The closest I came to something resembling sexual contact with him was his letting me one evening, as I made a detour to the lavatory before quitting my classes for the day, burst in front of the mirror a pimple which had materialised on the fleshy little bridge between his nostrils and which he couldn’t get a handle on unaided. (When I stepped into the lavatory, his eyes were already watery from a series of botched experiments.) But even I, candid as I have been, must draw the line at rhapsodising on the nerdish erotics of pimple-popping. All I’m willing to say is that, when Ralph’s pimple burst – discharging on my thumbnail a tiny tubular pellet of toothpaste-white pus – so did I. Thank God I was on my way home.
Though there was, as you would expect, a high turnover in the Berlitz, sudden arrivals and sudden departures, teachers who didn’t clock in one morning, or any other morning after, without having hinted in advance that they might have reached some kind of an interim climax in their careers, it was an environment in which I personally thrived. It’s true that I’d complain of my lot just as much as any of the older hands – the dismal pay, the day-in day-out drudgery, the unattractiveness of too many of my students. Yet not since childhood had I felt so (there are no other words for it) at home. When I really had been at home, a teenager in Oxford, I’d felt, rather, as though I were adrift. I’d had nobody to speak to about my apprehension of my sexual nature and my incomprehension of what I would only later discover was its comparative normality. (I know now that homosexuality is the most normal – oh well, yes, the second most normal – thing in the world.) And at Foyle’s, whose turnover was even more rapid than at the Berlitz, I was employed for so short a period I didn’t give myself enough time to overcome my own innate timorousness. It may be hard to believe, for it was a dead-end job with unsociable hours, no future and next to no money, but the Berlitz gave my life a meaning. For once I had to be somewhere, I was expected, I would be missed if I weren’t there.
It didn’t happen at once. To start with, shy as I continued to be, convinced as I still was of my physical and social inadequacy, what my new life brought me was just my old loneliness in a new setting. In my first few weeks in Paris I had nowhere to go after my last class of the evening save, by my eternal self, following a solitary supper in the sort of anonymous (and onanymous) brasserie that was willing to humour loners and losers, to my room in the Voltaire, so woebegone I felt like hanging a cardboard sign, Prière de Déranger or Do Disturb, on my outside door handle.
Apropos of which there occurred a droll encounter at the hotel, no more than a couple of months after I’d moved in. The Voltaire had a night porter, a Tunisian of indeterminate age, whose features were obliterated by the blackest-rimmed pair of spectacles I have ever seen and who, behind the reception desk, was always nose-deep in a book. Though I was initially impressed by what I took to be his laudable ambition to better himself, I soon learned to my cost, for I once made the polite point of asking what he was reading, that he was a fanatical devotee of every bestselling conspiracy theory to have circulated the globe since the year dot. No matter how desirous I was for human company, I swiftly learned to steer clear of engaging with him, since, if ever I did, it would take me all of half-an-hour to get free of him and twice as long again to cleanse my brain, now nearly as addled as his, of UFOs, Pharaonic curses, the Cathar heresy, the secret treasure of the Templars and the Carolingian dynasty of Christ.
One evening, on my way out to the cinema, I stopped in the lobby to stroke Bobby, Madame Müller’s aged, incontinent labrador, who would be parked there for the night out of too much harm’s way and who would woozily peer up at me through the spiders’ webs infesting his glaucoma-stricken eyes. Then I groped inside my overcoat pocket for my doorkey, which I had to surrender to the porter before leaving the hotel.
As I did, he glanced up at me from whatever mumbo-jumbo he was reading at the time and enquired what I was looking for.
‘My key,’ I replied, sticking my forefinger down through the pocket’s holey lining.
For a second or two he remained silent. Then he said, ‘Seriously, though, isn’t it you yourself you’re looking for?’
I stared at him, discombobulated by the question’s fatuity, wondering if even in the weird, warped world he inhabited it really might be possible to find yourself in the lining of an overcoat. Then I felt my fingertip brush against the cold metal key-ring. I carefully drew it up to the surface through the largest and most easily manoeuvrable of the holes and, handing it over to him, said coolly, ‘No, I wasn’t looking for myself. I was looking for my key. And here it is.’
