by Tim Parks
But going over all this now on my narrow bed after the extraordinary farce of the stube supper and the brief conversation with her vis-a-vis the exact composition and competence of the European Parliament’s Petitions Committee, and then the absurd group walk in the wet night, arm-in-arm with the long-legged, sadly flat-chested Nicoletta in search of a late-night bar - going over this and struggling to get a grip on the day’s events, as I appear to be under some kind of obligation, vain as it is compelling, to get a grip on everything, which is to say on myself, I am struck by the question, How can I preserve my relationship with my daughter? How can I behave towards someone who would be deeply offended and hostile if I told her what I thought about almost any issue worthy of discussion, to whom, if I wish to keep the peace, I will always have to say things like, I enjoyed the book overall, but …, or, I really tried to get out of this trip, but … For years, I tell myself, tossing and turning in my bed - because I have never quite known what to do with my arms when I am trying to go to sleep, and particularly when I am trying and failing to go to sleep - for years you have sought the affections of your daughter, sought the heart of your daughter, as before for years you sought the heart and affections of your wife, only to be thwarted by your daughter’s taking offence at observations so reasonable as to be self-evident, as before it had been your wife who took offence at such observations, all perfectly reasonable and even, so far as you could see, self-evident. Where do people put their arms when they sleep? For years, I reflect, one curries the favour of a person, one feels the need for a relationship with that person, one feels that one will be a lesser person oneself if one doesn’t have that relationship, only to discover, in a trice as it were, that the chief obstacle to that relationship is the other person’s lack of intelligence and discrimination, only to see, from one day to the next it seems, and perhaps after years of frustration, the blindingly obvious fact that you have been so desperately contriving to ignore: this person is not particularly intelligent.
How should I behave towards my daughter, I ask myself? Shall I lie on my right side or my left? And more in general, I ask myself, how should I behave towards anybody when almost anybody would be offended if I honestly discussed with them almost anything I care about? Or on my stomach? Which is the opposite of the illusion she brought, of course. The illusion she brought was that everything could be said. Every tic and quirk. Every masturbatory impulse. Every passing opinion, however, extreme and unacceptable. The inebriation of total intimacy, that was what she brought, on the fourth floor of the Hotel Racine, where everything was clear, everything was said, everything was acceptable, in a rapture of total communion, until the first piety, the first lie, not more than a fortnight later, when she said that she did not wish to compromise the serenity of her young daughter in a new and perhaps risky menage, and then the entirely gratuitous revelation, not three months after that, of the simultaneous mosaic of friendship she had been laying down with another man, unmistakably, though never admittedly, my colleague Georg, right down to the cod-piece, the cock-piece, at the centre of that tasteless mosaic, out of vraie sympathie, she said, because he insisted so much, with flowers and phone-calls, and then worse still somehow, worse than all this, the unwillingness to retreat from what she had done in any way, the unwillingness to see it as shallow in any way, to regret having done it in any way, to regret having so gratuitously told me that she had done it, to regret having so gratuitously blown away the foundations of our illusion, my illusion, that intimacy, and worst of all, worse than everything else, my sudden awareness of her almost constant use of such expressions as Í haue made my choices in life, or Je suis allée jusqu’au fond, or Je n’y suis pas allee pour faire l'amour, or There's no point in crying over spilt milk, my sudden awareness, I mean, that she wasn’t wise at all, that I had been a complete, and utter fool ever to imagine her so, that I, a stupid man, had left my wife for another stupid woman, until the moment I shouted whore and hit her. Irremediably.
How can I discuss things with people if discussion inflames me, if discussion makes me violent? Or is violence the only proper response when you are right, for years and years you are right and others are so obstinately wrong? But then why do you imagine, I ask myself, pushing my hands under the pillow now - and if my wife, my daughter, my lover have anything in common it is that they have all asked this same question - why do you imagine that you are right and that everybody else is wrong? I can’t answer. Yet that is exactly what I do imagine. Wouldn’t it be madness to suppose one was wrong merely because others did not agree with you? Where would that lead? You believe what you believe, I told myself. There’s no way round that. Even if you have frequently acted blindly and foolishly. And lying on my back now with my arms on my chest in this narrow bed in this Strasbourg hotel that I am beginning rather to like, if for no other reason than its appropriate awfulness, it occurs to me that the only way for someone like me to behave is to wait for dumbshow situations like the hand on the knee from Plaster-cast-tottie, and to go for them.
