When I Was Old (23 page)

Will it be the same with all the plans that I want to make for D. and for the other children, of which there are now three, once I am no longer here, which will certainly happen some day.

It reassures me to try to imagine them in such and such a place, in a certain atmosphere. At the same time it is partly a matter of personal geography.

Plato considered that the ideal city would have, I think (the book is five yards from me, but, once more, I refuse to get up to make sure of the number), five thousand inhabitants.

Doesn't this correspond to a city of a hundred to a hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants today, so long as it's a university town? It is because Lausanne fits this concept that I settled here, and after four years I am still content with my choice.

Shouldn't it be almost the same, after me, for the children? With the difference that, since they will not be able to live in such a large house, with as big a staff, distance from the town would complicate the least details of life.

If D. and they decide to remain in Switzerland, on the heights of Lausanne, near buses and trams, there are charming villas and even apartment houses which simplify life.

For I am the one who complicates it in this house, with my work and my demands.

Will they want to stay in Switzerland? Myself, if I am still here when the children are bigger, will I not wish to finish their education in France?

Apart from this, life must be made pleasant for D., and I fear the long distance from Paris, where we have most of our friends.

Versailles? I've always dreamed of it. But I've been there recently. It has become a tourist town and the neighbourhood is inhabited by a restless crowd of snobs, as bad for the children as the Côte d'Azur.

Aix-en-Provence again? Maybe. Aren't there airfields, army camps, and a great deal of tourism there too now?

If they need or want the South, I'd prefer Nîmes, near Montpellier and its university. Only for D. that's far from Paris, and even if only on business she will have to go there often.

There remains, as for Maigret, the Loire valley, Orléans or Tours, Saumur, for example.

Rouen is depressing and rainy. Caen is too new a city, though it offers the advantage of being near the sea.

At the moment I incline to the Loire valley, a big airy house surrounded by a garden at the outskirts of the city.

Vain speculation, I know, I've had some experience.

Wherever they decide to go, wherever D. decides to
take them, I know they will be happy and I hope they will never be sad thinking of me, that they will say that I had a full life, that they gave me all the happiness possible.

No museum of mementoes. Nothing to make them sad. On the contrary. Let them remember me almost as a clown and sometimes, at meals, let them burst out laughing thinking of me, as they do now.

Loire valley? Lausanne? Nîmes?

I'm entertaining myself, children, thinking of you, preferably of you grown up, all adults, for I haven't the slightest wish to leave you and I hope to do it as late as possible.

But I sketched many plans for Marc when I was only forty. Isn't it fair that I should make some for you at almost fifty-eight?

No! D. is going to frown. Let's not talk about it any more. Long live Echandens and life in January 1961.

Who knows? Perhaps, after all, I shall see all my children married and then we'll have to find a house for two somewhere, and from time to time, my darling D., we will try, with our old legs to climb the narrow staircase of your doll's house in Cagnes-sur-Mer. I doubt whether we shall get to that point – excuse me, that I'll come to that point, but I could always be carried upstairs.

Just now there may be fighting in Belgium. They may already be fighting there. They are fighting in Laos, in Algeria, in the Congo.

And I, nice and warm in my study, with the rain falling outside as in my childhood, I'm thinking of my old age.

It is sad to watch a being to whom one feels attached in every fibre struggling to regain her balance, her strength, her joy in living. One knows, as doctors know it, that in the last analysis this is finally only a question of chemistry, or glands, of a little too much of this or of that, or too little; that, little by little, the lack or the excess will be remedied.

It's a question of time, of groping, of keeping one's peace of mind, and, in a word, of confidence. But it is just this confidence that is almost impossible to achieve – otherwise, it would be so easy.

The patient – I do not say the sick man or woman since there is no true sickness to speak of – attributes his or her state to different causes, most often moral ones. He argues with himself, lies to himself, a little as if he didn't want to get well. For to get well would be to agree, to admit to himself that all his phantoms are imaginary.

A subtle shifting of reality takes place (for physical reasons) and it is that reality which he begins to flee from. So he submerges himself, and when he comes to the surface, is tempted to plunge back down again.

How to help her? Every word, every attitude, runs the risk of being wrongly interpreted. The other day I wrote that I was walking on tiptoe.

Yesterday, the day before, I believed that we were coming back to the surface. This morning we have to begin all over. She is trying, with all her strength. But,
fatally
, she is trying in the wrong direction.

The experience of earlier depressions is useless. Each time she loses all confidence. Not her fault. Because we are at the mercy of a hundredth of a milligram of acid.

In a few days I will smile about it and she will smile about it.

Last evening, on television, another charge by mounted police in Belgium. And once again there is talk of separation between Flemings and Walloons as at the time I was reporter on the
Gazette de Liège
. This time the Socialists are at the head of the movement. Their leader is a certain Renard, editor of
La Wallonie
. This paper was almost a turning point for me, which very few people know.

I was working on a Catholic and conservative paper (it is no longer so) near the Place Saint-Lambert because it happened to be the first job on a paper I could find, on the day when I suddenly decided, at the age of sixteen and a half, to become a reporter. To tell the truth, I had no idea of its political colour.

La Wallonie
, at that period, was considered by conservative people, including my parents, as a sort of emanation of the Devil, and its editors had the reputation of men who carried knives between their teeth.

Among them, I was friendly (in spite of the difference in ages) with the editor-in-chief, Isi Delvigne, and a deputy of the party called Troclet, who still wore a very Bohemian flowing necktie.

I was only a kid. On the
Gazette
they were careful not to entrust me with any tasks that had to do with politics
except, during elections, the accounts of electoral speeches by
our
candidates.

