When I Was Old (7 page)

He asks me questions about everything and I feel that he takes in the answers, that he attaches a great deal of importance to them. He has become a sort of disciple, which is disturbing. It's a relation I'm not used to, and when I'm conscious of it it bothers me.

Another X years …

He brings to this a kind of eagerness to build my image little by little in his mind, against the time when I shall no longer be here.

No doubt this image which is forming now will be more living in the end. It is through it that I shall live on. In turn, he will try to communicate it to his children.

I didn't think that a boy of less than eleven years could have this kind of idea. This explains to me certain secret glances, certain sudden outbursts. He sees me living, and he sees me already dead.

I don't like drinking – or the mornings after – because it makes me either sentimental or aggressive, two attitudes I hate. It humiliates me to an incredible degree.

I had to look at the date in a newspaper. We're on vacation at the Lido, long familiar to me, but I feel more off the beaten track than I did in a hut in the Congo on my first trip to Africa.

It's not Venice that makes me feel so, nor even the tourists. It's living the holiday life, everybody's holiday. When I wrote stories for the bi-weeklies, shortly after my arrival in Paris (1924–1925), two or three months ahead we had to write on ‘seasonal' subjects. In October, it was Christmas and New Year. Then winter sports, spring, Easter, summer vacation …

Papers continue to do it and it always seems to consist of the same caricatures of households or families at the beach or in the mountains.

But now, here, I feel like one of those ridiculous characters. I go through the same acts, at the same hours, with the same impatience and the same bad temper.

In short, it's the first time in fifty-seven years that I've taken the holiday train, that I've stayed, with my wife and two of my children, in a hotel catering to the holiday crowd.

As a child I used to go to Embourg in the suburbs of Liège with my mother – I've already written about that – and sometimes she would leave us there alone in a boarding house, my brother and me. Not at a hotel. With a good woman who kept a tavern and where we were the only boarders.

Never, either with my mother or father, or with one of the two, did I sleep in a hotel, or take a meal in a real restaurant. If we took a trip we took along our ‘snack'.

The first year that I spent as secretary to the Marquis de Tracy, I accompanied him to Aix-Les-Bains in August. But I worked from morning to night. That wasn't a vacation.

The following summer at Bénouville, near Etretat, where I lived three or four months on a farm, I was writing several stories a day.

Afterwards, at Porquerolles, I typed my forty pages of popular novel each morning.

I examine my memory in vain for traditional holidays.

On board the
Ginette
, then the
Ostrogoth
, I never stopped in the crowded places and I worked almost every day.

I spent one winter in a villa in Antibes. But I was working with Jean Tarride on the scenario of
Chien Jaune
, then with Jean Renoir on that of
Nuit du Carrefour
while writing several Maigrets, among them
L'Ombre Chinoise.

Again at Porquerolles, later, sometimes in summer, often in winter, and more novels.

At Les Sables-d'Olonne, at the end of the war, I was in bed. Still not a vacation.

At Sainte-Marguerite-du-Lac-Masson in Canada in 1955 we went skiing, D. and I. But I was writing
Three Rooms in Manhatten
,
Maigret à New York
, etc.

Same thing six months later on a beach in New Brunswick, where we never spent so much as an hour on the sand.

Still the same in Florida, where I was writing
Lettre à mon Juge
among other things, then in Arizona, in California.

Finally in Cannes, we still weren't vacationing.

It had to wait until we were living in Switzerland and the children wanted a change.

And here we are, like the caricatures, following the schedule decreed by … By nobody, probably. We follow the crowd. And, in Venice, among thousands of tourists, we buy stacks of useless things that we'll throw away when we get back.

This creates a mild degradation. One loses all personality, all individuality.

I was forgetting that two years ago we spent a month on the canals and lakes of Holland, also with the children. But it was aboard a boat we rented and we followed no rule.

The preceding year, I believe, we spent two weeks at Villars-sur-Ollon. That was a holiday hotel. I only remember it because it rained without a let-up and because we spent the whole time playing bridge.

Actually this is my first vacation, and I scarcely glance at the newspaper for which I have such a passion and the daily reading of which seems to me as necessary as my coffee.

This won't last more than ten days in all. But if it lasted a month? A year? Or more, as for the prisoners of war in the camps, or the regular prisoners in prison?

What would be left of me? What desires? What reactions?

Would I revolt after a certain length of time?

I wonder. It frightens me a bit. It seems to prove that by carefully organizing men's use of time, what happens is that …

And I certainly have the same look of happy stupidity as the two or three hundred other people who are staying in this hotel.

In the end would we begin to look alike?

I wanted to write about something entirely different, about the sincerity or rather what I consider the impossibility of a total lack of sincerity even in those who pass for cynical. I've already talked about that here. But it
plagues me. Perhaps I'll come back to it. I think of the Congolese, of the Russians, of the Americans, statesmen or journalists. Is it possible that they act out of a complete, an absolute, I was about to write, out of
pure
bad faith? I can't believe it. But then, to what extent our interest or our passions can falsify our judgement!

To be compared, when I come back to it, with a simple argument between husband and wife. Perhaps that will give me an answer.

Four journalists, on the day of our arrival here. This comes back to my mind because I am thinking of the news (still the Congo, American elections, de Gaulle–Adenauer, etc.) and of public opinion, of the way it is formed. Or the reverse. I mean that political personalities one speaks of are perhaps locked into their legend, and because of that, obliged to … but that's too long a story.

The first journalist was a good all-round reporter (hotels, stations, airports, police stations, clinics, hospitals) with his photographer.

Two or three questions, the most commonplace. Maigret on vacation. A child? Two here? Names. Ages. Thank you. And the others? Names. Ages. Thank you.

