by Tim Parks
Your breath smells of whisky, Plaster-cast-tottie says. She looks me in the eyes, pushing her page-boy fringe from her forehead. She stares glassily at me from too close, but with youth and sex written all over her.
It must be because I drank some whisky
Got any for us? she asks. She’s speaking Italian and she has that endearing boldness of people determined to be adults for the first time, more adults than an adult, which is to say adolescent. So I say, Non c’é piú - All gone - in the voice parents use with their tiny children.
Antipatico, she objects.
Oh, if the naughty girl likes whisky we can buy her some this evening, Colin says. Whisky is another favourite word.
And you? I ask Nicoletta, the other possessor of an equilibrio interiore. Tell us. Is Rifondazione Comunista the key?
Or have you got a dog? Colin asks.
Nicoletta isn’t flustered. She’s kneeling on her seat, but turning this way and that, a slim young body, though sadly flat-chested, so that if, it occurs to me with fatal inappropriateness, if I should score tonight with Nicoletta, I shall have to say that I like tiny breasts, love them, as I did once with a girl who became known as Psycho-tottie who was the first I had, or had me, after the disaster, by which I suppose I mean the Napoleonic episode. Yes, I swore to Psycho-tottie that I adored breasts that were no more than a sort of sad fried-egg with nipples, but she knew it wasn’t true, and I called her Psycho-tottie, telling Colin about her, because of a way she had of bursting into tears in the middle of love-making, something that I presumed had to do with a previous lover, but I felt it wiser not to enquire. The last thing you want, I told myself as she cried, is a story like your own.
I’m not interested in politics, Nicoletta says, though I do think it’s important to have ideals.
You betcha, Colin says.
Georg asks, Like?
Nicoletta puts the tip of a thumb between her teeth, smiles. She is such a little girl, but apparently so sensible, so genuine, with an imminent, immanent, motherliness about her.
Well, things like this trip, she says. Helping people in need, people who are being treated badly.
Dead right! Colin applauds but at the same time I feel warm breath against my ear, and Plaster-cast-tottie is whispering: Niki fancies you, did you know that? She fancies you. Though later it would be her, Plottie, who put her hand on my knee under the wooden table of the stube-style restaurant after I quoted Benjamin Constant in response to the sickening false modesty of Barnaby Hilson’s self-candidature to the position of lectors’ representative to the European Parliament: The mania of almost all men, I quoted, later on in the evening, leaning across the scrubbed top of the stube tisch — and it was my first contribution to a long discussion - The mania of almost all men is to appear greater than they are; the mania of all writers is to appear to be men of State. There was a short silence of incomprehension, before I added, since she clearly hadn’t recognized it, Benjamin Constant, De I’esprit de conquéte et de l'usurpation. Vikram Griffiths said in a loud Welsh voice, What if I propose our Jeremy as a candidate? and at the very same moment Plottie slipped her hand on to my knee and squeezed, definitely squeezed, but I was merely mortified to see that there was still no sign of recognition, or even gratitude, on her face.
CHAPTER SEVEN
It occurs to me now that memories act on me the way alcohol does, they excite and depress me, they inflame me, so that after all the talk in the coach about how only a sense of acting for a good cause could lead you to an equilibrio interiore, and after having to hear Georg agree with this and then add, along the same lines, that even when you weren’t acting for a good cause you should never act in contradiction of your beliefs, in a negative cause as it were, since moral contradiction led to mental turmoil, he said (speaking all the while in his measured pacato tones for the benefit of the young Veronica), and after remembering-, as inevitably I would then remember, how she insisted that on being invited to spend that first weekend in Várese she had not gone there in contradiction of all she had promised to me, no, since she had not gone there thinking to make love at all, but only, she said, to be close to someone the mother of whose child was in hospital, and hence the fact that they had made love in the end, she said, was just something natural, something that had arisen out of her vraie sympathie, the last piece, she said (and these were her very words), in that complex mosaic that friendship is, and thus not something she would, or could, ever feel guilty about -after all this, as I was saying, on the coach through the afternoon, this inflammatory cocktail of piety and platitudes spoken and remembered on top of a considerable amount of whisky, how could I be expected to conduct the phone-call I fell into shortly after checking into my room with anything like a clear head?