Yet, minutes later, strolling along the boulevard Saint-Germain, I realised the moron was right after all. I was looking for myself.
How at that instant I hated everybody whose path I crossed, how I hated all those people going places together, in the opposite direction, always in the opposite direction, all those couples staring at me out of their four cold little eyes, arms linked, destinies linked, talking, smiling, laughing, taking each other’s presence for granted and rowdily elbowing me out of their joyous way, while I alone seemed to be living out of conformity, living because living is what you’re expected to do if you’re alive. (When in Rome …)
Those were bad days for me, days when I almost thought of packing it in and returning to England, days when I’d actually hover outside the Berlitz’s personnel office, ready to resign on the spot. I persevered, though, I had to persevere; and little by little I discovered that for all the differences separating me from my fellow-teachers – differences of appearance, nationality, background, age and class – we had one thing in common. We were all expatriates, and expatriates are compatriots, possessed of their own customs, traditions, history and language. (English, fortunately for me, has always been the expatriate’s native tongue.) I discovered, too, that what makes expatriates compatriots is precisely those differences, ones which in other circumstances would conspire to segregate us. We were singled out, wittingly or not, by our estrangement from the shared heritage of the country of which we were the guests, a heritage from which, no matter how much we kidded ourselves, we were also excluded.
I won’t say that from that point on I wished to be at the Berlitz more than anywhere else in the world. It was a grim business rousing myself on a pitch-dark winter morning; grim, uncoiling my drowsy carcass from bed and dragging it to the Saint-Germain-des-Prés metro station; grim, the journey across town in a stuffy, steamed-up compartment dense with uncaptioned faces and, underneath their overcoats and windcheaters, unfathomable bodies; grimmest of all, the first class of the day. Yet, two hours later, Paris was alive and humming, and so was I. Whether gulping down a palate-scalding coffee, or simply walking to and from my classrooms, saluting colleagues as they went about their own daily rounds, I felt I belonged somewhere at last, belonged in as much a social as a professional sense.
Nothing could have been more reassuring to me than the sight of Schuyler, coffee cup and Herald Tribune in front of him, forever on duty before any of the rest of us, overseeing his brood with a benign and tranquil tyranny, like a vigilant lioness her cubs, inviting us to share his pleasure in a nifty crossword clue (‘Scratch Pad’ is one I remember, for which the four-letter answer was – think about it for a moment – ‘Hell’). Reassuring, too, was the babel of the common room, a jangling pandemonium not of different languages but of different accents, a babel outroared in its turn by the clamour of the bells that would summon us, the whole day long, to our various classes.
Those classes now. The self-styled ‘Berlitz Method’ disallowed us, even with total beginners, from addressing our students in any language but the one we were teaching them. So inviolable was this injunction that the strictness of our adherence to it was monitored by a microphone in every classroom, and it resulted in our needing forever to drive home some elementary point when it would have taken so much less time to say ‘Votre nom, s’il vous plaît?’ or ‘Ouvrez vos cahiers à la page vingt-huit’ before immediately reve
rting to English. The students would have preferred it too. Many of them, too many of them for my taste, were middle-aged businessmen and women, avid to get on, to cram into an hour’s session as much as could possibly serve them in their careers, impatient with anything as frivolous as adjectives or adverbs, and scandalised that in order to convey the meaning of the word ‘sleep’, say, I was forced – rather than merely scrawling ‘sleep = sommeil’ on the blackboard – to cup the palms of my hands under my chin and close my eyes and even, for the benefit of the real, unteachable dodos, pretend to snore.
There were compensations. Whenever I strode into any new class, the first thing I did – as, I learned, did most of my gay colleagues – was scrutinise the half-dozen faces nervously gazing up at me to discern whether at least one of them would make the coming lessons more than just bearable; whether, among my captive audience, there was one youthful set of features (I never dared to pray for more than one per class) I could guiltlessly contemplate, as also a youthful body I could attempt mentally to strip, while going through the mechanical motions required of me by my employers. It became standard with me, too, without fail, September after September – the start of our teaching year coincided with the rentrée universitaire – to come to the premature conclusion that, oh God, this year there’s nobody. Premature, because, as the days and weeks ticked by, and each of the semicircle of faces was endowed with individual expression and personality, there was always, always, at least one of them I would surprise myself by finding sexy and beautiful, even if I wouldn’t have looked twice, and hadn’t looked twice, the first time around.