The hand on my knee! I can still hear talking, laughter, glasses, distantly from the lobby, despite the protests of the proprietor, who was nevertheless ready, after our vain, drizzly search for a suburban night-spot, to sell us what Eurobooze he had (cognac, brandy, pernod, grappa - bottles of it - which people acquired quite wildly in infantile gestures of group bonhomie) before he drew his bar grille down and complained about the noise, as nations selling bombs like to complain about the noise when other nations explode them, as she complained when the love and dreams she nursed me on for so long came back to her in blows and ugly phone-calls. Yes, I can still hear talking from down the passageway through the thin prefabricated walls and the squeal of young girls' giggles and occasionally Vikram’s Welsh voice in Welsh song, or Colin shouting his favourite words, or a sort of fruity nervous guffawing that comes I suspect from the ambiguous Avvocato Malerba. So that most probably, if I wanted to, I tell myself, that hand, Plottie’s hand, could still be made to engage in something more than a caress of the knee - it’s only one o’clock, or thereabouts - I could still capitalize on that promised intimacy, or at least contact, with this strange girl. And the fact that I did nothing to capitalize on that caress under the table, indeed quite the opposite, discouraged, even spurned it, is, I suppose, reflecting on it now, here in this hotel room where I have just realized that I shall never really be able to talk to anybody about anything, both heartening and unnerving - heartening because it suggests that you are not on for absolutely anything, you are not totally a slave to that, to sex, in the way on occasion, very many occasions, you have been; and unnerving because it may well be that you acted as you did out of an incorrigible romanticism. You are an incorrigible romantic, I tell myself. How fascinating that those two words should have wed together in standard collocation. An incorrigible romantic. For sitting on the other side of me at the massive grosse tisch around which, to pre-empt any formally convened meeting of the lectors, Vikram Griffiths raised, over a sort of dumpling stew, since it turns out that Strasbourg is as much German as French, the pressing question of our representation to the official institutions of the European Parliament, thus muting the carefully prepared attack on him by conducting the affair in the presence of the students, who love Vikram and tend to equate him, and particularly his bushy sideburns and his drinking habits and his well advertised and injudicious private life, not to mention his embodiment of two ethnic minorities, with an idea of revolution dear to their innocent hearts - yes, sitting on my right side at that moment when the hand to my left reached across and firmly took my knee under the table was the ever more engaging Nicoletta, she of the flat breasts and equilibrio interiore, and of course it was she, Nicoletta, who later, in the fruitless search for a bar back in les banlieues when the coach driver had gone to bed and the group had lapsed into that sort of wilfully daredevil sentimentality that dictates that an evening cannot be allowed to end but must be made mythical in some bar or other under a tidal wave of
alcohol, it was she who took my arm and invited me, for the air was a mist of dark drizzle, to share her umbrella, a gesture I immediately and excitedly compared, even equated, with that previous gesture - the hand on the knee - from young Plottie in the restaurant, to the extent that the thought, There must be something about me today, crossed my mind, Spoilt for choice I am, I told myself, Sneaky Niki indeed! - the kind of presumptions you have to laugh at later, you have to mock and poke fun at, for it wasn’t long after I had been drawn under the umbrella and then into a conversation which seemed to have to do with difficulties the dear girl was experiencing at home with her widowed mother, it wasn’t long before I began to realize that far from being a gesture of sexual complicity, this, of Nicoletta’s, this drawing me under her umbrella, was no more, no less, than a gesture of friendship! And decidedly not the kind of friendship whose mosaic would require the placing of my cock-piece in its centre. I had turned down Plottie’s brazen advance for friendship!
