by Tim Parks
But now I am interrupted by an Italian voice that asks: What are you reading?
For it has to be said that I am very far from being alone on the back seat of this coach. Indeed, if one could be alone, or even hope to be alone, hope that other people would leave one alone, in a modern coach then I would not hate them quite so much, since perhaps what I hate most about coaches is that they imply groups, and one’s forced or presumed participation in a group for a given period of time, in the way that, for example, buses or trains or even aeroplanes do not imply such scenarios, since in those cases everybody buys their tickets separately and separately minds their own separate business. Yes, coaches, I understand now, make me think of groups and the tendency groups have to operate at the level of the lowest, and perhaps not even common, denominator, and what I’m thinking of I suppose is parties of people singing together all in the same state of mind, a church outing perhaps, or old people embarking on package tours to pass the time, or adolescents on the way to support a football team, and, in general, I’m thinking of all the contemporary pieties of getting people together and moving them off in one direction or another to have fun together, or to edify themselves, or to show solidarity to some underprivileged minority and everybody, as I said, being of the same mind and of one intent, every individual possessed by the spirit of the group, which is the very spirit apparently of humanity, and indeed of that Europe, come to think of it, to which this group is now hurtling off to appeal. Whereas if I recall correctly, and it was from a book she once made me read or rather re-read, for she was always making me read books in the hope that 1 might recover my vocation, might truly become that person, that man (this was important), I had once shown promise of becoming — if I recall correctly, then the first mention of Europe as a geographical entity (was it Theocritus?) referred only to the Peloponnese, and only in order to distinguish the Peloponnese from Asia, only to demonstrate that the small peninsula had not been swallowed up into the amorphous mass of an ever-invasive Asia. Or so I recall, rightly, or perhaps wrongly, from a book she made me read, re-read, in her insistent and one must suppose laudable attempt to have me recover my vocation, to have me become, perhaps this was the nub, somebody she could respect. It was a claim to distinction, Europe, as I recall.
In any event, I am far from alone, here on the back seat, which is to say that on my right, trapped between myself and the window, I have a rather plain young woman with somehow swollen lips who has been chattering intermittently with the two girls in the seat in front of us and, ignoring myself, with the girl, over made-up, to my left, who is dead in the centre of the coach’s, one has to confess, comfortable big back seat, while to her left sits the handsome Georg, a German of Polish extraction, who is exchanging occasional pleasantries with the girl to his left, trapped between himself and the window, and again with the boy and girl in the seat in front of them, one of whom, the girl, is standing up with one knee on her seat and one very long and attractive leg out in the corridor, holding forth absolutely non-stop, in Italian, as is to be expected of a young Italian, on a variety of entirely predictable topics, as for example, the quality of different makes of jeans, including the pair she has on (allowing Georg to examine her leg and plump crotch attentively); the impossibility of finding a place in one of the smaller university class- rooms when somebody ‘important’ (not myself) is lecturing; the credibility of astrology and numerology; the ‘stupendous’ sound system in a new discotheque recently opened in the small satellite town of Busto Arsizio; and the extraordinary behaviour, in love and out, of her cousin Paola, who studies law at the Cattolica and who, on being left by her boy-friend of long standing, got a friend to phone him in the middle of the night as though from a hospital to say that a girl with red hair (i.e. herself) had been found in a coma after a horrendous car crash, the only piece of identification found on her being a photo of a young man with a phone-number on the back, the boy-friend’s - all this to make him feel sorry for her and guilty about leaping her and to have him rush off to hospital imagining he would find her dying, whereas in fact what he, the ex-boy-friend, did was to call her parents, who, and particularly the mother, went almost out of their minds with grief before Paola came in through the front door in an advanced state of drunkenness.
How adolescent that is, I reflect, watching the girl’s animated face. And how attractive. You have always had a fatal attraction to adolescent behaviour, I tell myself. Most of your own behaviour, I tell myself, is irretrievably adolescent. And in the meantime this stream, indeed this torrent of juvenile and absolutely indiscriminating, but at least unpretentious chatter has, for the half an hour or so that we have been forcing our way through Milan’s cluttered thoroughfares, together of course with an occasional burst of communal song when a new voice takes over on the airwaves crooning without fail of love whether happy or unhappy - this chatter and the singing, sometimes choral, of insipid songs, has so far been offering an excellent cover for what I’m perfectly aware will be perceived as my misanthropic behaviour, sitting silent and slightly off-centre in the back seat of this coach, the only place left unoccupied on my late (studiedly late) arrival, my face buried in a book, an attitude which unfortunately legitimizes the innocent question of the girl in the seat in front.
What are you reading?
