A French Novel. Frédéric Beigbeder

a view that plunges into the grounds of Patrakénéa, as into a young girl’s cleavage. I too long to spy on the new neighbours whenever I go to take tea with my aunt Marie-Sol, who still lives in the Beigbeder villa (the Chasteigners’ house was sold last year). This geographical topography plays a not insignificant role in the story of my life. Had my father not watched the Chasteigner girls across the road, I wouldn’t be here to write about it. In my eyes, this blue-painted balcony is as hallowed as Shakespeare’s balcony in Verona.

      Seaside resorts are not all equal. Every beach along the Basque coast has its own unique personality. The large beach at Biarritz is our Cannes Croisette, with the Hôtel du Palais standing in for the pink-fronted Carlton, and the casino acting as a dilapidated Palm Beach Hotel. It’s even possible to imagine you are on the seafront in Deauville, as you sit on a terrace ordering oysters and white wine, watching strolling families in shorts who have never heard of the Marquis de Cuevas’s balls. The beach at Bidart is more family-friendly, it’s the same bourgeois crowd with jumpers tied round their shoulders you find at Ars-en-Ré. It’s best avoided unless you enjoy the screams of drowning children, Hermès towels and hyphenated Christian names. Nicknamed ‘the bastard of the Basques’, the beach at Guéthary is wilder, more plebeian; it has a regional atmosphere and attracts a lot of former addicts in detox. It smells of deep-fried food and bargain-basement sun-cream; a small, crowded stretch of beach where bathers change in red-and-white-striped huts rented for the season. Even the waves differ from one beach to the next: vertical at Biarritz, dangerous at Bidart, higher at Guéthary. At Biarritz, the waves smash you onto the sand, at Bidart the riptide pulls you out to sea, at Guéthary the rollers crush you on the rocks. At Saint-Jean-de-Luz the sea wall has neutered the swell, which is why the old-age pensioners sitting on the benches talk of nothing but the wheeling seagulls and emergency rescue helicopters. The biggest waves are at Hendaye, including the legendary ‘Belharra’, a wave that rises to between fifteen and eighteen metres, tackled only by the most psychopathic surfers, who are pulled out to sea by jet skis. The beach at Alcyons is almost like a strand in Brittany, offering sea spray instead of atomisers, and shingle as a ‘foot massage’; the Chambre d’Amour is a refuge for separatist romantics and pick-up artists nostalgic for the famous Rolls-Royce of champion windsurfer Arnaud de Rosnay; the Basque coast serves as a meeting point for drivers of VW microbuses that reek of whacky baccy and damp bikinis hung out to dry; La Madrague is snobbish, taking after Saint-Tropez, as its nickname suggests. The locals’ favourite beach is called Erretegia, a splendid natural amphitheatre between Ilbarritz and Bidart. Its chief virtue is that Parisians don’t know about it. Why do I only have memories of Cénitz? Is it simply because the Beigbeder villa at Guéthary was called Cénitz Aldea? Cénitz is morose, with sharp, jagged rocks and stinging sands. Cénitz is wild, disagreeable, depressing, gloomy. The waves that rise up there are big, heavy, frenzied, dirty, deafening. It is often very cold there. In the Basque Country, sunshine is a scarce commodity: you wait for it, at Sunday Mass the priest prays for its arrival, people talk about it endlessly, the moment it appears you rush to the Cent Marches or to La Plancha, and the following day it is raining as usual, but you don’t give a damn because you don’t wake up until 5 p.m. The sun may be unexpected at Guéthary, but how could anyone grow weary of such skies? The sky is a suspended ocean. From time to time it melts, washing the hillsides and the houses with seawater. My one memory of childhood unfolds on the least welcoming beach in France. My mind has not picked this spot at random. It was while heading down to Cénitz beach that my father nearly died at the age of nine, dragged along by a train. It was on the road to Cénitz that he met my mother, who was holidaying in the villa opposite. It was in this village that they married. Cénitz is a distillation of my whole life. In remembering this one place, I am encapsulating myself, condensing myself. To remember who one is at heart absolves one of having to remember the rest; my memory is lazy, it has preserved Cénitz like a crib-sheet, a mnemonic from which my whole life flows. Just like David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, the greatest of all films about amnesia, where a simple blue key is enough to reconstruct a shattered life. Imagine a buzzing noise in the background, steadily growing louder, making the scene more dramatic as we come to the thermonuclear core of my story. I am going to draw you a map so you can see it more clearly.

      Maman: very young, with fine blonde hair, wearing a light dress, pale azure eyes, white teeth, shy and refined, a posh girl with impeccable manners, living proof that intelligence can rhyme with innocence, eager to escape her starchy aristocratic family, hopelessly romantic, sublime in both body and soul. Ready for a long life of poetry, of love, of pleasure, she will offer herself to …

      Papa: a young, slim, rich man, somewhat overshadowed by his elder brother, he is studious, and at the age of eighteen he travelled round the world. He is focused and passionate, he has piercing green eyes, he is funny without being cruel, an adolescent curious about philosophy and literature like his father, keen to conquer the America that is his mother, relaxed without being blasé, open-minded, pleasure-seeking but not vulgar, proud and smiling, he hates snobs because he knows them only too well, he dreams of embracing the whole world, and my mother.