Europa

by Tim Parks

  Unable to masturbate over Plottie’s glassy disappointment, I find myself sitting up in bed again. I’m sitting up shivering in my bed. First you set off, I tell myself, on the trip to the bar because of her, then you turn back from the trip to the bar because of Plottie, and finally you set off on the trip to the bar once again because of Nicoletta. You are no more than a ball in a bagatelle, shot for one brief second over the moon. Nicoletta opened her umbrella and invited you under and slipped her arm in yours and immediately you were over the moon. Immediately a voice sang out: You’re on here, Jerry! And it sang, There must be something about you today! First Plaster-cast-tottie and now this. Sneaky Niki. Spoilt for choice I am! Thus your own mental rhetoric. In the space of one split second, I tell myself, you went from the most total misery (over her extraordinary miscalculation of your age) to the most gushing exhilaration and optimism. You thought, Love is a movable feast, Jerry, go for it. Thus your criminal naivety. You thought, why should I cry over split milk, and you thought, there is no reason at all why I shouldn’t fall in love all over again with this young and beautiful if somewhat flat-chested girl. Thus your asinine presumption. At which juncture, sitting here rigid and shivering on my narrow hotel bed, it has to be said that there can be no hope for a person as absurd as I am, no hope for someone capable of such extraordinary vanity. Though quite what one might mean by hope, I’m not sure; I suppose what she meant when she spoke of an analyst being able to save me; or perhaps what Plottie meant when she spoke of some improbable equilibrio interiore.

  I was under Nicoletta’s umbrella. We were striking off on a walkway beside a dual carriageway. Vikram Griffiths was trying to teach his two girls The Green Green Grass, explaining in between whiles that before coming to Italy he had never been south of Eastbourne. Nor north of Clwyd if it came to that. Then came a long gaggle of students and lectors under umbrellas and rain-hoods beside a muddy verge with no sign anywhere of any sort of building that might house a bar, though a huge billboard above chasing cars announced La ville veste les femmes núes, and at the rear there was myself and Nicoletta, with me wondering, as she spoke of difficulties at home since her father’s cancer, whether this was one of those occasions where one would ask for a kiss or simply try to snatch one. Her mother, Nicoletta said, speaking to someone she had only met that morning, a man any woman should have seen had designs on her, had become terribly morose and withdrawn after her father’s death and hardly talked, but at the same time she, the mother, tended to get upset if she, Nicoletta, or her twin brother or older sister, went out of an evening, as if they were somehow deserting her. Yes, they’ll all come to greet me, came Vikram’s voice. Then a peal of laughter. The green green grass. And while I began to appreciate, not without a prick of resentment, that the kind of complicity Nicoletta had imagined, on inviting me under her yellow umbrella, was one oí friendship, and far from the variety that might require for completion the cordial placement of my cock-piece in its mosaic centre, I nevertheless, resentful prick though I am, became extremely helpful and began to talk persuasively to this tall-necked young girl with her over-sweet perfume and delightful red hair-tie on the blackest, raven, almost blue hair (which I would be so willing to bury my face in and adore) - began to talk about modern theories of grieving and about her mothers inevitable jealousy that her children had their lives entirely before them (a feeling I have all too often experienced with my own daughter) whereas her life (the mother’s), at least as she was probably seeing it at present, was behind her, had ended, and badly at that, or at least unluckily, with her husband’s death. Vikram Griffiths started into Men of Harlech. And the only thing to do, I suggested with the sort of wisdom that comes from knowing absolutely nothing about a situation, was to be patient: her mother would no doubt come out of this with time, life would force her to.

