It is difficult not to come away shocked from a conversation with Catherine Camus, daughter and executor of Nobel Prize winner Albert Camus (1913-1960). She has witnessed, directly or indirectly, some of the great intellectual upheavals of the 20th century and has treated several of its protagonists, although her father died when she was only 14 years old, “so as a writer I met him posthumously, but I was amazed Seeing the same person I knew in books, it didn’t change.”
Camus, a fully current myth, inspires the Camus Trobades, which were held until yesterday Sunday in the Menorcan town of Sant Lluís – where the writer’s grandmother, Catalina María Cardona, was born –, bringing together intellectuals and artists from both shores of the Mediterranean and have motivated your visit. For his daughter, who wanders around the island in vain looking for the location of the family home (“they only tell me legends”), the confrontation between Sartre and Camus was not due to ideological disagreements but to something much more pedestrian: the fact that that he refused to sleep with Simone de Beauvoir.
Catherine remembers “dad” – that’s what she always calls him – as someone “tender and severe, but always fair”, someone who “didn’t give us toys but useful things”, but who was “wonderful, he taught us to be free. I still am. It was impossible to lie to him. If he asked you, in response to any nonsense: ‘Did you do this?’, you had to answer yes,” she says, before a small group of journalists, in the gardens of a rural hotel in Sant Lluís.
Regarding the legendary Sartre-Camus rivalry, and the two models of intellectual that they embody, he says that “Sartre was very generous, he donated money to many causes, and he and Dad met and treated each other with sympathy at the beginning,” but he points out that the The problem was that “Sartre was totally manipulated by his partner, Simone de Beauvoir, who encouraged him to launch harsh criticisms against him out of spite, since dad did not want to sleep with Simone, who believed that you never get to know a real man.” if you haven’t gone to bed with him, so I used to pitch the proposal to interesting men I knew. In fact, when we saw her on TV with the Pope, we asked ourselves: ‘Hey, do you think it’s with him too?’” And he continues: “Robert Gallimard told me that, when he published The Fall – my dad’s favorite book because it shows our duality –, Sartre told him: ‘It’s a masterpiece,’ and the editor replied: ‘Tell him,’ but Sartre told him. He replied: ‘I can’t.’ What a dick, right?”
Are there any unpublished works by Camus yet to be published? “Yeah. I am working on the correspondence between my father and my mother, but we will only publish until the year 1945 because I have no desire for my brother and I to appear there as characters.”
It bothers him that some “forgettable author” calls Camus a colonialist: “My father had to leave Algeria because he wrote articles in the press about the misery in the region of Kabylia and against colonialism, his texts defended the poor and the Arabs, that left him without a job.”
Camus said “that the best of him came from his Spanish blood.” And, although he refused to ever visit a Spain ruled by Franco, he maintained a long romantic relationship with the Spanish actress María Casares. In fact, Catherine was in charge of publishing, last year, the correspondence between the two – a book that inspired the play that was seen at the end of the year at the Lliure with Jordi Boixaderas and Rosa Renom. “I only met María once my mother died. One day she had recklessly asked her mother about María and she answered me, after a brief silence: ‘She is like you, you are very similar.’ Actually, my mother loved María. Before she died, she told us: ‘Let you know that I don’t regret anything about your father, he was never mediocre.’ María Casares stayed with my father 75%, but 25% was for my mother. “They were both good people.”
He praises the debate that has taken place about Gaza in the Trobades Camus although “I have missed Israeli voices against Netanyahu, because more than half of Israelis are against this barbarity.” Delving into politics, he remembers that “my father was always for the European political project, clearly, for a united and federal Europe. But now we have to change the EU rules a little if we want it to work: the unanimity of the 27 is difficult to manage, with the Hungarian Viktor Orbán and other far-rightists governing some countries.”
Regarding the French political situation, he does not want to speculate on what his father would think but he does offer his personal opinion: “I agree with Sylvain Tesson that the Frenchman is someone who wakes up every morning in paradise but believes in hell, we have a lot of Good luck in France, but we don’t stop grumbling.” And he adds: “I really like Macron, he is very hated, as happens to those who are very intelligent. The alternatives are horrible: we have an extreme left with Melenchon, whom I have known for 50 years, when we were both active in the Socialist Party, and even then he only sought to destroy. And another horror is the extreme right led by the big cow (Le Pen),” he says softly, while he smokes his cigarette with a holder.
Hours after the conversation, at lunch, he wildly applauds Sílvia Pérez Cruz, one of the participants in the Trobades, who, after being moved to tears by the testimonies of Palestinian poets who talk about their dead friends, begins to sing. a cappella Miguel Ángel Moratinos, high representative of the UN for the Alliance of Civilizations and promoter of the days, emulates that of Palafrugell with some peasant songs from Burgundy.
