The Despair of Monkeys and Other Trifles: A Memoir by Françoise Hardy ©2018 Françoise Hardy eISBN: 978-1-62731-0734 Originally published as: LE DÉSESPOIR DES SINGES … et autres bagatelles 978-2-221-11163-5, 2008 Printed with permission from Éditions Robert Laffont Feral House 1240 W. Sims Way, Suite 124 Port Townsend, WA 98368 www.FeralHouse.com Design by Sean Tejaratchi For Thomas Contents Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen One I WAS BORN at nine thirty in the evening during an air raid alert. It was on January 1 17, 1944, at the Marie-Louise Clinic at the top of Rue des Martyrs, in the Ninth 2 Arrondissement of Paris, where Jean-Philippe Smet had been born a few months earlier. My mother often told me that I cried every night during my first month of life, but she had never come to comfort me. She was proud of herself for never giving in to what she felt were my whims. She boasted that after a month I understood and stopped crying. Today I believe what I understood was this: the more you cry out, the more you are ignored. You must hold your tears back and never ask anything of anyone. But how can I hold this against my mother? She was only twenty-three years old and thought she was doing the right thing. She probably also believed she was doing a good thing by surrendering to her desire to have a child, made even keener by a recent abortion. She was not even truly in love with my father, a married man, who enjoyed a much higher social status. She most likely believed that he would make a good father, or at least be able to ensure his children’s material comforts. Their meeting was both banal and colorful. My mother’s exceptional beauty attracted even more attention because she was five foot eight, which was not all that common in the forties. Captivated from the first moment he saw her in the street, my father decided to follow her. My mother quickly spotted him and thought it would be funny to force him to march double time from the Gare Saint Lazare to the Gare du Nord keeping up with her. After an hour, she could not help laughing at his perseverance and this broke the ice. But how different they were from each other! First there was their age: twenty years separated them. Next was their social status: my father was from a large, middle-class family that had moved to Blois from their native Normandy, where my father managed an adding machine company. He and his brothers—an 3 admiral, a Jesuit priest , a doctor, and a printer-publisher—had all completed their education and taken music lessons. For her part, my mother was the youngest of three daughters whose parents were low-level bank employees who only read the newspapers and had a poor command of the French language. They lived on Rue de Tilleul in Aulnay-sous-Bois in a small bungalow made of burrstone surrounded by a garden. Here they raised their three girls, living hand- to-mouth. Their oldest daughter, the chubby Suzanne, married the first man who would have her, Louis, a milling machine operator. She followed him to Blanc- Mesnil, where they had nine children in quick succession and barely enough to feed them. Marie-Louise, who had a more delicate constitution, contracted tuberculosis during a time when it was hard to treat, and people treated its victims as if they had the plague. She came to Paris to pursue her desire to be a painter. It was here she joined the Communist Party. Despite the foul weather and even though she was spitting up blood, she would hand out copies of the party paper, L’Humanité, every Sunday outside of churches. Her mother’s narrow-minded Catholicism was likely no stranger to the radical nature of a political ideal, and she never questioned her daughter’s commitment. The youngest, my mother Madeline, left as soon as she got her diploma to find work in the capital, partially to escape the stifling family environment. The biggest gap between my parents, though, concerned their feelings for each other. My father was madly in love—maybe it was a mid-life crisis—while my mother merely felt flattered that a man of his standing would be interested in her. I have to say that she never received much affection from her own mother who, lacking her beauty and physical appearance, was unable to recognize herself in her daughter and constantly made cutting remarks that were no joy to hear, like: “Who does she think she is?” or “Wherever did she come from?” This was all my mother needed to believe she had been born from a much more godlike creature than this mocking woman she barely resembled, and she constructed a persona for herself in which individualism, independence, and pride formed the dominant traits, masking a terrible emotional void. Shortly before she died in 1991, my mother confided to me that she did not fear death at all, as she had been wishing for it since she had been very young. My grandmother’s hostility also targeted the male sex with equal ferocity. To hear her talk, all men were bastards who only wanted to sleep with young women. This was quite ironic, as she had been expelled from the convent by a mother superior who did not glimpse the slightest trace of any religious vocation in her. “Get married, my child,” she recommended. Jeanne Millot married Alexandre Hardy, a sufficiently “pure” and “honest” man who never cheated on her. As the bashful lover of this voluptuous redhead who would prove to be egocentric, narrow-minded, frigid, and emasculating, my grandfather was continuously rebuffed, especially whenever he made an effort to show his clumsy affections. He eventually took refuge in total silence, caring for nothing anymore but his chicken coop and garden, while compensating for his amorous frustration by reading romance magazines like Intimité and Nous deux. In her defense, my grandmother lost her own mother at an early age and was then sent away to a boarding school by her overwhelmed father. He would remain the only person my grandmother ever truly cared for and she called him “my own papa” until the end of her life. My grandfather only spoke to me once, in 1962, when I had been suddenly thrust into the spotlight. As I was about to leave, standing on the doorstep of the small house he had built with his own hands, he suddenly asked me, “Are you happy, at least?” I would never go back to Aulnay, and I find it hard to contain my emotions when I speak about it. What affection in those simple words! And how strange to hear them from the mouth of a man who had repressed his own feelings for so long that he seemed to have become indifferent to everything. When my mother became pregnant again in the autumn of 1944 despite herself, my father categorically rejected the