by William Boyd
It’s Sunday so I can’t enrol for my courses at the university until the next day. I carry my case across the Promenade des Anglais, go up one street and book into the first hotel I see. It’s called the Hotel Astoria. I go down some steps into a dim foyer. An old man gives me a room.
I sit in my room reading for most of the evening. At about half past nine I go out for a coffee. Coming back to the hotel I notice several young girls standing in front of brightly lit shop windows in the Rue de France. Despite the time of year they are wearing boots and hot pants. They all carry umbrellas (unopened) and swing bunches of keys. I walk past them two or three times but they don’t pay much attention. I observe that some of them are astoundingly pretty. Every now and then a car stops, there is a brief conversation, and one of the girls gets in and is driven away.
Later that night as I am sitting on my bed reading, there is a knock on my door. It turns out to be the fat daughter of the hotel manager. He has told her I am English and she asks if I will help her do a translation that she’s been set for homework.
I enrol at the university. This takes place at a building called the Centre Universitaire Méditerranéen or CUM as it’s generally known (the French pronounce it “cume”). The building is on the Promenade des Anglais and looks like a small, exclusive art gallery. Inside there is a huge lecture room with a dull mythological mural on three walls. This morning I am the first to arrive and there is a hushed marmoreal stillness in the place. In a small office I enrol and pay my fees. I decide to postpone my first class until the next day as I have to find somewhere to live. A secretary gives me a list of addresses where I can rent a room. I look for the cheapest. Mme. D’Amico, it says at the bottom of the list, 4 Rue Dante. I like the address.
As I leave the Centre I see some of my fellow students for the first time. They all seem to be foreign—in the sense that not many are French. I notice a tall American girl surrounded by chattering Nigerians. There are some Arabs. Some very blond girls whom I take to be Scandinavian. Soon the capacious marble-floored entrance hall begins to fill up as more and more people arrive for their classes. I hear the pop-pop of a motor bike in the small courtyard at the front. Two young guys with long hair come in talking English. Everyone seems happy and friendly. I leave.
Rue Dante is not far from the Centre. Number four is a tall old apartment block with bleached shutters and crumbling stonework. On the ground floor is a café. CAVE DANTE it says in plastic letters. I ask the concierge for Mme. D’Amico and am directed up three flights of stairs to the top floor. I ring the bell, mentally running through the phrases I have prepared. “Mme, D’Amico? Je suis étudiant anglais. Je cherche une chambre. On m’a donné votre nom au Centre Universitaire Méditerranéen.” I ring the bell again and hear vague stirrings from the flat. I sense I am being stared at through the peep-hole set in the solid wooden door. After a lengthy time of appraisal, it opens.
Mme. D’Amico is very small—well under five feet. She has a pale, thin, wrinkled face and grey hair. She is dressed in black. On her feet she is wearing carpet slippers which seem preposterously large, more suitable for a thirteen-stone man. I learn later that this is because sometimes her feet swell up like balloons. Her eyes are brown and, though a little rheumy, are bright with candid suspicion. However, she seems to understand my French and asks me to come in.
Her flat is unnervingly dark. This is because use of the electric lights is forbidden during hours of daylight. We stand in a long, gloomy hallway off which several doors lead. I sense shapes—a wardrobe, a hat-stand, a chest, even what I take to be a gas cooker, but I assume my eyes are not yet accustomed to the murk. Mme. D’Amico shows me into the first room on the left. She opens shutters. I see a bed, a table, a chair, a wardrobe. The floor is made of loose red hexagonal tiles that click beneath my feet as I walk across to look out of the window. I peer down into the apartment building’s central courtyard. Far below, the concierge’s Alsatian is scratching itself. From my window I can see into at least five other apartments. I decide to stay here.
Turning round I observe the room’s smaller details. The table is covered with a red and brown checked oilcloth on which sits a tin ashtray with SUZE printed on it. On one wall Mme. D’Amico has affixed two posters. One is of Mont Blanc. The other is an SNCF poster of Biarritz. The sun has faded all the bright colours to grey and blue. Biarritz looks as cold and unwelcoming as the Alps.
