“I was happy as long as I was a virgin,” she once complained bitterly. “Then it was enough that I was a good-looking, intelligent, nice girl. Ever since, it’s always the same story. What a sexy-looking woman, let’s lay her. And when she finally gives in, sick to death of being pestered, what a big disappointment! I wish I were ugly, then everybody’d leave me alone and I wouldn’t have to listen to complaints.”
“Who’s complaining? Don’t talk nonsense.”
“You wanted canned food, remember?”
We made love then the normal way, simulating enjoyment in unison. Our bed grew damp with the sweat of remorse, and there was nothing we could do about it. At first I thought she would welcome my attempts to give her joy, but she took them as an admission that I held it against her that she couldn’t satisfy herself. Of course I tried to convince her that there was more to sex than pleasure — much more, indeed! — and that it was facile, idiotic, to make a fetish of orgasm. She agreed. But whatever is sanctioned by society as a principal good also becomes a moral imperative (whether it’s the salvation of the soul or the body) and we can’t fail to attain it except at the peril of our conscience. Paola couldn’t help feeling guilty about her frigidity any more than she could have felt righteous about making love in the Middle Ages. In fact, I sometimes wished us back into the twelfth century, when her coldness would have been the pride of her virtue and she would have felt sinful only for the delights of the flesh, whereas now she was doomed to feel guilty for her painful frustration. Nor could I help sharing her guilt. If she had been younger and not yet convinced that her misfortune wasn’t her lover’s fault, we might have ended up strangling each other (even among frigid women, older women are preferable), but though we both knew I wasn’t the cause, I was still accessory to her suffering. And my attempts to relieve it only made matters worse. On the other hand, to ignore the despairing excitement and let-down of her body would have meant denying even the bond of elementary sympathy between us. We were getting lost in a desert of impossibilities.
Paola said that I made her feel like a real woman by wanting and enjoying her, and at times she was the blissful mother of my pleasure. But the mistress couldn’t have endured her smouldering expectations which never caught fire, except in a state of vigilant despair. There would be very few sexual problems if they could all be ascribed to inhibitions, yet at first I took it for granted that Paola refused to consent to any unfamiliar love-play out of modesty. However, her violent resistance showed not shyness but fear. It leaped through the blue of her eyes and hung over her long, white body — the fear of false hopes and deeper defeats.
Even a sentimental glance put Paola on her guard. She had a horror of being carried away, or rather of forgetting that she couldn’t be. On a mild evening late in March we sat at the edge of a sidewalk café, watching the flow of human splendour, and as Paola seemed relaxed and cheerful, I began to eye her as pleadingly as if she were a strange woman I was trying to pick up. She raised her eyebrows and turned her head away. “Your trouble is that you love yourself too much.”
“How could you possibly love anybody, if you don’t even love yourself?”
“Why should I love myself?” she asked with her casual and depressing objectivity. “Why should we love anybody?”
We might have been able to cope with her lack of physical satisfaction, but the metaphysical consequences were opening a void between us. They made it difficult — in fact, for a long time impossible — to test my hopeful guess at an easy way to free us from the sting of her husband’s wet towel.
Late one Saturday morning, I was awakened by the heat. The sun was shining into my eyes through the curved window panes and gauzy white curtains, and the temperature in the room must have been at least ninety degrees. During the night we had kicked off the blanket and the top-sheet, and Paola was lying on her back with her legs drawn up, breathing without a sound. We never look so much at the mercy of our bodies, in the grip of our unconscious cells, as when we are asleep. With a loud heartbeat, I made up my mind that this time I would make or break us. Slowly I separated her limbs: a thief parting branches to steal his way into a garden. Behind the tuft of blonde grass I could see her dark-pink bud, with its two long petals standing slightly apart as if they, too, felt the heat. They were particularly pretty, and I began smelling and licking them with my old avidity. Soon the petals grew softer and I could taste the sprinkles of welcome, though the body remained motionless. By then Paola must have been awake, but pretended not to be; she remained in that dreamy state in which we try to escape responsibility for whatever happens, by disclaiming both victory and defeat beforehand. However, the smell of pine grew stronger and I was lapping her up like a hungry dog. It may have been ten minutes or half an hour later that Paola’s belly began to contract and let up and, shaking, she finally delivered us her joy, that offspring not even transient lovers can do without. When her cup ran over she drew me up by my arms and I could at last enter her with a clear conscience.
