Gaudi Afternoon

by Barbara Wilson

  “Hi,” she said eagerly. “Cassandra, right?”

  “That’s right. And you’re Bree.”

  “I was just walking down the street and saw you through the window.” She gave me a sideways, flirtatious glance. “How fantastic to run into you!”

  “It’s the railway booking office,” I said. “I’m arranging my ticket to China.”

  “That’s so fantastic you’re going there. I’d love to go to China. Why don’t you take me along?”

  “Oh, I don’t think your grandmother would like that,” I answered, more sternly than gallantly.

  I wasn’t sure why I was so uncomfortable. Perhaps it was that around Bree dairy metaphors kept springing to mind. She was like a bowl of freshly whipped cream, a firm vanilla pudding, a pitcher of cold white milk. In contrast, I felt like a strip of beef jerky, or maybe just a hunk of barbecued tofu that someone had forgotten to put back in the refrigerator.

  I felt ancient at forty-six, and age made me awkward.

  “Oh, Gram couldn’t care less what I do. She’s cool. It’s my mother who made me come,” Bree explained. “Teresa suddenly got worried about Gram on her own in Eastern Europe. She talked me into skipping spring quarter with this bribe of seeing Europe and making sure nothing happened to my poor old grandmother. So this is what happens: I get to Paris, where I could easily have stayed the rest of the summer it was so fabulous, and Gladys is just fine and doesn’t even really want me around. I can barely keep up with her and now we’re going off to Romania.” Bree laughed in a manner that was meant to sound sophisticated, but was instead despairing. “To a geriatric spa!”

  “Well, you’ve got your camcorder. Nosferatu and all that.”

  “Yeah,” she sighed. “I’m sure it’s atmospheric as hell. But it was hard to leave my girlfriend in Berkeley. Not that we’re monogamous or anything.”

  Again the sideways look. I said nothing.

  “I’ll come straight to the point,” she said, then she dropped her voice nervously. “Are you a dyke? I personally just identify as queer, it doesn’t matter who I sleep with, I’m always queer.”

  In the world I’d grown up in and still moved in, especially when I traveled, bluntness was not a virtue and actions spoke more quietly than words.

  “Call me old-fashioned,” I murmured. “It still seems to matter to me who I sleep with. Some twisted Catholic thing, I would imagine.”

  The line had moved up somewhat during this exchange, but not fast enough. I wasn’t too worried about people overhearing. Even if they understood English they probably didn’t understand this kind.

  “Well, Gram is waiting,” Bree said, but as if she wanted me to stop her, and perhaps suggest a tryst in Mrs. Nagy’s flat. When I didn’t, she reluctantly began to move off. “She’s got a whole day of sightseeing planned, Castle Hill, the works. I’ll probably be a wreck by tonight, and then she’s got us on the train tomorrow morning at seven. Well, Cassandra, hope you don’t have to wait here too long. If you have any time later…”

  “I’m sorry,” I said quickly, and gave her an awkwardly maternal pat on the shoulder. “Enjoy your trip to Transylvania, and keep an eye on your grandmother. Gladys might surprise you.”

  Was it possible that I had been her age once, that I had once looked to older women for experience? But they could never have been as old as I felt now.

  I took my time getting over to Jack and Eva’s office. After leaving MÁV I refreshed myself with an espresso at one of the leafy outdoor cafés on Andrássy and then wandered through the side streets to the Jewish Museum and Synagogue. I had a nice kosher lunch at a small restaurant nearby, and continued reading Elias Canetti.

  One of the reasons I’m such a good traveler is that I’m endlessly interested in doing nothing much in particular. There were ten of us in my family, and babysitting and chores every spare minute. I missed parts of my childhood, and travel is, I sometimes think, an attempt to find the curiosity and joy that I sensed but seldom had time to explore growing up. On the other hand, travel could be, as my mother always tells the rest of my family, just an excuse to be a bum.

