Pedigree by Patrick Modiano Read Free Book Online

visited an array of properties. They stopped at rustic inns. Apparently my father, for some pressing reason, wanted to “get out of town.” In Paris, long confabulations between Robert Fly and my father, at the back of the office at 73 Boulevard Haussmann, where I would join them. Robert Fly sported a blond mustache. Apart from driving the DS 19, I have no idea what he did. Now and then, he told me, he took a “side trip” to Pigalle, and he would return home to the Quai de Conti at seven in the morning. Robert Car turned abedroom of the apartment into a dressmaking studio. My father nicknamed him Truffaldino, after a character in the commedia dell’arte. In the 1940s, it had been Robert Car who dressed the first transvestites: La Zambella, Lucky Sarcel, Zizi Moustic.
    I accompanied my father to Rue Christophe-Colomb, where he visited a new “crony,” a certain Morawski, in a small private hotel at number 12 or 14. I would wait for him, pacing back and forth under the leaves of the chestnut trees. It was early spring. My mother was in a play at the Théâtre des Arts, directed by a Mme Alexandra Roubé-Jansky. The play was called
Women Want to Know.
It was by a silk manufacturer from Lyon and his girlfriend and they’d underwritten the entire production, renting out the theater and paying the actors out of pocket. Every evening they played to an empty hall. The only spectators were a few friends of the silk manufacturer’s. The director wisely counseled the manufacturer not to invite the critics, on the pretext that they were “mean” …
    On the last Sunday evening before summer holidays, Robert Fly and my father drove me to the Montcel school in the DS 19 and waited while I packed my suitcase. After stashing it in the trunk of the DS, I left Jouy-en-Josas for good via the westbound highway.

A pparently, 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.
    â€œJacky” 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 forUncle 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