“You look smug,” were her first words when she focussed her critical blue eyes again.
We had one friend in common: a Hungarian-Italian painter, Signor Bihari, a tall, sportydooking gentleman in his sixties. He always wore an elegant ascot scarf of his own design, and used to assure everyone that his main ambition in life was to stay as young as Picasso. He had started his career as a reporter in Budapest, but his paper had sent him on a two-week assignment to Paris in 1924 and he hadn’t been back in Hungary since. His wife was a French lady whom he used to drag along to the Albergo Ballestrazzi so that she could at least hear Hungarian conversation and find out how her husband’s mother-tongue sounded. She would stand at his side, bewildered, while he talked with the refugees. Signor Bihari knew not only Paola but also the editor who’d been friendly with her, and it was thus I learned that Paola had broken off with the man, telling him that she was in love with a young Hungarian refugee.
I quoted the statement back to Paola, curious whether she would acknowledge such an affectionate confession.
“Don’t you believe it,” Paola said. “I wanted to get rid of the man peacefully, and you can’t get rid of anybody by telling him the truth of the matter.”
“And what’s the truth of the matter?”
We were in her kitchen and she was cooking dinner for us, wearing only a bra and a light skirt, for it was already summer. I sat by the kitchen table, smelled the delicious food and watched her moving about, with a stirring of all sorts of appetites.
“Well,” she said, her attention still on her steaming pots and pans, “the truth of the matter is that in ten years or so I’m going to quit working and retire to our old house in Ravenna. My parents’ll probably be dead by then, and I’ll live there with some other old maid. Our noses will get sharper every winter, I suppose.”
“Maybe I’ll be teaching in Ravenna.”
“There are enough philosophy teachers in Italy to fill the Adriatic. You’ll emigrate to some other country sooner or later. Which will be just as well, because it’ll save me from the unpleasant experience of having you get bored with me.”
Her prediction that I would get bored with her seemed most improbable. There was now less tension between us than with most of the women I’d ever known, and our relaxed happiness used to remind me of the bad times I’d experienced with all my other lovers. I remembered the moments of anxiety when I used to recite historical dates in my head while we were making love, so that I wouldn’t enjoy myself too much and too quickly for my lover’s convenience. With Paola, I had no reason to regulate my response. She used to receive me when already shaking and flowing — which somehow made her more desirable on each occasion, instead of the other way around. However, she was right about my leaving Italy. I could get a job, and since the Albergo Ballestrazzi was to be given back to paying guests on the fifteenth of August, and Signor Bihari had a friend at the Canadian Consulate who had friends at the University of Toronto, I took advantage of the opportunity to emi
grate to Canada.
On August 16, Paola accompanied me to the airport. We were rocking in the back of an ancient taxi and, as I was gloomy and speechless, she pulled my hair.
“It isn’t that you’re sorry to leave me,” she said accusingly, “you’re scared of going to Canada.”
“Both,” I admitted, and began to cry, which I believe made our parting easier for my unsentimental lover.
After we said good-bye at the gate of the runway, Paola turned to leave, then came back and gave me another hug.
“Don’t worry, Andrea,” she said, quoting our private joke with a serious smile, “every road leads to Rome.”
