Break.up

by Joanna Walsh

  I drag my bag along the Promenade des Anglais, passing between rows of white benches, a spectacle for the old people, of whom there are many, sitting out of the sports lane of rollerbladers and scooters. The two rows of seats face each other, not the sea, and all day long the tourists stare into each other’s holiday faces. Behind them the beach is partitioned – a culture of nature – each section about twenty metres long, each with its own white-awninged café. Most are marked private, exclusive to the guests of particular seafront hotels. Every fifteen minutes a low plane chokes over the sea on its way to the city’s airport. The sky’s skidmarked with contrails: remember, it says, you are on holiday.

  I reach the harbour. Big yachts are lined up like battleships behind weird desert trees. All along the quay Nice is rebuilding. Cranes knock cavities in a gap-toothed parade of icing-sugar hotels. The streets have had too many sweets. Nice looks nice – soft and crumbly – but that’s just the surface. You could break your teeth on the city. The beaches aren’t sand but large round stones. The confectioners here sell chocolate pebbles that look just like them, their sugar shells unforgivingly hard. Take a bite and the joke’s on you.

  I make a left into the old town. A short cut… perhaps. There is Russian, not French, on the menus but that’s OK; all the restaurants serve the same thing: salade niçoise, moules, pizza, spaghetti vongole. The kitchens, staffed by North Africans, are turning Italian. Beyond the restaurants the shopping zone sucks me into its tiny vacuum of aspirated streets. Tourists glance up from the narrow gullies to elsewhere, above them signs for the café de Turin; the Quai des Etats-Unis. Nice, tricksy city, turns me a couple of times before I find my way back onto a street I can name. I round a corner and a wall of flowers slaps up against my sight-lines with the crack of waves on the concrete piers. Plastic. There are real flowers that look like this for sale all over town, just as bright, and a bunch of them costs about the same as the fakes. Along the dark trenches of streets, clothes shop mirrors flashing light fly at angles to meet me, tip my tipsy sea legs landwise. Mise-en-abyme, my reflection rises up towards me, will not let me pass. This is not what I came for: a close-up, a reflection of my fragmented self.

  You are fragmented.

  Your voice comes more rarely now. Why is it only your insults I remember?

  No, I’m the sum of everything that has ever happened to me. You are obsessed by surfaces.

  And why not?

  Mirrors – transparent but solid – reflect movement the wrong way round. Every reflection conjures not its imitation, but its opposite. On Skype you were left/right reversed, as in a mirror – no wonder I sometimes got the wrong end of the stick. My webcam showed me reflected, tiny, in the corner of my screen and, at your end, you saw not only me but also your own image.

  Was I your mirror? We talked online but IRL I could only stare. When I look I can’t speak (try it: why else are photos silent?). I was content to reflect on what you said while I held you in my gaze, steady as a full bowl of water. If I disturbed the surface with a movement, a noise, it glanced dangerous reflections as though about to spill, so mostly I listened, mute as a swan reflected double, its white battleship twin masking frantic legs. You slid bright screens of words – you said – ‘betwixt’ us.

  Reciprocal love, such as I envisage it, is a system of mirrors which reflects for me, under the thousand angles that the unknown can take for me, the faithful image of the one I love, always more surprising in her divining of my own desire and more gilded with life.

  Breton, Mad Love

  I liked your words.

  I like a man who can use the word… betwixt.

  I like a man who can use extraordinary words carelessly and ordinary words magnificently.

  I like a man who uses… exclamation marks!

  I liked the rhythm of our written conversations, the ellipses, phrases left hanging, finished, or left to go hang; each sentence a switchback, every new word, a change of angle. There was a world in your words, or somewhere on the other side of them, because surfaces are something, after all. Words worked online, but when we saw each other face-to-face I reached out and touched only your surface (what else could I have touched?) and it pooled, rippled, destroyed the depth’s reflection. You look into, not onto, a mirror. Heloise to Abelard (a letter: words not flesh): I never sought anything in you but yourself. Why did you look for anything else in me?

