Pedigree by Patrick Modiano

Author:Patrick Modiano [Modiano, Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
ISBN: 9780300216721
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2015-09-16T16:00:00+00:00

That September, in Paris, I started at the Lycée Henri-IV, in the preparatory classe de philosophie, as a full boarder, even though my parents’ apartment was only a few hundred yards from the school. I’d been living in dormitories for the past six years. I had known harsher discipline in my other schools, but I had never been as miserable as I was at Henri-IV. Especially at the hour when I watched the day students leave by the main porch and fan out into the streets.

I don’t remember my fellow boarders very well. I seem to recall three boys from Sarreguemines who were prepping for the Ecole Normale Supérieure. A Martinican in my class was usually with them. There was another student who always smoked a pipe, and constantly wore a gray smock and carpet slippers. They said he hadn’t been outside the school walls in three years. I also vaguely recall my bunkmate, a small red-haired kid, whom I spotted from afar two or three years later, on Boulevard Saint-Michel, in a private’s uniform in the rain … After lights out, a watchman came through the dormitories, lantern in hand, to make sure every bed was occupied. It was the fall of 1962, but also the nineteenth century and, perhaps, a time still farther in the past as well.

My father came only once to visit me in that institution. The headmaster gave me permission to wait for him on the entrance porch. That headmaster had a lovely name: Adonis Delfosse. The silhouette of my father, there, on the porch—but I can’t make out his face, as if his presence in those medieval monastic surroundings seemed unreal. The silhouette of a tall man with no head. I don’t remember if there was a parlor. I think we spoke in a room on the first floor, the library or perhaps the social hall. We were alone, sitting at a table, opposite each other. I accompanied him back down to the porch. He walked away across Place du Panthéon. He’d once told me that he, too, had hung around that part of town when he was eighteen. He had just enough money to buy himself a café au lait and a couple of croissants at the Dupont-Latin, in lieu of a proper meal. In those days, he had a shadow on his lung. I close my eyes and imagine him walking up Boulevard Saint-Michel, among the well-behaved lycée pupils and the students belonging to Action Française. His Latin Quarter was the one of Violette Nozière. He must have run across her many times on the boulevard. Violette, “the pretty schoolgirl from the Lycée Fénelon who raised bats in her desk.”

My father married the ersatz Mylène Demongeot. They lived on the fourth floor, right above my mother. The two floors formed a single apartment, from the time when my parents lived together. In 1962, the two apartments hadn’t yet been separated. Behind a boarded-up doorway, there was still the interior staircase that my father had built in 1947, when he’d begun renting the third floor.

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