All Happy Families Read online

  ALSO BY HERVÉ LE TELLIER

  Atlas Inutilis

  Eléctrico W

  Enough About Love

  The Intervention of a Good Man

  The Sextine Chapel

  A Thousand Pearls (for a Thousand Pennies)

  Originally published in French as Toutes les familles heureuses in 2017 by Éditions Jean-Claude Lattès, Paris

  Copyright © 2017 Éditions Jean-Claude Lattès

  English translation copyright © 2019 Other Press

  Production editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas

  Text designer: Jennifer Daddio / Bookmark Design & Media Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 267 Fifth Avenue, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10016.

  Or visit our Web site: www.otherpress.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Names: Le Tellier, Hervé, 1957- author. | Hunter, Adriana, translator.

  Title: All happy families : a memoir / Hervé Le Tellier; translated from the French by Adriana Hunter.

  Other titles: Toutes les familles heureuses. English

  Description: New York : Other Press, [2019] | “Originally published in French as Toutes les familles heureuses in 2017 by Éditions Jean-Claude Lattès, Paris.”

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018031467 (print) | LCCN 2018056732 (ebook) |

  ISBN 9781590519387 (ebook) | ISBN 9781590519370 (paperback)

  Subjects: LCSH: Le Tellier, Hervé, 1957—Family. | Le Tellier, Hervé,

  1957—Childhood and youth. | Authors, French—20th century—

  Biography. | Authors, French—21st century—Biography. |

  BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs. |

  BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Literary. |

  BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Women.

  Classification: LCC PQ2672.E11455 (ebook) |

  LCC PQ2672.E11455 Z46 2019 (print) | DDC 843/.914 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018031467

  Ebook ISBN  9781590519387

  v5.4

  a

  FOR MELVILLE

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Also by Hervé le Tellier

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  One: Dialectic of A Monster

  Two: The Stepfather’s Funeral

  Three: Rachmaninov’s Concerto No. 2

  Four: Grandpa

  Five: Marceline

  Six: My Sister The Whore

  Seven: Begetter

  Eight: Guy

  Nine: La Maison Le Tellier

  Ten: The Naked Truth

  Eleven: Cuvilly

  Tweleve: The Swiss Account

  Thirteen: Fragments of Childhood

  Fourteen: The Great Escape

  Fifteen: Piette’s Death

  Sixteen: War And Peace

  Seventeen: The Old Couple

  Eighteen: All Happy Families

  Credits

  About the Authors

  The wound is the place where the Light enters you

  JALAL AD-DIN MUHAMMAD RUMI

  ALL HAPPY FAMILIES

  • ONE •

  DIALECTIC OF A MONSTER

  Listen to your father, who gave you life,

  and do not despise your mother when she is old.

  PROVERBS 23:22

  So, apparently it’s scandalous not to love your parents. Scandalous to wonder whether you should be ashamed because—despite your youthful efforts—you failed to find in your heart such a commonplace feeling as filial love.

  A child’s indifference is forbidden. Children are forever imprisoned by the love they spontaneously feel for their parents, whether the latter are good or cruel, intelligent or stupid, in a word, lovable or not. Behaviorists call these widely acknowledged, indisputable manifestations of affection “imprinting.” An absence of filial love not only is an insult to decency, but also stabs in the back the edifice of cognitive sciences.

  I was twelve years old. It must have been eleven o’clock in the evening and I was not yet asleep, because it was one of those very rare nights when my parents had gone out to dinner. Left alone, I was meant to be reading, probably Isaac Asimov, or Fredric Brown, or Clifford D. Simak. The telephone rang. My first thought was: it’s the police, there’s been a car crash, my parents are dead. I say “my parents” to simplify (you should always simplify), because I actually mean my mother and stepfather.

  It wasn’t the police. It was my mother. They were running late; she wanted to reassure me.

  I hung up.

  It occurred to me that I hadn’t been worried. I’d imagined their demise with no feelings of panic or sadness. I was amazed to have so quickly accepted my status as an orphan, and appalled by the twinge of disappointment when I recognized my mother’s voice.

  That’s when I knew I was a monster.

  * * *

  I was informed that Serge had died one sunny afternoon. Serge was my father, my actual father. I was being driven to the Manosque literary festival. I remember that, as well as the driver, the car contained at least the poet Jean-Pierre Verheggen and the writer Jean-Claude Pirotte.

  My cell phone rang; I didn’t recognize the number and picked up. It was my sister. I say “my sister” when she is in fact my half sister, even though I’ve never been definitively conscious of having a half sister. She is seven or eight years younger than I am, the fact that my stepfather has adopted me means we don’t have the same family name, and we must have met half a dozen times in our lives. Still, I did at some stage realize that she had burdened me with the heroic, mythologized mantle of the faraway big brother, an imaginary ceremonial garment that made me her brother while nothing succeeded in making her my sister. But I’d decided against pointing out this deceptive and elementary psychological truth to her. It was several years since we’d last spoken.

