by Tim Parks
There was a brief silence.
The Bundesbank included, I added.
Shall we sit here? Nicoletta asked. I owe you five thousand three hundred lire. Oh forget it, the Avvocato Malerba said. No, please. But I insist. Grazie, Nicoletta said, blushing, it’s very kind of you. At which the Avvocato Malerba looked up and, smiling at me from his somehow dusty but boyish cheeks, said, Just take it as a demonstration that not everybody is obsessed by the exercise of personal power, a statement which, on the contrary, I could have shown, only demonstrated the truth of what I had said, in that it served most perfectly to make him look gracious and myself foolish, and all the more so when, on turning round, I realized that she would not have heard at all. She had crossed the whole cafeteria since I last saw her and was now leaning over Georg, deep in confabulation.
CHAPTER FIVE
Robin Williams has just read Carpe Diem to his Dead Poets Society. How everything leads back. Does he have daughters? Lear asked, of anybody remotely unhappy And even this unexpected analogy, Lear, Cordelia, leads me back through my own daughter’s fantasticated lesbianism to her. She is the centre, of the world and this trip a vortex, the mind channelled, like the chase of traffic through this interminable tunnel beneath the Alps, in that one direction, her slender video-lit neck just a few paces further forward, but ever distant despite the headlong flight of this coach, these thoughts, never to be touched again, or licked, or when your nail trailed the knuckles of her spine. Everything is past, I tell myself, and yet because of that more present than ever. As if the only paradise one might ever set out to explore were paradise lost.
And it is this, sitting here on the third seat from the back in this luxury coach racing on a slight downward slope beneath incalculable tons of rock through one of those engineering feats which have given us the miracle, so called, of rapid communications, it is this that I cannot understand: how presently omnivorous that past is, how Robin Williams quoting Horace in an Alpine tunnel immediately recalls Robin Williams speaking a demotic DJ Italian in Buon Giorno Vietnam when my wife was away at the sea with Suzanne and she on the red couch at home in only a silk nightdress admiring the dubbing, saying how clever it was to have matched such rapid speaking and punning, how clever dubbing was in general, putting words in people’s mouths, annihilating differences, annihilating barriers - she would love, she said, to get a job in dubbing - and I can smell the sweet perfume in her hair fallen slantwise as she absently preens, I can sense the neatness of her posture sitting cross-legged, telling me in French that this Italian dubbing of American English was so good. And for all my adoration, I tell myself now, for all her complacency, the barriers between ourselves were such, though I didn’t know it then, as no polyglot facility or engineering prowess could ever resolve. The words, as now on the screen, were one thing, but the gestures came from quite another language: two cultures indifferently superimposed for the convenience of apparent comprehension, the luxury of immediate entertainment.
Cars overtake in the tunnel. There are red lights and glare. To the right, yellow neon every so many metres spangles on the curved plastic of our modern coach window, flashes chemically over the deep red upholstery, altering the colours on the screen, as if through fading and intensifying filters. And watching Doris Rohr (who always votes against strike action, who openly says she would be willing to accept less money so long as she can keep her job, her precious job, she whose husband is a surgeon, she who has to decide which of her holiday homes to spend the long summer break in), watching this German woman pensively unwrapping another of her expensive chocolates in the insistent on-off of a dark under-ground brightness, her fingertips plucking unseeing at coloured foil, her eyes happily fascinated by Robin Williams and by the sort of contemporary pieties these films purvey and that we all identify with in opposition to a status quo which miraculously no cinema-goer is ever part of, yes, watching solid, square-mouthed, brick-lipsticked Doris, it occurs to me, sitting on the third seat from the back of this coach full of, to use a Colinism, shaggable young women, it occurs to me I was saying, what an incredibly foolish philosophy the expression carpe diem enshrines.
Carpe diem, yes, yes, seize the day, seize it, now, and now, and now, then to be marooned there in those few precious hours, days, months, whatever, it doesn’t matter, of love, of passion, marooned for all the waste sad time that must stretch after, not shovelling shit against the tide as my wife, would to keep the corpses at least enburied, our grave-clothes decent if nothing else, her impossible struggle to ripristinare, nor gracefully chasing about the mythical urn in the bliss of the moment anticipated - those routine or romantic relationships with intensity, with beauty - no, but waltzing, as I am waltzing, with the living dead, the memory trapped in the groove of an endlessly repeated pirouette pushed to the furthest extremes of vertigo, she and I here, she and I there and then (when the day was so fatally seized), she and I as we might have been, today now, side by side on this seat, in this coach at this moment, her head against my shoulder, now now and still now. Which is the worst waltz of all.
