Europa
Page 14
CHAPTER EIGHT
She was proud of being French, she said, because the French Revolution lay at the heart of modern Europe. The principles of liberté, fraternité, égalité had transcended national borders and become the rights of every man, and finally the principles upon which the whole of Europe was built. In the great release of energy which came with the separation from her husband and her daughter’s first attendance at nursery school, she bought quantities of books and suggested we read them together and discuss them together. It would be exciting, she said, to have a fresh and intellectual relationship with someone after the years of tedium and near-moronic materialism with her picture-frame-entrepreneur husband. Plus it would be good for me, she said. It would be important for my sense of self-esteem, my sense of being someone going somewhere. So we read Chateaubriand and Benjamin Constant and the Duchesse d’Abrantes and Michelet, which had been her special area of study, and we read Xenophon and Thucydides and Plato and Aristophanes, which had been my area of study, and we discussed them together, usually after making love, in the afternoon in the pensione she stayed in when she taught consecutive days in Milan. We lay on the narrow bed, still clasping, still hot and damp, and we discussed, after perhaps hours of mutual adoration and oral sex and never without a bottle of Martini, for she was addicted to ice-cold white Martini, Plato’s notion of a realm of ideal forms, and we would try to relate that to the way the Revolution had, as it were, discarded men to champion an idea of man, an ideal man, since surely, or at least this was my feeling, it was this shift that lay behind the notion of égalité and of a single civil code for all the world. Man should be an incarnation of an idea rather than himself. Man should be a European. Or we would discover that Plutarch’s picture of Sparta was not unlike stories of Stalinist Russia, not unlike, in other ways, The Reign of Terror, or Nazi Germany - a European speciality, it seemed - and apropos of police states various we came across that other line of Benjamin Constant where he says: There is no limit to the tyranny that strives to extort the symptoms of consensus. Then discussing all these things quite seriously - orthodoxy and state terror and media hype -while drinking Martini and smoking the Gauloises Blondes she smokes, we would fall to making love again, remembering how all the great men we were talking about had loved women passionately, Talleyrand to start with, and more coyly Chateaubriand, not to mention Alcibiades, and how the great women we were talking about had loved men likewise, and likewise passionately, Ariadne and the Duchesse d’Abrantes, Madame de Staél and Medea, and how Napoleon had certainly been lying to Madame de Staél when he said the best women were the women who bore most children, that was Sparta talk, since the best women, it was obvious I said, coming up for a moment’s air from the taste of my triumph, the best women were the women who turned you on most and fucked you best. And fucking then, after those long and learned conversations, perhaps in the soft warmth of an autumn afternoon with the shriek of the trams clanging through the open window from the streets of ‘an ever-industrious Lombardy, we felt so sensual, and so intelligent, and intelligence seemed part of sensuality and sensuality part of intelligence and both together at once sacred and revelatory, though revelatory quite of what it would have been hard to say. Of their sacredness perhaps.
But how infantile! I think now, sitting up suddenly in another narrow bed and feeling the chill on my shoulders, a flash of yellow light crossing my face. How utterly infantile! And how extraordinary, I tell myself, sitting bolt upright on this narrow bed and shivering in this miserable hotel room, how infantile that you should ever have engaged in such conversations! How humiliating to think that you were not aware of the merest vanity in all this, the spurious stimulation of imagining yourself wise and communing with someone wise, discussing the world of pure form, or the noble savage, or the social contract, etc., when the only thing really speaking between the cheap sheets of that cheap pensione with the supermarket Madonna over the bedstead and the daguerreotype of the Duomo by the door was the sly old complicity of cock and cunt. What else? And remembering how, after my not incomprehensible choking fit at the farcical stube supper, I had retired to the loo to piss, to get a grip on myself, and seen a certain graffito there and thought certain thoughts, until I shouted out loud (over a urinal produced by Ideal Standard), How little philosophy helps! it comes to me now, in the soft slide of passing headlights, that the reason philosophy helps me so little is because the kind of philosophizing we traded on that narrow bed