by Tim Parks
Or so I thought. I thought psychology had established this business once and for all, this doing and observing oneself doing, and some very long time ago too. Until I challenged her about it. Until I said: But didn’t you even feel bad doing that, wasn’t there a small part of you watching as you did it, or, in this case, said it, a small part, detached, smiling wryly, sad?
And what I meant was, Will you offer me nothing I can cling on to, no small sop of remorse, of the variety I have always been willing to give to my wife, to help her, if only for my daughter’s sake, to believe that I’m not all bad, to help her feel the past was not a farce? Our marriage was worth something?
And she said no. There were no small parts of herself that saw or did or said anything different from what the main part of her did or said or saw. Because she was a happy, together, integrated person, she insisted, in French, though I remember it in English. And just at this very moment, she went on in an inappropriately husky voice, just at this moment what she was seeing was me, what she was doing was lying there spread out naked like melted butter on fresh baguette, and what she wanted to say was, Make love to me! Why bring up that whole ridiculous story again now that we’ve got over it, now that we are back together and with nobody between us at last on one side or the other. And she said: Who cares how this came about? The fact is, it’s what we wanted!
But I was holding a copy of a coffee-table book, entitled The Age of the Courtesan, and inside the lush front cover of this extremely lush and doubtless expensive exercise in historically aware prurience - as gifts of flowers also are never vulgar and always expensive, as telephone-calls from charming and assiduous suitors are always welcome and all the more so if they come long-distance and cost a great deal - inside the front cover, and in turquoise-blue fountain pen, someone had written, in Italian: The taste of triumph - how can I forget? And there were two tiny mistakes in the way this Italian was written, one of syntax and one of spelling, as if the whole thing had been spoken-written-thought in a foreign accent.
It’s not, I said, and as Vikram lurches off up the aisle ruffling girls’ hair as he goes, I find myself mouthing the words now towards her back, or rather towards that sliver of shoulder and freckled neck I can see as she sits entirely engrossed in the vicissitudes of the Dead Poets Society, quite oblivious, though occasionally passing some comment to her companion, who I can’t see, but I believe it must be Luis, a Spanish teacher of quiet, reflective, unreproachable character, and what she’s saying no doubt, as one of the romantic young Americans under the influence of the excellent Robin Williams now argues with his parents about wanting to become an actor rather than a lawyer, what she’s saying is how good the dubbing is - un vrai miracle de la communication, I remember her telling me - No, it’s not, I mouth - and I’m repeating the words by heart almost a year after the event -it’s not that he gave you the book, or even that he wrote that in it. It’s not that that upsets me.
She lies there on white sheets staring at me, so beautiful and beautifully, if only one could detach oneself.
Et alors?
It’s that Í said than They were my words.
At first she didn’t understand. I had to point to the dedication again. The taste of triumph. Then she didn’t remember. She did not remember. Whereas I will say this of my wife, that though she was/is criminally inattentive, would not notice if you were sitting in front of the TV weeping or had an adulterer’s grin all over your face as you washed the dishes, she did at least remember things, she would never forget a moment that had been precious. How else would she have known in what state things must be preserved?
She, on the other hand, had clean forgotten. As I have clean forgotten Nicoletta. The kind of cleanliness which really is a blessing.
The name Napoleon? I said. Doesn’t that mean anything to you? His letters to Josephine?
Because when I first managed to invent a fictitious conference and we spent three days together in her ex-husband’s second or third or fourth house that she still had the keys to in the mountains above Bolzano - and this was the first time we had been away together, the first time we had actually spent the night together - there was no running water. The pump had been turned off, there was no running water, and though I spent hours at it I couldn’t work out how to prime it. So she couldn’t take her bidet. She couldn’t soap and perfume herself as she so much liked to. And this worried her. She didn’t want to be putrid, she said, when I went down on her, as I invariably would. I invariably go down on women. I can’t understand men who don’t. Life, Colin says, is a muff mountain.
So it was then, in her husband’s somewhat twee ski and hunting retreat, surrounded by cuckoo clocks and stuffed birds and the like, that I told her what I was surprised that, as a Frenchwoman and indeed a student of the Revolution, she didn’t already know - about Napoleon’s letters, when, on return from military campaigns, he would command Josephine not to wash for at least three days before his arrival. He liked her gamey.
