When I Was Old (21 page)

Two or three days ago I spoke of her Jansenism. What I said is both true and false. I could say that even after fifteen years of intimate life with D. every so often I can be wrong about her, for a few hours or a few days, and always in the same way. Then I bristle and I suppose that I become pretty disagreeable.

What causes it? And why this consistency of error, its regularity, as it were? I think I understand and I would like to explain.

I'm apt to apply the word ‘perfectionist' to her. And it is true that she is one. Only, this word can be used for either praise or blame. In any event, it describes only part of her character. And the mystical leanings of a certain period, her adolescence in particular, and the rebellions that preceded and followed this mysticism, are not an adequate explanation either.

I've met many people. I've known them, very well, all kinds. But I've never seen anyone as tortured as D. by the need to do everything just right. Not only to do everything right, but to do her utmost. And even more than her utmost.

A need for intensity, in short. A need to excel, even in the smallest matters of daily life.

Also a need to exist, to be useful, if not indispensable. To be useful first to her own, of course. To me, to our children. An irrational need, instinctive, to smooth the path for everybody, to solve all his problems, remove all his difficulties.

This includes the staff for whom she feels responsible, and, in fact, anything in our orbit.

‘To take upon oneself the sins of Israel …'

The phrase flows naturally from my pen.

I don't think that this is either to punish herself or to win approval. In any case not to win the approval in the eyes of others. Perhaps in her own? I'm not sure.

With her it is an instinct. To help. To ease. To remake the world, if she could, so that everyone would be happy.

Isn't it natural that occasionally, when I am nervous or ill, I should misinterpret this attitude, should see in it a sort of pride, of personal satisfaction?

That's what happens, and afterwards I realize that I was wrong.

I don't know if the children will remember, later, the almost animal passion (I'm thinking of a family of gazelles in the jungle) with which their mother brooded over them.

One day – we had known each other for a short time and were walking in downtown New York – we stopped in front of the window of a pet store. There were dogs, cats, parrots in it. There was in particular a monkey who held her little one against her breast and looked at us fixedly.

D. could not take her eyes from it, and I have rarely seen her so moved. We stayed in front of the window a long time and I believe that we went back.

When D. had children, especially when Pierre was sick and she protected him against the world, even
against doctors, I found in her once more the same attitude, the same look.

All this is vague, forced. Perhaps I can best sum it up in one sentence:

Someone who desperately wants to do everything right, who desperately wants to do
everything
.

And who cannot understand, who will never understand, that there are limits to human powers.

All her life, behind her window, holding her own to her bosom, she will look out at the passers-by asking herself why …

Enough! I'll end on a lighter note: why isn't she, why aren't we all, God Almighty?

And all her life she will be torn with anguish, other people's anguish and her own.

All her life she will eat her heart out, sure that she is inadequate to her task.

Against this, I'm helpless.

Even as a small child, as long ago as I can remember, I used to become so emotional that I would sob all by myself or clench my fists with rage, with helplessness – and this still happens to me at fifty-eight. The human being is capable of the greatest heroism, the greatest sacrifices. He is capable of devoting his entire life to the sole concern of making another being happy. Is this not what is called love? And yet, he is incapable of dominating an
access of ill-humour caused by a trifle, a minor untruth, a troubled night, a headache, a fleeting irritation.

The same person who understood the other or others so well, who at bottom still understands, suddenly becomes unreachable, gripped by a fixed idea, and there he is, unhappy and humiliated, a victim of an objectless rage – or one whose object is ridiculous.

If this happened only to the weak, the ignorant, the obtuse, the violent-tempered. Not so! it happens to the best.

This, perhaps, is what in my eyes gives the truest measure of man. And the most humiliating.

In the same vein, man is capable of absolute sincerity and countless are those who have preferred death to retraction. Yet I would bet that even these were not above petty deceptions.

In
Le Fils
I took an actuary as a character. These are unquestionably the people who cast the coldest eye on human life, passions, etc., since they study man only from the point of view of insurance companies. So many chances for such an individual to live so many years, to have a fire, an automobile accident, a personal tragedy … calculated in figures …

They don't, as for instance many doctors do, read a paper at the Academy of Medicine, write an article or a report for a journal, or present a daring hypothesis calculated to lend importance to the author.

The actuary is a boring gentleman. He may occasionally be mistaken in a particular case. Not too often. Never in his general forecasts, where it is not a matter of science but of money, the sacred money of the companies.

The world as seen by these people. No room for philosophy, for feelings, no place at all for the approximate, for the nuances of art. A sort of X-ray of the world, of society.

All that has to be false. And yet close enough to the truth, since the estimates have to be more or less accurate.

Good risk. Poor risk. Bad risk.

In contrast to them, the psychologists, who, in place of figures, use abstract terms. It is true that psychologists, in their turn, make tests, establish quotas, norms, apply them even to children.

All this to lead up to a nomenclature. No inclination to describe a state of mind, a psychological state. Only a timetable: a schedule.

Woke at eight o'clock. Melting snow, still white on the fields. There are workmen all over the house. They have replaced the floors in the dining room and in the playroom. For a week furniture piled in the hall of the second floor and in the drawing room as if in preparation for an auction. Now, a cleaning team (of five or six) attacks the house floor by floor. This morning, it's the turn of my study and the kitchen.

Three or four cups of tea.

I shave and take my bath, listening to the radio while my wife has her massage.

Nine o'clock. Massage until 9:50. I dress, go down to read the mail in one of the first-floor offices.

In town with Marie-Jo. Take the five prints that B. Buffet sent me for Christmas to the framer. Then send chocolates to someone who was left off the list yesterday.

Florist. Sent flowers to different people in Lausanne for Christmas. The out-of-town ones were ordered yesterday by telephone.

