The Incorrigible Optimists Club Read online

  There is a gap of seven years between Franck and me. He was born in 1940. His story is the story of our family with its ups and downs and its imponderables. Without him, I would not be here. Our fate hinged on the early months of the war. At that time, my mother’s father Philippe was running his plumbing and zinc-roofing business. Before the war, it had branched out into selling kitchen and bathroom equipment. He had never touched a zinc pipe or a blowtorch in his life. He was happy to let others do the work and, to judge by his comments, it was tough. He had inherited the business from his father and he managed it efficiently. The start of his problems can be dated precisely to 3 February 1936 when he took on Paul Marini as an apprentice. My father was seventeen and had no wish to follow in the family tradition of working for the railways from one generation to the next. He wanted to live in Paris. On the day he was hired, he impressed Grandfather Delaunay by soldering some pewter perfectly and in record time. For the next three years my grandfather congratulated himself on having recruited my father, who charmed everybody with his smile, his kindness, his willingness and his ability. Without realizing it, he had let the wolf into the fold. His daughter Hélène fell madly in love with this handsome lad with his velvety good looks, wavy hair and slight dimple, who danced the waltz tirelessly and made her laugh with his imitations of Maurice Chevalier and Raimu. These must have been the most wonderful years for my parents. They were seventeen or eighteen; they used to see one another in secret and no one would have had any idea that they were going steady. In those days, a boss’s daughter was not allowed to consort with a worker, especially the son of an Italian immigrant. It was unheard of. Everyone had to keep to his or her place. In time, things would probably have reverted to normal. But war was drawing closer, and there is nothing worse for lovers than being separated by armed forces. I can easily imagine the pain of their separation and what they must have been through, what with my father being called up, and the phoney war in the depths of the Ardennes, and then the disaster. For six months, my mother hid the fact that she was pregnant from her parents. She had felt unwell but the family doctor had diagnosed a fatty tumour. Then they discovered her condition. She refused to say who the father was of the child whom she christened Franck. My father was held prisoner for four years in a prisoner of war camp in Pomerania, without receiving any news. Convinced that she had forgotten him, he discovered the truth on his return to France. The young girl, so carefree and lighthearted before the war, had become a woman. They had changed and scarcely recognized one another.

  Had it not been for Franck, they would not have seen each other or got together again. They would have gone their separate ways and their affair would have been merely a youthful memory, known only to them, and soon forgotten. Had it not been for Franck, my parents would not have married and I would not be here today. Franck was five years old. They had to sort out the situation. They shouldered their responsibilities. They were married hurriedly in the town hall of the fifth arrondissement. On the morning of the ceremony, the future spouses rushed off to the Delaunays’ lawyer and signed, without reading it, a marriage settlement. Paul Marini may have got the girl, but not the money. Grandmother Alice had a convenient ailment that morning and, since Philippe did not want to leave her, neither of them attended their daughter’s wedding. Had my father perhaps been more tactful, he might have succeeded in sorting out the situation, but he rejected a religious wedding on the ridiculous pretext that he did not believe in God. This refusal had worsened his standing among the Delaunay family, which had had its own reserved pew at Saint-Etienne-du-Mont for ages. In a black and white photo taken on the steps of the town hall, the young couple can be seen surrounded by just the Marini family. They are not holding hands, and little Franck stands between them. My parents’ wedding day was not a good one. In the late afternoon, they learned that Daniel Delaunay had been killed in Strasbourg. The modest repast planned by the Marinis was cancelled. They went into mourning for an entire year. Alice forgot all about her ailment and declared that she had not been able to attend her daughter’s wedding because of the heroic death of her son in the war. In the Delaunay family, the day has always been commemorated as the one on which Daniel died. My parents have never celebrated their wedding anniversary.

