, zoological, or physiological terms. It’s a golden rule …

On the other hand, I like what you wrote about your father.

Our fathers were clearly very unalike.

And our relations with them were also, clearly, very different. I adored mine and had nothing but respect for him. Unlike yours, mine impressed me to the end.

But I like the way you wrote about that.

And in doing so, you used two words that really resonated with me and that you made me feel like expanding on: the words
withdrawal
and
contempt
. I’m not sure that they mean the same to me, but still …

To begin, I’d like to point out that my father was born poor, in Mascara, a modest village in western Algeria, all steep slopes and loose stones, stifling in summer, freezing in winter, whose only bit of life and bustle came from the Foreign Legion barracks.

His father, my grandfather, was a photographer, but he was a village photographer restricted by the prevailing anti-Semitism to photographing only the “natives,” leaving to a “real Frenchman” the sole rights to the only worthwhile market, i.e., marriages and births among the “whites.”

His house, which I came across much later, almost by chance when I was doing a report following the footsteps of Camus in his youth, was a one-story dwelling made of poorly assembled stones, without electricity or running water and with one of those floors of beaten earth that nowadays can be found only in Africa’s shantytowns or the Brazilian
favelas
.

The little I know of my father’s life there until the beginning of 1938, when, at the age of seventeen, he escaped to Spain, I learned through cross-checking, as he never confided in me. It confirms this picture of black poverty, unilluminated, unmitigated: a childhood in which before dawn the little boy, still half-asleep, had to walk to the end of the town to fill the water bottles for the day; an adolescence spent dreaming of a wooden shelf, just one shelf, on which to place the books by Romain Rolland or Anatole France he had pilfered from the school library; football to pass the time and later on revolution in order to abolish it; and finally the opium of a communist youth, with the double virtue of being
both soporific and exciting that this type of opium has always had.

So, he was born into poverty, an absolute poverty, as monotonous as hell, where the milk had to be diluted, the soup was made with thistles and roots, where you got a thrashing if you were tempted to start the fresh bread before finishing the stale bread from the night before, a poverty I’m not sure that any French person today, even in the most deprived housing estate, can even begin to imagine.

And yet, after the war, at the age of not much over twenty, helped by his talent, his anger, and an unusual authority, and also perhaps the solidarity that came out of the early Gaullism and his affinities with the Communist Resistance, he changed his life radically and built up a thriving business, indeed one that very quickly became quite powerful.

The interesting thing (and the point I’m trying to get to) is that as far back as I can remember, I always understood that he loathed his native Algeria, which was for him synonymous with misery, but at the same time I could see that he mistrusted this “mainland” France where he had succeeded so brilliantly.

I always knew that he hated, for others no less than for himself, that atrocious, humiliating, killing poverty and yet at the same time that he equally—perhaps even more so—abhorred money, men with money, the customs, the insulting, arrogant behavior that went hand in hand with this money, which nevertheless had become his world.

He was bourgeois but despised the bourgeoisie.

He was a captain of industry who disdained captains of industry.

He had broken with the politics of the left he had supported
in his youth but at table he would still describe someone as “right-wing” as if it were an insult or a flaw.

His profession was wood, international commerce and the wood industry, like the left-wing Feltrinelli billionaire or Wallace, the hero of
Gommes
by Robbe-Grillet (a detail that did not escape the notice of my well-read mother: the same background, the same poverty, except probably the good fortune to get a bookshelf). But with a single exception (the young François P., who was his main rival, but in whom he recognized someone else who was out of place, no less contemptuous of the “establishment,” also inscrutable, having come from afar, and remaining distant), it was a mistake to mention any of his colleagues in the “Wood Federation” of the CNPF employers’ union
^*
for whom he felt a collective, definitive, and scathing contempt.

Neuilly was his city. Yes, we lived in Neuilly, as I suppose he thought that nothing could be better than Achille Peretti’s
^†
district, with its “bling” before the word was invented, to banish from his children’s minds the idea, the possibility, the subconscious vibration of the utter destitution he had endured as a child. But apart from two or three teachers who were invited to dinner at the end of each year in a ritual that, looking back, strikes me as even more outmoded, more inconceivable than the presentation of prizes at Le Chézy cinema, I don’t remember either him or my mother mixing with anyone in this ghetto of the rich and, worse, the nouveaux
riches (in our family’s criminal code, the supreme crime was bad taste), whose grotesque customs we mocked at every opportunity. The only thing I remember is his rage on the day when, at the age of fifteen, I came home from school and explained that I needed a dinner suit, as I wanted to become a member of one of the clubs the local young dandies were rushing to join, which were called “society parties.”

He was as much of a stranger in his new milieu as his old one, as much of a stranger to his destiny as to his origin, to the man he had become as to the one he had left behind.

Among the people around him, he had sent packing any possible witnesses to what he no longer wished to be (burning, suffering, known for false starts). Yet he did not replace them, as those who become wealthy do, with contemporaries of this new era (he did have some of those, of course, but he kept them at a distance, obstinately refusing to allow any familiarity).

As a result, he had no friends.

He hardly saw anyone.

I suspect that in his youth he had a happy nature, was one of the small glories of Saint-Germain-des-Prés by night, a dandy, a gambler, a man surrounded by women. Yet now he took no interest in any company but that of a handful of gray men who in my eyes had no charm about them. They were consuls, proconsuls, satraps, microstrategists, and other counselors of this “Group,” as he called it, of which he was so proud and which, when he spoke of it, sounded like that of an expanding empire.