in the Navigli, the grand thoughts and acute perceptions we whispered back and forth, the parallels across thousands of years and the flattering identifications of ourselves with the great figures of Western history and mythology, was no more than another tool of mutual seduction, like the smell and smoothness of skin, like the tone and accent of her foreign voice, her French laugh, like the diving cleavage of that beaded black chiffon and the delirious awareness of her tottie-tackle (Colinism) beneath. Thought itself is an erotic memory for you, that is the truth, I am bound to admit now, sitting up in my narrow bed in this Strasbourg hotel which might be any of a whole series of hotels we once stayed in. Yes, the headiness of thinking, and I mean the sort of thinking that approaches mystery and sacredness, the sort of thinking that makes life exciting, is the same headiness of burrowing into her twat on soft Milanese afternoons with the clang of the trams ringing in the air and a low honey sunlight stealing across the wall Thought, like hotel rooms, reminds me of her. And perhaps this explains why I simply stopped reading, from one day to the next, after the Napoleonic debacle. For two years, I tell myself, you read intensely, insatiably, with immense pleasure and with a deeply gratifying sense of power and self-esteem, because reading was to do with her, and to do with conversations you had with her, to do with what she wanted to make of you and what you wanted to be for her, until, from one day to the next, you could not read any more. And not only were you unable to read any more, but the meaning of everything you had read to date was suddenly and frighteningly shifted, was even inverted, from self-esteem to self-loathing, from a belief in your own intuition to a conviction of your own blindness, a conviction born from the irony that you had read in so many places of the experience you were now going through, to wit the experience of betrayal, of being cut off, abandoned by the gods, of intensity enjoyed and intensity lost - and, quite apart from reading about it, you had even inflicted that same experience on your wife - but still without ever believing that one day this might happen to you, just as one never truly believes, perhaps, in the sense of savouring fully and accepting completely, that one is going to die. From one day to the next you stopped reading entirely. Black Spells Magic is perhaps the first book you have seriously tried to read in a year and a half. Does this explain your inappropriate anger with your daughter? That she should have invited you to start reading again with this ridiculous tale of the magical and politically correct powers of sexual passion! And how bewildering, I tell myself, sinking back on my pillows, how ominous, that once again today, this very evening in fact, on the coach returning from the stube supper, you should have sat by her side, her in her black chiffon dress with full French tottie-tackle beneath, and once again heard her say, vis-a-vis the founding brief of the Petitions Committee of the European Parliament - its function, that is, as a body for righting all wrongs — that the principles of liberte, fraternité and égalité lie at the heart of modern Europe.
Still choking with wine over the stube tisch, I escaped Plottie’s strong hand to recover in the lavatory. And it was here, relieving myself before returning, that my eyes unerringly picked out one of a score of graffiti above the urinal I had chosen, or that had chosen me: Elene, someone had scribbled - amour fugitif di quelques minutes, dont je me souviendrai pour toute la pve! My immediate response to this, splashing on to Ideal Standard in the semi-basement lavatory of a German restaurant on dubiously French territory, was to laugh, to laugh out loud, too loud, to tell myself, in the words of the man who went mad at forty-five, that There are no facts, but only interpreta
tions. This biro scribble between smutty porcelain and barred window giving on to a courtyard of bins and sodden boxes has no more to do with you, I told myself, than the number 45 printed on a plastic oval and sunk into the synthetic plush of a luxury coach seat. Freud was right, I thought, to laugh at those who feared conspiracy in the contingent world. And if he suffered from the same problem himself and feared he might die at sixty-two because of the number’s frequent appearance right around his sixty-second birthday, then he had all the more reason for laughing at it, for laughing at himself. You can never go wrong when you laugh at yourself, I thought, and I told myself that what I must do was to take control of my mental processes, to repossess myself, as Freud no doubt had repossessed himself, I must stop functioning as a Black Hole dragging down all around me into a solipsistic world of unbearable density. No facts, I told myself, re-reading that graffito, only interpretations.