The German stube restaurant was perhaps the fourth restaurant our group of forty and more had tried after the coach driver abandoned us at the edge of a pedestrian area in heavy rain of the same weather pattern, no doubt, that was leaking through the skylight of what was once my home in the suburbs of northern Milan. Overwhelming a dozen quiet, Monday-evening clients, silently mulling over their chunks of boiled pork beneath the glazed stares of nobly stuffed stags and owls on wood-panelled walls, we were allowed to pull two great stube tischen together to accommodate us all, Dafydd the dog curling up on a seat to nibble at his hind parts, while Georg and Doris and Heike the Dike negotiated the cheapest group menu with a solid proprietress, many of the students being short of cash, and particularly so after it now transpired that in the brief space of our coach journey from Milan to Strasbourg the Lira had fallen not by fifty but by seventy points against the Deutschmark, and similarly against the French franc, and was still falling, indeed plummeting, on the so-called international markets, to wit New York and Tokyo, where it seemed, or so the Spanish lector Luis claimed to have heard on the hotel television, that people simply did not want to have anything to do with the Lira any more. And while Georg was negotiating with the proprietress in German, a language I once knew but have now forgotten, wilfully I sometimes think, Vikram Griffiths, infinitely more astute than I imagined, stood up as soon as everybody else had sat down and suggested that in the face of the present economic crisis the lectors could perhaps pay more for their meal in order to allow the students, who had so generously decided to lend their support to our cause, to pay less; we could fork out to ease the burden on them. That is, Vikram Griffiths suggested a redistribution of wealth, something which, lying as it does at the heart of the socialist ethos, and more in general at the core of what the Italians with technical piety and pious technicality like to refer to as consociativismo, the others in the group could hardly disagree with, though some wanted to, and in particular Colin, I felt, who is the tightest person with money I have ever known. And perhaps Doris Rohr. The lectors would pay half of the total between them, Vikram Griffiths suggested, and the students, of whom there were more than twice as many, would also pay half between them, meaning we would pay more than twice as much pro capita as them, Vikram Griffiths said, and he ordered ten jugs of the house wine and further suggested that before the food arrived we might as well resolve at once the pressing question of our representation at tomorrow’s important encounters, since he personally had no intention of wasting the latter part of the evening at a meeting. He was going out on the razzle. Devaluation or no devaluation. If they wanted to unfrock him, he laughed, let them do it now.
The silence that followed this supremely political manoeuvre confirmed the Indian Welshman’s cleverness, with the students clearly wondering what the trouble was, and what on earth ‘unfrock’ could mean, and those lectors who were against Griffiths finding themselves embarrassed to have to say so in front of students to whom he had just generously awarded the cheapest of meals. Then how could they speak against his drinking at precisely the moment they were so eagerly filling their glasses themselves? So it is, I thought, that one thinks all kinds of unpleasant things about a person, one denigrates that person in the urgent chatter of one’s mind, or in complicity with a third person or persons, one denigrates and wholly condemns a person and draws a certain satisfaction from having done so so comprehensively, but then hesitates to say what one thinks in public, and particularly in front of that person themselves, finding quite suddenly that one is, in some obscure way, ashamed of opinions one nevertheless still feels it perfectly legitimate to hold. One hesitates, for example, to say to one’s daughter, I think the problem here is one of your ignorance, or to one’s wife, I think the problem here is your terror in the face of change, in the face of life. Instead one stays silent and polite. Such is the nature of consociativismo, the sad glue that keeps couples and countries and coach parties together. Until the day you walk out or hit someone, or drop a bomb.
