In Extremis

by Tim Parks

  So I would leave the conference at lunchtime, I decided. Officially, of course, I was supposed to be here the full two days, listening to my colleagues’ papers and offering my penny’s worth in the discussions, particularly the final round table. An inaugural speaker is expected to make himself available. That’s why he is well paid. Then there would be the conference dinner. My flight to Madrid was not until the morning after that. But staying two days was out of the question. I had to get back to London. As soon as this morning’s session was over, I would invent some excuse.

  The present speaker, meanwhile, a feisty eighty-year-old in bright-red pullover and grey tie, was discussing hieroglyphs in Mesopotamian cultures. Each culture in the Euphrates valley borrowed freely from the others, he said, as far as languages and writing systems were concerned, over a period of many centuries. He wore spectacles on a string that he kept putting on and taking off. I could get Elsa to phone me, I thought, when we were all at lunch together, and pretend I was being called away for some family emergency. The question was – the speaker removed his spectacles to look at the audience – did writers of hieroglyphs distinguish between signs that were new and signs that were old, and did they introduce old signs among the new for certain rhetorical effects that went beyond the symbol’s immediate referent? What excuse, I wondered, would be most credible? For example, the elderly speaker replaced his spectacles, after the Mesopotamians moved from carving in stone to carving in clay, a process that rather altered the shape of certain glyphs, did they occasionally resurrect the shapes of the older glyphs in the way a writer in later centuries might deploy an archaism? I could hardly, I thought, say that my mother had died yesterday, since then people would wonder why I was here at all. Who is it sets off to a conference the very second his mother has died?

  The talk on Mesopotamia was actually more interesting than I had expected, though it was crazy, I thought now, that my colleague’s PowerPoint slides showed only old photographs of the archaeologists and linguists who had found and deciphered the Mesopotamian glyphs decades before, many of them the speaker’s own teachers and colleagues. Why not show the glyphs themselves, and the difference between the old and the new? These photographs are ridiculous, I thought, twisting my neck to look at the screen behind the podium. They were all men, all old, all bearded. What were the students who had been co-opted for the occasion supposed to make of this? For of course to give the impression that the conference was well attended and had aroused lively interest, something the sponsors would want to be reassured of in a perfunctory kind of way, a number of students – most of them young, most of them women, as in all liberal-arts courses these days – had been diverted from their regular university classes and were sitting patiently at the back of the auditorium. What were these young women supposed to think, I wondered, of a set of PowerPoint slides showing black-and-white photographs of ageing male linguists with beards and pipes? Why not show the glyphs? These slides were themselves a kind of archaism, I suddenly realised, lending a romantic and chauvinist aura to a period of research and discovery long over. What could the young female students conclude, but that there was no place for them in the worlds of archaeology and linguistics; and what excuse should I give my hosts, who to tell the truth had welcomed me very warmly, for leaving the conference when it had barely begun? Elsa would call, I would respond at table, sitting beside my colleagues in the conference-hall refectory. Andreas Leitner, the chairman of the European Society, a nice, avuncular, rather sleazy fellow, had specifically asked me to have lunch with him. Elsa would hang up, as I had told her to. We had done this before. And I would continue to speak to the silent phone, as if in urgent conversation with someone requesting my immediate departure. Leitner would look at me, raising a bushy eyebrow. But for what reason? I didn’t want to invent an illness for one of the children, if only out of fear that such lies might bring bad luck. Did I really fear that? I don’t know. Bringing in the children just seemed beyond the pale.

  Mr Mesopotamia, meanwhile, had sat down amid tepid applause and now a petite young woman, Elsa’s age maybe, or not much older, was talking about a corpus linguistics project which involved counting the archaisms in Don Quixote and in translations of Don Quixote in a dozen languages, including Russian and Mandarin Chinese. One day you sit beside your dying mother in a state of great emotional intensity, I thought, and the next you are obliged to listen to this kind of silliness.

