by David Plante
She laughed lightly.
It occurred to me that Germaine did not like to be asked about her life. It was as if she had never learned Italian, but had always known it, not only Italian, but dialects, as she had always known about bricks and copper.
Her past I knew nothing of, except that she was Australian and had been to Cambridge.
She said, “I want to get back to the house now. I’ve got to make sure the baby has had lunch, as well as the mother.”
In the afternoon, after a nap, I examined Germaine’s library exclusively of women writers, and I sat on the bottom step of the wooden stairs to read one. Germaine, passing from one room into another, came in and said, “I wish I could sit down and read. I wish I could sit down and do some serious writing. I got this place thinking I’d come here and lead a quiet, contemplative life, and out of the contemplation would pour, as out of a great cornucopia, wondrous books. But I haven’t written anything here.” “Why?” I asked. “I always have people staying and I have to care for them,” she said. I said, “You’re also always doing something on your house. I don’t do anything to my house.” She said, going out, “If you have a house, you have to keep it properly. It’s a responsibility.”
When I went upstairs to my room, Germaine, naked, was in her room, her back to the door. She was against the bright window, and her large body appeared dark. She raised her long arms above her head, then lowered them. The house was quiet, and I thought, in this quiet moment, I shouldn’t disturb her to get into my room, and I went back downstairs.
Later, dressed, she came out with a basket and I went down to the kitchen garden with her, on a terrace below the house, where we picked tomatoes which she said she would conserve.
I also picked the remaining aubergines, to make, I said, a special dish for supper, but I wouldn’t tell her what it was.
“Then you decide on the menu,” she said.
“Oh.”
“Tell me what to buy and I’ll buy it.”
I was taking on a great responsibility.
On the way back to the house we walked along the parterres of white flowers, and Germaine from time to time would lean low over the beds and shout out, “Come on, you fucking flowers, come on! Bloom, bloom!”
While Germaine was out in the late afternoon, after five o’clock when the shops reopened for the day, I started to prepare the dish. This required building a fire in the fireplace and reducing the blaze to embers; but the fire kept going out, and when it caught, a little, it smoked into my face. Germaine came back to find me still trying to get a fire reduced to embers. She said, “You’re doing it like a fucking fairy. Let me do it.” “Like a what?” I asked. She made a face. Within fifteen minutes she had knocked the fire down to bright hot embers.
“What shall I do?” she asked. “Well, you can make the lamb stew.” “What kind of stew?” “In a tomato sauce.”
Between then and supper I prepared only one dish, which required grilling the aubergines over the embers till their skins were charcoal black, scraping out the insides, squeezing the bitter juices out and mixing the pulp with butter and milk, salt and lots of pepper.
Germaine had invited an elderly American friend up from the valley for supper. He said about the dish I’d prepared, which, in combination with the stew, was called, approximately, huejiabendi. “This really is different from anything I’ve ever had.” Germaine ate without expression, as if she wouldn’t recognize that the aubergine dish was in any way special. But I knew it was special.
She had prepared everything else.
I said, “The stew is really delicious.”
She could not give a compliment, I saw, and she could not accept a compliment; she remained expressionless, her mouth pulled down so her nostrils, too, were pulled down, and her face was longer than usual.
Even while sitting at the table, Germaine seemed to be doing something other than sitting at the table and eating, and that other was more important; and if she could not in fact be doing that other, she was actively thinking about it. I recognized that she was always doing something other in her mind, and as intense as her concentration was in what she was doing, there was an air about her of considering, more intensely, something else. I had the vivid impression from her of, at some high level, trying to sort out, not her personal problems, but other people’s problems.
Most of Germaine’s talk at dinner was about infibulation, female circumcision, among tribes in Africa. She described how older women performed the operation on younger, using, at best, rusty razor blades. In severe cases, the clitoris was cut out and the inner lips of the labia; what was, in fact, a bloody wound was bound shut with grass tied tightly about the thighs, a straw inserted to insure an orifice large enough for urine and menstrual discharge to pass, and the wound was allowed to heal. When the time came for the woman to give herself to her new husband, he cut her open and fucked her; then a wooden copy of his erect cock was placed in the wound, and she was bound again, so only her husband, he thought, had access to her. As men with the same size, and smaller, cocks had access to her also, Germaine said a man who wanted to keep his wife his only should naturally want to have a very small cock. Of course, the woman, whose genitals were scar tissue, did not care much if she was fucked or not. Each time she gave birth, she had to be cut open.
Often as she spoke I put my hands between my legs and held my genitals.
After the American left and the mother joined her baby, Germaine and I drank wine and talked.
She said, “All evening I’ve been thinking about that mother and her baby and what can be done for them.”
•
The next day Germaine was very active, at the house and away. Sometimes she went off alone, sometimes I went with her. I recall the results of her activity in final images: many jars of conserved tomatoes, a miniature loden coat for the little girl—
In the garage where I went with her to have the car checked, she talked to two mechanics with grease-stained arms and Tuscan golden eyes, and as she spoke to them she appeared to dance lightly about the garage, among the dismantled cars and car parts. They stared at her. Perhaps they had never known a woman who could swing her hips from side to side and clasp her hands to her breasts and pucker her mouth and know as much as they did about shock absorbers.