  “Our father is dead,” she said.

  I watched the Provençal landscape spool past along the freeway, and found nothing to say in reply.

  She and I both experienced a form of paternal absence, because I had never really known him, while she had left our father’s house when she was fifteen to move in with her mother, and had rarely seen him since. In fact, this missing “father” compartment in both our lives was the only concrete subject of our very sporadic conversations. The difference between us was that I’d ended up resigned to his absence but she, who had spent her childhood with him, had never managed to come to terms with it and it pained her. On this particular morning, what she had actually lost was our absence of a father.

  “Our father’s dead,” she said again.

  “Really? When did he die?”

  I was aware of silence settling over the car. That’s often the effect you get with the word “die.”

  She told me briefly that he had been taken to the hospital for breathing difficulties, that his condition had deteriorated and he had died of an embolism in the night.

  I made inquiries about practical details, the date and place of the funeral. I thought of offering her my condolences, but that seemed rather indelicate. I feigned
sadness for another good minute, then hung up. Jean-Pierre Verheggen was watching me with some concern.

  To reassure him, I said, “It’s nothing. My father’s dead.”

  Jean-Pierre laughed and that’s when I knew I was a monster.

  * * *

  I was informed that my stepfather had died when I was called by Bichat Hospital while I was at the PEN Festival in New York. I’d set off for the United States when he’d already been in intensive care for a week. Still, his condition was not deemed to be life-threatening, and it didn’t strike me as vital to stay in Paris to visit a man in an induced coma and pretend to support my mother. I called once a day and grasped that Guy’s condition was deteriorating, with an endless round of alternating antibiotics and anti-inflammatories proving ineffectual and ultimately lethal. I was happier not being there. It would have been even more ignominious simulating affection than revealing my indifference to medical staff who have seen it all and can’t be fooled.

  I never liked my stepfather, and I can’t believe that this absence of affection was not reciprocated. There was, as they say, no connection.

  I was eighteen months old when he married my mother. The job of father was very much vacant, but he was in no hurry to snap it up, and anyway, I wasn’t especially disposed to his taking it. In the end, the position was never filled. Some people will draw conclusions from reading the study by Pedersen et al. (1979) about a father’s determining influence on a male child’s cognitive development. For anyone else, let’s say the father figure chose another route.

  Guy and I never saw eye to eye. I have no recollections of tenderness, or empathy, and I can’t have been much older than the age of reason when I decreed that he was a moron—a premature verdict, granted, but one that was not later invalidated.

  I remember once unleashing a personal opinion at home. It must have been inadvertent because it wasn’t something I did frequently, given that I was never satisfied by the debates prompted when I expressed my ideas. On this particular occasion, I was eleven; it was during the upheavals of May ’68 and I’d made what—I admit—was a sweeping pronouncement, calling de Gaulle’s minister for interior affairs, Michel Debré, a “dumbass.” My stepfather retorted that “if he was such a dumbass he wouldn’t be where he is.” I immediately identified this statement as servile stupidity, although the formula that spontaneously came to mind was, “This guy’s such a dumbass,” which proves that the word “dumbass” came to me readily. I chose not to waste my time on an unproductive conflict, a decision that, on the threshold of adolescence (a phase well suited to so-called character-building confrontations), is proof in equal measures of wisdom and a superiority complex.

  My stepfather respected every form of authority—be it hierarchical, police, or medical—and it so happens he also obeyed my mother. Weak with the strong, he was quite naturally strong with the weak. He was a teacher and enjoyed humiliating his pupils, taunting one in front of the others. That was his teaching method.

  Born in late 1931, Guy was twelve when Paris was liberated at the end of World War II, twenty-five when events in Algeria stepped up a notch. A lucky generation but also a misbegotten one, their teenage years shoehorned between the Occupation and the Algerian War of Independence. He was born too late to collaborate with the Nazis, too soon to torture North Africans. There’s nothing to prove he would have done either. Even performing despicable acts takes a bit of moral fiber. He probably wouldn’t have had it in him to refuse climbing up into a watchtower.

  My mother and Guy were that rare thing: a loveless codependent couple. She was never without him, he was never without her, they were never together.

  Guy’s death didn’t bother her either way, except that it heralded true solitude on a day-to-day basis, and she could not yet envisage this for herself. On the other hand, it was crucial that she shouldn’t be suspected of this indifference. Keeping up appearances was a social activity that had always strenuously mobilized her energy. Which is why my mother had gone to the hospital every day, because this—as she kept telling herself—was what duty required. She would take a sudoku and sit beside her deeply comatose husband, but boredom would settle in all too soon. She would resist it for a while, then couldn’t help herself asking a nurse or a doctor for some excuse to justify her imminent departure. “I’ll have to go home,” she would say. “There’s no point in my staying here, is there?” Bolstered by some such dispensation, she was then quick to flee.