  What excuse could I give for leaving the conference?

  Sitting behind the podium, while this young woman in a white blouse and green cardigan showed batteries of statistics on the mean distribution of archaisms in Czech and Japanese translations of Don Quixote, I began to feel seriously trapped. This happens to me all too often at conferences, as it happened to me as a child in church listening to my father’s sermons. One feels one has lost control of the present moment, that life is slipping away.

  Automatically, I did what I always do in these circumstances: I pretended to take notes. As a child in church I pretended to pray, and as an adult at conferences I pretend to take notes. There you are.

  ‘Dear Elsa,’ I wrote. Each sheet of notepaper had the logo of the Society of European Linguists in the centre at the top. ‘I have been remembering when we first kissed at that seedy bar off Calle Mayor. What a strange evening it was! First the casual meeting on the stairs by the library, then the beer in the open market. My idea. Then my surprise when you suggested we move on to La Latina. Or rather, you said, If we’re going to have a drink, we should go somewhere nice next time. And I said, Why not go now? And you looked at your watch and thought a bit and then said, Okay. A couple of hours later, halfway down the steps into the metro, I proposed a whisky. Because you’d said earlier you’d never drunk whisky. You said okay. And right at the moment that you drained your first whisky, I kissed you. I had been meaning to kiss you for a long time of course, but I also thought of this meaning to kiss you as an aberration that any sensible man my age would soon get over. I did everything to suppress that urge to kiss, yet still found, despite myself, that I really did mean to kiss you. I had come to think of you, I suppose, over the two or three years we had known each other, as somehow, possibly, the right person, though any relationship between us seemed improbable and even incongruous. Yet I felt that. Impossible, incongruous, but right. Then that evening there was a growing warmth – no doubt the alcohol helped – and I kissed you. And you returned the kiss with a heat I couldn’t have expected. Madly, it seemed to me. Not your usual composed self, Elsa! Our lips touched and you were transformed. You sprang into life. And between kisses, as we decided to walk one metro stop across the park – remember? – you began to say that this should never have happened. This is a disaster, you said. We should never have allowed this to happen. You were distraught. We kissed passionately in the street, like teenagers, and between kisses you said, I am not the kind of person who does these things. I can’t do this. And I said, You are doing it, Elsa. Rather well, actually. You laughed. We sat on a bench in the park and you were on my knees, things got pretty wild, and then again you said you couldn’t do this, it wasn’t you, and what if people recognised us? And I said, I want to marry you, Elsa. I actually said that, didn’t I? Minutes after the first kiss. You laughed. I repeated, Elsa, I really believe you are the person I should marry; and you said I was mad, or very bad, or both, and the whole thing was a catastrophe and you had better be getting home. So we walked to the metro and now your boyfriend started calling you. From Barcelona. He called, you didn’t answer, but he kept calling. He called you every evening at bedtime, you said. It was a long-distance relationship of canonical phone calls, regular as clockwork. Liturgical even. He needed to know you had got home safely. You always said goodnight to each other. But only once you were safely home. You were upset, thinking you were not the kind of person who did this sort of thing. You could never hurt anyone, you said. But again we stopped in the park to kiss on another bench and, because it was getting cold now,
you let me put my jacket round your shoulders and that was how your phone ended up in my jacket pocket. Then no sooner had you climbed into the metro just before midnight, having categorically refused to come home with me – you just didn’t do that kind of thing – than of course the phone started ringing again in my jacket pocket and, when I pulled it out, the screen showed it was your boyfriend. If I had known where you lived, this would have been the perfect excuse to come and see you and bring you the phone and perhaps start kissing again in more comfortable surroundings. But I didn’t know where you lived, and I couldn’t phone you now because you didn’t have your phone. I went home and wrote you an email. But you didn’t reply. You weren’t online. I couldn’t understand why not – it seemed the obvious thing, having lost your phone – and the phone kept ringing and I thought I couldn’t turn it off, because then your boyfriend would think you had turned it off so as not to speak to him, while if I left it on, he might just think you’d lost it or put it on silent. I tried to put it on silent myself, but it was not a phone I was familiar with and I couldn’t figure it out and didn’t want to tamper, so in the end I put the phone in an oven glove in a Tupperware box in the fridge, so as not to have to hear it ringing all night. I remember thinking there was a person who was very upset because of what we had done together, or who would be upset if he knew, but I couldn’t feel bad about what we had done; and towards six when I woke and checked the email, you had come online, you couldn’t sleep, and you said to meet you immediately, as soon as possible, because if you didn’t respond to his calls, he would tell your mother – probably he had already told your mother; his family was friends with your family, and if your mother couldn’t contact you, she would immediately call the police, because she too had to speak to you at least once a day and had to feel you were always on the other end of the phone ready to speak to her. I realised there was a whole life, your life, that I had stumbled into and upset. I thought you would never leave that life for me, and I went out and took the metro and found you at Atocha, looking exhausted and fraught, and I gave you the phone almost without a word, certainly without a kiss. You emailed to say you regretted it all, because nothing could ever come of it, and we must act as if nothing had happened, and I said I was immensely glad that what had happened had happened and that I had meant every word I said, but that I would do exactly as you wished. I promised never to mention it again and you wrote back a single word. Gracias.