  I’m ‘obsessed’ by surfaces?

  I’m only joking.

  There’s no such thing as tone of voice in instant message. Had you been joking all along? A joke has a mirror’s opacity: a pun’s the double of a word reflected, reversed left to right, not its true image. Its meaning bounces back. A reminder: every phrase mirrors its speaker, each word reflects its author. I catch myself in the mirror sometimes, certain expressions. Just occasionally I still look exactly like what it looked like you were looking for.

  Who goes there?… Is it only me? Is it only myself?

  Breton, Nadja

  •••

  Sitting in my hotel room, a white cube that plays games with space, I’m still wondering whether to press the send on my postcard. No. I detach the photo I took in London, attach another I took from the train window this morning. Instead of the image embedding, sentences spool out across the screen, sentences I can’t read. Oh yes, a jpeg isn’t made of pixels after all. Break it up and it’s made of language. Everything comes down to the words. I try again. This time the picture takes, but the moment’s passed. I don’t send. I put it into Drafts. Hide and seek; if I don’t press the button I may never hear from you again.

  Typical female manipulation.

  I don’t play games, I said.

  Sorry, you said.

  Once.

  Is this an ending, then, or just another gap? Consider the rhythm of our communication: its beats and silences. Consider the unwritten rules of the game uncovered as we went along:

  • If you write to me, I can answer.

  • At any point either of us can choose not to answer the other.

  • I cannot choose to write to you first, for fear that you will not reply.

  • You cannot choose not to write to me… eventually. Though your absences are longer I know it is just a matter of time.

  That I cannot write to you first is your trump card, your secret power; that you cannot choose not to write to me, eventually, is mine. Though the gaps widen, the rules still hold.

  Mind the gap.

  But what is this game for and why would anyone want to win it? What’s the prize, if there’s a prize at all, or is the prize just not losing? Too late for me. I lost you. If you never wanted me in the first place, you had nothing to lose but, if you win, you win either nothing, or nothing you any longer desire. Lucky at cards, unlucky in love: the King of Hearts. Having everything to lose, why did I, why do I, play your game?

  It is by an extreme capacity for defiance that certain unusual people who have everything to hope and everything to fear from one another will alway recognise one another… as regards love, the only question that exists for me is to resume under all the requisite conditions, that nocturnal ride.

  Breton, ibid

  Because if I let you have power over me, we have a relationship.

  Nice

  25th April

  Sun forces me away from my hotel room, away from my laptop, from the internet. Time ups anchor, thoughts can no longer be written as soon as I have them, or just as soon reciprocated. I have not felt sun on my skin like this for a long time. It touches only my outsides; the inside is still in shadow and dead cold. In the street, heat is turning the city inside out. It can be like this in England when winter flips over to spring, when the grass turns from green to blue, is suddenly for sitting on, but only for a day, then it’s back to cloud. There’s no stability in nature: nothing looks the same in a different light.

  I’m on the Avenue Victor Hugo, opposite a toytown church. It’s morning, and the chill has shifted to the other side
of the street. Crossing the road, I wait for the lights to change. Unlike Paris, there is no pedestrian button to press, no illusion of control. I give myself up to passivity. I’ve lost the map so I’m crowd-sourcing my day. K emails: Go to the old section, and wander about in and out the little streets where it goes uphill. Charming and inspiring. There is a small bar tucked in there somewhere, but I can’t remember the name of it, it hasn’t redecorated since the ’twenties. Also, walk the beach all the way around the big corner, where the land rises up away from the water, go all the way round and then sit and watch the Corsica ferries come and go. Take cigarettes and a lovely Provence rosé, perhaps that one is for late afternoon, when the sun gets slanty.

  The whole problem of the passage from subjectivity to objectivity is implicitly resolved there… What is most striking is that an activity of this kind, which, in order to be, requires the unconditional acceptance of a more or less lasting passivity, far from limiting itself to the world of the senses, has been able to attain, in depth, the moral world.

