Break.up

by Joanna Walsh

  Across Europe, coffee is the common currency. Sitting at the table in the café, somehow I order, flip open my computer. I show the waiter my screen. The cursor flickers in the box. He understands. He types in the code. And I am connected.

  I open my inbox. There is a moment – awful, wonderful – while the page loads: microseconds spent waiting. However quick, it’s never quick enough.

  Is there anyone here?

  (One here!)

  There is.

  You are. Or I am. Or, more rarely, we are here, together. I am not at this table, not in this street, not in this café. I am not in Athens. This is where I am.

  A girl, maybe eight years old, comes right up to my second-tier café table, selected in order to avoid vendors and touts. She’s with a couple of other children, older and younger, but she’s the one who enjoys her job. Elbows on the table, she looks up into the drinkers’ eyes before she offers her hand for coins. She leans over my new laptop, puts out a finger and strokes its aluminium shell, tentatively, sensually. She has never seen anything like it before.

  The future’s already here; it’s just not evenly distributed.

  William Gibson, attrib.

  When I crossed the international border last night, time flipped another hour on from England. I thought I was getting away but here you are, still. You wrote to me yesterday evening: I was already asleep. I replied this morning before you were awake. I remember when I was in Prague in the real past – post-Soviet but pre-internet – how I stalked my building’s postboxes for another love’s letters. I didn’t have a key – the box was my host’s – but I learnt to pry them out with a ruler; I couldn’t wait. The drip-feed of emails is more satisfying but more addictive, like the dark syrupy coffee, like the unaccustomed sun. It is delicious to go to sleep knowing that in the morning they will be there. Is this the extinction of loneliness, or its renewal? Online we can get in touch any time we feel like it. Feel… touch. I bury my cheek in my palm, just to be in touch with someone.

  Why do you fly from me?

  (Fly from me!)

  When I am online, I am the place you escape to. When I am not online (when I am with you), I am in the place you wish to escape. When I imagine what I desire I still think of you, perhaps because I have never had you. For a while we were so close, if only occasionally in the flesh. When I preserve our distance, you want to be in touch, but the more I pursue you the more you recede, the more extraordinary, mysterious, you become.

  That time you wrote:

  I would like to hear your voice.

  But when we Skype-called it was difficult to hear: my words echoed back to me, interfered with yours, mangled the start of your response. Did that happen at your end too?

  I asked it then, that old suicidal question:

  Why do you love me?

  But all I heard was the echo:

  (Do you love me?)

  Such a slender question. There is a point where voice leaves flesh, where it peels flesh right down to the bone. Voice is bone. How long could I have worked over our bare words? Not long, perhaps: one day soon after, you turned me off, your blurry avatar was gone from my contacts list. Uncharacteristically decisive of you, I thought, but then what did I know? It could have been something I said, but then, it could have been that I’d begun to say less and less. There came a point where there was little more I could say to you.

  If I can make disappear what I cannot not desire, I disappear too.

  Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak?

  (More I could say to you!)

  You had me disappeared, but I was already leaving, my voice hardly more than an echo. I have said nothing since I came to Greece. I am so quiet here, I no longer have any idea what I am aloud.

  I have slipped into visible silence: some call it writing.

  Spivak, ibid

  I still don’t understand how a person isn’t his words.

  (A person isn’t his words.)

  •••

  I pay, get up from the table, close my computer. If travel is passive – I am carried along, asked to choose nothing, to do nothing – then tourism is the opposite: an eternal to-do list to justify the future anterior of before the trip:

  Is there a radical counterfactual future anterior?

  Spivak, ibid

  I will have done.

  How will I decide how to walk this city In Real Life, where crossing real space takes real time? An algorithm could generate my narrative, but what decisions feed it? There is an algorithm called Ariadne’s Thread, which blindly exhausts the search space completely. Designed to deal with multiple means of proceeding, it permits backtracking to the last fork, the last branch in the forest. If I could type my movements into a program, would it tell me what I think I’m doing here, what I’m going to do next?