  Having overrun her time by almost ten minutes, the young lady colleague had now stepped down, and an older female professor in a maroon tailleur had gone to the lectern and was asking the question: When does grammatical correctness become archaism – for example, in the affirmations ‘It is I, ‘It is he’, and so on, as against the present received usage, ‘It’s me’, ‘It’s him’?

  I sat up on hearing this, since the question was an interesting one: when is the old, the correct, the proper, perceived as out of date, as not really correct or proper any more, or too proper; why and what to do about it? The way to develop the argument, I immediately felt, was to show how, as soon as a usage acquires the status of a rule, a propriety, it is at risk of being perceived as old-fashioned, as resisting life, resisting change. Instead, the colleague went on to catalogue examples of correct usages now lapsing into disuse, and she too had a battery of statistics gleaned from a corpus of some ten million words of discursive texts.

  I looked at the audience; a number of the students had left, others were whispering together, others still were busy with their phones, though some did seem to be taking serious notes. And I looked at my colleagues, most of whom had long learned to assume an air of professional interest at these occasions, whether out of a genuine sense of duty and respect to the speaker or the merest calculation of personal convenience, I couldn’t have said. Perhaps some of them really were interested.

  I took it all in at a glance, saw the clock at the back of the room inching towards midday, then went back to my notepad and wondered why on earth I was writing like this to Elsa, on paper, by hand, when no one mails paper to anyone these days. Let alone handwritten. Handwritten letters on paper are as archaic as the assertion ‘It is I’. Everything I had written here to Elsa was true and it was rather wonderful to remember it, but it was also true that after Elsa changed her mind and fired her boyfriend and came to live with me, I found there was a part of myself that had always thought she had been right, that this shouldn’t have happened between us. I was too old. The future was impossible. People would be highly critical. My children would be shocked. Elsa herself would regret it. I was forcing my ageing body on her, I thought. My decay. My corruption. Things might be fine today, but what about in ten years? We should never have done this.