There was a mill of students around the reception desk when we climbed off the coach with Vikram Griffiths reading out names and handing out keys from an envelope while the sour proprietor, furious about the dog, tried to get people to be quiet enough for him to speak on the phone. Never seen a more tottie-rich environment, Colin laughed, and he had Monica’s bag over his shoulder and another girl’s too, because a gentleman would never allow a young lady to carry her luggage, he said, and he insisted on delivering the bags right to their rooms: I shall not let a lady carry a bag in my presence, he announced, while both girls were fighting, pretending to fight, to grab their things off him and he was shoving his way through the others with one pink and one neon-green backpack held high above his head, when Vikram called out my name, then called it again when apparently I hadn’t answered the first time, and he told me I was to share room 119 with the Avvocato Malerba. We were the only two who hadn’t settled on a partner.
I took the key and walked down the linoleum corridor to this shamelessly anonymous room where I now lie disorientated, unable to sleep, on a narrow bed, as yellow headlights turn Picasso’s blue period to green and perhaps in the next room Mondrian’s Composition in Red, etc. to orange, etc., or a Van Gogh sunflower to cellophane, and the first thing I did, on getting in here, and this must have been perhaps seven o’clock in the evening, was to go to the phone and call my answering machine in Milan, which told me, in Italian, that I was out and that if I left a message I would phone myself back as soon as possible. Pressing the code on the beeper to retrieve any messages, I thought of the tiny tape whirring backwards and forwards on the small shelf in the narrow passageway of my minuscule apartment, stale and dark with the shutters down and all my nice books and pens and intimate odds and ends, recently replaced, in safe and shadowy order; and I thought how only twenty-four hours before I had been safe in that room, which was my room, and only mine, perhaps the first room that has been truly and exclusively mine in all my life. I had been safe and functional and had imagined myself cured, or almost, or at least convalescent, whereas now I knew that the contrary was true and that away from that neat and narrow retreat into order and limitation I was quite lost, completely without definition or identity, and that what lay ahead of me, until such time as I could return to my small apartment, was nothing but ever more bizarre strategies for avoiding the worst. A female voice announced, Hello, it’s me, and asked whether perhaps I was really at home but just not answering the phone, since it seemed too early in the morning, the voice said, for me to be up and out. No? Hadn’t I said I was never up before nine? With all I did in the evenings, ha ha? The voice left a message saying it would call back later, which, after a couple of beeps, it did, now leaving another message saying it only wanted to say how much it had enjoyed the evening before, thus confirming that this was Opera-tottie, whose peculiar urinating habit I have still to tell Colin about. There was a pause, followed by a nervous, calculated, adult woman’s laugh, generated in Monza, stored in my sitting room in Milan, heard, without interest, in Strasbourg, and she rang off. Then another voice announced name and time of day and said she had finished her thesis summary and would like to fix an appointment to bring it over to my flat for me to see, as I had sugg
ested. Would Friday at five do? and this was a mature student who I was planning to lure into my tottie trap (Colinism).Then after another silence of beeps and scratches my daughter said: Daddy? Daddy, have you already gone? She was speaking English to please me, and since she never speaks English to anyone but myself, and then only rarely, her voice, in English, has a babyish, uncertain tone to it, an endearing childishness, so different from her adult, rather brash Italian, and she over-accents the ends of all the words: I was just calling to see iff you likedd yourr presentt, she said.