Stationers. Buy paper for Christmas wrapping.

Then, still with Marie-Jo, buy a present for her little friend.

Back at eleven thirty. The Christmas tree has come. We'll trim it tomorrow when Johnny will be on vacation.

Glance at papers. At 12:45 we go to lunch at the inn (for lack of usable kitchen. The whole household goes in teams).

When we get back I light a fire in my former study on the ground floor. Papers. Leave at three o'clock with D. Errands. I to the tailor to try on some smoking jackets.

Then to some other place, to buy sheepskin jacket. D. during this time is shopping for clothes for Pierre and underwear for Marie-Jo. We run into each other from store to store the length of the Rue de Bourg.

Choose a present for a woman who just had a baby.

Buy a mackinaw for D.

When we get back, the upholsterer is finishing hanging the curtains returned from the cleaner, the carpet man brings back the clean carpets too.

In the halls, on the stairs, we meet people we don't know.

The new jazz drums for Johnny have come and I spend an hour putting them together, for there are always mysterious things to fiddle with.

6:45 to the inn, where we all dine together, with the cook, the valet, and one of the maids.

Back again. News programme on French TV. Put Johnny to bed after having looked at his school drawings, which surprise me.

Another half hour of television, alone in the drawing room. Then rejoin D. in her office. Back to drawing room upstairs, where we show the nurse our purchases for Pierre.

That's all. I forgot. This morning I ordered holly and mistletoe. And this afternoon I bought myself some gloves.

It is still snowing. It may be a white Christmas.

This time that's really all. We are going to go upstairs, kiss the children, take a phenobarbital, and sleep. I haven't done any thinking. I think of nothing. The proof! Tomorrow waking at eight o'clock. Tea. Bath. Drive D. to the hairdresser at ten o'clock. I will probably do errands and in the afternoon I will put the lights up on the tree. Then I'll watch the children decorate it.

I don't know just why, opening this notebook with the idea of writing: nothing, I thought of my actuary.

Incidentally. Met Geraldine Chaplin, who is sixteen. She was carrying Christmas packages. Everyone at her house has the flu.

Hallelujah!

The Christmas spirit. At last!

Is it from Epictetus? I think so. Anyway, I'm too lazy to find the source, less than three yards from me. ‘Of the ten evils we fear, only one happens to us. So, we will suffer nine times for nothing.' Very approximate quotation.

A perfect Christmas, in spite of my fears. One of the best, the most perfect, the most ‘complete'.

Thank you, God!

And, last night, two good hours, real ones, with D. That makes up for everything.

Strange end of the year. We have everything. The children are in good shape. I too. D. has nothing wrong organically. Nevertheless … Three times, five times a day the colour of life changes. In the evening, I go to
sleep confident, D. in my arms, sure that the release will come. And in the morning it begins all over again.

She's trying, though. If not, all would be grey, without a ray of sun. The moment must not have come yet. It can happen soon, tomorrow, in ten days, and then our life will go back to its true rhythm. She is worn out and, suddenly, without energy, incapable of taking things lightly.

We are all subject to this and at this very point medical science, as a rule so cocksure, is the most helpless. An infinitesimal change in the quantity of such and such an acid and our whole equilibrium is threatened. It has happened before and I feel confident because I know she will respond suddenly. In the meantime …

The day I first met her, in New York, when, after our luncheon at the Brussels, we went for a walk in Central Park, she left me to do an errand, promising to meet me at the Drake. I waited for her for about an hour. I didn't know her.

At first I read peacefully. Then for the first time in my life I felt a painful contraction in my breast and said to myself:

‘Maybe she won't come.'

Since then, I have had that sensation again each time there has been the slightest cloud between us.

This time the cloud is not mental; it is neither misunderstanding nor irritation, none of the things that can separate, for an hour, people who love each other.

A chemical formula. A reaction which will come. She is in bed, this morning, which is best. Perhaps this afternoon? … Tomorrow? …

I am going to the tailor with Johnny. There is snow. It is freezing. The sun is shining.

I am waiting.

Soon, perhaps, to change my mood, I'll try to write, without much conviction, on another subject. But for the moment nothing outside of D. is important. I prefer that she should not read this before the reaction has occurred. Then she will be able to smile about it with me.

Four o'clock. Success? Partial success? I should know that it is not a question of hours but of weeks, and all the same I always count in hours.

Instead of going to bed as she meant to do at one point, D. came to walk in the snow with Johnny and Marie-Jo. All four in furred parkas in the white village, we must have made a winter scene for a calendar. Now, I am going out again with Pierre. I have had enough of my armchair by the fire. I need air, cold, movement, activity.

Five o'clock. I've been much more affected than I could have believed, yesterday and the day before, by pictures of the Belgian troubles on television. I don't feel myself any more Belgian than French, American, or Swiss, I must already have said so. Belgium is the country where, I think, I would least like to live, while, if I had a preference (I haven't for the moment), it is the only place that I would designate as the ‘resting place for my ashes'. I say ashes, for I want to be cremated.

The pictures of slow, silent crowds in the streets lined with closed shutters recalled to me the strike in my
childhood which I tried to describe in
Pedigree
. And suddenly I feel very near, very involved with these people (I speak of a social class that I scarcely know, that I never was a part of, and which, actually, I almost feared).

I also react to the events in Algeria, of course, and I am distressed by the behind-the-scenes intrigues there and in the Congo.

Last evening, however, in bed, I was tempted to make a gesture and only hesitated because it would have seemed theatrical.

In 1952 I had to be forced (correspondence proves it) to join the Belgian Academy. I only went near the place once. On the same trip, I was given the decoration of officer of the Order of the Crown, as a surprise, and I swear I wasn't expecting it.