Free Pedigree by Patrick Modiano

of directors, is a director of the South American Timber Companyand represents our firm in this subsidiary.” But life is cruel and unfair, and it shatters the fondest dreams: the president of the board of directors would never receive any compensation from Bogotá.
    Christmas 1962. I don’t remember whether there really was any snow that Christmas. In any case, in my mind I see it falling at night in heavy flakes on the road and the stables. I was met at the stud farm in Saint-Lô by Josée and Henri B.—Josée, the girl who used to look after me from ages eleven to fourteen, in my mother’s absence. Henri, her husband, was the farm veterinarian. They were my last resort.
    Over the following years, I’d often return to their place in Saint-Lô. The city they called “capital of the ruins” had been flattened by bombardments during the Normandy invasion, and many survivors had lost all trace or proof of their identity. They were still rebuilding Saint-Lô into the 1950s. Near the stud farm, there was a zone of temporary workers’ huts. I would go tothe Café du Balcon and the town library; sometimes Henri would take me to the neighboring farms, where he treated animals on call, even at night. And at night, thinking of all those horses standing guard around me or sleeping in their stalls, I was relieved that they, at least, would not be taken to the slaughterhouse, like the line of horses I had seen one morning at the Porte Brancion.
    I made a few girlfriends in Saint-Lô. One lived at the power plant. Another, at eighteen, wanted to go to Paris and enroll in the Conservatory. She told me of her plans in a café near the train station. In the provinces, in Annecy, in Saint-Lô, it was still a time when every dream and nighttime stroll ended up at the station, where the train left for Paris.
    I read Balzac’s
Lost Illusions
that Christmas of 1962. I was still living in the same room on the top floor of the house. Its window looked out onto the main road. I remember that every Sunday, at midnight, an Algerian walked up that road toward the workers’ huts, talking softlyto himself. And this evening, forty years later, Saint-Lô reminds me of the lit window in
The Crimson Curtain
—as if I’d forgotten to turn off the light in my old room or in my youth. Barbey d’Aurevilly was born around there. I had once visited his former house.

N ineteen sixty-three. Nineteen sixty-four. The years blend together. Days of indolence, days of rain … Still, I sometimes entered a trancelike state in which I escaped the drabness, a mixture of giddiness and lethargy, like when you walk the streets in springtime after being up all night.
    Nineteen sixty-four. I met a girl named Catherine in a café on Boulevard de la Gare, and she had the same grace and Parisian accent as Arletty. I remember the spring that year. The leaves on the chestnut trees along the elevated metro. Boulevard de la Gare, its squat houses not yet demolished.
    My mother got a bit part in a play by François Billetdoux at the Théâtre de l’Ambigu:
Comment va le monde, môssieu? Il tourne, môssieu
… Boris Vian’s widow, Ursula Kübler, was also in the cast. She drove a red Morgan. Sometimes I went to visit her and her friend Hot d’Déé in Cité Véron. She showed me how she used to dothe “bear dance” with Boris Vian. It moved me to see the complete set of Boris Vian’s records.
    In July, I took refuge in Saint-Lô. Idle afternoons. I frequented the town library and met a blonde. She was spending her holidays in a villa in the hills of Trouville, with her kids and dogs. During the Occupation, when she was fourteen, she had lived at the Legion of Honor school in Saint-Denis. A “schoolgirl of old boarding-schools.” My mother wrote me: “If you’re happy there, it would be best if you stayed as long as possible. I’m living on