  At every crossroads I turn because of a tree or the way light slants across a building or because of a telegraph pole against the unfamiliar cloudless sky. Sometimes enough similarities occur to begin to seem predictive: I’m avoiding monuments, museums, the already coded, but I make few demands. Sometimes I limit my walking to a few streets, sometimes I take it further. It depends on how much energy I have left after travel. It depends what the city’s systems want of me.

  If on the other hand there is nothing in particular one has to accomplish on one’s trip, one can just wait for something to happen. One will sometimes see things in this way that others miss.

  Kierkegaard, Repetition

  This city is a dog’s bark from far off. Here workmen use picks to dig up the streets: modern tarmac vs ancient tools. It’s not a fair fight. Churches are covered with coloured plastic weave, awaiting restoration. It is the same material as the large rectangular checked bags sold on the street stalls in every square here, the bags that say displaced, or homeless, or refugee. Why do I walk in cities? I think I am trying to trace the form of something. My real space map is in my pocket. It names the main streets; others are left blank. It misses off some of the smaller streets altogether. It’s a tourist map I picked up in the lobby of my hostel, and it shows me the city it thinks I’d like to see. I try not to rely on it too much. I make my eyes soft, and skim its surface, hoping to find my way, to pick up a pattern in the letters of each street name, but meaning crumples.

  T-shirts are some of the only things I can read.

  A city-break tourist strolls hand-in-hand with his girlfriend. Across her chest: WHEREVER YOU ARE. On his: LEAVE ME ALONE.

  A man (a native of the city?) walks along the street from the station wearing a pink polo shirt – WOMAN LOVE ORGASM – and carrying a single rose.

  ‘Been here before,’ you said, on that afternoon in the old city, and you didn’t mean you’d been in Athens before, or in the city where we were when you said it, or in any place at all. You must have been mapping me from another relationship. You expected certain corners, and refused to acknowledge new patterns but you can’t walk one city to the map of another. ‘I am not,’ I told you, ‘anyone you have met before.’

  Love is sequential, in other words… it’s not autonomous. There are points, tests, temptations.

  Badiou, In Praise of Love

  I keep seeing you in other people, still. I’ve spent the morning falling in love with men across the street who are wearing your coat, carrying your bag, whose hair is cut like yours, and Athens is full of men who look like you: dark hair, dark skin, that physique… I looked at you, and you looked at me, but I do not remember us looking at each other at the same time. I mapped you by the places I finished and you began, always from the corner of my eye. You said, ‘Don’t look at me like that. Don’t give me those eyes.’ And, just before you disappeared me, ‘We’ll never see each other again.’ You can’t know how much that hurt, not even being allowed to look. Looking evokes something else. The old Greek gods punished people who looked. They knew that witnessing was the first step to telling. Not just Psyche: Tiresias was blinded when he told Zeus he’d seen both sides of s
ex. Acteon was turned into a stag for looking at Artemis. Look, and you’ll end up looking like something else. Looking changes you.

  Could I trace how it works, that change? Probably. There’s a yarn behind everything here: all you have to do is follow the clue to find out how people change when touched by another’s desire. Midas desired wealth. His touch turned his son to gold. Apollo pursued Daphne, who became a tree. In Greece, there’s no such thing as an inanimate object. Women, especially, turn into things – when they are threatened, frightened – and the transformation, though occasionally punishment, is more often relief. Love objects are so difficult to hold onto as people. The very moment you think you have them they fall from your hand, as stone, or water, or leaves, or whisper into air. The men (the gods) transform in order to get sex, the women transform in order to avoid it. There are so many women under spells here. In northern Europe enchanted girls – Snow White, Peau d’ne – can be restored, but in Greece the change is permanent: nymphs escape into reeds, stars, stones, transform into nature, not art.

  May I die before I give you power over me!

