Ring Roads (6 page)

Then boarding school, in Bordeaux.

It is raining. My father and I are walking side by side, without speaking, as far as the Quai des Chartrons to the family I stayed with outside term time, the Pessacs. (One of those patrician families in the wine and cognac trade I fondly hope will soon be ruined.) The afternoons spent at their house were among the bleakest in my life, so the less said about them the better.

We climb the monumental steps. The maid opens the front door. I rush to the box-room where I had asked permission to leave a suitcase stuffed with books (novels by Bourget, Marcel Prevost, and Duvernois, strictly forbidden at school). Suddenly I hear Monsieur Pessac’s peremptory voice: ‘What are you doing here?’ He is talking to my father. Seeing me with the suitcase in hand, he scowls: ‘You’re leaving? But who is this gentleman?’ I hesitate, then manage to blurt out: ‘MY FATHER!’ Obviously, he doesn’t believe me. Suspiciously: ‘Unless my eyes deceive me, you were sneaking away like a thief?’ This sentence is burned into my memory, because it was true that we look just like a couple of thieves
caught
red-handed. Confronted by this little man with his moustache and his brown smoking jacket, my father remained silent and chewed his cigar to give the impression he was calm. For my part, I myself think of only one thing: how to get out of there as soon as possible. Monsieur Pessac had turned to my father and was studying him curiously. At that moment, his wife appeared. Followed by his daughter and his eldest son. They stood, staring at us in silence leaving me feeling as though we had broken into this bourgeois mansion. When my father let ash from his cigar fall on the carpet, I noticed their expressions of amused contempt. The girl exploded with laughter. Her brother, a spotty youth who adopted ‘English style’ (much in vogue in Bordeaux), piped up in a shrill voice: ‘Perhaps Monsieur might like an ashtray? . . .’ ‘Really, Francois-Marie,’ murmured Mme Pessac. ‘Don’t be so uncouth.’ As she said this last word she looked pointedly at my father, as if to make it clear that the adjective applied to him. M. Pessac maintained a disdainful equanimity. I think what had made them so unfriendly was my father’s pale green shirt. Faced with the blatant hostility of these four people, my father looked like a butterfly caught in a net. He fumbled with his cigar, not knowing where to stub it out. He backed towards the door. The others did not move, shamelessly
revelling
in his embarrassment. I suddenly felt a kind of tenderness for this man I barely knew, and went over to him and said in a loud voice: ‘Let me give you a hug, monsieur.’ And, having done so, I took the cigar from his hand and painstakingly crushed it on the inlaid hall table Mme Pessac so loved. I tugged my father’s sleeve.

‘That’s enough, now,’ I said. ‘Let’s go.’

We went to the Hôtel Splendid to collect his bags. A taxi took us to the Gare Saint-Jean. In the train, we struck up a conversation of sorts. He explained that ‘business’ had made it impossible for him getting in touch, but that from now on we would live together in Paris and would never be apart again. I stammered a few words of thanks. ‘I suppose . . .,’ he said point-blank, ‘I suppose you must have been very unhappy . . .’ He suggested that I not call him ‘monsieur’. An hour passed in utter silence and I declined his invitation to go with him to the restaurant-car. I made the most of his absence to rummage through the black briefcase he had left on the seat. There was nothing in it but a Nansen passport. At least he and I shared the same surname. He had two Christian names: Chalva, Henri. He had been born in Alexandria, at a time – I imagine – when the city still shimmered with its own particular radiance.

When he came back to the compartment, he handed
me
an almond cake – a gesture which I found touching – and asked if I was really a ‘
bachelier
’ (he pronounced ‘
bachelier
’ in a rather affected way, as though the very idea of passing the baccalauréat inspired in him a fearful respect). When I told him I was, he nodded gravely. I ventured to ask a few questions: why had he come to Bordeaux to fetch me? How had he tracked me down? His only answers were dismissive gestures and formulaic phrases: ‘I’ll explain later . . .’, ‘You’ll see . . .’, ‘Well, you know, life . . .’ After which he sighed and looked thoughtful.