  We were talking under the girl’s yellow umbrella while I resentfuly tried to come to terms with the idea that her invitation to walk along under its dripping rim had had nothing to do with any plans to seduce me, let alone shag me rotten before the evening was out. Perhaps your mother will even take another husband, I announced thoughtfully. I had as much chance of sleeping with Nicoletta, I thought, as of taking the Madonna from behind. It was as easy and as difficult as that. But Nicoletta said that that was impossible, her mother could never love anybody else. She could never love anybody after her father. With whom she had been very much in love. To the exclusion of all others, she added, unprompted. I asked her her mother’s age, and she said forty-five. Then, responding rather well I think to the-nth recurrence of this number, almost as if it were an old ailment I had finally learnt to put up with, I laughed out loud, even good-heartedly. I laughed and said, Perhaps I would marry Nicoletta’s mother myself, we were the same age, after all, and instinctively the two of us, man and girl, squeezed each other’s arms a little harder and exchanged entirely friendly smiles in the street-lit gloom of the umbreEa as Vikram Griffiths now stopped the group at a crossroads surveying blocks of flats to the right and, across a soaking urban highway, low industrial buildings to the left, and admitted he had no idea where he was. My mother would like you very much, Nicoletta laughed, I think, and I laughed - call me Niki, she said, everybody else does - and Vikram Griffiths said we would have to turn back. That miserable bastard at the hotel with his miserable directions! Dafydd! he shouted, then slowly sang for the girls who were learning, With the foe towards you leaping, You your valiant stance are keeping. Dafydd! And lying here now on this narrowest of divan beds, not even waiting for sleep, not even trying to masturbate, not even wondering about the Avvocato Malerba’s delayed return, I am struck by the amusing fact, this very early morning of the fourth of the fifth in my forty-fifth year, that not only did a young woman offer me her friendship this evening, rather than her body, her affection, rather than her sex, but what’s more that I amazingly walked along beside this young woman for almost an hour in the sifting rain, and condescended to her, discussing fashionable grief-theories and other psychoanalytical simplifications of everyday calamities, some of which I vaguely remember allusions to in the atrocious Black Spells Magic, not to mention the execrable Dead Poets Society, and even began to pretend to myself, like the infantile and incorrigible romantic I am, that perhaps this gesture of friendship, of affection (complete with jesting vis-a-vis a possible relationship with her mother!), was somehow better or more appropriate than the gesture of straightforward sexual complicity offered by the Plottie girl (young enough to be my daughter), as if, apart from the easy good conscience that comes from talking sympathetically to another human being about their insoluble troubles, there could possibly be any use to me in the mere affection of a no more than moderately intelligent twenty-one-year-old.

  Why haven’t I given the girl her tottie-tag as yet? What is wrong with me? Or am I simply hoping that chaste friendship first will eventually lead to more serious sex later? Will lead to Rheims?

  Quite suddenly I’m furious with myself. Furious. How could I possibly have imagined that the caress under the table, the blunt message of the hand on the knee, the leaning against me in the drizzle by the floodlit anodyne cathedral, was not infinitely preferable to earnest talk under umbrellas about the nature of grief? Grief. I was offered sex with no frills, for Christ’s sake, and turned it down for a discussion of everyday misery, playing kind Uncle Jerry, wise Uncle Jerry, disinterested Uncle Jerry, who might at most amount to a sensible last resort for Mummy. It would have been less absurd, I tell myself, to have joined in with the choral expression of Welsh nationalism led by a man whose features and skin-colour suggested the subcontinent. An Englishman, I tell myself, in France singing a Welsh nationalist song, led by a man whose mother came not from Bangor but Bangalore, would have been less absurd! And if I cannot masturbate over Plottie, I decide, and I can’t, because I can’t imagine her, then I shall masturbate over someone else. My mind wrenches viciously to Opera-tottie. I rehearse our first meeting at an evening course I gave for high-scho
ol teachers: Echoes of the Greek Classics in Modern English Literature. A tall, solid woman, handsome legs boldly crossed in the front row. I recall the first smiles of obvious complicity. I remember the difficulty of approaching her at after-course drinkypoos in a busy bar in Via Fatebenesorelle with one particular pain-in-the-butt who just would not go away. Somehow I appreciate that despite a kind of sadness that hangs about her - no, it’s because of that sadness - she goes. She’s porca, I tell myself, drinking too much after my mediocre lesson. She wears stockings, not tights, I tell myself. And all the while, as I become outrageously unpleasant with this pain-in-the-butt who just will not leave us alone, who will not understand that I want to make a pass at this woman, here in the bar, now, I’m thinking that the amused awareness of her smile across the table definitely promises porcheria, promises filth. As