Apart from my brother, Rudy, his death, I don’t believe that anything I’ll relate here truly matters to me. I’m writing these pages the way one compiles a report or résumé, as documentation and to have done with a life that wasn’t my own. It’s just a simple film of deeds and facts. I have nothing to confess or elucidate and I have no interest in soul-searching or self-reflection. On the contrary, the more obscure and mysterious things remained, the more interesting I found them. I even looked for mystery where there was none. I lived through the events I’m recounting, up to the age of twenty-one, as if against a transparency — like in a cinematic process shot, when landscapes slide by in the background while the actors stand in place on a soundstage. I’d like to translate this impression, which many others have felt before me: everything paraded by like a transparency and I could not yet live my life.
I was a boarder at the Montcel school until 1960. Four years of military-style discipline. Every morning, flag salutes. Parade marches. Company, halt. Stand at attention. Evening inspections of the dormitories. Bullying by a few senior-year “captains” charged with maintaining “order.” Electric clamor of the morning alarm. Showers in batches of thirty. Fitness trail. At ease. At attention. And the hours spent gardening, when, in a row, we raked up the dead leaves.
One of my classmates that year was named Safirstein. He was with me in the green dormitory. He told me that his father had been a medical student in Vienna when he was twenty. In 1938, at the time of the Anschluss, the Nazis had humiliated Vienna’s Jews by forcing them to wash the sidewalks and paint the Star of David on the windows of their shops themselves. His father had suffered this bullying for a time, then fled Austria. One night, we decided to go explore inside the blockhouse at the far end of the park. This meant crossing the great lawn, and if one of the staff spotted us we could be severely punished. Safirstein had refused to join in this scouting expedition. The next day, my classmates ostracized him and called him a “chicken,” with that garrison-style boorishness that emerges when “the men” are among themselves. Safirstein’s father showed up unannounced at the college one afternoon. He wanted to talk to the entire dorm. He asked us nicely not to bully his son and to stop calling him “chicken.” This way of handling things amazed my classmates, Safirstein included. We were all sitting around the table in the teachers’ lounge. Safirstein was next to his father. Everyone made up in good spirits. I think his father gave us cigarettes. None of my schoolmates gave the incident any further thought. Not even Safirstein. But I had keenly felt the anxiousness of that man, who wondered if the nightmare he had suffered twenty years earlier wasn’t starting up again for his son.
The Montcel school catered to the unloved, bastards, lost children. I remember a Brazilian who for a long while occupied the bed next to mine, who’d had no news of his parents for two years, as if they had left him in the checkroom of a forgotten station. Others were already smuggling blue jeans and sneaking past police roadblocks. Two of the students, two brothers, would even stand trial some twenty years later. Gilded youth, for the most part, but the gilding was tarnished, of poor alloy. Most of those fine young lads would have no future.
My readings at the time. Some books left their mark: Fermina Márquez, The Penal Colony, Les Amours jaunes, The Sun Also Rises. In other books, I rediscovered the fantastic character of the streets: Marguerite de la nuit by Pierre Mac Orlan, Rien qu’une femme by Francis Carco, La Rue sans nom by Marcel Aymé. In the college infirmaries, there were still some old novels lying around that had survived the last two wars, and that stood quietly on the shelves for fear someone might haul them down to the basement. I remember reading Bazin’s The Children of Alsace. But mainly, I read the first “Livres de Poche” that had just been published, with their purple cardboard bindings. Good novels and bad, indiscriminately. Many have since gone out of print. Among those books, several titles have retained their aroma: La Rue du Chat-qui-Pêche, La Rose de Bratislava, Marion des neiges.
On Sundays, strolls with my father and one of his cronies of the time, Stioppa. My father saw a lot of him. He wore a monocle and his hair was so thick with pomade that it left a stain when he rested his head against the sofa. He had no discernible profession. He lived in a boardinghouse on Avenue Victor-Hugo. Sometimes Stioppa, my father, and I would go walking in the Bois de Boulogne.
On another Sunday, my father took me to the boat show at the Quai Branly. We met a friend of his from before the war, “Paulo” Guerin. An aged young man wearing a blazer. I don’t remember whether he was also visiting the show or manning a booth there. My father explained that Paulo Guerin never did anything but ride horses, drive around in fancy cars, and seduce the ladies. Let that be a lesson to me: yes, indeed, in life, you have to have your diplomas. That late afternoon, my father seemed pensive, as if he’d just met a ghost. Each time I’ve found myself on the Quai Branly, I’ve thought of this Paulo Guerin and his slightly stocky build, his pasty-looking face under swept-back brown hair. And the question remained forever unanswered: whatever could he have been doing at the boat show that Sunday, without his diplomas?
There was also a certain Charly d’Alton. It was especially with him and his old pal Lucien P. that my father tossed the phone back and forth like a rugby ball. His name reminded me of the Dalton Brothers in the comic books, and later I noticed that it was also the name of a friend of Alfred de Musset’s. And a man my father always called by his surname, Rosen (or Rozen). This Rosen (or Rozen) was the spitting image of the actor David Niven. I seem to recall that during the Spanish Civil War, he enlisted on the side of Franco. He could sit silently on the couch for hours. Even in my father’s absence. Even at night, I imagine. He was part of the furniture.
Sometimes my father came with me on Monday mornings to the Rotonde at the Porte d’Orléans. That’s where I would catch the bus that took me back to school. We got up at six o’clock, and my father used the time before the bus arrived to hold appointments in the cafés around the Porte d’Orléans, lit with neon on those winter mornings when it was still pitch black outside. Hiss of the percolators. The people he saw there were different from the ones he met at the Claridge or the Grand Hôtel. They spoke in low voices. Stall hawkers, men with the ruddy complexion of traveling salesmen or the sly demeanor of provincial clerks. What did he want with them, exactly? They sported rural names like Quintard, Chevreau, Picard …
One Sunday morning, we took a taxi to the Bastille neighborhood. My father had the driver stop about twenty times in front of apartment houses on Boulevard Voltaire, Avenue de la République, Boulevard Richard-Lenoir … Each time, he left an envelope with the concierge. A notice to former shareholders of a defunct company whose stock certificates he had unearthed? Something like the Union Minière Indochinoise? On another Sunday, he dropped off his envelopes along Boulevard Pereire.
Sometimes, on Saturday evenings, we went to visit an elderly couple, the Facons, who lived in a minuscule apartment on Rue du Ruisseau, behind Montmartre. On the wall of the tiny living room, exhibited in a frame, was the military medal M. Facon had been awarded in World War I. He was a former printer who loved literature. He gave me a handsomely bound edition of Saint-Pol Roux’s book of poems La Rose et les épines du chemin. Under what circumstances had my father met him?