Pedigree by Patrick Modiano Read Free Book Online Page B

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 mynightstand. 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 actaround 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 pretendthe 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 Philippede 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