bring me back to the red and white mirage of the Basque Country, where the wind swells sheets pegged to washing lines like the sails of a motionless ship? I often think: That’s where I should have lived. I would be different; growing up there would have changed everything. When I close my eyes, the sea at Guéthary dances beneath my eyelids, and it’s as though I were opening the blue shutters of the old house. I gaze out of that window and tumble into the past; suddenly, I see us again.
A Siamese cat is scampering out of the garage door. We head down to the beach, me, my brother Charles and my aunt Delphine, who is the same age as us (she is my mother’s youngest sister), with buttered ginger cake wrapped in tin foil, rolled-up beach towels under our arms. Along the way, my heart beats faster as we come to the train tracks, for fear of having an accident as my father did in 1947 when he was my age. He was carrying a kayak, one end of which was clipped by the San Sebastian train and he was dragged along the tracks, bleeding profusely, his hip ripped open along the metal rail, his skull fractured, his pelvis crushed. Ever since, there has been a sign at the crossing advising walkers: ‘Warning, one train may hide another.’ But my heart is also beating faster because I hope we might see the girls who man the level-crossing barrier. Isabelle and Michèle Mirailh had golden skin, green eyes, perfect teeth, denim dungarees cut off at the knee. My grandfather didn’t approve of us hanging around with them, but it’s not my fault if the world’s most beautiful women are socially disadvantaged; that is surely God trying to re-establish some semblance of justice here on earth. It hardly mattered anyway, since they only had eyes for Charles, who looked straight through them. They would light up as he passed – ‘Hey, there’s the blond Parisian boy’ – and Delphine would proudly say, ‘So you remember my nephew?’ He walked ahead of me down the hill towards the sea, a golden prince with indigo eyes, a boy so perfect in his polo shirt and white Lacoste Bermuda shorts walking towards the beach in slow motion, his polystyrene body-board sticking out under his arm, amid the burgeoning terraces of hydrangeas … then the smiles of the girls would fade as they saw me trotting along behind, a tousled skeleton with uncoordinated limbs, a sickly clown with incisors broken in a game of conkers in the Bagatelle gardens, knees crusted with purple scabs, a peeling nose, clutching the latest contraption to come free with Pif Gadget. It was not that they were repulsed by my appearance, but when Delphine introduced me, their eyes were elsewhere: ‘And, er … this is Frédéric, his little brother.’ I blushed to the tips of the jug ears that stuck out from my blond mop. I couldn’t bring myself to speak, paralysed with shyness.
I spent my whole childhood struggling not to blush. If someone spoke to me, scarlet blotches appeared on my cheeks. If a girl looked at me, my cheekbones took on a garnet hue. If a teacher asked me a question in class, my face flushed purple. Out of necessity I had perfected techniques to hide my blushes: retying my shoelace, turning round as though there were something fascinating behind me, setting off at a run, hiding my face behind my hair, taking off my jumper.
The Mirailh sisters, sitting on the low whitewashed wall by the edge of the train track, swung their legs in the burst of sunshine between summer showers while I did up my laces, breathing in the damp earth. But they paid me no heed: I thought I was beet red, but in fact I was transparent. Thinking back about my invisibility still makes me angry, it filled me with such terrible sadness, such loneliness and bewilderment! I bit my nails, I had a terrible complex about my protruding chin, my elephant’s ears and my skeletal thinness, which made me the butt of taunts at school. Life is a vale of tears, there’s nothing to be done: never in my life did I have more love to give than I did on that day, but the girls who manned the barrier wanted none of it, and my brother was not to blame if he was better-looking than me. Isabelle showed him a bruise on her thigh: ‘Look, yesterday I fell off my bike, see there? Here, touch it, ow! not too hard, you’re hurting me …’, while Michèle tried to charm Charles by leaning back, her long black hair streaming, her eyes closing like those dolls whose eyes shut when you lie them down and open again when you sit them up. Oh my fair damsels, if you but knew how little he cared about you! Charles was fretting about the game of Monopoly we would pick up again that night, about his mortgaged houses on the rue de la Paix and the avenue Foch; even at the age of nine he lived the life he does today, with the world at his feet, the universe bending to his conqueror’s whims, and in that perfect life there was no place for you. I can understand your admiration (we always want what we cannot have), because I admired my triumphant elder brother as much as you did, I was so proud to be his younger brother I would have followed him to the ends of the earth – ‘Oh brother who art dearer to me than the brightness of day’ – and that’s why I don’t resent you; quite the opposite, I am grateful to you: if you had loved me from the first, would I ever have written?