  The happier I was with Elsa – and I was very happy, quietly, calmly happy in a way that was entirely new to me – the more frequently these negative thoughts presented themselves. Now the sudden return of the old peeing problem confirmed all misgivings. Elsa, this is hard, but you must leave me. That is what I ought to be writing to her. I ought to be explaining to this young woman that I didn’t have the energy, the vitality, to carry through this relationship. Yet on scribbling down a letter absolutely off the top of my head, while my colleague rather tediously considered the relationship between archaism and syntactical correctness – and it seemed astonishing to me that she didn’t field the case of ‘whom’ (perhaps I could mention it myself, I thought, in the discussion afterwards; perhaps I could offer the classic example ‘for whom the bell tolls’, where archaism and memento mori are superimposed, as if archaisms were mementi mori, of a kind) – on scribbling down a few thoughts, to take my mind off the vast waste of life that every conference is (why had it seemed so important for me to come?), instead of telling Elsa we should split up, I had been writing a love letter, remembering the excitement, the wonder, the huge rush of positive emotion that evening when we first kissed and the barriers fell away between us. We moved from being strangers who happened to meet from time to time to man and woman arm-in-arm. Lovers. I felt Elsa and I were lovers the moment we kissed. At once I said, I could marry you, Elsa, no, I want to marry you, and you said we should never have done this, then kissed me all the more passionately, as if something tremendously urgent were at stake, something that just had to be done. That a love should be.

  I sat now, at the conference, needing to go to the bathroom, with my pen poised, wondering how I might continue this letter to Elsa, all the time trying to look as if I were taking notes about my colleague’s talk on grammatical correctness and archaism. Had something really changed between Elsa and myself over the last forty-eight hours? With my mother’s death? Unable to answer that question or go on with the letter, I suddenly had the very strong sensation that I was two people. That was the only way to describe my state of mind. I was two people: one going one way, one another; one in love with Elsa, determined to make this young Spanish woman my destiny, and one still attached to family and children, wife and mother, and my position in that world of family and mother and wife. Which was also the world of my work, of course, in the sense that the colleagues in my field knew about my family, and my family knew about my work, but neither the one nor the other knew about Elsa. And each separate ‘I’ was attached to a place: the Elsa ‘I’ to Madrid, where I was now Emeritus Professor, and the other family ‘I’ to almost everywhere else – all the many cities we had lived in through the years – and of course, to Edinburgh, to London, to Mother. Mother was a place, I suddenly thought, as much as a person. Mother was a planet. A clay planet. She had gravity. But it was not a gravity that included Elsa. Elsa was a comet. A shooting star. It had been a mockery, I thought, to have pronounced Elsa’s name in Mother’s presence, when Mother was not only unconscious but never likely to become conscious again. It was like a comet passing unseen on a night of thick cloud cover.

  The present speaker had now fallen into the error of disparaging and regretting the new usages that had replaced the old, showing an
obvious preference for more syntactically elaborate periods and an emotional, and perhaps class, attachment to the supposedly ‘correct’. Correct syntax, she said, tended to attract a greater lexical richness. This was a state of affairs she evidently felt was positive, even morally positive. Which amounted, I felt, to a complete misunderstanding of the dynamic that fuses syntax and vocabulary in language. Nothing could be less rich than a dusty embalming of elaborate syntax in the Anglican hymnal. But how could two selves become one, I wondered, still unable to continue this letter, which most likely I would tear up as soon as the conference session was over.

  How do two selves become one? I wrote on the same piece of paper, immediately under the word Gracias. You were two selves, Elsa, when you kissed me passionately, then said it was a disaster. But after that month of silence, when I supposed the romance was over, you showed me how two can become one. Simple. One self kills the other. You fired your boyfriend, came to my apartment and we made love. He was upset. You were upset. It was a death. But you did it of your own free will. I never asked you to. And from the moment you had done it, you never looked back. So why am I looking back, I wondered? Why do I find it so difficult to go forward? Was it perhaps – I remembered another of Mother’s favourite expressions – that I had feet of clay? I wanted to go forward but my feet were stuck in the ground, clay in clay. Or perhaps the ballast in my older life was simply too great; it generated a crippling gravity. It was the ballast made David decide to marry the woman he had already lived with for thirty years, always saying that she was not his woman. Those thirty years with Deborah were David, even if not the whole David. So he killed the other David and married Deborah. But not with the same joy that Elsa killed her other self and turned to me. Elsa, I wrote, you fill my life with joy …