When I Was Old (15 page)

Now, the slightest whim, sometimes just to take a walk in town, demands complete preparation, orders to give to everybody in the household. You would imagine – I used to imagine it too at one time – that after a certain age one settles down, is almost without wishes, dislikes whims and the unforeseen. How indignant one feels at the idea that a mother and father at the age of forty still make love!

They imagine that we no longer have other satisfactions, other desires than to enjoy a big house, have a comfortable life, buy furniture and pictures. But all this is only imposed on us. We submit to it. The kids will realize one day all the desires held back because of them, without bitterness, only, sometimes, with some sadness, a remembering of the time when it was possible to make love any time, I was going to say any place, without wondering if … and if …

It's no use having an enormous house – and for work and relative freedom of each it is indispensable that it should be so – D. and I still have to make a great effort in order to be alone together for a moment. I regret none of it, on the contrary. Each time I meet a bachelor of a certain age, a couple without children, ageing or aged Bohemians, I can't help feeling sorry for them.

And I know very well that one day, when all the children have flown the nest, we will think nostalgically of our house when it was so full. It is true that I will be
really old then. But will I think myself old? I am beginning to wonder. My carcass will have shrunk, surely. But will the rest change? For the better? For the worse? If I live long enough I will know the answer one day. But it is not impossible that I will keep putting it off until later, until so late that no one will be able to give it, which would explain why we never have enough satisfactory answers to these questions. So why ask it?

I often say I'm apolitical, and I think it's true. However, at this moment if I were a French national, it is probable that I'd yield to the temptation to sign the manifesto of the 121 or 125, the number doesn't matter, which demands the right of desertion for the soldier sent to Algeria and more or less forced to commit acts against his conscience. I envy a little those who have risked it and who are now suffering for it. I hope that all actors, authors, etc., will go on some sort of strike in solidarity with their colleagues who have been barred from television, films, subsidized theatres – and worse, the teachers, who have been hit even harder. All these things upset me, make me indignant.

I do nothing. Not only, I'm sure, because I am not French, but because, as always, I feel that there is exploitation for murky ends on both sides. This is neither egoism nor, I'm sure, concern for my peace of mind nor that of my family. Nor is it wisdom. It is more an uneasiness that
I feel in the face of a certain kind of use of ideas, no matter how pure they are.

At the same time I am aware of a feeling I am ashamed of but which I can do nothing against. From the beginning of the de Gaulle experiment, I was revolted by his conceit, by his scorn of the opinion of others, by what he and his entourage represent (theoreticians from the great schools who are obliged to reduce social problems to equations – all more or less tools of the great banks and business groups), I have been revolted, I say, and also convinced that the experiment will inevitably end in failure. That must have been two years ago.

This failure, for a time at least, for a short time I hope, is a failure for France. It can be seen today, it will be seen even more tomorrow in the United Nations if nothing unforeseen happens.

I love France. Of all countries, it is the one nearest to me, although I do not belong to it and I don't go there regularly.

So, I am surprised by myself, watching television, for example, when I hope for a new failure of French policy, because it is de Gaulle's policy.

Is it because I hope, in a more distant future, after God knows what revolution, for a return to the past, a real success for France? Isn't it so that I'll be proven right? Or because I rejoice at the failure of a man who is antipathetic to me, for whom, however, I begin to feel pity now that he is almost alone?

I would like to be sure that these last hypotheses are not the true ones.

D. and I, in the company of Pierre, have just made our traditional trip to the Lausanne station for the papers. This morning I want to tell a story, not because I attach importance to it, but because it came to my mind just now while I was shaving, and also because it's a beautiful autumn Sunday, sweetly familial, and then perhaps because I hope to begin a novel on Tuesday or Wednesday, which I'm getting into little by little, because I don't want to go too fast, because the birth of the characters must never be too thought out, or willed. I'm giving myself a short respite. An intermission.

The story has been told in the papers several times, but never, if I remember correctly, in an exact way. And sometimes an attempt was made to connect it with the character of Maigret, who must have been born ten years later.

I was a beginner, a reporter on the Liège
Gazette
. Every morning I used to write one of those daily columns like the ones one sees published in italics in most of the provincial papers. Maybe it was the Lausanne
Tribune
that refreshed my memory today. These little columns most often focus on local life, with a bit of poetry, some facile and affected philosophy, some irony, etc.

To indicate clearly that my little corner in the
Gazette
was separate, my editor had proposed to call it ‘Outside the Hen-house' and to sign it ‘M. le Coq'.

I admit that at first I did not understand either the title or the signature, which I changed later into Georges Sim,
because one of my colleagues told me that Le Coq was a collective pseudonym for the editors.

All this takes a long time to tell. It seems to me that in a novel it would be given only a sentence or two. It must have been in 1920, hence a little more than a year after the Armistice of 1918 and the liberation of Belgium. About the war as it had developed in France or elsewhere, those of us who lived under the occupation more than four years knew only what the Germans allowed us to know, plus a few gleanings from the rare Dutch papers that got across the border from time to time.

At that period I liked to roam around City Hall, which, at Liège more than any place else, is the real centre of the life of the countryside. I wandered, sniffing the wind, eating cherries in spring, later candy or biscuits that I kept in my pocket, because I was always hungry. I loved the noise, the bustle, the colours, music … I loved the little cafés of the neighbourhood which smelled of gin and were frequented by Walloon poets and actors from the local theatres.

Professionally, I was obliged to be at police headquarters behind City Hall every morning at eleven o'clock, where my four colleagues and I would be given the daily reports.

