A French Novel. Frédéric Beigbeder

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      8

      THE ORIGINAL RAKE

      Why Guéthary? Why does my only childhood memory constantly 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.