Читать книгу Sagan, Paris 1954 - Anne Berest - Страница 9

I was immersed in the writing of my third novel when, more than ten days ago now, Françoise Sagan’s son suggested that I should write a book about his mother. Denis Westhoff is a man of around fifty. Listening to him talk is very pleasant: he speaks rapidly, in a soft, staccato tone, without any hesitation, like the needle of a sewing machine regularly piercing felt.

‘We will soon be marking the tenth anniversary of her death, ten years already, and I would like people to remember just what the publication of Bonjour Tristesse represented for society back in 1954. That was sixty years ago!’

This proposition is like a sign; it is obvious to me that this is something I must do. I drop the book I’m working on for her, for Françoise.

I phone Édouard because I am delighted to tell him the news. But we argue: he says that I feel flattered to set my name alongside Françoise Sagan’s and that I should guard against vanity, etc.

I send him an email telling him how hurt I am:

Sometimes your friends attack you with cruel words that hurt. But because they aim true and see in you the things you keep most hidden, they say, ‘It’s because I care about you that I can see the part of you that you would like to hide. And, seeing that side of you, I still go on caring about you. Perhaps I care about you even more, knowing what I do. Because you and I are alike, united in guilt.’

When your friends act like this, they bind you to them more strongly than by any declaration of love.

But when your friends attack you and their aim isn’t true, when they are aiming at other people (usually themselves) through you - that’s to say, instead of looking at you, they are looking in the mirror - that’s when your friends become terribly remote from you.

Édouard phones me back to say that there has been a misunderstanding and that I have misrepresented what he has said. He gently mocks the emphasis I put on our being friends, something I have done regularly over the nigh on fifteen years that we have known each other. We make up by having lunch in the little Italian restaurant at the entrance to the library where I work.

Édouard knew Françoise Sagan. He tells me the things he remembers about her – he does an imitation of how she used to answer the phone in a Spanish accent in order to weed out unwanted callers informing them that ‘Madame Sagan is not in.’ I say to him, ‘You loved her so much, so I don’t understand why you shouldn’t be pleased that I – your friend – am writing a book about her.’

‘Of course I’m pleased,’ he replies, ‘but that’s not the problem. What annoys me is that you’re abandoning your novel.’

Édouard is a generous soul, just as Françoise was.

So, for the last ten days roughly, whenever someone asks me, ‘What are you up to at the moment? Are you writing anything?’ I answer, ‘Yes, I’m writing a book about Françoise Sagan.’

Like a chemical reaction, people’s initial response is always the same: it’s as if a combination of certain words automatically produces a smile.

Utter the name ‘Françoise Sagan’ and you will see a smile come over people’s faces, the same smile you would see if you were to say, ‘Will you have some champagne?’

I am wondering whether, in agreeing to write about her, I am not going to put myself in an impossible position by touching on what belongs to everyone. All of a sudden I am afraid of this book.

Yesterday when I put a whole series of questions to Denis Westhoff (What perfume did she wear? What year was it that she met Pasolini? Where was her brother Jacques living in January 1954? etc.) he said something very important.

‘My mother was never afraid.’

‘Even in 1954, when she was just a young girl, before her first book came out, do you not think she was afraid?’

‘No, she wasn’t afraid of anything or anyone.’

‘But she must have wondered whether she would get good reviews.’

‘It was one of the things she taught me. Not to be afraid.’

I make a note in my work-book: ‘A scene to show that Françoise Sagan was never afraid of anything.’

I make a note in my head: Must teach my daughter that the only thing to be afraid of is fear itself.

Clearly, in my hands, there is a danger that Françoise Sagan might be lost to view. I am appropriating her for myself, just as a portrait painter imposes his own profile on the portrait of the sitter.

I am going to slide her into my bed with its rumpled sheets, there to wipe away the anguished sweat that, though I attribute it to her, is so like mine. She may not be afraid, but I am. So I let my black hair intertwine with her fairness and, like a photographer using light-sensitive paper, I develop the outlines of a silhouette that, while grave, is full of joy. I can’t help myself. If it’s a problem, all anyone had to do was not to ask me in the first place.

It is 11 January 1954.

It is so cold outside that Marie Quoirez, Françoise’s mother, has agreed to lend her daughter her fur coat, made from the silvery pelts of squirrels which, even after death, do not lose their ash-grey colour, while the belly remains as pale as Snow White’s thigh. The fur coat is so big on Françoise that Marie pictures her daughter as she was eighteen years previously, a gift from heaven, a newborn baby wrapped in a blanket.