This girl must be kneeling on her seat, because her arms are resting quite naturally on the top of the backrest above my face and her rather strong chin is just above her linked hands, head cocked to one side in an expression of friendly enquiry and what the Italians call disponibilitä, meaning openness, willingness to listen and to help, amenability. And though she is perfectly aware, it seems to me, of this body language, this simple friendliness she is communicating, there could be no question of her having deliberately and carefully adopted it, which is exactly the opposite of so many adults, I reflect, who are often amazingly unaware of what they have indeed been meticulously scheming, as when she, I am bound to remember now, told you that though she loved you dearly she felt she needed a little breathing space on her own before making the kind of decisions that would upset the vie tranquille that she and her young daughter had been enjoying since her painful separation from her husband. And her face as she said this had a wonderful warm poignancy about it, yearning would be an appropriate word, an expression I still remember very clearly, as if gazing at a loved one through prison bars, or in fading twilight, with all the intimacy of a love that cannot be, but an expression that time would all too soon reveal as entirely false and hypocritical, knowing what she knew then, as so many of the expressions, I reflect, that you yourself have adopted with your one-time wife and indeed with all those people who at some time and for whatever reason have become important to you and whom at some point in your life you could not have done without, have been entirely false and hypocritical.
I am not reading, I tell the girl in front of me.
But you have a book.
I insist to the perhaps twenty- or twenty-one-year-old girl that though this is self-evident, the fact is that I am not reading the book which, admittedly, I am holding open in my hands.
Why not?
Already, during the course of this brief exchange, I am aware of smiling wryly and generally sending out the kind of friendly, apparently avuncular social messages which I know are expected of me. It’s as if I had indeed been reading the book, but had now chosen to say that I was not reading it in order to tease and prolong the conversation, rather than just giving the girl the title of the thing and having done. Indeed it would not greatly surprise me if before very long I weren’t telling this pleasant young studentessa some small sad half-truths about myself merely in order to appear, as they say, interesting.
I explain to her that I am not reading the novel I hold in my hands, because I already know it to be a tiresome thing written by a woman who can think of nothing better to do with her very considerable talent than prolong a weary dialectic which presents the authorities as always evil and wrong and he
r magical-realist, lesbian, ethnic-minority self and assorted revolutionary company as always good and right and engaged, what’s more, in a heroic battle where LIFE will one day triumph over the evils and violence of an uncomprehending establishment.
Again I smile, warmly, to show that I am perfectly aware that this fierce demolition will seem pompous and presumptuous and even fascist, whereas what I really feel is that my criticism, far from exaggerated, is, if anything, inadequate, since what needs to be said is that people who do nothing more than analyse the world in a way in which it has grown used to being analysed, offering their readers the illusion of participating in a movement that gives them a sense of moral superiority with regard to a society they have no intention of ceasing to subscribe to (as indeed why should they?) - people, whether writers or not, of this variety deserve nothing better than scorn and perhaps a good deal worse.
But it would be unwise to say this. It would be, I have discovered, and indeed it generally is, unwise to say almost any of the things one feels most moved to say. Unless you can somehow present them as a joke.
So why are you reading it? she asks me.
In a pantomime of patience I explain that, as I have already explained, I am not reading it.
But you’ve got it open.
It was given to me.
She looks at me with big young eyes, wondering if she can ask the question, and perhaps because we’re on a coach and hence all part of the same group supporting the same cause, my cause, she feels she can. Who by?
I tell her: Somebody who wanted me to read it.
Clearly she is being teased, and clearly she enjoys being teased. She bounces up and down on her knees, she is young, she smiles, she raises an eyebrow (endearingly bushy), she cocks her head to one side, smooth cheek for just a moment against the synthetic stiff blood-red of the upholstery. Immediately I’m thinking that if I don’t tell her who gave me this book, with all that the two words involved would imply, perhaps I’ll have more of a chance with this young student, a thought which equally immediately short-circuits to have me thinking, uncomfortably, of Georg and of her, so expert in the withholding of information, so that in the kind of reflex that isn’t so much a decision as a small convulsion of self-recognition followed by fearful rejection (as of one throwing away a cigarette after the first puff), I decide I will tell her who gave me this miserable novel. I will tell her so as to save myself from all equivocation. Just as I open my mouth, she asks, Your girl-friend?
What?
Was it your girl-friend gave you the book?
She smiles warmly She is being bolder now. She has noticed - I saw her eyes - that I don’t wear a ring.! close my mouth, hesitating again, when our conversations if such we are to call it, is interrupted by an announcement. Vikram Griffiths is standing in the aisle of the coach up front by the driver and he has a microphone in his hand and his mongrel dog at his feet. His voice is harshly electronically deep, and deeply Welsh: Welcome to y’all! he begins, benvenuti, bienvenus, wilkommen, croeso, good t’see ya!
