January 2008, the evening had started out well: dinner washed down with grands crus, then the usual bar crawl through dimly lit watering holes, the shots of coloured flavoured vodkas: liquorice, coconut, strawberry, mint, curaçao, downed in one; the shot glasses, black, white, red, green, blue, the colours of Rimbaud’s poem ‘Vowels’. Riding along on my moped, I hummed the Pixies’ ‘Where Is My Mind’. I was dressed up as a schoolboy, wearing suede cowboy boots, with unkempt shoulder-length hair, cloaking my age in my beard and my black raincoat. I have indulged in such nocturnal excesses for more than twenty years; it is my favourite hobby, the sport of grown-ups who refuse to grow up. It’s not easy being a child trapped in the body of an amnesiac adult.
In Proust’s Sodom and Gomorrah, the Marquis de Vaugoubert wants to look ‘young, virile and attractive, though he could see and no longer dared to peer into his mirror to inspect the wrinkles solidifying around a face whose many charms he would have wished to preserve’. As you can see, the problem is not new: Proust used the name of the château that belonged to my great-grandfather Thibaud. A mild state of inebriation began to envelop reality, to temper my speed, to make my childish behaviour seem acceptable. A new law had been passed by the republic a month previously forbidding smoking in nightclubs, so a crowd had gathered on the pavement along the avenue Marceau. I was a non-smoker expressing solidarity with the pretty girls in patent-leather pumps who huddled around the proffered cigarette lighters. For a second, their faces were lit like a painting by Georges de la Tour. I was holding a glass in one hand, using the other to cling to friendly shoulders. I kissed the hand of a waitress still waiting for a part in a major motion picture, pulled the hair of the editor of a magazine with no readership. An insomniac generation gathered on Monday nights to stave off the cold, the loneliness, the financial crisis already looming on the horizon – God knows, there’s no shortage of excuses to get plastered. There was also an actor who dabbled in art-house cinema, a few out-of-work girls, bouncers both black and white, a singer on his way out and a writer whose first novel I had published. When the latter took out a white wrap and began to tip powder onto the bonnet of the gleaming black Chrysler parked in the access road, no one protested. Flouting the law amused us: we were living in an era of Prohibition, it was time to rebel like Baudelaire and Théophile Gautier, Brett Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney, like Antoine Blondin, who was rescued from a police station by Roger Nimier disguised as a chauffeur. I was meticulously cutting the white crystals with a gold credit card while my writer friend bitched that his mistress was even more jealous than his wife, something that he considered (and as you can imagine, I was nodding vigorously in agreement) an unforgivable lapse of taste, when suddenly a strobing light made me look up. A two-tone car pulled up in front of us. On the doors were strange blue letters underscored by a red stripe. The letter ‘P’. Consonant. The letter ‘O’. Vowel. The letter ‘L’. Consonant. The letter ‘I’. Vowel. I thought of that TV game show, Countdown. The letter ‘C’. Oh, fuck. The letter ‘E’. Doubtless these widely spaced letters had some hidden meaning. Someone wanted to warn us of something, but what? A siren began to wail, the blue light whirled as on a dance floor. We both scarpered like rabbits. Rabbits in slim-fitting jackets. Rabbits in ankle boots with slippery soles. Rabbits unaware that in the 8th arrondissement 28 January 2008 was the first day of the hunting season. One of the rabbits had even left his credit card with his thermally moulded name lying on the bonnet of the car, while the other did not even think to throw away the illicit packets hidden in his pockets. This dawn marks the end of my endless youth.
5
FRAGMENTS OF AN ARREST
You are the one I have been searching for all this time,
in the throbbing vaults, on the dance floors where I never danced,
amid the forest of people,
beneath the light bridges and the sheets of skin, at the end of painted toenails hanging over the end of blazing beds,
in the depths of these eyes that hold no promises,
in the back yards of ramshackle buildings, among lonely dancers and drunken barmen,
between green rubbish bins and silver convertibles,
I looked for you among fractured stars and violet perfumes,
in icy hands and syrupy kisses, at the bottom of rickety staircases,
at the top of brightly lit elevators,
in pallid joys, in seized opportunities, in fierce handshakes,
and in the end I had to stop looking for you
under a starless vault,
on white boats,
in downy necklines and dark hotels,
in mauve mornings and ivory skies, among marshy dawns,
my vanished childhood.
The police wanted to confirm my identity; I did not protest, it was something I too needed to confirm. ‘Who is it that can tell me who I am?’ asks Lear in Shakespeare’s play.
I haven’t slept a wink all night. I don’t know whether the day has dawned: my sky is a crackling white fluorescent tube. I am squeezed into a lightbox. Deprived of space and time, I occupy a container of eternity.
A custody cell is the part of France where maximum pain is concentrated into the minimum square footage.
It is impossible to cling to my youth.
I have to dig deep within myself, like the prisoner Michael Scofield digging a tunnel in Prison Break. To remember in order to go over the wall.
But how can someone take refuge in memories when he has none?
My childhood is not some paradise lost, nor some ancestral trauma. I imagine it more as a slow period of obedience. People have a tendency to idealise their childhood, but a child is first and foremost a bundle that you feed, carry and put to bed. In exchange for bed and board, the bundle conforms on the whole to policies and procedures.
Those who are nostalgic about their childhood are people who miss the time when they were looked after by others.
In the end, a police station is like a day-care centre: they undress you, feed you, keep an eye on you, stop you from leaving. It’s not illogical that my first night in prison should take me back so far.
There are no more adults, only children of all ages. To write a book about my childhood therefore means talking about myself in the present. Peter Pan is amnesiac.
It’s curious that we say someone ‘saved his own skin’ when he runs away. Isn’t it possible to save your skin while staying put?
I can taste salt in my mouth, just as I used to at the beach at Cénitz when I accidentally ended up swallowing seawater.
6
GUÉTHARY, 1972
Of my entire childhood, one single image remains: the beach at Cénitz, near Guéthary; Spain barely visible, sketched along the horizon, a blue mirage suffused with light; this would have been around 1972, before they built the purification plant that stinks, before the restaurant and the car park blocked the path down to the sea. I see the image of a scrawny little boy and an emaciated old man walking side by side along the beach. The grandfather is much more dashing, tanned and handsome than his sickly, pale grandson. The white-haired man skims flat stones on the sea; they skip across the water. The little boy is wearing an orange swimsuit with a seashell embroidered on the terrycloth; his nose is bleeding, a wad of cotton wool pokes out of his right nostril. Count Pierre de Chasteigner de la Rocheposay looks very like the actor Jean-Pierre Aumont. He shouts, ‘Do you know, Frédéric, I’ve seen whales, blue dolphins, even an orca, right here?’
‘What’s an orca?’
‘It’s a big, black killer whale with teeth as sharp as razorblades.’
‘But …’
‘Don’t