  2

  School did not interest me. I preferred to hang around the Luxembourg, the Place de la Contrescarpe or the Quartier Latin. I spent that part of my life slipping through the net. I did just enough to move up to the next class. My getting into the first year at Lycée Henri-IV had been a close-run thing. Grandfather Delaunay had felt reluctantly obliged to call on the headmaster, who knew the family. Franck had been a pupil there. Despite its old-fashioned etiquette and its musty smell, Henri-IV did have a few advantages. The pupils were reasonably free, and could come and go without supervision. I was fortunate in that Nicolas was the best in the class. I didn’t simply copy out his maths homework line by line. I embellished it. I digressed, or allowed deliberate minor errors to creep in. Occasionally, I got better marks than him, when all I had done was to paraphrase him. Then I moved on from minor idiotic cheating, with the book on my lap during essay writing, to the ingenious planning of undetectable crib-sheets. I spent more time preparing these than I would have needed to learn them. I never got caught. In history and geography, I had no need of them. I read the lesson once and it was imprinted in my mind. This enabled me to return the favour for Nicolas as this was his area of weakness. We monopolized the top places. For years, I was reckoned to be a good student and I didn’t do a thing. I went to great lengths to appear older than my age. I succeeded effortlessly. I made the most of being almost six feet tall so people believed I was in my fifth year when I was actually beginning my third. For this reason, I had no friends of my own age, apart from Nicolas. I went around with Franck’s friends whom I met in the cafés in the Maubert district, where they spent their time discussing things and setting the world to rights.

  It was an exciting time. After a long period in the political wilderness, De Gaulle was back in power in order to save French Algeria, which was threatened by Algerian terrorists. People started to use words whose meaning was not very clear to me: decolonization, loss of empire, Algerian war, Cuba, non-aligned and Cold War. I wasn’t interested in these political innovations. Since Franck’s friends spoke of nothing else, I listened without saying anything, pretending I understood. I livened up when the conversation moved to the subject of ‘rock’n’roll’. We had come across this music inadvertently a few months earlier. Usually we listened to the wireless without paying much attention. I read, slumped in a chair. Franck swotted. Then sounds we had never heard before came from the radio. We both looked up at the same time, staring at one another in amazement. We moved closer to the radio, Franck turned up the volume. Bill Haley had just changed our lives. From one day to the next, it became our kind of music and it dumped accordion music and all it evoked into the forgotten past. Adults loathed it, apart from Papa who loved jazz. It was feral music that was going to make us deaf and more stupid than we were already. We didn’t understand any of it, but we didn’t mind. Franck and his pals discovered loads of American singers: Elvis, Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis became our inseparable companions.

  It wasn’t just the period that was lively, the Quartier Latin was as well. The name of the Poujadist deputy for the fifth arrondissement was Jean-Marie Le Pen. Elected by small shopkeepers and landladies, he came to blows with ‘the reds’, that is, those who did not share his views. Around the Sorbonne and boulevard Saint-Michel there were real pitched battles between the students on either side. The traditional left-right divide was swept away by the Algerian war, which added to its chapters of horrific deeds by the day. From now on, you were either for or against French Algeria. Many socialists were for it, many on the right were against it, and many people switched sides, in both directions.

  Franck was for independence. A member of the young communists, he had just joined t
he party proper and was a hardliner. Being close to Enzo and Baptiste, he accompanied them to every fête de l’Huma.* That made him a Marini. Grandfather Delaunay never missed an opportunity to make fun of him and to register his disapproval. This simmering war explained why Franck was waiting impatiently for his economics studies to be over so that he could leave home. Papa had a foot in both camps. If he had declared himself a communist, Philippe would have thrown him out at once, but my father knew how far he could go. They put up with him because he said he was a socialist, of a radical tendency. For him, it was more important to claim independence from his own family. He did everything to smooth corners with his father-in-law and to make himself acceptable to him. But he wasn’t actually a socialist, except in words. In his day-to-day life, it wasn’t obvious. Franck, at least, tried to make his life fit in with his ideas. Sunday lunches were livelier than they are in most families. My mother refused to allow current affairs to be discussed at the table, but it was not easy to avoid the topic. As Franck would say, all subjects were political.