I hate myself for quoting Thucydides, for shouting at the Avvocato Malerba in the Chambersee Service Station. I hate myself for having come on this trip. My idea, when Vikram Griffiths placed his clipboard beneath my nose in the miserable and amorphous institutional space of the foreign lectors’ tutorial room - my idea, or rather the idea that so seductively presented itself, was that of showing myself in public again, no, showing myself to her again, of demonstrating that I wasn’t the least bit troubled by the sight of her or even by the sight of her confabulating together with Georg. I would show her, and myself - this must have been my idea - that these things did not touch me any more, because she had not after all, I told myself, had such a determining effect on my life. Quite the contrary. She had merely been the catalyst I needed to make a change in my life, merely the particular day I had chosen, at the last, to seize: Tuesday, though it might perfectly well have been Wednesday; her though it could equally have been Psycho-tottie or Bologna-tottie or Opera-tottie. Yes, I would come on this trip and be urbane and relaxed. That’s what I imagined. I would watch lights flash on and off in deep Alpine tunnels and the effect would not become an image of my obsession, pulsing, lurid, unflattering. For I had left obsession behind, I told myself, when I moved into Porta Ticinese number 45, when I changed my whole music collection, when I bought a new wallet, a new briefcase, a new coat.
So I would come on this trip and I would be sensible and witty and just slightly but not overly ironic when my colleagues talked of community spirit and group identity, when they made a great show of their knowledge of the legal niceties of Italian Law and European Law, of the way in which we have been victimized and of our ultimately inevitable victory. I would be friendly, savvy, even helpful. And at the end I would return home unscathed, though perhaps with a fresh tottie or two to place on the old back-burner, as Colin puts it, one or two new phone numbers to inscribe in the old carnet. I would have been near her - this was my idea - for three days, and nothing out of the ordinary would have passed between us, nothing would have happened, and this in itself would be the beginning of the happy ending I hoped for.
But I wasn’t ready for it. And had I been ready, it would never have occurred to me to do it, I wouldn’t have needed it. Had I been ready, I would have appreciated that this was not what I hoped for at all, this prosaic, sensibly cheerful fellow seeing through the world with a sort of mild, devil may-care indulgence. I would have known that what I hoped for, what I still hope for, against all the good sense in the world, was, is, some impossible turning back of the clock, not so much a softening on her part, but on mine, on mine, since she has never forbidden me to speak to her, she has never said it was impossible. On the contrary, the last time we met she said she hoped one day it might be possible again, she said one day I might see things as she did.
But most of all, as it turns out, I wasn’t ready for the train of thought that begins now as Vikram Griffit
hs, who despite the film has been walking up and down the aisle, his mongrel trotting at his heel, continuing his never-ending parleyings with all and sundry, perhaps in search of the notorious spy — as Vikram Griffiths leans over me, his breath full of whisky, his clothes of dog, and, nodding to the video screen, suddenly pale as the coach shoots out of the tunnel into a world of white mist and drizzle amid the great looming shapes the Alps are, frozen in the contortion of that last orogeny, majestic and broken - leans over, clears his throat and says low, so as not to be heard by Doris, What do you think, boyo?
This business about a meeting this evening?
No. The shagplan, man! He grins, fingers in his dark sideburns. The film! he explains. Don’t tell me you hadn’t realized why I chose it? Fuckin’ toss in itself of course, but gets the girlies in the right old mood, you know. Love thy teacher. Thy Teachers. Carp the old diem. Can’t get more fuckin’ appropriate than that, can you? Without writing ‘shag me’ up all over the screen.
My Welsh colleague with the Indian skin puts his arm round my shoulder with what is now an extraordinary assumption of complicity, an avuncular matiness, as if to force me to declare myself in some way. The dog thrusts his snout between the seat and the underside of my knee.
Can you? he insists.
At random I agree, I laugh half-heartedly, I ask, Got anything lined up?
But he’s already saying, I don’t mind yours either. Lovely little girlie. And he nods back to Nicoletta.