In the opening session I confined myself to ‘drawing out’ my students, inviting them to talk about their lives and backgrounds. All of which was in accordance with my training as a Berlitz teacher, except that I enjoyed privately thinking of it as a cunningly flirtatious gambit I myself had devised, like the central conceit of Agatha Christie’s who-dunnit The ABC Murders, whose villain, saddled with an all too deducible motive for doing away with somebody bearing the initials C.C., camouflages his homicidal intentions under the cloak of a serial killer’s insanity by murdering an A.A., then a B.B., and then, and only then, the person he intended to murder in the first place. For me it became the means by which, under cover of the Berlitz Method, I could pump the one boy (it was always a boy) whose background genuinely interested me. That the petite, lavender-scented Monégasque girl had an elder sister who played the violin in an internationally famous string quartet, that the Belgian paediatrician had lived two of his teenage years just around the corner from Edinburgh Castle, were random scraps of information no sooner received than ignored, in one ear, out the other, significant only in that they enabled me finally to turn to the real object of my interrogation, as though he were haphazardly next in line, and invite him to tell us – tell me, rather – something about himself.
I would even experience a faint frisson whenever I set my class a written test, as we were all instructed to do once a month, and leaned suggestively over the hunched shoulders of some beetle-browed beauty, rubbing my wrist, accidentally on purpose, as we used to say at school, against his naked knuckles, while pointing out one of his poignant misspellings. Naked knuckles! Yes, it was risible, it was shameful, but I was at an age, don’t forget, at which one is as obsessed with sex as infants are with sweets. Any hint of friction, of the merest physical contact, with a youthful male body, whether it was sitting in a packed bus with a standing passenger’s jean-clad crotch at face-level or in the infernally hot upper circle at the Opéra, hip by hip and thigh by thigh with a voluptuously sweaty cutie-pie who didn’t suspect a thing, would cause my cock to behave like Dr Strangelove’s Führer-hailing arm: no matter how innocent the brush with desirable flesh, it would raise an instant and uncontrollable Nazi salute.
In school, though, such tanked-up sexual energy could prove embarrassing if you weren’t too careful about disguising the appeal any one student might have for you. Roll-call was the rule at the beginning of every class and, naturally, it was only after two or three weeks had elapsed that I’d be capable of properly identifying each of my students by his or her own name. Except, just as naturally, for the sole good-looker. His name was as quickly imprinted on my memory as his face on my eyes, with the result that, during those first days, when I requested the class to take turns reading aloud from the Berlitz textbook, I’d find myself pointing at one nameless face after another with a necessarily impersonal ‘Would you read?’ and ‘You?’ and ‘You?’, till my eyes finally alit on the class’s Adonis and I’d unthinkingly blurt out, ‘Didier, if you please?’ Then it was back to the impassive impersonality of ‘You?’ again.
I was long insensitive to the effect of so evident a bias, and it was not till one evening when I must have done it yet again, and the ‘Didier’ in question (or ‘Patrick’ or ‘Marc’, one of those French forenames, at any rate, that rightfully belong only to youth) not simply blushed but, aware of having been made, through no initiative of his own, the cynosure of his classmates’ smirks, actually glared up at me, that I realised to my dismay how obvious had been the motive behind my favouritism, and how unwelcome my attentions, even if Didier himself were, as I knew he wasn’t – Didiers very seldom are – gay.
(When I told Schuyler what had happened, he wagged a finger at me and said, ‘Ixnay, Gideon, ixnay.’)
