Ring Roads Read online

  When he came back to the compartment, he handed me an almond cake – a gesture which I found touching – and asked if I was really a ‘bachelier’ (he pronounced ‘bachelier’ in a rather affected way, as though the very idea of passing the baccalauréat inspired in him a fearful respect). When I told him I was, he nodded gravely. I ventured to ask a few questions: why had he come to Bordeaux to fetch me? How had he tracked me down? His only answers were dismissive gestures and formulaic phrases: ‘I’ll explain later . . .’, ‘You’ll see . . .’, ‘Well, you know, life . . .’ After which he sighed and looked thoughtful.

  Paris–Austerlitz. He hesitated a moment before giving the taxi driver his address. (Later we would find ourselves being driven along Quai de Grenelle when in fact we were living on the Boulevard Kellermann. We moved so often that we got confused and only belatedly noticed our mistake.) At the time, his address was: Square Villaret-de-Joyeuse. I imagined the square to be a little park where birdsong mingled with the murmur of fountains. No. A cul-de-sac, with opulent houses on either side. His apartment was on the top floor and the windows overlooking the street had curious, small circular windows. Three low-ceilinged rooms. A large table and two shabby leather armchairs made up the furniture in the ‘living-room’. The walls were papered in a pink, imitation ‘Toile de Jouy’ pattern. A large bronze ceiling light (I am not entirely sure of this description: I tend to confuse the apartment on the Square Villaret-de-Joyeuse with the one on the Avenue Félix-Faure, which we sublet from a retired couple. Both had the same musty smell). My father nodded to the smallest room. A mattress on a bare floor. ‘Sorry about the lack of comfort,’ he said. ‘But don’t worry, we won’t be staying here long. Sleep well.’ I heard him pacing the floor for hours. So began our life together.

  To begin with, he treated me with a politeness, a deference that a son rarely expects from his father. Whenever he spoke to me, I felt as though he was carefully choosing his words, but the result was terrible. He resorted to increasingly convoluted phrases and circumlocutions, and seemed to be constantly apologising or anticipating some reproach. He brought me breakfast in bed with a ceremonious manner which jarred with our surroundings: the wallpaper in my room was peeling in places, a bare bulb hung from the ceiling, and when he pulled the curtains, the curtain rail would fall down. One day, he accidently referred to me by my Christian name and was mortally embarrassed. What had I done to earn such respect? I discovered it was the fact I was a ‘bachelier’, when he personally wrote to the school in Bordeaux to ask them to send the certificate proving I had got my baccalauréat. When it arrived, he had it framed, and hung it between the two ‘windows’ in the ‘living-room’. I noticed that he kept a copy in his wallet. Once, on one of our nightly wanderings, he present the document to two policemen who had asked for our identity papers, and seeing they were puzzled by his Nansen passport, he told them five or six times that ‘his son was a bachelier . . .’ After supper (my father often prepared something he called rice à l’égyptienne), he would light a cigar, give an occasional, worried, glance at my diploma, then slowly sink into despair. His ‘business’, he told me, was causing him a lot of trouble. Having always been a fight, having known the ‘harsh realities of life’ at a very early age, he now felt ‘tired’, and the way he said: ‘I’ve lost heart . . .’ moved me deeply. Then, he would look up: ‘But you’ve got your whole life ahead of you!’ I would nod, politely . . . ‘Especially now you’ve got your BACCALAURÉAT . . . If only I’d had the chance . . .’ the words died in his throat, ‘the baccalauréat is really something . . .’ I can still hear this little phrase. And it still moves me, like a forgotten melody.

  At least a week passed without my knowing anything about his ‘business’. I would hear him leave early in the morning, and he only got back in time to prepare supper. From a black oilcloth bag, he would unpack the provisions – peppers, rice, spices, mutton, lard, dried fruit, semolina – tie an apron round his waist and, having taken off his rings, he would fry up the contents of the bag in a pan. Then he would sit facing the diploma, call me to dinner and we would eat.