  For the Delaunays, Algeria was France. But this was not the real reason it was untouchable. Algeria was sacred because Maurice had settled there after the war, when he married Louise Chevallier, a pure pied noir.* Her extremely wealthy family owned dozens of apartment blocks in Algiers and Oran. Maurice looked after his wife’s assets and continued to increase their fortune every year by buying more buildings. The word ‘independence’ was therefore both impossible and inappropriate. Philippe and my mother had stood firmly with Maurice, and De Gaulle’s arrival at the helm reassured them. Thanks to our great national figure, Algeria would remain French. No bunch of scruffy terrorists was going to get the better of the third largest army in the world. These fellaghas were a gang of bloodthirsty and ungrateful degenerates manipulated by the Americans. Even if the Delaunays admitted that the ‘natives’ might get forgotten in this impasse, they pledged boundless hatred for those Frenchmen who were betraying their country and their fellow citizens, and were supporting the rebellion. Between Franck and Maurice, there was more than animosity. Each of them stood his ground and made it a point of honour to proclaim his opinion, provoke his opponent and let him know how deeply he despised him. We avoided having them in the same room. When they were together, my mother forbade them to bring up the subject. The words: Algeria, war, assassination attempts, self-determination, referendum, generals, colonels, Africa, legionnaires, army, as well as: honour, concern, future, bastard, torture, arsehole, freedom, commie, oil, bad for business, were banned from conversation from the apéritif to the end of the meal. This limited the field of discussion but it allowed the leg of lamb with beans to be consumed without insults flying.

  Because of Franck, and to prevent me from following in his footsteps, Philippe and my mother created a sort of cordon sanitaire that stopped me from associating with my father’s family. They forbade me to accompany them to the fête de l’Huma, and from the way they spoke about it, with an air of purse-lipped complicity, I believed for a long time that secret and unmentionable horrors took place there. My mother was not able to stop me from going to the Louvre once a month with Enzo. He made no attempt to sway me or to bring me over to his side. He was a fatalist before he was a communist. They probably amount to the same thing. If you were born a worker, you were a communist; if you were born into the bourgeoisie, you were on the right. There could be no mingling of the two. For him, it was only the Socialists who compromised. He was annoyed with my father for going over to the enemy’s side and he resented him for having betrayed the working class. You were not allowed to change social classes. The world was a simple place; since I was the son of a member of the bourgeoisie, I would become a member of the bourgeoisie myself. In actual fact, I could not care less about their stories, their political persuasions or their rows. I was neither on one side nor the other. Their certainties bored me and were alien to me. Their squabbles did not concern me. What interested me in life were rock’n’roll, literature, photography and baby-foot.

  * The annual festival organized by the Communist daily newspaper, L’Humanité. Tr.

  * A person born in North Africa of French descent. Tr.

  3

  Nicolas and I were one of the best teams at baby-foot. He in defence, I in offence. We were hard to beat. When we wanted to play quietly, we went to place de la Contrescarpe. Our opponents were students from the neighbourhood, or those from the nearby Ecole Polytechnique, who were brainy fellows and useless at the game. We could not care less about winding them up. Some of them were annoyed that kids ten years younger than them could thrash them. We behaved in the same way we saw Samy do. We ridiculed them without taking any notice of them.

  ‘Next.’

  To begin with, we were over the moon. We made it obvious how thrilled we were. Later on, we relished our victories in silence. We ignored them. We concentrated on the baby-foot, on the white ball and the little red and blue footballers. The students knew what awaited them before they started, and knew they could not beat us. Being ignored was worse than disdain. In order to merit a glance, they had to put us in a dangerous position, score ahead of us or be tied at match point. There were quite a lot of keen players, and when you lost you had to hang around for a long time before playing again. As the number of teams increased, people eventually grew tired and as soon as they lost their concentration they were thrown out, with a little sideways smirk to mark the transfer of power. There were the good players, those who managed at least five or six consecutive games, and those who just about got by.