I am not the only lodger at Mme. D’Amico’s. There is a muscle-bound taciturn engineer called Hugues. His room is separated from mine by the W.C. He is married and goes home every weekend to his wife and family in Grenoble. Two days after I arrive, the phone rings while I am alone in the flat. It is Hugues’ wife and she sounds nervous and excited. I somehow manage to inform her that Hugues is out. After some moments of incomprehension I eventually gather that it is imperative for Hugues to phone her when he comes in. I say I will give him the message. I sweat blood over that message. I get my grammar book and dictionary out and go through at least a dozen drafts. Finally I prop it by the phone. It was worth the effort. Hugues is very grateful and from that day more forthcoming, and Mme. D’Amico makes a point of congratulating me on my French. She seems more impressed by my error-free and correctly accented prose than by anything else about me. So much so that she asks me if I want to watch TV with her tonight. I sense that this is something of a breakthrough: Hugues doesn’t watch her TV. But then, maybe he has better things to do.
Almost without any exertion on my part, my days take on a pattern. I go to the Centre in the morning and afternoon for my courses. At lunch and in the evening I eat at the enormous university cafeteria up by the Law faculty. I return home, have a cup of coffee in the Cave Dante, then pass the rest of the evening watching TV with Mme. D’Amico and a neighbour—a fat jolly woman to whom I have never been introduced but whose name, I know, is Mme. Franchot.
Mme. D’Amico and Mme. Franchot sit in armchairs. I bring a wooden chair in from the hall and sit behind them, looking at the screen between their heads. While the TV is on, all other source of illumination is switched off and we sit and watch in a spectral grey light. Mme. D’Amico reads out loud every piece of writing that appears on the screen—the titles of programmes, the entire list of credits, the names and endorsements of products being advertised. At first I find this intensely irritating and the persistent commentary almost insupportable. But she speaks fairly softly and after a while I get used to her voice.
We watch TV in Mme. D’Amico’s bedroom. She has no sitting room as such. I think that used to be the function of my room. Hugues sleeps in what was the kitchen. He has a sink unit at the foot of his bed. Mme. D’Amico cooks in the hall (I was right: it was a cooker) and washes up in the tiny bathroom. This contains only a basin and a bidet and there are knives and forks laid out alongside toothbrushes and flannels on a glass shelf. There is no bath, which proved something of a problem to me at the outset, as I’m quite a clean person. So every two or three days I go to the municipal swimming baths at the Place Magnan. Formal, cheerless, cold, with pale-green tiles everywhere, but it stops me from smelling.
The fourth room in the flat is a dining room, though it’s never used for this purpose, as this is where Mme. D’Amico works. She works for her son, who is something—a shipper, I think—in the wine trade. Her job is to attach string to a label illustrating the region the wine comes from and then to tie the completed label round the neck of a wine bottle. The room is piled high with crates of wine, which she sometimes calls on me to shift. Most days when I come back I see her sitting there, patiently tying labels round the necks of the wine bottles. It must be an incredibly boring job. I’ve no idea how much her son pays her but I suspect it’s very little. But Mme. D’Amico is methodical and busy. She works like hell. People are always coming to take away the completed crates. I like to think she’s really stinging her son.
There are lots of girls I’d like to fuck who do courses with me at the Centre. Lots. I sit there in the class w
ith them and think about it, unable to concentrate on my studies. I’ve spoken to a few people but I can’t as yet call any of them friends. I know a Spanish girl and an English girl but they both live outside Nice with their parents. The English girl is called Victoria and is chased all day by a Tunisian called Rida. Victoria’s father was a group captain in the R.A.F. and has retired to live in Grasse. “Out to Grasse,” Victoria calls it. Somehow I don’t think the group captain would like Rida. Victoria is a small, bland blonde. Not very attractive at all, but Rida is determined. You’ve got to admire his persistence. He doesn’t try anything on, is just courteous and helpful, tries to make Victoria laugh. He never leaves her side all day. I’m sure if he perseveres, his luck will turn. Victoria seems untroubled by his constant presence, but I can’t see anything in Rida that would make him attractive to a girl. He is of average height, wears bright-coloured, cheap-looking clothes. His hair has a semi-negroid kink in it which he tries to hide by ruthlessly brushing it flat against his head. But his hair is too long for this style to be effective and it sticks out at the sides and the back like a helmet or an ill-fitting navy cap.
