When I Was Old (33 page)

I saw the nearby café-bar with its reddish lights, like the little cafés of my childhood in Liège. I saw the ill-lit rectangle of a window and felt as always the mystery of hidden lives. I noticed a couple in the shadows.

There is much talk about the upheavals of the atomic age. We seek new truths, new bases for life. But windows like these are still the same in the time of electricity as they were in the time of oil, of kerosene, or of gas. Couples too. Noise and lights of a train in the distance. A plane flew over, going towards Cointrin, and it was only a buzzing, a very small light in the sky.

I can't believe the world has changed so much, and in
Paris, in London, or even New York I've found the same lights and the same evening shadows in the streets, the same smell of night, the same echoes of human footsteps. At six in the morning, there must still be little boys walking fast, a shiver of fear on their skin, going to serve early mass.

Yet how many investigations, probes, studies, researches, on the new generation and the world of tomorrow!

This afternoon the whole family went to the country together as I used to go to Chèvremont with my parents on Easter Day, when I was a child. We would go there by tram. Today, we were in a car. But we saw the same faces. There were the same sudden showers. The air had the same taste of grass and dust, and when we came back Pierre's cheeks were redder than usual because of the first spring sunshine, and he was the way children always have been, shedding a few tears of weariness.

We've had a relative of my wife's in the house for a week, charming, tactful, nineteen years old, who took up as little space as a guest can. She leaves tomorrow.

Ouf! Just by her presence she has managed to spoil my Easter vacation – and the children's because of that – which I was so happy about.

I can't stand a strange presence in the house any more. It shocks me to find her seated in my study, to see her at
the table, then, in the evening, in front of the television. Suddenly I become impatient, nervous, especially with the children.

I feel any presence as a violation of our intimacy. And I don't think it's a question of age. I suppose it has to do with the fact that I've always considered (actually, it began only with D.) that the couple, then the family, are the real human cell, the true unity.

It doesn't matter how many strangers spend an hour or two, the time of a meal or a chat, with us. But I consider it an attack on our intimate life to meet one unexpectedly in a hall, to find one seated in ‘my' armchair, or D.'s or one of the children's. If, on top of that, they join in the conversation …

However, I am full of good intentions and I do my utmost to make our relative happy here.

Monday, I hope, I shall plunge into revision of
Le Train
and, I also hope, recover.

Alone at last! And a lovely family Sunday. Oddly, I have recently rediscovered odours, the vibrations of ordinary things as I felt them in my childhood and adolescence. I'd lived for a long time without feeling these small daily ecstasies.

I used to seize passing impressions which remained in my mind, isolated ones, which I probably didn't enjoy much at the time I perceived them. Now, for the past few
years, I have been newly aware, as I was at fifteen, of a ray of sunshine, a scent, the colour of a flower.

At fifteen, it was intentional – I called it my theory of little joys. Now it is less conscious. Perhaps it has to do with a state of balance that allows me to enjoy time passing. Or else with the fact that I attach less importance to questions which from twenty-five to forty seemed vital to me.

Not detachment. My curiosity is no less. Hard to explain. Each thing takes its place, it's true value and, for example, it delights me to see D. coming down the stone staircase in a certain housecoat, to smell the odour of earth and grass that Johnny gives off when he comes in from the garden (as when I used to come in from playing at the water's edge) … a look from Pierre … Marie-Jo's straw hat with the orange ribbon.

In fact I'm happy to have an excuse for putting off our trip to Paris. Too many people are expecting us there. Would prefer to go elsewhere, it doesn't matter where, even just ten kilometres away with D. And to continue to inhale the spring.

For tomorrow morning, I promise myself the joy, in the peace of my study, of beginning the revision of
Le Train
, in which I've tried to put certain impressions I've set down above. For my hero, it took a war. And it didn't last. But who knows, when he's my age … ?

One of these days I must talk about abstract art, because it bothers me.

Began the revision this morning – one chapter – and, as usual, incapable of saying if I like it or if I hate it. I will know after three or four chapters, otherwise at the end.

If abstract art is preoccupying me, it's not in an impersonal way but very much because I feel involved. All my life I've been closer to painting than to literature. From the age of sixteen, my friends in Liège were painters, students, or former students at the Beaux-Arts. Some are now teachers, but none has really arrived as a painter.

In Paris, at nineteen and a half, I met one of them again. I've spoken of his studio at the foot of Sacré Coeur where some of us used to go virtually every evening. (I remember a young man from a bourgeois family coming to ask my friend to teach him – not how to paint, but how to handle colours. He had his own plan. To do modern painting and make a lot of money. But I recently learned that he is the quite famous painter whose name never even struck me as familiar.)

So from the time I arrived in Paris I often hung around Montparnasse, Foujita, Vlaminck, Derain, Kisling, etc., who, for the most part, became my friends. I used to go to the shows every week.

My childhood was especially influenced by Impressionism and Pointillism (the gayest, happiest painting, where every spot of light is like a song) and I'll gladly admit that my novels reflected them.

I liked the Fauves, too – then the period of guitars, matchboxes, grey packets of tobacco. Matisse was one of my gods.

I saw life through those men, or rather I loved its surfaces as they did.

Later, at La Rochelle, then in the United States, I lost touch, and today I find myself faced with abstract art, which baffles me. It happens – rarely – that certain paintings please me, but I admit that I don't understand them, that I mistrust them, that I sniff them as if I were detecting a fraud.

On the level of logic, these painters seem to be right. At a time when we are discovering (?) the mechanics of the universe, the atom, the genes, antimatter, etc., perhaps it is natural for painting to interest itself in a dissociated world.

Very well! But … Am I going to object that art should be difficult, that fraud has become too easy? Isn't it just as easy to make a chromo as today, let us say, to do
tachisme
?