  Finally, one Thursday afternoon, he invited me to go with him. He was going to sell a ‘very rare’ stamp, and the prospect made him agitated. We walked along the Avenue de la Grande-Armée. Then down the Champs-Élysées. Several times he showed me the stamp (which he kept wrapped in cellophane). It was, according to him, a ‘unique’ example from Kuwait, depicting ‘the Emir Rachid and divers views’. We arrived at the Carré Marigny, The stamp market was held in the space between the théâtre de Marigny and the Avenue Gabriel. (Does it still exist today?) People huddled in little groups, speaking in low voices, opening cases, poring over their contents, leafing through catalogues, brandishing magnifying glasses and tweezers. This furtive flurry of activity, these men who looked like surgeons or conspirators made me feel anxious. My father quickly found himself surrounded by a dense crowd. A dozen men were haranguing him. Arguing over whether the stamp was authentic. My father, taken aback by the questions fired from all sides, could not get a word in edgeways. How was it that his ‘Emir Rachid’ was olive-coloured and not carmine? Was it really thirteen and one quarter perforation? Did it have an ‘overprint’? Fragments of silk thread? Did it not belong to a series known as ‘assorted views’? Had he checked for a ‘thin’? Their tone grew acrimonious. My father was called a ‘swindler’ and ‘crook’. He was accused of trying to ‘flog some piece of rubbish that wasn’t even documented in the Champion catalogue’. One of the lunatics grabbed him by the collar and slapped him hard across the face. Another punched him. They seemed about to lynch him for the sake of a stamp (which speaks volumes about the human soul), and so, unable to bear it any longer, I stepped in. Luckily, I had an umbrella. I distributed several blows at random, and making the most of the element of surprise, dragged father from this baying mob of philatelists. We ran as far as the Faubourg Saint-Honoré.

  In the days which followed, my father, believing I had saved his life, explained in detail the kind of work he did, and suggested that I help him. His clients were twenty or so oddballs scattered over the whole of France whom he had contacted through various specialist magazines. They were fanatical collectors, obsessed by the most varied objects: old telephone directories, corsets, hookahs, postcards, chastity belts, phonographs, oxy-acetylene torches, Iowa Indian moccasins, ballroom slippers . . . He scoured Paris in search of such things, packed them up and sent them off to his contacts having extorted vast sums from them in advance that bore no relation to the actual value of the goods. One of his clients would pay 100,000 francs apiece for pre-war Chaix railway timetables. Another had given him 300,000 francs on account, on condition that he had FIRST REFUSAL on all busts and effigies of Waldeck-Rousseau he might find . . . My father, eager to amass an even greater clientele among these lunatics, planned to persuade them to join a society – the ‘League of French Collectors’ – of which he would be appointed president and treasurer and would charge exorbitant subscription fees. The philatelists had bitterly disappointed him. He realized he couldn’t use them. As collectors, they were cold-blooded, cunning, cynical, ruthless (it is hard to imagine the Machiavellianism, the viciousness of these apparently fastidious creatures). What crimes have been committed for a ‘Sierra Leone, yellow-brown with overprint’ or a ‘Japan, horizontal perforations’. He was not about to repeat his unfortunate expedition to the Carré Marigny, an episode that had left his pride deeply wounded. At first he used me as a messenger. I tried to show some initiative by suggesting a market which he hadn’t yet considered: bibliophiles. He liked the idea and gave me a free hand. Though I knew nothing about life yet, I had memorized Lanson’s French Literature at school in Bordeaux. I knew every French writer, from the most trivial to the most obscure. What was the point of such recondite erudition if not to launch me into the book trade? I quickly discovered that it was very difficult to buy rare editions cheaply. What bargains I found were of poor quality: ‘original editions’ of
Vautel, Fernand Gregh and Eugene Demolder . . . On a trip to the Passage Jouffroy, I bought a copy of Matière et mémoire for 3,50 francs. On the flyleaf, was a curious dedication from Bergson to Jean Jaurès: ‘When will you stop calling me Miss?’ Two experts formally identified the master’s handwriting, and I sold on this curio to a collector for 100,000 francs.