Who I now realize I have forgotten. Astonishingly, in the space of only ten minutes of having her sitting behind me rather than in front, I have forgotten about Nicoletta, her little glow-coloured purse and sweet gratefulness, clean forgotten, as they say the way I am so often forgetting the names of my tottie, so that sometimes someone you supposedly made love to only a day or so before, Bologna-tottie for example, will call you on the phone and you simply cannot remember the name. Or worse still, you can’t remember which of two or three names. You know it’s Bologna-tottie, but you can’t remember whether Bologna-tottie is Francesca or Marta or Valeria, and for a moment you’re desperately flustered, searching for the name, before recalling with a sigh of relief that so long as you don’t care, it is perfectly possible to carry on not only a conversation but an entire relationship, or avventura as she always used to call them, without ever using the caress a woman’s name is. Except that this in turn only reminds you that her name on the contrary, her Christian name her surname her second name her daughter’s name her home phone number her work phone number her address her bra-size her birthday her saint’s day her daughter’s birthday her necklaces her earrings her bracelets her brooches her ankle-bracelets her shoe-size her complete wardrobe her favourite drinks pastas meats and sweets her brands of perfume of deodorant of cigarettes of tampons of chewing gum, and a thousand other details are things you will neper be permitted to forget. You will never be permitted to forget them. So that on more than one occasion, having got the phone down on some nameless tot tie, I have found myself dialling her number, automatically, without even being aware of it. 045, it begins, it began, for Verona, for my age. Then I stop.
Nice little girlie, my colleague is saying. Sneaky Niki.
Turning my head for a moment I see that the charming and charmingly forgotten Nicoletta is having to lean, because of Vikram’s balding head, over to the middle of the seat behind me, in order to see, on the video screen four places up, a cluster of boys who, under the influence of their charismatic schoolmaster, are now, somewhat improbably, reciting Wordsworth in a cave by torchlight. The world is too much with us late and soon, these Americans read, badly, and in Italian to boot: Il mondo é troppo presente….
Bit young for me though, Vikram laughs. And he whispers: Perhaps I'll take a poke at old Doris. Because another thing about Vikram Griffiths is that he never misses an opportunity to remind you that his preference is for older women, even fifty- and sixty-year-olds, and this is part again of his wilful outlandishness, his determined declaration of difference, in all its possible forms (the whisky flask! the red cravat!), and simultaneous demand for acceptance. He is different in order to crave acceptance, I tell myself. As if he had got himself born half-Indian in Wales on purpose. And in the early fifties at that. Vikram Griffiths, I tell myself, as he leans over me to make a pantomime show of squinting down Doris’s cleavage, has made a destiny out of circumstance, has multiplied and magnified his separateness a thousandfold, the better to demand that we accept him. Even tossing in a shabby mongrel dog to the bargain. An ugly dog. A smelly dog. Named after a Welsh poet. Worth a squeeze, Vikram laughs, his arm round me, fingers of his other hand fidgeting in his dog’s prosaic ears, and all at once I appreciate that I find all this endearing, I find it attractive, and sad, as if, far from having put one over on me by getting me to come on this questionable trip and by taking these little liberties of complicity - the arm round the shoulders, the innuendos, etc. - he were himself in danger somehow, vulnerable, in need of help. He cares so much about keeping this dull job, I tell myself, about leading the boys to victory, about being our misfit, alternative leader, whom we must love. It’s touching.
Pouting his lips in a kiss,Vikram is saying: Anything to do a proper lady a favour, boyo. He taps his nose. Especially if she’s a frau.
The only problem, Vikram, I warn - and how witty can be sometimes! - is that a delicate personal kindness like that, shown towards one of our Teutonic colleagues, might be mistaken for merely another manifestation of Euro-solidarity. You know? More political correctness - Celt to Kraut - than the gesture of a sensitive, passionate man.
Ah, yes, the ambiguity of the Euro-shag! Vikram nods his sideburns, apparently pleased to be called a Celt, while on the screen a curiously sexless Robin Williams expounds to his eager class on the theme of living one’s life to the full. I might just have to toss the old sou’wester at someone else’s door then, he laughs. And then he says her name. He might shag her, he says.
Go for it, I immediately tell him.
Y’see, what I fancy there, he says, in his interminable search for intimacy, his low voice that is never low enough (and there is a positive gale of whisky on his breath), what I fancy about that, is the razzled, last-orders look, y’know, the mauve lipstick and the skirts and stockings and shoes. The gear. Very French.
Give her hell, I tell him. My voice is flat. Quickly I say: By the way, I hope you’ve got it all organized for tomorrow? I mean, who we meet, what we say? The great campaign. Treaty of Strasbourg.