There are genuine pleasures to be derived from having a room of one’s own. Sometimes at night I fling back the covers and masturbate dreamily about the girls at the Centre. There is a Swedish girl called Danni whom I like very much. She has big breasts and long white-blond hair. Is very laughing and friendly. The only trouble is that one of her legs is considerably thinner than the other. I believe she had polio when young. I think about going to bed with her and wonder if this defect would put me off.
***
My relationship with Mme. D’Amico is very formal and correct. We converse in polite phrases that would not disgrace a Victorian drawing room. She asks me, one day, to fill out a white fiche for the police—something, she assures me hastily, every resident must do. She notices my age on the card and raises her eyebrows in mild surprise. She says she hadn’t supposed me to be so young. Then one morning, apropos of nothing, she explains why she reads everything that appears on TV. It seems that Mme. Franchot is illiterate. If Mme. D’Amico didn’t relate them to her, she would never even know the names of the old films we watch nightly on Monte Carlo TV. I find I am surprisingly touched by this confidence.
One evening I go to a café with Rida after our courses and meet up with some of his Tunisian friends. They are all enrolled at one educational institution or another for the sake of the carte d’étudiant. They tell me it’s very valuable, that they would not be allowed to stay in France if they didn’t possess one. Rida, it has to be said, is one of the few who actually tries to learn something. He shares a room with a man called Ali, who is very tall and dapper. Ali wears a blazer with brass buttons which has a pseudo-English crest on the breast pocket. Ali says he bought it off a tourist. The English style is très chic this year. We drink some beer. Rida tells me how he and Ali recently met a Swiss girl who was hitch-hiking around Europe. They took her back to their room and kept her there. They locked her in during the day. Rida lowers his voice. “On l’a baissé,” he tells me conspiratorially. “Baisser. Tu comprends?” He says he’s sure she was on drugs, as she didn’t seem to mind, didn’t object at all. She escaped one afternoon and stole all their stuff.
The café is small, every shiny surface lined with grease. It gets hot as the evening progresses. There is one very hard-faced blond woman who works the cash register behind the bar; otherwise we are all men.
I drink too much beer. I watch the Tunisians sodomise the pinball machine, banging and humping their pelvises against the flat end. The four legs squeal their outrage angrily on the tiled floor. At the end of the evening I lend Rida and Ali twenty francs each.
Another phone call when I’m alone in the flat. It’s from a doctor. He says to tell Mme. D’Amico that it is all right for her to visit her husband on Saturday. I am a little surprised. I never imagined Mme. D’Amico had a husband—because she always wears black, I suppose. I pass on the message and she explains that her husband lives in a sanatorium. He has a disease. She starts trembling and twitching all over in graphic illustration.
“Oh,” I say. “Parkinson’s disease.”
“Oui,” she acknowledges. “C’est ça. Parkingsums.”
This unsought-for participation in Mme. D’Amico’s life removes another barrier. From this day on she uses my first name—always prefixed, however, by “Monsieur.” “Monsieur Edward,” she calls me. I begin to feel more at home.
I see that it was a misplaced act of generosity on my part to lend Rida and Ali that money as I am now beginning to run short myself. There is a postal strike in Britain which is lasting far longer than I expected. It is quite impossible to get any money out. Foolishly I expected the strike to be short-lived. I calculate that if I radically trim my budget I can last for another three weeks, or perhaps a little longer. Assuming, that is, that Rida and Ali pay me back.
***
When there is nothing worth watching on television I sit at the window of my room—with the lights off—and watch the life going on in the apartments round the courtyard. I can see Lucien, the patron of the Cave Dante, sitting at a table reading a newspaper. Lucien and his wife share their apartment with Lucien’s brother and his wife. They all work in the café. Lucien is a gentle bald man with a high voice. His wife has a moustache and old-fashioned black-framed almond-shaped spectacles. Lucien’s brother is a big hairy fellow called Jean-Louis who cooks in the café’s small kitchen. His wife is a strapping blonde who reminds me vaguely of Simone Signoret. One night she didn’t draw the curtains in her bedroom properly and I had quite a good view of her undressing.