likewise the blonde-brown hair that keeps falling across her face. A lined face, carefully made up, with exactly that bold poignancy of recently lost youth, exactly that shrewdness that recognizes a red carpet when it’s rolled out before her. Then her postcard, then my phone-call, then the dinner, the ritual swapping of our sad stories, somewhat tedious, but at least safe in the knowledge that it was definitely on — one can listen for a long time to someone’s failure to become anything more than an amateur opera singer when the brushing of knees under the table reassures you that some pretty high notes will be struck later on. Then at last the undressing, the slightly thick, softening body squeezed tight in tight underwear, the particularly high waistline of fancy pants, and then my tongue under the flop of the breasts. But no sooner have I started to fist myself seriously over this stuff than I get a very strong image of myself masturbating over her breasts, myself coming over her breasts, and she taking the sperm on her finger and rubbing it on her lips and drawing me down to kiss me. And the reason I get this image is perhaps because this is exactly what we did, only last night to be precise, only about twenty-eight hours ago. Incredibly. Though I haven’t thought of it so much as once since then. And the reason I masturbated over her breasts, which is also perhaps the reason why it hasn’t so much as crossed my mind since, is that I set up the whole evening, clinically you might say, with the specific intention of doing just that, the specific intention, that is, of repeating what had been done before on one quite mythical occasion with her, in her husband’s second house in the mountains, if I remember rightly, when for the first time in my life I masturbated in front of a woman. So that immediately her image is now superimposed over Opera-tottie’s, though Opera-tottie’s expression sticks, a haunting mixture, on a rather pudgy face, of lust and compassion, as if aware that she is acting out a part for me, doing me a service, perhaps, who knows, in order to save me, such missions being something that so often seems to get mixed up with female gratification. This superimposition upsets me. I become conscious of the words I am muttering to myself as I masturbate, the same words that so excited Opera-tottie: I want to smother you in sperm, I want to come on your breasts, in your face, in your mouth, in your hair, I want to drown you in sperm and then fuck you and fuck you and fuck you, etc. And I become conscious, but I was always conscious, it was never out of my mind, that these are words I first spoke with her, since before her I had never experienced the liberation of saying such words to any woman. The first time I came on her breasts, in her face, the first time she flicked her tongue in my anus, the first time I flicked my tongue in hers, the first time she finger-fucked my arse while blowing me, and all the words we spoke as we did it all, the wild wild words we spoke, in Italian, in French, in English, and the book we found that claimed that the whole elaborate structure of Greek rhetoric and philosophical dialogue had been built around the art of seduction. How excited that made us. The Athenian obsession, this rather unorthodox book said, that the beloved should concede her or his graces willingly, rather than being forced, had been the driving force behind all dialectic. What important discoveries we imagined we were making! Behind all persuasion lay the libido. Lay our sex talk. Our shag chat. How superior we were, what initiates, and how we despised a crass world that had forgotten how to love, as the Athenians despised the mental sloth of the Spartans, whose women were merely obliged to submit. And for the first time, here in this Strasbourg hotel room, in the heart of Europe, it comes to me, perhaps prompted by that ridiculous conversation about Nicoletta’s grieving mother, that masturbation will always be an expression of bereavement for me. Every sexual fantasy I ever had was fulfilled with her. And so, in a sense, stolen from me. The day seized and lost. There is as much chance, I tell myself, of my concentrating on Opera-tottie or Plaster-cast-tottie as of seeing the moon beside the sun. Over the moon indeed! I cannot masturbate, that is the truth. I cannot masturbate, in the same way I cannot read, in the same way I cannot think, in the same way I cannot talk. Because all of these things are intimately connected with her. Yet, I have to masturbate, I have to read, I have to think and above all I have to talk, inside my head and out. I have to be with her.

  With mindless urgency, in the small hours of the fourth of the fifth, perhaps fatal, not long after my forty-fifth birthday, I catch myself stumbling out of bed and into my trousers. My shirt I left inside my sweater and I pull them on together. I have no idea what I shall do, only that it must bring some resolution. There is still soft chatter from along the corridor, the occasional giggle. Closing my door I’m aware I haven’t put my shoes on, my hair is uncombed. I stride with empty determination on a coarse synthetic carpet. And two exquisitely disconnected thoughts cross my mind: that I am the University of Milan’s lectors’ representative to the Petitions Committee of the European Parliament, instituted to set all wrongs to right, and that Nicoletta’s tottie-tag will be Not-So-Sneaky. Or no, Sneaky, for irony. Sneaky-tottie. My mind is in pieces. Each door I pass could be hers.

