When I Was Old

by Georges Simenon

  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.

  There are passing traditions that last for several months or a year, and others to which he remains attached.

  Marie-Jo seems less concerned with these trifles.

  Is that really true? She has always had a more secret life. The entire house is her domain. She may be found all by herself in the most unexpected places.

  In the morning she goes to the kitchen to prepare her scrambled eggs, Daddy’s eggs, made according to my recipe; she says the ones the cook makes are not as soft.

  She can also be found in the secretaries’ office, working near them. Finally she follows Pierre’s tracks, knows where he is at each moment of the day. So she has a whole personal life and, I am persuaded, her own secret rituals.

  At twenty-three months, Pierre has some too. After meals, for example, he dawdles, eating his dessert in the dining room while D. and I go into the drawing room and my adjacent study. By the time Pierre gets there, I often have a newspaper or a book in my hand, and my reading glasses on. Pierre takes these off and puts my other spectacles on my nose. If he sees me without a pipe, he goes to get one from the rack, insists that I fill and light it.

  Finally he takes his mother by the hand, leads her to her armchair in the drawing room. Then me to my armchair. Then the nurse to a chair which he has decided is hers.

  If Marie-Jo and Johnny are there, they must sit down too, in definite places.

  And then the bss … bss … begins, a game he invented a few weeks ago. He plays at flying, his arms out like wings, running around the centre table very fast imitating the noise of a bee.

  Useless to try to drop this ceremony. There would be tears and we would have trouble getting him to sleep.

  ‘Bsss … Bsss, Mamma.’

  After which he goes to bed himself.

  I could cite other fads, for each of the four. Four experiences, then, with children of different temperaments. We haven’t discouraged them. We haven’t invented these rituals for them. They established them themselves, when they were still young, when they could barely walk.

  Human groups, small or large, act in the same way. You might call it a need.

  A holiday with bells ringing today, and festive meals, processions, etc., which have more or less lost their meaning. Automobiles speed along the roads. Nomadism is reborn. I am sure that traditions are being established just the same, different ones, but just as deep-rooted in those who follow them, or will follow them.

  Fear of the void!

  I forgot that every evening in bed, Marie-Jo, for whom we bought a little plush monkey, for months, nearly two years, if I’m not mistaken, has demanded stories about her monkey, named Bob. But she has a very well-developed critical mind.

  If the stories are not funny, she is so disappointed that sometimes I spend more than an hour during the day on them. Finally I had to throw in the towel! She always sleeps with Bob near her in a doll’s bed, though she has never played with dolls, and she dresses him and makes clothes for him.

  Johnny, at eleven, sleeps with a clown that was given him eight or nine years ago, in his arms, and his plush bear. He is so attached to his clown that every time it is worn out or dirty D. has to remake it with a new sponge rubber inside, so that it no longer has its original body.

  For a few weeks Pierre has slept with a wooden cart and horse in his bed. He doesn’t ask for stories yet.

  Monday, 17th

  Our friend left this morning at eleven thirty. It’s one thing to meet friends in Paris or elsewhere, to dine with them and pass the evening, and another to see them here twenty-four hours a day. Then we realize how much separates us from them, our almost complete lack of shared tastes. It is a saddening experience.

  This afternoon between the time when I drove Marie-Jo and D. to the dentist and the time I had to get Johnny after school, I went into a brand-new little coffee bar where I spent nearly an hour all by myself playing the pinball machine.

  At the moment (nine thirty in the evening) television commentators are still talking about the man shot into space last week – who has come back. If these pages are read later, won’t it seem odd that the day after this event I didn’t devote a single line to it?

  It affected me, certainly, even moved me; above all, the pictures of the crowd in Moscow; but it remained no less external. Why do I note it here today? I’ve forgotten, and I’m not going to look back.

  Wednesday, 18th

  I wonder if pity (human, as we always call it), which has replaced religious pity, born of Catholicism, isn’t more likely to generate stress, isn’t more traumatizing, both for the one who feels it and the one who is its object.

  Religious pity accepted evil, pain, misery as necessities and a Christian’s duty was only to give ‘comfort’.

  Today, man believes it is his duty to ‘suppress’ it. And I am always the first to share this feeling. More from a medical than from a philosophical point of view.

  Journalists, for example, are told to go after ‘blood and gore’. Whether in the daily papers, the weeklies, on radio, on television, in newsreels, everything is set up in such a way that the reader or viewer will be in the middle of the action, inside the skin of the victims.

  Nowadays, in Europe and most of the developed countries, no one can escape news broadcasts, even in the depths of the countryside, and they affect women and children as well as men.

  Here, grosso modo, except for unintentional omissions, is a summary of the past few days:

  A man in space. General rejoicing, while we begin to talk about military possibilities and the vital necessity of colonizing other planets eventually, to accommodate the surplus population on our own which we won’t be able to feed.