I am now running so low on money that I limit myself to one cup of coffee a day. I eat apples all morning and afternoon until it is time for my solitary meal in the university restaurant up by the fac du droit. I wait until the end because then they give away free second helpings of rice and pasta if they have any left over. Often I am the only person in the shining well-lit hall. I sit eating bowl after bowl of rice and pasta while the floors are swabbed around me and I am gradually hemmed in by chairs being set on the tables. After that I wander around the centre of town for a while. At half nine I make my way back to the flat. The whores all come out at half nine precisely. It’s quite amazing. Suddenly they’re everywhere. Rue Dante, it so happens, is right in the middle of the red light district. Sometimes on my way back the girls solicit me. I laugh in a carefree manner, shrug my shoulders and tell them I’m an impoverished student. I have this fantasy that one night one of the girls will offer to do it free but so far I’ve had no success.
If I’ve saved up my cup of coffee for the evening, my day ends at the Cave Dante. I sit up at the zinc bar. Lucien knows my order by now and he sets about making up a grande crème as soon as I come in the door. On the top of the bar are baskets for brioches, croissants and pizza. Sometimes there are a few left over from breakfast and lunch. One night I have a handful of spare centimes and I ask Lucien how much the remaining bit of pizza costs. To my embarrassment I still don’t have enough to buy it. I mutter something about not being hungry and I’ve changed my mind. Lucien looks at me for a moment and tells me to help myself. Now every night I go in and finish off what’s left. Each time I feel a flood of maudlin sentiment for the man, but he seems uneasy when I try to express my gratitude.
One of the problems about being poor is that I can’t afford to send my clothes to the “Pressings” any more. And Mme. D’Amico won’t allow washing in the flat. Dirty shirts mount up on the back of my single chair like so many soiled antimacassars. In a corner of the wardrobe I keep dirty socks and underpants. I occasionally spray the damp heap with my aerosol deodorant as if I were some fastidious pest controller. When all my shirts are dirty I evolve a complicated rota for wearing them. The idea is that I wear them each for one day, trying to allow a week between subsequent wears in the faint hope that the delay will somehow have rendered them cleaner. At least it will take longer for
them to get really dirty. At the weekend I surreptitiously wash a pair of socks and underpants and sneak them out of the house. I go down to an isolated part of the beach and spread them on the pebbles, where a watery February sun does a reasonable job of drying them out.
One Saturday afternoon I am sitting on the shingle beach employed in just such a way. I wonder sadly if this will be my last weekend in Nice. The postal strike wears on, I have forty-two francs and a plane ticket to London. Small breakers nudge and rearrange the pebbles at the water’s edge. This afternoon the sea is filled with weed and faeces from an untreated sewage outlet a little way up the coast. Freak tides have swept the effluence into the Baie des Anges. The sun shines, but it is a cool and uncongenial day.
The thought of leaving Nice fills me with an intolerable frustration. Nice has a job to do for me, a function to fulfil and it hasn’t even begun to discharge its responsibility.
I hear steps crunching on the stones, coming towards me. I look round. It is Rida with a girl I don’t recognise. Frantically I stuff my washing into its plastic bag.
“Salut,” Rida says.
“Ça va?” I reply nonchalantly.
“What are you doing here?” Rida asks.
“Oh … nothing particular.”
We exchange a few words. I look carefully at the girl. She is wearing jeans and a tie-dyed T-shirt. She has reddish blond medium-length hair and a flat freckly face. It is not unattractive though. Her eyebrows are plucked away to thin lines and her nose is small and sharp. She seems confident and relaxed. To my surprise Rida tells me she’s English.
“English?” I say.
“Hi,” she says. “My name’s Jackie.”
Rida has literally just picked her up on the Promenade. I don’t know how he singles them out. I think he feels he has another Swiss girl here. He saw me sitting on the beach and told Jackie he knew an English guy he would like her to meet.