CHAPTER TWO
When Vikram Griffiths begins to speak, the girl in the seat in front of me, whose great brown eyes are of course like those of a million other Italian girls, not to mention Spanish and Greek and doubtless other races too, by which I mean to say, unique, splendid, eminently replaceable, swivels on her seat to pay attention, and what I’m telling myself now, slightly right of centre in the back seat of this packed coach, assailed by Vikram Griffiths’ efficiently amplified, demotic voice, what I’m telling myself is that I truly am in this now, in this coach I mean, like it or not, for twelve hours and then the two nights in Strasbourg and then twelve hours in the coach again on the way back, not to mention the danger that it could well be more than twelve hours, depending on traffic and circumstances beyond your control, since of course the moment you set out on the road with other people, the moment you undertake a trip together in a coach, the moment you commit yourself to some joint project, some communal enterprise, circumstances are always well and truly beyond your control.
I’m in. Deeply, inescapably in. We’ve already left Milan behind, we’re on the autostrada, speeding along, a solid group of us, so that, as when they bolt the doors on the plane and it moves out onto the runway, there can be no more getting out now before the other end, no more splitting us up into separate sovereign urges and desires. You’re in it now, I tell myself, with all these young students, girls for the most part, to either side and in front, beautiful and plain, and Georg next-but-one to my left, plus your other colleagues, liked and disliked, but mostly the latter, from France and Germany and Spain and Greece and God bless us even Ireland, and with her in the third seat from the front, with her dark brown hair and dark brown document-case that she just took down from the overhead rack, the same case where she used to keep such things as her train timetable and the rubbers we used and the photographs we took of ourselves with the time-delay, and then miscellaneous memorabilia of the air-ticket and hotel-bill variety, the receipts for meals I always had to be careful not to put in my own pockets, and my letters of course, my many many letters, some of them ten or even twenty pages long, some of them no more than fragments of poor poetry I had written, or better poetry I had copied out for her but which she never recognized, and later an aerosol can -of ammonia spray, as is the way with things that are intense and have to change, things that start well but can’t stand still and end badly, very badly, though now no doubt she will have nothing more in there than notepaper for the reflections she is gathering and will be using this trip to gather further, for her research into a possible constitution for a United Europe which is part of a competition she has enrolled in to win a Euro scholarship for a year’s work and study in Brussels, or so I heard from my daughter, a move that she sees as the indispensable next step in her career, for she still thinks of life in terms of career and self-realization, she is still at that stage.
Yes, I am in this now, with all the singing and the toilet stops and the making friends and the exchanging of addresses and the boredom and doubtless the confabulation as some try to grab more power and responsibility in our little group and others (myself) to refuse it, and the enormous waste of time it will no doubt be going through the bureaucratic procedure of presenting our petition to a European Parliament whose exact functions and powers and suffrage none of us understands, except perhaps her, perhaps the Avvocato Malerba, perhaps Vikram, and on the way back we will all have to discuss the importance of what we have achieved and mythologize it and tell ourselves we did well to come and that now we are safer, meaning that we can feel more secure that we will continue to receive our salaries for some time to come.
Yes, I am caught now, I am not in my small flat where the answering machine vets all the calls and where no photograph, ornament, poster or object of any intimacy whatever dates back before 1993, not in my own private space so dear to me and so dull, but here in the thrall of forty or fifty people. You are caught, I tell myself, trapped. And despite my late arrival, due mainly to a half-hour spent in a café on Corso Sempione debating all the reasons for avoiding this ridiculous excursion (without ever for one moment believing I would avoid it), despite my late arrival and all my misgivings, I must say that the thought that I really am in this now is beginning to get me rather excited, it’s cheering me up, so that already I am considering indulging in a little fling, an avventura as the Italians say, with one, with any one for heaven’s sake (for they are all the same to me - how could it be otherwise?) of these young women. You should have an adventure, I tell myself, looking around at the fresh young students, a little fling, in full visibility of everybody, flagrant. By which of course I mean in full and flagrant visibility of her. As if such a gesture could in any way upset her! As if she would care, which I know perfectly well she wouldn’t. On the contrary she would probably say, if we were to speak to each other at all on this trip, which frankly I doubt, she would probably say how pleased she was that I was having a healthy sex li
fe, a notion this, whatever it might mean, that she always advocated and indeed used, as a precept, to excuse almost any behaviour, and by any behaviour what I mean I suppose is betrayal, which is surely the most terrible behaviour of all, and the most inevitable it seems sometimes. And this reminds me now how, with her historical studies, so similar to my own, and her desire for sophistication, or at least to be seen to be sophisticated, she liked to say that European hegemony in the world began with a woman’s betrayal, and she meant Helen, Helen’s betrayal, which prompted the Achaean triumph and the shift of civilization’s centre from east to west, Troy to Athens and thence of course further west to her beloved Paris. Another protagonist. Every epic adventure (I remember her saying this and myself thinking how intelligent she was and how well-read and articulate), every epic adventure turned on a woman’s betrayal, of father, family, or husband - Medea, Antigone, Ariadne - and she would laugh her laugh, her liquid French laugh, and whenever history’s wheel began to move, she said, it was betrayal set it in motion - Hitler’s of Stalin, De Gaulle’s of Britain - and she said that so long as we saw our affair in the wider world perspective I need never worry about feeling guilty or justifying myself.
