Europa

by Tim Parks

  After dinner Suzanne sat at his feet with the puppy on the balcony while he proceeded with the sad story of his first marriage, then his second, already in difficulty, and my wife, perhaps having trouble following his Welsh accent, his mistakes, whether of stress or inflection, or both, in almost every Italian word he spoke, very kindly played by the now open french window with the silent Martino. She found an old Lego set of Suzanne’s and they began to build a house together. It was one of those sets - and it’s a surprise to me now that I recall this - with pink and primrose bricks and kitchen appliances and sunshades to set out on the terrace. White deck-chairs. Small figures to sit on them who never move, never change. Thinking of Rheims, I accepted a cigarette too. Vikram showed Suzanne a photo he kept of his first fiancee. The only photo he would ever keep of anyone, he said. He was on the whisky now and very near to being out of his head. The puppy buried its nose in Suzanne’s jeans. He’d got it off a friend for Martino’s birthday, he said, but the first wife refused to keep it. We’ve got to beat those bastards at the University, he told me. I was in the deck-chair opposite. They’re determined to fire us. I laughed, euphoric, pulling on my cigarette, thinking of Rheims. It is from this collision of intimacy and distance, I reflect, that our collective dreams arise. Love affairs, families, Europe. We construct them in the dream of overcoming distances. We imagine we have overcome distances. Through these dreams. We have constructed something. An equilibrio. But she was already receiving flowers from him when she told me to meet her in the Hotel Racine. The words were waterwords. Frasi di letto. The Lira has almost disappeared overnight. We’ve got to give them hell on every possible front, Vikram was saying. He had the dog on his own lap now and was ruffling its ears. Suzanne laughed and said Dad actually wanted to be fired. Oh, your father’s a queer one, Vikram joked, ruffling the puppy’s ears. He’s a double agent, your father is. By this point almost all the conversation was between these two, while I smoked and watched my wife building a dream house with the young Martino, surprised to see how attractive she could be sometimes, and how kind, a big, kind body down on her knees with a little boy. Vikram was saying that he’d married his first wife because he felt he could help her get over her depressions, then his present wife because she had been pregnant, though she had then got an abortion immediately after they were married. And now again, last month. He couldn’t understand why she had got an abortion. Nor why she insisted on visiting her parents every weekend and holiday. I’ll have to keep the dog if Paola can’t stand it, he said. I love dogs. Mart can see it at my place. Then in response to Suzanne, he said that apart from the fact that this pregnancy reminded him of his first fiancee, he was against abortion. It’s called Dafydd, he laughed, turning the puppy upside down, after the Welsh poet Dafydd ap Gwilym. He’d always had a dog as a child. He cleared his throat. Though not an anti-abortionist, of course. He told these stories to everybody, I later discovered. Word for word. Not all of them were true. Now where shall we put the bathroom? I heard my wife saying very gently. Yes, beside the bedrooms, of course. Who said you hadn’t got a tongue in your mouth, Martino? You’re quite a chatterbox. Between the children’s bedroom and the parents’? A very good idea. Her father is a newspaper editor, Vikram laughed. The first wife’s. The puppy yowled when he pulled an ear too hard. You should never get pregnant by accident, Vikram Griffiths told my daughter very earnestly, you should always use contraceptives, he insisted. And remembering this now, I can’t help but reflect on the remarkable intimacy that was developing between these two, Vikram Griffiths and my daughter, perhaps precisely because of the enormous distance between them. Do we love each other because of the distance between us, the foreignness? Of age and nationality? Of colour? Is it the combination of intimacy and distance that generates such intensity, such longing? Vikram Griffiths would have shagged my young daughter senseless if he’d got half the chance, I tell myself. She’d have been in a bathrobe in his dilapidated apartment, while he spoke on the phone to some other tottie, or to his analyst. Vikram talked a lot about anal sex and about having women piss on him, Colin once told me. In his mouth, apparently. On his pursed lips. He liked women to piss on his lips. Speckled that evening with tiramisu. Yesterday with spittle. Which reminds me of Opera-tottie, of the unanswered message on my answering machine, of Rheims hopelessly revisited. Where are the loving couples? I ask myself in the Meditation Room, so-called, of this important international institution. Where are the happily monogamous marriages, where the flourishing families, where Europe? To be invented, I tell myself. And I appreciate that I invented that speech because of her, to please her. I invented the unlikely image of a Jeremy Marlowe polemically engaged in the question of human rights. I was still imagining we might get together again somehow, over the lectors' crisis, over Europe. We would make love again. It’s unforgivable the way I just can’t leave be, I reflect. At one in the morning Vikram staggered to his feet and drove himself and his young child home. With the puppy-dog. In bed, my wife and I made love and laughed.

  I invented the speech to please her. Encouraged by the touch of her hand on my leg. Perhaps if allowed to go on I would have introduced the concept of permanent pan-factional compromise. If allowed to go on speaking to the influential Petitions Committee of the European Parliament, and I was certainly planning to go on, I might have discovered some rhetoric to suggest that the whole process of European integration hung on the resolution of the lectors’ crisis at the University of Milan, or on my relationship with her. A test case, I could have said. A test case in the application of the collective will to establish a new and more ‘acceptable reality. Then Dimitra came. O trelos aftoktonisse! It never occurred to her she was speaking the wrong language. Aftoktonisse! Someone had to go and recognize the body. I volunteered. I was still in the buzz of my new authoritative role, my new success. She had always wanted me to realize my potential, to become the man she felt I had been born to be. Were we together again? We walked back around the left hemisphere, hurried along by an official in traditional dark suit, the Welsh MEPs Yorkshire blonde secretary quietly padding beside. On the first floor a small crowd had formed by one of the toilets. A doctor held her back. Only one, he said. It’s upsetting. So she and Nicoletta and Luis and Barnaby Hilson stood outside talking to journalists while I went in. And it occurs to me now how bizarre Vikram Griffiths’ decision was. I would have imagined a man who enjoyed his suffering so much was proof against suicide, a man who had moulded his identity around an accident of birth that made him a minority of one, around his eloquent articulation of the world’s endless conspiracy against him, who told his sad life-story with such relish, who discovered himself in his struggles, against the University, against his women, against the English, against God, luring everybody else into embattled complicity, for and against; a man who said, We’ve got to get the bastards, Jerry boyo, we’ve got to take our case to Europe. Full of energy, full of determination. In the Shag Wagon! A man safe in the knowledge of the just cause, and likewise of his insatiable appetite for trouble and for women. He should have been proof against suicide, I thought. Unless suicide was the ultimate mise-en-scene for his kind of theatre. Suicide was the one way he could become our representative again, and emblematically forever, centre^stage in the European Parliament.