  When we felt on top form, ready to take on the whole world and happy to get thrashed, we went along to the Balto, the large bistro on place Denfert-Rochereau. At the Balto there were two baby-foot tables. We played with the grown-ups and we were respected. It would never have occurred to us to play on the small table next to the pinball machines, even when it was free or when other players suggested a game to us. We conserved our energy for the big shots, those who came from the southern suburbs. Samy was the best. He played on his own against two opponents and won easily. He stopped when he had had enough or when it was time for him to go to work. He had a night job with a sales agent at Les Halles, carting around tons of fruit and vegetables. He was a real rocker with a quiff and sideburns, a huge fellow, built like the side of a house, with enormous biceps and two leather bracelets on each wrist, not the sort of guy you failed to respect. He played at a speed that left us stunned, and he struck each ball incredibly violently. You could count on the fingers of one hand the players who had managed to defeat him. I was one of them. It had happened just three times, and then only narrowly, whereas he had smashed me on dozens of occasions. Samy had no time for students or bourgeois types. He had just one word for us: we were morons, and he regarded us contemptuously from his imposing height. He only spoke to his own kind and to a small number of others, one of whom was Jacky, the barman at the Balto, a mate of his, who came from the same suburb as he did. Rumours were rife about Samy and they were discussed in a hushed voice, behind his back. He was variously either a small-time crook or a major one. Nobody knew whether it was his shady appearance or his black leather jacket that had earned him this reputation or whether it was justified. He had had a soft spot for me ever since I had played ‘Come on Everybody’ on the Balto juke-box, an enormous Wurlitzer that glistened between the two pinball machines. This had earned me a friendly pat on the back and a nod of approval from him. From time to time, when a pair of good players turned up whom he knew he could not beat single-handed, he took me on to play at the back. I made it a point of honour to be worthy of his choice and I always scored two or three goals thanks to a killer shot, which I was one of the few who knew how to do. Apart from these rare displays of friendship, I was treated as contemptuously as the others, and given the nickname ‘complete moron’; I found his constantly changing attitude bewildering. When I had a bit of money, I put on a rock record, and as soon as the guitars started strumming, he gave a sigh of r
elief and motioned to me with a nod of his head to join him and play at the back. Together, we never lost a single match.

  The Balto was run by a family from the Auvergne. The Marcusots had come from the Cantal after the war and had spent their lives in this café. They worked there as a family seven days a week, from six in the morning until midnight. The father, Albert, ran his business masterfully and proclaimed his social success by flaunting his English bow ties, which he collected and which he was forever adjusting in the mirror to obtain a perfect balance. When the takings had been good, he drummed his fingers in satisfaction over his prominent belly.

  ‘The dosh is all there and no one’s going to take it away from me.’

  The phrase ‘bon vivant’ could have been invented for old Marcusot. He spoke about returning to the country, and starting up a nice little business in Aurillac or Saint-Flour. His wife, the voluminous Madeleine, had no desire to go back since their three children had all settled in the Paris area.

  ‘It’ll be bad enough to be bored stiff once we’re in the graveyard, there’s no point burying ourselves there during our lifetime. The holidays are quite enough.’

  Almost everything the Marcusots made came from the Cantal. Their truffade was as famous as it was vast, with Quercy sausages that filled you up for at least two days, and people came from afar to sample their entrecôte de Salers. Old mother Marcusot was a fine cook. She used to prepare a homemade dish of the day. The enticing aroma greeted you on arrival and it had earned her three rave reviews that hung inside a gold frame alongside the menu. People used to make many unkind remarks about the stinginess of Auvergnats. But these particular ones were generous and they paid no heed either to the portions or to the bills, which they allowed to mount up over the course of the month, but which had to be settled without any discussion by the beginning of the following month if you wished to be served again. Woe betide anyone who forgot and imagined that he could simply change restaurants, for the Auvergne phone network was quick to remind bad debtors of their obligations.