idea of another child, which was hardly encouraged by the difficulty of the times and the irregularity of their situation. After she weighed the pros and cons, she decided to keep it. Michèle was born on July 23, 1945, and my mother, who was working part-time as a bookkeeper’s assistant and barely making ends meet, sent her off to my grandmother’s while she was still a baby. Because of this, a bond was forged between the two of them for which I would pay the price. On second thought, we both paid the price. My mother was never able to spend a single night with a man. Only one time before she died did she ever mention her frigidity, but she was never able to connect it to the way she was compelled to toughen herself to compensate for her emotional isolation. One night when my father was caught by surprise by the curfew that was in effect during the Occupation, he knocked on the door to the two-room apartment he had rented for her at 24 Rue D’Aumale, and she refused to let him stay. She justified this by her belief that the bond they shared had been made unbreakable by having children together. But after four years of treating the father of their two children quite poorly, she was dumbfounded to learn that he was cheating on her. What tricks did she use to discover her rival so that she could show her the photo of their two little girls? The woman was so outraged that she immediately broke off her relationship with my father. He was so incensed that he took a sudden and irreversible dislike for my mother. They only spoke to each other on the telephone after that, and with great formality. My sister and I spent our childhood and adolescence in a vacuum that consisted of the house in Aulnay and the small apartment in the Ninth Arrondissement where no visitors ever came—except once in a great while a 4 rejected suitor, Jean Isorni, the brother of the famous lawyer Jacques Isorni . Then starting in the fifties, and more frequently, there was Gilbert von Giannellia, an Austrian baron who worked at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and spent his free time at the racetrack, where he lost his last dime. He was probably the only man with whom my mother had ever fallen in love, and she became so beautiful and proud. But he would also ask for money from her when she did not have a single penny to spare, and I would often see her hang up the phone in tears after one of these demands. I began taking a dim view of this man whom my mother had made my sister’s godfather. He vainly tried to get into my good graces by saddling me with the detestable nickname of “Framboise” [raspberry]. To my great relief, he and my mother never lived together. I loved my mother passionately and exclusively as I had no one but her to love, and I was the first person for whom she had ever felt deeply. My sister did not even inspire in me the tenderness people are supposed to feel for younger children, because of my confused desire to have our mother for myself alone, and because I was given the restrictive responsibilities of an older child even though our age difference was only a year and a half. The gap between Michèle and I would widen later on. She would make my mother hit the roof with her systematic disobedience while I, the sad incarnation of order and discipline, would drive her up the wall. When she was around twenty years old, my sister confided to me that she had only felt fear of our mother, whose strictness scared me, too. Decades after this, my mother admitted that she never felt she had anything in common with my younger sister. Keeping himself busy feeding his chickens, collecting eggs, pruning trees, watering his vegetables, or reading his mushy magazines, my grandfather seemed to ignore his grandchildren, while my grandmother continued to target me with all her sarcastic remarks. “You are going to make your mother weep tears of blood,” she would say, or “That girl is definitely her father’s daughter!” The latter remark inspired me to idealize my father more than he deserved, considering we barely saw him; he was content with only having lunch with us in Aulnay during the Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost holidays. His manners and conversation impressed my grandmother so much that she would suddenly become obsequious in his presence, only to hurriedly badmouth him as soon as his back was turned. For my part, I had a very confused impression of this unknown world inhabited by people who were totally different from the gossips of Aulnay or the cousins of Blanc-Mesnil. People I found even more attractive than my father, who sweetly called me “Patchouli” and seemed to prefer me to my sister. Despite my father’s rare visits, which I prized so highly, I always felt huge pangs of anxiety as the vacation days approached. I was already unhappy about the obligation every week to leave after school on Saturday for the Gare du Nord annex, where Michèle and I would catch the train for Aulnay. But this ordeal was softened by the prospect of my mother’s arrival the next day and returning with her to Paris, sometimes in the baron’s car, but most often by train. If we had the time, we would not take the bus and walk home from the station. I can still see the three of us as if it were yesterday, walking down the Rue de Maubeuge to the Rue Saint-Lazare, from where we would turn on to the Rue Taitbout, which took us to Rue d’Aumale. I was at the height of euphoria as I was with my dear mother again and would be with her until the next Saturday, except for the brief intermission on Thursday when my despicable grandmother came to watch us. However, the activities she forced on us were much more enjoyable in Paris than in Aulnay. As the holidays approached, for example, she would take us to see the lively and spectacular display windows of the Galleries Lafayette or Printemps, which were sources of endless wonder. We would then go up to the floor with the toys, but I most remember the intoxicating fragrances of the main floors of these department stores, where the perfumes and cosmetics were displayed. When the nice weather came, we would walk to the Jardin des Tuileries, with quasi-ritual stops along the way in front of pastry shops where, for want of anything better, we would devour the cakes with our eyes. The Sundays in summer when my mother would return to Paris without us were so heartbreaking that I would sob desperately once I was alone in bed. I hated Aulnay and the house on the Rue de Tilleul, where I had no one to cling to and which even today still gives me nightmares. My sister and I took turns sleeping in one of the two small, sinister, and poorly heated rooms of the single-