In Paris, Jacky Gérin served as front man for Uncle Ralph, my father’s younger brother: the so-called Etablissements Gérin, 74 Rue d’Hauteville, was in fact run by Uncle Ralph. I was never able to clarify the exact nature of that Etablissements Gérin, a sort of warehouse where Uncle Ralph had an office and sold “equipment.” Several years later, I asked him why the business was named Gérin and not Modiano, after him. He answered in his Paris accent: “Gotta understand, kid, Italian-sounding names didn’t really cut it after the war …”
On my last holiday afternoons, I read The Devil in the Flesh and Witches’ Sabbath on the small beach at Veyrier-du-Lac. A few days before classes started, my father sent me a harsh letter, the type of letter that could easily dishearten a boy about to be locked away in boarding school. Was he trying to assuage his conscience by convincing himself he was rightly abandoning a delinquent to his fate? “ALBERT RODOLPHE MODIANO 15 QUAI DE CONTI Paris VI, September 8, 1960. I’m returning the letter you sent me from Saint-Lô. I must tell you that, reading it, I did not believe for one second that your desire to return to Paris had anything to do with studying for entrance exams. That is why I decided you should leave the following morning, on the 9 o’clock train to Annecy. I expect a report about your conduct at this new school and I can only hope for your sake that it is exemplary. I had intended to come visit you in Geneva. Under the circumstances, this trip now seems pointless. ALBERT MODIANO.”
My mother blew through Annecy, just long enough to buy me two items for my school outfit: a gray smock and a used pair of shoes with crepe soles that would last me a good ten years and never leak. She left well before evening. It is always painful to see a child return to boarding school, knowing he’ll be a prisoner there. One would like to hold him back. Did that cross her mind? It seems I found no favor in her eyes. And besides, she was about to leave on a long trip to Spain.
Still September. New school year, Sunday evening. The first days at the Collège Saint-Joseph were hard for me. But I quickly got used to it. I had already spent four years in boarding schools. My schoolmates in Thônes were mainly of peasant origin, and I preferred them to the gilt-edged hooligans of Montcel.
Unfortunately, our reading was monitored. In 1962, I would be suspended for a few days for reading Ripening Seed by Colette. Thanks to my French teacher, Father Accambray, I would be granted “special” permission to read Madame Bovary, which was forbidden to the others. I’ve kept the copy of the book in which they wrote, “Approved — Junior year,” with the signature of Father Janin, the school principal. Father Accambray recommended one of Mauriac’s novels to me, The Unknown Sea, which I greatly enjoyed, especially the ending — so much so that I still remember the final phrase: “… as in the black dawns of yesteryear.” He also suggested Les Déracinés by Barrès. Had he sensed that what I was missing was a village in Sologne or the Valois, or rather, my dream version of them? My bedside books in the dormitory: Pavese’s This Business of Living, which they hadn’t thought to ban. Manon Lescaut. Les Filles du feu. Wuthering Heights. Diary of a Country Priest.
A few hours of liberty once a month, and then the Sunday evening bus would take me back to school. I waited for it at the foot of the large tree, near the town hall of Veyrier-du-Lac. I often had to make the trip standing, because of all the farmers returning home after a Sunday in town. Night was falling. We drove past the chateau of Menthon-Saint-Bernard, the small cemetery of Alex and the one where the Resistance heroes of the Glières Plateau were buried. Those Sunday evening buses and the trains between Annecy and Paris were as packed as during the Occupation. Moreover, they were basically the same buses and trains.
The Generals’ Putsch in Algiers, which I followed in the dorm on my little transistor radio, thinking I should take advantage of the widespread panic to break out of school. But order was restored in France by the following Sunday evening.
The nightlights in the dormitory. Returning to the dormitory after the holidays. The first night was the worst. You would wake up and not know where you were. The nightlights brought it all back brutally. Lights out at 9 P.M. The bed was too small. The sheets weren’t washed for months and smelled bad. So did our clothes. Up in the morning at 6:15. Cursory wash, in cold water, at sinks that were ten yards long: troughs topped with a row of spigots. Study. Breakfast. Unsweetened coffee in a metal bowl. No butter. During morning recess, in the covered playground, we huddled together to read a copy of the newspaper L’Echo Liberté. A slice of dry bread and a square of dark chocolate handed out at 4 P.M. Polenta for dinner. I was starving. I felt dizzy. One day, some schoolmates and I yelled at the bursar, Father Bron, telling him there wasn’t enough to eat. Class walks around Thônes on Thursday afternoons. I took the opportunity to buy Les Lettres françaises, Arts, and Les Nouvelles littéraires at the village newsstand. I read them cover to cover. All these weeklies piled up on my nightstand. Recess after lunch, when I listened to the radio. In the distance, behind the trees, the monotonous whine of the sawmill. Endless rainy days under the playground roof. The row of stand-up toilets with doors that didn’t stay shut. Evening Benediction in the chapel before returning to the dormitory, in line. Six months of snow. I’ve always felt there was something touching and benevolent about that snow. And a song that year, on the transistor radio: Non je ne me souviens plus du nom du bal perdu …
During the school year, I occasionally received a letter from my mother, from Andalusia. Most of her letters were sent care of the Gérins in Veyrier-du-Lac, except for two or three that went to my school. Letters sent and received had to be unsealed, and Janin, the canon, deemed it odd, this husbandless mother in Andalusia. She wrote to me from Seville: “You should start reading Montherlant. I think you could learn a lot from him. My boy, take this to heart. Please, do it, read Montherlant. You’ll find him full of good advice. How a young man should act around women, for instance. Really, you could learn a lot by reading Montherlant’s The Girls.” Her vehemence surprised me — my mother had never read a word of Montherlant in her life. It was a friend of hers, the journalist Jean Cau, who had prompted her to give me that advice, which I still find puzzling: did he really think Montherlant should be my guide in sexual matters? In any event, I innocently began reading The Girls. Personally, I prefer his Le Fichier parisien. In 1961, my mother inadvertently sent me another letter that raised the canon’s eyebrows. This one contained press clippings about a comedy, Le Signe de Kikota, in which she was touring with Fernand Gravey.
Christmas 1960, in Rome with my father and his new girlfriend, a high-strung Italian, twenty years his junior, hair the color of straw and face like a poor man’s Mylène Demongeot. A photo taken on New Year’s Eve in a nightclub near the Via Veneto perfectly captures the visit. I look pensive and, forty years later, I wonder what I was doing there. To cheer myself up, I pretend the photo is a composite. The ersatz Mylène Demongeot wanted to get a religious annulment of her first marriage. One afternoon, I accompanied her to the Vatican to see a Monsignor Pendola. Despite his cassock and the inscribed picture of the pope on his desk, he looked just like the hucksters my father used to meet at the Claridge. My father seemed startled, that Christmas, by the severe chilblains on my hands.