Opposite, to the left of the staircase of City Hall, was another station, and one day, by chance, I saw three monumental and very heavy cases in the corridor which seemed to me mysterious. Who told me about them? I forget. Still, I learned that these cases had been sent to the city of Liège by a Belgian violinist living in Paris, and
that they contained a complete collection of
L'Illustration
(the big magazine of that time) of the time of the war, along with other reviews and journals.

The sender offered this documentation to his fellow citizens and asked that it be placed in the public library.

The cases sat there, unopened, for more than a year. Wasn't it important, for us who knew so little about the war, to be able to consult these collections?

Soon, I was at the home of my editor-in-chief, Joseph Demarteau, and I told him my plan. He approved of it with a certain amount of hesitation, and he warned me that if anything went wrong I could not make use of his name.

The next day, on a beautiful sunny morning like today, I left the paper in the company of a linotypist who is still alive and continues to give me news of himself from time to time, he pushing a handcart, I looking unconcerned. A big wedding was taking place, so there was much activity in the court of City Hall.

In a few minutes, my linotypist, who was stronger than average, put the three cases on the handcart without anyone's questioning him. A half hour later they were in the hands of the head librarian of Chiroux, the kind Walloon poet Joseph Vrienst, who had sent me his first books when I was a boy of ten.

Two hours later the
Gazette
appeared with an enormous headline across an entire page:

INDIFFERENT ADMINISTRATION POORLY GUARDED CITY HALL

The story was told in detail. At five o'clock, I was called to the office of the police chief, who told me there would be legal proceedings, at the request of the alderman of Public Instruction and Fine Arts.

The next day, for fear of ridicule, the alderman withdrew his complaint. He held it against me for a long time. Later, when he was a very old gentleman, I saw him during one of my trips to Liège, and we talked, laughing about the famous cases.

That is the only time that Joseph Demarteau sent me a box of cigars, which I shared with my linotypist. Why cigars? I was seventeen years old and only smoked a pipe.

For forty-eight hours, or maybe a week, I was a sort of celebrity. But, of course, I was thinking much more of Rouletabille than of Maigret.

Novel finished this morning. Was going to be called
Le Cauchemar
. Finally, it will have
Betty
as a title. Working full tilt for seven days. Nothing else seemed important to me. This morning, after writing the word ‘End', it all seemed wasted, almost absurd. I wondered why in a few months people would pay to read it. And I dread the moment when I will have to undertake the revision. The tragedy, to use a grandiose word, is perhaps that between novels I can't believe in the last one … Funny profession!

On the subject of
L'Ours en Peluche
. What I'm about to say is at odds with the last entry. It is a novel to which I attach a certain importance (or attached?) perhaps because I had the impression of discovering a little area of humanity that only the psychiatrists had paid attention to. Then, when de Fallois, who seems to have understood all my books and who has read them all, read it he said to me:

‘I followed the character [by followed he meant: I identified with the character] up to a little before the end. The three or four final pages escaped me.'

Yesterday, young Mauriac, who also knows my work and who has written some things about me which I find to the point, wrote almost the same thing in
Figaro
. He saw the last page as a concession, or a set piece. I, who never write to critics to correct them or explain myself, almost sent him a few words.

For it is just the last three pages that are important and which would explain many crimes that are apparently inexplicable. For a long time my character was obsessed by the desire to throw in his hand, to get rid of his responsibilities,
while remaining the centre of attention
. He needed to be a kind of hero, needed to be questioned about himself, to be discovered finally as not so simple as those around him thought.

For a long time, he has not seen any other means of obtaining this result than suicide, a spectacular suicide, which would create excitement. Then, at the moment when there seems to be no other way out, he discovers
the possibility of a substitution. He can obtain the same result without dying and, thus, be present at the upheaval that will follow. The gesture will be almost the same. A difference of only a few centimetres in the angle of the revolver. It is another who will die. And, as assassin, he has the same advantages as he would have had as victim.

This substitution seems to me to happen often and could be, consciously or not, the basis of a great number of homicides and crimes of passion.

De Fallois and Mauriac do not understand. The other critics will not understand either, which means they do not understand the meaning of my novels. Am I wrong in not explaining, in not dotting the
i'
s, in refusing to use a moralistic or exegetic tone? I have the impression that if I did so I would betray my craft as novelist.

This shouldn't bother me. But there are moments when it discourages me.

Will they understand
Betty
? They will again talk about the sexuality in this novel when it is only secondary in my eyes. Mauriac mentions it in discussing
L'Ours en Peluche
where there can't be more than thirty lines that have to do with sexual life in all the novel!

I would like so much to be indifferent to opinion. Entirely indifferent. I manage to be in what concerns me personally. Not yet in what concerns my characters, as if, in my eyes, they are more important than myself.

Tomorrow Lyons. Criminology Congress. I'm curious to know the level of these men who indirectly dispose of people's heads. If I can judge by the works of some of them, it's rather frightening.

Three days at the Criminology Congress in Lyons. Jurists, doctors, psychiatrists, medical experts, social workers, chaplains, policemen, each one well versed in his profession. Assuredly professional conscientiousness (also many petty ambitions). But an astonishingly average level. Each speaks his own language and barely deigns to explain himself to the specialist next to him.

As for the criminal who, in the last analysis, is the foundation of this activity …

He is
examined
. With a microscope, or a scalpel, or with theories. He is made to undergo somewhat ridiculous tests, like those for the driver's licence in some American states. And the man? All these people function as members of their background, their class. Once again, they examine. And the appearance of a photographer interests them more than the reports being made.