As is the rule, of all the journalists of Liège we were the worst paid (I noticed later that it is always the same: the further right a paper is, the less it pays its staff; if it is Catholic on top of that, you can starve).

One day Isi Delvigne took me aside and proposed that I come to work for
La Wallonie
, not just as an editor, but with the promise that when I was twenty-one I'd be listed among their candidates for elections, local and provincial at first, legislative later.

It was an assured fortune and future. At that period, in fact, the parties of the Left in Belgium had few educated elements, lacked cadres, as one says today, and I remember candidates and even men elected to office who barely knew how to read or write.

For a long time I had wanted to become a novelist. I had published a first book:
Au Pont des Arches
. I had written a second:
Jehan Pinaguet
, which my editor-in-chief had forbidden me to publish (I had found a publisher, or rather a lady-publisher, an older woman but very attractive, whom my youth must have stimulated) because there was a priest who smacked of heresy among its characters.

Politics? Literature?

Did I really hesitate? Anyway, I was tempted. The thought of manipulating the masses, of speaking from the podium, organizing impressive parades, fighting for a cause …

I said No. Without regret, I really believe. It is none the
less true that one night, a little drunk, crossing the Passerelle in a fog, and also in a poetic mood, I declared to my friend Lafnet, who was taking me home:

‘At forty I shall be a minister or a member of the Academy!'

At fifty-eight I am neither one nor the other. For I meant the French Academy, of course. I wasn't speaking seriously, just metaphorically, since, a Belgian, I knew that the Quai Conti was closed to me.

But a minister I would certainly have been at the specified age if I had joined
La Wallonie
and the party. It happened to several of my age group who were less well equipped than I.

As to becoming an Academician, there is no question of that, of course. I've expressed my opinions – sincerely – on this subject as on that of decorations.

I'm happy I never became a minister, never dabbled in politics wherever I was.

But still that was a turning point, a decision which it was necessary to make, at an age when I hadn't the slightest maturity. I certainly did not weigh the pros and cons. I followed my instinct. The other way was easier and put an end to my problems at the time.

I stayed on the pious
Gazette
until my military service, which I got over with ahead of the draft, and at nineteen and a half I went to Paris where, after some menial secretarial jobs, I was soon busy writing popular novels all day long under fifteen or sixteen pseudonyms before taking my own name again.

Yesterday there was fighting in Belgium, but no
decisive battle. This disappoints me somewhat. On the whole, my instinct enables me to foresee events quite accurately, I have had proof of it recently in rereading my old reporting.

Where I am invariably wrong is in my sense of timing. Events always take longer to ripen than I think.

Perhaps it is the same for personal tragedies and even for illnesses. Whether it is a matter of nature, of men, of crowds, it could be said that there is a nearly immutable rhythm to which I am not attuned, which I have a tendency to anticipate.

This is also true for D., with whom I become impatient because she isn't getting well when she has scarcely begun to take care of herself and when she has to counterbalance more than a year of worry and extreme fatigue.

The children dismantled the Christmas tree this morning, with the same pleasure with which they had trimmed it, the same impatience.

Pierre, who has been eating with us for three days only, has proved the life and soul of the family table and meals have become delightful.

A relapse for D. yesterday, suddenly, at the same hour as in December. Same pains. Same utter fatigue. Fortunately less crushing, perhaps because we know. I watch over her from morning to night, look about fifty times a
day into whatever room she's in, not because of restlessness but because I would like to help her.

Our five doctors have all been on vacation for the past eight or ten days and are not coming back until next week. Of course they need a rest, like everyone, and much more than most.

But that doesn't make it any less of a problem, linked to the social problem of the organization that some day must be set up, an entirely new organization, which is going to force change on us, the older ones, but which appears indispensable to me.

I would be greatly upset to find myself in a clinic before a more or less anonymous doctor ‘in possession of my file'. But won't this be better than the present semi-anarchy? Three times in less than a year all our doctors were away when we needed them, and their substitute would have been helpless faced by a complicated problem on which he had no information.

D. is in good spirits today. Last evening, in the car, she told me a little of what oppresses her, almost all of it, in any case almost all she is aware of.

For my part, I'm still puzzled. I envy the clear minds of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for whom man was so simple. They believed in intelligence. They believed in primary truth, in black and white, and were satisfied with caricatures (excuse me: with simplifications) almost as crude as the ‘Caractères' of La Bruyère.

Will we appear later as a grey turbid age, a time of gropings, of restlessness, of unresolved questions? Who
knows? A period of sick men which, in the quest for understanding of life, will be brushed aside?

In terms of art, the passion for wretchedness has already been discussed. I am afraid, sometimes, of creating such wilful wretchedness or ‘morbidity'.

I try to remain detached, objective, not to succumb to sentimentality.

What comforts me is that professional researchers, scientists, arrive at almost the same … I was going to say conclusions, when there are none … Say at the same difficulties, at the same doubts, at the same anxieties as I do; even that last word embarrasses me.

Expecting Dr R., who is in a hurry to see the book he has written about me published and who is also persuaded that he has discovered some subtle or secret things. He does not suspect – and I shall not say it to him so as not to hurt him – that I have the impression that all he writes about me diminishes me. I shall have to keep D., who is less patient than I, especially about what concerns me, from speaking her mind too openly. It's all the more difficult since I am very fond of him and admire his talent.

Am I not a bit like Anatole France taking umbrage at his portrait by van Dongen? But van Dongen was right.

What I would like to set down this morning is this. It is probable, if some day I reread these notebooks, that
I will find the same subject taken up twice, twice in the same way. Loss of memory?