They, as did all the locals, called her La Dottoressa.
By the time we were ready to leave—the big Ford packed, a basket of panini with ham, of cheese, of fruit, and a bottle of brandy at my feet by Germaine in the front seat, and a bed made in the back for the baby—the sun was setting.
Germaine said, “This is going to be one fucking bad trip. I wish I were going back to London by plane.”
As we passed Cortona, the town, high on the side of a mountain among olive trees and cypresses, was still in sunlight, and beaming.
“We have a rule,” Germaine said; “no one ever points to anything and says, ‘Look at that, how beautiful it is.’”
In the plain, passing a field of the stumps of sunflowers, I said, “Look at that, how ugly it is.”
It was soon dark. The baby fell asleep, as did the mother in the back seat. Germaine drove up into northern Italy, towards the Brenner Pass. She drove very fast, so the highway lights seemed to stream about the car.
The night itself became a country, floating above the other countries, which was measured not in terms of hours, but kilometres; the night was hundreds of kilometres long. Though we stopped for passport control at the Austrian and German borders, the real frontier, I felt, was when we crossed from darkness into dawn.
All night, Germaine talked, or so I imagine now she did. What I most recall was her telling me about her sexual experiences. As often happened after I listened to Germaine talk, I recall vivid images, and the most vivid is this: a dark, thin, intense Italian used-car salesman took her to the sea outside Melbourne one summer evening, at hot, green sunset, where, lying on the beach, people were sleeping wrapped completely in white sheets; there w
as a sharp, hot wind, and the sheets thrashed about the still bodies, among which Germaine followed the used-car salesman down to the sea, deep green; he took her hand and led her into the sea, both of them clothed, so she felt the rising and falling water pull at her clothes, and, in the waves, he fucked her.
As Germaine told me such stories, I felt that I was being taken into her confidence, into her private world; that is, I was taken into the private world of a public woman, where I learned something about her no one else knew. But I also felt that she was not talking to me, but to anyone, and what I heard anyone could hear.
Her only secret was this: she would not reveal how she had become Germaine Greer, how she had learned everything she had had to learn to become the person she was. She would reveal everything about the Germaine Greer who actually was, who was entirely public, and about whom she kept no secrets.
As for her sexual activities, they were not dark and private, but activities in which the world was engaged and which were in large part determined by, and with study might explain something of, the world she lived in. She talked about those various activities (she preferred men for their bit of gristle) as if talking about the sexual activities of the outside world.
At a petrol station in Germany we all got out to pee. It was dark and cold. Back in the car, I waited with the mother and the woken baby for Germaine, who was, I thought, taking a long time. She came, finally, with a silver envelope containing a condom, which she had bought from a machine. I wondered if she had gone into the men’s room for it, or if there was a dispensing machine in the ladies.’ She was interested in it, she said, because it was advertised as prolonging love-making. Before she started the car, she tore open the envelope and pulled out the condom and stuck a finger in it. “Just as I thought,” she said. “It’s coated inside with a lubricant which simply numbs the cock.” A bit of evidence for some scientific research on contraception, I thought. She threw it and the envelope out.
We drove off. It began to rain. Germaine took long pulls from the bottle of brandy. We played word games. It rained harder, then stopped.
With dawn, we went into the country of light, a light rising from the flat wet green-grey countryside like a mist. The autobahn was deserted. The first sign I saw in the daylight was DACHAU. Germaine went silent.
A long time afterward I said, “Look, another sign for Ausfahrt. What a funny name for a town.”
For the first time since Dachau, she spoke, laughing. “You nit, that means exit.”
We were silent again.
She said, “Another sign for Ausfahrt. All roads in Germany lead to Ausfahrt.”
After a prolonged silence, driving very fast, she began to talk quietly to her car, sometimes patting the dashboard.
“You’re doing well, baby. You’re doing so well, my baby.”
Whenever we stopped for petrol, Germaine, I thought, spoke, not simply German, but the German of the region. She might even say, afterward, that the garage man who’d served us wasn’t from the area, but, according to his accent, from another region.
By ten in the morning we were in Belgium, a country, she said, of no shadows.
The mother and the baby woke. The baby had to pee, which she did, as before, in a pot her mother held for her. The pot was handed to me; I rolled down the window, stuck the pot far out, tipped it upside down, and the pee was sprayed back in through the window, into our faces. Pee was dripping from Germaine’s nose. She laughed. I looked at the mother and the baby; the mother, too, was laughing lightly, wiping her face with her fingers, but the baby, her pee dripping from her face, looked shocked. Perhaps she wasn’t sure if this was meant to happen or not. Perhaps, in the month away, she had had a lot of shocks.
At Ostend we waited in the car in a queue for the ferry. Germaine took out a little round mirror to look at herself, holding the mirror at different angles. Then she put on some makeup and combed out her hair; she combed it out till it stood on end.
We had a late lunch on the ferry. The American girl said something I didn’t hear, as it was said in a low voice; it made Germaine explode, and the explosion made her hair stand out more.
