Read Online Pedigree by Patrick Modiano - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Patrick Modiano
Ads: Link
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 âmisfortunes,â 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 dormitorieswhere Iâd 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 Iâd bring home to my mother. On certain days, I brought nothing home, which provoked furious outbursts from her. Soonâaround the time I turned eighteen and in the years followingâI 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. Itâs all so distant now ⦠I remember copying out these words by Léon Bloyat school: âMan has places in his heart which do not yet exist, and into them enters suffering, in order that they may have existence.â But in this case it was suffering for nothing, the kind from which you canât even fashion a poem.
Our poverty should have brought us closer. One yearâ1963âthey had to âreconnectâ the gas mains in the apartment. Work needed to be done, and my mother didnât 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 pawnbrokerâs on Rue Pierre-Charron, where I hocked a fountain pen âmade of gold with a diamond nibâ 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, werenât very high at first. Thenthey started rising around 1966 as the neighborhood changed, along with its shops and residents. Please donât 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
Over the following months, my father had to resign himself to my finally leaving the dormitorieswhere Iâd 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 Iâd bring home to my mother. On certain days, I brought nothing home, which provoked furious outbursts from her. Soonâaround the time I turned eighteen and in the years followingâI 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. Itâs all so distant now ⦠I remember copying out these words by Léon Bloyat school: âMan has places in his heart which do not yet exist, and into them enters suffering, in order that they may have existence.â But in this case it was suffering for nothing, the kind from which you canât even fashion a poem.
Our poverty should have brought us closer. One yearâ1963âthey had to âreconnectâ the gas mains in the apartment. Work needed to be done, and my mother didnât 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 pawnbrokerâs on Rue Pierre-Charron, where I hocked a fountain pen âmade of gold with a diamond nibâ 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, werenât very high at first. Thenthey started rising around 1966 as the neighborhood changed, along with its shops and residents. Please donât 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
Similar Books