He was a reclusive king.

As I said before, he played chess, but alone or with me, or, in the end, with a computer.

He was a radiant person, yet impervious to his own radiance and, strangely, he derived no benefit from it. Others basked in the warmth and light he exuded, while he remained
in the shadows he sought, where he could give free rein to his new taste for austerity, solitude, and silence.

He was a real “self-made man,” in fact the essential self-made man, that is, someone who wanted to make himself, abolish his history, to inherit nothing from anyone, to shorten his memory, as you would shorten a bridle. But he was a haughty self-made man, inflexible in his pride with an obsessive fear that was at least equal to his renunciation of, indeed his armed rallying against, the great and small pleasures which his new social status would have allowed him.

Dear Benny Lévy,
^*
to whom I spoke one day about this odd relationship with oneself, replied with a shrug of the shoulders that such was the destiny of this type of Jew, whom he called “Jews of negation.”
^†

Albert Cohen, in his portrait of Solal, the Jewish prince who acts the clown with Christians but thinks no less of himself, who keeps in reserve a spare authenticity, who in the cellar of his residence keeps a mangy pack, which he goes down to at night to talk to and mingle with in secret, puts forward another theory of the type of man my father was, what he calls the “neo-Marrano.”
^‡

I myself sometimes see a crucial component of this abstract, unanchored man with his head in the sky, instead
of his feet on the solid ground of one of the community nations—for which I later provided a philosophical apologia in my books, in particular
L’Idéologie française—
in his asceticism, the way he snatched himself away from his past without taking root anywhere else, this decision to avoid at all costs replacing one identity by another and substituting the background he might have dreamed of for the one he had known.

But today, at this moment, my first impulse is to say that he was a perfect example of the “withdrawal” you spoke of, a withdrawal so complete in his case, so perfected that it confined him to the role of a hero and created around him a solid halo of opacity and mystery. A soul like a pyramid, a soul like a tomb … Because for a man like that, his soul is the tomb! Not the body, as it is for philosophers, but the soul. Only occasionally, rarely, did an event or meeting occur, when, as I mentioned, a word would rain down on him like a blow from a pickax, piercing the halo, sparking the fine dust of unwanted memories.

It’s quite simple.

I told you that my father and I were very close.

Indeed, I was one of the very few people he was close to and in whom he could have imagined confiding, as he suffocated in his tomb.

I realize now that this mystery was so unyielding, that shadow into which he chose to retreat was so dense, the remoteness from others and himself, to which he was condemned by not wanting to live either in the obscene satisfaction of his new success or in a conventional loyalty to the child buried within him, was so well constructed that I don’t know what he thought about most of the important matters.

I don’t know what role love played in his life.

I don’t know what his idea of God was or even if he had one.

I don’t know if he was afraid of death, if he was resigned or believed himself beyond its reach.

His sense of propriety, that is, his fear of words and the fire they contained, was so strong that on his very last evening, when part of him knew that this was the end, the last word he left me was a ridiculous business card on which he had scribbled for the nth time the financing plan for my film
Le Jour et la nuit
. He had been getting ready to produce it, the prospect of which gave him a naïve pleasure that wasn’t like him.

His inclination toward secrecy was so strong—as was the faith he had in his son and his son’s choices—that only in the glasnost of the Gorbachev years did I learn from loosened tongues the incredible story of that day on June 1977, right in the middle of the New Philosophers period, when I stood before the Soviet embassy in Paris at the head of a protest demonstration against Brezhnev’s visit to France. Through one of those ironies that are the destiny of men whose life is like an iceberg, immersed except for its tip, my father happened to be inside, heading up the delegation that had come to negotiate the state contracts I was protesting against. To the astonishment of the colleagues who had accompanied him, and naturally without stating the real reasons for his U-turn, he set so many preliminary conditions, raised so many difficulties, in short complicated the process to such a degree that the share of those contracts that were due to be allocated to him, as they had been every year for the last twenty years, never came to fruition …

As for his military past, his commitment to Republican Spain, then the Free French Forces, he never spoke of that
either. Several years after his death I found a ragged black folder with his decorations, the photographs from that time, letters sent from Barcelona to the fourteen-year-old girl he would lose sight of for eight years but who after the war became my mother, and the honorable mention from General Diego Brosset at Monte Cassino, which I spoke of in my last book and which brings tears to my eyes each time, like now, I copy it out: “an ever willing ambulance driver, day and night, whatever the mission; carried out evacuations through a hail of mortar with total indifference to danger, again and again going back to look for those wounded in the lines under intense enemy fire.”

The other day I returned to the rue Saint-Ferdinand, where he had his offices, very near the building where Drieu la Rochelle
^*
committed suicide.

I followed the route he took every day with his slow, sovereign step, as sovereign as his voice, never bowing to any urgency.

I heard once more his low voice, slow, muffled as the voices of those tending toward silence are, yet at the same time melodious, well tempered, a voice that commanded attention and for which I envied him.

I walked again in front of the tobacconist’s where my first film was born about Bosnia at war.

Then, in front of the avenue des Ternes, where we went to speak of that other “work,” his own, of which he was secretly proud and in which he tried to get me interested once in a while, with no hope of succeeding.