  Heartened by my initial success, I decided to pen a few spurious dedications myself, each highlighting some unexpected facet of the author. Those whose handwriting I could most easily copy, Charles Maurras and Maurice Barrès. I sold a Maurras for 500,000 francs, courtesy of this little sentence: ‘For Léon Blum, as a token of my admiration. Why don’t we have lunch? Life is so short . . . Maurras.’ A copy of Barres’s Déracinés fetched 700,000 francs. It was dedicated to Captain Dreyfus: ‘Be brave, Alfred. Affectionately, Maurice.’ But I soon discovered that what really fascinated my customers was the private lives of writers. So my dedications became more salacious and prices rose accordingly. I favoured contemporary authors. As some of them are still alive, I will say no more for fear of litigation. All I can say is that they made me a lot of money.

  Such was the nature of our shady deals. Business flourished because we were exploiting people who were not entirely sane. When I think back over our little schemes, I feel very bitter. I would have preferred to start my life in a less dubious fashion. But what else could you expect of a teenager left to his own devices in Paris? What else could the poor bastard do?

  Though my father spent some of our capital buying shirts and ties of questionable taste, he also tried to increase it by dabbling on the stock market. I frequently saw him slump into an armchair with armfuls of share certificates . . . He would stack them in the halls of our successive apartments, check them, sort them, make an inventory. I eventually realized that the certificates had been issued by companies that were either bankrupt or had long since ceased to trade. He was convinced he could still use them, put them back on the market . . . ‘When we’re quoted on the Stock Exchange . . .’ he would say with a mischievous look.

  And I remember we bought a second-hand car, an old Talbot, in which we took night-time jaunts through Paris. Before setting out, we had a ritual of drawing lots. Twenty slips of paper were scattered over the rickety drawing-room table. We would choose one at random, and this would be our itinerary for the evening. Batignolles-Grenelle. Auteuil-Picpus. Passy-La Villette. Otherwise, we would cast off and set sail for one of those quartiers with mysterious names: Les Épinettes, la Maison-Blanche, Bel-Air, l’Amérique, la Glacière, Plaisance, la Petite-Pologne . . . I have only to set foot in certain secret parts of Paris for memories to erupt like sparks from a fire. The Place d’Italie, for example, was a favourite port of call on our trips . . . There was a café there, the Claire de Lune. Towards 1 a.m., all the flotsam from the music-hall would gather there: pre-war accordionists, white-haired tango dancers trying to recapture the languorous agility of their youth on that tiny stage, haggard old crones with too much make-up singing songs by Fréhel or Suzy Solidor. Desolate street entertainers entertained during the ‘intermissions’. The orchestra consisted of Brylcreemed men in dinner jackets. It was one of my father’s favourite places; he took great pleasure in watching these ghostly figures. I never understood why.

  And let’s not forget the illicit brothel at 73 Avenue Reille, on the edge of the Parc Montsouris. My father would gossip endlessly with the Madame, a blonde woman with a doll-like face. Like him, she was from Alexandria, and they would reminisce about the nights there, about Sidi Bishr, the Pastroudis Bar and various other places that have long since ceased to exist . . . We would often linger until dawn in this Egyptian enclave in the 14th arrondissement. But there were other places that called to us on our odysseys (or our escapes?). An all-night restaurant on the Boulevard Murat lost among blocks of flats. The place was always empty and, for some mysterious reason, a large photograph of Daniel-Rops hung on one of the walls. A pseudo ‘American’ bar, between Maillot and Champerret, the gathering point for a gang of bookies. And when we ventured as far as the extreme north of Paris – the region of docks and slaughterhouses – we would stop off at the Boeuf-Bleu, on the Place de Joinville, by the Canal de l’Ourcq. My father particularly liked this spot because it reminded him of the Saint-Andre district, in Antwerp, where he had lived long ago. We would go south-east to where the tree-lined streets lead to the Bois de Vincennes. We would stop by Chez Raimo on the Place Daumesnil, invariably open at this late hour. A gloomy ‘patissier-glacier’, of the sort you can still find in spa towns that no one – except us – seemed to know about. Other places come back to me, in waves. Our various addresses: 65 Boulevard Kellermann, with its view of the Gentilly cemetery; the apartment on the Rue du Regard where the previous tenant had left behind a musical-box that I sold for 30,000 francs. The bourgeois apartment building on the Avenue Félix-Faure where the concierge would always greet us with: ‘Here come the Jews!’ Or an evening spent in the run-down three-room flat on the Quai de Grenelle, near the Vélodrome d’Hiver. The electricity had been cut off. Leaning on the window-sill, we watched the comings and goings of the elevated métro. My father was wearing a tattered, patched smoking jacket. He point to the Citadelle de Passy, on the far bank of the Seine. In a tone that brooked no argument, he announced: ‘One day we’ll have a hôtel particulier near the Trocadéro!’ In the meantime, he would arrange to meet me in the lobbies of grand hotels. He felt more important there, more likely to succeed in his great financial coups. He would sit there the whole afternoon. I don’t know how many times I met him at the Majestic, the Continental, the Claridge, the Astoria. These places where people were constantly coming and going suited a restless and unstable spirit such as his.