  So I heard that Guy had died when I was in New York. I handled administrative questions long-distance. Then I went home. For the funeral.

  That’s when I discovered that my mother was crazy.

  Let’s be clear on this.

  I always knew my mother was crazy but I won’t be discussing that here.

  She had lost touch with reality long ago, but her husband managed everyday issues in such an orderly way that he had succeeded in disguising the evidence. After his death, my mother’s madness descended into burlesque.

  The morgue was almost deserted. There were five of us, maybe six.

  The servants of death otherwise known as funeral parlor staff have a vocabulary all their own. My mother had hers too, a rather more immediate one. There was no common ground.

  When the body had been laid out and nestled in the coffin’s silk lining, one of the men in black came through to the waiting room and asked my mother gently, “Madame, would you like to view the deceased?”

  “View him?” my mother asked indignantly. “He’s not some house I’m thinking of buying, he’s my husband!”

  The man must have heard it all before, and he went on with his detailed protocol. He wanted to know whether we would like the coffin to stay slightly open so that, in keeping with a rather morbid tradition, family and friends could catch one last glimpse of the loved one. But this was how he put it:

  “Would you like us to do an exhibition?”

  “An exhibition of what?” my mother asked anxiously.

  Then she added (and the rationality of it reassured her), “He had a lot of neckties.”

  The undertaker looked at her, perplexed.

  Eventually the time came to screw down the lid. There was no one there anyway.

  “We’re closing, madame.”

  My mother glanced at her watch.

  “Do you close for lunch?” she asked fretfully.

  I laughed. And that’s when I realized I was a monster.

  • TWO •

  THE STEPFATHER’S FUNERAL

  There are people who are

  granted a life by death.

  LOUIS SCUTENAIRE, MES INSCRIPTIONS

  I do hope I’ll be forgiven for this meteorological chapter incipit, but it was the month of May and, as the temperature was over ninety degrees, the sidewalk outside the Paris church was almost deserted. We were waiting for the hearse.

  You could argue that plenty of old people die alone, when their friends have died off before them one by one. But friends were something my parents didn’t have. As a child, I was not surprised that no one, other than my grandparents and various cousins, ever visited us at home. For coffee, tea, or dinner. To a child, in the absence of any points of comparison, madness can appear to be the norm: after all, Romulus and Remus weren’t in the least amazed to be raised by a she-wolf, Mowgli by a bear, or Tarzan by great apes. It was only later that I became aware of how strange my normality was.

  It’s fair to say that early on in their marriage, my mother and stepfather rented a very small Paris apartment, not very conducive to entertaining. But when I was nine they moved into a “character” apartment, as the ads like to call them, with a large tree-lined terrace looking out over the noisy boulevard Barbès and boulevard Ornano. It had unobstructed views of Montmartre and the Sacré-Coeur Basilica. This picture postcard setting could have made it a party venue, revolutionizing their social life. Nothing changed.
/>
  Occasionally—but this was very rare—my parents were invited for a meal by, let’s call them acquaintances. I never saw my mother come home from one of these dinners anything but dissatisfied, disgruntled even. She would complain irritably, “To think we’ll have to return the invitation.”

  My mother did not invite, she “returned” invitations. And it was a “pain in the ass.”

  So there was not one friend of the deceased on that sun-drenched sidewalk, and we waited for the hearse with just “close family,” in other words relations of my son’s mother along with my aunt, my cousins, and some of their children. Add to that the teenage faces of my son’s friends who wanted to be there for him. Lastly, let’s not forget the handful of people whose attendance could be deemed compulsory: an older man who occasionally did home improvements for them, and the gardener from their house in the country and his wife—who seemed genuinely sad.

  Not one person there had been invited to my parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary celebrations a few years earlier. The Golden Wedding party had consisted of an excruciating trip in a bateau-mouche on the River Seine, for which too many canapés and too much champagne had been ordered, and where the guests—who had only very little to say to each other—were trapped together for the four hours of the cruise from Alma Bridge to Alma Bridge. It gave me a sort of parabolic summary of my teenage years, that needling sensation that yet again, if I wanted to jump ship, I’d have to throw myself in the water.

  A woman in black, the back end of fiftysomething, came up to my mother to offer her condolences. I didn’t know her, and my mother introduced her to me.

  “This is Anna.”

  “Anja,” the woman in black corrected her. “Anja Zewlakow.”

  “Yes, that’s right,” my mother went on. “Anna cleans my apartment for me. And she does it very well, in fact.”

  An indisputable way with a compliment. After this spontaneous tactlessness, my mother moved away and I stood alone with an embarrassed woman with downcast eyes. I said hello to her, putting as much courtesy and respect as I could muster into my eyes and gestures.