But how little philosophy helps! Tucking my cock in my pants, I was reminded for some unfathomable reason of the Eleusinian mysteries. My special study it was to be, at last light thrown on that most obscure of Athenian traditions, the twelve-mile dance down the Sacred Way to Eleusis, the group hysteria under pure light of midsummer: sex, ecstasy, possession. I read everything I could find about the subject and discussed it at length with her in Pensione Porta Genova, and once I remember her hugging me tight and gesturing to the room and saying this was our Sacred Way, these embraces our Mysteries, she had tears in her eyes, but I never mentioned to her then what now seems the only sensible comment I ever found on the subject, or rather somebody else did, because it was quoted in the kind of scholarly work I once dreamed of writing myself. What were the mysteries, asks Aristophanes? The saying of many ridiculous and many serious things. Eléne, amour fugitif. Thank God her name was not Eléne.
How infantile! I sink back on my bed. But will there come a moment, I ask myself, when your disgust now will seem as infantile as your vanity then? Will there? One can only hope so. One can only hope that self-loathing will one day seem as foolish as self-esteem. Certainly there will never be a point of rest, I tell myself, never an equilibrio interiore, the mind anchored to a world of pure form or in reposeful contemplation of the Dantesque divine. Not even if forty-five does prove fatal I remember stopping in amazement once at those lines in Chateaubriand when he talks about the dusty thoughts of the dead, when he asks, musing in some revolutionary cemetery: Who knows the passions, the pleasures, the embraces of these dry bones? More than once it has occurred to me that there is already something posthumous about my present existence.
Returning to my meal from Hommes et Eléne, it was to find my colleagues in the middle of an amicable show of hands. While I peed and philosophized, Vikram Griffiths had already been voted out. His minority culture credentials, his friendship for animals, his generosity with other people’s money, his considerable charm, had not been enough. And it occurred to me, as I sat down at the stube tisch, how appropriate it was of my colleagues not to have waited for me. I had said nothing during the discussion. I had said nothing on the coach trip from hotel to town during which Barnaby Hilson, experimental novelist of middle-class Protestant Dublin family and bland good looks, had played traditional Irish tunes on his traditional Irish tin whistle and Indian Welsh Griffiths and English Colin danced an unsuitable highland fling in the aisle while I was forced by powers beyond me to analyse every back and forth of the ill-judged telephone conversation with my daughter. So much for your decision to be extrovert, I told myself. So much, I thought, returning to my seat from the lavatory, for all your decisions. Then sitting down I was just in time to cast the vote that deprived Dimitra of a majority. I raised my hand as the count was being taken and I thought, apropos of absolutely nothing: Dimitra is the spy. Dimitra announced the shock-horror of’ Professor Ermani’s having a list of those who had voted for the trip to Europe precisely because, having given him the list herself and having agreed to keep him informed, as a matter of courtesy (after all she had voted against the trip), she felt it wise to invent the spy story so that nobody would ever imagine it could be her, Dimitra, who had told Ermani what everybody would be surprised he knew, assuming that knowledge should ever come out. And at once I felt fascinated, appalled, by how devious people can be; then, reflecting that I had no grounds for believing what I had just supposed, I felt even more appalled by how devious I could imagine people being. As if in a world where nothing can be said (to my daughter for example), where the truth can only bring offence (to my wife for example), there were nothing for people to do but be endlessly, infinitely devious, though always behind a smoke-screen of the noblest values. So you betrayed your wife for years, I thought, telling yourself all the while that it was precisely the outlet this betrayal afforded, the pleasure and emotional release you derived from it, which would allow you to keep the family together, telling yourself, ludicrously, that betrayal was a form of faithfulness, as if love, obsession, whatever, were things that could be managed and manipulated and made to serve an overall strategy rather than simply things that happen to you and that you will never never understand, like being born or dying.