Right enough, he laughs. Then amazingly, and with that awesome remorselessness with which things can go wrong sometimes (as when, at billiards, the white shoots unerringly off three cushions into the centre pocket, doesn’t creep or slither down like the balls you’ve aimed, but slams straight home, as if nothing could be more meant, at some metaphysical level, than the unfortunate coincidence) - amazingly Vikram Griffiths announces, Oh yes, when it comes to campaigns, fuckin’ Napoleon Bonyfarts got nothing on this boyo. This boyo just rolls on from one war to the next. I’d’ve stuck the old Duke’s mercenaries right back in their Wellington boots.
And Vikram goes on then, after the brief interruption of a feminine cheer when Robin Williams invites his students to tear pages out of the books they or their parents have paid good money for, to explain the details: the Welsh MEP who will meet us and prepare us for our meeting with the Petitions Commission; then the presentation itself; then …
But I’m lost, I’m suspended between the chattering video screen and Vikram ‘s now earnest Welsh rhythms in a world where, quite apart from the subsiding ripples of pain that fanned out from the word ‘razzled’, and the vaguer, deeper disquiet generated by the fact that people don’t know about us, to the extent that this man can merrily talk about having a poke at the woman who has meant most to me in my life, apart from all that I’m suddenly riveted by the recollection of the last time Napoleon Bonaparte crossed my path, a recollection of such absurd and tangled complexity, suc
h abject consequence, that I find it remarkable that my mind can hold it all together as a single entity, a single feeling, can say to itself, Ah, the Napoleon thing. For this anecdote, this little - no, not little, this personal - horror story, which I immediately understand I am doomed to go picking over for at least the next hour, like a ghoul over his own carrion, is the kind of improbable agglomeration of negative material that would seem to crave just one nice international word to sum it up and get it out of the way as soon as possible; the way there are convenient words like Inquisition or holocaust or pogrom which sum up whole epics of human awfulness so that they can be got out of the way with the greatest rapidity, buried forever in the immense sludge of world wide buzz^words and brand names - global warming and Gor-Tex, Coca-Cola and ethnic cleansing - or rather perhaps, assuming we have a certain level of culture, as the Italians like to say, we may exhume such words from time to time in well-written novels, serious films, to enjoy the pang, to check that it’s still there, to feel good that it is still there, as so we should, then to push them even deeper in the shit once again (in fact it’s rather unusual, now I come to think of it, that neither Black Spells Magic nor Dead Poets Society has aired the holocaust as yet, seen fit to set its compass by that convenient lodestone of human cruelty).
Oh for just one word for my Napoleonic anecdote! To be able to say, Chaeronea, the Terror, or Waterloo, and never to have to retell the story at all, never to have to think of it or through it at all. I hate having to think of things, having to go over things. The tyranny of memory But in the meantime, I suddenly tell myself, how remarkable, isn’t it, that while listening to Vikram Griffiths, now saying that it’s important the girlies are properly shown around the Parliament and hence able to feel that they have taken part, that they didn’t come allthis way for nothing, and while observing Doris Rohr, with whom I have no particular axe to grind, trying to find the space between one seat and the next to cross her thick legs in those kind of loose, too sharply creased woollen trousers (maroon) that in semiotic terms at least would surely permit her to use the men’s lavatory, how remarkable that while taking all this in, and at the same time allowing once again the complex misery triggered, absurdly, by the name Napoleon to explode in your mind, you are nevertheless still able to marvel at the extraordinariness of a brain that can do all this at once, a brain that can be totally obsessed and yet totally conscious of everything that is not obsession, locked into a tremendous, perhaps unforgivable alienation, yet aware too of a change in the hum of the coach, a change that must be the result of switching from a smooth road surface to a rough, with some of the American college boys in this pretentious and unlikely film being punished now for having left the school premises to read their Wordsworth and Whitman in the more romantic surroundings of that underground cave, perhaps grotto is the word, and Vikram doing his whisky-inspired imitation of a plummy Queen’s English to say: After which ceremony we are graciously invited to a jolly luncheon with the correspondent of the London Times. So that there is always Self, I tell myself, taking up pretty well the whole of the picture, but equally invariably there is always that little Brahminic bird sitting on one corner of the frame observing Self, observing everything around Self, and saying, To what end, to what end? And did you remember to pay the phone bill?