Coincidentally, or perhaps not, it tended to be the attractive ones who came out with the kind of amusing solecisms which, like an adoring parent whose tot has just said the funniest thing, I’d rush back into the common room to repeat. There was the sloe-eyed young Moroccan, with lashes out to here, who, when I asked him what he was wearing, answered ‘a pair of yellow blue-jeans’; and the Robert Redford-lookalike of a lawyer who, on my chiding him for arriving a quarter-of-an-hour late for class, protested that he’d been caught in ‘a traffic marmalade’. I myself would get a kick out of exploiting the potential for translingual innuendo of a handful of elementary English words and turns of phrase. I particularly enjoyed teaching the noun ‘bite’, for example, expressing my apparently authentic bafflement at the collective spasm of blushful sourires and fous rires whenever I chalked it up on the blackboard. I knew perfectly well that ‘bite’ was French for ‘prick’ and I could easily have prepared my students for its introduction into the lesson by proposing that we all be grown-up and knowing and sophisticated about it in advance. Yet I never tired of provoking not only the gasp that the word itself drew forth from the class but also the ensuing delight taken by it in my, as they all supposed, charming, disarming ignorance of its scurrilous connotation in their own language. (I write ‘they all’, but the only reaction I cared about, naturally, was Didier’s, Didier’s or Patrick’s or Marc’s.)
I recall one ‘Didier’. His name was actually Martial, and he was the double of Sal Mineo in Rebel Without a Cause, having the moistest and sultriest incisive fossa I ever saw off a cinema screen. (The incisive fossa is that short vertical furrow, the face’s navel, as it were, that divides the nose from the monogrammatic M of the upper lip.) One afternoon, to my secret joy, Martial hung back after class and, as I was getting ready to leave, bashfully approached my desk. What he wanted to know, he said, was the meaning of the expression ‘dire straits’. If it had been anybody else, I’d have seen off both him and his query as cursorily as was consistent with the Berlitz regulation that, however inconsiderate the paying customers might be, the staff remain at all times impeccably patient. With Martial, by contrast, given how much such a mini-tutorial would eat into my free time, I was conscientious well beyond the call of duty. I started with the expression’s basic dictionary definition, supplemented that with a variety of examples, mostly in relation to financial hardships, then got him to match these examples with a few of his own. It all took about twenty minutes, twenty minutes I could have spent relaxing in the common room, but it was worth it just to be able to gaze into his orchidaceous little face with its limpid, perplexed eyes and winningl
y furrowed forehead. And when I asked him at the last why he’d sought this information, and he replied with a flush of embarrassment that it was because his ‘favourite group’ was Dire Straits, and I understood that all those well-chosen examples of mine had been for him utterly beside the point, it mattered not a whit. I had drunk him in to what was then for me the full. He was now fodder for my fantasies.
Such were my days. And my nights? I wrote earlier of the terraced café on the boulevard des Italiens – it occupied the ground floor of the Berlitz building itself – where I would have a coffee with a cigarette after my last class, between eight and nine o’clock in the evening, and where I met, without realising that she was one of my own colleagues, Consuelo whatever-it-was. I wrote, too, that I meant, later in my story, to elaborate on why I would select that spot in particular.
The fact is that its location, especially in summer, when I’d take a pavement table, enabled me to see, and be seen by, other teachers leaving the school. Why was it so important to be seen? Simply, I repeat, that in those early weeks (could it actually have been months?), I had no friends, close or otherwise, none, none at all, nowhere to go in the evening, nowhere, except back to the Voltaire. I had, I admit, plucked up the courage to buy, in W. H. Smith’s wood-panelled bookshop-cum-tearoom in the rue de Rivoli, a French-language copy of the same Spartacus guide I mentioned before and now knew the names and addresses of the more reputable Parisian gay clubs. But after circling the Nuage for an hour one evening, watching from the shadows on the far side of the street a sleek parade of svelte young men swanning up in a flutter of falsettos, I felt just too scruffily English to risk entering any such club on my own. I couldn’t face being even politely spurned. I needed to be taken, the first time at least. Friendly as my colleagues were, though, the instant their classes were over, they were swallowed up in their (I imagined) incident-packed private lives. Left thus to my own devices – but what devices? – I grew more and more desperate for companionship (an only child, I started to think of myself as an only adult); and by making myself so prominent on the café terrace in question, my hope was that a colleague, quitting the Berlitz later than I had, would notice me, would stop to share a couple of minutes of good-humoured banter about our respective students, then decide, why not, to order an express for himself and eventually, over that express, suggest we dine together.
Buenas Noches, Buenos Aires Page 4
