A French Novel. Frédéric Beigbeder

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      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 worry, the monster can’t come close to the shore, he’s too big; here on the beach you’re in no danger.’

      To be on the safe side, I decided that day never to set foot in the water again. My grandfather was teaching me to shrimp with a net, and I remember why my elder brother was not with us. At the time, an eminent doctor had told my mother I might have leukaemia. I was on a rest cure, in ‘rehab’, at the age of seven. I had come to the seaside to gather my strength, to breathe in the fresh salt air through a nose clotted with blood. In my grandfather’s house ‘Patrakénéa’ (Basque for ‘The Peculiar House’), in my damp room, a green hot-water bottle would be slipped into my bed; it made a sploshing sound when I moved, and regularly reminded me of its presence by scalding my feet.

      The brain twists childhood, to make it better or worse, to make it more interesting than it was. Guéthary 1972 is like a recovered sample of DNA; like the white-coated forensic officer in the 8th arrondissement police station who has just swabbed the insides of my cheeks with a wooden spatula to get a mucus sample, I should be capable of recreating everything from this single strand of hair found on the beach. Unfortunately I am not skilled enough: closing my eyes in my squalid little cell, I can reconstruct only the rocks chafing the soles of my feet, the murmur of the Atlantic roaring in the distance alerting us to the rising tide, the slippery sand between our toes, and my pride that my grandfather has made me responsible for holding the bucket of shrimps wriggling in the brine. On the beach, a few old ladies pull on flowery bathing caps. At low tide, the rocks form little swimming pools, in which the shrimp are held prisoner. ‘You see, Frédéric, you have to scrape around inside the fissures. Go ahead, it’s your turn.’ As he held out the shrimping net, my grandfather, with his white hair and pink espadrilles bought from Garcia, taught me the word ‘fissure’; keeping the net close to the jagged edges of the rocks beneath the water, he caught the poor creatures as they jumped backwards into his net. I tried my luck, but caught only a few listless hermit crabs. But it didn’t matter: I was alone with Bon Papa, and I felt as heroic as he. Walking back up from Cénitz beach, he picked blackberries along the roadside. It was miraculous for a little city kid holding his grandfather’s hand, to discover that nature was a sort of giant smorgasbord: the ocean and the trees teemed with gifts, you had only to stoop and pick them up. Until then I had only ever seen food come out of a fridge or a shopping trolley. I felt as if I were in the Garden of Eden, its pathways burgeoning with fruit.

      ‘One day, we’ll go to the woods at Vaugoubert and pick ceps under the fallen leaves.’

      We never did.

      The sky was an uncharacteristic blue: for once, the weather was fine in Guéthary, and the houses seemed to get whiter as we watched, like in those ads for Ajax: The White Tornado. But perhaps it was overcast, perhaps I’m trying to arrange things, perhaps I just need the sun to shine upon the one memory I have of my childhood.