This memory came back to me spontaneously: when you are in prison, childhood floats back to the surface. Perhaps what I took for amnesia was merely freedom.
9
A FRENCH NOVEL
All four of my grandparents were dead before I was truly curious about their lives. Children take their own immortality for a generality, but their parents’ parents pass away without giving them time to ask all their questions. By the time when, having become parents themselves, children finally want to know where they came from, the graves no longer answer.
Between the two world wars, love reasserted itself; couples came together; I am a distant result of those couples.
Sometime around 1929, the son of a doctor in Pau who had hacked off a number of legs at Verdun attended a recital at the Conservatoire Américain in Fontainebleau, where he was doing his military service. A widowed singer (born in Dalton, Georgia) by the name of Nellie Harben Knight was performing Schubert lieder, arias from The Marriage of Figaro and Puccini’s famous ‘O mio babbino caro’ wearing a long white dress trimmed with lace – at least I hope so. I found a photo of Nellie wearing that dress in an edition of the New York Times dated 23 October 1898, which states: ‘Her voice is a clear, sympathetic soprano of extended range and agreeable quality.’ My great-grandmother with her ‘clear soprano’ was accompanied on her tours by her daughter Grace, who well deserved her Christian name. A willowy blonde girl, with blue eyes permanently fixed on her piano keys, like the heroine of a Henry James novel, she was the daughter of a colonel in the British Army in India who died in 1921 of Spanish influenza: Morden Carthew-Yorstoun met and married Nellie in Bombay, having earlier served in the Zulu War in South Africa, with Lord Kitchener in the Sudan, and having led a New Zealand regiment, the Poona Horse, during the Boer War with Winston Churchill under his command. The soldier from Pau managed to catch the eye of this orphan of intriguing ancestry, and later to hold her hand during some frenzied waltzes, foxtrots and Charlestons. They discovered they shared the same sense of humour, the same love of Art – Jeanne Devaux, young Béarnais’s mother, had been a painter (she had notably painted a portrait of Marie, wife of the poet Paul-Jean Toulet, in Guéthary), a profession almost as exotic as that of a singer. The young man from south-west France suddenly became an ardent music lover who regularly attended the soirées at the Conservatoire Américain. Charles Beigbeder and Grace Carthew-Yorstoun met up whenever he was on furlough; he lied about his age: born in 1902, at twenty-six he should have been long since married. But he loved poetry, music and champagne. The prestige conferred by his uniform (Grace, after all, was a soldier’s daughter) did the rest. Young Grace never returned to New York. The couple were married at the town hall of the 16th arrondissement on 28 April 1931. They had two boys and two girls; the second son, born in 1938, was my father. On the death of his own father, young Charles inherited a spa in Pau: the ‘Sanatorium of the Pyrenees’. It was a vast property of nearly two hundred acres (forests, copses, meadows, gardens) rising to a peak among the hills of Jurançon, at an altitude of 335 metres. As in The Magic Mountain, a well-to-do clientele in dinner jackets contemplated the spectacular sunsets over the central Pyrenees and, to the north, the expansive vista over the town of Pau and the Gave valley. It was hard to resist the call of the forests of mature pines and oaks, where children could gambol freely before being packed off to boarding school – in those days, parents did not raise their children themselves, and, as we will later see, that’s still true to some extent. Charles Beigbeder resigned from his position as a solicitor with no regrets and took my grandmother to breathe