He will get the names and ages mixed up. Not that it matters. He will caption it ‘Maigret in Venice'.

‘Are you writing at the moment?'

‘No.'

‘Do you expect to write a novel about Venice?'

‘No.'

That socks them, in whatever country, in whatever city. So, in order not to hurt their feelings, I explain that I can only use settings where I've lived a long time. Several years as a resident, not as a tourist, which is true.

As my daughter comes in at this moment, the reporter has her pose with me and the photographer asks her to hug me. Very natural!

Second journalist. Important Milan paper. Fifty to sixty years old. Sophisticated man-of-the-world type. He asked me for an evening meeting. At the appointed hour, he takes a paper from his pocket with typed questions and blanks for answers, like the questionnaires papers send out at vacation time.

This is no simple reporter. He observes me, with a malicious glint in his eyes.

‘Have you been in swimming?'

‘Yes.'

‘For how long?'

‘A half hour.'

‘Do you always go swimming for half an hour?'

What to say? I say Yes, and he writes Yes, gravely.

He pauses a moment, slyer than ever.

‘Meat or fish?'

This must mean: ‘Are you a fish or a meat eater?

‘Fish.'

He gloats:

‘I was sure of it!'

And to him it really seems important.

‘Work in the morning? At night?'

‘Morning.'

‘Blood pressure?'

‘Medium. 12½–7½.'

He notes it down, delighted with himself and with me.

Two or three questions of the same kind which I've forgotten and he thanks me and leaves, his duty done.

The third is from a big Rome daily where, he tells me at once, he only writes for the literary page. An intellectual. A real one. He speaks only Italian and is accompanied by a blonde Viennese of twenty, a painter, who is to act as interpreter. She repeats the question to me in French first, but since I feel that this French is very laboured and approximate, she moves to English.

I understand enough Italian to realize that she translates only a third of the questions and a quarter of the answers and we, the journalist and I, end by speaking to each other directly in a mixture of three languages.

He isn't interested in Maigret. Durrell, Faulkner, Hemingway, Sartre, the younger generation …

Above all this younger generation which worries him, they suddenly are arriving too fast, like a train that is going to knock down the station.

He tells me about his concern. He hasn't come to listen to me, but to have his worries confirmed.

‘You are a pessimist, aren't you?'

‘Not at all. I'm a born optimist.'

‘Even with things going the way they are?'

‘How are they going?'

‘Atomic war, crime, population explosion, girls …'

I play at being contrary, to prove to him that juvenile crime has not increased in the last hundred years, that at fifteen, his ancestors, if they were nobles (they must have been), already had at least one death on their record, since a young man had to prove himself by fighting in a duel.

He held that the world was in turmoil; he desperately wanted me to paint it black and my optimism only reinforced his feelings, of course.

‘But you're interested in men!'

‘In man. And if one looks at his history not just in terms of a few centuries, but since the beginning of time …'

I improvise. I'm not entirely serious. He sinks deeper into depression.

‘A history that will end in an atomic cataclysm.'

‘You think so?'

Suddenly I tell him a story, very intense.

‘Take staphylococci aurei instead. They lived in peace and prospered, because we hadn't found a defence against them. You see! Suddenly a gentleman invents penicillin and generations of staphylococci are exterminated … Those that escape mutate, God knows how, and penicillin no longer destroys them …'

Next a new antibiotic, streptomycin or the like. A new extermination. A new mutation.

Aureomycin … I go on …

‘Twenty times … twenty-eight times, I think … And
now these devils of staphylococci aurei anticipate future attacks, prepare for them so well that the new strains are often impervious to the new antibiotics. They confound science!

‘And with all this,' I say, ‘do you despair of man, who is so much further evolved than the staphylococcus aureus?'

He left deeply disturbed, I'd swear. Because of noise too.

This ‘modern plague' of noise, this bustle that no longer allows man …

I remind him that in seventeenth-century memoirs, for instance, Parisians were already complaining of the noise, of the traffic, of the vehicles that scraped against the walls, of the cracking of whips, the cries of street vendors, etc.

Imagine a post station relay …

I know. Parisian doctors have just demanded larger apartments in public housing, attributing a great number of nervous ailments to lack of privacy. Three rooms for a household with two or three children …

The peasants of earlier times had one room for themselves and their nineteen or twenty children. And often it opened on the stable! I cite the narrow streets of Naples, of Rome, even of Venice, the houses there where there was a whole family to a room, too.

The truth is that in those times one didn't worry about the common people.

And Versailles? What a beehive! Every cell was occupied and there wasn't a square yard of free space, so to speak.

Papers only print ready-made ideas. Psychologists,
sociologists, seem never to have read any history outside their manuals.

What will this journalist's article be like? It probably won't contain a word of what I've said. Perhaps, in our three-language dialogue, neither of us has understood the thoughts of the other.

I'm waiting for the fourth, who will be here for two weeks; he has already interviewed me once in Cannes. A first-rate man. We met on the beach where he was with his children, I with mine, and we postponed a serious interview until later.

Serious? About what? Why? I have nothing to tell him he doesn't already know.

But he is a journalist, I am a novelist. So, an interview.

He must wonder, as he stares at the sea, what new question to ask me.

What happens to all my words that people print?

Previously I used to answer:

‘Nothing.'

And I would say whatever came into my mind.

Later I saw that all those words thrown out like confetti did not disappear. They finally were formed into a whole that became a legend, and this legend in turn took on a character of its own.

Hitler must have spoken of the Jews as I spoke Tuesday of the staphylococci aurei because someone asked him to speak and this appeared to him as a good subject. I'm beginning to believe that he didn't know that he would be forced to return to it and finally to kill I don't know how many millions of Israelites.