When I Was Old (9 page)

Yesterday, by train, Venice–Lausanne, with my wife, Johnny, Marie-Jo, and a young neighbour who has been nurse for the two children during our vacation. Five people. I had reserved the six seats of a first-class compartment. But the train was jammed as the ones in cartoons, and as only Italian trains are. The corridors filled with travellers and luggage, trunks, bags, parcels of all kinds, with old men, with children. There seemed to be several layers, and it was impossible to get to the washrooms, which were blocked off by passengers and full of luggage besides.

There was an empty seat in our compartment. Children were standing in the corridor. I knew that Marie-Jo would be train-sick during the trip and would have to lie down. But, even without that, we still wouldn't have offered the seat to anyone. All the time I had a bad conscience. At the same time I was furious that I was forced to travel under such bad conditions.

I'm no longer able to stay in a hotel where I haven't a private bath and perfect service; I can't even eat in a bistro.

Why? As a child, I didn't have running water in my room, or any toilet except down in the courtyard. I suffered from the odour of chamber pots and pails. We
washed ‘down there' only once a week, on Saturday, in the kitchen, in a washtub. A shirt and pair of socks a week.

In those days, miners left work without having taken a shower, with black faces and white eyes. They called themselves Black Mugs.

Today they have showers, and often own their own homes.

An English MP said recently on television:

‘What weakens the Labour Party is the worker's acquisition of property. He has no more wants and he becomes conservative …'

Not only have the people become conservative, but they have adopted bourgeois morals and taboos.

At one time, it seems to me, the two extremes of society, the little man and the great landowners or the aristocrats, more or less escaped the narrow morality of the middle classes. Then the lower rose, the higher descended. The middle class expanded on both sides and, with it, bourgeois taboos.

Everyone owns something, a bank account, a house, a car … So everyone has something to defend.

Against whom?

I don't know any more where I was heading. Probably nowhere. It's unclear. This is connected with everything I've written up to now, but the connections are vague.

For example, a decree is issued (not a law, a decree, because France has gone back to decrees) limiting the freedom of the press. Virtually no newspaper protests.

The whole world knows that it is a financial cartel,
the Union of Mines, which this very morning stands in the way of peace in the Congo and creates a dangerous situation. The deception is obvious. It has been exposed in the papers, or at least in some of them. The Belgians, when forced to do so, gave freedom to the Congo. But one of their straw men, named Tshombe, declared that Katanga too was free.

France claims that it is vital for her to keep Algeria.

However, without Katanga, the Congo isn't viable.

It's been almost a week since everyone agreed on this point and the UN was supposed to enter Katanga yesterday.

It didn't.

You don't risk a ‘holy war' with the blacks in Africa.

What happened? To what propaganda or blackmail do we owe this reversal?

This also is connected with my Black Mugs from the coal mines of Liège at the beginning of the century, and with my travel experience yesterday.

‘It is harder for the rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.'

I have often thought of that Gospel saying. I am often ashamed, as I was yesterday. I wonder if I don't act dishonourably by raising my children in what is called luxury.

If I were alone, wouldn't I renounce it? I've been tempted to; I often still am. I live with my convictions and my instinct at odds. It is possible that this causes me twinges of conscience. Anyway it makes me uneasy. I make peace with my conscience, like the rest of the
world, telling myself that otherwise I couldn't work, that I'm not harming anyone, that at this stage of the evolution of the world, it's natural that …

It isn't true. And it's just because others make the same compromises that …

On the other hand I know that equality does not exist, that a semblance of equality is possible only by levelling inequalities. I recognize the biological necessity of a natural solution which this equality is about to abolish.

However, this is not enough to set me at ease. I write this in a manor house built for a seventeenth-century family, for an almost all-powerful bailiff, since there are three prisons at the far end of the courtyard. And, for three years now, I have gone to the greatest trouble to make each room perfect, each wall beautiful to the eye, each piece of furniture a little marvel.

It's still allowed. By whom?

Perhaps this too is connected with what goes before. Lying down for a short nap, a flash of the kind of place for which I have most nostalgia came to me. There aren't many left in the world. Thirty years ago in Equatorial Africa, in the South Seas, it was called a general store. I know they have changed since. One still finds a few, under the name of Trading Posts, in some obscure corners of the United States and Canada.

There men who live more or less in isolation within a ten to a hundred kilometres' perimeter come once a
week, once a month, or twice a year to buy whatever is needed in their life. Matches, for example. Gasoline or carbide, storm lamps, soap, fishhooks or cartridges, wool blankets, rough clothing, leather or rubber boots, thread, needles …

Merchandise is piled up in casks, in barrels, in cases. It hangs from the ceiling. There is liquor to be had there too, of course.

Necessities. Not things you're made to buy because someone needs to sell them. Today, a French minister announced that each Frenchman should eat three more kilos of tomatoes this year than in previous years to prevent a slump. (Thirteen kilos instead of ten!)

Two wars, more precisely two occupations, have taught me the true value of provisions, the satisfaction of possessing them when it is almost a question of survival. Sugar, for example. Sugar with a capital
s
. During the last war, afraid of a shortage, especially for my son (I had only one at that time), I bought beehives. I sweetened my coffee with honey. The tricks for getting a few litres of gasoline because you couldn't count on the electricity. Carbide too. Rice, pastry. And, since I had three cows, the search for barbed wire.

Thick shoes to protect against cold and mud. An overcoat of thick wool or one lined with sheepskin.

Things took on their real value again. Their real beauty, too. The beauty – and also the odour – of a barrel of black soap, for example, and of beginning the winter knowing that we wouldn't be cold, caressing the woodpile with our eyes.

