A French Novel. Frédéric Beigbeder

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.

      7

      NATURAL HELLS

      When the police descended on us on the avenue Marceau, we were a dozen revellers huddled together, lighting cigarettes around a car whose gleaming bonnet was striped with parallel white lines. We were more like Marcel Carné’s Youthful Sinners than Larry Clark’s junkie Kids. As soon as the siren began to wail, we scattered to the four winds. The officers only managed to net two delinquents, like my grandfather shrimping, delving into the fissures – in this case the entrance to Alma-Marceau métro station, whose shutters were closed at this late hour. While my friend – let’s call him the Poet – was being arrested, I heard him protest, ‘Life is a nightmare!’ The baffled face of the Policeman in front of the Poet will continue to make me smile until my dying day. Two keepers of the peace carried us right up to the bonnet of contention; I remember having enjoyed this exercise in nocturnal levitation. The ensuing dialogue seemed to be perched midway between Poetry and Public Order.

      Policeman: ‘What the hell were you thinking, doing something like that on a car?’

      Poet: ‘Life is a NIGHTMARE!’

      Me: ‘I am descended from a gallant knight who was crucified on the barbed wire of Champagne.’

      Policeman: ‘All right, that’s it, take this lot down to Sarij 8.’

      Me: ‘What’s Sarij 8?’

      Policeman II: ‘The service for reception, research and judicial investigation of the 8th arrondissement.’

      Poet: ‘“As human beings advance through life the romance which dazzled the young man, the fabulousss legend which enchanted him as a child, these wither and grow dim of themselvesss …”’

      Me (simultaneously brown-nosing and showing off): ‘That’s not his. Surely you must have read Baudelaire’s Artificial Paradises, Captain? You know that artificial paradises exist to help us escape our natural hells?’

      Policeman (into his radio): ‘Boss, we’ve got a violation here!’

      Policeman II: ‘You’re crazy to do this on a public highway! Why don’t you hide in the bogs like everyone else? That’s provocation, that is!’

      Me (wiping the powder from the bonnet of the car with my scarf): ‘We are not everyone else, Commandant. We’re WRRRRITERS. OK?’

      Policeman (brutally grabbing my arm): ‘Boss, the apprehended individual tried to destroy a piece of evidence!’

      Me: ‘Hey, hey, easy does it, Mr Officer Sir, no need to break my arm. I liked it better when you carried me.’

      Poet (with vehement head movements intended to express human dignity and the pride of the misunderstood artist): ‘Liberty is an impossibility …’

      Policeman: ‘Can’t you get this guy to shut up?’

      Poet (convinced he is convincing, articulating every syllable, one finger raised like a tramp muttering to himself in the métro): ‘The Powers That Be need aaartists to ssspeak truth to power.’

      Policeman: ‘Are you playing the fuckwit with me?’

      Poet: ‘No, because you’d be sssure to win.’

      Policeman: ‘Well, now, I think that warrants a little time in the cells! All right, boys, bang them up!’

      Me: ‘But … my brother is being awarded the Légion d’honneur!’

      We were levitated into the wailing two-tone car.

      I don’t know why, but I immediately thought of a scene from The Gendarme of St Tropez (1964), where Louis de Funès and Michel Galabru run after a group of nudists on the beach to paint them blue. We used to watch it as a family every spring in Guéthary, in the living room that smelled of wood fires, floor polish and Johnnie Walker on the rocks. Another reference would be Pellos’s comic strip Les Pieds nickelés en plein suspense (1963), but I couldn’t work out which of us was Ribouldingue, and which was Filochard.

      I had already been in the back of a police car once, during the Paris Salon du Livre in March 2004. I had tried to go up to President Chirac to give him a T-shirt emblazoned with the face of Gao Xingjian. The Chinese were the guests of honour at the Salon that year, but the winner of the 2000 Nobel Prize for Literature, a Chinese dissident living in exile in France and a naturalised Frenchman, had been bizarrely ‘forgotten’ by the organisers. Here, too, muscular arms had lifted me off the ground; here, too, I had found the experience somewhat mind-blowing. I have to admit, I was lucky that time: one of the guys carrying me got a reassuring message on his walkie-talkie.

      ‘Don’t beat him up, he’s famous.’

      That day, I thanked God for my notoriety. They released me after an hour, and the following day my brief incarceration made the front page of Le Monde. One hour spent banged up in a police van in order to seem like a fearless defender of human rights offered an excellent ratio of physical pain to media benefit. This time, they were going to lock me up for a little longer, for a cause that was significantly less philanthropic.

      8

      THE ORIGINAL RAKE