But for Dimitra, perhaps, that moment had come. Or was close. Insisting on her Greek Italian, she started to say that, no offence meant, but there were those who felt that his,Vikram Griffiths’, how could she put it, wildness - she tried to smile at the students she knew - might not be entirely appropriate for the kind of interlocutori we were likely to find at a major international organization and in particular at that legislative body that ultimately held the key to our long^running case against the Italian state. There was a noisy silence until the Avvocato Malerba now saw fit, as an outsider, he said, with a particular perspective to offer, to intervene, and having begun by saying that he himself thought it might be unwise of us to discuss these matters over dinner, rather than in more formal circumstances, he proceeded to analyse the legal weapons that the Community, as he insisted on calling it, as if there were but one community in the whole world, laid at our disposal. Like children admitted to the adults’ table for the first time, the students sat paying serious attention to the Avvocato Malerba of lean neck, dusty features and ponderous manners, as he took us through the niceties of that clause in the Treaty of Rome which forbids discrimination against citizens of other member states and posed the question how best such discrimination could be made to emerge for the kind of people we would find ourselves presenting our case to. The students sat listening, Plottie on my left and Nicoletta to my right, and then dozens of sensible and silly and pretty and plain girls under the dim stube light, faces concentrated, even devoted, as if any of what the Avvocato Malerba was saying could remotely matter to them, while Colin on the other hand, half-way down on the left-hand side, Colin to whom this matter matters enormously, since Colin has neither the inclination nor perhaps the capacity to engage in any serious work and counts greatly on his,,gravy train and his adequate supply of fresh tottie, is rolling up small balls of baguette and flicking them insolently at the various girls he is interested in, who smile and look pained. And she of course has pulled out a pen and is taking notes. Upon which it occurs to me that she and the Avvocato Malerba are the only two people who have dressed up for this dinner. The only two people who have made that kind of effort. For beside his sober suit and tie, which I now realize has on its blue background that circle of yellow stars which symbolizes our European solidarity, twelve identical yellow nebulae encircling a void, she is wearing the tight black chiffon dress with black beading down into a pronounced cleavage which she liked to wear the two or three times we went to the theatre together, or the opera once, and beneath which I know she invariably has her black suspender gear with red trimmings that so excites her when she sees herself, ice-cold Martini in hand, in the full-length mirror of a hotel wardrobe, just as it excites her, she always said, to have her thick dark hair pulled up tight, as it is now pulled up very tight, with a great wooden pin through it that keeps the tension on her scalp all day, and as her slightly undersized bra, she said, kept her slightly oversized breasts forever in a state of slight tension, at once uncomfortable and exciting. And precisely as the
Avvocato Malerba, pressed by Dimitra, explains that his point is that any presentation must approach the problem from two angles: on the one hand a genuine feeling of injustice, this for those Euro MPs who are not experts in the field but will respond emotively, and on the other a meticulously technical presentation of the legal nitty-gritty, for those on the Petitions Committee who would be only too ready to find the kind of flaw in our case that would save them from having to consider it seriously - precisely at this moment, when the Avvocato Malerba is trying to establish the strategy our representative must adopt and hence, by inference, the qualities he, or she, must have, I am seized, seeing that low-cut dress I know so well, by such a vision of love-making, such an immediate and overwhelming impression of skin and hair and perfume, such a meticulously technical sense of the adherence of underclothes to slightly heated flesh, the give of a bra undipped, flattened nipples plumping, and then the glassy pornographic reflection of all this in the mirror of the fake, or no, perhaps genuine, antique wardrobe on the fourth floor of the Hotel Racine, so inflamed by the smell of skin and sex, that I have to grab my glass and down, in one gulp, a very considerable quantity of very poor quality house wine, a gesture that has Nicoletta turning to me in concern, while Dimitra predictably interrupts the Avvocato Malerba to say that all things considered she is not convinced that Vikram Griffiths is really the best person for either of these modes of presentation. Plottie bangs me on the back when the dregs go down the wrong way, then bangs again, harder, upon which it comes to me, coughing fiercely over remembered rapture, a comic, ludicrous figure with cheap wine in his windpipe, a girl thumping on his back, it comes to me that the presumptuous, judgemental Nietzsche went mad at forty-five. Didn’t he? Wasn’t it forty-five? Or at least in his forty-fifth year, I can’t remember. I must check. Assuming there is still time.
