When I Was Old Read Free Page B

…
    Explain what? There is nothing to explain.
Sunday, 10 July 1960
    In a few minutes, as I do every Sunday morning, I’ll be going with the children to get the papers at the Lausanne station, and then for a few minutes’ walk on the shore of the lake at Ouchy. Tradition. The house is full of small traditions. I think I’m the one who unintentionally inculcates them in the children. Isn’t that a bit like a guardrail or the banisters on a stairway?
    It’s possible that I’m repeating myself – I hate to reread. Even, and above all, my novels. Revising them is torture. And when a film is made from one of my books, if producer or director wants my advice, I hardly can recognize the story he’s talking about. I have to ask my wife to reread the book for me and then to remind me of this or that detail.
    That’s not at all what I wanted to jot down before going out. It was only a sentence that struck me in my bath and which will probably come back to me at the last moment. Yesterday, three people to question me, each one following his own notion, which I’m unaware of. For example, the English journalist (a former lawyer) observed me and asked questions for two or three days and will continue
for an indeterminate number of days without my being able to guess what she has in mind, the point of view she’s taking. It’s a little like stretching out on an operating table without knowing what operation the surgeon is going to perform. An unpleasant thought.
    S., himself a novelist, a biographer, has come with a definite idea, a character he has already decided on, and I sense that he is determined for me to be this character. He scales down reality to a point where it coincides with his point of view. He could just as well write his book or his essay (?) in Paris without having met me.
    Stranger still was the one sandwiched between these two sessions of questioning. A criminologist, a professor in the Law Faculty of Poitiers, a graphologist to boot, he came to interview me for …
L’Echo de la Mode
. Each time I say something he declares:
    ‘That’s not for our audience …’
    What is for his audience? A few picturesque touches, carefully arranged, a few anecdotes, also arranged.
    But he announces that he will be
also
writing for a law or criminology review.
    All this is a bit confused and reminds me of the Festival at Cannes, where from morning to night I shook hands, answered questions, without knowing any more who was who or what he was doing there.
    There are those, I know it from friends who have been in my position, whom this reassures, to whom this idea gives a sense of their importance. Not I. On the contrary. If I had complexes, and I can be sure I don’t, this would give me an inferiority complex.
    Good! I’m getting to my little idea from the bathtub. Last night, showing pictures to the Englishwoman (this gives me a subject, a connection, instead of talking in a void), I stumbled on a pile of photos I took in Africa, while passing through the Belgian Congo, from the Sudan to Brazzaville, around 1932 or 1933. Different races, different tribes, at different levels of evolution. At the time, I wrote several articles entitled ‘The Negro’s Hour’ (published in the magazine
Voilà
, which no longer exists).
    I got them out of the files. But will I have the courage to reread them? At that period, Paris was covered with posters for a film,
Africa Speaks
. It was made by the French government to encourage enlistments in colonial troops.
    (Yesterday I observed to my Englishwoman that Kipling, on a literary level, is a victim of political evolution. The English are distressed when you mention him. It reminds them of their pride in the Victorian era, a state of mind for which they have both nostalgia and a sense of sin.)
    This morning the radio announces serious trouble in the Congo. The blacks are disarming white officers and throwing them in prison. The Belgians who live there are fleeing …
    Troubles in