  Breton, Mad Love

  Bonjour. A beggar clicks his plastic cup. The street smells of orange blossom, lime blossom. I retrace my steps through the old town past the plastic flowers. In a supermarket, I buy a tiny bottle of rosé, which comes with a plastic cup. I see many useful or delicious things I would also like to buy, but I don’t have room in my luggage to weigh myself down with keepsakes. In a tabac I stare and stare at the display of primary-coloured blocks until finally I choose a tough cube of Gauloises, and a lighter, a briquet. ‘Gauloises,’ I hesitate, ‘light.’ Women don’t smoke full strength, do they? Not that I really smoke, but I occasionally like to be part of the international republic of smokers. Bum a cigarette off any of them; there’s no such thing as private property. Vous avez du feu?/Do you have fire/a light? Which sounds better, English or French? You don’t need to use the words to ask; a flick of the wrist will do. But how do I know these are the cigarettes I’ll like?

  I’ve already seen the old town, I head up the hill as K suggests.

  Everywhere in Nice there are dog turds, and dried-up pine cones that look exactly like dog turds. I climb uphill towards the castle. There are few signs, and I take a number of turns that lead me down again to a square with a quiet church. I retrace to follow a steep zigzag of yellow paths, alternating light and shade. It’s hot, getting toward midday. Shadows back against the house fronts, doors retreat into the inch of dark that clings to their sills.

  Around a green corner (Nice is all corners) half-way up, a shock: a man sprawled asleep on a bench in full sun. He has your profile, instantly recognisable, and it’s the sort of crazy thing you’d do. He’s been up, travelling all night, no money (I Instagram a story). For a moment I imagine… But the jolt I’ve given myself is self-indulgence. He’s not even your mirror image. One square further up, a girl spreadeagled – asleep too? Then I see she’s reading, and remember that women seldom abandon themselves in public.

  I pass a bar called L’Authentic. Is that the one K meant? It’s empty and it doesn’t look like anywhere I’d like to stop so I keep going. It’s noon. As I climb higher the tourists in leisurewear fall away. My clothes begin to peel against my skin: I’m conscious of my extra civilised layer. My mission takes on its own momentum: just like in Belleville I have to get to the top, if only for the point of view – and a hidden castle! Who wouldn’t want to see that? Besides there’s a waterfall, a cascade. The signs peter out until, at the entrance to the castle area, a notice board with a map I can’t pin myself down to. Never mind. Here’s the summit, finally flat. The castle’s beyond those trees. What will it be like?

  A terrible disappointment. I’m in a children’s playground. There is a toy train, manicured gardens, an insistent notice handwritten in English, WC NOT FREE!. I expected a dragon and met with a pussycat. This is not a castle. It’s an hallucination, a slice of lower Nice floated here by djinn. This is no reward for the effort of the climb. How ever did all the immobile people sitting down get up here? The plateau is sheltered by trees from the wind and the sight of the sea. The benches turn inward, away from the view. We could be at ground level. I search for the castle, find a few scattered stones hauled out of the earth, fenced off. Where its battlements would have been, a white wave of a cafés set for lunch. On a crag beneath the resto I find a corner with a view. I sit down and open my screw-top rosé, arm-wrestling the wind for my plastic glass. I try to light a cigarette. (Why smoke if you’re not addicted? Why flirt if you don’t mean it? Why play these dangerous games?) I thumb the button but can’t spark the lighter, try again, cupping my hands, but lose the fire to the breeze. I suck furiously but the cigarette won’t stay alight. Who said it was easy to give in to temptation? I give up. I don’t want the people in the café to see my failure. The wind drops and I think about trying again, but where and when is it right to smoke? A family with children sits down on the bench beside me. Clearly not here or now. It’s supposed to be relaxing – a cigarette, a glass of wine. I’m meant to be having fun. The wind snatches my half-empty plastic tumbler, bowls it between the railings into the dead drop. I look over, half hiding. Did it hit someone? I pick up the packet of cigarettes, then drop it, once-bitten by its warning photo of a mouth full of blackened piano keys: Fumer tue/Smoking kills doesn’t bother me. I’m happy to flirt with my death wish, but… the teeth. I hide the packet away in my bag.

