For Sorj Chalandon (Tunisia, 1952), Jean, her father, was always a mystery. “He still is, even though he is no longer there,” the French journalist and writer acknowledges to La Vanguardia during his visit to Barcelona to present Son of a Bastard (Seix Barral/ Edicions de 1984), a Goncourt finalist. He comes with a blue folder under his arm, in which he keeps a copy of the judicial file of that man who in five years deserted four armies and deceived everyone, even his family.
It was not until he was an adult that he was able to piece together the complex puzzle that is his father’s biography. He enlisted in the French army. He deserted and was a collaborationist, forming part of the Tricolor Legion, which he ended up abandoning. He then joined the NSKK group of the German army and, after a time, surrendered to the French resistance. He “He also left there.” He looked for the Germans again, already in retreat, but the American troops detained him and handed him over to the Police. “It’s normal to get lost. It happens to me often,” he says, putting himself in the reader’s shoes.
Chalandon did not have all this information when he covered the trial of Klaus Barbie, better known as the Butcher of Lyon, for the newspaper Libération. “It’s a very crazy image. A person who was in the German army watching someone from the Gestapo be tried. Both in the same room. But when that scene happened, I thought he was a French resister who wanted to see the person who killed the head of the resistance, Jean Moulin, of whom he claimed to be a close friend.”
The author defines his father as “a person who lied compulsively. It was as if telling the truth hurt him.” And it may be that this ‘ailment’ was what led him to die in a psychiatric hospital. The biggest lie he remembers was when he told her that “I was the one chosen to kill De Gaulle. He taught me how to use the gun. He told me that the Algerian Liberation Army wanted to kill him but that a child had to do it. He would have killed him just to make him pay more attention to me.”
Their comings and goings were very present in the family routine. “One day he was a great judo champion and, a month later, a Presbyterian minister. When he worked at the Post Office, the letters that fell into his hands did not reach their recipients. He threw them down the mountain. The war and his passion for uniforms may have aggravated it. When he met my mother, she told him that he was a secret agent.”
If for Chalandon his father was enigmatic, his mother was “someone indecipherable who never protected us. Who knows if he believed everything he said. I played along. He told my brother and me not to make noise, that dad was sleeping because he had been on an important mission.” She believed. “What was he going to do? At school, students and teachers laughed at me when they asked me about my father’s work. To make matters worse, I stuttered as a child. “A circus was set up.”
There was a day when he said enough was enough. “At sixteen and a half, when I was aware enough to realize that what was happening at home was not normal nor did it happen in other families, I left. It was hard because I was without a fixed address for a year and a half. My house was a kind of sect in which my father was the guru and my mother, my brother and I were the disciples. We were forbidden to listen to music, read books and newspapers.” It is therefore ironic that Chalandon ended up working in the newspaper’s editorial office, “but not so much to fight against lies, but because of my obsession with finding the truth,” he concludes.