  Bombs dropped on Cuba, and yesterday a landing on that island. National funeral services for the first victims. Anti-aircraft on the rooftops. Tension between East and West and possibility of world conflict.

  Eichmann trial. Photographs and films of German atrocities rerun. Three times a day we are shown piles of naked bodies, children marching to the gas chamber, skeletal prisoners.

  The Sunday and weekly accidents in detail, of course. The young bridal couple, leaving the wedding in a car, who drove off a railroad bridge. Seven young people in a car that crashed into a tree …

  The Congo troubles go on, cases of cannibalism are cited.

  Troubles begin in Angola. Series of murders with machetes and firearms. Torture.

  The weekly victims. The woman who drowned herself in a river trying to save her child. A madwoman who tried to hang her child in the Père-Lachaise cemetery rather than have it left in the care of her mother-in-law …

  Plastic bombs in Paris, in the provinces, in Algeria …

  Machine-gun attacks in the eighteenth arrondissement and elsewhere …

  De Gaulle, in a speech, says in substance:

  ‘Count of war dead in Algeria used to be as high as seventy a day. Now is it down to eight or ten …’

  An expert sounds the alarm (there’s at least one a week) warning of the end of the world if atomic tests aren’t stopped.

  Another, backed by statistics, demonstrates that in 2020 men will be crowded nose to nose all over the earth.

  Not to speak of earlier news items kept alive in the papers.

  The doctor who announces a new cure for cancer, causing cancer patients or those who feel threatened by the disease
to dread that they may die too soon.

  Etc., etc. All this through the medium of voices, of pictures of haggard or convulsed faces, all the suffering of the world right in your living room several times a day, pleas for funds for refugees, for polio sufferers, for heart victims.

  A doctor told me about the case of one of his patients, a rough fellow, whom he saw arrive one day from a sawmill two or more miles away with one arm completely torn off. It is a truism that the more man evolves the more he suffers, not just physically, but from fear. A dentist is the worst patient another dentist can have, a doctor for another doctor.

  Peasants of earlier times knew that of ten or twelve children they would lose half at an early age, and accepted this without too much grief. Death, disease, hunger, cold, poverty, were accepted as part of everyday life.

  All social levels have evolved. All have become sensitized.

  Each man suffers not just from his own suffering but from the whole world’s. Each man fears for himself and for all humanity.

  One might even say that fears for the future of the species subconsciously trouble man even more than those that concern himself.

  (Joys too. At the parade in Moscow, there was more joy over this triumph over space (?) than over some event that might have touched each individual personally.)

  All of this piled up, accumulated, overlapping, entering each life.

  There are not enough mental hospitals, and disease has become more moral than physical.

  Is this attitude of man towards his fellows, towards his fate and theirs, rooted in evolution, or isn’t it rather a passing style, like romanticism?

  Will we return to a cynical acceptance of the law of the jungle and what seems to be biological law?

  This bothers me. My instinct is on the side of compassion. My reason sometimes pulls me in the opposite direction and I’m not sure that this is not the condition of many men, and an important cause of unbalance. As I believe I have already said, the world has a bad conscience and insists on it, increasing instead of placating it.

  The Fascists may not have been buried for ever, and who knows if Rome will not return to life?

  Same day, 6 o’clock in the evening

  I just reread the first fifty pages of Je me souviens for the final (?) edition (the title is not mine but my publisher’s, because I was travelling across the United States and he couldn’t reach me in time). I just reread, I say, this text, which served as a point of departure for Pedigree, and I’m troubled.

  I wonder if my style wasn’t more intense, more lively, than today. I worked faster, drinking a great deal of wine. I find little to correct – unless I rewrite everything. It’s loosely written, often inaccurate, but I dare not touch it for fear of demolishing the whole thing.

  It also seems to me that I have already written many things that I am rediscovering, hence that I repeat myself. Is this inevitable? Is it the rule? Or do I, after all, see the world differently now, more maturely, or, on the contrary …

  It’s because of my fear of this impression, which is depressing, that I always refuse to reread myself, even to correct proofs. In the case of Je me souviens it was necessary for family reasons, because of the people I quote: which has not prevented certain among them from bringing suit against me.

  Marc, for whom I wrote it, since I had only that one child at the time and had no hopes for more, has never read it. He is twenty-two today. Could he have read it and not talked to me about it for some reason I don’t understand? One day he told me he had skimmed over a few pages.

  Will the others read these notebooks later? Johnny, almost certainly.

  Curious feeling, this noon, hearing him coming in from school (his first day of Latin) shouting: Rosa – the rose. How little these things change – or rather how little men change – in the midst of so many changes in things!

  D. in town. I decided not to go with her, not to wait for her during her fittings. I didn’t so as to stay here and work, and now I feel a sort of emptiness, a lostness, a ‘hunger’.

  My dizzy spells have got better in the past few days. I’d rather not talk about that, nor about my slight depression; rather not play at medical diagnosis.

  I think that this morning again I wrote nonsense as I do every time I take off on abstract ideas. Why should I, when it isn’t my trade?

