Break.up

by Joanna Walsh

  Jamaica?

  No. She went of her own accord.

  Accord,

  a cord,

  a catechism.

  We were in a cheap hotel room in another country: your country, not mine. It was filled by an iron bedstead like those frames round graves. A washbasin overhung its corner. One of the floorboards seesawed. On the windowsill, fake flowers, dusty, in a ceramic jar.

  Like in a French cemetery, I said.

  That’s just like a tourist. Why does everywhere have to be like somewhere else?

  I am a tourist here. What would you like me to be?

  In the corner of the ceiling, a hole in the plaster spewed white flakes down the wall. It was late, late at night, or early in the morning. We’d been out drinking. What next?

  You said, Would you like to take your clothes off?

  Wait! Where are the Andes?

  You said, But you told me you like to take your clothes off.

  Like?

  I said, No! I said I didn’t mind. I told you, I was an artist’s model. For a job. I don’t mind.

  Where are the Andes?

  I don’t know. Where are the Andes?

  They’re at the end of the Arm-ees.

  You can see the connection (at the wrist) once I strip.

  I unwrapped like an onion, and sat down on our iron grave-frame bed nearly as still as a statue, nearly as white, though who would bother to sculpt something so human? You moved away, as far as you could to the corner of our little room, where you sat down on its only chair, and looked and, for a while, nothing happened.

  I can’t perform authenticity any more authentically. (Me)

  Seducing on behalf of something that, in the end is a truth. Badiou, In Praise of Love

  That was a joke, though you didn’t think it was, didn’t think I had the mind to make it. All the same, you wrote it down in your little book, a case-note. A joke between me and myself then? Well I can’t see anyone else smiling here.

  Why did you ask me to take my clothes off? I asked you, weeks later.

  Why did you do it?

  I thought it might be reciprocal. Why did you ask me to?

  Why not?

  Mirror answers. Well there’s no point in asking any more questions.

  But I still want to know. Did you peel me to find out what was really inside? Naked’s not enough, what would I look like without surfaces? A shapeless mass, like guts, like spooled tape? Is that really the real me, that heap there? Is it a pile of discarded clothes, or is it my mind? I said I didn’t mind undressing, but who wants to look like that? If that’s how you see my mind then, OK, I think I do mind, yes. Even if I was there of my own accord. I think, yes, therefore I mind.

  You thought you could make my body a trap, a hammer, that you could use it to make me fragment, disappear. You thought I was a white stone nymph with insides of salt-crumbled, honeycombed concrete. But I don’t feel like a surface with a separate inside, a body with a detachable spirit, the soul only you believed in. Sitting on the bed, the feeling I have is of my own strange smoothness, my rubbery, unified, unmanufactured nature. Turn me inside out and I’d look just the same, a magician’s rubber egg, lisse and white. A con-juror, you squeezed me into a sphere that small and I shrank to it, I even wanted to. Amazing! I was enchanted, mesmerised. I couldn’t keep my eyes off you. But a conjuror’s magic is never in his nature, it’s in his props, and the trick is, I’m flexible not friable – a joke-shop egg, I don’t crack. I bounce.

  But seriously… I reached across to take your hand, surface to surface. You moved away. None of that! you said.

  Well we never had any of that.

  And, though we talked together again online, so it didn’t seem like it was the end, that night was the last we saw of each other.

  D H Lawrence wrote a story called, ‘None of That!’ (complete with one of your exclamation marks). In it, Ethel kills herself because the writer has her raped, reminds her that she is her body, she who’d dared to declare a mind she could use to tell the tale herself. Lawrence smothers Ethel with layers of male tellers, each as shifty as the next, palming the reader off, passing you along to another. We never get Ethel’s own story; she slips between the pages, a ghost, a memory. It all happened elsewhere, some time ago. One teller questions another. No one speaks the same first language. Conjuror Lawrence slides between his lovers, making sure we know – those paper rapes, those prose killings – that none of that’s his fault.