We laughed and hugged, thinking of raunchy Josephine, and it would be difficult to exaggerate, assuming I would ever wish to exaggerate, how much we were in love then, how much we believed we were in love then, which is the same thing, I imagine, how much, for example, we stared and stared into each other’s wide eyes, how immensely gratifying it all was. And drawing on the classical education that she was so determinedly re-galvanizing in me at that point in order to stimulate my sense of self-respect and of purpose, to give me back a vocation, a sense that I could do something and be somebody, I said that returning from Marengo, from Austerlitz, from Jena, from the Europe, in short, he imagined he was liberating and uniting, returning from his military campaigns and approaching Paris and the crowds and the celebrations, the wonderful thought of how Josephine wasn’t washing, of how her plump little puss was getting stickier and saltier, must have been, for the victorious Emperor Napoleon, the secret taste of his triumph.
We made love, our first whole night together, and though it was wild and wanton, I tell myself now, it was religious too. There was an awesome approach to the sacred, even a sense of becoming sacred oneself. It was she not me first used ‘ the word, first wept and laughed, so that it seemed and seems now here on this coach inconceivable to me that she could later have told my little expression, the secret taste of his triumph, to Georg, and told it without even remembering where it had come from, or, assuming she did remember, without respecting that moment’s apparent uniqueness, a moment never, we would have thought at the time, to be crassly repeated or dubbed or offered in ten translations (putting words in people’s mouths) to whoever happened to phone with a certain insistence, whoever happened to draw on the services of a national network of florists to send a tangible sign of his lust.
The taste of triumph, he had written, losing the classical reference suggested by the possessive, which was the remark’s only wit, the only thing that redeemed it from the merest male chauvinism. And then that How can I forget? Well, only too easily, it would appear. And I don’t even turn my head to envy his straight German nose and wryly wrinkled brow as he sits pacato behind, intent no doubt on a pasty-faced Robin Williams now contemplating the very bad news that the sensitive young student has killed himself over his Dead-Poets-induced actor-lawyer dilemma.
I don’t believe you, I shouted. And I don’t believe you could have gone to bed with someone just because they phoned so often and sent so many flowers and insisted so much you could not refuse. What does it mean, you couldn’t refuse?
I was shrieking at her on a hot afternoon in her Verona flat. I was shrieking. First she had said she was leaving me just when I had said I wanted to leave home, for her, I wanted to be with her. Because she wasn’t ready, she had said, to compromise the serenity of her young daughter in a new and perhaps risky menage. Then I had left home anyway, too betrayed and betraying to continue with the old facade. I told my wife everything and left home. Then she had come back to me. What, a month later? She was ready now, she said. She sai
d she just hadn’t wanted to be the one who made me leave my wife, surely that was understandable, but now that I had left her of course she wanted to be with me. She came back and we were happy. We were wildly happy. Perhaps two weeks. Until, in response to the merest enquiry about a receipt from a café in Várese found between the pages of the Michelet I had borrowed from her, she told me entirely gratuitously (for she could perfectly well have hidden it from me) that in fact the real reason why she had hesitated before, when I offered to leave my wife for her, was not, after all, because of her daughter’s psychological welfare, or her scruples vis-a-vis my making such a radical decision for her, but because she had just started a second affair. She was having a second affair, she told me. But that was over now, she said. Three weeks ago. So first she says no. Then she comes and says yes. Then she blows my world apart with this story, told entirely gratuitously, of a second affair conducted during our apparently perfect passion, during the passion where we had both stared into each other’s eyes and sworn we would love each other for ever. And now, after weeks of unhappiness and confusion, just when I finally seem to be getting over this, when I have finally accepted that, given the difficulties of her affair with me, it was not unreasonable for her to have tried to dilute that intensity with a casual avventura elsewhere, at this very point I discover The Age of the Courtesan, I discover the taste of triumph. His triumph. Which she hasn’t even tried to hide. You didn’t even try to hide it, I protested. What I mean is, I discover who she is. And that the whole thing meant- nothing at all. There had been no great passion.
Then, since it seemed at the time to be the only way to maintain any seriousness at all, any sacredness at all, I hit her. That was the second time. All your life, I reflect, you tell yourself you are a pacifist, you tell yourself you will never hit anyone, you never have hit anyone, you can’t imagine yourself hitting anyone. And then you do. When she said nothing had happened. You hit her, hard. But immediately you regret it. Immediately you tell yourself that you will never hit anyone again. And you feel this vow is stronger now. Because of the experience of the first time. Forewarned is forearmed, you tell yourself. I will never hit anyone again, you tell yourself. But then you do do it again. You find The Age of the Courtesan with that triumphant dedication, not even hidden, barely remembered, and you hit her again. I hit her across the face, very hard, I who never hit anybody, not even as a boy, and she cried and said, Again, hit me again, if it will get it out of your system. And I did hit her again, even harder, two or three times, across the cheeks and face, and I was appalled and begged forgiveness and hit her again and we made love, until she found she couldn't move her jaw properly, it clicked when she opened and closed her mouth, and I took her to the casualty ward at the hospital where we invented some story which they clearly didn’t believe about her catching her chin on one of those fold-up garage doors, and even while they were shaking their heads in disbelief, all I could think, repeating it over and over to myself, was that she was not the person you imagined her to be. I had fallen in love with someone and she had turned out to be someone else. And already Í was someone else. And even though that night was spent together and there was no suggestion that we were breaking up or that it was all over, still I understood now that everything was impossible, everything was past.