  Wednesday, 19 April

  As I foresaw, end of discouragement – touch wood – and end of bad weather. Yesterday seemed like autumn. Now it’s spring again. And I’m going out with D. this morning and afternoon.

  Re Je me souviens, a few pages of which I’m revising before going out. Yesterday a passage struck me and worried me as I was going to sleep. I speak somewhere of the country house, a sort of grandmotherly house, which ‘we’ established so that Marc could have a childhood in it like the one ‘we’ had dreamed of having, far from town and artificiality.

  I wrote ‘we’ because this text was meant for Marc, who, I believed then, would grow up having hardly known me, since a stupid or malicious doctor had told me I was doomed, so that I expected him to be raised by his mother.

  But in reality, she never cared for the country, at least not as long as I was living with her. Her dream was to have a studio in Montparnasse (she is a painter) and her ideal of marriage was to live in a different house from her husband.

  Nothing existed for her outside Paris, and she often reproached me for our travels, which kept her from painting, for our moves to La Richardière and elsewhere, although the largest and best-lit room was always reserved for her use.

  Isn’t it ironic that she now lives in that house in Nieul that I gave her at the time of the divorce? I haven’t set foot in it since I left it shortly after the arrival of the Germans. I lived there only about a year, the time it took to get settled. Marc lived there no longer than that, and recently he spent a few days there but didn’t like it; he thought La Rochelle ‘a hole’.

  Another memory comes back to me, equally ironic. When we first came to Paris, my first wife and I, we quickly became aware that from a practical point of view we couldn’t both of us embark simultaneously on careers of ‘serious art’ since neither of us had any money and it would take a long time – if ever – before we could make it pay.

  We discussed it calmly. We weighed the chances each of us had of ‘making it’. And decided, with utmost gravity, that for three years I was not to write seriously but keep the pot boiling (with short stories, popular novels) while she would try her luck at painting. If she got somewhere, I was to efface myself. If not, it would be my turn to try.

  So she had canvases, easels, paints, models. We rented a room at Bernheim’s for a show, then for another …

  My self-effacement went beyond the three years, up to the start of the Maigret series, and even, you might say, until the end of the Maigrets, since I consider these as semi-potboilers.

  If she had achieved success at that time, what would have happened? I wonder and tremble. I am scrupulous by nature, and I think I might have kept to our agreement and effaced myself.

  I never talked about it. Nor about Nieul. Or about the fact that it was for her sake that I settled in Paris in 1935 or 1936, Boulevard Richard-Wallace, in an apartment that I considered hers, and where I always felt like a visitor.

  This makes me realize even more the near impossibility of being entirely sincere in writing notebooks like these. I’m not distorting anything. I’m not inventing anything. But sometimes I’m insincere by omission, for fear of the consequences.

  Often I feel I would like to write:

  ‘Today I made love to So-and-So …’

  Because it would set the tone of the day. Because these acts are part of the whole. But even if I left out names, abbreviations would make it possible for someone to guess who was meant. These women will have children some day, perhaps. Some of them already have. Or else they will fall in love. Have I the right to upset someone just to indicate the tone of a day?

  Others don’t have suc
h scruples, neither Gide nor Jouhandeau, for example, and I am tempted to envy them. At the same time, it seems to me that they are the ones whose sincerity is most suspect, because they give in to the temptation of playing a part and making others play parts.

  In preparing this new edition of Je me souviens I could re-establish the truth by putting ‘I’ in place of ‘we’. But would this be the decent thing to do? And wouldn’t people believe it was done out of shabby revenge or resentment?

  Tonight, Russian ultimatum to the Americans on Cuba.

  America’s reply. Cessation of peace talks in Laos. It’s too much. Personally, I no longer react, I can no longer get excited, even feel interested. Doesn’t the public feel the same? I hope so. It would contradict what I wrote yesterday on this subject, but so much the better.

  Only in that case, if I were in the place of those who govern, I would begin to fear that after long apathy there might be danger of a terrible reaction.

  Aren’t there signs of this in France, where de Gaulle has put public opinion to sleep, hypnotized the Parliament?

  We speak of millionaires, billionaires. The papers like to cite figures. And they mean nothing.

  At one time, a man owned large flocks or small ones, or such-and-so many women, such-and-so many palaces, or even reigned over a huge or not so huge country. Or so much land, so many farms, so many slaves, so many serfs (so many souls, as they said in Russia).

  Then he received so much income.

  It’s only in the past century, quite recently, that we’ve talked in millions, only since most of the world’s currencies have become stable.

  What is a millionaire today? In what? In old francs? In new francs? In marks? In dollars? In pounds sterling? It ranges all the way from poverty to real riches. So-and-So earns so much per film. Before or after taxes? There too the amount can range from one to several digits. How many servants has he? But real dollar millionaires in the United States have only a housekeeper, while lira millionaires in Italy have a dozen and live in historic palaces.