Fifteen
On Grown Women as Teenage Girls
sex on the moon
— Norman Mailer
My ears buzzing from the landing at Toronto’s Malton Airport, I walked away from the plane on the concrete of a new continent, feeling as if my blood had dried up. A fat, uniformed official gave me a blue slip which bore my name and the affirmation of my Canadian existence: landed immigrant, 1957 . He also handed me a five-dollar bill, explained that it was “welcome money,” and gave me a receipt to sign. Then he indicated with a wave of his hand that I could go anywhere I wanted. I would have liked to turn around and go straight back to Europe, but as I had only the receipt for my one-way ticket and less than a hundred dollars, including the welcome money, I dragged my three suitcases out of the dirty, run-down air terminal. After one glance at the vast, empty, alien landscape, I sought courage from my own giant shadow, which the sun cast ahead of me on the ground. A few miles away a huge malevolent cloud of brown smog hung in the air, signalling the presence of the city where I was to live.
My taxi-driver was a bulky man with a square, flat face and dull eyes, who didn’t encourage conversation. But I knew no one else, so I told him I had just arrived in Canada and needed a cheap room in the university district. Luckily he turned out to be an Austrian, and when he learned that I came from Hungary and knew Salzburg well, he became friendly and promised to set me up. Talking into the rear-view minor, he observed that I was young enough to be his son, and warned me that there were no coffee houses in Toronto and that I should get myself a girl friend as quickly as possible, because prostitutes were expensive. As we drove toward the city on the Queen Elizabeth Way, with tall poplars and banks of shrubs on either side, and then along the shores of Lake Ontario, I began to think the landscape was quite pleasant and not unlike the country around Lake Balaton. But the Austrian insisted that it was peopled with different spirits than the ones I knew back home.
“The natives are just as human as people any place else, but they won’t admit it unless they’re drunk. And then they pass out on the floor of the cab or get the bright idea to rob you. Sometimes I wish I was driving a carriage in Vienna in the days of old Franz Josef.” There was a brief pause to honour the passing of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which neither of us could possibly have remembered. “Canadians love money first, which is OK,” he went on, “but then comes liquor, then TV, then food. Sex is way down on the list. When you’d grab a girl, a Canadian grabs another drink. The place is full of fat men and unhappy women.” He himself looked quite heavy, I remarked. “Oh, well,” he conceded ominously, “when you’ve lived here as many years as I have, you’ll turn Canadian too.”
We parked on Huron Street, a narrow tree-lined street of shabby, turreted, dark-red brick Victorian mansions converted into rooming houses, and walked from door to door inquiring about rents. The Austrian upbraided half-a-dozen landladies for their exorbitant prices before advising me to take an attic room at ten dollars a week. It had a low, slanted ceiling, ornate wallpaper and a linoleum floor, but I was anxious to settle somewhere, if only temporarily. We went back to the car for my luggage, and I thanked him for his inexplicable kindness. “Tomorrow I wouldn’t bother with you,” he said, raising his open palms for emphasis, “but I couldn’t turn down a man on his first day in Canada. I came here alone myself — in ‘51, in the middle of winter! You never forget the first day, believe me. It’s the worst.” He took the fare but wouldn’t accept a tip, and we parted with an affectionate handshake.
I saw him again three years later: he had given up driving and had opened the Viennese Strudel Shop on Yonge Street. He must have been doing well, for he told me he’d just come back from a holiday in Japan. Meeting him again as a successful small-businessman and world-traveller, still overweight, moody over his sudden affluence, reinforced my memory of him as an almost mystical guide who embodied many of the chief characteristics of my new countrymen.
I found most Canadians as willing as he had been to give a break to a stranger. Thanks to Signor Bihari’s friend at the Canadian Consulate in Rome, I met a number of academic officials who seemed to be looking forward to helping me. They got me a job at a boys’ school for the first year, and then helped me to obtain a lectureship at the university. In 1962, after five years in Toronto, I came to the University of Saskatchewan, where I remain to this day — though I’m planning to go back east next fall, this time to Montreal. I suspect it’s impossible for some people to stay in one place for good, once they’ve left the city of their childhood; or it may be that however long I stay in Canada I’ll never feel quite at home, and that’s why I want to move about, restless yet secure in the knowledge that a stranger is welcome everywhere. But the life of a wandering professor falls outside the scope of this memoir, nor is it rich in noteworthy incidents, and I mention it only as the new social background of my sentimental education.