  (I give you power over me.)

  Under your spell, I tried to transform to keep you. You told me I must be – what? A libertine, librarian, a lesbian – and I was surprised because I was none of these things. You invented a life for me that looked nothing like my own, and I was happy to give myself up to your word. I was asking for it, like Callisto, like Daphne. I never challenged what you made of me, but, no matter how I echoed your desires, there was no metamorphosis I could use to keep you. What worked at first worked no longer. I had no shame – tried everything – but in the end it was all the same. Why do you love me? echoes as, Do you love me? Could I have tried anything else? I had no idea how to answer you, only that any answer would have the same result: No – while, before, any answer would have had the same result: Yes. There was no cause I could twin with any effect. Each route was a dead end. There is no algorithm for love.

  Why do you fly from me?

  (Fly from me!)

  Echo’s warning-in-longing.

  Spivak, ibid

  In Greek myth, it’s the men who do the chasing, usually. Apart from Psyche. Apart from Echo.

  Echo was not chased so is not changed. Half-metamorphosed as a punishment for blabbing, she kept the same body but her voice got stuck on repeat. She pursued Narcissus, a man who loved the sound of his own voice. I could never work out why, when she gave him exactly what he wanted, he continued to fly from her.

  Why was I (why am I) like this?

  I don’t know.

  30th April

  Athens is a visitation of light on my eyes, so bright I can’t recall the dark days in England. I’ve lost my grip on time. A week of summer, and summer will go on forever, I can imagine nothing else. I flood my eyes with strong light, with sights striking enough to defy my narrative or to supply their own. I am a tourist and maybe this is what tourists do: shock their own sad stories out of them with large buildings, old statues, juxtaposed timezones and styles, with no personal context.

  The Athens metro is a large, cool bathroom: tiled, low-lit and very clean. It is a better bathroom than the one in my hostel, and this between-space is more homelike, as it reminds me of other metros in other cities. It is the centre of my Athens. I take a train to Monastiraki and walk up to the Acropolis. The ruins in Athens are not like the ruins in Rome, the city built around its own hard shell. Here the city is in a park, and the park is full of monuments that are bigger and grander than the buildings in the city. The steps up to the Acropolis are crowded with people, but all they want to do is cut the buildings down to size, snapping each other, hands posed so the porticos appear to be pinched between their fingers, or offered on a flattened palm. Their cameras are digital, and it doesn’t matter if they get it wrong first time. They overwrite photo after photo until they get the perspective trick just right. Each photographer turns away from the others, some toward the monuments, others toward their subject, who is standing on a vacant plinth, or between two pillars. Each tries not to notice the other photographers, wants to be the only one who looks. And what role does the companion play, who, complicit but not closed down by the circumference of a lens, sees all the photographers, but collaborates in not noticing them, and consents to be the subject – or do I mean the object – of one photograph alone?

  By the Parthenon, a T-shirt (on a woman): NATURAL LOVE.

  In front of the Parthenon, people are behaving badly: children kick each other, a young Japanese woman sits on a rock and plays pop loudly from her phone. No one asks her to switch it off. I can’t say I blame them: dwarfed by perspectives of size and of time I’m not sure I can calibrate what’s appropriate. Some of the Acropolis, says a notice, is not even original: casts have replaced the building’s original ‘members’, held in place by mechanical prosthetic limbs, their marble stained, like the rotten teeth on my crumpled cigarette packet. I photograph the scaffolding, the restoration work. My photographs look like tourist photos gone wrong: ratés, they say in French, which means, missed, as in I’ve missed a good shot, but it also means, ruined.