  The lobby-cum-lounge opens up at the end of the corridor: armless armchairs scattered about low tables, cut-glass ashtrays under concealed fluorescent light, great windows polished black behind lace curtains. A low ceiling is supported by thin, square white pillars. Wass the difference, girls, comes a voice from the far side, Wass the difference between fear and horror? Tell me that. There are still ten of them perhaps, sprawled over chairs and carpet round a table full of bottles glasses empty packets of eats and fags the far side of a tropical tree that must be fake. Titter and giggles. Under the table, the dog is again licking his genitals. With loving absorption. Fear, Colin begins, fear is … Lurching round the tree I see that Plottie is sitting on the Avvocato Malerba’s knee…. the first time you don’t make it the second time. Georg is not there. She is not there. While horror is … They are not there. Immediately, I must know who Georg’s room-mate is. Who her room-mate is. I couldn’t give a damn what Plottie’s up to. Are they around or are they in their rooms? I couldn’t even masturbate over Plottie. The quiet rhythm of the dog’s licking makes a mockery of your attempts to masturbate, I reflect. Are they together, or are they not? Horror is … Oh I don’t think I can tell ‘em this, Colin laughs, perched on the edge of a chair with Tittie- to trie’s decidedly grand canyon beside him, and either they have shagged already or have missed out on shagging, perhaps due to difficulties with the experimental Barnaby and the charity-ball party. Jerry, you know this joke. Do you think I can really tell ‘em what horror is? Who are they sharing with? Why didn’t I make a mental note when the rooms were being allotted? Why wasn’t it obvious that the Avvocato Malerba came on this trip solely and exclusively to tottie, came because Vikram Griffiths coined that expression The Shag Wagon? No, it was Georg coined that expression. Georg. I am suddenly overwhelmed by the need to know if they are fucking now. A matter of absolutely no importance to me. It’s vital. I must find out, I must resolve something. All these years and I haven’t resolved anything! I am still exactly where I was when I first hit her so long ago. Vikram Griffiths, with his arms round Heike the Dike of all people, is splashing whisky on to the dregs of something else. Wine? Grappa? Jerry where did you fuck off to? He
offers the glass to me. Full And now I need a cigarette too. Better late than never, he grunts, sucking in catarrh. Or is this the first of the breakfast crowd? He prods his dog with his toe. If I could lick my cock like that I’d never go out of the house. He laughs. You can even hear it, he laughs. Per favore, one of the girls says, per carita. But suddenly I need a cigarette. Who will give me a cigarette? The shameless old shagger, Vikram grins, scratching in a sideburn. If fear, Colin repeats - Colin always has that facetiously patronizing tone to his voice, why do they put up with him? Why don’t they hit him? — is the first time you don’t make it the second time, what do you think horror can be? Heike says she hasn’t the slightest idea what he’s talking about. Somebody grabs the ashtray just before it falls, but sending stubs flying all the same, while I can already see myself going down the corridor and listening at every door. Í must know. It’s an entirely vivid picture. There are only, what, forty rooms. Fifty. And myself with my ear pressed to the brown-pink-painted door of every one, listening for sighs and squeaks. Listening for her Mais oui, mais oui! It’s the blatancy of people like the Avvocato Malerba that amazes me. Man Dieu! Mon Dieu! Not unlike the blatancy of a dog who licks his genitals in public. And of course like every awful, inappropriate and above all humiliating action, this image of myself eavesdropping all along the corridor, listening for her mots sur l'oreiller at every door, is immediately immensely seductive. The blatancy of a respectable professor on the point of retirement stroking a girl’s thigh as she sits on his knee in a hotel lounge. But why not for heaven’s sake! Why not? As when I prowled about outside her Verona flat for hours, chain-smoking tipped Gauloises because they reminded me of her. I must have a cigarette. To catch them at it. To know. To confront. Georges car was there. To achieve some resolution. To suffer. I’m sure it was Georg’s. And Plottie, first with her hand on my knee, then her arse on his. Why not? Why didn’t I take the licence plate to compare it later? Statistics