Pedigree: A Memoir

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Apparently, they wanted to keep me away from Paris. In September 1960, I was enrolled in the Saint-Joseph de Thônes secondary school, in the mountains of the Haute-Savoie. A man called Jacques Gérin and his wife, Stella, my father’s sister, were my unofficial guardians. They lived in a rented white house with green shutters in Veyrier, on the edge of Lake Annecy. But apart from the rare Sundays when I was let out of school for a few hours, there wasn’t much they could do for me.

“Jacky” Gérin dabbled “in textiles.” He was originally from Lyon, a bohemian, fond of classical music, skiing, and expensive cars. Stella Gérin carried on a correspondence with the Geneva lawyer Pierre Jaccoud, who had been convicted of murder and was then serving time. When Jaccoud was released, she went to see him in Geneva. I later met him with her, at the bar of the Mövenpick, around 1963. He spoke to me of literature, particularly Mallarmé.

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.

Back to boarding school, until summer vacation. At the beginning of July, my mother returned from Spain. I went to meet her at Geneva Airport. She had dyed her hair brown. She moved in with the Gérins in Veyrier-du-Lac. She didn’t have a cent. Barely a pair of shoes to her name. The stay in Spain had not been successful, and yet she had lost none of her arrogance. She told us, with chin raised, “sublime” stories of Andalusia and bullfighters. But beneath the theatricality and fantasy, she had a heart of stone.

My father came to spend a few days in the area, accompanied by the marquis Philippe de D., with whom he had business dealings. A large, blustery blond with a mustache, trailed by his brunette mistress. He borrowed my father’s passport to go to Switzerland. They were of similar build, with the same mustache and the same corpulence, and D. had lost his papers when he’d fled Tunisia following the military action in Bizerte. I can still see myself with my father, Philippe de D., and the brunette mistress at a sidewalk table at Père Bise in Talloires, and once again I wonder what I was doing there. In August, my mother and I left for Knokke-le-Zoute, where a family she’d been friends with before the war took us into their small villa. It was kind of them; otherwise we would have had to sleep under the stars or at the Salvation Army. Spoiled, boorish teenagers hung out at the go-kart track. Industrialists from Ghent with the casual manners of yachtsmen greeted each other in their deep voices, in a French to which they labored to give English inflections. A friend from my mother’s youth, who looked like an overripe delinquent, ran a nightclub behind the dunes, near Ostend. Then I returned alone to the Haute-Savoie. My mother went back to Paris. Another school year began for me at the Collège Saint-Joseph.

Break for All Saints’ Day, 1961. Rue Royale, Annecy, in the rain and melting snow. In the bookstore window, Moravia’s novel Boredom, with its belly band: “And Its Relief: Eros.” During those gray holidays, I read Crime and Punishment, and it was my sole comfort. I came down with scabies. I went to see a doctor, whose name I’d found in the Annecy phone book. She was shocked at my weakened state. She asked, “Don’t you have parents?” At her solicitude and maternal kindness, I had to force myself not to break down in sobs.

In January 1962, a letter from my mother that, luckily, did not fall into the hands of Father Janin: “I didn’t call you this week, I wasn’t home. Friday night I was at a cocktail party that Litvak threw on the set of his film. I was also at the premiere of Truffaut’s film Jules and Jim, and this evening I’m going to see the Calderón play at TNP…. I’m thinking of you and know how hard you work. Be brave, my dearest boy. I’m still not sorry I turned down the play with Bourvil. I’d have been too miserable playing such a vulgar role. I hope to find something else. My son, don’t think I’ve forgotten you but I have so little time to send care packages.”