From along the corridor I could hear the girls refusing to let Colin bring the bags into their room and he protesting that he had never been anything but a gentleman. I phoned my daughter at once and got my wife’s voice from the kitchen phone over the throb of the dishwasher. The skylight was leaking again, she said. I asked to speak to Suzanne. It was pouring, my wife said. It had been pouring all day and the skylight was leaking. Then Suzanne came on the extension, where I could now pick up the gibberish of the television. Suzi, I said. My wife rang off, taking the dishwasher with her, and I said I was sorry I’d have to miss the birthday party. I had tried to get out of this business, but in the end I felt a certain obligation when everybody’s job was at stake, not just my own.
My daughter asked me had I read Black Spells Magic, and I said about half, and she asked what did I think, and still inflamed from all that had been said and remembered on the coach, and what’s more irritated with myself now for having lied about my motives for coming on- this trip, and not only for having lied about them, but for having heard in my own mouth precisely the kind of pieties I have no time for in others (a certain obligation!), I began to say, injudiciously, just as the Avvocato Malerba walked into the room with a far larger suitcase than anyone could possibly need for two nights, that although I was enjoying the book overall I found bits of it hard to take.
Don’t you think all her magic stuff is great though! my daughter said.
I said I had only got to the bit where their love-making in the lift emanates a power that puts all the stockbrokers’ computers on the blink.
Isn’t that brilliant! my daughter said. It’s a fantastic metaphor.
Of what exactly? I asked obtusely, and what I remember now, lying in this lurid, insomniac dark, is that although I was perfectly aware, at this point of the conversation, of the impending danger, aware I mean that I was perhaps about to argue with my daughter, or at least to disappoint her, almost the only person in the world I would rather not argue with or disappoint, I nevertheless, inflamed as I was, already knew that I would not be able to resist saying what I feel has to be said about books like this, perhaps because it sometimes seems that all that has happened to me, all that I have allowed to happen to me, has intimately to do with such books, or at least the mentality they are steeped in, which is of course exactly the mentality of the person who can pretend, on accepting an invitation to spend a weekend with a man who has bombarded her with flowers and phone-calls, that she is not going to his house to make love but only in order to add one final piece to the complex mosaic that friendship is. To wit Georg’s no doubt considerable cock. And twisting the receiver cord round my finger, I told myself, All her love for you was mere whorishness.
My daughter was saying, Obviously it’s a metaphor of how human emotions and sensations - I mean when two people make love like that - are stronger than electronics and money.
The Avvocato Malerba had now laid out three sober and, to my untrained eye, identical suits on the bed and was going through a pantomime of gestures to ask which wardrobe he could use when I objected to my daughter, who is eighteen tomorrow and hence at just that age where you begin not to know whether you should still be making allowances, that this was precisely the kind of comforting cliché it was so easy to sell to people, was it not? Didn’t she think, I went on to ask, trying to indicate to the Avvocato Malerba that he could have either of the wardrobes, or both, since I had no clothes worthy of hanging, unless with myself in them, didn’t she think that in the end this book was not unlike a narrative version of a Benetton advertising campaign, Hands Linked Around the World and such-like stultiloquence, United Colours of Good Conscience, etc., etc., while all the while the company, as here the author, sorry authoress, was sensibly pocketing the cash that came with a higher moral profile. Entirely inappropriately, I was furious. The Lira’s fallen fifty points against the Deutschmark today, I said. I want to see what love-making could reverse that.
You don’t approve because it’s lesbian sex, my daughter said, switching to her adult Italian. And I had offended her. Your daughter, I thought, your delightful daughter, Suzanne, has given you a book for your forty-fifth birthday and you are telling her it is terrible. Your daughter is trying to establish a new relationship with you after the period of hostility that inevitably followed your walking out on her mother and herself and then again the shocking stories she quite probably heard about you from her. She has given you a birthday present, something she did not do the previous year. She has called you in your flat, something she has done no more than two or three times in this whole period of separation, the norm being that it is you who call her, you who visit her, engaging in conversations of an almost palpable limpness and hostility. Your daughter, I thought, has given you a present and called you. She has left a message on your answering machine. In English. And what do you do? Rather than sharing, or at least tolerating, her enthusiasm for what is in the end no worse than another kitsch expression of present-day orthodoxies, you simply confirm what an offensive and irretrievably acrimonious person you are by judging the book according to standards perhaps exclusively your own and anyway entirely dependent on your own peculiar vision of the nature of contemporary decadence.