  The office was off Rákóczi út. It was in a nineteenth-century building with an elevator that didn’t function. I walked up four flights and knocked on the door with the small sign:

  O.K. Temporary Secretarial Services

  English and Hungarian receptionists, stenographers, and business secretaries

  Our motto: O.K.!

  Opal and Kálvin? Okay…

  “Cassandra!” said Jack from a cross-legged yoga position on the floor. “We’ve been waiting hours for you! Eva has gone out; she said she’d meet us at Gerbeaud’s at four.”

  The offices consisted of several small rooms. This one had a rug, a couple of chairs, some tables with typewriters, and a reception desk kitted out with a phone, a fax and a Macintosh computer. Through one doorway I could see a futon and another desk; another door, with KÁLVIN EVA on a brass plate, was closed. There seemed to be no one else around.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in an office, Miss Opal,” I said, crouching down beside her.

  “Oh, you know I’ve temped for years. Every Australian does.” Jack stretched out one of her long legs and put her head on her thigh. “I had a whole set of different clothes; I was good at taking shorthand, good at taking shit. After all, I was well-paid and it was temporary.”

  “But then you met Kálvin Eva and everything changed.”

  “It’s not what you think. Okay, so I’d never made it with a former Olympic athlete before. Okay, she’s cute and has that charming Zsa Zsa Gabor accent. But, believe it or not, there were ideals involved, feminist politics.”

  “And was there beer involved as well? Where did you meet her anyway?”

  “At the Fallen Angel.”

  “I’m not surprised.”

  Jack held her position. “She started talking to me about women’s desperate economic situation in the emerging democracies of Central and Eastern Europe. How women were losing everything: maternity leave, free childcare, the right to an abortion. How women were being betrayed by the same men with whom they’d worked to make the revolution. How women were the first to be laid off and the last to be hired. How it wasn’t enough just to talk about this problem, something had to be done.”

  “What about a temporary secretarial agency in Budapest that would only employ women!”

  “Exactly.”

  “A joint venture between an Australian who has excellent secretarial skills, and a former Olympic gymnast with connections. What about the financial incentives that many of the Eastern European countries are giving to foreign investors and jointly-owned businesses? It’s a great idea. You can’t miss!”

  Jack straightened herself suspiciously. “Have you been talking to Eva? How do you know all this?”

  “A Financial Times I found on the Central Line. And was Eva really in the Olympics?”

  “Montreal, 1976. But Nadia Comaneçi won everything.”

  Jack went into a headstand, slowly. “She said I didn’t have to put much money in, just my name on the papers would be sufficient…”

  Her cheeks were suffusing with pink. “It’s just getting going, this business. It has potential. I mean, I’m getting older. Was I just going to keep taking the tube to the City and home again, saving up money to go back to Bali? This is my chance, Cassandra.”

  I was roaming the small office. “So who’s criticizing?”

  Jack’s legs came down with a thump. “Just the part of me that wants to be in Bali,” she said sadly.

  Chapter Three

  JACK IS ONE OF those creamy-complexioned, blue-eyed, buxom Anglo-Saxons who look as if they would be most comfortable at the church fête in the village of Lower Crumble on Dent, yet who you will consistently find popping up all over the world, from Ouagadougou to Rawalpindi. Her parents had emigrated from Suffolk to Perth straight after the war so that her father could take a job as a geologist. He had died in a roc
k slide and Jack’s mother had brought the girl up in stifling Australian-British nostalgia, complete with tea cosies and toast racks. Jack had taken off at nineteen for London, after a course at secretarial school.

  She hadn’t told her mother that she was going by way of Borneo, or that she didn’t plan to return to Perth after the obligatory world tour to marry and raise a family. In that she was like many Australians I’d known: a year abroad turned into a lifetime. But Jack, though Australian to the core, also carried with her softer English traits. She might be a goddess-worshipping, knife-carrying, beer-guzzling adventurer, but she also, always, had to have her tea.

  Now we sat, in satiated luxury, outside Gerbeaud’s on Vörösmarty tér, one of the main city squares and certainly the most elegant, with a pot of black tea and the remains of two strudels, poppyseed and morello cherry.