  It still hurts to read the Lawrence story. Not because of you, but because I took it down, too young, from my father’s bookshelf, that Bluebeard’s library full of mysterious stories written by men. So this was good writing? (It was, of course – brilliant! – but to what end? The question you’re never meant to ask of art.) From it I learned women can be killed, raped on paper, but little about why. It’s a hard, tangled tale of all the ways men hate women, and whichever string you pull leads to a different frayed end until, for a moment, it seems that there is no other way men can love, and that writing is no more than an act of violence.

  But, wait a minute: it was you, not me, who said, None of that!, you who told me the body was so very different from the mind, that words trump flesh. When I reached for your hand I was not ashamed, though, for a moment, shame hovered in the air between us and I couldn’t work out where it had come from. To hold you would, I thought, have been to hold on to you, and I would have sat there however long, just to carry on looking, to hold you in my gaze in order to prolong the illusion. In the end (as no moments stay on hold forever) I sat there for less than five minutes, then I put my clothes on and left. But I found I’d looked too long, and shame, which, for a moment had been unclaimed, passed between us from you to me. It had been your shame all along and, wishing to rid yourself of it, you had looked for its reflection in me. And the morning after I wished I was dead, but not for very long, and not because I had a body, but because the man I loved had tried to use it to destroy me.

  You liked to joke about it afterwards: Would you like to come to my hotel? Shame can lie inert for years until, alchemically, a joke changes its state and it disperses as laughing gas. But, insubstantial as it is, a joke still needs a butt, a line to punch, material for another shaggy god story, for the blonde jokes, the mother-in-law jokes, all the girl jokes. Would I do? Maybe. Unless I am too fragmented, all surface, layer after layer of it, unless you unraveled me to find I’m no more than my peelings, an onion without a centre. Whatever you were looking for it’s clear you didn’t find it in my nakedness. Lossily compressed, I don’t bother the memory. The more you look, the more I pixilate. Rage at my fragments and the joke’s on you, or maybe on both of us. The whole scene is laughable: a clothed man and a naked woman: Dejeuner sur l’herbe – each makes the other look out of place.

  How ever could I have loved anyone so terrible?

  How ever could I have loved anyone so ridiculous?

  Sometimes I’m bored with my own dreary story. What more is it, on dull days, than a tale of a sadist who found an easy prey? But there’s no way I’m passing the narration over to you: sometimes I think that’s all that keeps me alive. And I must be cautious in my retelling. A joke evaporates shame and I feel better about it, numb as rubber, like it – like I – was nothing. But, along with the shame, I have lost something: something of the closeness of shame. It’s no longer a story I have to keep to myself, it’s no longer mine. I let go of it reluctantly. It’s almost all I had.

  Experience degrades so quickly into prose. The stone books on the gravestones in Nice cemetery erode memory. Well, you’re never alone with a book, particularly when you’re writing one. What better way to leave a name behind? But here the names of the dead crumble into blank pages. Essence is flesh: it lives through it, and dies with it. The word doesn’t persist without the page, the screen. When one is gone, so’s the other, though a page unwritten is no more than a piece of paper.

  Maybe I should forget it, let it go. Who’d wish for an eter
nity of grieving in a cemetery full of bad generic sculpture: soap-white amorphous nymphs with elastic legs that merge with their supportive stones – slyly – sex where there should be angels (who knows the mixed motives of those who build monuments to the dead?) One good bust – Antoine Balestra – that looks, perhaps, like something from life; elsewhere, artificial flowers; iron roses flaky with salt-blight, a maritime vogue for sailors’ knots.

  Ni moi sans toi: the gravestone of a married couple.

  No me without you.

  Remember, though, I’m crying here in Nice cemetery because the wealthy were able to pay to make a show of death, and an ugly one at that. Bad taste, what’s more human? A bad joke is hardly a matter of life and death. You taught me to laugh at myself – I mean ‘at’ not ‘with’ – and I loved to feel myself toughen, turn to stone. What exercise is harder, more concrete, what metempsychosis more down-to-earth? If you like, we could take it further. If being away is nearest, if naked is the final mask, is un-communication closest of all? Let’s think up a new game with new rules, a joke with no punch-line, a shaggy dog story that never gets to the tail end.