I sat down, somewhat flushed still with the wine and my choking fit and my inflammatory memories, to find, on the table before me, pork and dumplings abandoned in a stagnant pool of thin broth, and immediately, without mental mediation, I cast the vote that tipped the balance five to four against Dimitra, the spy, whose fiercely powdered glare upon my raising my arm cheered me up, galvanized me, to the point where I was actually paying attention. And the person I paid attention to, of course, was her. Because this must be the moment, I thought, that she had been waiting for. Unfrocking Griffiths, I thought, with all he had drunk and the way he was behaving, winking at all the girls and putting arms round shoulders and talking about going on the razzle afterwards, trying to translate the notion of razzle for those who didn’t understand, and using the sleeve of his tatty blue sweater to wipe the dumpling soup from his chin, had not, for all his apparent political astuteness, been too difficult. And the students understood in the end, despite their groans, despite their no doubt vraie sympathie for someone who not only was not quite white but was giving them a cheap meal into the bargain. They’ were all from wholesome middle-class families in the end. They understood that Vikram Griffiths’ kind of revolutionary behaviour would not impress a major international institution of the variety they themselves would one day like to work for. Why else were they studying for a degree in languages if not to work one day for a major international institution? So it is, I thought, sitting down at the table to discover from Plottie that Vikram Griffiths had already been voted out, six to two, in my absence, so it is that while one’s sympathies lie in one direction one ends up choosing another, or accepting another, out of a sense of realism, by which of course we mean a sense of fear, a sense of obedience to laws we imagine greater than ourselves. As for example morality, or society, or history. So it is, I told myself, forking a dumpling into my mouth, that one stomachs more or less any mess one’s nose is pushed into, in the name of history and common-sense and realism, until the day comes when something inside simply compels us to behave in the least realistic manner imaginable, compels us to fly in the face of all prudence, as when I said on that same narrow bed in Pensione Porta Genova: I want to leave my wife for you, or later still when, quite gratuitously, after years of caution and realism, but definitely operating under the strongest of compulsions, I told my wife everything that had happened and destroyed her world for her.
Getting rid of Vikram Griffiths had been easy. Then the hostility Dimitra aroused by speaking against the Indian Welshman, Dimitra of the brick-orange lipstick and solid Teutonic nose under Macedonian black eyes, had been sufficient to prevent her from being elected either. We had elected Dimitra as president of the union on two or three occasions now because on each of those occasions no one else would contemplate doing the job, except Vikram, who again was unacceptable since he would have proposed an ind
efinite strike more or less every time we had an assembly, and this was something that the German contingent in particular just could not deal with. But when it came to representing us to the powerful institutions of the European Community there were more than two candidates. For this was a brief appointment, and perhaps interesting, perhaps useful. So now it must be time, I imagined, for her to put herself forward. As she had no doubt always planned. Or for someone to do that for her.
Amidst the general chatter, having returned to my seat and cast my vote and filled my mouth with German dumpling, I watched her. She was looking across the table at Georg. And I thought, She is still in complicity with Georg. They only made love once or twice, she said. Out of friendliness (this around the time I said, I want to leave my wife for you). Yet she is still in complicity with him, in a way she could never be with me. And quite probably, I told myself, their names were indeed together on that list you so hastily and unwisely signed in the drab offices of the Istituto di Anglistica that morning of three weeks ago. Their names were together, above and below each other no doubt, and written no doubt, for all I cannot rightly recall it, with the same pen. As far as this trip is concerned, they were already and always in complicity. As two people who have briefly been lovers then use that intimacy as a bond, an alliance, a secret society, for all future mutual convenience. And one can’t help wondering at the maturity, as she would say, of this, the good sense, the fact that there are people who know how to enjoy themselves without coming to grief, without intensity, those lovers who see each other occasionally, when convenience permits, and fuck each other cordially, perhaps with a little healthy back-massage to boot, and then are perfectly content if the opportunity doesn’t present itself for weeks and even months. And one can’t help wondering why you came on this trip, I tell myself now, if their names were together on that list, if they were already in complicity. Why did you come? Why did you insist on this mistake, when you had the perfect alibi of your daughter’s eighteenth birthday party, now to take place in your much-censured absence? And the only idea that springs to mind is that you came on this trip, having seen their names together on that list, to savour defeat once again, to rediscover intensity. The defeat and intensity, for example, of finding that this trip is precisely one of those convenient occasions when she and Georg can get together and, cordially, fuck. Now, in this very hotel perhaps. At one in the morning. A few rooms down from your own. Who knows? As yellow headlights pass over some reproduced masturbatory ecstasy by Gustav Klimt. And I am reminded of the time she told me that she had bought an ammonia spray and was keeping it in her handbag. We were speaking on the phone, and she said, So don’t say I didn’t warn you, but then immediately began talking about the possibility of another night together. It was me who hung up.