  She finished telling me the sad story of Charis Freespirit, who had turned out to be married to someone in the men’s movement back in California, and then we turned to more cheerful topics.

  “I’d love to be going to China,” Jack said, and embroidered a long story I’d heard once before about a flight from hell that had taken her from Beijing to Harbin in the dead of winter. And then I told one about trying to get to Rangoon overland from Bangkok in a jeep that broke down in a jungle full of insurgents, and then, since we were on the subject of travels in that part of the world, Jack mentioned how long it had been since she’d been to Japan and had I ever heard the story of Yukiko, the punk rock star from Kyōto (I had), and then we reminisced about a winter we’d spent together many years before in Indonesia.

  “Where were you on your way to then? I’m trying to remember,” she said. “I know that I was heading back to Australia to see my mum. Come to think of it, it’s the last time I was back in Perth.”

  “But that was, that must have been at least fifteen years ago!”

  “Have we really known each other that long? My mum died, you know. And anyway, when’s the last time you were in the States?”

  “I get to California every year or two. My friend Lucy still keeps a bed for me in her attic in Oakland. I think she has my collection of Virago Travelers too. I was looking for The Gobi Desert recently, couldn’t find it anywhere. That’s the one where the three lady evangelists travel through China to spread the word of God with their portable harmonium.”

  “And what about your family?” Jack countered. “I bet you never see them.”

  “What’s to see? More nieces and nephews? I might have to start sending them presents if I met them. And I think there might be thirty or forty by now. Maybe fifty. My mother set a bad example.”

  “And what about your mum?”

  “I assume she’s still praying for me. You never know, someday it may make the difference between hell and purgatory.”

  Eva Kálvin came from the direction of the pedestrian street, Váci utca; she clattered quickly over the square on high heels. Her blond hair was in a French twist, and she wore small pearl earrings.

  “So tell me quick, Jack, what’s the story with Eva?”

  “All I know is that she’s divorced and says she’ll never get married again.”

  “You know what I’m talking about.”

  In England and in our native countries, both Jack and I knew better than to get intentionally entangled with straight women (there was always the occasional Charis Freespirit, who simply forgot to mention her husband until later) but we’d both found that in the rest of the world, where there were no rules or different rules about gender and sexuality, behavior and naming that behavior were often two separate things. Jack had had several amorous encounters with married women in North Africa (“I’m irresistibly drawn to veils”), and while I drew the line at married women after an extremely unfriendly interaction with the lovely Flora’s husband, a Bolivian policeman, I rarely said no to any woman—particularly spinster schoolteachers with a pedagogic bent—who wanted to flirt with me and teach me the names of body parts in her language.

  “I never got anywhere,” said Jack. “And of course now we’re in business together. But maybe you’ll have better luck. If you can get past Mrs. Nagy.”

  Eva kissed each of us enthusiastically several times and sat down just as a phone began to ring somewhere in the vicinity.

  “Excuse me,” she said and, opening her handbag, pulled out a cellular phone.

  “The new Hungary,” Jack remarked. “In a nutshell.”

  Eva’s conversation was soon over and she turned back to us.

  “You can’t imagine how well our secretarial service is doing, Cassandra. Already we have five women working for us speaking six languages among them. There hasn’t been anything like this in Budapest before; American and British businesses have told me that they’re very impressed with our staff. We’re helping many women. And, we’re going to get rich!”

  Hungary was moving more quickly than I’d guessed, if feminism and capitalism could already be combined in such an unabashedly exuberant manner. It had taken Western feminists almost two decades to get through the anti-hierarchical, anti-financial-success stage. Though I suppose you could say the Hungarians had already done the collectivity thing.

  “And of course they all love Jacqueline. They wish she was always available. But I save her for the top clients.”

  “But Jack doesn’t speak any languages!” I said.

  My friend looked disdainfully at me. “Well, I’ve never studied them, like you have,” she said. “I speak them—sympathetically.”