  • We should get married then never see or speak to each other again, tell no one. Any effect on our lives would only be discoverable after our deaths.

  • I could use my years to work over our few months, become a nun to them. Who’s to say what’s important or, afterwards, what will remain of us?

  In Nice cemetery, sticks and stones…

  I’m only playing.

  Well, there’s more than one kind of playing, and not all of them are fun.

  •••

  I find the waterfall on the way back to my hotel. It was constructed (a notice) in 1885. They switch it off, it says, every day at 5pm. A joke-shop cascade, then, an imitation of nature so our holiday selves can play at living by the seaside? A joke is the answer to a question you weren’t looking for, a fake waterfall round an unexpected corner. There was once a walkway behind the falls – a spying platform designed to charm the view, refracted through water that pours itself into a sort of paddling pool – but it closed in 1983 (a gate with another sign, FERME, and also, BAIGNADE INTERDIT/NO SWIMMING). Why are waterfalls romantic – the real kind I mean? Is it because they are impulsive? Is it because they fall? I’d prepared myself for the sublime and met the ridiculous. Funny, I can never bear to lose my illusions.

  That’s because you want to live in a romcom.

  Back down the hill. You’re right, Nice is funny, and that suits me fine. An opera box set of candy-coloured stage flats, all balconies, terraces, bathing huts. Opportunities for plot are everywhere the private rubs up against the public (isn’t that what comedy is?), and alongside artifice, there’s authenticity: L’Authentic bar’s full now, flesh and blood bulging over the tops of swimming shorts and bikinis and, further down the hill, there it is again, exposed in ranks all along the gravelled beaches. Almost naked there’s all the more chance of a comedy of errors, of one word disguised as another, a pun…

  So, how do I like my holiday so far?

  Like?

  Nice is like those sugar-gritted Nice biscuits: not nice, not really, always the last biscuit left in the variety pack, the very city a childhood joke. The air here is hard and salty but it’s beautiful, clear and warm, a summer England dreams of but hardly sees. I’m happy enough with the sugary crust. If you’re talking about the biscuit, it’s the best bit. Yes, Nice is nice. This’ll do.

  4 Nice – Ventimiglia – Milano – Roma

  26th April

  The 8.30am from Nice is the commuter train crossing the border to Italy, and it is filled with people standing, wearing work clothes. They are not the same people I saw in Nice at the castle, or in the old town, or along the Promenade des Anglais. Or perhaps some of them are, but these people are more beautiful in their everyday clothes than in their holiday outfits and their beauty is something to do with having somewhere to go. I’ve been told to look back at Nice, which looks most lovely as you leave it but, although I’ve chosen a backward-facing seat, the train keeps going in and out of tunnels and I miss the view. Who told me I should look? Oh yes: Round the curve, said K, way around the big corner, where the land rises up away from the water.

  This willingness continually to revise one’s own location in order to place oneself in the path of beauty is the basic impulse. Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just

  Ice cream villas line a stretch of coast that’s one of the most beautiful in Europe. I know this because it said so on the website where I bought my ticket. Washed by the sea and the sun the houses look pretty, whatever else goes on there. Is it something to do with distance?

  Nowhere is so beautiful as when it’s left. The beauty is part of the leaving. Leavers may miss what they’ve left behind but there are always new vistas, making leaving a joy in itself: the joy of finding yourself somewhere else, or joy in the self that will be found in a new place. The ideal holiday would be constant arrival and departure; as it is I’m bored by day three, with all the boredom of home and none of the convenience, but to travel constantly is to gather momentum, as if I followed the sun in an aeroplane flying westwards, chasing the self-same hour, making time, hoping never to grow old. But today I’m headed east into the sunrise, losing time I never had.

  You were always the one who left. You took that privilege. No one is so beautiful as when they are leaving, no one so ready to be left as the one who can’t. If only I could always be leaving, I’d never miss anyone.

