When I Was Old (38 page)

I would like a quiet story, almost serene, with lots of sun, little touches of colour, a waxed staircase, patches of shade, and reflections.

Yesterday, Johnny gave me his latest French composition to read. There were odours in it, sounds, little joys, as in my novels. He isn't imitating me. He hasn't read me enough for that. Say rather that he is attracted by the same things that I am, by the savoury, incidental aspects of life. For example, he sees a grocer in front of his iron blind, smells the odour of the bakery …

To please his teacher, he added one or two conventional pieces of ‘fine writing', but in his revision he cut them out. He's a good cub.

I would like to say many things about my four children. But it will be long. I'll wait for another day.

As for D., two nights ago I saw her as she was in 1945, with her face so puzzled and touching, especially her eyes. I must always remember to see her this way, which is her real self. I know it. I'm sure of it.

Sometimes I forget, I doubt – but never for long. She is
a real woman, and I think back to the two of us, naked, walking in the moonlight at Tumacacori, after crossing a flooded arroyo. We undressed to ford the water. (There were no bridges.) Why get dressed again when there wasn't another human being for miles around? That was the nearest we came to nature. We were like a pair of coyotes, and real coyotes must have been watching us.

Too bad one can't more often … Too many obligations, bondages, though this is neither by desire nor by ambition, but because these obligations pile up, because one doesn't want to cause trouble, fear that …

The main thing is never to lose sight of the fact that all that counts for nothing, to remember the naked couple in the desert, to know that it is still the same couple, plus the little ones – one of whom has already left the nest.

The papers are full of articles on the responsibility of parents in the education of children. And the State, which has become almost all-powerful and substitutes itself for the individual in most realms, insists on this responsibility too.

By temperament, by taste, I am a ‘child lover', if I can put it that way, meaning that I devote a good part of my time and attention to them. Not only with the passion of a father but with that of a collector (I envy my neighbour Charles Chaplin's collection!).

However, while I do my utmost for mine, I still haven't
that sense of responsibility. Still less am I tempted to follow the rules and theories of education which are adopted in rapid succession.

Friday we had twenty doctors here, several of whom were quite famous professors at the medical school, and a number of whom were paediatricians. I was comforted to see that most of them, and especially the best, those who have remained most simply human, rejected this sense of responsibility as I do – which did not prevent them, again like me, from feeling anxious and often tormented.

(Just interrupted by D. Don't hold it against her, on the contrary. But am going to have trouble returning to my train of thought, if thought there was!)

They think that no one can foretell what will have influence in the life of a child. Each is a different being, and what will mark one will leave another indifferent. All the rules of psychology are false. I have seen Marc, Johnny, Marie-Jo successively at the age Pierre is now, and not one has reacted in the same way as the others.

Marc, for example, who seemed the most attached to me, almost alarmingly so, who never raised his voice, never protested, never stood up to anyone, is without question the one of the four who is least influenced by me. I could be wrong, since at twenty-one, twenty-two, his development is not complete, and the others' has barely begun.

Johnny has sudden gusts of rebellion, stands up to me as an enemy for a few minutes or a few hours, but I have an impression that it's more a rebellion against himself, that he is too much identified with me.

As for Marie-Jo, I hardly know her, for, since her birth, I have felt the presence of a woman, a different being. Does she resemble her mother? That's a game I refuse to play, which in most families becomes the bane of children's existence. Of course, they have something in them of their parents and their grandparents and their great-grandparents. But first of all, they are a unique combination.

Why wish to assimilate them to one of two clans? For that is what happens. In each couple – the most loving – a struggle, the struggle of the clans, goes on, like social or tribal struggles. And each one, the father and the mother, once in possession of a child, tries to turn it into an ally, to assimilate it to his clan.

‘He has eyes like …'

‘And as for his personality …'

Documents, family photos, old stories, more or less exaggerated, are used in evidence. In spite of himself, each of the parents treats the child according to whether he belongs to (or resembles) this or that clan.
*
*

The other day it seemed to me that I had a great deal to say on this subject. But I'm already finished. It's unclear. No idea emerges.

A quiet Pentecost, grey, with an occasional ray of sun. The children are playing in the garden. Downstairs, D. is receiving an English publisher who came to see her between two planes.

While reading papers and magazines I am thinking of my next book.

What a queer profession ours is! Can it be called a profession? There are moments when it is more like a vice, for which one has a bad conscience and wants to excuse onself.

During the writing days it's all right. Even strangers realize you're working and respect your solitude. But between novels? Those who are amazed by my writing three to six novels a year are also astonished when I'm not always available, like a worker on holiday.

It's true for those near me, too, almost true, sometimes true, and I understand it. They are so much in the habit of seeing me lead a life like everyone else's that though they know I ‘also' work, when I am not in the middle of a book, they forget it.

But I shouldn't just have said ‘also', but rather ‘especially', for with a novel, aside from the anguish over the first chapters, the actual writing is a deliverance, while the gestation is invariably painful. No one, myself included, knows when this gestation begins. And I'm the first not to want the whole family to walk on tiptoe because Daddy is ‘thinking'. Like Maigret, I don't think. But good God, how laborious it sometimes is!

If I happen to need a lesson in humility, I have only to think of my first wife's grandfather. I didn't know him. I never exactly knew if he was a workman or a foreman in
the big foundry at Seraing. He must have been quite a character, because at a certain point in his life he left for Valenciennes with his wife and half a dozen children to become a lay clerk in a church.