  Every morning, he would greet me in his ‘office’ on the Rue des Jardins-Saint-Paul. A vast room whose only furnishing were a wickerwork chair and an Empire desk. The parcels we had to send that day would be piled up round the walls. After logging them in an account book with the names and addresses of the addressees, we would have a ‘work conference’. I would tell him about the book I intended to purchase, and the technical details of my dedications I planned to forge. The different inks, pens or fountain pens used for each author. We would check the accounts, study the Courrier des collectionneurs. Then we would take the parcels down to the Talbot and packed them on the back seat as best we could. This drudge work exhausted me.

  My father would then make the rounds of the railway stations to dispatch the cargo. In the afternoon, he would visit his warehouse in the Quartier de Javel and from among the bric-a-brac, choose twenty or so pieces that might be of interest to our clients, ferry them to the Rue des Jardins-Saint-Paul and begin to parcel them up. After which he would restock with merchandise. We had to satisfy the demands of our clients as attentively as possible. These lunatics were not prepared to wait.

  I would take a suitcase and head off on my own, to scout around until evening, in an area bounded by the Bastille, the Place de la République, the grands boulevards, the Avenue de l’Opéra and the Seine. These districts each have a particular peculiar charm. Saint-Paul, where I have dreamed of spending my old age. All I would need was a little shop, some small business. The Rue Pavée or the Rue du Roi-de-Sicile, that ghetto to which I would be inevitably drawn back one day. In the Temple district, I felt my bargain-hunting instincts come to the fore. In the Sentier, that exotic principality formed by the Place du Caire, the Rue du Nil, the Passage Ben-Aiad and the Rue d’Aboukir, I thought about my poor father. The first four arrondissements sub-divide into a tangled multitude of provinces whose unseen borders I eventually came to know. Beaubourg, Greneta, le Mail, la Pointe Sainte-Eustache, les Victoires . . . My last port of call was a bookshop called Le Petit-Mirioux in the Galerie Vivienne. I got there just as it was getting dark. I scoured the shelves, convinced that I would find what I was looking for. Mme Petit-Mirioux stocked literary works of the past hundred years. So many unjustly forgotten books and authors, we agree
d regretfully. They had taken so much trouble for nothing . . . We consoled each other, she and I, reassuring ourselves there were still fans of Pierre Hamp or Jean-José Frappa and that sooner or later, the Fischer brothers would be rescued from oblivion and on that comforting note, took leave of each other. The rest of the shops in the Galerie Vivienne seemed to have been closed for centuries. In the window of a music bookshop, three yellowing Offenbach scores. I sat down on my suitcase. Not a sound. Time had stood still at some point between the July Monarchy and the Second Empire. From the far end of the Galerie came the faint glow of the bookshop, and I could just make out the shadow of Mme Petit-Mirioux. How long would she remain at her post? Poor old sentinel.

  Farther on, the deserted arcades of the Palais-Royal. People had played here, once. But no more. I walked through the gardens. A zone of silence and mellow half-light where the memories of dead years and broken promises tug at the heart. Place du Théâtre-Francais. The streetlights are dazzling. You are a diver coming up too quickly to the surface. I had arranged to meet ‘papa’ in a caravanserai on the Champs-Élysées. We would get into the Talbot, as we always did, and sail across Paris.

  Before me was the Avenue de l’Opéra. It heralded other boulevards, other streets, that would later cast us to the four points of the compass. My heart beat a little faster. In the midst of so much uncertainty, my only landmarks, the only ground which did not shift beneath my feet, were the pavements and the junctions of this city where, in the end, I would probably find myself alone.