  “She’s even picked up Hungarian, in only two months,” said Eva.

  “Hungarian’s impossible,” I said. “It’s like Finnish. It doesn’t look like anything else.”

  “The secret is not to look,” said Jack. “Not to use your left brain.”

  I thought back to various travels with Jack; she always had been adept at getting herself from place to place and making herself understood. I also recalled an impressive intervention on her part in Java when I seemed to be on the verge of purchasing a very large live tortoise rather than a colorful sarong.

  “I suppose it’s possible,” I allowed. “Hungarian is based on root words. It’s an agglutinating language.”

  “My point exactly,” said Jack.

  “I’ve heard that you’re a translator, Cassandra,” said Eva. “What languages do you speak?”

  “The Romance languages.” I smiled at her.

  Jack agreed. “Romance is her specialty.”

  “Spanish, French, Italian,” I said. “A smattering of Icelandic, Arabic and Tagalog. Serviceable German, some Mandarin, and Russian.”

  “We all had to learn Russian at school,” said Eva. “I can’t bear to speak it now. German I don’t mind—we look forward to working with more German clients. But I would never speak it for pleasure.”

  “In that case, I suggest we stick to English.” I looked inquiringly at Jack. “Unless you’d rather go on with your Hungarian, my dear?”

  The Polski Fiat took us across the Danube from Pest to Buda. The two cities weren’t connected by bridges across the river until the last century. Buda was much older, a medieval fortress on a hill that during the Turkish occupation had turned into a city of minarets and domes. Although that skyline was gone, the Hotel Gellért and its adjoining baths, nestled at the foot of Gellért Hill, echoed the Turkish past. The buildings were constructed in the early part of the century in an art nouveau Ottoman style that reminded me of glorious silent science fiction films. Mad scientists and space voyagers could have easily been at home in the mosque-like, round-roofed towers of the baths, which looked as if they would slide open at any moment to launch a homemade rocket to another planet.

  The main entrance to the baths led to more Mozarabic elegance: a vaulted ceiling with skylights, a tiled floor, marble pilasters and patterned mosaic walls, potted palms and white marble copies of Greco-Roman statues, all women in uplifted poses. We bought our tickets to the thermal baths and swimming pool and went
into the women’s dressing room, where we were each given a cubicle, a white muslin wrap and a plastic cap.

  The air here had a secret mineral smell, like dirt, like metal. After disrobing, Jack, Eva and I met up in a mosaic and marble room with two sunken thermal pools. The arched ceiling had a skylight of amber glass, the tiled walls were aqua blue. Naked, we dropped into the warm, buoyant water that came bubbling up from the interior of the earth.

  The Romans were the first to tap into the waters of Gellért Hill, but it was the Turks with their languorous notions of the hammam who brought the bath to its steamy perfection. I could never be in an establishment like this without thinking of Ingres’s The Turkish Bath, which I had first seen, printed in black on a clear-plastic shower curtain, at the apartment of my high-school Spanish teacher, Dede Paulsen, the first woman I was ever in love with. Such was my cultural background that I never realized the image was taken from a famous painting (when I saw it years later in the Louvre I had to stop myself from exclaiming, “Dede’s shower curtain!”). But such are also the wonderful powers of the adolescent erotic imagination that from this bathroom artifact I constructed an entire fantasy of gorgeously plump nude women lounging around a tiled sunken bath in various attitudes of sloe-eyed indolence. Ignorant of Ingres’s orientalizing male voyeurism I could happily conjure up a Turkish bath cum harem where naked women soaped and steamed in close proximity.

  All bathhouses had a homoerotic element; for men it was overtly sexualized, for women subtly. In the Turkish harems the odalisques spent hours soaking and scrubbing, being massaged and pumiced. They hennaed the hair on their heads and removed every strand of it elsewhere with harsh depilatories. The enforced interiority of their lives, the sumptuous idleness bred sensuous addictions to opium, to rich food and to each other. The women in the harems were slaves and concubines; they fought for position, they intrigued, they poisoned, smothered and drowned each other.