have proved, Vikram is claiming, that people of mixed race shag more and better than their pure-bred counterparts. His laughter is raucous. I cadge a cigarette, having imagined, during what I now see as that masterpiece of self-deception which was my ‘recovery' that I had stopped smoking. Do we expect the likes of Plottie to be faithful? What for? I hate cadging cigarettes. Especially from someone you’ve never spoken to before. A student with red hair. If you have a bad idea, I tell myself, be sure you’ll act on it. How could I ever have imagined I’d stopped smoking? Per l'amore di Dio tell us! says Tittie-tottie. Tell us what horror is. Red-hair lights my cigarette. Cadging a cigarette, it occurs to me, becomes an image of one’s humiliation, of everything one’s been reduced to. She’s called Serena. But then how could I ever have imagined I’d recovered? Horror, says Vikram Griffiths - would I beat on the door if I found them? Would I be able to restrain myself, would I be able to stop myself from becoming totally violent, from seeking to resolve the situation once and for all? -horror is a wet afternoon in Swansea with no booze and your girl-friend with the Red Army in. He laughs loud, squeezing an arm round Heike the Dike’s shoulders. But it’s forced. I suddenly see that now. Vikram Griffiths is morose from hours of drinking. I’m suddenly aware of that. Then I ask myself, could it be that her room-mate is Heike and Georg’s Vikram? Could it be that these two, Vikram and Heike, are only here in the lounge so late to give the others some time in bed, their own jokey arm-in-armness a sort of comic reflection of the others’ embrace? Perhaps they wish they’d gone to sleep hours ago. They’re only staying up to do the others a favour. Horror is English Three, says Plottie, when Ermani sets the dictation. Incredibly, I’ve managed to sit down, rather than set off along the corridor. Incredibly, somebody actually giggled at Plottie’s unimaginative remark. How could I ever have wanted to sleep with her? Tubby, dull, silly. The Avvocato Malerba is playing with the beads of her blue necklace. I’m on the floor. She’s pushing her fringe back. I’ve got the whisky in my hand and I’m on the carpet with my first cigarette in weeks between a certain Valeria, small and peppy, tousled black hair, boyish body, and the belligerent Maura, who sat beside Nicoletta, sorry Sneaky-tottie, on the coach, saving her very occasional remarks to further the cause of the moderate Left. Nah, nah, Colin says. 1 can’t tell them. Too adult. Three of the girls are pulling at his clothes and pinching him to get him to finish his joke. You can’t just leave a joke hanging in the air! But I’ve seen him do this trick once before. In a bar in Sesto San Giovanni. No, I can’t be responsible for corrupting a group of nice young women, Colin protests. He smoothes his moustache in a pantomime of serious reflection. It was the first night I slept with Psycho-tottie. Which resolved nothing. He finds a Queen’s English: You are acquainted with my moral values, I’m sure. Plottie watches from Malerba’s knee, though somehow they’re not quite together. The truth is I admire their blatancy. My vocation, says Colin, for the preservation of innocence. Comes a shout: I'll strip off my top if you don’t tell us inside one minute! It’s the peppy Valeria. Exactly one minute, she shouts. That’ll show him who’s innocent! Peals of laughter. Go on then! One minute, she shouts. And counting. Now where were me reading glasses, Vikram Griffiths says, ‘orror … Colin begins again, again pauses. Sorry, horror. Where are your aitches? Mum always used to say. He has a huge teasing grin on his face. Then he whispers something to Tittie-tottie. Laughter. You don’t believe me? Valeria stands up. I’m counting. Cinquantuno, cinquanta, you don’t believe me but I’m going to take my top off, quarantanove. Whoo-oo-oo-ooh! Vikram Griffiths shouts on a rising note. But still obviously morose. Nobody, I suddenly tell myself, sitting on the floor observing the Indian Welshman, pretends to enjoy themselves more than the sullen, the morose, the defeated. Our respective ages were definitely the crucial factor in our affair. I see that now. Quarantasei. The girl untucks herself. Clearly tipsy. Quarantacinque. Age was the colour of our affair, you might say. Quarantatre. Nobody, I tell myself, throws themselves into life more determinedly than the terminally ill. Clearly drunk. How on earth could I have been so blind as to envy Vikram taking two girls under his mac and then singing