Jacques is expecting her to join him for dry martinis at the Hôtel Lutetia. In the taxi taking her across town, Françoise is deep in thought as she looks out of the window at the succession of illuminated signs adorning Haussmann’s buildings: ‘Frigeco’, ‘Paris-Pêcheur’, ‘Chocolat Suchard’, ‘Janique’, ‘Gevapan’ and, especially, ‘Grand Marnier’, advertised in that Gothic script that makes you want to be sipping a liqueur in front of a log fire.

The taxi carrying Françoise drives alongside the courtyard of the Palais-Royal, as yet devoid of Buren’s columns, then past the Louvre without the addition of the Pyramid and the Jardins du Carrousel without Maillol’s bronze statues. By day Paris is sooty black. At night she is navy blue.

Françoise enters the Lutetia through the revolving doors, which muffle the noise from outside and give you the feeling of moving into a world wrapped in cotton wool. Her feet go trotting over the chequered marble floor of the luxury hotel. She recalls that, at the Liberation, a girl Jacques was engaged to at the time, Denise Franier, whose surname before the war had been Frankenstein, had been driving them through Paris in a mustard-coloured Rovin D4. As they passed the hotel she had told them it was there that whole families were awaiting the return of their fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters and children, and news from Poland and Germany.

Françoise has not forgotten those entire families that had disappeared. Even if she never referred to them, some things may be heard very clearly in the silence of their not being spoken about.

Comfortably ensconced in one of the deep red-velvet armchairs, sipping a cocktail, and paying no heed to the shrieks of laughter that pierce her heart like shards of glass, Françoise is not listening to her brother’s friends, who are already drunk.

At that moment she is immersing herself in her memories.

The sharp, crystalline music of the tinkling ice cubes is taking her back to the war years.

She is seven.

Seven is old, so old that it is called ‘the age of reason’.

She is living in the Isère, in Saint-Marcellin, at the foot of the mountains of the Vercors. The whole family has left Paris because of the war; on the day of their departure they had to turn round and come back because Marie, the mother, had forgotten to collect her hats from the famous milliner’s, Paulette’s.11

Some weeks later, soldiers of the Wehrmacht come to search the house, which has the misfortune to be called ‘The Gunnery’; they are looking for arms. They know that a van belonging to members of the Resistance has been spotted in the area. They get all the Quoirez family to line up and face the wall while they carry out the search. The story has a happy ending, as the Germans don’t find anything.12 But Françoise can remember the sound of her own breathing as, hands clasped on her head, she heard orders being given in a foreign tongue and the dogs barking. And she also remembers not being afraid.

I get the impression that for many French children of that generation, that is to say, those who were children during the war, their memories are not painful. Fear is not their abiding memory and the expression ‘a long holiday’ often crops up. Two things are mentioned: the women whose hair was shorn for having fraternised with the enemy and the revelation of images from the death camps. When you come to think of it, it is rather strange that an awareness of the war should be defined by those two things, both of which date from the period after the war, and yet they are cited in answer to the question ‘What do you remember about the war?’

This is what Françoise remembers: she was eleven when she went to the cinema in Saint-Marcellin to see In Old Chicago, an American film starring Tyrone Power. It was 1946 and newsreels were shown before the film started. Suddenly there appeared on the screen those images of Buchenwald and Auschwitz in which you see snow ploughs clearing away heaps of corpses. It took Françoise some time, a few seconds at least, to realise what she was seeing.13

A friend of mine, Gérard Rambert, once told me that when he discovered some photographs under his parents’ radiator cover, all he could see in them were hills. He could not understand why his parents would hide ‘photographs of hills’ in their radiators. It had taken him several days to realise what it was all about. Just as the faces in the paintings of Arcimboldo are made up of vegetables or fruit, so the hills in the photographs belonging to Gérard’s parents were made up of bones and decomposed corpses.

In Un Pedigree, Patrick Modiano would write, ‘At the age of thirteen I discovered the images of the death camps. Something changed for me that day.’

Those two sentences say it all.

‘Something changed for me that day’ is an experience that we have all had, every one of us, whatever our age or culture and whatever generation we belong to.

I remember the day when something changed for me.

I must have been six or seven.

My mother placed a big history book on the baize surface of her writing desk. We pored over its pages. I don’t think I realised at first what I was seeing – I’m not talking about its meaning or import, I am merely saying that it was difficult to work out what the photographs were of.

My mother explained to me that we belonged to that family of bodies, that we were ‘Jews’.

‘Something changed for me that day.’