  From the seaward window, between the rails and the water, billboards interrupt the view in a rhythm of sun and shadow. Drawing into a station, photo-ads for a cheap store I shopped at in my teens: women in bikinis with moulded cups, round as hard half-footballs. They’re on a beach, each woman alone on her particular billboard, bent in some semi-posture, ready to start into the waves or out from the sea towards the land. The waves in the photos don’t move but the real waves between the billboards do, and sometimes I’m looking at the waves and sometimes at the photos of the waves, close-up and still, with women in bikinis sticking up out of them. At their age. I wanted to look like them, but I didn’t know quite what for.

  Even when I am merely admiring a beautiful body, I am in movement toward the idea of beauty.

  Badiou, In Praise of Love

  Unanchored, I knew what it was to be attractive long before I knew what I wanted to attract.

  At Ventimiglia, a rush to exchange French coupons for Italian tickets, to find the right platform in a new language. English guys x3 stand outside the train smoking last cigarettes. They’re in shirtsleeves and jeans in different fades of blue, and they have an air of travelling for pleasure, of touring – like me, but not like me. I don’t say hello. Today, I don’t want to be English. I try to look like the people on the train, like I have somewhere to go, something to do. I don’t want to get into a conversation. How could I ever explain myself?

  I’ve been told to take the train to Rome running along the beautiful Genoan coast. Instead I am on the faster train to Milan. I worry that the landscape through which I am passing is not beautiful enough. Then the railway line ploughs into a cut. Its sides sprout cacti, and I have to look up to see the sky.

  Why did I take the fast train? What kind of hurry do I think I’m in?

  I flip through the magazine I bought in Nice. The images are still, and I’m moving. On each page the model is a woman alone in a place, and all the places are different and without connection, other than that they are all under blue skies. Often they are the same woman, shown across several pages, looking, on each page, like different women in different clothes, in different places, and sometimes they are also the same women as on the billboards, or women who look very like them, but they don’t look like they’re meant to be the same women because their clothes and their settings are different. Like the women, the settings look similar to each other, but are never quite identical. The women are not doing things, or they are doing things that are diff
icult to explain, like jumping into pools, which spray up into the camera to show movement, or playing ball on a beach, but with no partner, and all of the women have an expression of intense, private experience, sexual or otherwise. Is this what beauty is?

  Looking up, now everything I look at looks like sex, which was suggested by the models’ beauty though, missing something of sex’s vulnerability, they look like they desire nothing outside themselves. Through the landward window pollarded palms wear plastic caps/capotes (that’s French for condoms), thrust down over their knobby tops. The Milano treno has compartments, like in an old movie where – public enough for chance encounters, private enough to limit the number of characters – something’s always starting: plots get underway, people fall in love, or they kill each other. Relations of some kind are formed, in any case. A train compartment is a smoking gun, still loaded.

  If a beautiful palm tree one day ceases to be so, has it defaulted on a promise?

  Scarry, ibid

  In a tunnel the lights flick off. Fantasies flick on. We’re in the compartment alone, have drawn the curtains between the carriage and the corridor. The landscape moves and we don’t; we are doing something private in public. The cloth of the curtains is like the cloth of your coat. I dreamt about it last night, your coat, but with someone else inside, or maybe no one. I couldn’t see your face and the back of your head might as well not have belonged to you, but I held your hand and it felt exactly as it did in real life when I traced it down to the blunt ends of your fingers and, in my dream, we walked through the streets of a city together, as we’d done at other times.

  We wander through the streets together, but quite separately… Time is a tease.

  Breton, Nadja

  A man passes in the corridor with a coffee cart. He stops outside and tings a bell for attention – so cheerful, so musical. In England the coffee cart runners must call out or ask each passenger, individually, whether he or she would like tea or coffee, but this bell is so neat, so playful, so efficient, affixed to the side of the cart, which is stacked so precisely, each packet of whatever top-and-tailing another, polished bricks of chocolate parquet.