This atmosphere of ‘stores' I already knew as a child, in a city, however, at my Aunt Maria's house beside the canal at Coronmeuse. I've often written of it in my novels and in
Pedigree
. She used to supply the boatmen whose barges were moored above the locks. Boatmen bought what they needed there and my aunt had to stock what they wanted, from Norwegian tar to starch, along with anything else simple, rough people might need.

The
real
. This defines as nearly as I can the word ‘real' for me: that which relates directly to the life of human beings. That which makes it possible.

The real is never ugly. But as soon as one gets near the realm of the superfluous … See the bazaars, the shops with many counters, etc.

The place where I would like to live, if I had the courage, or if I had no responsibilities, would be a house, a cabin, as real as those stores: essential furniture of pine, partitions of fir, a stove, a pump in a corner, maybe a shelf for books …

This environment is artificially manufactured today, and those for whom these places, called camps, are built, in the United States, in Canada, in Kenya, in Polynesia, are the people who have the most money, the most responsibilities, those who are called billionaires and who relax by fishing, cooking their own meals, and making their own beds.

On a more modest scale, the ordinary camper does very nearly the same thing.

Hence this must be a virtually general need, this return to the real, but a prefabricated real. Why does the
word ‘lard' suddenly make my mouth water? I haven't eaten it since the war of '14–'18. I see it again, spread on black bread. It meant a fatty substance. We no longer need fatty substances. Eating it, we had the sense of protecting ourselves.

Compared with this, how artificial and joyless gastronomy seems!

Another memory of war, of the second, this time, 1939–1945. At La Rochelle I directed the Belgian refugee service and I had the right to requisition – among other things – unoccupied apartments or insufficiently occupied ones. Women with children, babies, the sick, the old were sleeping on straw.

A woman whom I knew well, a so-called friend (I use this word too, but it has no meaning for me), urged me:

‘Be sure to send me
nice
people!'

Some day I must take time to explain myself on the question of money which preoccupies so many journalists who interview me. My position is rather complicated. I've often thought of it. I would like to get as close to the truth as possible and it is for fear of not being precise enough that I always hesitate. It will come.

I've been reunited with my son Pierre and already I find it hard to believe that he has walked only for a month. Soon I will find it improbable that there was a time when he was unable to talk.

God! How fast it goes. And how one worries over useless concerns.

The man seated on the threshold of his cabin who watches the sun set and does not think.

And the gorilla, surrounded by his family, on the watch in the forest.

He is already one step above the man in the cabin, isn't he? He doesn't need matches.

No doubt I'm going to write some more nonsense. But won't this whole notebook seem childish? That's what it's for, after all, to get rid of all the silly ideas that pass through my head. And I'm trying to forget all philosophical works, and avoid their vocabulary on purpose.

We tend to be sentimental; at any rate we look – at least most of us – on little children and the dying with compassion.

Between these two poles, for the being that is no longer a child and not yet dying, we have a tendency to be strict, even to be aggressive.

And yet they are the same beings, only at different stages.

Is it because at these two stages they do not compete with us, if I may put it this way?

There is another explanation. The child and the person in the process of dying are, as it were, beings in their natural state, undisguised.

As adolescents or adults, other factors will be added to their natural state: education, instruction, profession, environment, nationality, etc.

To put it another way, they are: Man + … + … + …

Each of these ‘pluses' brings mannerisms and taboos with it.

Suppose it were only those +s that we hate in our neighbours?

Suppose, under that little crust of +s, we were to discover that man is no different from the baby or the dying?

Suppose it were only the
acquired
factors that separate us?

Curiously enough, as one sees in times of catastrophe, war, earthquakes, floods, shipwrecks, etc., whenever a powerful external event momentarily attenuates or destroys these acquired characteristics, there is sympathy, compassion, a sort of love between men who hated each other the day before.

The difference between what I call the naked man and the clothed one.

Are we really moving towards the naked man? It seems possible, since today, for the first time in history as far as I know, the undernourished peoples are talked about and the overfed people have bad consciences.

Is this healthy? Was it healthier for each one to defend his place in the sun, to subject the weak to slavery and to kill for a yes or a no?

We begin to respect human life to a point of extremity. We almost make a religion of it. It's true of me. But I sometimes wonder if this is not sentimentality, if we are not going against natural law.

The events in Africa worry us.

What is most troubling of all is to consider the same
events, in turn, from the historical point of view, the biological, the sentimental, and the political.

In the past, we must have had instinct, which guided us to where we are now. Is it still with us? Where is it? When does it speak?

And if we have lost it, when and why did we lose it?

A mass-circulation paper, hence a paper that caters to public opinion and is careful not to shock it, yesterday or the day before carried an article by a lawyer not noted for his revolutionary opinions. It was concerned with the archaic quality of the Penal Code, both here and elsewhere, with laws that take no heed of our medical knowledge, particularly in the matter of the degree of responsibility of the criminal. He envisaged for the future a jury of specialists – not specialists in jurisprudence, but in medicine and psychology – and the conversion of prisons into asylums.

This is a familiar theme in specialized journals almost everywhere in the world and particularly in the United States. The idea began by seeming revolutionary. Even today, among the doctors whom I meet, many are sceptical, and lawyers continue to believe in exemplary punishment and Society's revenge.

My very first Maigrets were imbued with the sense, which has always been with me, of man's irresponsibility. This is never stated openly in my writings. But Maigret's attitude towards the criminal makes it quite clear.

I don't write this in order to demonstrate that I was ahead of my time. I invented nothing. Even at that period these ideas had certainly been formulated by others. But it is still a fairly recent movement. It began with articles in the criminology reviews.