In February 1962, I took advantage of the Shrove Tuesday break and hopped the crowded train to Paris, running a high fever. I was hoping my parents, seeing me so ill, would let me stay in Paris for a while. My mother had moved into the third-floor apartment, where the only remaining furniture was a sagging couch. My father was living on the fourth floor with the ersatz Mylène Demongeot. At my mother’s, I saw the journalist Jean Cau, who had a bodyguard because of the OAS assassination plots. Sartre’s former secretary was an odd duck, with his lynxlike face and his obsession with bullfighters. When I was fourteen, I’d convinced him that the son of Alexandre Stavisky, under a false name, was at school with me and had told me his father was still alive somewhere in South America. Cau had arrived at my school in his 4 CV, desperate to meet “Stavisky’s son” and come away with a scoop. That winter, I also saw Jean Normand (alias Jean Duval), a friend of my mother’s who had recommended pulp novels to me when I was eleven. At the time, 1956, I couldn’t have known that he’d just got out of prison. There was also Mireille Ourousov. She slept in the living room on the old couch. A brunette of twenty-eight or thirty. My mother had met her in Andalusia. She was married to a Russian, Eddy Ourousov, nicknamed “the Consul” because he drank as much as the hero of Malcolm Lowry’s novel — cuba libres. The two of them ran a small hotel-bar in Torremolinos. She was French. She told me that when she was seventeen, on the morning she was scheduled to take the baccalaureate exams, her alarm didn’t go off and she slept until noon. It was somewhere around the Landes. At night my mother would be out, and I stayed home with Mireille Ourousov. She couldn’t sleep on that small, sagging couch. And I had a large bed … One morning, I was with her in Place de l’Odéon. A gypsy read our palms, under the arcades of the Cour du Commerce Saint-André. Mireille Ourousov said she’d be curious to know me in ten years.

Return to Thônes in drab March. The bishop of Annecy paid a formal visit to the school. We kissed his ring. Speeches. Mass. And I received a letter from my father that the canon Janin never opened and that, if it had had any basis in reality, would have been the letter of a model father to his model son: “May 2, 1962. My dear Patrick, We should tell each other everything with complete honesty; it’s the one and only way to keep from becoming strangers, as sadly happens in too many families. I’m glad you’ve confided in me about the problem now facing you: what you’ll do later on, what direction to take in life. You’ve explained to me, on the one hand, that you understand diplomas are necessary to obtain a good position, and on the other, that you need to express yourself by writing books or plays and would like to devote yourself fully to this. Most of the men who have enjoyed the greatest literary success, apart from a few rare exceptions, had been brilliant students. You can cite as many examples as I can: Sartre would probably never have written some of his books if he hadn’t pursued his studies through an advanced degree in philosophy. Claudel wrote The Satin Slipper when he was a young embassy attaché in Japan, after graduating with top honors from ‘Sciences Po.’ Romain Gary, who won the Prix Goncourt, is another alumnus of ‘Sciences Po,’ and a consul in the United States.” He wanted me to become an agricultural engineer. He considered it an up-and-coming profession. If he attached so much importance to schooling, it’s because he himself hadn’t had any and was a little like those mobsters who send their daughters off to be educated by the “sisters.” He spoke with a slight Paris accent — the accent of Cité d’Hauteville and Rue des Petits-Hôtels and also the Cité Trévise, where you can hear the fountain murmuring in the silence beneath the trees. Once in a while he used slang. But he could inspire trust in potential investors, for he looked like a pleasant, reserved fellow, tall and soberly dressed.

I took my baccalaureate exam in Annecy. This would be my only diploma. Paris in July. My father. My mother. She was in a revival of Les Portes claquent at the Daunou. The ersatz Mylène Demongeot. The Parc Monceau, where I read newspaper articles about the end of the Algerian War. The Bois de Boulogne. I discovered Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night. I was happy when I walked the streets of Paris by myself. One Sunday in August, in the southeastern part of town — Boulevard Jourdan and Boulevard Kellerman, a neighborhood I’d later come to know so well — I learned from a news dealer’s display about Marilyn Monroe’s suicide.

The month of August in Annecy. Claude. She turned twenty that summer of 1962. She worked for a dressmaker in Lyon. Then she became a “temp” model. Then, in Paris, a full-time model. Then she married a Sicilian prince and went to live in Rome, where time stops forever. Robert. He scandalized Annecy by loudly proclaiming himself a “queen.” He was a pariah in that provincial town. That same summer of 1962, he was twenty-six. He reminded me of Divine in Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers. When very young, Robert had been the boyfriend of the Belgian baron Jean L. during the latter’s stay at the Hôtel Impérial Palace in Annecy — the same baron whose shill my mother had known in Antwerp in 1939. I saw Robert again in 1973. One Sunday evening, in Geneva, we were driving in his car across the Pont des Bergues, and he was so drunk that we nearly toppled into the Rhone. He died in 1980. His face bore the marks of a beating and the police arrested a friend of his. I read about it in the papers: “The real death of a larger than life character.”

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.