One day, if my understanding is correct, he invented a process for scaling boilers. The patent earned him a certain amount of money.

From that time to his death – he died quite old – he spent his life sitting in an armchair,
thinking
, demanding silence around him.

Since he had become an inventor, he was inventing. And, as I said earlier speaking of myself, isn't the essential moment in invention as in literature that of conception?

He invented nothing else. Forty years of thinking … of nothing. With his family walking respectfully on tiptoe in the fear of spoiling a miracle!

People – including the most serious sociologists and, for different reasons, psychoanalysts – talk a lot about woman's increasingly important place in society, and of the tendency of man, in leading countries like the USA more than others, to a sort of resignation, of self-effacement of the male.

Certainly the suffragettes of day before yesterday, who can still be seen in old newsreels, looking ridiculous, could never have dreamed of a more rapid transformation of customs and laws.

Is it chance that this is the time when science is succeeding in artificial insemination, that it is on the point of being able to preserve sperm indefinitely, and that we are in sight of the ‘test-tube baby'?

It is not
because
of the new emergence (or aggressiveness) of the female element that scientists are carrying on research in this direction. It is the result of other research of a purely biological order. Chance, then, in that area.

But don't things happen as if …

As if humanity, foreseeing the more or less imminent reign of the female, is arranging things in such a way as to make this reign possible and absolute?

Wouldn't that be funny?

Some tribes in the distant past of the world, and even some today in a few remote places, have known such a state. Who knows whether at the beginning of human life …

But why, suddenly, has man, in two or three decades, abandoned the prerogatives that he formerly held so fiercely?

For it seems to me not only that he has abandoned them, but that it is he who cedes ground before being attacked.

To put it another way, woman isn't taking over occupied territory but is simply occupying a place that has been vacated.

Curious and amusing.

Especially since this development runs parallel to what is happening among the races: some, all-powerful yesterday, are inviting those who were then considered inferior to pick up the torch.

All this is very good, since it
is
. And it is, perhaps more than the atomic bomb and flights into space, the major characteristic of our era.

Re
– for I have the impression that I've already set down similar reflections once or twice. Yesterday went to Béthusy School, where Johnny was in a play with his schoolmates, both boys and girls.

Found there some of the same atmosphere as in schools in the United States where the child feels completely at home, where constraint is at a minimum. What struck me was the freedom in relationships between boys and girls.

When I was in school, the idea of co-education was thought monstrous. To such an extent that our relations with little girls were very distant. Only country children and what were then called children of the people, the ‘street kids' as my mother used to say, had easy access to precocious sexual relationships.

Johnny, who makes no secret of it, has already had some superficial experiences. Marc, whose puberty was later, nevertheless began at around fourteen. And from sixteen on, he lived in a world in which sexual acts were not taken too seriously.

What strikes me is that in spite of that, young people, those young girls who know neither continence nor the mystery of sexuality, are scarcely less sentimental than we were.

People talk about their cynicism, their disenchantment, when this last word in particular would better suit the snobbism of the end of the last century and the beginning of this one. Couples form … and break up. They know passion, jealousy, tenderness …

In short, I don't see anything basically different, and this amazes me, for doesn't it prove that love is probably rooted in our nature? They get married so young. They set up housekeeping. They live the best they can, side by side.

Raised in another period, I have a deep innate need for ‘exclusivity', not just in the present but in the past of the woman. This need, in man, existed for centuries if not thousands of years, and feminine virginity was almost an institution.

Today it has no more importance. It does not seem that men suffer from it. And woman?

Never mind. This is another subject that I don't want to get into, noting only that so-called modern life, sexual familiarity, has changed nothing in love, and that the couple, up to the present, anyway, remains the basic cell.

This seems to contradict what I wrote yesterday, but I can't help it.

I'd like very much to go back to school! …

I'm often reproached for my pessimism about human nature and its limitations. God knows, however, that
I always give a man a chance, that I always see him first with sympathy, even enthusiasm.

I've spoken here of a doctor, a professor on the Faculty, whom I had alone here in my study, of our exchange of looks, of a sort of immediate and almost accomplice-like understanding.

He came yesterday. He is writing a book of memoirs. I soon saw that beneath the surface he harboured certain resentments he wanted to air, certain more or less conscious selfish motives and small vanities which I would have preferred not to know about. The man is no less sympathetic to me. I am tempted to add: on the contrary. However, some day I would wish not to be disappointed, to like and admire one hundred per cent! …

Have I spoken of those other doctors, mostly paediatricians, at our last party? One of them struck me by the intensity of his curiosity about human nature, by the enthusiasm he brought to understanding it. I see him again, going from group to group, listening avidly, and from the little he said I understood that of all of them, he was the most up-to-date on all the latest works in the medical field, including those only remotely connected with his speciality.

Why did I have the impression that he had some secret which gave him a tragic look?

Yesterday I learned that, while still a student, he was caught stealing – small thefts – sometimes bars of chocolate from newspaper kiosks. He is a true kleptomaniac, a clinical case.

He was treated as such. All the same, after a few years, he had to move to another city. And in the one where he presently lives, he has relapsed. He does not steal valuable objects. It is the act that is important. He knows it, and cannot cure himself.

For two years, though, he has not been caught. Has he got control of himself? If so, is he like a reformed alcoholic who knows that a single drink could plunge him back into disaster?

Now I understand better why his look struck me, and his bashful allusions to certain of my characters.