  The people at the Acropolis are all in groups. No, there is one woman alone, a little younger than me. She has long unartificial red hair and is pale and freckled. She looks Celtic: Irish, Scottish, or Breton, perhaps. She dressed in a long, plain dress, like someone who wants to see things plainly, and she looks at the buildings, flatly, squarely, taking in both them and their artificial supports. I want to talk to her, about the scaffolding, and the music, and the photographers, but I don’t know what to say. Loneliness again. I wonder if she is lonely. She has that quality – something I recognise in me – a quality of… what? Of being alone. I don’t think she has strayed from a group. I don’t think she is here on a mini-break. What could I say to her? Perhaps, I see that you are looking too?

  I don’t. I walk down the steps from the ruins. The tourists follow quickly. They’ve done the Acropolis, and are restless for the next monument. They don’t look back. Instead they look out over Athens and photograph the view, which is transformed into an object smaller than the size of their hand.

  A man with a t-shirt: LIVE FOR SOMETHING OR DIE FOR NOTHING.

  I am sick of making room for couples to take photographs of each other.

  On the way back down the hill is the site of an arena, or perhaps a theatre, a space for performance, or maybe combat. It’s lunchtime. In the shade of trees under the white rocks of Areopagus Hill, a group of Greek teen boys perform an elaborate traditional dance to hand-clapped rhythms. On steps up to the POINT DE VUE, pale northern European children play games on their phones. As I climb down the iron stair drilled into the rock, a street vendor slaps down a tomato on the ground in front of me. It bursts then, miraculously, it shrugs itself back into shape. It is made of silicone: a trick, a toy, a fake. But for a moment, time goes magically backwards.

  The arena of the two. Badiou, What is Love?, EGS Lecture 2008

  •••

  I walk for a long time to find a bar that is not a tourist bar. it must be the right kind. I find a bar that is right, in a square that is not perfect, then a perfect street with no bars, then I backtrack and turn corners to find a perfect bar on a square that is also perfect. It is nothing more than a small, white house. I can only tell it is a bar because there are two sets of tables and chairs on the narrow pavement outside its door and, across the street, which is narrow and has no cars, several more tables and chairs by a patch of waste ground. I’m finally hungry, instead of that thing that feels like emptiness but not at all like the desire that is necessary to convert emptiness into hunger. So far, Athens has resisted me, offering mezze plates big enough for two. There are smaller dishes if I were only willing to choose. I could choose, I suppose, cutting off my other options, but where’s the fun in that?

  I sit for a while at one of the two tables on the narrow pavement. I order a beer and watch people smoke. I still have a lot to learn
about smoking. Not just the language: is there a right way to do it? At a stall on the patch of waste ground, where the newspapers are weighed down with stones, a customer mumbles to the vendor, a cigarette stuck to his lower lip. The waiter passes me and I signal to him, but he does not see.

  A woman at a table in the square calls the waiter for attention. He does not notice. She calls again. She is not loud enough, or tall enough, or maybe she doesn’t look like she holds the purse strings. Always women have to speak louder to be heard at all. I don’t mind. I don’t want to be noticed. I am playing the woman who is there for a reason. I might be waiting for my husband. I might have been stood up. I must look like I have a story. Without a story, a woman can look a little purposeless, sitting in a café at least. A woman in the city is a space for something to happen: a girl alone at the table in the square looks like an opportunity, a location for an encounter, something that will change her, or the man who encounters her.

  There are, said B, in Paris, plenty more fish in the sea. I didn’t believe her, though there are plenty more fish on the menu. Seeing the waiter pass by carrying a tray, I’m sorry I’m still not hungry enough, not quite, so sorry I distribute my flecks of hunger between the dishes that come along. The fish are small, a starter. I could eat the fish. I call the waiter. ‘The fish are sold out,’ he says. Then I will have nothing. Having had the idea of fish, I can’t imagine anything else. Another fifteen minutes – he comes back. He says, ‘I will go fix it. You wait here.’ Some time later I am eating the fish. They are extraordinary (but should I have chosen the salad?). There are so many things to eat here. You exchange money for them, and it is hard to part with the money but, once you do, it seems like nothing because – here is the food! And the food is so very unlike the money, and so very good, that one seems to have no relation to the other.