Last night on the television screen, I saw faces of serious, sincere painters, and their words troubled me.

So? The
roman nouveau
, the novel that isn't a novel of which there is so much talk (I haven't read any), isn't it the literary equivalent of such painting?

I would have liked to understand, to feel enthusiasm, not to be reactionary. I can't manage it. I doubt. I look for reasons.

The parallels with painting in my work, in my life, have suddenly stopped. Is it the fault of painting or of me?

It ought not to bother me and I should go on my way without asking questions. That's what I try to do. But in spite of myself, more and more often, when I'm beginning a novel, I hesitate. I don't like to be repetitious. I would like even less to imitate current fashion – a question of principles.

Vlaminck used to dismiss all abstract painting with a shrug and a laugh, but I'm not sure that deep inside himself he didn't have doubts too.

Bernard Buffet is no less categorical, though he is only thirty-two.

At fifty-eight I am less sure of myself, less sure of being right. To the point where I go over my predecessors to reassure myself, to see if one of them was able to understand up to the very end.

It isn't a matter of following the movement or the surface. I said understand. But not gently, imperceptibly becoming a stranger in a world whose sap is continually renewed.

Is this too ambitious? Perhaps. Anyway, there is nothing else to do but jog along quietly without wondering too much where I'm going.

At ten years old, when I served at mass, each day I looked with new eyes at the richly embroidered altar cloth, at the complicated patterns, where I saw new images each time, mainly very strange personages.

After so long a time, certain of these images still appear on my retina. I've had the same experience with a cracked, fly-specked ceiling, and staring at certain stones with odd veinings, or even just in a pond where the
reflections of clouds were distorted by the evening breeze.

Last evening, on television, a connoisseur declared that this was how he looked at his favourite modern painting each morning, which was facing his bed.

In that case …

But where is creativity, if it is only a matter of giving the viewer – or the reader – a point of departure for dreaming?

Finished revision of
Le Train
last evening, after four days, by dint of eight to ten hours a day. Impression? Less bad than I feared. Less good than I hoped? Maybe. I haven't any idea. Now the book must begin to live its own life.

Today it was photostated. Then it leaves for the publisher, then the printer. A cover will be suggested. It will come off the presses. It isn't so much reviews I'm waiting for. It's a ripening process that takes nearly two years. Little by little I shall see the novel go into different languages, take different forms, and then it will be filed away in my mind between this book and that. I have nothing more to do with it.

It's taken me years to have an opinion on
Three Rooms in Manhattan
, which will soon be coming back to me in the form of a film.

It's raining. Have done the errands. Have listened to a friend I'm very fond of talking endlessly about famous,
rich, titled, glamorous people. Her husband is famous too. Why do these people interest her? I wonder. At a certain point it irritated me just because I'm very fond of her, and my wife tells me that I was a bit short. I'm sorry.

But after finishing a hard job, hearing this talk about false values has something depressing about it. I needed peace and intimacy so much!

Next week, probably, I shall revise
Je me souviens
for a new edition. In the first one, I cut some passages from the manuscript that I considered too personal. I'll see if there's a way to put them back in.

This is a kind of work I'm not familiar with, the work of a man of letters, which I'm not.

This afternoon, on the other hand, I revised and corrected a little ‘novel' that Marie-Jo wrote as vacation homework. It was delightful.

How much better it would be to spend even only forty-eight hours with D., nobody else, no telephone, no mail, walking unfamiliar streets, eating anywhere, going to bed and getting up any time! Real luxury! The only one virtually forbidden us – or granted so sparingly! We end up loving in shorthand.

Last night I almost forgot the lion's socks – D. reminded me of them when we went to kiss the children before going to bed ourselves. That's the first time this has happened to me.

It made me think of the importance of traditions, of habits, of rituals. We live in a period when nomadism reigns anew. In Russia, entire populations are dumped in Siberia. In the United States, factories, offices, and all who work in them are shipped from New England to the South. In France, heads of businesses that leave the Paris area for the provinces are given a bonus. Few people still know where they will be in ten, even five years. Families separate.

(It is curious to note that it is just at this moment when furniture and objects of daily use are interchangeable, mass produced, that the purchase of an apartment is indirectly imposed, of a cell in a huge co-operative where the man who occupies it has nothing to say, where he will have nothing to say, where he will not really be the owner. To my mind, it's a cynical swindle.)

I have always thought that the human being needs the landmarks which traditions are. As a child, I was impatient to leave my family. I pretended to be a rebel. Our way of life was a burden to me.

But I am still grateful to my mother for having, for example, taken me to market with her from the time I was three years old. I've kept a taste for markets, for baskets filled with fruit and vegetables, for odours. Later I took each of my own children to market in turn. One or another of them will probably continue the custom.

These habits are a need so natural that children, even very young ones, demand them, each according to his temperament. Perhaps to reassure themselves? Probably, for the first ones have to do with bedtime, always an anguish for them.

One evening when Marc was two years old I told him a story of a little Chinese named Li. For years after, each evening I had to invent new adventures for Li. When I met D., he asked her for a story too, so that for a long time one or the other of us gave him a daily instalment every evening.

For Johnny, the ceremony was just as complicated, but different. He was the most watchful, the most jealous of these little traditions, and he is very unhappy if one is forgotten. I understand him all the better since I am rather like him.

Putting him to bed one evening, I put the socks he had just taken off on the ears of his plush lion. This amused him. That was at least three years ago. He is eleven. Every evening I have to cover the lion's ears the same way.

And I must leave his door open just enough so that the nurse can come in without touching it if he needs her, for he likes to think I am the last to touch that door before he goes to sleep.