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I myself sometimes see a crucial component of this abstract, unanchored man with his head in the sky, instead of his feet on the solid ground of one of the community nations—for which I later provided a philosophical apologia in my books, in particular L’Idéologie française—in his asceticism, the way he snatched himself away from his past without taking root anywhere else, this decision to avoid at all costs replacing one identity by another and substituting the background he might have dreamed of for the one he had known.

But today, at this moment, my first impulse is to say that he was a perfect example of the “withdrawal” you spoke of, a withdrawal so complete in his case, so perfected that it confined him to the role of a hero and created around him a solid halo of opacity and mystery. A soul like a pyramid, a soul like a tomb … Because for a man like that, his soul is the tomb! Not the body, as it is for philosophers, but the soul. Only occasionally, rarely, did an event or meeting occur, when, as I mentioned, a word would rain down on him like a blow from a pickax, piercing the halo, sparking the fine dust of unwanted memories.

It’s quite simple.

I told you that my father and I were very close.

Indeed, I was one of the very few people he was close to and in whom he could have imagined confiding, as he suffocated in his tomb.

I realize now that this mystery was so unyielding, that shadow into which he chose to retreat was so dense, the remoteness from others and himself, to which he was condemned by not wanting to live either in the obscene satisfaction of his new success or in a conventional loyalty to the child buried within him, was so well constructed that I don’t know what he thought about most of the important matters.

I don’t know what role love played in his life.

I don’t know what his idea of God was or even if he had one.

I don’t know if he was afraid of death, if he was resigned or believed himself beyond its reach.

His sense of propriety, that is, his fear of words and the fire they contained, was so strong that on his very last evening, when part of him knew that this was the end, the last word he left me was a ridiculous business card on which he had scribbled for the nth time the financing plan for my film Le Jour et la nuit. He had been getting ready to produce it, the prospect of which gave him a naïve pleasure that wasn’t like him.

His inclination toward secrecy was so strong—as was the faith he had in his son and his son’s choices—that only in the glasnost of the Gorbachev years did I learn from loosened tongues the incredible story of that day on June 1977, right in the middle of the New Philosophers period, when I stood before the Soviet embassy in Paris at the head of a protest demonstration against Brezhnev’s visit to France. Through one of those ironies that are the destiny of men whose life is like an iceberg, immersed except for its tip, my father happened to be inside, heading up the delegation that had come to negotiate the state contracts I was protesting against. To the astonishment of the colleagues who had accompanied him, and naturally without stating the real reasons for his U-turn, he set so many preliminary conditions, raised so many difficulties, in short complicated the process to such a degree that the share of those contracts that were due to be allocated to him, as they had been every year for the last twenty years, never came to fruition …

As for his military past, his commitment to Republican Spain, then the Free French Forces, he never spoke of that either. Several years after his death I found a ragged black folder with his decorations, the photographs from that time, letters sent from Barcelona to the fourteen-year-old girl he would lose sight of for eight years but who after the war became my mother, and the honorable mention from General Diego Brosset at Monte Cassino, which I spoke of in my last book and which brings tears to my eyes each time, like now, I copy it out: “an ever willing ambulance driver, day and night, whatever