Paris–Austerlitz. He hesitated a moment before giving the taxi driver his address. (Later we would find ourselves being driven along Quai de Grenelle when in fact we were living on the Boulevard Kellermann. We moved so often that we got confused and only belatedly noticed our mistake.) At the time, his address was: Square Villaret-de-Joyeuse. I imagined the square to be a little park where birdsong mingled with the murmur of fountains. No. A cul-de-sac, with opulent houses on either side. His apartment was on the top floor and the windows overlooking the street had curious, small circular windows. Three low-ceilinged rooms. A large table and two shabby leather armchairs made up the furniture in the ‘living-room’. The walls were papered in a pink,
imitation
‘Toile de Jouy’ pattern. A large bronze ceiling light (I am not entirely sure of this description: I tend to confuse the apartment on the Square Villaret-de-Joyeuse with the one on the Avenue Félix-Faure, which we sublet from a retired couple. Both had the same musty smell). My father nodded to the smallest room. A mattress on a bare floor. ‘Sorry about the lack of comfort,’ he said. ‘But don’t worry, we won’t be staying here long. Sleep well.’ I heard him pacing the floor for hours. So began our life together.

To begin with, he treated me with a politeness, a deference that a son rarely expects from his father. Whenever he spoke to me, I felt as though he was carefully choosing his words, but the result was terrible. He resorted to increasingly convoluted phrases and circumlocutions, and seemed to be constantly apologising or anticipating some reproach. He brought me breakfast in bed with a ceremonious manner which jarred with our surroundings: the wallpaper in my room was peeling in places, a bare bulb hung from the ceiling, and when he pulled the curtains, the curtain rail would fall down. One day, he accidently referred to me by my Christian name and was mortally embarrassed. What had I done to earn such respect? I discovered it was the fact I was a ‘
bachelier
’, when he personally wrote to the school in
Bordeaux
to ask them to send the certificate proving I had got my baccalauréat. When it arrived, he had it framed, and hung it between the two ‘windows’ in the ‘living-room’. I noticed that he kept a copy in his wallet. Once, on one of our nightly wanderings, he present the document to two policemen who had asked for our identity papers, and seeing they were puzzled by his Nansen passport, he told them five or six times that ‘his son was a
bachelier
. . .’ After supper (my father often prepared something he called rice
à l’égyptienne
), he would light a cigar, give an occasional, worried, glance at my diploma, then slowly sink into despair. His ‘business’, he told me, was causing him a lot of trouble. Having always been a fight, having known the ‘harsh realities of life’ at a very early age, he now felt ‘tired’, and the way he said: ‘I’ve lost heart . . .’ moved me deeply. Then, he would look up: ‘But you’ve got your whole life ahead of you!’ I would nod, politely . . . ‘Especially now you’ve got your BACCALAURÉAT . . . If only I’d had the chance . . .’ the words died in his throat, ‘the baccalauréat is really something . . .’ I can still hear this little phrase. And it still moves me, like a forgotten melody.

At least a week passed without my knowing anything about his ‘business’. I would hear him leave early in the morning, and he only got back in time to prepare supper.
From
a black oilcloth bag, he would unpack the provisions – peppers, rice, spices, mutton, lard, dried fruit, semolina – tie an apron round his waist and, having taken off his rings, he would fry up the contents of the bag in a pan. Then he would sit facing the diploma, call me to dinner and we would eat.

Finally, one Thursday afternoon, he invited me to go with him. He was going to sell a ‘very rare’ stamp, and the prospect made him agitated. We walked along the Avenue de la Grande-Armée. Then down the Champs-Élysées. Several times he showed me the stamp (which he kept wrapped in cellophane). It was, according to him, a ‘unique’ example from Kuwait, depicting ‘the Emir Rachid and divers views’. We arrived at the Carré Marigny, The stamp market was held in the space between the théâtre de Marigny and the Avenue Gabriel. (Does it still exist today?) People huddled in little groups, speaking in low voices, opening cases, poring over their contents, leafing through catalogues, brandishing magnifying glasses and tweezers. This furtive flurry of activity, these men who looked like surgeons or conspirators made me feel anxious. My father quickly found himself surrounded by a dense crowd. A dozen men were haranguing him. Arguing over whether the stamp was authentic. My father, taken aback by the
questions
fired from all sides, could not get a word in edgeways. How was it that his ‘Emir Rachid’ was olive-coloured and not carmine? Was it really thirteen and one quarter perforation? Did it have an ‘overprint’? Fragments of silk thread? Did it not belong to a series known as ‘assorted views’? Had he checked for a ‘thin’? Their tone grew acrimonious. My father was called a ‘swindler’ and ‘crook’. He was accused of trying to ‘flog some piece of rubbish that wasn’t even documented in the Champion catalogue’. One of the lunatics grabbed him by the collar and slapped him hard across the face. Another punched him. They seemed about to lynch him for the sake of a stamp (which speaks volumes about the human soul), and so, unable to bear it any longer, I stepped in. Luckily, I had an umbrella. I distributed several blows at random, and making the most of the element of surprise, dragged father from this baying mob of philatelists. We ran as far as the Faubourg Saint-Honoré.

