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 schooclass="underline" “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.