The Despair of Monkeys and Other Trifles: A Memoir by Françoise Hardy

311 Pages·2018·8.32 MB·English

by  Françoise Hardy

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
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17, 1944, at the Marie-Louise Clinic at the top of Rue des Martyrs, in the Ninth
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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
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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
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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-