Why don’t we talk about it when I get back? I said. Hotel calls are expensive, I said, and I wondered, Did she have lesbian tendencies, or didn’t she? The Avvocato Malerba was selecting a shirt and tie.
All men are afraid of lesbians, my daughter laughed. Come on, Dad, loosen up, go with the flow. And she laughed again, rather mockingly. At which, instead of repeating that we should talk about this when we were together and could relax, I foolishly, on the line from Strasbourg, began to object that, quite the contrary, men were not afraid of lesbians at all, they were fascinated by lesbians. Lesbianism was the only aspect of the book that even remotely interested me, I told her. And this was the truth. But all the same, I insisted, as far as the doubtless imaginative scene in the lift was concerned, I just felt that such a prurient enlisting of fashionably transgressive multiracial pop eroticism to blow away the paper tiger of white male domination symbolized by the computer circuits of an evil stock-market could hardly represent the apex either of literary achievement or of intelligent political comment. Could it?
Was I right in imagining my daughter had begun some kind of relationship with her? How often had she been babysitting? -And how was it my wife could look on with such indifference while her daughter baby-sat for her husband’s ex-mistress? Was she deliberately encouraging the kind of relationship she thought would make me jealous?
I don’t understand you, Suzi said, and she asked, why did I have to talk in this pompous way? She didn’t understand at all. So that now, rigid on the bedspread while the Avvocato Malerba drew the curtains before removing his jacket and shirt, I recognized this as another of those increasingly frequent conversations where one feels that one must reconstruct the entire history of Western thought just to knock the undesirable parts down again, say absolutely everything in order to say anything at all. Which at the price I was no doubt paying to call suburban Milan from suburban Strasbourg, at hotel rates, would be imprudent to say the least. Such is the power of money over human relationships. And once again it occurred to me that one of the sources of immense uneasiness in my marriage had always been the growing preoccupation that both my wife and in a different way my daughter were, if not stupid, then hardly very intelligent No, they are not particularly intellige
nt, I told myself. They don’t discriminate. They don’t think. And the agony here is that one feels presumptuous and. judgemental in reaching such conclusions, in deciding that one’s wife and daughter are not particularly intelligent, yet on the other hand one cannot help but be aware of the evidence that comes constantly before one’s eyes. So that perhaps one of the reasons I fell so completely for her when I did was the illusion she managed to generate of being deeply wise and extremely intelligent. The illusion. Let’s talk when I get back, I said to my daughter.
She laughed. Switching back to English, she said, You always back down from an argument, don’t you, Daddy?
Happy birthday as of tomorrow, I managed, and finding, on getting the phone down, the Avvocato Malerba buttoning a white shirt over a grey hollow of chest hair, I asked him - I would pay the phone-bill of course, I said - if he knew what Nietzsche had once written down in his notebook as the most cogent argument against his own cherished notion of The Eternal Return, the eternal repetition of all things?
Determined to show off his English, which it occurs to me now might be a plausible reason for his having agreed to come on this trip — seventy-two hours of free English lessons - the Avvocato Malerba said he found Nietzsche unbearably presumptuous and judgemental. He actually used those two words, presumptuous and judgemental. The world would have been a better place, said the Avvocato Malerba, without people like Nietzsche, who had been criminally responsible, he said, for the rise of Nazism and Fascism. He preferred Spinoza himself. So there seemed no point in telling the Avvocato Malerba, or indeed any person who could prefer Spinoza to Nietzsche, that the most cogent argument against the notion of the eternal return, for Nietzsche, was the existence of his mother and sister.
