Pedigree Read Free Page A

wonderful title Goethe gave to his childhood memories: Dichtung und Wahrheit, a title which has been translated more or less accurately as: Poetry and Truth.
    Roger Mamelin’s childhood, his environment, the settings in which he develops, are very close to reality, as are the people he observes.
    The events, for the most part, are not invented.
    However, particularly with regard to the characters, I used the writer’s privilege to re-create reality from composite materials, keeping closer to poetic truth than to truth pure and simple.
    People so completely failed to understand this that because of a facial feature, a mannerism, a similarity in name or profession, a good many insisted on recognizing themselves in my characters, and some had writs issued against me.
    I am not, alas, the only one in this position: many of my colleagues have had the same experience. It is difficult nowadays to give a name, a profession, an address, even a telephone number to a character in a novel without incurring the risk of a lawsuit.
    The first edition of Pedigree concluded with the words: ‘End of Volume One’, and I still get letters asking me when the following volumes are going to appear.
    I left Roger Mamelin at the age of sixteen. The second volume was to recount his adolescence, the third his arrival in Paris and his apprenticeship in what I have called elsewhere the business of being a man.
    They have not been and never will be written, for, among the hundreds of minor characters which I should have to bring on to the scene, how many would result in my being condemned all over again to pay heavy damages? I dare not imagine.
    When Pedigree was reprinted in 1952, in a new type, I cautiously, and perhaps somewhat ironically, left the incriminated passages blank, keeping nothing but innocent punctuation marks, and attributing these gaps, in a brief prefatory note, to the judgment of the courts.
    In the present edition, the reader will find no blanks. Not without a certain melancholy, I have renounced even irony and pruned my book of everything which could appear suspicious or offensive.
    I none the less reiterate, not out of prudence but out of a concern for accuracy, that Pedigree is a novel, hence a work in which imagination and re-creation play the most important part, although this does not prevent me from agreeing that Roger Mamelin has a great deal in common with the child that I once was.
    G EORGES S IMENON Noland, 16 April 1957

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE
    S HE opened her eyes and for a few moments, several seconds, a silent eternity, there was nothing changed in her, or in the kitchen around her; besides, it was no longer a kitchen, it was a mixture of shadows and pale gleams of light, without any consistency or significance, Limbo perhaps?
    Was there a specific moment when the sleeping woman’s eyelids parted? Or did the pupils remain fixed on the void like the lens over which a photographer has forgotten to lower the shutter of black velvet?
    Somewhere outside—it was just in the Rue Léopold—a strange life was flowing by, dark because night had fallen, noisy and hurried because it was five o’clock in the afternoon, wet and slimy because it had been raining for several days; and the pale globes of the arc lamps were flickering in front of the dummies in the dress shops, and the trams were passing by, extracting blue sparks, as sudden as flashes of lightning, from the ends of their trollies.
    Ã‰lise, her eyes open now, was still far away, nowhere in particular; only those fantastic lights from outside came through the window and passed through the lace curtains with the white flowers whose arabesques they projected on to the walls and on to the objects in the room.
    The familiar purring of the stove was the first thing to reappear, together with the little reddish disc of the opening through which tiny burning coals could sometimes be seen falling; the water began singing in the white enamel