Men of Harlech of all things? Men of Harlech! With those ridiculous sideburns. To end up the evening in a drunken embrace with a woman renowned only for her many economically advantageous affairs with women older than herself, and most notably with the appalling Professoressa Bertelli, who gave her her job. A man obliged to keep a dog in order to have someone or something around who will not betray him. Trentacinque. Perhaps age is the key to everything, I tell myself, drinking my whisky. The Avvocato Malerba shifts Plottie on his knees to get a better view around the tropical tree. Sixty if he’s a day. Trentadue. From the carpet below I’m looking up at a solid young butt in jeans and at bitten fingers beginning on bottom blouse buttons. Perhaps none of us are truly ourselves, it occurs to me, but only ourselves at a certain age. Whoo-oo-oo-ooh! shouts Vikram. The dog looks up from his genitalia. We have no identity apart from our age. And now it occurs to me that all day Vikram Griffiths has never been anything but morose. That all day what 1 took for cheerfulness, for high spirits, was just a vain attempt to defend himself from his melancholy. I see this now. A depression perhaps even greater than my own. Otherwise why would he trail around with a shaggy dog, with a whisky flask? Am I going to listen at the doors or not? They must be fucking. Ventinove. Heike the Dike shakes her head. Pessimo gusto, she says, with her heavy German accent, but watching. You imagine somebody is happy, 1 tell myself, and instead they are choking with despair. You imagine somebody wants to seduce you and instead they want to tell you about their father’s cancer. You imagine somebody finds complete fulfilment in you and instead they’re completing a mosaic of friendship with someone else. Ventiquattro. This kind of thing doesn’t happen with dogs, I reflect. Ventidue. For example, it would not be beyond her, it comes to me (how fertile my mind is when everything is going wrong), first to fuck Georg, now, cordially as ever, in the room with the Modigliani reproduction, and then (penti) to fuck Heike, if fuck is the appropriate word, equ
ally cordially, in the room with the Gustav Klimt reproduction. And why not? Why shouldn’t people do these things?. Why shouldn’t my daughter do just whatever she wants? It’s her eighteenth birthday tomorrow. Today. Why shouldn’t she read trash? And why couldn’t 1 just have gone to sleep without thinking about all this? Quindici. Or just got drunk without thinking about all this? Tredici. Georg’s woman, after all, is crippled with muscular dystrophy. Undid. It’s quite reasonable for him to want to shag around. Not much point if you’ve got a bra on, Plottie says, wriggling on the knees of a sixty-year-old who prefers Spinoza to Nietzsche. The mother of his child, as he always describes her. Horror is Berlusconi becoming president for life, says Committed-moderate-left-tottie. Why do 1 hate the word committed? But the peppy Valeria is making that beautiful gesture women have of arching their backs to enable their hands to get up to the bra fastener, so that their tits, and 1 remember remarking on this to her and getting her to do it over and over in front of the mirror of some hotel or other, so that their tits are pushed forward and upward, foregrounded a modern grammarian might say, at precisely the moment nakedness is promised, the sudden give when the fastener is released more dramatic and more exciting than if you had undone it for her. Nope, otto. She raises the tone of her voice. The accent is Roman. All this abundance of beauty, 1 tell myself, watching Peppy-tottie pull her bra out through a sleeve, is somehow more present to me now than it ever was, and more unavailable. Sei, cinque. Nothing could better convince me, Colin gloats at the now bra-less girl, that what fragments of innocence remain to this fallen child must be preserved at all costs. I’m afraid I really cannot reveal the end of this joke. Plottie has started to croon strip music. What a prick you are, Heike says in her Austrian accent. I’d never forgive myself, Colin gloats. And will somebody please get that disgusting beast out of here! Tittie-tottie tries to cover his eyes. A skirmish. Though her own must be altogether more impressive. Quattro, tre. Peppy has a curious grin on her face, there’s a gleam in her eyes. As if removing her shirt were an act of terrorism. I'll do it, she shrieks. You don’t believe me, but I will do it. Whoo-oo-OO-OH! Thus Vikram Griffiths. Morose. Promptly echoed by his lyric hound.