It seemed at times, especially during my first couple of years in Toronto, that I had come over the Atlantic only to lose my cherished faith in older women. And at the risk of undermining my own argument, I must admit that there are women whose years have left marks only on their face, and none on their brain or character. In fact, it would appear that stupid girls grow more inane as they mature. They’re consumed with vanity and avarice, which may be the reason why they spared me in my student days when I was young and poor. On the few occasions when I caught their attention back in Budapest, I knew how to recognize them and could escape in time. But knowing that I should keep my distance from women who adored Comrade Stalin or gypsy music was flimsy protection against similarly twisted personalities in North America. It took time to realize that I should stay clear of women who lower their glances with a blush of respect at the mention of the Bell Telephone Company, who subscribe to Reader’s Digest , who hum tunes about detergents, who kiss with their eyes open and pride themselves on being practical. Such women are often dangerous and always painful, and I still resent my bad luck in running into one of them on my second day in the New World, at a time when it took very little to depress me in my strange new surroundings.
She appeared, appropriately enough, in a setting of movie-magazines, TV Guides, milk-shakes, toothpastes, medicines, cameras, scissors, Kleenex, and various Specially Reduced Items, in a drugstore on Bloor Street. It was half a block away from my rooming house, and I’d gone there for an early supper, to avoid venturing any farther out into the city than I absolutely had to. I’d finished my meal and was drinking a glass of milk when I became aware of her glances: she was looking at me so directly and persistently that I decided she must be some luckless prostitute trying to pick me up. I remembered my Austrian friend’s warning about high prices, but was even more daunted by the prospect of returning to my attic room to go on thinking about Paola. However, by the time I’d made up my mind, the woman had left the lunch counter.
A few moments later, I had the feeling in my back that someone was watching me. Turning around on the revolving bar-stool, I saw the same woman standing by the magazine rack, holding a copy of Screen Gems and looking straight into my eyes. She was about thirty-five, and with curly auburn hair, a heavy mouth and a plump but rather good figure. I stared back at her to test her reaction, and she smiled. Hopefully, I considered the possibility that she might be a lonely housewife who found me attractive (my Ital
ian suit was still quite new, though a little too warm for a summer day in Toronto) but the shameless professionalism of her smile left no room for doubt. Wanting to be absolutely sure, I took my time finishing my glass of milk. When I got up to pay my bill, she was standing near the cashier’s desk, examining a display of various toothpastes. She stepped outside and loitered by the door, eyeing me through the glass, then walked very slowly along the sidewalk. When I left the drugstore, she was only a few paces ahead of me.
“Forgive me for speaking to you without an introduction,” I said as I caught up with her, “but I’d like to know you.”
“Go away!” she commanded, in a voice heavy with outrage, and began to walk faster.
I couldn’t think of any explanation for this rebuff except that I’d perhaps been too polite and had given her the impression that I wanted her for nothing. “I’m quite willing to oblige you in any way,” I told her.
“Leave me alone or I’ll call the police!”
An old woman passing by heard her and gave me a nasty look. I stopped for a moment but then, remembering how she had eyed me earlier, I hurried after her — only to be threatened again. “If you keep on pestering me, I’ll scream for help!”
I gave up, and watched her walk away. She looked back a couple of times to see whether I was following her; and the second time she turned around, she was laughing.
I was furious. It wasn’t so much that she’d made a fool of me, but that she had no conceivable reason for doing so except pure impersonal malice. I’d known young girls who amused themselves with sadistic teasing, but a woman who couldn’t have been a day younger than thirty-five yet behaved like a frustrated teenage girl was a novel experience. I’m superstitious about bad starts, and the incident filled me with foreboding about the amorous mores of Canadian women.
In Praise of Older Women Page 15