  From here, there’s nowhere to go but downhill. The road down winds around the town cemetery. I find myself looking for the entrance. Why do I want to visit? I don’t know, why did the chicken cross the road? But it is difficult, more difficult than you would think, to get into the graveyard. Elevated above the road its clean white wall is gateless, six feet deep; the stroller on a level with the dead. Eventually I find a door, one body wide.

  On the steps of the Jewish section, the flyblown spine bone of a rat, tail still attached. There’s no one here. It feels indecent to gawp at these segregated graves so modestly turned in upon themselves, away from the sea. I’ll be more comfortable in the Protestant section, whose flamboyant angels I saw without the city wall: better a tourist on the religion I’m not. I follow the road further down the hill and find the gate.

  A French cemetery is not an English cemetery. Graveyards are not parks like in England. There is no grass. Resting on the gravestones would be very wrong. They are always tombs; they never decay into scenery. The English dead go to earth: trees, brambles strangle their coffins, a fashion approved time out of mind. In France all green is banished. My first French boneyard shocked me, choked me, left me dizzy. I could hardly cross it: the sun flying off shard-white stone, ceramic chrysanthemums, photos under glass. To mourn, the French need surfaces, reflections. They have not gone, their dead. There’s no decay: they’ve turned to plastic, marble, bronze. Imprism’d, they catch the light and something left is caught, something desired by the people left behind. It bounces between mirrored surfaces. English flesh is grass. But French flesh is not essence. Evaporated, the essentials rattle, dry, trapped. Knock, knock. Who’s there? Anything alive? Tough, shiny dark-leaved plants in pots, at most. Who’d buy chrysanthemums out of season? (A heap of dead ones drying by the gate, stalks slimy, soon to be burnt.) A French cemetery: the deadest thing I ever saw.

  A ring-dove clatters out of my path into the sky, its cry the rattle of a wind-up toy.

  No, French cemeteries are not designed to comfort the living. The dead have the best seats, looking out over the dead drop, tombs ranked for clear sight lines, stalls to balcony. You, the visitor, do not sit. An usherette to the dead, you stand because there are already presences sitting, leaning against those iron gate things, those blasted greenhouse frames, those fancy ironwork bedsteads that shore up the monuments. These presences look like people, or sometimes like objects: amongst the marble mourners, birthday cake plinths piled with stone toy cars, planes, tools of the trade, scrolled qualifications, sculpted with the same skillset as the icing-sugar monuments in the pati
sseries downtown. Blind angels scan the baie des Anges, some with teddybear glass eyes: Florette, Solange Cornetti, who died in the ’twenties with fashionable hairdos and improbable bodies: children. Why do the dead need to see the sea, to watch the sun fragment the crawling waves? Why do the living in the castle park turn away; why do the locals leave the seafront to the tourists? Why do the seafront benches turn inwards? Because they know it kills you, one way or another. Even if it doesn’t drown you, it rusts you ‘til you crumble, its salt skein settles into wrinkles, draws flesh back against the bone. Better turn away.

  Yes, there were some times I wanted to die. K, who told me to buy cigarettes and wine, said there would be. K is divorced. She said, it wasn’t the end of my marriage that hurt, it was the end of the relationship right after.

  Are you having a breakdown? (you)

  No. I’m like this all the time. (me)

  That’s like something I’d have said.

  Like, like?

  Alike?

  Still like to marry me? (you)

  (I knew it was only a joke. But…)

  Sure.

  Good. I like you very much.

  Wait. I know some jokes too. OK, here’s one:

  Why is a something like a whatever?

  (Why is a raven like a writing desk?)

  No, not that one. All the jokes I know are about women who go travelling, like:

  My wife went to the West Indies.

  Jamaica?

  No she went of her own accord. And how about,

  My wife went to Italy.

  Genoa?

  Should think so after all these years. My wife went to Switzerland.

  Geneva?

  Not any more: I’m doing just fine on my own.