Dead Poets Society has reached its climax. Robin Williams has been fired by the reactionary school authorities who do not realize what a splendid life-force, despite the suicide, our million-dollar actor is. Robin agrees to go, with a certain nobility, with the wisdom of he who accepts the inevitable having carped his diem - the wisdom, in short, that I lack. But the boys in his class are challenged to show their solidarity, to show that their relationship with their teacher was a real one, of trust and complicity and mutual respect. And to do this, one by one and very bravely, they climb on top of their desks, a gesture of wilfully making oneself visible and vulnerable, for of course they have been forbidden to do so by some conservative schoolmaster eager to tidy away the whole unfortunate affair and get back to some serious teaching. The boys climb on top of their desks because they feel the need to show their love and support and affection for Robin and to show above all that the past was worth something, even if the future must now be different.
On six video screens speeding across a soon-to-be^united Europe a dozen American college boys stand up on their chairs and then on their desks, and I can see, sitting here on the third seat from the back, how this wonderfully kitsch scene, where we all enjoy feeling that we are on the right side and revelling in our sentiments, is actually drawing tears from many an eye in our group, and not least, amazingly, from the expensive, soft-contact-lensed eyes of Doris Rohr, whose own lessons one imagines must be the last word in the dusty formality of the day unseized, since teaching, for Doris, is merely a necessary and unfortunate corollary of having a position. Yes, a fat tear is rolling down through heavy powder on Doris’s cheek. She is weeping for Robin, as others once for Hecuba, and at this point I too get up from my seat. I can’t stand it any more.
I get up from my seat. But without standing on it. The coach is charging down those long curves that- lead away from the Alps. Swaying up from the red upholstery, I stumble a moment, for someone has left a bag in the passageway. Head down! a voice shouts, in Italian, We can’t see! I start to lurch forward up the carpeted passage, which has small rubber squares every pace or so. The light from outside comes in in chinks and slashes, since the curtains are drawn on the video, a muddled, fluid, mobile light. There’s the throb of the road beneath my feet and sudden gleams of reflected daylight glancing over the seat backs.
I draw level with her, level with her seat, where, as expected, she is utterly engrossed in watching how even the last and weakest of the boys has the courage to climb on his rickety desk and declare his sniffling allegiance to his crazy non-conformist schoolmaster, who, intercut with the brave boys, is beaming with poignancy, his pointed nose red with emotion. And she too is beaming. Her face, which always had a friendly, nibbly rabbitiness about it, is smoothed out and as if polished by the soft-hued light playing over her cheeks, and her eyes like Doris’s are shiny with the pleasures of vicarious emotion, I’m barely a foot away.
Then standing here, swaying in the passageway as this multi-facility air-conditioned coach abruptly changes lanes to overtake something slow, I experience an overwhelming sense of incongruity and inconsequentiality, of the unlikeliness and unloveliness of everything, both within my head and without. Here, only inches away, I tell myself, is the woman who more than any other gave you the illusion of love, who made you believe, no, who systematically undertook to make you believe, that you had taken a wrong turning in life, as she put it — your marriage - and that all you need do to feel whole and happy again was to take matters into your own hands, reverse that decision: Be yourself, I remember her saying; as she was also capable of saying such things as honesty is the best policy and make love not war, and even, on our return that night from the hospital, despite a heavily bandaged jaw, that there was no point in crying over spilt milk, an expression which exists, remarkably enough, not only in English, but in Italian and French as well, and even, I believe, in Georges German, and is equally ridiculous in all of these languages, since what would one ever cry over, I demanded of her then, what would one cry over if not spilt milk? I wanted to hit her again for saying that. For the stupidity of saying that. Would you cry over milk if it hadn’t been spilt? No, it’s over spilt milk you cry, people have always cried. Nor does there need to be any point in it at all. Whoever suggested there need be any point in crying, I tell myself now. And sensing, with this sudden and atrocious awareness of incongruity, literally inches from this woman who fills my thoughts incessantly and to whom I have nothing to say, sensing that I am only seconds from that awful brink where I might try once again to drum some meaning into absurdity, to force a resolution that cannot be - with the back of my hand, I mean - I tear myself away to stumble forward almost to the front
of the coach, where Vikram Griffiths is talking to the driver.