If I mention all these things, in a digression that is taking me further than I intended, it is because I see in Françoise Sagan’s levity, in her irreverence and offhandedness, not an elegant front concealing despair, but a sign of her secret awareness of human suffering. She had no legitimate right to speak of suffering, for she belonged neither with the victims nor indeed with the executioners. Françoise Sagan was never to tire of exploring forms of distress that may be regarded as merely trivial but I sense that there was a deeply embedded seriousness in Françoise Quoirez that she respected too much to make it her own. And I know that the sight of a shaven-headed woman paraded through the streets of the village where she, Françoise, lived as a child was to haunt her for the rest of her days.14

‘So, what’s this about you waiting to hear back from publishers?’

Françoise, put on the spot by a friend who is flirting with her brother Jacques, comes out of her daydream.

‘Yes, well, we’ll see,’ she replies, pushing back a lock of hair that has fallen forward.

‘So,’ insists someone else, ‘have you heard back?’

Few things make Françoise feel more ill at ease. She doesn’t want to talk about it. She is furious with her brother and his big mouth.

‘No, not yet. I only dropped the manuscript off last week … it can take several months.’

This is the cue for people to give their opinions, to come up with an anecdote about someone who had been read by Gide for Gallimard, or someone else who received a letter with a positive reply, or Proust who paid to have his work published, and so on and so on. Françoise has had enough. She doesn’t want to have to listen to them any more; she feels dizzy.

It’s at this point that her friend Véronique whispers to her, ‘Come with me, I’ll take you to the carnival. We’ll have our fortunes told.’

The two girls grab their coats, then hail a beetle-black Citroën taxi on Boulevard Raspail.

‘We’re going to Pigalle,’ says Véronique, in the serious voice she reserves for special occasions.

So here are the girls, speeding through the night towards their future. It’s not the first time that Françoise has met a fortune-teller. The previous year, in Rue l’Abbé-Groult, a blonde woman with an enormous bosom had announced to her, ‘You will write a book that will cross the oceans’15 and that had encouraged her to take from her drawer the few pages that had been lying there abandoned.

So it all stemmed from the woman who had predicted that Françoise would write books and that they would be very successful.

I can’t see into the future, but I do have one extraordinary power, the power to transport Françoise back to that night in Pigalle.

Up there on the heights, from mid-December until mid-January, a carnival with dozens of strange booths sets up along Boulevard Rochechouart, stretching from Place Blanche to the Anvers Métro station. There you can find women who will tell your fortune with playing cards, as well as shooting galleries, bearded ladies and fishing for prizes.

I quote here from the photographer Christer Strömholm, who photographed these carnivals in the late fifties:16

You could get to see wrestling matches … Dwarves with beards would invite you to performances that lasted an hour.

The female snake charmer in her glass case would allow big, lazy snakes to coil languorously round her body. You had to pay to see her. We would watch in fascination for a good quarter of an hour.

Her working day was long and whenever she took a break she would leave her glass case but she never parted from her snakes. They stayed tightly coiled round her half-naked body. There was always a packed house for the ‘leopard woman’. She would let us stroke her hairy patches.

I can imagine Françoise and Véronique wandering among the stalls and the roundabouts. I can see them laughing at the dodgems, sinking their teeth into round, sweet toffee-apples and getting candyfloss moustaches as they stood guffawing in front of the booth of the crocodile woman – half woman, half crocodile.

I like to picture them, complete with the leather handbags that mark them out as well-brought-up young ladies, entering the fortune-teller’s booth.

There are some grey and orange stones on the fortune-teller’s table; light from the candles throws into relief the wrinkles on her face – she could be one hundred years old – she wears jewellery, lots of jewellery. She asks Françoise to choose some cards and place them on the table, then she stands up, takes a pendulum and, looking Françoise straight in the eye, says to her in a gravelly voice that conjures up some never-never land, ‘I see someone who is coming to live with you, someone who will be arriving in the near future.

‘It’s someone you will get to know very well indeed, someone you will love and who will love you straight away, for you are very lovable. But, beware, the relationship between you will be one of extremes for she is haughty and capricious. She will love you as children love, unreasonably. She will love you as women love: if you neglect them, they do not easily forgive.

‘This is someone you will know for the rest of your life, who will at times desert you and then you will suffer greatly. As she brushes past, you will always call her name. You must honour and cherish her, for you are one of those who know how to make her happy. You know how to make her laugh and to entertain her. She is on her way towards you. And when you open the door to her, you must look her straight in the face.’

‘Who is this person?’

‘It is Lady Luck.’17