A girl, Marie. In the summer, she took the bus in Annecy, as did I, on Place de la Gare, at seven in the evening after work. She was going home to Veyrier-du-Lac. I met her on that bus. She was barely older than I and already working as a typist. On her days off, we would rendezvous at the small beach in Veyrier-du-Lac. She read Maurois’s A History of England. And photo comics that I’d buy for her before joining her on the beach.
The kids my age who spent time at the Sporting or the Taverne, and who are now gone with the wind: Jacques L., called “the Marquis,” the son of a milicien who’d been shot for treason in August 1944 at Grand-Bornand. Pierre Fournier, who carried a knobbed walking stick. And those who belonged to the generation of the Algerian War: Claude Brun, Zazie, Paulo Hervieu, Rosy, La Yeyette, who had been Pierre Brasseur’s mistress. Dominique the brunette with her black leather jacket passed beneath the arcades, and they said she lived “off her charms” in Geneva … Claude Brun and friends. A gang of vitelloni. Their cult film was The American Beauty. Returning from the Algerian War, they had bought secondhand MGs. They took me to a “floodlit” football match. One of them had bet he could seduce the prefect’s wife inside of two weeks and take her to the Grand Hôtel in Verdun, and he’d won; another was the lover of a rich and very pretty woman, the widow of a local notable, who in winter frequented the bridge club on the first floor of the Casino.
I used to take the bus to Geneva, where sometimes I saw my father. We had lunch in an Italian restaurant with a man called Picard. In the afternoons, he held appointments. Curious Geneva of the very early sixties. Algerians spoke in low voices in the lobby of the Hôtel du Rhône. I would walk around the historic part of town. They said that Dominique the brunette, on whom I had a crush, was working in a nightclub at 58 Rue Glacis-de-Rive. On the way back, the bus crossed the border at sunset, without stopping for customs.
In the summer of 1962, my mother came through Annecy on tour, playing in Sacha Guitry’s Ecoutez bien, messieurs at the Casino, with Jean Marchat and Michel Flamme, a typical blond “good-looking boy” who wore leopard-print bathing briefs. He took us for refreshments at the bar of the Sporting. A Sunday walk along the Pâquier gardens with Claude when the holidays were over. Autumn already. We walked past the prefecture, where a girlfriend of hers worked. Annecy turned back into a provincial town. In the Pâquier, we came across an old Armenian, always on his own; according to Claude, he was a wealthy businessman who gave lots of money to girls and paupers. And Jacky Gérin’s gray automobile, with body by Allemano, circled slowly around the lake for all eternity. I will keep on reciting these moments, without nostalgia but in a rush. It’s not my fault if the words jumble together. I have to move quickly, before I lose heart.
~ ~ ~
That September, in Paris, I started at the Lycée Henri-IV, in the preparatory classe de philosophie, as a full boarder, even though my parents’ apartment was only a few hundred yards from the school. I’d been living in dormitories for the past six years. I had known harsher discipline in my other schools, but I had never been as miserable as I was at Henri-IV. Especially at the hour when I watched the day students leave by the main porch and fan out into the streets.
I don’t remember my fellow boarders very well. I seem to recall three boys from Sarreguemines who were prepping for the Ecole Normale Supérieure. A Martinican in my class was usually with them. There was another student who always smoked a pipe, and constantly wore a gray smock and carpet slippers. They said he hadn’t been outside the school walls in three years. I also vaguely recall my bunkmate, a small red-haired kid, whom I spotted from afar two or three years later, on Boulevard Saint-Michel, in a private’s uniform in the rain … After lights out, a watchman came through the dormitories, lantern in hand, to make sure every bed was occupied. It was the fall of 1962, but also the nineteenth century and, perhaps, a time still farther in the past as well.
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.