So we stayed where we were, my father in his smithy, waging his covert war against progress. Perhaps to a blacksmith, this seemed like a war you could win; after all, he spent the day bending things to his intention, taking obdurate, resistant matter and making it obey him; why couldn’t he take on the world in the same way, plunge reality itself into the white heat of his will and reform it? And if he couldn’t, if the bills mounted up and the bailiffs came, this was just more evidence that the world was biased against us; our poverty was proof of our rectitude, a sign that we were the good guys that those in control wanted to crush.
I, too, regularly found myself subjected to the blast of his will. He didn’t want me to be a blacksmith; he wanted me to go to college. This struck me, even as a boy, as a contradiction. Wouldn’t I just be lining up with the phonies and the fakes? Why couldn’t I stay here with him, learn the family trade? When he heard this he’d laugh, and say the family could only afford one piss artist. But when it came to school reports and parent — teacher meetings, he would not be laughing. There was no question that I would not go to college. By the time I was sixteen, if I so much as showed my face in the backyard he would bellow at me to get back to my studies. And I would dutifully return upstairs to my logarithms or supplementary English, though I wouldn’t read; instead I’d watch as he worked or read or played cards and talked about football with Yannick, the boy he hired on the rare occasions he had a backlog.
I knew we were headed for some kind of rupture — in the pictures it seems I can see it, an invisible crack behind the smiles. But I’d thought it would be philosophy that did it. I’d chosen to study it largely in a spirit of revenge: I was too cowardly to defy his wishes outright by refusing to take my college place, and philosophy — demonstrably impractical, infamously unemployable, the polar opposite of my father’s own materialist world — seemed the next best thing. As it turned out, though, my father was so proud of me for getting into university that he approved of anything and everything I did there. He dug up an ancient newspaper photograph that showed Texier, Deleuze et al. marching with union leaders in his beloved événements of 1968, and stuck it on the wall of his forge; I heard him tell the neighbours that philosophy was France’s greatest export.
Instead the rupture came when I took the job in the bank. Having spent a literal lifetime witnessing his anger, I don’t think I ever saw him as angry as he was that night. Even though the firm was prestigious, even though the position I’d been offered was lucrative, my father was mortally against the whole financial industry. He was old enough to remember the scandals that emerged after Liberation, the bankers who had collaborated with the Nazis in order to enrich themselves. He accused me of taking the job out of malice; he said I was sticking it to an old man by choosing a career that flew in the face of everything he believed.
I told him he didn’t believe in anything, so I didn’t see how that could be an issue. ‘Oh, you’re very clever,’ he said. ‘There are names for people like you.’
I was very clever. He had made me very clever. Now he was annoyed because his gingerbread boy had come to life and run off down the road — tant pis, I wasn’t coming back. Anyway, the world had changed, hadn’t I listened to him proclaim it for years? The money men were taking over, men for whom nothing was real except profits, who sourced their ironwork from China or just used knock-offs made of plastic. In college I could see it all around me: street by street, Paris the working city was being replaced by ‘Paris’ the stage-set, familiar from the movies, where everyone was perpetually in love and/or carrying a baguette. Hardware stores and laundromats were vanishing, expensive tea shops, sushi restaurants and boutiques of tiny baby clothes arriving to take their place. The Arabs, the Africans, were disappearing too, out past the city limits to the dreaded banlieues. Not even our dowdy town was left untouched: the building sites, which for as long as I could remember had been stagnant, began to show signs of activity; developers were throwing up hoardings within sight of the great monument to decay that was the magasin général.
Empires fall, that was what he had taught me; the world turns, and people, whole cultures, become obsolete. Progress might be a lie, but it was a lie that swept all before it and so the best tactic was to find high ground.
I took the job, sure that he would come around in time. Why did I think that? This was a man who had chosen, in the 1980s, to pursue the trade of blacksmith. Pig-headed defiance was his métier. He loved difficulty, loved it more than he loved me.
And so we played out that first conversation over and over again. Sometimes he would lure me into it, pretending to have a question about the nature of, for example, derivatives, in order to harangue me about the inequities of the global financial system — ‘… so if you wanted to cover yourself, you could then buy what’s called an option —’ ‘Which is nothing, am I right? You are trying to sell me thin air?’ ‘It’s not nothing, I am selling you the choice to buy something for a specific price at a specific point in the —’ ‘Why do I need you to sell me the choice? Don’t I have the choice myself?’ ‘Well, not in terms of —’ ‘I’m a free man, last time I looked! Your crowd hasn’t managed to sell us all down the river yet!’ ‘No, but I’m saying, if you wait, the price could —’ ‘Down with the collabos! Vive la France! Vive la France!’ — and so on, until Maman came in, and told him he must take his medicine.
More usually, though, he launched straight into his jeremiad, calling me a criminal, a parasite, taking me to task for the sins not only of my own profession but those of countless others — of the developers uprooting the city, of the American neoconservative movement, of ‘Rat Man’, as he termed our president, and of Rat Man’s brother Olivier (who was, in fact, a banker). He seemed to enjoy making himself angry — that was the only pleasure either of us found in my visits.
‘What does he want me to do?’ I said to Maman in the kitchen. ‘Become an anarchist and live in a squat?’
‘He is old, Claude,’ she would sigh. ‘He is old and he cannot bear it.’
Eventually I stopped visiting. I told myself I blamed my father for coming between my mother and me; in truth, it suited me rather well. I was busy at work, and there were more enjoyable ways to spend my few hours of leisure. I’d started seeing a girl, a model with a degree in art history from the Sorbonne. I didn’t go home for six months. As a result, I didn’t find out my mother was sick until she’d been admitted to hospital.
I found my father at her bedside; all the fury I felt at him disappeared in an instant. He sat there, waxy hand on hers; his eyes, blinking uncomprehendingly at me across the white wastes of the hospital sheets, reminded me of the horses that would be brought into his shop to be re-shod, the ones the cabbies drove around and around the Bois de Boulogne for the benefit of tourists — expressive of both resignation and a kind of glacial panic, one that unfolded slowly, over years.