She said, “You and your child can just get out of my sight for a while.”
The mother and the baby went off to walk about the deck.
Germaine ordered drinks, vodka and tomato juice.
I said, “I’ll bet there’ve been a lot of people in your life whom you’ve taken on to help, and whom you’ve resented helping.”
She looked at me, her eyes narrow. “You think I ask for it, do you?”
“Well, no relationship is one-sided. If she’s with you for you, you’re with her for some reason, too.”
Her face twisted, and a shock seemed to make her hair vibrate. “I wanted to help.”
A little boy, half tripping, came running into the restaurant, followed by the American girl’s child, who ran after him.
In a loud voice, Germaine said, “I know what you’re after, baby. You want to give him a blow job.”
The little boy went out, and the little girl, toddling, went after him.
Germaine sighed.
The mother came through, looking for her daughter.
Germaine sighed again.
At Dover, Germaine said, “Here we are in the country of the grey underpants.”
I began to hallucinate, seeing, in the gathering twilight, buildings from other countries. I wondered if, after more than twenty-four hours of driving, Germaine too might be hallucinating; then I imagined that she wouldn’t hallucinate, that her strong will would keep her seeing only what was there, the dual carriageway, the lights, the signs. Her face was tense with concentration. Her hair was electric in the way it stood out. I depended on her, on the clarity and power of her concentration, to get me through my hallucinations to London.
After she left off her friend and the baby, she came to my flat, where we had scrambled eggs. If she gave in to being tired, it was by talking more and more about the mother and baby. I wondered if she were hallucinating about them. Abruptly, she stood to go to her house.
She said, “I want, I need, someone to sleep with tonight.”
I kissed her good night.
Over the following days, I thought a lot about Germaine, and my thinking made of her a large public woman obsessed with the world, the entire world; she was difficult towards people in the world because so few cared a fuck about it.
When, a week later, she came to dinner, I asked her about the mother and the baby; she said, “They’re staying with me again.” She sighed. “Well, what’s to be done for such people? What?”
2
In the late summer of 1980, I was in New York, on my way to Oklahoma, where I was to be writer in residence for the autumn term at the University of Tulsa. Germaine was also to be there, as she’d been the previous autumn term, setting up the Tulsa Center for the Study of Women’s Literature. I had seen her in Italy the summer before, and she’d said to me about Tulsa, “The people there are good people. You’ll be treated very well. But you’re not going to find many men of a particular sex in Tulsa, Oklahoma.” I said, “What sex is that?” She drew in her chin and pursed her lips; she put her hands to her breasts and threw out a hip and fluttered her eyelashes. She said, “If you don’t know, my dear, you can’t expect me to tell you.” I laughed. In New York, I could not imagine Tulsa inhabited by any people, of no matter what sex, except for Germaine.
I was staying with a friend on the West Side; invited one hot Sunday afternoon to lunch by another friend on the East Side, I walked through Central Park. I tried to keep my course across the park by sighting a tall pointed building on the East Side, but, among narrow paths about hillocks and mulberry woods and scummy ponds, I got lost; I walked round and round, and came out of the woods into a meadow; in the high, dry grass of the meadow were hundreds of men, all in narrow bathing trunks, sun bathing, and as I walked along the path at the edge of the meadow they moved, as if together, and looked at me. Their
oiled bodies gleamed. I walked quickly, though it was hot and dusty.
The path took me through woods again, then out on to a wide flat playing field, and I sighted my tall pointed building.
As I walked, slowly, I thought of what Germaine had said.
I could not imagine myself among those men, in their country. It frightened me, I knew, because there were no women in it.
This occurred to me in Central Park: why should I, who was supposed to be independent of women, so want to be with women?
When, after I returned to the West Side, I told this to my friend, he said, laughing, “Not just women—difficult women.”
“Oh Christ,” I said.
Why, I thought, why was I so anticipating being in Tulsa with Germaine, whom I knew to be an enormously difficult woman?
•
I arrived a few days before she did, and stayed with the Dean. With him I went to meet Germaine at her hotel. It was white-hot in Oklahoma, and all surfaces seemed to vibrate in the heat. In the cool car I kept asking myself why I was anxious about seeing her, as if my stay in Tulsa were not going to be judged by the University, the graduate department, my students, but Germaine. For some reason, my success or failure seemed to depend on her. I was talking with the Dean about Tulsa and thinking, at the same time, about Germaine. Then I thought: You must sort this out. We drove under the portico of the big, glassy, modern hotel, and there she was, waiting outside the revolving glass doors, her shoes held by their straps in her hand. I got out to meet her, and kissed her, lightly, on both cheeks.
“Isn’t it extraordinary,” I said, “that we should have seen one another last in Cortona, Italy, and this time in Tulsa, Oklahoma?”
She scowled a little. “I don’t think it’s at all extraordinary.”
As she walked barefoot across the pavement, I looked down at her feet. It was the first time I had noticed that they were broad and stubby. I had, before, thought of her as beautiful beyond any fault. I had thought of her, large, standing high above me and looking down upon me, a very beautiful public woman. Her feet made her, in one small part, a private women. But she was private only in her feet. At the car, she put her shoes on.
