the beach at the Sporting Club. We were the only living creatures, except for one of the beach attendants, dressed in white, who was putting out deck chairs and parasols.Yvonne wore an opal-colored two-piece bathing suit, and I’d borrow her beach robe. She’d go swimming, and I’d watch her. The dog too would follow her with his eyes. She’d wave and shout to me, laughing, to come in and join her. I used to tell myself it was all too good to be true, and that some disaster was going to happen tomorrow. On July 12, 1939, I’d think, a guy like me, wearing a red-and-green striped beach robe, was watching his fiancée swim in the pool at the Éden-Roc. He was afraid, like me, to listen to the radio. Even there, at Cap d’Antibes, he wouldn’t escape the war … The names of possible places of refuge jostled one another in his head, but he wouldn’t have time to desert. For a few seconds, I was seized by an inexplicable terror, and then she got out of the water and came and lay down beside me in the sun.
Around eleven o’clock, when the beach at the Sporting Club started to be overrun by people, we’d take refuge in a kind of small cove. You could reach it from the restaurant terrace by going down some crumbling steps built in Gordon-Gramme’s time. Below, a beach of shingles and rocks, and a tiny one-room cabin with windows and shutters. On the rickety door, carved into the wood in Gothic letters, two initials: G-G — Gordon-Gramme — and the date: 1903. He must surely have built that doll’s house himself and come there to gather his thoughts. Sensitive, farsighted Gordon-Gramme. When the sun was beating down too hard, we’d spend a little while inside. Semidarkness. A pool of light on the threshold. A slight odor of mold, which we eventually got used to. The sound of the lapping water,as monotonous and reassuring as the tennis balls. We’d shut the door.
She swam and sunbathed. I preferred the shade, like my Eastern ancestors. In the early afternoon, we’d go back up to the Hermitage and stay in our room until seven or eight o’clock in the evening. There was a very wide balcony, and Yvonne would stretch out in the middle of it. I’d install myself at her side, my head covered by a white felt “colonial” hat — one of the few things I still owned that had belonged to my father, and all the more precious because we were together when he bought it. It was at Sport et Climat, on the corner of Boulevard Saint-Germain and Rue Saint-Dominique. I was eight years old, and my father was getting ready to leave for Brazzaville. What was he going to do there? He never told me.
I went down to the lobby to get magazines. Because of the foreign clientele, you could find most of the major European publications there. I’d buy them all:
Oggi, Life, Cinémonde, Der Stern, Confidential
… I’d cast a wary glance at the big newspaper headlines. There were some serious goings-on in Algeria, but also in France and elsewhere in the world. I preferred not to know. A lump formed in my throat. I hoped there wouldn’t be too much talk about all that in the illustrated magazines. No. No. Avoid important topics. Panic would take hold of me again. To calm myself, I’d down an Alexandra at the bar and go back upstairs with my pile of magazines. We’d read them, sprawled on the bed or the floor in front of the open French window,amid the golden patches strewn by the last rays of the sun. Lana Turner’s daughter had stabbed her mother’s lover to death. Errol Flynn had died of a heart attack, but not before responding to a young friend who asked him where she could put the ashes of her cigarette by gesturing at the open mouth of a stuffed leopard. Henri Garat had died like a tramp. Prince Ali Khan had died too, in a car crash near Suresnes. I can’t remember any of the happy events. We’d clip out a few photos. We hung them on the walls of the room, and the hotel management didn’t seem to mind.
Empty afternoons.
Around eleven o’clock, when the beach at the Sporting Club started to be overrun by people, we’d take refuge in a kind of small cove. You could reach it from the restaurant terrace by going down some crumbling steps built in Gordon-Gramme’s time. Below, a beach of shingles and rocks, and a tiny one-room cabin with windows and shutters. On the rickety door, carved into the wood in Gothic letters, two initials: G-G — Gordon-Gramme — and the date: 1903. He must surely have built that doll’s house himself and come there to gather his thoughts. Sensitive, farsighted Gordon-Gramme. When the sun was beating down too hard, we’d spend a little while inside. Semidarkness. A pool of light on the threshold. A slight odor of mold, which we eventually got used to. The sound of the lapping water,as monotonous and reassuring as the tennis balls. We’d shut the door.
She swam and sunbathed. I preferred the shade, like my Eastern ancestors. In the early afternoon, we’d go back up to the Hermitage and stay in our room until seven or eight o’clock in the evening. There was a very wide balcony, and Yvonne would stretch out in the middle of it. I’d install myself at her side, my head covered by a white felt “colonial” hat — one of the few things I still owned that had belonged to my father, and all the more precious because we were together when he bought it. It was at Sport et Climat, on the corner of Boulevard Saint-Germain and Rue Saint-Dominique. I was eight years old, and my father was getting ready to leave for Brazzaville. What was he going to do there? He never told me.
I went down to the lobby to get magazines. Because of the foreign clientele, you could find most of the major European publications there. I’d buy them all:
Oggi, Life, Cinémonde, Der Stern, Confidential
… I’d cast a wary glance at the big newspaper headlines. There were some serious goings-on in Algeria, but also in France and elsewhere in the world. I preferred not to know. A lump formed in my throat. I hoped there wouldn’t be too much talk about all that in the illustrated magazines. No. No. Avoid important topics. Panic would take hold of me again. To calm myself, I’d down an Alexandra at the bar and go back upstairs with my pile of magazines. We’d read them, sprawled on the bed or the floor in front of the open French window,amid the golden patches strewn by the last rays of the sun. Lana Turner’s daughter had stabbed her mother’s lover to death. Errol Flynn had died of a heart attack, but not before responding to a young friend who asked him where she could put the ashes of her cigarette by gesturing at the open mouth of a stuffed leopard. Henri Garat had died like a tramp. Prince Ali Khan had died too, in a car crash near Suresnes. I can’t remember any of the happy events. We’d clip out a few photos. We hung them on the walls of the room, and the hotel management didn’t seem to mind.
Empty afternoons.
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