In the days which followed, my father, believing I had saved his life, explained in detail the kind of work he did, and suggested that I help him. His clients were twenty or so oddballs scattered over the whole of France whom he had contacted through various specialist magazines. They were fanatical collectors, obsessed by the most
varied
objects: old telephone directories, corsets, hookahs, postcards, chastity belts, phonographs, oxy-acetylene torches, Iowa Indian moccasins, ballroom slippers . . . He scoured Paris in search of such things, packed them up and sent them off to his contacts having extorted vast sums from them in advance that bore no relation to the actual value of the goods. One of his clients would pay 100,000 francs apiece for pre-war Chaix railway timetables. Another had given him 300,000 francs on account, on condition that he had FIRST REFUSAL on all busts and effigies of Waldeck-Rousseau he might find . . . My father, eager to amass an even greater clientele among these lunatics, planned to persuade them to join a society – the ‘League of French Collectors’ – of which he would be appointed president and treasurer and would charge exorbitant subscription fees. The philatelists had bitterly disappointed him. He realized he couldn’t use them. As collectors, they were cold-blooded, cunning, cynical, ruthless (it is hard to imagine the Machiavellianism, the viciousness of these apparently fastidious creatures). What crimes have been committed for a ‘Sierra Leone, yellow-brown with overprint’ or a ‘Japan, horizontal perforations’. He was not about to repeat his unfortunate expedition to the Carré Marigny, an episode that had left his pride deeply
wounded.
At first he used me as a messenger. I tried to show some initiative by suggesting a market which he hadn’t yet considered: bibliophiles. He liked the idea and gave me a free hand. Though I knew nothing about life yet, I had memorized Lanson’s French Literature at school in Bordeaux. I knew every French writer, from the most trivial to the most obscure. What was the point of such recondite erudition if not to launch me into the book trade? I quickly discovered that it was very difficult to buy rare editions cheaply. What bargains I found were of poor quality: ‘original editions’ of Vautel, Fernand Gregh and Eugene Demolder . . . On a trip to the Passage Jouffroy, I bought a copy of
Matière et mémoire
for 3,50 francs. On the flyleaf, was a curious dedication from Bergson to Jean Jaurès: ‘When will you stop calling me Miss?’ Two experts formally identified the master’s handwriting, and I sold on this curio to a collector for 100,000 francs.

Heartened by my initial success, I decided to pen a few spurious dedications myself, each highlighting some unexpected facet of the author. Those whose handwriting I could most easily copy, Charles Maurras and Maurice Barrès. I sold a Maurras for 500,000 francs, courtesy of this little sentence: ‘For Léon Blum, as a token of my admiration. Why don’t we have lunch? Life
is
so short . . . Maurras.’ A copy of Barres’s
Déracinés
fetched 700,000 francs. It was dedicated to Captain Dreyfus: ‘Be brave, Alfred. Affectionately, Maurice.’ But I soon discovered that what really fascinated my customers was the private lives of writers. So my dedications became more salacious and prices rose accordingly. I favoured contemporary authors. As some of them are still alive, I will say no more for fear of litigation. All I can say is that they made me a lot of money.

Such was the nature of our shady deals. Business flourished because we were exploiting people who were not entirely sane. When I think back over our little schemes, I feel very bitter. I would have preferred to start my life in a less dubious fashion. But what else could you expect of a teenager left to his own devices in Paris? What else could the poor bastard do?

Though my father spent some of our capital buying shirts and ties of questionable taste, he also tried to increase it by dabbling on the stock market. I frequently saw him slump into an armchair with armfuls of share certificates . . . He would stack them in the halls of our successive apartments, check them, sort them, make an inventory. I eventually realized that the certificates had been issued by companies that were either bankrupt or had long since ceased to trade. He was convinced he
could
still use them, put them back on the market . . . ‘When we’re quoted on the Stock Exchange . . .’ he would say with a mischievous look.